In Plain Sight

Once the lamps were lit, Alex was almost ready. Trying not to grunt with the pain of physical exertion, he shoved Brewer’s chair over to the door and faced it outward, while Brewer spewed a string of colorful profanities. The chair was attached to the back wall by a rope that ran through the two pulleys he’d installed earlier. Now he tied his second rope to the first, between the pulleys, and pulled it tight through the anchor he’d put in the wall by the door. This created about six inches of play in the rope holding Brewer and the chair. Below the anchor sat a small table with a candle on it and a box of matches.

The stage was set.

“I don’t know who you are,” the Broker said with a snarl, all pretense of his high society manners gone. “But you’ll pay for this. I’ll make sure you die spitting blood with my name on your lips.”

Alex shoved the chair forward until the ropes stopped it. The front feet of the chair slipped off the edge where the vault door was, and it slammed down hard with the front legs resting on the brick wall outside the door.

“Jesus!” the Broker swore as the chair suddenly pitched forward, “what are you doing?”

Alex stuck the disguise rune to his forehead and lit it with his cigarette. Next, he pulled the bag off the head of Jeremy Brewer and the Broker got his first look at the empty nothing in front of him. He screamed. To his credit, however, he did not lose control of his bodily functions.

“What do you want, you crazy son-of-a-bitch?” he yelled.

“Now, that’s what I like to hear,” Alex said in his cultured British accent, loosely patterned on Iggy’s, of course. He leaned against the wall by the door so that Brewer could see him. “You see, if you’d just taken that attitude back at the club, we could have avoided all this unpleasantness.”

He looked up at Alex with a snarl.

“Who told you my name?” he demanded. Alex laughed.

“My employer, who, as I mentioned, wishes to remain anonymous. Privileged information, you understand.”

“And what does your employer want?”

“A name.”

“Whose?”

“Someone stole a shipment of uncut diamonds out of a customs warehouse at the New York Aerodrome,” Alex said. “Now, they’ve not been offered to the local fences, even the high-class ones, so that means the theft was pre-arranged. By you.”

“Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.” The Broker chuckled. Alex leaned down, close to Brewer’s face.

“You’d better hope it was, for your sake.” He nodded toward the open door. Brewer leaned out and looked down at the water far below.

“So if I don’t give up a name, you send me to sleep with the fishes, is that it?”

“Exactly that, Mr. Brewer,” Alex said.

“So what happens if I tell you?” he asked. “You just going to let me go?”

“You have my word.”

“I hope you’ll pardon me for being skeptical,” Brewer said, his manners returning. “But I’ve seen your face. If I decided to look for you, there’s nowhere in the city you could hide.”

“As you may have surmised, I’m from out of town,” Alex chuckled. “My employer brought me here to do a job and once it’s done, I’ll move on. I have no fear of your righteous vengeance, Mr. Brewer, because I will be far beyond your grasp.” He paused to take a puff on his cigarette. “Now, the name. If you don’t mind.”

Naked calculation ran across Brewer’s face like tape feeding out of a stock ticker. Alex knew he was weighing everything that was said, judging whether he thought Alex was bluffing. Ultimately, he decided that Alex was.

“Sorry, old man,” he said, mimicking Alex’s accent. “I’m afraid what you want is a trade secret. Privileged information, you understand.”

Alex laughed at the sound of his own words being thrown back at him.

“Yes,” he said, walking around behind Brewer, stepping over the ropes that held his chair in place. “I’m a very understanding person. Unfortunately,” he added, taking out a match and lighting it, “the laws of thermodynamics are much less understanding. They’re downright rigid.” He lit the candle on the little table and pushed it under the taut rope, tied to the anchor bolt. Immediately, the rope began to smoke as its trailing fibers were incinerated. “I’m afraid you don’t have very long to tell me what I want to know.”

“You’re bluffing,” Brewer said, craning his neck in an effort to see where the rope went.

Alex just smiled and puffed his cigarette while the rope began to burn. Brewer stared at him hard, looking to see if Alex had the eyes of a killer. He didn’t believe it.

His tune and his color changed, however, when the first large strand of the twisted rope snapped and he felt his chair tip forward a bit.

“All right,” he yelled. “The guys who set up the job had German accents, real heavy.”

“Who were they?” Alex pressed as the rope burned.

“I don’t know,” Brewer said. “They paid in cash, so I didn’t ask questions. They didn’t even tell me what was in the box they wanted.”

Alex ground his teeth. He hadn’t foreseen this problem. Still, whoever stole them would have had to deliver them, right?

“Who did the job?” he asked.