“And I don’t remember a construction-site scene.”
“For God’s sake, you get what I mean, though, right?”
Quinn paused at the top of an earthen ramp leading down into what would be the basement of the soon-to-be-erected seven-story building. The concrete for the support pillars had already been poured, but the floor and walls of the basement had not. That was scheduled to happen in a little over six hours.
Once his colleagues caught up, Quinn let them rest for a couple seconds before saying, “Let’s get this done.”
Wooden forms built to contain the concrete that would become the walls surrounded most of the basement, while the floor was divided into sections, most of which were filled with crosshatch rebar. The hole Quinn and his men had dug before retrieving the body from the van was in one of these sections.
The rebar had been difficult to move, but they’d managed to lift a portion high enough to dig under. The dirt from the hole now kept the metal bars aloft.
Nate might have been trying to be funny with his Goodfellas comment, but the sentiment pretty much summed up why Quinn wasn’t happy with the location. As cleaners, their specialty was to make bodies permanently disappear. This could mean anything from dumping a well-weighted package into the ocean to burying an assignment in an out-of-the-way location. Though he and his colleagues had put bodies below basements before — in fact, had done so recently — those had all been discreetly located.
A construction site in the middle of the Bronx? Not so much.
And therein lay Quinn’s second problem with the job.
This was one of those rare cases when the client didn’t want the body to disappear forever. Just long enough so that when it was found — via an anonymous tip and the use of a jackhammer after the building was completed — it would convey the appropriate message to the dead man’s colleagues. So the clients had chosen the site and ensured that the security officers who usually patrolled the location had been given the night off.
Their message wasn’t hard to guess, but Quinn barely gave it a thought. The message wasn’t his job. The whats and the whys were almost always best left to the client — in this case Wright Bains Securities, an offshoot of MI6. Quinn and his team need only concentrate on the disposal of the package. But if he hadn’t done work for them in the past, he would have never taken this gig.
It took all three of them to carry the body across the rebar to the burial location. They then unwrapped the plastic and guided the man into his grave. This would usually be the point when one of them would douse the body with the special chemical mix Quinn had developed. The lethal cocktail would ensure rapid decomposition, and within a few months there would be little left to find at all. But because the client had requested that the body remained identifiable, the chems stayed in the bag.
They covered the man with the dirt they’d earlier removed and then smoothed it out, leaving no evidence that a hole had been dug there at all.
Nate looked across what would soon be the basement floor. “Totally Goodfellas. Kinda makes you want to be here when they pour the cement.”
“I’d rather head home,” Quinn said.
“I’m with you,” Daeng said.
The two men headed for the ramp. Behind them, Quinn heard Nate pick up the plastic the body had been wrapped in and hurry to catch up.
“I just said kinda, not that I wanted to,” he said. “Man, you guys are no fun at all.”
“You know, if you want the total Goodfellas experience,” Quinn said, “Daeng and I’d be happy to dig a hole for you.”
“I bet you would.”
When they reached the van, Nate shoved the used sheeting into a yard waste bag, cinched it closed, and tied off the top. It was now ready to be burned in the Dumpster they’d already picked out along their route to the airport.
As Daeng pulled the van onto the street, Quinn’s phone vibrated in his pocket. After pulling it out, he was surprised to see the name on the display was Helen Cho.
He thought about ignoring her, but knowing Helen would just keep hitting redial, he hit ACCEPT. “I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back later?”
“I know you are,” Helen said. “You’re doing that thing for Annabel Taplin.”
Though he was annoyed that Helen knew what he was doing, it didn’t surprise him. She was in charge of a semi-autonomous US government intelligence agency based in San Francisco and seemed to have her fingers in a little bit of everything. Quinn and his team had been doing a lot of work for her recently, a budding relationship that filled the void left when Quinn’s previous main employer, the Office, had been dismantled. But Quinn wasn’t going to let her agency, or any organization, dominate his time like the Office had.
“If you know I’m busy, why call me?” he asked, not hiding his displeasure.
“Because if you’re still in New York, I have something I need you to do immediately.”
“You heard me say I’m in the middle of something, right? Immediately’s not going to work.”
“How much more time do you need?”
“That’s not your business.”
“Actually, I think it is.”
“No. It isn’t.”
She paused. “All right, maybe it’s not, but I have a serious situation in need of your talents that happens to be right there in New York. The problem is, I’m not sure how much longer we can keep the wraps on it, and the last thing I want is to see it splashed on the front page of the New York Post. Is there any way part of your team can finish your current job and you could move on to mine?”
The truth was, once the plastic sheeting had been destroyed, they’d be done and could all move on to her assignment, but Quinn didn’t want her to know that. It could create unrealistic expectations for future jobs. “I might be able to do that, but I won’t be able to break free for at least a half hour.”
“You’re sure?”
“One hundred percent.”
She paused. “Well, we’ll have to make that work, then. If you could get there sooner, I won’t complain.”
“When did the subject expire?” he asked.
“Approximately twenty minutes ago. I have a couple agents on scene who can brief you on the details.”
“Where?”
“Manhattan.
CHAPTER 2
Sticking to the initial plan, Nate drove the van into Queens, where they set the plastic ablaze in the pre-selected Dumpster. From there, they went another seven blocks and exchanged the van for the rental sedan meant to take them back to the airport. While it would have been helpful to keep the van to transport the new body, Quinn was not about to use the same vehicle on a pair of unrelated jobs. The possibility of cross contamination was too great. He always kept jobs separate. Durrie had taught Quinn that. “If you don’t,” his old mentor had said, “and one goes south, it’ll take the other with it. Bad business.” They would have to appropriate a new vehicle in Manhattan.
Being a little after two a.m., the drive into the heart of the city was easy, and soon they were parked three blocks from the Tribeca address Helen had given Quinn. Nate and Daeng grabbed the two duffel bags containing their clean kits, and the three of them headed the rest of the way in on foot. When they reached the specified street, they paused at the corner and scanned the area ahead.
“That’s it,” Quinn said in a low voice as he motioned toward a five-story red brick building. It was smashed between two similar structures, all of which were mixed-use, with apartments above ground-floor businesses.
The restaurant on the ground level of the target building appeared closed — a sushi place, with a glass door on the left and a large window under an awning on the right.