Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [50]
She stooped and kissed him again. She didn’t want him to ruin one minute, not a single heartbeat of his European trip because she couldn’t go with him this time.
“Oh, here he comes! Here Mitchell comes now.” She suddenly pointed up along the row of dull, virtually faceless tract houses.
A yellow cab had turned onto their street Mary could make out Mitchell Cohen at the wheel, wearing his usual, flap-eared Russian fur hat.
She knew that Mitchell and Harry had been working on their business scheme for almost two years. All they would tell her and Neva Cohen was that it had to do with arbitrage—which Mary loosely understood as trading currencies from country to country, making money on discrepancies in the exchange rates—and that this arbitrage scheme was their ticket out of hacking cabs for the rest of their lives.
“He takes two Dilantins before bedtime,” Mary said as she and Mitchell Cohen helped load Harry into the Vets cab.
Harry cracked up at that remark. He loved the way Mary continually worried about him, worried about dumb things, like the Dilantin which he took regularly every night and three times during the day.
“You have a wonderful trip over to Europe, Harry. Don’t work too hard. Miss me a little.”
“Awhh cah-cah-mon. I muh-muh-miss you already,” Harry Stemkowsky muttered, and he meant it.
He’d never really been able to understand why Mary had decided to live with a cripple in the first place. He was just happy that she had. Now he was going to do something for her, something that both of them deserved. Harry Stemkowsky was going to become an instant winner in life.
While Stemkowsky and Cohen drove to Kennedy Airport, another of the couriers, Vets 7, was already on board Pan Am flight 311, winging its way toward Japan.
Jimmy Holm was entertaining a first-class stewardess, skillfully recounting the stories of how he had survived three years in a North Vietnamese prison; then two more years in a Bakersville, California, VA hospital. Bakersville, he said, had been much, much worse.
“And now, here I am. This high and mighty clipper class life-style. Europe, the Far East” Holm smiled and drained his glass of Moët & Chandon. “God bless America. With all the ugly warts we hear so much about, God bless our country.”
At approximately the same hour, Vets 15, Pauly Melindez, and Vets 9, Steve Glickman, were enjoying first-class treatment on another flight scheduled for Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport Both Melindez and Glickman had most recently worked as private rent-a-cops in Orlando, Florida. Today, December 9, they were personally in control of something over sixteen million dollars…
“Samples.”
Vets 5, Harold Freedman, had already arrived in London. Vets 12, Jimmy Cassio, was in Zurich. Vets 8, Gary Barr, was settled in Rome—where he was sitting on a beautiful stone terrazzo which overlooked the Tiber.
Barr had most recently been a comedy nightclub bouncer for over four years on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. Now he was thinking that this had to be a dream.
Vets 8 finally closed his eyes. He blinked them open again … and Rome along the Tiber was still there.
So was the twenty-two million for his negotiations.
More “samples.”
Chapter 35
IN THE WEST VILLAGE section of New York, Vets 3 wasn’t flying, or even living very first class. Nick Tricosas had no four-hundred-dollar Brooks Brothers suit. He had no leather Dunhill wallet full of credit cards. Vets 3 was wearing a cut-off USMC T-shirt, a greaser’s head bandana, and faded khaki-drab fatigue trousers.
Tricosas stared around the cramped radio room and felt a rush of claustrophobia tighten his chest. The broom closet was tucked up on the third floor of the Vets garage. The only furniture was a gray metal card table and matching folding chair, the PRC transmitter-receiver, a First Blood movie poster taped to the wall.
“Contact. This is Vets Three.” Tricosas’s index finger finally clicked on the PRC again.
“All right all you brave veterans of foreign wars. You purple heart and medal of honor winners….