The Clause Read Free

person, but mostly because you looked death in the face and oblivion has you scared. Real scared. There’s a grinder in all of our futures.
    There would be a lot of sleepless nights, and the best I could do was keep my head straight, stay on policy, and know that once Trudy was compromised there was nothing anybody could do, and Trudy was cool with that. I was sure of that.
    I opened my eyes, wiped the tears off my face, and dropped in a few more fingers of Old Crow but set the glass aside. Out of habit, it was time to do a little inventory.
    The roll of cash from the sock drawer totaled eight thousand four hundred and twenty dollars. That would come in handy.
    I slid Trudy’s knapsack toward me, unzipped it, and dumped the contents onto the bench.
    In a dark apartment, a burglar doesn’t spend a lot of time looking at what he lifts. Especially not in this apartment, because there were a lot of sparks in the safe. I could tell by the weight and the sound of it that it was quality. But on the bench before me were some really nice pieces. I plugged a jeweler’s loupe into my eye.
    Too nice.
    Too nice?
    Yeah, like a four-carat ruby pendant in a filigree platinum setting. A gold necklace set with maybe thirty one-carat lemon-and-lime diamonds. A red diamond rose broach that filled my palm. A cabochon emerald ring the size of the end of my thumb. Marquis blue ruby earrings, matching aqua sapphire teardrop earrings and pendant, and an elaborate tanzanite necklace that must have weighed two pounds.
    All of it marked Britany-Swindol. That’s a high-end international jeweler, appointment only, and you have to be both rich and famous. They turn away mobsters. They can afford to. Harry Winston is almost as good as Britany-Swindol.
    My knapsack contained the pedestrian Tiffany, Cartier, and Mikimoto stuff that was easy to fence for a high return. It was the kind of stuff I sold to jewelry stores, which in turn sold to rich slobs I might one day take it back from. It was the stuff from the jewelry box. I knew because the sack had the Patek Philippe watch in it, the one from the dresser.
    I took a slug of bourbon.
    The apartment we targeted was not the kind of place where the super-rich and famous lived, not the kind of place you expected to find Britany-Swindol, probably because the local gentry had never even heard of anything nicer than Bulgari. A pile of Britany-
Swindol the size of a turkey platter at the Grand Excelsior was almost like finding the Hope Diamond at Zales.
    This was all wrong, but it clicked somehow, because Trudy getting killed was all wrong, too. They shot her without any warning, when she was unarmed.
    The safe and its pile was the reason the goons showed up. That’s where we tripped the alarm. Had we set off an alarm somewhere else in the apartment, they would have been there sooner. And something told me they wouldn’t have been willing to use deadly force if they were a legit security outfit.
    I drained my glass but froze when the glass was halfway to the table.
    The Britany-Swindol heist.
    It was a Macau couture-store smash-and-grab heist back in June by the Serbian mob.
    I suddenly understood.

Three
    My day job brought me to the Grand Excelsior to fix screens. That’s right, I was “The Screen Man.” It said so on the side of my white van. I made house calls servicing the high-rise buildings along Boulevard East, the ones on top of the cliff called the Palisades across the Hudson from Manhattan. I knew most of the supers of those buildings, and bought them Johnnie Walker Blue for Christmas so I would get called in to fix the tenants’ torn or bent screens. Some of these high-rises were more exclusive than others, and the Excelsior happened to be one with rich slobs on every floor. By slobs I mean new money—self-made men with a string of hardware stores or in construction or car dealerships. They need to show everybody that they’re rich, so they throw their money around on things of value, namely