The Last Orphan -
Chapter 26
Derek Tenpenny and his sinful six had a cadre of low-level security schmuckatellis to cover the basics so they could concern themselves with higher-order strategy for Mr. Devine. They also had the run of Tartarus with all its hidden spaces and secret corridors. Lately they’d been commandeering the billiards room as their unofficial HQ. Its plush leather couches and the curved bar in the corner made it ideal for confabulations, and that’s where Tenpenny and the extant five met now.
Bram Folgore had been stabbed to death.
As always, word traveled rapidly to Mr. Devine, in this case from patrolman to detective to the commanding officer of the First Precinct to the police commissioner to the mayor of New York City, on whom Tenpenny himself had compiled a substantial file over the course of a lost weekend last autumn.
This glorious job that Mr. Devine had bestowed upon Tenpenny—part security tactician, part interceder, part espionage agent—seemed uniquely designed to fit his attributes and temperament. Tenpenny’s only weakness was women. He got after it every time he found a participant who was willing and properly shaped and, in a pinch, when she was neither. Being a media fixer had provided ample access and plenty of opportunities. After an incident involving cracked hotel drywall (DoubleTree, Times Square) and cheekbone (hooker, Thai), a judge had ordered him to attend S*x Addicts Anonymous, which had proved richer hunting grounds yet. During the six-week stint, he’d nearly worn out the sink basin in that church bathroom.
A Division II hoops player from way back when, Tenpenny was taller than any man had a right to be, his height a useful icebreaker when it came to the dark arts of lechery. He’d had the benefit of pouring the foundation of his career before the #MeToo nonsense had gotten up steam, so he’d had plenty of time to hone his skills at keeping one step ahead of the social-justice mob.
Working for Luke Devine felt like getting called up to the Show after laboring for years in the farm system. Per Mr. Devine’s wishes, Tenpenny had dirtboxes installed all over the property, cell-site simulators that threw out powerful pilot signals stronger than those from any cell towers in the area. They made all phones within range switch over to their network. Then—bam—you had IMSI numbers, ESNs, and you could snatch encryption-session keys in less than a second. That meant you were logged in. Emails, text histories, all that juicy stuff Mr. Devine used to exploit their owners and, in turn, the world.
Mr. Devine was, if anything, laissez-faire. Tenpenny had plenty of elbow room to work with on the side. He’d grab all the girls’ information when they entered Tartarus. If you got into a young woman’s phone, you got into her head. There was an art to it. Pulling photos and comments out of Instagram and Snapchat, compiling information on their best-loved attributes. Did they favor their asses? Their long, long legs? Did they post wistful pictures of their deceased daddies? Or were they frosty and immaculate, shelf ornaments like the cable-news ice queens he used to look after who always had to be the prettiest girl in the room? In fact that’s what he lusted after most of all—the collection of insecurities those girls put right out there for the world to see, all the poker tells he could use when lubricating his angle of attack.
Tenpenny kept records for himself in a big old-fashioned leather-bound ledger like the ones they used at European bed-and-breakfasts. On the weighty pages, he noted flexibility, mouthfeel, degree of required persuasion, s****l positions. It gave him a kind of power, his big book of exploits. Write her name in the ledger and he owned a piece of her forever.
But now, now they had a problem. And he was at bottom a fixer. So he had to fix it.
The one holy rule of Luke Devine: No one was to see what went on behind the scarlet door.
Ever.
But someone had, and that had opened up the gates of hell, so now Tenpenny was here meeting with his marines.
Years ago they’d been flown into the city for a news segment on their alleged misdeeds in Kandahar, and Tenpenny had been tasked with looking after them. Right away he’d recognized that they were beautiful savages, the purest of what they were, and he’d made clear that he could provide bountiful opportunities to exploit their expertise. Through the course of doing business, he’d learned much about their temperaments.
Like that of Craig Gordon, currently embedded in the couch, thunder thighs parted to allow room for his belly to sag. A great big shiny pink man with a bald head and hot-dog bulges of fat at the base of his skull, Gordo had been an M240 Bravo Gunner with the Corps, lugging the Pig into more firefights than he could keep track of. The front of his shirt carried potato-chip shrapnel and various streaks of lunch condiments, as did his push-broom mustache. A spiral notebook rested, as always, on the slate of his knee, and he doodled now, the pen dwarfed in the catcher’s mitt of his hand. He seemed to keep the scribble pad with him as a security blanket; Tenpenny had never seen him take a single actual note.
At Gordo’s side Daniel Martinez stood with a ramrod posture that looked reinforced with rebar. On the gym-swollen ball of his biceps, Dapper Dan wore his marines tat with pride, the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor inked in vibrant blue to match his piercing eyes. Waxy black hair, not a strand out of place. Prominent eyebrows manscaped to perfection, waxed chest showing at the open collar of his Polo shirt, waft of Creed Viking cologne giving off smoke and a hint of spice.
Norris Norris, which was actually the dude’s f*****g name, sat on the pool table with his stick legs dangling. Double N had done a stint as a nonappropriated fund-audit technician within the Force Support Squadron before changing his MOS so he could get his d**k dirty out beyond the Green Zone. Lean and dark-skinned, he had a pronounced Adam’s apple and a pair of old-school thick-frame eyeglasses that popped his pupils. Of the men he was the easiest to predict and handle; he ran on nothing but money. It was almost shocking what he was willing to do if his price was met.
João Santos perched on the arm of a couch like a gargoyle. He wore an Order of Christ pendant, square and symmetrical with flared tips like an Iron Cross. It was pinched between his lips, white-gold chain drooping on either side of his chin like an eyeglasses strap. He was the smallest and least-liked of the crew, and in some ways the most dangerous. An MMA-ranked fighter in the Gracie tradition, he was underappreciated and undermined, covetous of the camaraderie the others enjoyed. Grapplers rarely got the same respect as snipers and demolition breachers, but if Sandman got someone—anyone—down to the ground, he owned them. During a tavern fight, Tenpenny had seen him hyperextend a guy’s elbow in an arm-bar and then rake it so severely to the side it looked as if the limb might twist right off.
Last was Rathsberger. Slouched low and crooked in a leather wing chair studded with bronze nailheads, Rath had one leg flung over the armrest, a wicked prince trying out the throne. He wore his 9-mil on his h*p, as Folgore had. The k**s of white phosphorus from an artillery shell burn had turned the right side of his face into a hypertrophic mudslide, but his dark shiny eyes were intact, peering out from the depths of the wreckage.
Rath was the only one the others feared. He’d been the ringleader over in the Sandbox, the guy who’d gone in not quite right and had spent his time inside the war theater giving vent to his worst and darkest instincts. If there was a lighter side to the man, Tenpenny had never glimpsed it.
Rath held up a slender test tube, which he ticktocked like a hypnotist’s watch, aggravating its living contents. To satisfy his infinity of perverse habits, he cast his line far and frequently into the dark net and fished out all order of evil delicacies. These latest, bull ants from Tasmania, grew up to an inch and a half. Their nasty scissoring mandibles were so long that, according to Rath, zoologists believed them to be evolutionarily derived from legs. The ants could jump like crickets and were known to hang off their victims once their mandibles were sunk into flesh.
Tenpenny had requested that Rathsberger keep the stopper in the test tube.
Rath had taken the news of Folgore’s death the hardest. He’d skipped grief-stricken and headed straight to rageful.
“So he killed him.” Rath rattled the test tube before his eyes. The bull ants seethed behind the glass, a tangle of menace. “Left him in an alley like trash. What are we supposed to do about that?”
“Not a damn thing,” Norris said. “This is a private job. We all knew that. There’s no taps, no flag presentation.”
Rath’s upper l*p curled away from his teeth, and Norris’s Adam’s apple bobbed once with a swallow. The thick scarring of Rath’s chin and throat had led to contractures, the skin tight enough to tug down the right corner of his mouth and expose the gum line.
“But,” Tenpenny said, “we gotta cover our tracks.”
He lit up another Marlboro Red now, sucked in the inhale, and blew it out through clenched yellow teeth. He was a messy kind of smoker, bits of ash on his tie, stale tobacco wafting from his clothes with every movement. He never understood people who were closet smokers, who could indulge in the vice without having it seep into their pores.
“I thought everything was covered,” Sandman said. “What isn’t covered?”
“Relax, lil’ man,” Gordo said. “Let Tenpenny talk.”
Tenpenny took a drag, the tobacco hitting the bags of his lungs with a pleasing burn. “We have to lock down the home front hard. And. Those squeaky wheels in Boston surrounding the dear departed? We can no longer afford to have them out there squeaking. Not now that this a*****e’s showed up prying around, kicking over rocks. Who wants to go to Boston, tie up loose ends?”
Rath jiggled the test tube. Even from here Tenpenny could make out the shapes of individual ants, their red waxy bodies, big compound eyes, and cutting jaws. A leaf trapped inside with them had been turned into jigsaw-puzzle pieces.
Rath slid upward from the chair onto his feet, his olive-drab utility jacket flapping wide to show off a barrel chest and a tapered waist. He tapped the test tube down into an interior pocket and rubbed his hands. “I’d be delighted.”
“Pick a battle buddy,” Tenpenny said.
Spitting out the Portuguese cross, Santos popped up eagerly, puffed out his own chest, dusted his hands on his jeans. He was a hair below five foot five counting the lifts in his boots.
Rath’s gaze swung right past him, and Santos deflated a little.
“I’m out,” Dapper Dan said. “I got interval training tonight. Part of a regime.”
“Oooh,” Rath said, “a regime.”
Dan’s smile was so white and smooth the teeth looked of a single piece.
Rath flicked a forefinger at Gordo, who shifted onto his left flank, setting off a rippling effect as he prepared to rise. It took considerable effort, and even once he was planted on his feet, his corpus needed some time to settle back into place around him.
“Take the jet,” Tenpenny said. “No loose ends.”
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