He had taken only half a dozen jaunty and unconcerned steps when a power company truck came rumbling around the corner and stopped beside the manhole. The uniformed workmen who got out never even glanced his way.
Runyan slid open one of the glass doors, entered, shut and locked it carefully behind him, then pushed his way through the drapes into the spacious living room. It was sumptuous and decorator perfect in the dim glow of his break-’em-shake-’em.
The study also was a decorator’s wet dream: thick carpets, microcomputer and letter-quality printer, massive hardwood desk, overstuffed leather executive’s swivel chair that looked ready to fly, waist-to-ceiling bookshelves behind the desk, silver-edged trophy plaques on the walls.
“Coke-Dealer-of-the-Year Award,” muttered Runyan. He shut the door and returned his break-’em-shake-’em to the stuff bag after turning on the lights. His time was almost up.
The telephone was a futuristic model with memory; on one side of it was a black oblong box with six buttons on it, on the other a computer modem cradle for the receiver. The phone was the key to the safe, but here Taps’s intelligence was vague. Runyan pushed the top button on the black box. The stereo deck started to play. He pushed it again. The stereo stopped.
Second button. The maple doors slid open on the huge console TV and the set switched on. Again. Off.
Third. Lights on and off.
Fourth. Window blinds.
When Runyan pushed the fifth button, a panel of the bookshelves, books and all, swung open to reveal a small wall safe of hardened cadmium steel. Runyan tried the swing handle. Locked. Since there was no visible dial, the box with the buttons on it probably also opened the door of the safe.
He went back to the desk and pushed the final button. Nothing happened. Again. The safe was still locked.
But it had to have something to do with the box and its buttons. How would the mind of a Brother Blood work? Intricate mind. Liked games. Liked gadgets. A sly and tricky dude...
And a dude who played around with a computer. A computer which had a modem for communicating with other computers through the telephone. What if this modem had a different function? He picked up the phone receiver and fitted it into the computer modem. Then he punched the final button again. Nothing.
One last thing to try. He flicked on the black rocker switch on the back of the computer. Tried again. The door of the safe popped open an inch.
Yeah. The games people play. Here’s to you, Brother Blood. He switched off the computer and took from the stuff bag the stacks of ornately-scrolled counterfeit bearer bonds which had been forged to Grace’s order. Inside the safe were exactly similar stacks of genuine bearer bonds with the same sequenced serial numbers. He put these stacks on the far end of the desk. It would be disastrous to mix them up.
Taps cut off from the sidewalk between bushes to the rear wall of Brother Blood’s building. He had just put down his electrician’s box when a thin nylon cord set down Runyan’s black nylon stuff bag a dozen feet away. Taps slashed the cord with his switchblade and walked away with the bag, not glancing back, not bothering with his tool kit.
At the corner was an open pay phone without a booth. He looked quickly, almost guiltily around, then slotted his dimes and tapped out a seven-digit local number.
“Yeah,” he said into the phone. “I want to talk with Brother Blood. Tell him Taps Turner is calling.”
Chapter 27
When Louise turned the corner, she saw Taps talking and gesturing earnestly on the pay phone. Beside her, Grace drew in a sharp breath.
“That rotten son of a bitch! Stop the car!”
She was out before it stopped moving, leaving her door hanging open and Louise gaping after her, open-mouthed, as she ran across the grass strip toward the phone where Taps was just saying
“Okay, that be cool...”
Grace snatched the receiver out of hand and slammed it back onto the hooks. He backhanded her across the face, yelping in astonishment, “You crazy, woman? Wuffo you—”
Grace was yelling, “He saved your life! You owe him!”
He grabbed her by the arms and started shaking her, barely aware of Louise’s pale shocked face framed in the open car door a few yards away.
“We got the bonds, all of ’em!” Seeing some of the wildness fading from Grace’s eyes, he gingerly released his grip on her arms. In a quieter voice, he said, “Wasn’t no way we could do that except make sure he couldn’t ever come back at us.”
“You did it ’cause he saved your ass in prison,” said Grace in a low, intense voice. “There ain’t a livin’ soul in this world you’d do that for, an’ you can’t stand thinkin’ about it.” She gave a harsh laugh. “And now Brother Blood’s gonna take you down, nigger.”
Taps hesitated when, in the background, their car suddenly fishtailed away, so abruptly that Grace’s open door slammed shut. He felt sudden fear. Grace wasn’t hardly ever wrong, and now the white bitch Runyan had brought along had cut out with their car, stranding them. But he said, “You... You’re crazy, woman.”
“Don’t you see it yet?” she asked in an almost tired voice. “Brother Blood, he’s gonna start wonderin’, How that man know to call me at the dealer’s unless he was in on it an’ just chicken’ out at the last minute?” Over his protestations, she continued, “It’s what you’d think, was you. Ain’t Brother Blood gonna be any different.” She shook her head and turned away from him. “I ain’t hangin’ around to die with no boot dumb as you.”
Taps let her get almost to the sidewalk before he called after her, “But I got the bonds, baby!”
She turned to look at him, almost with pity. “You got shit, Taps. You think Runyan didn’t know you planned to cross him when you asked he th’ow those bonds down to you?”
She trudged away, her steps tapping out a jaunty staccato in marked contrast to the slump of her shoulders. Taps wanted to run after her, grab her, make it right. But he had to know about this first. He ripped open the black stuff bag with his switchblade in a frenzy of anticipation and dread. It was full of newspapers folded to the approximate size of bearer bonds.
Runyan stepped into Brother Blood’s private elevator and pushed the GARAGE button next to the LOBBY and PENTHOUSE buttons. Tight security. He touched the bulky oblong under his sweater. If Taps was waiting for him across the street from the garage entrance, then everything was straight; if not, yet another friend had betrayed him. He was running out of people who hadn’t tried it, one way or another. Even Louise...
Ashcan that. It was all in the past. They were together now for the long run.
Taps Turner had a terminal case of the stupids, thought Brother Blood. Planning to steal the bond stash — with a white dude, yet! — and then chickening out and thinking he’d be dumb enough to swallow the con about stumbling across the robbery! No, Taps was dog meat right now, he just didn’t know it yet.
Brother Blood was a tall lean bald hollow-eyed man, impeccably dressed in a three-piece midnight blue suit and mirror-shined black oxfords. He leaned forward to peer out of the windshield past the beefy shoulder of his bodyguard as the stretch limo whispered down the deserted street beside his apartment building.
They turned the corner. The driver pushed the remote electronic-eye activator. Fifty yards away, the heavy steel mesh gate began rattling upward. As it did, a lean dark-haired white man in black slacks and black sweater emerged from the garage, walking quickly. His hands were empty, but Brother Blood’s practiced, suspicious eye could pick out the ex-con.