The Yakuza Gambit Read online

  “Safe.”

  “Not good enough.” The large Irishman tightened his fists but didn’t raise them.

  “Don’t worry,” Bannon said. “Kwon’s in police custody. He’ll face multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, and a host of other crimes. He’ll spend the rest of his days behind bars. LaSala is, or will be, taken care of. He and Rafael Solis are both permanently out of the picture. You’re the last man standing, Flanagan. The undisputed king of the New England syndicate.”

  Flanagan narrowed his eyes to threatening slits. “Just remember, you double cross me, boy-o…” he let the threat linger.

  “I’ve no intention of reneging on your son’s deal,” Bannon said. “You’ll get what’s coming to you, Flanagan. All of it and more.”

  He gave Bannon a curt nod, turned, and with his hands in his pocket strolled away, disappearing into the shadows, seconds before a cadre of marked and unmarked police cars squealed to a stop, surrounding the abandoned Highlander. Cops jumped out of their vehicles with guns drawn. Cautiously they searched the vehicles and stormed the empty container.

  By then, Bannon and Tara had slipped back into the shadows much as Flannagan had. They watched as the cops scratched their heads and wondered what was going on. The anonymous tip called in had reported a massive drug deal going down. But all they found were an abandoned car and an empty container.

  A hoax? Had they been swatted? Or were they simply too late?

  Satisfied, Bannon clutched the laptop as he and Tara turned and strolled away. Bannon felt like whistling.

  “You are going to tell me how you made five tons of cocaine disappear,” Tara said. “If I have to torture it out of you.”

  Bannon smiled. “No need for all that. A tall cold one back at the Keel Haul is all it’ll take.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  It was long into the wee hours of the morning when Skyjack McMurphy strolled into the Keel Haul, a black backpack slung over one arm, looking pleased as punch. He dropped down onto his favorite barstool and happily accepted the pilsner glass of cold draft beer Bannon offered him from behind the bar.

  “Finally,” Tara said sitting at the bar beside Kayla. “We’ve been hounding Brice all night to tell us how he made the drugs disappear. All he kept saying was, ‘Skyjack did it.’”

  “Or where the drugs are now. We’re this close to waterboarding him,” Kayla said. “And if I have another daiquiri. I’ll be too drunk to remember how you did it in the morning.”

  McMurphy put the backpack on the floor by his feet, grinned and sipped his beer, savoring the moment, and dragging the suspense out just a little bit longer. “Oh, come on. Tell me you two smart,” he raised his glass, “and beautiful women haven’t figured it out on your own yet?”

  “They’ve come close,” Bannon said with a smile, drawing another beer for himself. “I particularly liked the Star Trek transporter theory.”

  “Screw you, Bannon,” Tara said, then demanded, “Spill, Skyjack.”

  “How’s the Palmer kid?” McMurphy asked.

  Tara groaned and Kayla rolled her eyes. “Come on!”

  “Kwon and his people did a number on him.” Bannon ground the back of his teeth just thinking about it. “They cut off two fingers. He’s got busted ribs, a concussion, lost a few teeth. A ruptured an eye socket.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He’s in the hospital still but is expected to be released in the morning,” Bannon said. “He’ll face charges when he’s out, a lot of them. But he’s cooperating with the authorities, giving them everything they need to dismantle what’s left of LaSala’s operation. Along with the contents on the flash drive which has been turned over to the authorities, as well.”

  “I’ve given his mother the name of a very good defense lawyer,” Kayla said. “He’ll do time, but hopefully not too much. He has a lot to answer for.”

  “Too bad LaSala’s not here to pay the price, too,” McMurphy said.

  “Oh, he’s paying,” Tara said. “The ultimate price.”

  McMurphy raised his glass in a toast. “Good ridden to bad trash. And Kwon?”

  “After we finished up at Ocean Gate, Singleton turned him and the others over to the FBI.”

  “He’s being hailed a hero.” Tara spread her hands, as if displaying a marquee headline. “Hero cop rescues hostage and takes down notorious yakuza gang single-handedly on historic World War II ship.”

  McMurphy laughed. “Would love to hear the story he came up with, considering the dead you all left behind. Especially how he got his hands on three military grade grenades.”

  Bannon smiled. “He’ll figure something out.”

  “Nobody’ll be looking to hard into his story,” Kayla said. “Trust me.”

  “Skyjack!” Tara snapped. “The drugs. How’d you make them disappear?”

  “And, where are they now?” Kayla asked.

  “It was simple, really.” He handed Bannon his empty glass and accepted a full one in return. “There’s thousands, tens of thousands, of containers in that yard at any one time.”

  “Like looking for a needle in a stack of needles,” Bannon said. “We needed Solis to led us to it.”

  “Which he did,” Tara said. “I know. I was there for that part.”

  “The point is, there wasn’t much we could do ahead of time, but as soon as we knew which trailer it was, I texted the block location and container number to Skyjack.”

  “Which I forwarded to my DEA contact who worked the docks, because I was locked inside another container, with a team of three machinist technicians. Coasties, of course.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask the dumb question,” Kayla said. “Why?”

  Tara figured it out. “Your friend. He was the toplift operator that pulled a shotgun on Solis’ henchman, Javier.” She slapped the bar. “You were inside the container he dropped off.”

  McMurphy nodded. “Earlier we cut through the side wall of our container. We put the sections on tracks and were able slide the wall open, in sections, then put the sections back into place. We’d have never gotten away with it if the container was closely scrutinized…”

  “But held thirty feet in the air by the toplift, in the dark,” Bannon said. “No one was the wiser.”

  “Once we were dropped into place,” McMurphy said.

  Tara finished, “You cut a hole in the wall of the container containing the drugs…”

  McMurphy nodded. “Once we gained access to the container, we removed the drugs and patch-welded the wall shut. Again, if anyone had looked closely…”

  “But,” Bannon said, “As we predicted, Solis and LaSala panicked, too worried about the money, and mystified by the missing drugs to think straight.”

  “If they hadn’t?” Tara asked. “If one of them had gone in?”

  Bannon shrugged. “I’d have thought of something.”

  “And the drugs?” Kayla said. “Where are they now?”

  “We had to wait for the commotion to die down around the empty container. When the cops finally left, unable to figure out what, if anything, had happened,” McMurphy said. “I fulfilled my promise to my father.”

  He drank his beer.

  “You delivered four thousand kilos of pure cocaine to the now undisputed leader of the Boston mob?” Kayla asked.

  “Of course.” McMurphy drained his beer glass. “I am nothing if not a man of my word.”

  Kayla and Tara exchanged glances. They both looked at Bannon. Tara said, “Please, tell me there’s more.”

  Bannon smiled and handed her his cell phone. He tapped the incoming message he’d received from McMurphy an hour earlier. Kayla and McMurphy leaned in close as a video began to play.

  The camera’s point of view was at a distance and from high ground, looking down at an alley between two rows of an outdoor storage facility. Parked in the alley was a tractor trailer with a shipping container on it. The doors to several of the storage units were rolled up. There were lights on inside each.

&nb
sp; The shipping container doors were open as well.

  Several men were inside, moving large pallets of burlap and shrink-wrapped bundles with a forklift back and forth from the trailer, transferring pallet after pallet of Solis’ drugs into the storage units. The faint sound of the forklift’s backup alarms could be heard over the rush of wind the cell phone video picked up.

  When it was clear the trailer was nearly unloaded, the screen suddenly flashed with blue lights and the sound of police sirens. Over the noise a voice amplified by a bullhorn called out. “This is the police. Stop what you’re doing and put your hands up.”

  The video zoomed in as Chief Reggie Singleton emerging from one of the police cruisers, gun drawn, along with dozens of cops now swarming the area, pushing people to the ground, cuffing them.

  And finally, Singleton happily escorted an obviously distraught Paddy Flanagan away in handcuffs. Tara snapped off the video.

  “That video will be broadcast on every morning newscast across the county,” Bannon predicted. “Chief Singleton will be created with leading the investigation into one of the largest drug seizures in American history. Not bad, for an ex-NYPD cop retired to the sleepy seacoast town of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire.”

  “I promised to deliver the drugs to Paddy,” McMurphy explained. “To make him the undisputed leader of the New England syndicate.” He accepted his third beer from Bannon. “I didn’t say anything about not narcing him out to the cops or how long his reign as undisputed boss of bosses would last. As it turns out, it was a short one.”

  They clinked glasses all around and drank.

  McMurphy put his beer down and picked up the backpack at his feet. From it he extracted a plaque and handed it to Bannon.

  “What’s this?” Bannon asked.

  “Turn it over.”

  He did.

  McMurphy’s machinist friends had mounted the Queen Anne flintlock pistol on the teak plaque. “To commemorate our successful take down of the New England syndicate. At least for the time being.”

  He waved a hand around the Keel Haul. “I thought it would class up the place.”

  Bannon spent a minute admiring the gold inlays and intricate detailed etchings on the weapon, running his fingers over it. “This is incredible. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything,” Tara said.

  “Hang it up somewhere,” Kayla said.

  When the bar had been attacked over the summer, assault weapons, grenades, fire, and the sprinkler system, had destroyed a lot of valuable and one of a kind items Bannon had used to decorate the bar. Items he’d collected over the years. Items that couldn’t be replaced.

  Bannon moved out from behind the bar and walked over to jukebox. There he took down a nice, but generic coastal picture of Maine. In its place, he hung the mounted flintlock.

  He turned to his team. “What do you think?”

  “Much better than being locked in Kwon’s safe,” McMurphy said with a raised glass.

  “Hear, hear,” the others said. They toasted and drank and told stories, laughing until a new dawn turned the night sky red.

  le·vi·a·than

  (in biblical use) a sea monster, or a thing that is very large or powerful, especially a ship, or an autocratic monarch or state.

  con·spir·a·cy

  a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful, or the action of plotting or conspiring.

  The Leviathan Conspiracy – Coming Soon

  If you enjoyed meeting Brice Bannon and his friends,

  be sure to check out David DeLee’s other exciting series

  And for more information about all his books check out his author page:

  David DeLee's Author Page

  ALSO BY DAVID DELEE

  Grace deHaviland Bounty Hunter series

  Too Far

  Stare at the Moon

  Takedown

  With Intent to Deceive

  Pin Money

  Fatal Destiny

  Runners

  Brice Bannon Seacoast Adventures

  The Leviathan Conspiracy – coming soon

  The Yakuza Gambit

  Strike of the Stingray

  The Oceanic Princess

  Facing the Storm

  Nick Lafferty Crime Thrillers

  Out of the Game

  Crystal White

  Flynn & Levy Police Thrillers

  While the City Burns

  Moral Misconduct

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David DeLee is the author of the Grace deHaviland Bounty Hunter series, including the novels Fatal Destiny, Pin Money, With Intent to Deceive, Takedown. And Too Far. David's also written many short stories featuring Grace, most notably Bling, Bling, which appeared in the anthology The Rich and the Dead edited by Nelson DeMille.

  David’s other work includes the novel Crystal White which SUSPENSE MAGAZINE called “…a dark portrayal of the evil that men—and women—can do.”, the second novel in the Nick Lafferty thriller series, Out of The Game, and Moral Misconduct, his Flynn & Levy police procedurals, and his Brice Bannon Seacoast Adventures.

  A member of the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers organization, and a former licensed private investigator, David also holds a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice. He makes his home in New Hampshire.

  For more information, check out David’s website: www.daviddelee-author.com

  All Rights Reserved