The alarm went off, and Sheryl Mott got up in her efficiency apartment on Lincoln Avenue in St. Paul. Five-fuckin’-thirty in the morning. Still dark out-and this is after doing a six-hundred-mile round trip yesterday, missing work…she gingerly touched the rash on her cheeks from Gator’s Brillo-pad four-o’clock shadow.
Mission Impossible theme music was playing in her head. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it…
Her assignment today was Dickie Werk, Werky for short.
Richard M. Werk maintained an office in the Ramsey Building, a liver-colored brownstone near Mears Park in downtown St. Paul. He employed a secretary, two legal clerks, and an “investigator.” Simon Hanky, the investigator, was a vetted OMG soldier whose main job was to keep an eye on Werky and clean up messes. Sheryl had some history with Hanky, and he was one scary fella.
Werky rented space to three young, eager, world-saver attorneys who rallied to the defense of disadvantaged inner-city youth who had difficulty finding gainful employment in a tough economy…and were forced to support themselves by robbing and selling dope. And stabbing and shooting people.
Sheryl rolled her eyes, shook her head, planted her feet on the chilly hardwood floor, and pushed up off the bed.
Werky was the kind of overly self-dramatizing guy who never outgrew snarfing his first line of cocaine in law school, blowing his brains out listening to Warren Zevon’s Lawyers Guns and Money at max volume. He ate too much, sweated too much, talked too much and had this absolute, and potentially fatal, fascination with rubbing up against hard-core criminals.
She had heard him blab at a party once; comparing himself to Robert Duvall playing Tom Hagen in The Godfather. How he only had one client. Wink, wink.
But pulsing in all that corpulent narcissism was a brilliant legal mind totally devoted to getting Danny T.’s convictions overturned. So the gang indulged Werky’s affectations. So far.
Sheryl sighed and headed for the bathroom. A few minutes later she was worried she had a mild kidney infection. Goddamn Gator wouldn’t use condoms. Made her stand around after so he could see his jizz…
Back on task. Werky.
How to proceed. After Seattle had exploded in her face, Sheryl didn’t indulge nobody anymore.
She didn’t trust Werky’s office help or his do-good office mates.
She didn’t trust the office phones.
Neither did Werky. He handled his One Client’s real business affairs exclusively by cell phone in his car. Had a whole stash of cells. Use them one time and toss them. So she’d have to catch him in his car.
She took a shower, washed and blow-dried her hair, put on minimal makeup, a long denim skirt, a mock turtleneck, and a long leather coat that reached down past the tops of her tall leather boots.
No sense in giving Werky ideas by showing skin.
She tucked Gator’s stolen paperwork into her purse, went down to the street, and started the Pontiac. Then she stopped at the Grand and Dale drugstore, bought a pack of Merit filters. Two blocks down, she picked up a tall cardboard cup of Starbucks with a couple shots of espresso. Then she joined the steel-and-glass bumper-to-bumper escalator of commuters going down Grand Hill into St. Paul. She inched through the business district and turned into the parking garage next to the Ramsey Building. Drove to the contract parking level in the basement. Some things don’t change. Werky still had a parking stall with his name on it.
The stall was empty.
She parked one floor up in hourly, took the stairs down, and walked a figure eight in the crowd of sleepy-eyed nine-to-fivers getting out of their cars and marching into the skyways. She kept a sharp watch on the parking stall.
Two Merits later: bingo. The shiny black Escalade wheeled in on a plush squeal of Michelin radials. Sheryl took a deep breath. The OMG gang had matured around dope from street thugs into serious big-time crooks. Trick was to be nimble, like a fly zipping through a sticky spiderweb. Get in and out fast. And not get wrapped up and eaten. She walked up to the tinted driver’s-side window and tapped.
The window zipped down an inch. An eye appeared in a thick puddle of a glasses lens.
“Yeah?” said the eye.
She watched the eye cross-reference a databank of faces, names, levels of trust and threat, and quickly reach a decision:
“How you doin’, Sheryl?”
“Hiya, Werky.”
“What’s up?”
“Need you to look at something.”
The eye fluttered, amused. “Like your tattoo? You still got it?”
Mastering an impulse to puke all over his fancy wax job, Sheryl said, “You gonna make me stand out here in the cold?”
The door locks snapped open. Sheryl walked around the front of the SUV, opened the passenger-side door, and slid into the deep leather bucket seat.
Same old Werky, piled up like Jabba the Hutt’s pinstriped baby brother. He licked his gummy lips and said, “You’re looking well, Sheryl. Threadbare but righteous. Sorta like the Little Match Girl.”
Sheryl resolved to keep her cool. She had once known a Las Vegas hooker who swore that men were all just physical extensions of their dicks. Werky fit the pattern; short, sixty pounds overweight, and lopsided with a head too small for the rest of him.
She removed the sheaf of papers Gator had lifted from Broker’s house from her purse and handed them to him.
Seeing the documents, Werky’s demeanor changed. Focusing fast, he flipped through the pages, his voice concentrating in a meditative “Hmmm.” Sheryl sipped the remains of her coffee and waited. Another, longer “Hmmmm” followed by an impressed: “No shit.” Now Werky had tilted his thick glasses down his nose, looking over them as he scanned the warrant, the memo, the Visa statement, and the Washington County pay voucher. “The missing puzzle piece. Perhaps,” he said slowly. When he looked up at her, his eyes darted fast and alert. “Where’d you get this?”
Sheryl gave him a brief, ambiguous smile.
“So,” he said.
“So?” she said.
“You want something,” Werky said, waffling the papers in his hand. “In exchange.”
Sheryl pursed her lips and said, “Consider it a gift. For now, just make Danny aware of what’s in those papers. I know it nags him, the way Jojo checked out. You can talk to Danny, right? So no one’s listening in.”
“I can do that.” Werky cocked his head.
“Just tell him I said hello. And, ah, maybe, after you make that call, we could talk again,” Sheryl said.
“I see,” Werky said slowly, watching her as he heaved in his seat, reached in the back, and pushed open a square leather briefcase the size of a small Duluth pack, started to insert the papers. “May I?”
Sheryl shrugged, “Sure, they’re yours.”
“Good,” Werky said. He tucked the papers out of sight and removed a yellow legal pad, picked up a pen from the dash, and handed pen and pad to her. “Give me a number where you can be reached day or night.”
Sheryl jotted down her cell, handed back the pen and pad, and started to open the door.
Werky laid his porcine hand on her arm, friendly. “Nice seeing you again, Sheryl,” he said, no games, level and businesslike.
“Yeah, me too,” she said.
Werky maintained the pressure on her arm. “Welcome back,” he said.
“Yeah,” Sheryl said, trying to maintain her unassuming expression and stuff her building anticipation. Shit, they might actually go for this.
Werky released her arm; she opened the door and got out. As she closed it, she saw him reaching for the car phone. She headed for the stairs. Three minutes later she was strapped into her seat belt and pulling the Pontiac out of the parking garage.