The Reluctant Warrior (Warriors Series Book 2) Read online

  He would try to stick it out at the garage; he needed the money. But if necessary, he was ready to wage war.

  Chapter 5

  The garage was closed the next day.

  Shattner peered above the gate and saw that the garage was deserted, with no movement from within. He looked to see if there was any notice put up about the closure; there was none.

  After an hour of hanging about, he gave up and made a call to Diego. Diego didn’t pick up, and after several rings his call went to voice mail. Shattner didn’t leave a message. Diego wasn’t into voice mail. He called the office number for the garage and, after several rings, got the teenager’s recorded voice stating the opening times for the garage.

  He hung around for another hour, trying Diego’s number repeatedly with no response, before making his way slowly back to the apartment. The absence of any information was eating away at him, his mind conjuring various scenarios when the terrible thought struck him.

  He stood still on the sidewalk, oblivious to the cursing of the pedestrians who were forced to flow around him.

  He pulled out his phone and called the children’s school. After a five-minute harangue with the receptionist, she put him on hold, and after a million years, the cool dry voice of Mrs. Harwood came on.

  ‘Ah, the missing father. What’s so important, Mr. Shattner, that you had me dragged out of a lesson?’ Sarcasm. A New Yorker’s birthright.

  He breathed deeply, oxygen filling his mind, trying to blow away the mist in his head and mute the roaring in his ears.

  ‘Mr. Shattner?’

  ‘Mrs. Harwood, are my kids in school?’

  A pause. ‘Why wouldn’t they be, Mr. Shattner?’

  He squeezed the phone tightly as if by doing so he could get a better reply from her. ‘Mrs. Harwood, are they in school right now?’

  The cool voice went cold. ‘I taught Lisa earlier today and saw her with her brother later. Is there something that the school should know?’

  ‘Mrs. Harwood, this will sound insane, but could you please go and see for yourself that they’re both in their lessons right at this minute? I’ll hold. Please?’

  ‘Mr. Shattner, I have seen both of them earlier today. Now, I have a lesson to teach, and I’m hanging up.’

  ‘Mrs. Harwood, please. I shall never ask another favor of you, but please do me this one. Please check on them right this minute and let me know. Please!’ Desperation cracked his voice and singed and burnt the air around him.

  She went quiet for a minute and then said, ‘Mr. Shattner, I don’t know what’s going on in your life. I’m not sure I want to know, but I have to ask. Are they in some danger? What exactly is happening that you have to ask this?’

  ‘Mrs. Harwood, just this once, please go check on them.’ Cities, continents, sun, life disappeared. Existence was reduced to the voice in his ear.

  He heard nothing, just an empty line, and feared she had hung up on him, but no, there wasn’t a dial tone. Just an empty silence. He crushed the phone harder to his ear as if that would bring her back, and then through the fog surrounding him, he heard her voice in his ear.

  ‘Mr. Shattner? Mr. Shattner, are you there?’

  He licked his lips and forced sound through his parched throat. ‘Yes.’

  The coldness was replaced by cool dryness. ‘I’m happy to say they’re both in their respective classes. Would you like me to message you a picture to your mobile?’

  He cleared his throat once, then twice. The planet started spinning again. ‘No, that won’t be necessary. I apologize for the trouble and can’t thank you enough.’

  A pause and with it came the slightest softening in her voice. ‘If there is some trouble, we might be able to help, Mr. Shattner.’

  ‘No trouble, Mrs. Harwood. I was missing them, that’s all.’ It sounded lame even to his ears.

  ‘Very well then,’ came the brisk reply, ‘I have to go back to my students, who no doubt will be thinking and behaving as if it was Christmas come early. You have a good day,’ and she hung up.

  Shattner stood there, the darkness disappearing, New York sprouting around him, making its presence felt again. He walked unsteadily to a nearby wooden bench, drawing huge gulps of air, a dead man revived. He sat there till the world had righted itself and then started thinking, analyzing, planning.

  Clearly something had happened for the garage to shut down and Diego to go off the radar. He tried Diego’s phone again a few more times and got no reply. He had to check if the gang was still operational, but first he had to drop off the radar, just in case.

  He walked towards Thatford Avenue, taking care to check for tails and finding none. He stopped at a store and bought a change of clothes for the kids and himself and headed back to the school. He camped outside the school, a concrete structure that looked pretty uninspiring for a school – but most schools were these days. Drab on the outside, yet expected to churn out geniuses.

  A burger and a bag of peanuts gave him brief company. At three p.m. the school regurgitated its contents, children streaming out of the gates and into the open doors of their parents’ cars.

  Through the crowd, Shattner spotted Shawn holding tightly to Lisa’s hand, his daughter skipping and talking excitedly to him. Shattner held back, just drinking in their sight, feeling his skin and insides warm, and then stepped forward into Shawn’s vision.

  ‘Daddy,’ his daughter screamed and hurled herself into his arms.

  ‘Hello, princess, I wanted to surprise you,’ he replied over her excitement. She kissed him on the cheek and started telling him about her day. He set her down and looked both of them in the eye.

  ‘I have a surprise for you both, but I can’t tell you what it is,’ he told them solemnly.

  Lisa started dancing on her toes and tugged at his hands. ‘What is it, Daddy?’

  ‘He said it’s a surprise,’ Shawn said in his big-brother superior voice.

  ‘Daddy, won’t you tell me, please?’ Lisa pleaded with him.

  Shattner shook his head and took their hands and started walking away from the school.

  ‘I won’t talk to you then, Daddy,’ Lisa said in her most serious voice. They walked in silence for a minute, and then she burst out, ‘Daddy, I mean it, if you don’t tell me, I won’t talk to you.’

  Shattner grinned down at her and winked at Shawn. ‘I heard you the first time, princess.’

  She pouted and flounced along and then burst into giggles as he tickled her. He drank in her laughter greedily, drawing sustenance from it. He walked them to the subway at Rockaway Avenue, Lisa barely able to contain her excitement as they walked down the subway stairs and bought the tickets.

  ‘Are we going somewhere, Dad?’ This time it was Shawn who could not contain his curiosity.

  Shattner smiled and nodded and directed them to the platform going towards Manhattan. He looked around discreetly, noticing nothing out of the ordinary. They were part of the anonymous commuting populace, merging into their inescapable routine. During the subway ride, Shawn kept Lisa entertained while Shattner organized his thoughts and planned his next steps. The motion of the train lulled his children to sleep, and he held Lisa in his arms as the train sped from light to dark and light again.

  He roused them when the subway was approaching the Upper West Side and got them off on Eighty-Sixth Street. He checked them into a run-down but still decent hotel, paid in cash, and settled them in their room.

  He arranged the children’s stuff in the wardrobe in the room, the highest shelf holding his bag with his gun and phone, its battery removed. He let the kids have a shower and freshened himself up quickly and then set up the takeaway dinner they had ordered from a diner.

  Lisa was barely awake when they finished and went to sleep soon after he had changed her clothes. Shawn was tired but awake, knowing that something had happened to make his dad change their routine.

  When Lisa was asleep, he sat up in the narrow bed and looked at his father expectantly. Shattne
r ruffled his hair. ‘I’m taking you out of school for a few days. I have some work in this part of the city, and once I finish it, we’ll go back and start school.’

  Shawn’s mouth opened in an ‘O’ as he processed all this.

  ‘Dad, how many days will we miss? Mrs. Harwood will have to be told.’

  ‘Done.’ Shattner ticked in the air. ‘I told the dragon about it and made her feel nice about letting you both have some days off. And we’ll be here two or three days, at the max.’

  Shawn frowned as another thought struck him. ‘What will we do when you’re away, Dad?’

  ‘Oh, ye of little faith.’ Shattner pulled him toward his chest. ‘Your superman dad has taken care of that too. There’s a daycare center here that’s very good. I’ve checked both of you in for tomorrow, and you can spend the whole day there. You’ll enjoy it. My buddies rate it highly.

  ‘No dragon, no schoolwork, just fun and games all day,’ he continued.

  Shawn pumped his fist and whispered loudly, ‘Yes! I can’t wait to tell Lisa.’

  He grinned widely at Shattner, his dimples pronounced. ‘You were planning this all along, weren’t you, Dad?’

  Shattner nodded, his heart clenching, and sat with him till he fell asleep.

  And felt like the smallest person in the greatest city on earth.

  Chapter 6

  He awoke in the morning without conscious thought and lay on his bed for a while, orienting himself.

  The city made itself known through the constant growl of traffic coming through the thin windows. He got up and did his customary survey of the street below through his hotel window and then went to the wardrobe and turned on his phone again.

  No messages, no voice mail, no missed calls.

  He looked across the room to check if his children were still sleeping and then called the garage first and then Diego. He got no response from either of the numbers and pulled apart the phone again and slipped it into his pocket.

  He woke his children and spent a couple of hours with them, pushing back the real world as long as he could, but finally it was time to get them to the daycare center and check them in.

  An hour later, he was driving a yellow cab, after paying its driver handsomely for the day, driving back to Brooklyn. In the passenger seat was a map of Brooklyn with six red crosses marked on it.

  5Clubs had stashes for the crack and meth and stuff they moved all across the borough, and those red crosses were the stashes that Shattner knew of.

  If the warehouses were operational, the gang was operational.

  The stashes were not your conventional warehouses. They were apartments in which families lived.

  The occupants were usually gang families or connected to the gang in some way and got to live free in the apartments in return for having the drugs stashed in their homes. It was a neat setup by Cruz and worked so well that not once had any of his warehouses been raided. His genius lay in the location of those apartments. Some of those were in the most run-down, deprived neighborhoods of Brooklyn, such as Brownsville, and some were in the wealthiest neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn Heights.

  Shattner drew up to the first address, a single-family home that housed a gang member and his wife and three kids, a two-storied building off Christopher Avenue and Newport Street in Brownsville. As soon as he drove on Newport Street, he realized this was a bad idea.

  He was the only white male driving a cab in the neighborhood, and if he stepped out of the cab, he would stick out and be remembered. He drew near as slowly as he could without drawing attention, spotted the house on his left ahead, and slowed down further.

  Nothing. No one.

  He debated coming back up the street for a second pass, but discarded that thought and headed to the next cross.

  He made his way past upmarket cafés and bistros till he came to an imposing apartment block in Brooklyn Heights. The apartment was on the third floor and was occupied by a lawyer who represented 5Clubs. The apartment was guarded whenever it housed a load.

  Shattner parked his cab a block away and hoofed it across to the apartment block, grabbing his caffeine fix on the way. He walked past the block, his cap pulled low, and peered inside the entrance through the corner of his eyes, but couldn’t see anything. He knew the block had CCTV coverage, and he reckoned he could make a couple of more passes safely before he attracted attention.

  It was on his third pass, when he had almost given up, that he saw Aleksander, one of the gang’s hit men, talking with the concierge in the entrance. Aleksander was a nasty piece of work; Shattner had seen him casually break the knee of a bystander near the garage just because Joe Bystander had stopped in his tracks to make a phone call and Aleksander had bumped into him from behind.

  Aleksander’s presence indicated the gang was still operational, so the garage was closed for other reasons.

  Maybe Shattner was suspected of being a snitch by Diego and Cruz, and hence the garage was closed till Shattner was taken care of. Shattner didn’t know and didn’t waste time speculating. He glanced at his wrist. Just past noon and still time for his next visit, one he was not looking forward to.

  Elaine Rocka was born with a scowl and an opinion and never failed to display either or both at the slightest provocation. Which explained why she had run through three husbands and had no children. Husband number three had left her a sprawling five-bedroom home in the Bronx where Elaine now lived with a couple of cats and dogs for company. If her opinions bothered her pets, they didn’t let on.

  Elaine Rocka was Shattner’s sister-in-law.

  She had never liked him and hadn’t ever hidden that dislike. She thought her sister had ruined her life by marrying him.

  Elaine Rocka had one redeeming quality in Shattner’s eyes.

  She loved his kids and never lost an opportunity to keep them with her. Shattner drove the cab to Pelham Bay in the Bronx and wove his way to Laurie Avenue. He parked outside the short driveway, climbed the few steps and banged the knocker, fully knowing she didn’t like it banged. He could hear the deep silence in the house, and then a dog barked from its deep interior, and he could hear steps approaching the door.

  Elaine flung open the door, robustly built and elegantly dressed; her scowl threatened to split her face apart when she saw Shattner.

  ‘Prick,’ she said by way of greeting. She turned her back on him and polished the brass knocker, which was shining brighter than a mirror, with a cloth tucked away in her waistband.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked coarsely. ‘Ran out of bread and come begging again?’ referring to the one time Shattner had asked her for financial help after his discharge from the army.

  ‘The kids,’ Shattner replied, stuttering a little in her formidable presence, ‘could you keep them for a few days while I sort out some issues at work?’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘In deep shit again, are you? Right, I forgot. That’s where you wallow normally, don’t you?’

  ‘Elaine, please… I need your help. Can you take them in just for a few days? I wouldn’t have come to you if I could put them up with someone else.’

  A wrist shot out and grabbed Shattner’s shirt. ‘Put them with someone else, would you, you prick? Where are they?’ Her eyes moved past him and searched over his shoulder.

  ‘They aren’t here. I’ll bring them in the evening,’ Shattner replied as he tried to pry himself loose from a grip that was suffocating him.

  ‘What about that tight bitch? What have you told her?’ Elaine asked him, politely referring to Mrs. Harwood.

  ‘That they’re unwell and that they’re visiting you for a few days.’

  ‘Six p.m. Don’t be late. They need to be fed,’ she said as she stepped back into her home and started shutting the door in his face.

  Shattner dug into his pocket and brought out a roll of bills and handed them to her. The heavy hand pushed him back, and he stumbled on the steps.

  ‘I don’t need your wad, you prick. Only the kids.’ The door sl
ammed in his face, her dogs barking a contemptuous chorus in farewell.

  Shattner went to his cab and sat a long while. He observed the slight trembling of his hands, the tight band of pressure around him taking its toll. He picked up the phone to try the garage and then dropped it when it rang, the shrill tone unexpected and grating in the confines of the car. He looked at the display and saw that it was an unknown number.

  He held it to his ear. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Chollo, we have to meet tomorrow, come to the place where we did the first transfer, at eleven.’ Diego’s voice was harsh, brooking no refusal.

  ‘Diego, where the fuck are you, man? The garage has shut down, and you aren’t picking up your phone. What’s going on, man?’

  ‘Tomorrow, eleven.’ Diego hung up, ignoring his questions.

  Shattner took deep breaths, calming himself, and looked at his hands. They were still trembling. They always did when the threat level went off the scale. He looked at Elaine’s house and thanked himself for making the arrangement with her.

  Shattner brought his kids to her house promptly at six in the evening. They were ecstatic when they heard they would be spending a few more days away from school, with their aunt Elaine.

  She doted on them and spoiled them silly, and they took full advantage of that.

  Lisa unbuckled and scrambled out of the car even before he had turned off the ignition when they reached Pelham Bay. By the time Shawn and he had got their bags out, she had leapt into Elaine’s arms, the dogs yelping and running excited circles around her.

  ‘Prick,’ mouthed Elaine silently in Shattner’s direction and then bent down and crushed Shawn in a hug.

  ‘Cookies and milk first, homework second, and play afterwards. You know my rules,’ she told Lisa and Shawn sternly, and then she grinned widely, ‘and you know what I think about stupid rules!’ She high-fived them and shepherded them inside and then turned back and stiff-armed Shattner outside the door as he was stepping inside.