I tucked Allen’s 1911 in my waistband and placed Belik’s weapon on the desk, then showed him that my own revolver was empty. “You know who I am, which tells me that you weren’t aware of the severity of your situation. But let’s make a deal, because I’m sure you’ll be more useful alive than dead.”
“This isn’t my fault! Well, it kinda is, but not really. I didn’t want this fiasco to happen, but he told me it would.”
“Who is he? Are you talking about your partner over there, Davin Morris?”
“Morris?” Belik wiped the blood pooling under his nose and chin and peered over at the man cuffed to the railing. He looked back at me, apparently insulted. “Morris got taken out in ’27 in a raid on a speakeasy in Hell’s Kitchen. That is just some lackey who does the heavy lifting. I’m the only one left from the original group.”
“So Morris and almost everyone else are dead? Then who is he?”
“A Black Hat, G-man, whatever. He never gave me a name or a handle, but he was the one who planned on taking out my old friends in a bid to give me control over the little empire we had. I just rolled with the plan. But I had no intention of dragging you into this. You’re a death sentence in this business, and I’d prefer to keep living until my hair goes grey.”
“Glad you know what you’ve got yourself into. But tell me, was he worth all this trouble?”
“The G-man? Fuck him, seriously. If it gets me less time, I’ll rat him out. There may be honour among thieves, but not people like him. But then if none of this had happened, he’d still be running around without anyone chasing him.”
“So then, explain how he fits in with you and everything else that’s happened. Start at the beginning … but be quick. More cops, maybe even the Mafia, might be stopping by after the lights go out, so you have less than an hour.”
Belik shifted in his seat and wiped his bloody face before beginning his tale.
“It started back in ’22, after the War, when the Automatics were welcome on every street corner and the Iron Hands had just begun peeping out of the shadows. The five of us — by now you must know who we were — were running a few ops, scouting a lot of heavy traffic at this speakeasy. We thought it was alcohol from up north. Little did we know that we’d walked into one of the Iron Hands’ biggest outposts for racketeering, with our old friend Karl Jaeger at its head. Smart bastard, he was, but he was still surprised when three cops in street clothes pulled .38s on him. Still, I felt bad about that fiasco, so after he got out of the slammer, both me and Stern decided to give him a deal on parts.”
I stopped him with a raised hand and leaned forward. “Jaeger worked for the Iron Hands? You can’t be fucking serious. I thought he was a freelancer.”
“Freelancer? With those resources? Hell, no, man. He was loaded to the neck with money and parts, so the bust was easy when there was evidence up the wazoo. We took him down and locked things up, but that’s as far as it went. As I said, he was a smart bastard: he burned his paper trail, so we couldn’t get a single lead that truly connected him with the Iron Hands. After the trial and our formal promotions, we thought maybe it was more than just a fluke, maybe it was even a blessing after all the shit we went through during the War. We brought a ton of parts in as evidence, and they were all detained and catalogued, but we hid some in our personal vehicles. Not a lot, just a crate or two. We planned to make some money on the side, divvied up the parts and ran a few small deals. We got good coin. Eventually it led to us finding dealers, suppliers, running trade routes, making deals out of state, and it boomed from there. After we all met back up and none of us had been caught during those few months, we pooled our cash and graduated to a full smuggling ring and split the money five ways. We funded a ton of things over about five years, from weapons deals to information on rival smuggling companies that we funnelled to other cops. Things took a dip when Morris took a bullet at that speakeasy a few years back.
“Because of that and the Iron Hands putting more eyes on us, Stern decided to stem off on his own again, run smaller ops for his own stuff and keep his money away from ours. We kept in contact, but he was way too paranoid for his own good, or ours. Things went okay for us for about three years, until our old supplier got canned a few months ago and we got a new one: the Black Hat, who offered us better parts but wanted forty percent of the cut. One hell of a cut to take, but after we saw what our stock sold for, that sixty percent the three of us shared was more than double what we used to make.
“Then, apparently, the other two found out that the Black Hat’s forty percent was funding some shady government projects and told me about it. This included a little pet project he had going downstairs in the attached office. The G-man came down a few days later, asked me if the others had told me anything. I denied it all, of course, but he wasn’t
