The Hardest Thing

the fuck is this? What have you done to my little girl?”
    I jumped to my feet and pulled on some clothes. Martin’s face was as white as a sheet, and he was gesturing frantically for paper and pen. He scribbled some details—an address, a time, NO POLICE underlined three times.
    “Hello? Hello?”
    He put the phone down. His face was white, and he looked very old.
    “They’ve got my daughter.”
    I sat beside him, put an arm around his shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll get her back. I’m trained for this kind of thing.”
    “If I bring anyone with me, they will kill her.”
    “What?”
    He told me everything—the rendezvous arrangements, the ransom, the usual conditions: come alone, no police, no publicity. The grisly details of what they would do to Linda if Martin disobeyed. There was no doubt in either of our minds who “they” were. We didn’t even ask each other. Martin had been to see Marshall, I’d been seen at Martin’s address, they almost certainly knew that we’d been talking to Jack Rendell. The heat was on, the deadline approaching, and they were getting dangerous. They struck where they knew
we were vulnerable, dividing the opposition with one ruthless stroke. It was tactically admirable. Martin was already dressing, his mind focused on one thing only. When he looked at me he scowled—of course, all this was my fault. One steam room fuck and now his daughter’s life was at risk.
    “Martin, I’ve got to come with you.”
    “You stay right here.” His voice was loud and harsh, and from the look on his face I knew better than to argue.
    “At least let me call the cops.”
    “No. Don’t you dare screw this up.”
    “But they’re…”
    “No!” Jesus—he reminded me of a bullying sergeant I’d known in my junior days. He made an effort to calm down. “I’ve got to do this myself. Stay here and don’t do anything.”
    No point in arguing. He was out the door. But what was I supposed to do now? Sit tight like a good little boy and wait for the nasty men to go away? Oh, sure. Just my style. No—the moment Martin left I was figuring out my strategy. “No cops,” they said. Okay. No cops. But I still have guns, and if I can’t outmaneuver a bunch of gangsters like Marshall and Ferrari, then I’ll send my medals back to Uncle Sam, postpaid.
    You don’t rush these things. You sit down and think, with a cool and logical head. So twenty minutes later I was at Martin’s desk, making a list. The two Glock 19s were loaded and ready in my knapsack on the table.
    And that’s when the doorbell rang.
    Martin lives in one of those fancy apartments with a video-entry phone at street level, intercoms on every
floor, controlled access to every landing—your typical paranoid New Yorker’s domestic fortress, basically. The final frontier is a bell on the apartment door which sets off a discreet, muffled ding-dong that won’t disrupt the flow of your discreet dinner party. In theory, the only people who could ring your bell without first going through every other level of security were your next-door neighbors.
    “Who is it?”
    “Martin? It’s Jerry.”
    “Jerry?”
    “Jerry from apartment five, man.”
    Yeah, right. I walked toward the table where my knapsack lay, Glock inside, saying, “Sorry, man, Martin’s not here. I’ll tell him you came by.”
    No need – next thing I knew the lock had been shot open by a Glock with a silencer, and I was shoved up against the wall. It was not Jerry from apartment five.
    “Hello, Dan.”
    “Hello, Ferrari.” There were three of them. “Who are your friends?”
    I put up a decent fight and got within an inch or two of pushing them out, but three against one is bad odds. I ended up winded, sprawling on the floor.
    “Nice of you to visit,” I said, picking myself up. Ferrari was pointing a gun at my head.
    “Make a noise, faggot, and see what happens.” He clicked his fingers, and one of the goons grabbed my wrists while the other secured them behind my back with cable ties. “Search the place.”
    It didn’t take them long to find the guns.
    “Planning a little exercise, Dan?” Ferrari calmly
unloaded the weapons and handed them to his associate, who put them neatly away in an attaché case. Out on the street the three of them would pass for businessmen—charcoal suits, white shirts, dark ties. Businessmen or upscale gangsters—it’s so hard to tell the difference these days.
    “Get down on your knees.”
    I did as I was