The minute interval felt like ten. The chart blinked. The candlestick moved up.

Got it. Crane calculated an eighty percent chance the trend in the next few minutes would continue up. He clicked his first sell order, grabbing the first tranche. Then he quickly pulled up his order ticket and typed in sell orders in ascending values, hoping the trend would last for a few minutes.

He was on a roll. He knew he’d grab each price. He felt it. He’d make a profit on this position. And not for you, Markov, you fucking Russian cunt. Putting these assholes on me. Having them snoring and shitting and sleeping in my house. Bringing their mess and their stink and their bullying. Fuck you, Markov.

Crane pushed back from his desk. He turned to Anastasia. He made a point of not asking permission or informing him of what he was doing, and went to the kitchen.

Ralph Anastasia sat in one of Crane’s custom George Smith chairs and watched him without comment. He had concluded early on that Crane wasn’t going to present any problems. It was just a matter of keeping an eye on him and killing time, not something that Anastasia found hard to do.

He could hunker down and wait for days doing essentially nothing. Ralph Anastasia had been shot at enough times to appreciate an opportunity to get paid for hiding out and laying low.

Harris and Williams were a bit more restless, but every once in a while Anastasia would send one of them out to walk the neighborhood and look for anybody lurking or watching Crane’s building.

As Crane walked barefoot to his kitchen, his Bluetooth earpiece buzzed. He continued walking, headed for the bathroom in the main area of the loft, and waited until he was out of sight before he tapped the on button.

“Hold on,” he said. When he had the bathroom door closed, he continued talking. “Yes?”

Olivia Sanchez spoke in a soft voice, obviously somewhere she didn’t want to be heard talking on her phone.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“It’s going. What about you?”

“They’ve got me stashed away up in East Harlem.”

“Why?”

Olivia lied, “Beck’s place is getting too crowded. There’s nowhere for me to sleep. One of Manny’s gang people is watching over me at this place. Luckily she prefers watching TV to watching me. Where are you at?”

“Closing out everything I can. Grabbing profits, minimizing losses. Same thing I’ve been doing for days. I’m planning to have everything closed out by ten, eleven o’clock this morning. I won’t make it much longer. There isn’t much left.”

“Good. When is Markov going to take over the account?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard shit from him. He must be busy with something else. Drugs, whores, or presumably killing Beck. You sure your guys are going to survive this?”

“Well, nobody is going to take them by surprise, that’s for sure.”

“If Beck doesn’t make it, you realize, we’re fucked.”

“No, we just go to plan B and take it ourselves.”

“And be on Markov’s kill list for the rest of our lives?”

“We’re not giving up now, no matter what happens.”

Crane said, “Agreed.” But he was thinking it through. Realizing now that he had to have a plan in case Beck and his men didn’t make it.

He asked Olivia, “Where are you going to be when the market opens?”

“Hopefully back at Beck’s.”

“Hopefully?”

“He said I would.”

“You’ve got to be there to see where they put the cash.”

“I will. I will. Just hang in. Eight more hours and it’s done. If you don’t hear anything from me by nine-thirty, you’ll know I’m back there.”

Crane calmed himself. “Fine. You keep them pointed in the right direction. I’m assuming Markov will show up to look over my shoulder and breathe his stink all over me sometime soon. When I start consolidating everything in his bank account I’ll do it fairly fast. I’ll make the amount of the last transfer about five million, so hit it when you see it going in.”

“Got it.”

Olivia cut the connection.

Crane splashed his face with cold water, washed his hands, and headed back to his computer.

Anastasia stared at Crane when he returned.

Crane stared back at him, almost daring him to say something. He didn’t.

Crane asked, “You hear from Markov?”

Anastasia shook his head.

“When is he going to show up?”

“No idea.”

Anastasia continued staring at Crane. For the first time since they’d been guarding him, Crane wondered, is this guy just trying to fuck with me, or could Markov be paying these thugs to watch me until he has his money, and then kill me? No. He’d made money for Markov in the past. If he made him almost whole this time, there’d be little reason for Markov to kill him, but still—definitely got to think about a Plan B. There’s no downside having a Plan B.

All right, Crane told himself, keep going. Make this work. Cover your bases. First, get the fucking money. Money can solve anything, even this hard ass watching him like he was a target.

As Crane settled behind his keyboard, he had a disturbing thought. If these guys did manage to kill him, Olivia could very well end up with everything.

For a moment, Alan Crane tried to calculate the possibility that Olivia Sanchez had planned it that way from the very beginning.

71

It took Jeffrey Esposito and his men two hours just to square away the bodies and arrest the survivors.

They’d left the Seven-Six in four cars. Esposito and Augustus Mosebee in the lead, driving an unmarked squad car. Behind him the three detectives from his precinct squad in another unmarked. Behind them were two patrol cars. He’d managed to wangle one more than he originally planned after talking to Pearce, both cars with a team of two uniformed cops.

They’d heard the gunfire and seen the light from the burning gasoline five blocks away. Esposito stopped and immediately called for support. All police personnel in the area were told to respond to gunshots at Beck’s location.

Esposito sent one patrol car to investigate the fire on Conover. He and his detectives and the other patrol car converged on the gunshots on Reed Street.

By the time Esposito screeched to a halt near the bullet-ridden SUV blocking the empty lot, the gunshots had ceased. He flooded the SUV with his high beams. The unmarked and the patrol car pulled in next to him and did the same. That’s when he spotted the two men Beck and Ciro had knocked out lying on the ground.

Everyone stayed behind the cover of their open doors. Esposito got on his loudspeaker and ordered, “Police. Anybody in there, come out with your hands up.”

Immediately, shots rang out, bullets hitting their cars. Esposito and his men returned fire, but the advantage of the two remaining assault rifles almost outweighed their superior number of handguns. Two patrol cops taking cover behind car doors were hit. One in the hip, the other in the lower part of his bulletproof vest.

By then, more police flooded into the area and joined the gunfight.

Eventually, the overwhelming firepower of the cops prevailed. Of the six remaining Bosnians, three were killed, two seriously wounded. The sixth evaded injury by taking cover in a dip in the ground behind a pile of discarded tires. He surrendered babbling unintelligible English.

Before it was all over two more cops were hit, both in the lower legs.

Everybody was half deaf from the gunshots.

On Conover, the first fire truck had arrived before the cops. Two more were on the scene by the time the flames were extinguished.

Three more patrol cars arrived on that side of Beck’s building, but they had stayed well back of the billowing fire, even though they saw bodies on the street and sidewalk.

All five men that Demarco had wiped out had survived the fires because they were on the far side of the SUV. Four suffered extensive burns when the SUV went up in flames, but by then the firemen were on the scene and had dragged them away.