Sergeant Sam Morgan's close friend has been killed. He is being framed for the crime by a corrupt police lieutenant, who was responsible for the death. Morgan survives attempts on his own life as he tries to clear himself. He becomes involved in a vast worldwide conspiracy in which businessman, politicians and criminals vie with each other to get control of the research papers of a famous scientist, Dr. Sanchez, who has been killed in a botched kidnapping. With the help of friends like Wang, a shady Chinese manipulator, El Gordo, a Sino-Cubano restaurant owner and others, he unravels a conspiracy so complicated that even the participants are not sure whose side they're on. Judy Greene is beautiful, intelligent, broke and desperate. A former government researcher, she has a young daughter and a senile father to support. She is bribed by a retired intelligence officer, Colonel Lawson, who has been hired by a large corporation to get Sanchez papers, whatever the cost. To confuse adversaries, Greene agrees to masquerade as the wife of an assassin she never meets. Unknown to her, an old lover has infiltrated the colonel's operation and may have recommended her for the job. Many others are involved in the twisting fast-moving pursuit of the Sanchez papers. Among them: Harry Gibson, the ambitious and ruthless fixit guy; Palermo, the squirming Mafia don who distributes the drugs being imported by McCameron, the CEO of a shipping company who picks up the tab for all the mayhem and may be untouchable; big and small operators, all cogs in a corrupt adventure. The goal of this competition is control of a discovery that will make all other forms of energy irrelevant and the possessors of the research wealthy and powerful. To survive all the betrayal, violence and even a tangled love affair requires courage, nerve and luck.

JUST DESERTS

A Novel By John Ahern

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 John Ahern
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4670-4000-6

Chapter One

Wang, the hot dog man, had called Sergeant Sam Morgan that Lieutenant Rogers was sitting in a car on Mulberry Street. Morgan took the BMT downtown to Canal Street reading the paper on the way. He found what he had been looking for since yesterday. A man named Valdez-Gomez had committed suicide in Miami. He was found sitting in his car in the garage adjoining his home with a bullet in his chest and a gun on the seat beside him. Morgan had been informed that something would happen in Miami. Johnson, a mysterious hitman, had just visited that city and where Johnson went, something happened. It wasn't coincidence. Two months ago, the death of an Israeli in Paris was first reported as a suicide, but subsequently there were doubts expressed by his friends that he had actually killed himself. After the initial flurry of questions, total silence descended on the affair. Suicide, however, was the final official position.

Johnson had gone to Paris that weekend also. A busy guy thought Morgan. "It could still be coincidence," reasoned police officer Jensen.

"Yeah," countered Morgan, "like your youth and lack of smarts. Like the way I got transferred to work under Lieutenant Rogers."

Wang sold his hot dogs from a cart with a casually patched umbrella. "Everything's good in them but the meat." He hustled a few sodas, put a little extra sauerkraut on to quash the competition and took numbers. Wang squinted fiercely as Morgan grabbed a small Coke to go with the egg roll he'd bought across the street. "Business looks bad," smiled the sergeant.

"You got an egg roll in your mouth and you say that? Shit, the least you could do is get ptomaine from a friend." Wang busied himself with what might have been his first customers of the day. "I don't know why I start so early. No one eats hot dogs in the morning except maybe cops and whores." He took Morgan's egg roll and threw it in the garbage under his cart. "Egg rolls make me look bad. Sergeant." He shoved a hot dog at him.

"This one's on the house, right?" Morgan nibbled at it delicately. "Next time I'll buy one so you don't starve to death."

"I'm dying here. Dying, mother."

"Come on, Wang, don't bullshit me. You got other ways to make a few."

"Sauerkraut or relish?" Wang spoke in Chinese to a customer, then without looking at Morgan, but speaking in English, he recited a litany. "This is all I do. I'm Wang the hot dog freak. My parole officer says this is all I do. My girlfriend swears this is all I do. My mother who sews up a storm in a sweatshop down the block swears in Chinese this is all I do. Everything's kosher. So don't bite the hand that feeds you, baby."

"Where's Rogers at, Wang?"

Wang popped a couple of cold drinks for his customers and gave a nod of his head toward the corner. Morgan lifted his eyes and observed the blue Chevy. Rogers was sitting in the driver's seat.

"Still running that poker game on Canal Street?"

Wang cursed and checked the light under his pot of boiling dogs. "A guy like me does a bull a favor and he busts balls. Who can figure it? That's why no one loves you, Morgan. That's why you got bleeding ulcers and piles."

Aman wearing sneakers, short pants, an Irish walking hat and a T-shirt with a photo of a tiger and a golf club on it. Biked through the busy traffic that clogged the narrow streets of Chinatown day and night. He stopped at Rogers' car and they chatted.

Wang got some more customers and cheered up. He didn't bother to look in the direction of the car. "These guys can meet anywhere they like and they pick this pissy street. That's what's wrong with bulls. Absolutely no sense of elegance." He shook his head with a disdain that indicated the social difference between himself, Wang—the hot dog man, as long as he was on parole, but a sport at heart—and these "cops." Wang bunched the fingers of both hands and raised them close to his face in an Italian gesture that indicated frustration in the face of stupidity.

"You guys are robbing the public blind and you still can't get a suit that fits. `Un cazz' un cul'. Look, all I want is a taste."

"What are you, Wang, a Chink or a Wop?"

Morgan threw the cold remains of his hot dog in Wang's garbage can and smiled a farewell. Wang was right, Morgan thought, about my suit. He looked down and saw that his cuffs were about two inches above his shoe tops. So, I'm a slob. So?

The conversation between Rogers and the biker was brief. The lieutenant was pulling out of his parking spot into the slow-moving traffic. The biker walked his bike to the corner and then mounted it. Morgan saw him cut across the traffic and head north on Mulberry. Morgan speeded up until he was almost trotting. He caught a cab at the corner, but the traffic slowed the car down to the pace of a slow walker. Morgan could still see the bike rider. He cursed to himself and yelled in frustration at the driver who was bored by passenger's complaints. "What are you, a nut?"

"I gotta be sitting here with a shithead, stuck in traffic, to catch a clown on a bike."

"Just don't bust chops, okay?"

The cab came to a full stop in the middle of the block just south of Houston St. There was some construction work going on. Morgan paid the fare and jumped out. He didn't notice the finger the driver gave him in farewell.

Morgan ran to the corner hoping to catch a glimpse of the biker. At Houston St. he had vanished. That was the second time he'd gotten away. "Maybe next time I should bring a bike." The thought of exercise sickened Morgan ...

The man on the bike entered Soho. He stopped at an art gallery and chained his bicycle to a fire hydrant near the entrance. He surveyed the passing gallery visitors who seemed to be enjoying this unusually warm spring day. The bars and restaurants that dotted the area were busy for an afternoon.

The biker had worked up a sweat on his ride from Chinatown. He entered the gallery where a luncheon dance concert and poetry reading were taking place. A jaundiced gnome of a man spat out his bastard translation of Baudelaire, while a nubile woman moved sinuously to the words of the French poet.

It was not the biker's cup of tea at all, but the dancer was stunning, yet limber in spite of a wiry hardness that gave her limbs the tensile strength of steel. A fairly interested group had flattened themselves along the walls of the gallery to watch the performance. To the left of the entrance, was the woman the biker had come to see. He made his way through the crowd, his attire perfectly in accord with the eclectic costumes—dashikis, togas, saris, kimonos, culottes, women in mannish vested suits, lots of phony Louis Vuitton handbags, men in tattered Levis with their asses hanging out, and a sprinkling of skirts down to the crotch.

"You're late and I had to watch this crap. Christ!." Judy Greene was not in the mood for either the gallery or the dancing. The gnome reading Baudelaire was now transformed from a spitter to a drooler. His straggly, straw-colored hair had been carefully coifed to hide its thinness and to disguise the spreading baldness that had reduced his widow's peak to a wispy puff in front. "I ran into traffic." Lawson had difficulty removing his attention from the dancer.

"God, look at you. You are almost as delicious as the rest of them here. What an imperialist image you create."

"We are flexible. He straightened himself...