Moving the Meat

By Xlibris US

Mark Dolan earned millions as a major-league baseball pitcher until his arm gave out. He succeeded again in his second career as a freelance detective, guiding clients through tight spots with a combination of luck, guile, and stubborn resolve. Then he got careless during a case and a woman he cared about died, savagely beaten and left to bleed out on the side of a California highway.

A year later, Dolan, still grieving, finds himself once more immersed in a world populated by dangerous people. Hes been hired by Hank Callahan, a Chicago tycoon who built a profitable international airline despite a weakness for Kentucky bourbon and long nights in dark saloons. Callahan wants to retire and hand the airline over to his employees. But powerful industry rivals have other ideas, and they are willing to play very dirty to get their way.

Dolan takes them on, battling the bad guys, defying the long odds against himand changing the course of his life along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493198092

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Face-Down on Avenue A

A DEAD RACCOON was floating in the pool and somebody had stripped all the copper off the roof, said the guy. The place was supposed to be guarded 24/7. He stared at his drink, Black Jack straight up. Divorce goes way beyond just sucking, h e said.

We gonna settle up this check or go ahead and get drunk? said Mark Dolan.

It was the end of the afternoon, close to dusk on a cloudy mid-October day, and they were drinking at the six-stool bar at Opia, a second-floor, medium-rent French restaurant on 57th and Lexington in Manhattan. Dolan wanted to get out of there before the financial wizards from the Bloomberg and Ing buildings poured into the place, but the guy seemed to want to talk more.

He played center field and led off for some good Mets teams in the 1980s and he had become a fan favorite, a scrappy, hustle guy from South Carolina who made sliding catches and never bothered to fix his chipped front tooth. He busted out a knee on a bang-bang play at home plate against the Angels in the playoffs and that was the end of the baseball for him.

He resurfaced a few years later as some sort of financial imam, and he signed up a half-dozen rich jocks as his investment partners—two retired NFL quarterbacks, a Hall of Fame NBA star, a trio of his former Mets teammates. The partnership evolved somehow into a Bahama-based hedge fund, and that entity became bankrupt in 2008 when all hell broke loose, and then the guy’s wife divorced him, gathering up whatever was left. He had showed up that October morning at Dolan’s townhouse, demanding they have lunch.

I can make this whole thing happen with minimal capital, said the guy. He waved the bartender over for another round.

C’mon, man, said Dolan. You know my sister runs my money. She still gives me abuse about that cash I gave you last year—the thirty grand.

Some air seemed to escape from the guy: he seemed to become smaller. I’m dying here, he said. I got out of the game before the big money. My last year with the Mets, my agent went in and asked for $1.3 million, he got $875,000. They said my whole game was speed and I was slowing down.

That was true though, right? said Dolan.

Fuck you, said the guy. What did you get from the Yankees?

$120 million over ten years, said Dolan. But my sister spread it out, so I don’t get that much each year.

And you never threw an inning for them, right?

Blew out my shoulder in spring training, just warming up. Then they found a bunch of bone chips in my elbow. That was it.

The guy looked down at his drink. But you had that big year with the Cubs, right? he said.

Yeah, said Dolan. 22-7.

So you played, and now you’re what? Thirty-five, with all that money, said the guy. And you never got married, never had to split it up.

Thirty-four, said Dolan, Problem is I have all that money and I meet a lot of women with various skills, and it’s taking me a while to figure out that crazy is not a good skill.

Dolan believed he would not have survived his childhood without the calm presence of his sister Mona—the two of them dusky, freakishly tall children among their solemn Aryan classmates in a Minnesota college town. They both did well in school and excelled at sports, but they were by their very nature outsiders in such a place. Dolan had always presumed they were somewhere between one-eighth and one-quarter African-American and that Mona was between one and two years older; the estimates were required because their mother had left them in a hospital emergency room in downtown Minneapolis when they were infants, without any records, not even a note. The surveillance tape they saw years later showed a thin white woman with their dark blonde hair who walked in with a baby swaddled in blankets in either arm, then crossed over to an empty bench and placed the children down with some care. She waited perhaps ten seconds, staring at the two of them, and then she left without looking back.

Dolan knew that it could have gone much worse for them. They were adopted within a month by a couple in their late 30s who taught at Carleton College in a river town called Northfield, forty miles to the south and a world away from the Twin Cities; she was a religion professor and he was chairman of the sociology department. They had despaired of ever having children and they doted on Dolan and his sister, as unexpected gifts from a benevolent Deity. All through his school years in Northfield, Dolan feared more than anything that he might disappoint them in some way.

Mona, a year ahead in school, left first, taking a soccer scholarship at Duke. When she came home for Christmas, she looked like she had lost ten pounds and wasn’t sleeping well—her skin a shade ashy, her blue eyes sunken. In May, she called to say that she had been selected for an all-star traveling team and would spend the summer playing in tournaments all over southern Europe.

So Dolan didn’t see her before he left for Stanford the next September. Dolan had got his fastball up to 94 and gone 16-1 his senior year in high school. The Dodgers drafted him in the second round and offered a $200,000 bonus, but he had full-ride offers from six Division 1 schools. He visited Vanderbilt, Georgetown, and Tulane, and he finally settled on Stanford, mostly because he didn’t want to see snow for a while.

Dolan majored in American history and lived in a single room on the jock wing of a three-story, redwood-faced dormitory. On the first day of baseball practice, he looked over the freshmen pitchers and figured he was the fourth-best left-hander. About halfway through his first season, he picked up a big overhand curveball and started getting his slider over, and he still had the fastball. They started using him out of the bullpen and he finished two games in the NCAA Tournament; Stanford made it to the final eight. He started the next three years and went 12-6, 14-4 and 16-3. The Cubs drafted him sixth overall after his senior year and he signed for a $4 million bonus.

Dolan’s parents and his sister came out to Palo Alto for his graduation. They all spent a weekend together in San Francisco—Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Park, Chinatown. It was the last time Dolan saw his parents; two weeks later, they were hit and killed in their Volvo back in Minnesota by a 14-year-old kid who turned out to have spent the day inhaling various aerosol sprays. At the funeral, Mona seemed listless, crushed by the loss. She stayed on in Northfield, dealing with the house and the paperwork, delaying by a semester her move to Boston to attend business school at Harvard. Dolan saw Mona now and then over the next few years—Christmases in New York, weekends in Boston. Mona moved to Manhattan after Harvard, started as a research analyst at Morgan Stanley.

After two years in the minors, Dolan got called up to Cubs in the middle of a late-August pennant race and got bombed every time he pitched—major league hitters fouling off his curves and sliders and then loading up on his fastball. He stuck with the Cubs over the next two seasons mostly because they didn’t have any decent left-handed starters in their system, going 6-9 and 8-14.

Dolan was in the last year of his contract with the Cubs, and they were unlikely to resign him. At that point, it seemed probable that he would be scuffling for a major-league job the following spring. So in the off-season he made what he considered a pragmatic decision: he learned how to cheat. A Cubs bullpen coach told him about an old pitcher down in Texas, a guy who had won 180 big-league games and didn’t mind sharing some of his tricks with young lefthanders.

Dolan flew down to Dallas, looked the guy up, and, over three days, platters of barbecued ribs, and several bottles of Maker’s Mark, he learned how to slice the ball with his belt buckle or a piece of razor blade sewed into his uniform shirt, how to create a rough spot on the stitches with a sliver of sandpaper in his glove, how to use Vaseline behind his ear to make his slider dip. The old man’s tricks propelled Dolan to his triumphant 22-win season.

It was in late September of that season, in the sixth inning of a meaningless day game against the Astros in Wrigley Field, when Dolan first felt a kind of tug in the back of his left shoulder. A week later, warming up before a start in St. Louis, he felt needles in his elbow whenever he threw his slider.

At the end of the season, unaware of his health issues, the Cubs, Mariners, Red Sox, Rangers, and Yankees contacted his agent, waving wads of cash. The agent suggested they play the various suitors against each other over the next few months. Dolan fired the agent, sparing him a role in the subsequent sketchy behavior, and walked into the office of Yankees chairman George Steinbrenner agentless, naked, and walked out with a $120 million contract.

Mona meanwhile was succeeding wildly at Morgan Stanley—youngest-ever senior research analyst, first female department head, youngest-ever full partner of either gender. At a fixed-income conference in Aspen, she met a 40-year-old, twice-divorced, Italian-American hedge-fund manager. She fell in love with the man, married him, and together they had two babies, a boy and a girl. They both prospered on Wall Street and moved from Turtle Bay to a four-bedroom duplex in a refurbished red-brick and granite building on Park Avenue and 74th St. All was well with Mona until a warm Friday evening in May, when two men wearing ski masks appeared on the first floor of her apartment, shot her husband to death, and crippled her for life with three bullets in her back.

Dolan asked around and eventually found an NYPD captain with contacts in the FBI, who told him that Mona’s husband had handled money for certain Cuban-Americans who ran a Miami-based shipping company that law-enforcement agencies had been tracking. The speculation, the captain said, was that the Cubans, who had vanished to Brazil, were cleaning up any indictable information they may have left behind, and Mona’s husband knew too much. Mona, said the captain, was probably just an inconvenient witness—and praise Jesus the kids were upstairs in their beds. Mona was likely still in danger, he said. The shooters were stone professionals, he said, and those guys try to kill everyone who has ever seen them work.

Dolan found a secluded four-bedroom house in northwest Connecticut, and he moved his sister and her kids to the place. He then found Eli and Zariah, a stern Israeli couple, both of them former Mossad agents skilled with firearms, and installed them on the property to deal with security and whatever else came up.

At that point, on that October afternoon, Dolan had been in a sour funk for six full months. The previous year, Mona had involved him in a nasty battle between two big athletic-gear manufacturers. Dolan had been careless around some villainous people, and a woman he cared about had been beaten to death.

He had worked hard at dulling the pain—a month-long trip to Barbados and Jamaica that became a blur of dark-rum drinks, thick ganja cigars, and floral-patterned bikinis, a week with a Swiss model in Barcelona, five days with a French-Vietnamese flight attendant in London, two weeks at a beach house in Cabo san Lucas with an intense blonde who had once starred in a high-rated TV sitcom. He could sometimes forget about the previous year when he was drunk or stoned or immersed in the flesh of one of those women, but then the cloud would always reform and settle over him.

Then it all got ugly. On a humid Saturday night in September, Dolan was drinking Cuervo-sodas out of a beer glass in a dark hipster bar called Sinai in the East Village. It was the fifth or sixth bar of the night for him, and he had begun to feel that all the people he knew in the place were speaking in a foreign language he did not understand. It was, he knew, a whisper in his ear that another Cuervo was probably unwise. He plunged ahead anyway, threading his way through the crowd in search of a space at the bar.

He finally wedged his way between two sweaty hipsters, then leaned over the bar and waved at the bartender, a skinny, black-haired man who wore a short-sleeved black shirt that showed off his ink. At some point, while Dolan was waving, his arm made contact, grazed the forehead, of a red-haired hipster who was standing behind him—and then things slowed down for Dolan. He could feel the guy’s warm spit land on the back of his head and he could feel a terrible tide sweep over him, all the months of rage. He would later remember the first blow he landed on the red-headed fool, a hard forearm shot to his ribs. Then someone broke a beer bottle over the back of Dolan’s head and he felt the blood trickle down the back of his neck.

Then somehow they were outside under the street lights on Avenue A, the red-headed guy and two of his friends—a fat guy with a dark brown beard wearing a plaid flannel shirt and a slim black man wearing a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt. The red-haired guy was holding something metal, a piece of pipe, and he smacked Dolan on the side of his head with it, and Dolan went down. He could see a fine sprinkle of broken glass and smell the grit of the street, but he didn’t really feel the punches and kicks that the redhead and his friends delivered. Dolan suffered a terrible moment, lying there while he was being pummeled; he felt like he deserved the beating.

The moment passed though, and he put an arm down, found his feet and stood up. He moved back from the three guys who had been beating him, brushing against the small gathering of hipsters who had been watching him get his ass kicked. You should sit back down, said a woman’s voice. An ambulance is coming.

The three guys were standing close together and Dolan ran right at the black kid in the middle, catching him in the right eye with an elbow and then spinning toward the fat guy and breaking his nose with a hard forearm blow. The red-headed guy brought the piece of pipe down on Dolan’s shoulder, numbing his whole left side for a moment. Dolan turned and faced the guy, then moved toward him and hit him with a flurry of hand, elbow and forearm blows. The guy went down, all three of them were down, and it was over then. The ambulance showed up, then two cops, a fat black guy and a tall Hispanic. None of the hipsters would tell the cops what they saw, and Dolan and the three guys weren’t talking either, so the cops put their notebooks back in their pockets and told the EMTs to haul them all off to the emergency room at Beth Israel Hospital to get stitched up. On the way, Dolan learned that the red-headed guy was hoping to find a job in the music industry and the black kid’s name was Tyrell; the fat guy was holding a blood-soaked towel up to his nose and didn’t say anything.

The fight frightened Dolan; he kept remembering that moment on the sidewalk, when he was face-down on Avenue A, ready to give up. The following morning, after juice and a bagel and an hour of switching between Sportscenter and Morning Joe, he trudged up the staircase in the bedroom to the gym he had built on the top floor of his brownstone on 16th St., just off Fifth Avenue. He hadn’t been up there for months, and the place smelled musty, an odor of dust mixed with stale sweat. He started slow, jogging two miles on the treadmill, then stepping it up for another two. He picked up the barbell and did bench presses and bicep curls, then worked his arms and back with hand weights. He got on the slant board for a series of stomach crunches and leg lifts, then put on the thin gloves and smacked the heavy bag with his hands, elbows and forearms for twenty minutes. He was sore all over the next morning, but he trudged up the stairs and doubled up on his workout.

He kept at it for a week before he called Jeremy, a bald, often angry Ghanaian man in his 30s who taught a Hong Kong-style of close-in street fighting to wealthy men in London, Manhattan and Los Angeles. Dolan paid him $1000 in cash per hour, plus another $500 as a tip, and Jeremy let him know he was getting a bargain.

Jeremy was ruthless during their first session, pushing Dolan through a half-hour of lung-searing floor exercises, followed by a half-hour of sparring—Jeremy catching him over and over with Shuto ukses, scooping blows with his elbows and the edge of his hands to Dolan’s ribs and kidneys. They took a five-minute break, Dolan chugging down water while Jeremy stared straight ahead, and then fought hard for another ten minutes. Dolan took most of the blows, but he landed hard forearms to Jeremy’s chest and sternum and caught him on the side of his throat with an elbow. Jeremy came over two or three times a week for a month, and then he said he was off to LA to work with a certain actor who thinks he is clever with his hands.

That October afternoon, Dolan left the miserable ex-Met at Opia; the guy was chatting up two Italian investment bankers who had come in to watch a soccer match on the TV over the bar. Dolan caught a cab on Lexington, and the neon lights on the stores and bars were just flashing on in the fading daylight as they headed downtown. When they got to 19th St., Dolan told the driver to pull over. He paid the guy, then crossed the street to the red-brick Gramercy Park Hotel. As he climbed the white stone steps to the big glass doors at the entrance, he could see through the first-floor window that the dark-wood bar off the lobby was jammed with people—men in dark suits, women in close-fit pastel dresses. He stopped for a moment, then turned around and