Mama gave me a sharp look, then nodded slowly.
Whoever they were, they knew their business. I was waiting at the corner they’d had the Russians send me to, standing next to a pay phone. It rang. I picked it up.
“You’re going to hear me say a 917 number. I’m only going to say it once. You walk away from that pay phone. Far away. When you get far enough away, you call the 917 number. Don’t bother writing it down—it’s going to disappear after this one call. That’s the way we’re going to work this, until we get it all sketched out. A new number each time, understand?”
“Yes,” I said, keeping it short. If he thought I was trying to prolong the conversation, he’d smell cop. And that would end it.
“You ready for the number?”
“Yes.”
He gave it to me. I shook my head “No!” at the men from Dmitri’s crew who’d been standing next to me and walked over to where my Plymouth was parked, keyed the ignition and took off.
I drove all the way out of Brighton Beach, one hand on the cell phone the Mole had built from spare parts around a cloned chip. As soon as I got clear, I punched in the number he’d given me.
“Go ahead,” is all I said.
“We’re not going to play around,” he told me. “The Russians, they’re already satisfied, understand? So don’t be asking any questions about the merchandise. All you and me have to do is figure out how to make the exchange.”
“Safest place is right out in public.”
“Safest for who, friend? I don’t think so.”
“Just tell me how you want to do it.”
“That’s the problem. . . I can’t think of a way to do it and still be safe. And I have to be safe. Otherwise, I’m just going to keep the merchandise. I was told you’d know a way.”
Who told him? The Russians? Someone else? Or was this just his way of saying he was putting all the weight on me? I spun it through my mind quickly, but nothing came up on my screen.
“You know East New York? The flatlands south of Atlantic?” I asked him.
“Sure. Not a chance.”
“Maspeth, then? By where the water tanks used to be?”
“Nope. I’m not going anywhere near tunnels, chief.”
“Hunts Point?” I offered, letting just a trace of annoyance show through.
“Where in Hunts Point?”
“You know what I’m driving?” I asked him, ignoring his question, trying to feel my way through to him. He talked like a pro, flat-voiced, detached. But what pro snatches a kid, keeps him ten years, and then turns him loose? The cash wouldn’t be worth the risk. He kept saying “I,” as if it were just him, as if I were dealing with the kidnapper himself. But that didn’t ring true. He had to be a middleman, same as me.
“No,” he answered.
“Listen close: 1970 Plymouth, four-door sedan. Painted a dull gray primer with a bunch of rust blotches on the sides. Outside mirror’s held on with duct tape.”
“Sounds like an old yellow cab.”
“That’s exactly what it is. You won’t see many like it still alive. But the next time you see it, it’s going to have a broad stripe of day-glo reflecting tape, orange, front-to-back. No way to miss that in your headlights, right?”
“So?”
“So I drive to Hunts Point. Triborough to Bruckner Boulevard to the Avenue, make a right, okay? Then I go out into the prairie, moving nice and slow, make a few circuits. There’s a thousand places for you to stash a car in there, and I don’t know what you’ll be driving, see? You watch me pass by, you check for tags and wait. Or you pull right out behind me; do it however you want. Soon as you’re happy, you ring me on my cellular. . . I’ll give you a number for that night.”
“How’ll I know it’s—?”
“Let me finish. You’ll like it. I find a good spot. I park. You watch me from a safe distance. You sound like a man who knows where to get some night-vision optics. Make your own decision when to come in. Or not. Soon as you’re ready, you tell me what you’re driving so I don’t spook when I see you pull up. We make the exchange, takes about fifteen seconds—me to check for a pulse, you to count the cash, okay?”
“I’ll get back to you,” he said.
He’d done that. And tonight, he was somewhere behind my rear bumper, watching and waiting.
I pulled into a strip of concrete that dead-ended at the river. Some kind of garbage dump or recycling plant to my right, wasteland to my left. I did a slow U-turn until I was facing out the way I’d come.
I saw a pair of headlights blink on and off once, about a hundred yards away. Had to be him. I thumbed the cellular into life.
“Yeah?”
“How’s this?” I asked him.
“I don’t like that abandoned car on your right.”
“If you were closer, you could see it’s wide open. Nothing left but a skeleton.”
“You got a flash?”
“Yes.”
“Get out. Shine it on the car. Light it the fuck up, understand?”
I didn’t bother to answer him. Just pocketed the phone, climbed out of the Plymouth, walked carefully over to the stripped-to-the-bone car and sprayed it with a mega-watt halogen beam. In the ghost-white light, the car looked like an Oklahoma double-wide after a tornado.
“I still don’t like it,” the phone said. “Find another spot.”
I didn’t say a word. Got back in the Plymouth and pulled out. . . slowly.
He passed on my next choice too. And the one after that. I went on auto-pilot, hardly speaking at all, mechanically searching for spots. I left the cellular on, the lifeline between us.
“Change of plan,” his voice cut into my thoughts.
“What?”
“I found a spot. Just past the meat market. Drive back over there.”
“Right.”
It was only a couple of minutes away. But when I drove by, slowly, I couldn’t see anything but a couple of burnt-out hookers waiting on a semi. Or a serial killer. Car-trick roulette, with all their blood money on the double-zero.
“Keep going,” the voice said.
He must have me on visual now, I remember thinking. I didn’t answer him, just let the Plymouth motor along, a touch past idle.
“See the train?”
Train? I saw what was left of an abandoned railway car sitting on rust-clogged tracks. “Yeah,” I told him.
“Kill your lights and pull in there.”
The ground was all ruts. I drove real slow, like I was worried I’d snag an axle, but the Plymouth’s independent rear suspension handled it fine. I’d told the trader the truth about what the car had started out as, but all it had in common with the original was the body.
I figured he was somewhere in the shadows, and in a four-by, too. He didn’t know what the Plymouth could do, so he thought he’d given himself an edge.
But it was me who had the edge—my Neapolitan mastiff, Pansy. One hundred and fifty-five pounds of war dog, resting comfortably in the Plymouth’s padded trunk. Pansy’s about eighteen years old. I’d raised her from a tiny pup, weaned her myself. She’s lost a step or two. But you couldn’t have a better partner at your back. More than a partner. . . part of me. And like everything that was part of me, we’d chosen each other.
When I got almost parallel to the boxcar, I could see I’d been right on both counts. His ride was a black Lincoln Navigator, crouched in the boxcar’s shadow.
“Get out,” his voice came over the cellular. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
I did that, moving like I had major arthritis, slitting my eyes against the expected blast of light.