“Uh-oh,” I mumbled.
“What?” Madame asked.
“This is the neighborhood where Matt’s renting a warehouse. Do you think Ellie’s on her way there for some reason?”
“For what reason?”
“I don’t know... Matt’s storing Ric’s decaffeinated green beans right now. They’re extremely valuable, and I have to tell you, at the moment, I don’t trust Ellie...”
“They’re not turning or stopping,” Madame noted. “Where is Matt’s warehouse exactly?”
“Just a few blocks away, I’m surprised he never took you to see it.”
“What’s to see? Bags of green coffee in a big building. I’ve seen them all my life, dear. Matt’s handling all that now.”
The buildings around us began to change again, from industrial to residential. The streets became cleaner, the graffiti disappeared, and well maintained brownstones now lined the blocks.
“We’ve entered Carroll Gardens,” I informed Madame.
But my focus was momentarily off the vehicles we were following. Mike Quinn’s brownstone was around here somewhere, and I was searching for a glimpse of it.
During my previous trips to Matt’s warehouse, my ex-husband had been driving, and I wasn’t about to sound like a teenager asking her father to “please drive by Mike’s house. I want to see where he lives...” At the moment, Madame and I were still on Union. We passed the intersection with Hoyt, then Smith (ten blocks down was the famous Smith and Ninth subway station, the highest elevated platform in New York’s entire subway system). Suddenly, a woman in another SUV, a cherry red one, pulled out of her parking space, and jumped right in front of me, cutting me off.
I hit the brakes. “Damn!”
Now there were two SUVs between me and Ellie’s car. Court Street was just ahead, and the line of traffic had stopped for a red light. I found it interesting that the Asian man in the black SUV was still following Ellie.
Coincidence? I wondered. Mike Quinn always said that in his line of work there were no coincidences.
The reminder of Mike and coincidences together had me back checking the street addresses. His old home had to be on this block. I peered down the row of connected brownstones, and noticed a FOR SALE sign in front of one of them. Like the others on this quiet, tree-lined street, the house was set back from the sidewalk, giving it a nice little front yard, delineated by a wrought iron garden gate.
I counted three floors and knew, on sight, that it was a valuable building. An owner could comfortably live on one or two floors and rent out the third. Buildings like this one, in this quiet, lovely neighborhood, a close commute to Manhattan, easily sold for one million dollars or more.
I tried to remember some of the funny things Mike had said about living here... how the area was named after the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence (Charles Carroll), but the area was more famous for a more modern Brooklyn native, Al Capone. The gangster had ended up in Chicago, but he’d begun his criminal career near here and was married at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea church just around the corner.
I wondered in passing if Mike’s wife and two kids had moved out yet, and I automatically scanned the street for any sign of them (Mike had shown me photos). But the narrow block was empty, save for a young woman with short dark hair and trendy glasses, talking on a cell phone as she pushed along a baby carriage. She was clearly one of the newer transplants to what had once been a neighborhood of working class Italian immigrants.
“Clare!” Madame suddenly cried.
I jumped in my seat. “What?”
“The light’s changed! Look, the cars are turning onto Court.”
I didn’t have to ask what direction. It would have to be south, because down here Court was one way. I was about to make the turn when the tightly timed stoplight changed again. The woman in the cherry SUV in front of me hesitated on the yellow. She stopped, as if considering whether to go through it, then started up again, making the turn.
“Damn!”
The woman had left me stuck on a full blown red light, and traffic was starting to come through the intersection.
“Go through it,” Madame demanded.
“I can’t! There’s no ‘left on red’ allowed in New York State. I don’t think ‘left on red’ is allowed in any state!”
“Go through it anyway,” Madame demanded. “This is an emergency.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We’ll lose both Ellie and the man in the black SUV following her—and you said someone is after Ric. You said they could have killed him the night he was mugged, and he looks so much like Matt that you’re afraid someone might make a mistake. Am I wrong, dear?”
“No.”
“Then do as I say. Put your foot on the gas, sneak out carefully into the intersection, and go through that red light, tout de suite!”
I did. Pretending I was simply entering another traffic circle, I waited for the oncoming flow of cars to lighten up just enough for me to nose out there, then I burned rubber, made a screeching turn and headed down the street. Within three blocks, I spotted that cherry red SUV.
“Where’s the black SUV?!” I cried. “It should be in front of her!”
“It’s up ahead. Look!” Madame replied.
“But there are two of them now!”
A pair of the same model black SUVs were rolling side by side down Court. Each of the large, boxy vehicles had a dark-haired man driving, and I couldn’t tell which of them was the Asian man who’d been following Ellie.
“Oh, damn,” I murmured. “Why didn’t we get the license plate?!”
“Where’s the Town Car?” Madame asked.
“I don’t see it!” I cried.
Just then, the black SUV on the left, put on his left-turn signal. He was planning to turn soon, while the one on the right was obviously going to continue driving straight.
“Which way should I go?” I asked. “Should I turn with the guy on the left, or go straight with the guy on the right?!”
“I don’t know, dear!”
The burst of siren nearly sent me through the car roof. I checked my rear view mirror. A half a block back, a police cruiser was threading through the heavy traffic. “You in the red vehicle,” a loud voice suddenly boomed over a loudspeaker, “pull over.”
Crap!
An NYPD traffic cop had obviously witnessed my little lapse in judgment back at the intersection of Union and Court.
“But officer,” (I could say) “right on red is legal on Long Island.”
“You’re not on Long Island!” (The cop would probably bark.) “And you made a left. License and registration, and get out of the car, we’ll want to search the vehicle and give you a sobriety test.”
“Don’t, Clare! Don’t pull over!” Madame cried.
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m very serious. I bought a little something in the Garden.”
“Excuse me?”
“There was this nice Jamaican man. He and I hit it off— you know, I’ve been to his native island many times—and he offered to sell me some clove cigarettes. But I suspect they might have a little something more than cloves in them.”
“A little something more? What are you telling me? What something more?!”
“You know, something of that famous native crop from the man’s island home.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Ganja?”
Madame nodded.
“You made a drug deal at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens!”
“I have the cigarettes in my bag, and I’ll gladly throw them out the window, but you have to evade the police car well enough for me to get rid of them without those two nice-looking officers seeing me dispose of the evidence.”