“Okay. What do you want?”
“I can’t have what I want, but short of that I want you to go for a ride, alone, and keep your cell phone available. I’ll call you when it suits me.”
“Where should I-”
“Head toward the County of Kings. Yes, that suits me fine. Take the thruway and remember, Moe, old stick, alone.”
“I’ll remember.”
I clicked the phone shut.
“You don’t look so good,” Markowitz said. “Who was that?”
“The man who is going to murder my wife.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I had just pulled onto the New York State Thruway, heading south toward the city, when Brightman called. He had changed his mind, he said. It seemed I wasn’t destined for Brooklyn after all. He had me circle back north and head into the Catskills. Then as he continued reciting the directions, it hit me. I knew where he wanted me to go. I shaped my lips to form the words Old Rotterdam. I wasn’t even certain I had spoken them aloud until Brightman answered.
“Yes, Moe, Old Rotterdam, very good. Do you remember the grounds of the Fir Grove Hotel?”
“I do.”
“Then I’ll see you in an hour or so. Now, without hanging up, toss your cell phone out your car window. I want to hear it hit the pavement. Toss the phone.”
“No,” I said. “First, I want to talk to Katy. And don’t give me that ‘hurt her stuff’ again. Put her on the phone and then I’ll toss it.”
Again, he moved his mouth away from the phone, but not far away. “Bring her over here.”
I heard some background noise, the shuffling of feet, then, “Moe. Moe, what’s going-” It was Katy.
Brightman got back on the phone, his voice edgier, the threat closer to the surface. “Don’t try anything cute. You’re being watched. Now, toss the fucking phone!”
I tossed it. The phone bounced once before being crushed under the wheels of a semi coming up fast on my left. I used the opportunity to check my mirrors to see if Brightman was bluffing about my being followed. It was impossible to tell in the dark in the midst of hundreds of cars. Even when I turned off and circled around, too many other vehicles exited and entered for me to have spotted a tail. It was moot. Destiny lay ahead, not behind me.
The Fir Grove Hotel was gone. It had been gone that first time I drove up its huge semi-circular driveway in 1981. All the bulldozers and dump trucks that had leveled the compound and carted away the debris were mere formalities in the aftermath of the workers’ quarters fire, the broom and dust pan sweeping away the refuse of shattered crystal. No, not crystal. Glass, cheap glass. The Fir Grove, The Concord, all the Catskill hotels that had pretentions were never really anything more than baloney sandwiches. Once people saw what the rest of the world had to offer, the Catskill Mountains became the lunch meat option, a vacation spot for poor schmucks and sentimental fools. In spite of what the locals thought, the Fir Grove fire was nothing more than an exclamation point on the Catskills’ death certificate. My eyes adjusting to the darkness, I noticed that now even the grand driveway was gone. I couldn’t tell if anything more than memories remained.
I parked down at the bottom of the hill and popped my trunk to get my flashlight. People say the crisp mountain air is good for you, that it smells fresh without the taint of the city. They say a lot of things. All I could smell was smoke from the distant fire that killed Andrea Cotter, the first girl I ever loved. A cop becomes intimately familiar with what fire does to the human body. The image of Andrea’s charred body flashed into my head and I shuddered. Although it felt like a million years since I’d last done crowd control at a fire scene, I could taste the acrid stink of burnt hair on my tongue and in my nostrils.
Bang! I stopped in my tracks, trying to remember the date. August
… Christ, it was the anniversary of the Fir Grove fire. Was it the thirty-fourth anniversary? The thirty-fifth? I couldn’t recall. It had been so many lies, so many secrets, so many lifetimes ago. Brightman had done his research. He was going to kill the last woman I loved where the first had been murdered. It was all so symmetrical in a twisted kind of way.
I had to put Andrea Cotter out of my head. Three and a half decades had passed and she was as dead as she was ever going to be. She had met the end of time, the clock had stopped ticking on her nevers and forevers. Katy’s clock was still running. She was who I had to think about. I couldn’t let Brightman play with my head. He already had too much of an advantage. I slammed my trunk shut.
“Stop!” a voice came out of the darkness.
“Ralphy Barto.”
“You remember?”
“I remember. Hitting you in the eye like that, it was a lucky shot.”
“Not for me.”
“As I recall, you were trying to kill me at the time.”
“There was that,” he said, a smile in his voice. “You carrying?”
“I got my. 38 tucked into the small of my back. You want me to-”
“No, thanks,” he said, stepping out of the darkness. “I’ll handle it.”
He was carrying a submachine gun of some kind, a long, thick sound suppressor on the end of its barrel. In spite of the eye patch and years, Barto actually looked better than he had in 1983 and I told him as much.
“Yeah, I take care of myself these days. Anyone in the car?”
“Brightman told me to come alone.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Before I could say anything else, Barto sprayed my car with bullets. The rate of fire was amazing, the suppressor-silencer is a misnomer-keeping each shot down to a loud snap and hiss. He paid careful attention to the trunk and backseat.
“No,” I said too late. “I’m alone.”
“That you are, my friend.” He replaced the clip, took my. 38, and patted me down. He knew I wouldn’t risk Katy’s life by trying anything. “Christ, you smell like puke. You’re scared, huh? Somehow, I didn’t figure you as a puker.”
“Bad shrimp.”
“Cute,” he said. “Listen, he’s gonna kill her one way or the other. There’s nothing I can do about that, but if you wanna run, I won’t shoot you. I’ll lay this thing down and you can split.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I know, but I figured I’d ask. Come on. Up the hill. You try anything now, I’ll wound you and it won’t change anything.”
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“She’s a little freaked, I guess.”
“Has he hurt her?”
“Not really.”
It was a tough climb up the hill. We stopped at the top to rest a minute before heading toward where the guest parking lot had been. The parking field was gone as were the wildly overgrown hedges that had once marked the rear boundary of the lot, but the concrete steps that led down to where the pool area and ball courts used to be still remained. The same could not be said for the pool and courts themselves. Now nothing but a great flat field with hills in the distance appeared in the beam of my flashlight. We started across the field.
About fifty yards on was where the late Anton Harder had established his angry white boys town: a collection of ratty trailers, abandoned cars, and abandoned souls. The people who lived there were a ragtag collection of losers, misfits, and bigots. Harder had his own reasons for choosing the Fir Grove property as base camp. His mother, Missy, a hotel chambermaid, had died in the fire. As the flames had consumed his mother, the hate had consumed him. He had even built a shrine to her not very far away from the foundation of the workers’ quarters.
“Come on, let’s go.” Barto nudged me along with his gun.
We kept on ahead, insects hurtling themselves into my hand as they flew toward the source of the light.