“I’ll stay the course,” Levine told him.
Santangelo said, “There’s something else to consider. If something goes wrong, if Banadando gets killed or slips through our fingers, we could all be in trouble for not reporting the situation right away.”
Levine spread his hands. “If you’re worried about that, you do rank me after all, you could take the decision out of my hands.”
“No, I don’t want to,” Santangelo said. “I think we’re handling it right, but I want you and Fred and Officer Crawley to know there could be trouble for all of us down the line. Within the Department.”
Lieutenant Barker said, “Let’s count that out of the decision-making.”
“Fine with me,” Santangelo said.
The Long Island Expressway ended just short of Riverhead, seventy-five miles from Manhattan but still another forty-five miles from the end of the island at Montauk Point. The last dozen miles the traffic had thinned out so much that on the long straightaways Levine could see in the rearview mirror Jack Crawley’s car, lagging way back. The rain had stopped sometime during the night but the sky was still cloud-covered and the air was cooler and still damp. In mid-morning, the sparse traffic here at the eastern end of the Expressway was mostly delivery vans and a few private cars containing shoppers, the latter mainly headed west toward the population centers.
The land out here seemed to imitate the wave-formations of the surrounding sea; long gradual rolls of scrub over which the highway moved in easy gradients, long sweeps steadily upward followed by long gradual declines. It was on the upslopes that Levine would catch glimpses of Jack Crawley’s dark-green Pontiac far behind, and on the downslopes that he was increasingly alone.
At the Nugent Drive exit, two miles before the end of the highway, a car was entering the road, a black Chevrolet; Levine pulled accommodatingly into the left lane, passed the car, saw it recede in his mirror, and a moment later was over the next rise. Signs announced the end of the road.
The Chevy reappeared over the crest behind him so abruptly, moving so fast, that Levine had hardly time to register its presence in his mirror before it was shooting past him on the right and there were flat cracking sounds like someone breaking tree branches, and the wheel wrenched itself out of Levine’s hands.
He’d been doing just over sixty. The Chevy was already far away in front, and Levine’s car was slewing around toward the right shoulder, the wheel still spinning rightward. Levine grabbed it, fighting to pull it back to the left, his right foot tapping and tapping the brakes. Blow-out, he thought, but at the same time his mind was over-riding that normal thought, was telling him. No! They shot it out! They shot the tire!
Banadando! They found him, they’re going after him! They cut me out of the play!
He was recapturing control, of his emotions and his thoughts and the car, when its right tires hit the gravel and dirt beside the road and tried to yank the steering wheel out of his hands again. He hung on, his foot tapping and tapping, pressing down harder as they slowed, daring to assert more and more control until at last, in a swirl of tan dust of its own creation, the car jolted to a stop, skewed slightly at an angle toward the highway, seeming to sag in exhaustion on its springs.
Levine opened his mouth wide to breath, but the constriction was farther back, deep in his throat. He leaned forward, resting his forehead on the top of the steering wheel, feeling its bottom press hard into his stomach. His trembling hand went up to cup his left ear, the position in which, he had learned, he could best hear his heart.
Beat, beat beat—
Skip.
Beat, beat, beat—
Skip.
Beat, beat, beat, beat—
Skip.
Beat, beat—
All right. Straightening, Levine took a deep breath, finding his throat more open, the act of breathing less painful. That had been a scary one.
Generally, the skips came every eighth beat, but excitement or exercise or terror could shorten the spaces. Three was about the closest it had ever come, and this near-accident had matched that record.
Accident? This was no accident. His entire body still slightly trembling, Levine struggled out of the car, walked around it, and saw that both right-side tires were flat. They showed garish big ragged holes in their sides. A sharpshooter, worth the money Polito would be paying him.
Polito. Banadando. Feeling sudden urgency, Levine looked up the empty roadway toward the top of the slope he’d just come down. Crawley should have appeared by now, he wasn’t that far back.
They’ve taken him out, too.
Jesus, what’s happened to Crawley? Levine had actually trotted a few paces toward the distant crest when over it came a rattly white delivery van, and he remembered his other urgency instead: Banadando. In going for Levine’s tires, Polito’s men had made it clear they weren’t interested in killing police today, so they’d undoubtedly taken out Jack Crawley the same way. The man in real trouble was Banadando.
Pulling his shield out of his jacket pocket, waving it in the air, Levine flagged the approaching van to a halt. A big boxy contraption advertising a brand of potato chip on its side, it was driven by a skinny bearded young man who stood up to drive. He was frowning at Levine with a kind of hopeful curiosity, as though here might be that which would rescue him from terminal boredom.
It was. The tall door on the right side of the van was hooked open. Climbing up into the tall vehicle, still showing the shield, Levine said, “Police. I’m commandeering this truck.”
“This truck?” The young man grinned, shaking his head. “You got to be kidding.”
“Drive,” Levine told him. “As fast as this thing will go.” To encourage the young man, he added, “We’re trying to stop a murder.”
“You’re on, pal!”
But no matter how enthusiastic the young man might be, the van’s top speed turned out to be just about fifty-two. Levine kept leaning his head out the open doorway, looking back, hoping to see Jack Crawley after all, but it never happened.
The interior of the van was piled high with outsize cardboard cartons, presumably containing potato chips. Levine leaned against the flat top of the dashboard under the high windshield and wrote a note on a sheet of paper torn from his memo pad:
“NYPD Detective Abraham Levine, 43 Precinct. Partner Jack Crawley in apparent accident on LIE. Underworld informant under attack. Follow caller to site.”
After the highway ended, the young man followed Levine’s instructions along Old Country Road and Main Road and Church Lane and Sound Avenue. “It’ll be a dirt road,” Levine said. “On your left.”
When they finally found it, the young man was going to swing to the left and drive down that road but Levine stopped him. Handing over the note, he said, “Go to the nearest phone, call the Suffolk County police, read this to them, tell them where I am.”
“You might want me along,” the young man said. “Maybe you could use some help.”
“Bring me help,” Levine told him. Stepping down to the shoulder of the road, he slapped the tinny side of the van as though it were a horse, calling to the driver, “Go on, now. Hurry!”
“Right!”
The van lumbered away, motor roaring as the young man tried to accelerate too rapidly up through the gears, and Levine trotted across the road and started down the dirt road, seeing the fresh scars and streaks of a car’s having recently passed this way.
First he saw the water through the thin-leaved birch trees; Long Island Sound, separating this long tongue of land from Connecticut. Then he saw the automobile, a small fast low-to-the-ground Mercedes-Benz sports car painted dark blue. The black Chevy was nowhere in sight; Polito apparently employed specialists.