“That is being addressed.” To Garza’s ears, the voice was soft, calm, almost pleasant. “But of course he knew nothing. Did you think anything would have been discussed in his presence? He was in the back of a truck.”
Ramos said, “No, I thought you would want assurance . . . and that is what I am calling to offer you.”
“And where are you calling from?”
“I am still at the hospital—”
There was a beep. Interruption of signal.
Ramos said, “Hello? Hello?”
The line was dead. The technician turned off the playback.
“The call went to a cell phone, Comandante,” the tech said. “Probably a burner. But we traced it to the cell tower. Telmex tower T-421.” He pulled up a map, zoomed in on a tiny village. “Nacimiento de los Negros. That is where the other phone’s signal was captured.”
As she had for Manuel, Garza said a brief prayer for Chief Ramos. He would need it.
In the three long years she had been tracking this killer, this was the first time she had heard his voice.
The Hummingbird. The assassin they called Chuparosa.
She checked her watch. She had so little time before her flight, and yet she was finally so close.
She pulled out her phone and called Chavez. “We’re rolling. Right now.”
CHAPTER 8
Late August
Manhattan
Midblock on Broome Street off the Bowery, Fisk turned in to the door under a black canopy with white cursive lettering that read PENCE.
This had been one of their places. His and Gersten’s. He liked the mix of upscale club and old-school downtown gin joint, with brass rails and banquettes with cracked leather upholstery. She had liked the fact that there was not one television screen on its walls; Gersten believed that sports bars should be sports bars, but that a real bar should be free of distractions. It was also a cop place, for those in the know, as well as a neighborhood spot, with a good flow of regulars that kept things steady and fresh.
As he walked in now, a sign reading UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT! was tacked to the unmanned hostess’s podium. Instead of the regulars and low-rent boozers, the place was filled with lawyers in suits and hipsters in thickly framed eyeglasses. The daily specials were chalked on a blackboard in pastel lettering: veggie sliders, broccoli rabe pot stickers, chicken and gorgonzola panini bites. The barmaid, when he made it to the sticky brass rail, wore a tank top tied up under her breasts, showing off the tattoo of the sun around her taut, bejeweled navel.
“What’s funny?” she asked him, in greeting.
Fisk was smiling but he wasn’t laughing. He was thinking about how much Gersten would have hated this, how she would have grabbed his hand and led him out of there.
But through the filter of reminiscence, he could see enough of the old in the new. The scarred oak bar, the spidery crack in the corner of the mirror.
“Jack, neat,” he ordered.
The barmaid slid a cocktail napkin down on the bar in front of him, leaning over a bit so he could get a good shot of cleavage with his drink. “We have a beer back special, five dollars.”
“Just a water,” Fisk said. “But make the Jack a double.”
“Bad day?” she said breezily, wiping the bar clean around his napkin. “Or good day?”
“Long day,” he said.
She went off to pour his drink, and he looked around for an empty table. The barmaid might as well have worn a sign reading, “Will Flirt for Tips.” Fisk had zero interest right now. He spotted an empty high-top and retreated to it as soon as his drink came, sitting facing the door.
The first sip of Old No. 7 hit his throat with a warm hello. The end of the day had officially been reached. And what a day it had been.
The terror trial of Magnus Jenssen had ended as it must: with a guilty verdict. Jenssen had all but admitted his guilt from the beginning, but pled not guilty just to gum up the courts and roll the dice and maybe luck into some sort of acquittal on procedural grounds. It didn’t happen. Neither did the trial afford Jenssen much of an opportunity to air his anti-American screed.
Fisk had avoided the trial altogether. The government’s case was so exceptionally strong that Fisk’s testimony was not needed. Gersten’s murder was included in the charges, yet Jenssen was spared the death penalty due to a pretrial agreement with prosecutors in which his cooperation—he divulged his methods and detailed the participation of his accomplices—was taken into consideration.
Today was the sentencing. Fisk had been invited to make a victim’s statement and declined. Gersten’s mother went full Staten Island Grieving Cop’s Mother on him: it had been a rough several months for Mrs. Gersten, and as much as Krina might have wanted him to get close to her, the woman’s finger-wagging left him cold. She had slumped, nearly lifeless herself, as the bailiffs finally removed her from the courtroom.
He had sat in the back of the courtroom looking at the back of Magnus Jenssen’s blond head. Jenssen never once turned to look behind him, so Fisk had not seen his blue eyes. Fisk had expected him to turn. Not wanted it, or needed it, but expected it. And now that it hadn’t happened, he felt a tug of disappointment. He had managed to give Jenssen very little emotional consideration, reserving all his thought for Gersten.
They had come here a few times before they ever became a couple, with that feeling hanging in the air between them, a pregnant feeling of anticipation and longing as their attraction gathered steam. She would sit at the bar, and Fisk would stand next to her, talking close, she swinging her leg into his, little bumps of camaraderie and flirtation; spying is not the “great game,” flirting is. Gersten never wore perfume, but he still had a bottle of the shampoo she kept at his place, and for a while he uncapped it every morning, never to use it, only to inhale the scent. Now it stood in the wire basket that hung from his showerhead along with his own Head & Shoulders and his razor, his focal point every morning and every postworkout shower.
Would he and Gersten have married? Had kids? Moved to Staten Island (if she’d had her way) or Brooklyn (if he’d had his)? What color would the door to their house have been? Or would it all have come crashing down in time, the way of most relationships? He wasn’t an easy guy to love.
It was easy to go on loving someone who wasn’t there anymore. But he knew this in his bones: she had been The One. It would have taken another cop, and a tough one at that, to put up with him.
He sat facing the door, as most cops do, but his gaze was far away. It had been a long time since anyone had snuck up on him, even without meaning to.
“Hey, whoa. Easy. I come in peace.”
Fisk must have looked startled and angry. He recognized the sandy-haired man standing at his table. He looked like he could have been a computer programmer, probably a science fiction buff: pale skinned, plain faced, wincing.
“Dave Link,” said Fisk, making him. “Sorry, man. Weird moment.”
“Not a problem,” said Link. “Good to see you, Fisk.”
Link had two identical drinks in his hands. Whiskey, neat. Fisk looked down at his own glass. To his surprise, it was empty.
Link set one down in front of Fisk. “Compliments of the Central Intelligence Agency,” he said. “May I?”
Fisk nodded to the empty seat. Link sat, turning the chair so that he was facing half toward the bar, with the back wall at his shoulder. “Thanks,” said Fisk, raising the fresh drink from the tabletop to toast him, but not drinking it yet.
“Here’s to the light of day,” said Link. “And that piece of shit Jenssen never seeing it again.”
Now Fisk had to drink. And so he did. “Didn’t see you at the sentencing.”
Link winced after the first swallow. “Wasn’t there. Heard you were.”
Fisk nodded.