"You have to admit, though" he continued, "if she did force Andy to finance the Re-Coop, it would show off how complicated the psychology became in all this. It not only got her out of a jam, but a lot of people who'd been in her shoes, as well. 'Cause the Re-Coop deal is a good thing. It's not a con. They really do what they say they're doing, which makes Mary the person they should thank. I'm not saying she was just being altruistic, necessarily- another thing that bank account might show-and I don't guess we'll ever know what her ultimate plans were for Andy. But, considering her modest lifestyle and what we know she forced Andy to do, it doesn't look like she was such a bad egg. It might turn out she was blackmailing a crook not just for a little payback, but to be useful, too."
"Until Ron Cashman killed her, stole what she was holding over Andy, and then kept it for himself. That is what happened, right?" Panatello asked.
Ogden shrugged. "Probably wanted it for a rainy day. I'd almost bet he told Andy he couldn't find it anywhere. You have a location on Liptak yet?"
The Customs agent glanced over his shoulder at one of his men, who shook his head. "No. We think he's on the move. We hit his office an hour ago and found the place sanitized. Combining what you found with what we've been putting together, we have a pretty good picture of his operation, but not where he is. He has a wife out in Long Island. We've been grilling her ever since you called us, but she's clueless-had no idea what he did for a living, legit or otherwise, much less where he might be hanging out."
He handed Ogden a file and opened it to what looked like a flow chart to Joe Gunther, who was craning to see from his corner. "That's a breakdown of what we know so far. Liptak, through Cashman, grabbed cars from wherever he could get them-car dealerships, off the street, airport parking lots, even from way out of town- decided which ones would get top dollar either as parts cars or complete models, and then sent them to chop shops or to overseas and Latin American receivers, shipped right out of New York. Incredibly well organized. One of his people's favorite hunting grounds, by the way, was on both sides of the GW Bridge, which not only provides a quick getaway to New Jersey or New York when the heat's on, but where there're a bunch of limo storage yards to pick through for extra cars. That would explain how Cashman got friendly with La Culebra and how and why he bought the junk that killed Mary Kunkle. And you may be right about the Seabee Group. We found no mention of it anywhere-it was a totally separate deal."
"How did he keep the stolen cars under wraps?" Ogden asked.
"Empty eighteen-wheeler boxes," Panatello answered. "You see them in vacant lots all over the city. Some of those are as abandoned as they look, but most are put there by legitimate shipping container brokers. They get a call for a forty-footer, for example, and they spot it at whatever location they're given, no questions asked, for maybe thirty-six hundred bucks per. From there, the bad guys can either move it or fill it with a couple of cars, rig a dummy shipping document, and put it on a boat. Unless we tear into every big box in every port every day of the week, there's no way we can separate the stolen goods from the legit stuff. What we do find is almost nothing."
Ogden returned the file and waved his hand at all the documents and cell phones littering the table between them. "Is any of this going to help?" he asked reasonably enough. "Sounds like you're still at a loss."
But there, Phil Panatello looked more optimistic. "No. With Mary's facts and figures, we'll be able to shut him down, even if he splits the country. That's what we're doing now-using what you found to send people knocking on doors, checking warehouses, and rounding up peons. When the banks open in the morning, we'll hit him there, too. Guaranteed he knows we're after him by now, so we don't want to lose time."
The cell phone in Joe Gunther's pocket began chirping, making everyone in the room stare at him.
His face flushing, he removed it and held it up to his ear. He listened briefly, asked for a couple of clarifying details, and snapped it shut, looking directly at Ward Ogden. "I think we've got a fix on Andy Liptak." The Bush Terminals line the Brooklyn shore below Red Hook like an endless row of abandoned, pre-World War Two beached tankers, lined up nose first to the uneven, broken-backed wide expanse of First Avenue. Dark, quiet, vast, and cavernous, they speak both of an earlier industrial might and of a changing world in which urban powerhouses like New York have yielded to an evolving national identity, leaving in its wake aging remnants, largely empty, in which only the occasional bare bulb advertises the rare, usually short-term tenant.
Willy followed the black BMW from farther and farther away as the midnight traffic thinned to near nonexistence at the north end of First Avenue. Even with his headlamps out, there was the odd security light that threatened to reveal his presence, so he played a game of hit or miss, sometimes letting the lead car get so far ahead that he risked losing it altogether.
It was with some relief, therefore, that he saw the car's brake lights blaze brightly one last time before suddenly swinging to the right and disappearing into the yawning mouth of one of the pitch-dark pier buildings.
Driving very slowly, he closed the gap by only a few hundred feet and then killed his engine to continue on foot. It was an odd sensation, leaving the cloistered security of the car. The huge buildings were so far apart and the spaces between them, once home to vast fleets of container trucks, so wide open that he felt as exposed as if he'd been the only man standing in the middle of a prairie. The vast, flat void of the water beyond didn't help, of course, introducing its own image of a cold and hostile hole in which the far-distant New Jersey shore lights vanished without reflection.
The building Andy Liptak's car had entered was far different from the dilapidated warehouse where Ron Cashman had died. This place was a shipping transfer station, designed to handle thousands of tons of material coming off cargo ships and headed for trucks aimed toward the nation's interior, and vice versa. An erstwhile maze of mammoth corridors, loading docks, and storage areas, it was now compartmentalized to serve a new hoped-for clientele of small manufacturers or people needing extra space for their excess inventory. Once a layout for maximum traffic flow, it had been cut up, diverted, and otherwise thwarted so that as Willy stepped gingerly into its midst, he was hard put to know in which direction to turn. Only by staying very still and listening carefully could he get some sense of activity off to one end of the building.
Slowly, watching for lookouts or warning devices, he began working his way toward the muffled sounds of voices, guided only by the crepuscular light seeping through the occasional broken window. It was like he was wandering through the heart of a gigantic tomb or the base of an ancient pyramid. The night before, in the warehouse with Riley, he'd felt more the way he had when he'd operated behind enemy lines. The familiar sense of calm focus had lent him an inner stillness from which to make decisions based on training and experience. Even when all hell had broken loose, he'd kept on task and gotten the job done.
Here, he was out of sorts, neither in combat nor police mode, thrown by circumstance to act alone and by instinct from a purely emotional basis. Cashman, like opponents before him, had been the enemy, a faceless target. Andy Liptak, by contrast, was wholly other. An old friend, a drinking buddy, a keeper of mutual experiences, the one person who'd known Willy as the Sniper, but who'd chosen not to treat him as such. Andy probably wouldn't have been accepted as a friend in normal circumstances. He came from a different world, even while being a fellow New Yorker. But in Vietnam, he'd filled a need that fate had chosen to prolong beyond the war, up to and including sharing time with the same woman. Given those facts, the memories attending them, and the sense of betrayal that had finally subsumed them all, Willy was left without much rational latitude. As too often in the past when his boldness had bordered on the suicidal, he was tempted to merely run screaming through these funereal, gloomy spaces, and have it out with Andy Liptak and all the metaphorical baggage he carried, once and for all.