Chapter 25.
The next morning at twenty minutes before nine, I was sitting and staring at a Norman Rockwell print.
It was one of my favorites. The one of the big state trooper seated beside the cute little runaway kid at the diner. I loved all the incredible colors and details. The deep blue of the trooper"s uniform, the focal point red of the bandanna tied to a stick under the kid"s shiny chrome diner stool. I thought it was a heck of a painting, but then again, I suppose you could accuse me of being a little biased in the cops and kids department.
The print hung on the office wall of Chief of Detectives Fabretti, who had texted me for a meeting on my way in to One Police Plaza. Beside the print on a whiteboard were crime scene photos. One was of the MetLife Building"s roof, another of the a.s.sa.s.sin"s blind that we"d found under its rim. Beneath them was a shot of the huge Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle we"d been unable to trace or find even one print on.
I hoped the chief wasn"t looking for an update on things, because there was none. It was pretty frustrating. We were no closer to finding the president"s shooter than on day one.
"Yeah, yeah. Okay, I know. I"ll call you back," Fabretti said into his cell as he came in and loudly dumped the bunch of binders he was carrying onto the smooth gla.s.s top of his desk.
"The fricking president is making another visit to the UN. Can you believe this?" he said as he dropped himself into his tufted leather office chair. "That was Paul Ernenwein. He just got off the phone with the Secret Service. Does Buckland have a death wish? I mean, some in the press like to say he"s like the new JFK. You think he wants to end up like him?"
"When is he coming back?" I said.
"Two weeks. They said he has a big meeting with amba.s.sadors from a bunch of the former Eastern Bloc countries and some NATO ones. They said he"s trying to put the full-court press on Russia. Really up the pressure."
"He"s upping the pressure, all right," I said, shaking my head.
"You said it," Fabretti said. "My blood pressure alone. Just having to work with those Secret Service prima donnas again after all they did to try and throw us under the bus is an outrage."
"I"m with you there," I said. "Anything else, Chief?"
"Well, now that you ask," said Fabretti as he took a sheet of paper out of one of his binders.
Chapter 26.
In the last daylight of my long day, I stepped out of my unmarked into the parking lot of a big, ugly, yellow concrete building in Brooklyn. It was the last, most southern building in the South Brooklyn marine terminal, a ma.s.sive industrial wilderness of rusting chain-link and corrugated sheet metal just south of the Gowa.n.u.s Ca.n.a.l.
Icy wind off the bay roared in my stinging ears as I crossed the parking lot. I looked up at the looming silhouettes of a couple of ma.s.sive dock cranes at the adjacent facility, where imported cars were processed and put onto freight trains.
This must be the old Brooklyn, I thought, turning up the collar of my coat. There wasn"t a hipster in sight.
The inside of the building was even more depressing than the outside, if that was possible. It was a meat distribution center-basically, a giant refrigerator stacked with row after endless row of cardboard cases of frozen meat. Beyond a smudged window by the front door, workers in hooded winter coats piloted forklifts and pallet lifts between the rows, like lost souls doing penance in a frozen h.e.l.l.
I found Pavel Levkov upstairs in a cozy, warm gla.s.s office overlooking the interior tundra of the warehouse. He was a medium-size bald man in his fifties, with gray eyes and a weight lifter"s build. He didn"t offer me a seat.
I"d actually been looking for him all day. He was a hard man to find. He had a list of cash businesses as long as my arm: a bunch of gas stations in Newark, a slummy motel in Coney Island, a garbage-hauling outfit out in Staten Island.
Though Levkov didn"t have a record, he was linked to the Russian mob in New York. He was also linked to the informant who"d told the FBI about the MetLife shooter.
Apparently, the FBI"s informant had split town yesterday, out of the blue, but not before telling his wife that if something happened to him, we should talk to Pavel Levkov.
So here I was.
"NYPD? What the f.u.c.k is this about?" Levkov said after I showed him my shield.
"How do you do, Mr. Levkov? My name"s Detective Bennett, and I"d like to ask you a few questions. Actually, just one. Who put the hit out on the president? Was it you?"
The Russian immediately started laughing. I"d really hit his funny bone. He crossed his arms as he creaked his bulk back in his old wooden office chair, giggling.
"Yeah, it was me. You"ve found me out, Detective. Welcome to Dr. Evil"s lair," Levkov said with a theatrical wave of his meaty hand.
He sat forward then, leaning on his desk with his elbows. "I"m just a businessman, Detective. Look at this place. Do I look like I"m getting rich to you? Look at my car in the lot, some piece of s.h.i.t Jeep Cherokee with a bad transmission. How many times do I have to tell you people? I pay my taxes and pursue the American dream. That"s it."
"We have reason to believe that"s not just it. Maybe you didn"t set it up, but I know you know something. I need the shooter. He killed a cop. We"re not gonna stop looking for him. You choose to stand between us and him, you"re going to find your little grimy empire coming down around your ears. You need to give me something. If not the shooter, then a name that gets me off your a.s.s and on theirs. Think hard. I"m actually trying to help you."
"You"re crazy, Detective. I voted for Buckland. I don"t know who put my name in this, but you need to arrest them because they"re pulling your chain."
"Okay, Levkov. Let"s do it the stupid way. Get up and put your hands behind your back."
"What? Why?"
I took out the subpoena that I had been handed by Chief Fabretti for the over three thousand dollars in unpaid parking tickets the Russian had racked up.
"Well, Pavel, sometimes the American dream includes paying your parking tickets."
Chapter 27.
"So how do you like the madhouse so far?" Brian Bennett said as he huffed and puffed next to Marvin Peters; they were jogging in Riverside Park after school. "You don"t have to answer that. It"s only for a few weeks, right?"
"Madhouse?" Marvin said as they ran. "You don"t know how lucky you are, man. Your dad, and Father Seamus, and Miss Mary Catherine, and all your brothers and sisters. Not to mention this neighborhood. Heck, you livin" the good life, believe me."
"Yeah? Tell me that again after one of the peewees gets into your stuff or the first time you slip on a Barbie roller skate in the middle of the night."
Marvin just smiled.
They were coming out of the icy trail by the Riverside Drive sidewalk at 86th when Marvin spotted him. Hardly believing his eyes, Marvin slowed to a stop. It really was him, Big Flicka himself, just standing there by his big double-parked silver Mercedes, smiling.
"Hey, what gives, Marv? Getting soft on me?" said Brian.
Marvin didn"t answer. All he could do was stare out at the street beyond the snow-filled park at the big, lanky, fifty-year-old black man in the black thousand-dollar Canada Goose down jacket.
As Flicka gave him a wave, Marvin remembered a s.n.a.t.c.h from some old stupid eighties song, "Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car." Only here in real life, it was like Flicka had just come out of Marvin"s nightmare, and Marvin only wanted him to go back.
"Marvin, Marvin, you were a friend of mine," Flicka sang soulfully. He had a nice voice. Ghetto legend had it that he actually did some backups on a couple of tracks in the nineties before he got caught for a body. "Marvin, it is you, isn"t it?" Flicka said. "I thought it was, and I was right. Look at you, son. It"s been too long."
How had the b.a.s.t.a.r.d found him here in Manhattan? Marvin thought. He must have spotted him at school and followed him here.
"Come here, boy," Flicka said, tilting his head to one side playfully. "What, you"re not even going to say hi?"
Marvin didn"t want to go but did as he was told. Because Flicka was effing crazy. Full-bore, hockey mask, chain saw crazy. You didn"t know what Flicka would do until he was doing it.
"Tell your white boy to keep going his merry ol" way or I"ll clip you right here," said Flicka, still smiling like he was posing for a selfie. "I"ll do you just like I did yo" cousin, and the white boy, too. You know I will."
"Hey, Brian. You keep on going," Marvin said. "I"ll catch up with you later."
"Maybe we should just head home, Marvin," Brian said.
"I won"t be long," Marvin said.
"Okay," Brian said. "You"re sure?"
Marvin nodded.
"Yeah, keep going, white boy," his cousin"s killer said as he opened the pa.s.senger door of the Merc. "You don"t want any piece of this punk a.s.s"s sorry problems. Not any piece at all."
Chapter 28.
Sat.u.r.day morning, Matthew went into the famous Strand Bookstore on Broadway, down from Union Square Park, while Sophie got her hair done nearby.
He was deep in the stacks, flipping through a coffee-table book about depictions of pain in Renaissance art, when a big guy in a hooded wool toggle coat and Clark Kent gla.s.ses jostled him in the narrow aisle.
"You and your girlie art books," Mark Evrard said under his tobacco breath.
"Yeah, well," Matthew said, c.o.c.king an eyebrow at Evrard"s Brooks Brothers fall weekend ensemble, "at least I don"t dress like one."
"You"re losin" it, a corn-fed Indiana boy like you, letting me sneak up on you like this," Evrard whispered as he elbowed him. "You have a minute?"
Matthew closed the book on the photograph of Laocon that he"d been studying.
"You have a car?" he said.
"Yeah, but let"s take a walk instead," Evrard said, gesturing beyond the precarious sea of stacked books, toward the door.
They didn"t talk as they went north up Broadway. Or even when Evrard led him across Union into an old pub a block past the park.
"Ah, if these tin ceilings could talk," Evrard said when he arrived back at the darkened rear booth with their whiskeys. "Does anything on earth beat one of these when-New-York-was-Irish joints?" They were the only ones there so early, besides the bartender.
Matthew nodded. "What"s up?" he said.
"Good job on the uptown shuffle, Mattie, not to mention your antics under the bridge," Evrard said as he gently clinked Matthew"s gla.s.s. "You said you"d come through, and as ever, you"re a man who does what he says."
"Yep. That it?"
"Of course not," Evrard said, slipping him a thick envelope under the sticky table.
It was the same kind of paper as the one for Rafael Arruda. Thick stationery. Scratchy. You could feel the threads in it.
Matthew tried to hide his shock and numbness as he tucked it inside his jacket.
He had thought they were done.
He"d thought wrong.
"So he"s here?" Matthew said.
Evrard took off his gla.s.ses and rubbed at his dark doll"s eyes and then put the gla.s.ses back on.
"He"s here," he said.
"The last of the Mohicans," Matthew mumbled.
"The last," Evrard said as he turned the thick gla.s.s tumbler in his big hand. "And most dangerous."
Matthew"s eyes went wide as he figured it out.
"Wait, the president thing?" he gasped. "With the MetLife and the chopper and the cop?"
"Yep," said Evrard, nodding. "He might have had him, too. Rumor is, in the blind there was a big ol" Barrett zeroed in. Who knows what would have happened if that cop hadn"t got lucky."
Matthew did the quick calculations in his head. Lex to First Avenue, little over a mile.
"Just mighta had him at that," Matthew said with a whistle. "How did he get in, though? I thought he was in Dubai."
Evrard shrugged his grizzly bear shoulders in his prissy coat. Though he looked like an academic, the Chicago native had played defensive tackle at the University of Michigan before he tore his ACL.
"Who knows? Mexico? That barn door is wide," Evrard said. "It ain"t like before. Everything"s screwed up now, Mattie. Truly, madly, and deeply. Why do you think I"m sitting here with you?"
"And he"s still here?"
"Far as we can tell. But check the paperwork. You have to talk to a guy first. But you know this b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He"s just like you, Mattie. He likes to finish a job. You sure you"re down for this? Should Sophie be sitting here with us?"
"No, we got this," Matthew said, patting the envelope. "Believe me. This one we"ve been waiting for."