He gave it to me. I shook my head “No!” at the men from Dmitri’s crew who’d been standing next to me and walked over to where my Plymouth was parked, keyed the ignition, and took off.
I drove all the way out of Brighton Beach, one hand on the cell phone the Mole had built from spare parts around a cloned chip. As soon as I got clear, I punched in the number he’d given me.
“Go ahead,” is all I said.
“We’re not going to play around,” he told me. “The Russians, they’re
“Safest place is right out in public.”
“Safest for
“Just tell me how you want to do it.”
“That’s the problem—I can’t think of a way to do it and still be safe. And I
Who told him? The Russians? Someone else? Or was this just his way of saying he was putting all the weight on me? I spun it through my mind quickly, but nothing came up on my screen.
“You know East New York? The flatlands south of Atlantic?” I asked him.
“Sure. Not a chance.”
“Maspeth, then? By where the water tanks used to be?”
“Nope. I’m not going anywhere near tunnels, chief.”
“Hunts Point?” I offered, letting just a trace of annoyance show through.
“Where in Hunts Point?”
“You know what I’m driving?” I asked him, ignoring his question, trying to feel my way through to him. He talked like a pro, flat-voiced, detached. But what pro snatches a kid, keeps him ten years, and then turns him loose? The cash wouldn’t be worth the risk. He kept saying “I,” as if it were just him, as if I were dealing with the kidnapper himself. But that didn’t ring true. He had to be a middleman, same as me.
“No,” he answered.
“Listen close: 1970 Plymouth, four-door sedan. Painted a dull-gray primer with a bunch of rust blotches on the sides. Outside mirror’s held on with duct tape.”
“Sounds like an old yellow cab.”
“That’s exactly what it is. You won’t see many like it still alive. But the
“So?”
“So I drive to Hunts Point. Triborough to Bruckner Boulevard to the Avenue, make a right, okay? Then I go out into the prairie, moving nice and slow, make a few circuits. There’s a thousand places for you to stash a car in there, and I don’t know what
“How’ll I know it’s—?”
“Let me finish. You’ll like it. I find a good spot. I park. You watch me from a safe distance. You sound like a man who knows where to get some night-vision optics. Make your own decision when to come in. Or not. Soon as you’re ready, you tell me what you’re driving so I don’t spook when I see you pull up. We make the exchange, takes about fifteen seconds—me to check for a pulse, you to count the cash, okay?”
“I’ll get back to you,” he said.
He’d done that. And tonight, he was somewhere behind my rear bumper, watching and waiting.
I pulled into a strip of concrete that dead-ended at the river. Some kind of garbage dump or recycling plant to my right, wasteland to my left. I did a slow U-turn until I was facing out the way I’d come.
I saw a pair of headlights blink on and off once, about a hundred yards away. Had to be him. I thumbed the cellular into life.
“Yeah?”
“How’s this?” I asked him.
“I don’t like that abandoned car on your right.”
“If you were closer, you could see it’s wide open. Nothing left but a skeleton.”
“You got a flash?”
“Yes.”
“Get out. Shine it on the car. Light it the fuck
I didn’t bother to answer him. Just pocketed the phone, climbed out of the Plymouth, walked carefully over to the stripped-to-the-bone car, and sprayed it with a megawatt halogen beam. In the ghost-white light, the car looked like an Oklahoma double-wide after a tornado.
“I still don’t like it,” the phone said. “Find another spot.”
I didn’t say a word. Got back in the Plymouth and pulled out … slowly.
