The Holdouts (Buddy Lock Thrillers Book 2)

by James Tucker

  Ward told him.

  “Small eyes?” Buddy asked. “Like a rodent’s?”

  “Maybe smaller than normal.”

  A coincidence? Buddy wondered.

  Ward continued relating the meeting, and how Stella Bannon and Vance McInnis had refused to provide him with information about their corporate and personal aircraft. “Yes,” Ward said, “they clammed up. McInnis stands there like an elementary school teacher and tells me, ‘Time’s up, Mr. Mills. Time’s up.’”

  Buddy’s skin felt like static electricity was brushing it, making it almost crackle. He said, “‘Time’s up?’ That’s what McInnis told you?”

  “Yeah. He’s a prick.”

  “No,” Buddy said. “That’s not the point.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Buddy raised a fist. “The guy who pushed me out of the plane? He looked like Vance McInnis. And before he threw me out, do you know what he said?”

  Ward didn’t answer.

  Buddy said, “The asshole said, ‘Time’s up.’”

  “Shit,” Ward said.

  Buddy nodded. “Yeah. Shit. It’s the same fucking guy. So it’s got to be Cromwell Properties that’s crooked here. Cromwell Properties that’s killing people to push its projects forward and make hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  Ward nodded. “I’m with you, Buddy. But that’s if McInnis is your guy. ‘Time’s up’ is a common expression. You can’t build your case on it.”

  Yet Buddy’s mind was spinning forward. He thought about confronting McInnis, arresting him. He wanted to kill McInnis, but he’d settle for sending him to prison for life. But that wouldn’t work. Not right now. He had no evidence that Cromwell Properties had done anything illegal, let alone commit multiple murders. And even if he saw McInnis and confirmed that McInnis had thrown him from the plane, he had no proof that had happened. He had no proof of anything, not yet.

  Turning from his brother, he slowed his breathing and tried to focus. Hard evidence, he thought. Irrefutable evidence. He thought silently for another moment, then he put on the black Patagonia jacket with the magazines in the left pocket, the baseball cap, and the sunglasses that Ward had brought him.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Their time’s up.”

  106

  To avoid Schmidt, he led Ward into the laundry room and down the interior fire stairs. As they descended from the twenty-fifth floor, he grew apprehensive about the way the afternoon and evening might play out. He was about to break the law. Several laws. If he were caught, the repercussions could be prison or death, depending on who caught him. But he reasoned the law was a thing that protected the innocent, and in this case the only people he’d hurt by breaking the law were killers. His conscience cleared. Or cleared enough.

  For a moment they waited on the other side of the door from the lobby, until they were certain that despite the cold, Schmidt was standing outside under the sidewalk canopy. Then they hurried across the lobby and along the narrow hallway that led to the lobby of the adjacent Carlyle Hotel.

  Out on Madison Avenue, Buddy looked right and left. Seeing nothing suspicious, he turned to Ward and said, “We’re going after Cromwell. But first, we need to clear away the dirty cop or cops. You take Chief Malone. I’ll take Mingo. Depending on what we find, we might focus on Stella Bannon.”

  Ward nodded. He lifted his phone and called Buddy. Buddy felt the burner phone in his pocket vibrate and heard it ring.

  Ward ended the call and said, “You have my number.”

  “Yeah.” Buddy nodded. “But remember, you’re watching the chief but you’re not doing anything to him, okay? He might be clean.”

  “And if he’s not?”

  Buddy said, “If he’s dirty, call me.”

  Ward nodded, walked to the curb, and held out a hand for a cab.

  Buddy walked south, alone. He wouldn’t take a taxi because he wasn’t in a hurry, not for what he needed to do. And he liked the walk, no matter how cold it was. It would give him time to think, time to plan.

  As he went, he glanced in the window of a restaurant and caught his reflection. He almost didn’t recognize himself. The hat and the sunglasses helped to hide his features. Nobody paid him attention, and that made him feel dangerous.

  The familiar weight of Ward’s unregistered Glock 19 at the small of his back helped the feeling. He’d forgone body armor. He didn’t think he’d need it for surveillance. Because surveillance, he’d told himself and Ward, was all they were going to do tonight.

  107

  A few minutes after five o’clock that evening, Ward followed Chief Malone out of One Police Plaza. Malone didn’t get into an unmarked and drive home, but instead walked out of the massive brick building and descended the steps into the subway at Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall station on Centre Street.

  Malone didn’t spot Ward, but how could he? He’d never met Ward, and Ward was dressed like any of the dozens of other businessmen waiting on the platform, although Ward was better dressed than most of them.

  Better than all of them, Ward thought to himself.

  Malone, NYPD’s chief of detectives, wore a nondescript suit and a gray wool coat that stretched over his bulky stomach. His bare, domed head shone in the dull lights of the subway car as he sat near the front and took out a copy of that morning’s Gazette. Ward sat on the other side of the car, toward the back. The train lumbered through the depths and stopped again and again and again. Eventually, at the Newkirk Plaza stop in Brooklyn, Malone got up, folded the newspaper, and tucked it under his left arm. When the doors opened, he walked out of the train, Ward five paces behind.

  Above ground, Ward dropped back to forty feet behind Malone. From the other side of Foster Avenue, Ward saw the chief of detectives enter a liquor store. Ward waited in the cold, watching the door, not quite trusting his vision. It was beyond dusk now, everything dark except under the streetlamps or lights from stores and restaurants along the sidewalks. The other pedestrians ignored him as he paced back and forth outside a clock repair shop, closed for the day.

  Five minutes later, Malone emerged from the liquor store carrying a bottle in a tan paper bag. He walked south on Foster another two blocks, turned left on Rugby Road, and a hundred yards farther, walked up the steps of the third-row house on the left.

  Ward watched the door close. After waiting a moment, from his pocket he pulled a black knit ski mask. He put the mask on his head, but he didn’t pull the forward part of it over his face. Moving quickly, he approached Malone’s doorway and withdrew the set of lockpicks from his overcoat pocket. At Malone’s doorway, he pulled the mask over his face.

  He knew people might see him, approach him, or alert the police. Speed was everything. Yet he’d practiced for years, and he was calm and fast. Four seconds, and the lock drew back with a nearly silent click.

  He opened the door and stepped inside the row house. Moving quickly, he slipped the picks in his jacket pocket and pulled out a Beretta M9.

  As he proceeded along the left wall of the center hallway, he heard voices from the television news. Then he heard the kitchen floor creak and knew that Malone had heard him.

  No good options, he thought.

  He didn’t know the layout of the house. He was flying blind.

  He pressed up against the wall by the doorway from the kitchen to the hall. Not breathing, he watched the door open and studied the scuffed oak floor for a shadow. Straight through the doorway he could see a family room, a television set at its far end. To the right of the doorway, he could see the side of a white refrigerator.

  Except for the noise of the television, the house was silent. He heard no traffic outside. The kitchen floor didn’t creak a second time. For a second he suspected the noise he’d heard earlier was the house shifting. Or perhaps Malone had put his feet up on a living room coffee table beyond Ward’s field of vision.

  But then a shadow moved from behind the refrigerator into the doorway, followed a second later by a six-inch kitc
hen knife held by Chief Malone’s enormous fist.

  Ward crossed to the other side of the hallway. He encircled Malone’s forearm with his left arm and pulled Malone into the hallway, knocking him off-balance with a kick to the shin, and hitting him in the chest with the Beretta.

  Malone was a bureaucrat and hadn’t been in the field for years. He went down quickly, still holding the knife. Ward stomped on Malone’s wrist.

  “Aghh!” Malone shrieked.

  Ward reached down and took away the knife, threw it back into the kitchen, and pointed the M9 at Malone’s chest. He tilted his head, as if studying Malone’s fear and thus eliciting more fear.

  This seemed to work. Malone raised his hands. Bubbles of sweat appeared on his domed forehead. “Take anything you want,” Malone blustered. “Anything. But leave me alone. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care!”

  Ward ignored the suggestion. He knew Buddy would be furious to learn about the break-in and his holding Malone at gunpoint in the chief’s own house. But he knew the danger of a traitor on the force. He knew all too well. So he leaned closer to Malone and said, “Tell me about Haddon House.”

  Lines appeared across Malone’s expansive forehead. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Yeah, I heard you. But what’s Haddon House?”

  “The project?”

  “Project? What project? I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  Ward was starting to think he did, too, but he’d make sure. “When did you last meet or speak with Stella Bannon?”

  Malone laid his head on the floor, closed his eyes. “Shoot me if you have to, but I’ve never heard of Stella Bannon. Is she the victim of a crime? Did we arrest her?”

  Not yet, Ward thought.

  He raised the gun, turned it sideways, and hit Chief Malone on the side of the head.

  Malone’s head slammed against the baseboard and then was still. His eyelids dropped like curtains.

  Ward watched to be sure Malone’s chest continued to rise and fall. Convinced the chief of detectives would live without permanent injury, he raised the mask and left the row house. Outside on the street, he called the number for Buddy’s burner phone.

  Buddy answered, “Yeah?”

  “Malone’s not involved.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  Ward wasn’t going tell his brother anything further. He ignored the question and said, “Where are you?”

  “At an airfield.”

  Ward stopped walking and clenched the phone. “Buddy!” he shouted into the phone. “Are you all right?”

  108

  Buddy recognized the airfield. He’d been here yesterday, and this time he could see the signs: Republic Airport. And knew where it was: Farmingdale, on Long Island. But this time, he wasn’t tied to a chair and a luggage trolley. Today, he was hunting.

  In order to follow his partner, Mario Mingo, he’d positioned himself behind the stairs going up to the Park East Synagogue on East Sixty-Seventh, outside the Nineteenth Precinct, a red brick building with stone detailing around the windows. This was Buddy’s home base. Where he had his cubicle. Where he’d spent years of his life.

  Just before five o’clock, Mario had run out of the building, jumped into his Ford Interceptor, and headed north.

  Luck had been with Buddy. An available yellow cab, a Toyota Prius, was dropping off an older woman on the precinct steps. Buddy raised a hand and hurried across the street, hoping his disguise was effective against anyone from the building who might glance out one of the windows as he crossed the street.

  “Follow the Ford Interceptor,” he said, slamming the front door.

  The driver, who Buddy thought was West African, looked over at him. “Hey, man . . .” the driver began.

  Buddy handed over some of the twenties Ward had given him and pointed forward at the rapidly disappearing Ford. “Come on!” he said, his voice rising. “Let’s go!”

  The driver put the car in drive and pulled into traffic. He said, “But the guy driving the Ford is a cop.”

  “So am I,” Buddy said. “Fucking step on it.”

  Now, as they approached the airstrip, he put up a hand and said, “Hold back, okay? Hold back.”

  The cab driver slowed the car, and Buddy couldn’t complain. The guy had kept up with Mario despite breaking speed limits the entire way out of the city—north to the RFK Bridge and then Interstate 278 down to the Grand Central Parkway.

  Most airfields, even those as small as this one, were surrounded by extensive flat ground. Visibility extended hundreds or even thousands of yards. To the west of the runway was the dun brown wall of a big-box store. To the east from the cab, Buddy could see flashing police lights and spotlights arrayed around a small plane a quarter mile away—a plane that seemed awfully familiar.

  At an eighth of a mile, he could make out the plane. It was the white dual-propeller plane in which he’d flown yesterday.

  Jesus, he thought. Could Mario have figured it out?

  “Stop the car,” he told the driver.

  “Sure.”

  As the car rolled silently to a stop, Buddy saw the plane illuminated by the eerie white glare of the sodium vapor lights used by CSU. And CSU was there in force. Two teams, each with several detectives. He watched Mario drive the Ford close to the scene and get out.

  Mario approached plane, one of the detectives speaking with him, gesticulating toward the open door. Mario nodded as he peered in through the doorway, talking further with the detective standing to his right. Then he returned to his car, stood beside it while typing on his phone, then got in the car and headed away from the airfield and toward the taxi and Buddy.

  “Turn around,” Buddy said, hunching over so Mario couldn’t see him when he passed them. “Follow the Ford.”

  The driver put the car in drive and turned the wheel. Buddy heard the sound of the Ford pass them.

  What’s Mario doing?

  Buddy’s driver stepped on the accelerator, and the Toyota surged forward. Buddy sat up and saw the Ford speeding away.

  They followed Mario’s car.

  West on Interstate 495.

  Through the Queens Midtown Tunnel and back into Manhattan.

  Across the island on Thirty-Seventh Street.

  Down Ninth Avenue, arriving eventually at Little West Twelfth Street on the Lower West Side.

  It took over an hour and twenty minutes.

  Mario pulled up to a newer building in the Meatpacking District. He made no effort to find a parking spot for the Ford, just double-parked by the building’s front door. Four uniforms were waiting for him.

  Mario got out of the car and approached the uniforms at the door. All five drew their guns, and Mario led them into the building.

  Buddy handed over most of his money to the taxi driver. Then he walked into a coffee shop across the street from the building. He stood by the window, not bothering to order anything. Five minutes later Mario and the uniforms came through the building door, leading out a man in handcuffs.

  Buddy watched carefully. At first he thought it was Rat Eyes, who’d thrown him from the plane. Same Mediterranean complexion, same dark hair, same level of fitness.

  But the man in handcuffs was taller, softer, handsome as a movie star. And he was more than confused, he was stunned. He looked up at the sky as if waiting for deliverance from God. But there was no deliverance, not as Mario pushed him into the back of a black-and-white and slammed the door.

  Buddy watched from the coffee shop as Mario climbed into the Ford, pulled into traffic heading south, then turned left, the black-and-white with the perp and the second black-and-white following. Buddy knew they were headed east to One Police Plaza. That’s where you booked a high-profile guy like . . . like who?

  Vance McInnis, Buddy thought. Ward’s description of the guy to a tee. But what did Mario find on McInnis? What did I miss?

  As he stood behind
the window and watched the cars pull away, he wondered if it had been Mario who’d missed something. Or been misled.

  He took out his phone and called Ward. When his brother picked up, he said, “Meet me in the Meatpacking District. Little West Twelfth Street. I’m at Grind It Coffee.”

  Buddy remained by the window without moving. His breath fogged the window as he waited. And waited. He expected a CSU team to arrive and examine Vance McInnis’s condominium. Yet nobody showed up. Maybe they were busy with the plane at Republic Airport.

  He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one.

  109

  Buddy worked the pick and tension wrench in the lock. He crouched low and wore latex gloves. Ward stood to his right, blocking an immediate view of Buddy from the elevator and the empty corridor. Four seconds, and they entered Vance McInnis’s condominium. They stood in the foyer, listening, making sure Mario hadn’t left a uniform inside the place to maintain the integrity of the potential crime scene.

  “Hello?” Buddy called.

  There was no response.

  Buddy turned to his brother, amazed that Ward wore a beautiful suit and overcoat for this kind of work. He shook his head silently.

  Ward noticed. “What?”

  Buddy didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “How were you sure Malone wasn’t involved?”

  “He convinced me.”

  “You talked to him? I told you not to—”

  “I made an executive decision,” Ward interrupted.

  Buddy felt his face go hot. He held up a hand. “I told you to follow him and nothing more. What the hell did you do?”

  Ward shrugged, looked away.

  “Tell me, goddammit.”

  Ward faced him. His lightly tanned face showed no sign of embarrassment. Ward was confident about everything he did. Buddy wondered how that felt.

  Ward said, “I roughed him up.”

  Buddy couldn’t believe it. “Where?”

  “His house.”

  “You broke into his house?”