It was cat-and-mouse time, and frankly, I wasn’t exactly sure who was going to come out on top.
I was surprised when the man made a hard right out of the complex and headed under the raised roadway of 155th Street past a ROAD CLOSED sign. I noticed some cars parked at the dead end of the short street. Would he hop into one of them?
Instead, he made another right at the face of the dead end’s stone bluff and turned toward a set of ascending stairs I hadn’t seen. I shook my head when I reached them and saw how incredibly steep they were.
I wasn’t sure if it was my thighs or my lungs that were burning the most as I neared the top.
“We have a visual,” I heard over my radio as the man hit the top of the stairs next to a Harlem River Drive entrance ramp. We had an undercover Highway Patrol unit stationed a hundred yards north up the highway in case he attempted to move the money out that way.
He didn’t, though. He passed the entrance and was crossing over Edgecombe Avenue along the upper part of 155th Street when I got to the top. I thought he would head down into the subway on the corner of 155th and St. Nicholas, where yet another team was waiting, but he surprised us all by heading to the window of a place called Eagle Pizza on the corner and grabbing a slice.
A slice? I thought. Was this guy for real? Nobody could be this calm. I searched the crowd of pedestrians going up and down the subway stairs. There was definitely something off about this whole thing.
Emily pulled up beside me, and I joined her in the Fed car. We watched the black guy finish his slice and continue west with the money.
He’d just rolled the suitcase off the next corner when it happened. There was a high scream of a motor, and a figure wearing a black motorcycle helmet and matching racing leathers roared up on a BMX dirt bike.
Without stopping and without an opportunity to do anything except look on with our mouths open, we watched as the rider scooped up the bag the black guy had let go of. He gunned the cycle through the red light, almost hitting the hood of our car, and raced the opposite way down 155th.
Chapter 50
We were pointed in the wrong direction as he lasered past us. Emily hopped the curb as she U-turned after him. I was on the radio, screaming the recent happenings, when the biker screeched to the left north onto Amsterdam. The biker swung off the street onto the sidewalk and into a city park. It felt like the axle broke as Emily hopped curb number two directly after him.
“I guess this means we’re not maintaining tailing distance anymore!” I yelled as we violently off-roaded on the uneven grass behind the dirt bike.
The rider skidded to a stop beside a city pool. He left the bike and began booking with the money into the trees. I didn’t have time to say, “You’ve got to be shitting me,” as I jumped out after him.
I made it through a break in the thick brush and gulped as I spotted where the guy was headed.
It was the High Bridge pedestrian bridge, which connected Manhattan to the Bronx. Built in the mid-1800s, the thirteen-story narrow stone walkway that spanned the Harlem River had originally been used as an aqueduct that carried the city’s water supply down from upstate. Now it was an abandoned structure just south of the Cross Bronx Expressway that city administrations debated whether they should renovate or tear down.
Motorcycle man swung the bag onto his back, hopped onto some ancient scaffolding, and started climbing. In a moment, he hopped over a break in the razor wire and was hightailing it toward the Bronx over the bridge’s weed-filled cobblestone pavers.
“Call the Bronx!” I radioed my backup. “The Forty-fourth Precinct. The crazy son of a bitch is headed over the High Bridge walkway toward the Bronx!”
“And so’s this one,” I mumbled to myself as I tucked the radio into my pocket and pulled myself onto the scaffolding.
I paused as I hopped down from the fence onto the bridge itself. It was maybe ten feet across, with only flimsy, waist-high cast-iron railings between me and a horrifying fall to my death. Talk about vertigo.
Motorcycle man was going flat out at the other end of the bridge when he shrugged the bag off his back and chucked it. I thought it would hit the river, but I saw it land with a puff of dust on the Bronx side between the Major Deegan Expressway and the Metro North train tracks.
“He tossed it!” I called. “Get somebody across the river and down by the train tracks. The money is next to the Bronx-side tracks!”
When I looked up, I saw the motorcycle man running in a new direction. Directly at me!
He had his jacket off and was grasping something in his hand now. It had wires coming out of it. They seemed to go over his shoulder toward his back.
Bomb!? I thought, drawing my Glock. What the-?
“DOWN! NOW!” I yelled. The guy was a bad listener.
“ON YOUR KNEES!” I yelled.
He kept coming. The sight of him, silently running at me for no conceivable reason, was beyond surreal. I was about to squeeze off a shot, when he did it. The craziest thing of all.
Without pausing, he veered to my left, bounded up onto the low iron railing, and dove without a sound off the bridge.
I think my heart actually stopped. I ran to my left and looked down. The guy was plummeting toward the water when there was a strange bloom of color that at first I thought was an explosion. I thought he’d blown himself up, but then I saw the orange canopy of a parachute.
Son of a bitch! I thought. He hadn’t committed suicide. He’d base-jumped off the bridge. I knew I should have shot him! I debated whether I still should as he sailed up the river.
“Get Harbor and Aviation up!” I screamed. “The son of a bitch just did a James Bond off the bridge. He parachuted off. I repeat. He just parachuted off the bridge!”
Chapter 51
I thought we were going to flip ten minutes later as Parker whipped us off the Bronx-side highway onto a Metro North utility road. We were still skidding to a stop when I hopped out of the car and over the third rail to the weeds where I thought the bag had landed.
I searched through the weeds like a man possessed. I kicked past a Prestone can, a Happy Meal box, several tires. Where the hell was it! That’s when I saw the black strap. I rushed over and pulled. Shit! It was weightless. The bag was empty.
I decided to take a seat in the dead grass beside it. There was a path behind me that led less than a hundred feet up to the highway. The kidnappers must have been waiting. They were long gone.
We’d blown it. We’d lost the money.
“Shit and double shit,” Emily said, when I showed her the empty bag. She offered her hand and pulled me up. “Harbor got the jumper at least. Let’s go.”
I was still firing full bore on adrenaline when I hopped out of the Fed car and crashed down a bank of the Harlem River to the north. Harbor had pulled the base jumper out of the drink and was holding him near the southbound entrance for the Cross Bronx Expressway.
With the help of one of the Harbor guys, I sat the parachutist up from where he was lying wet and handcuffed on his belly. He was a young, pimple-faced white kid with a frosted faux-hawk haircut.
“This is over. Where is Dan Hastings? Where is he?” I yelled.
“What? Danny who?” the kid said, his face scrunched in surprise. “Is he a new guy on the team? The Birdhouse Team?”
I squinted my eyes into slits.
“You have two seconds to tell me what you’re talking about before you go swimming in handcuffs.”
“Hey, man. I didn’t do anything. I was paid to jump the bridge by this guy Mark. He said he was from Birdhouse-you know, the Tony Hawk skateboard company? He said they needed some crazy-ass footage for one of their new movies. I know it wasn’t exactly legal, but he gave me ten grand cash. He said some black guy would drop a bag on the corner of Amsterdam, and I would bike it to the bridge and do my thing. He gave me half up front. I swear to God that’s the truth.”
I stared at the dopey kid, furious.
“What did you think when I wa
s pointing my gun at you? I was method acting?”
“Yes,” the kid said emphatically. “I thought it was all part of the movie, man. So, you’re basically telling me the cameras weren’t rolling?”
Could anyone be this stupid? I decided this guy could.
“They still are,” I said as a couple of Bronx uniforms arrived. “This next scene is where you get thrown in prison.”
Back at the car, I said to Emily, “The idiot says he was hired to jump the bridge, and I actually believe him.”
That was a definite low point in the investigation. We’d lost the money and the trail back to Hastings ’s son. We got taken to the cleaners. We’d blown everything.
We were comparing notes with the rest of the shell-shocked surveillance guys when the victim’s father, Gordon Hastings, showed up in his town car.
“You cocked it up! You lost my money! You killed my son!” the red-faced Scot screamed as he came for me across the shoulder of the highway.
He’s lucky he didn’t make it through the half dozen cops and agents between us. At that point I was so frustrated, I would gladly have knocked his millionaire teeth out, father or no father.
Chapter 52
Five minutes later, Parker and I spun over to the Thirtieth Precinct, where the two suspects in the money chase had been taken.
After a lost coin flip in the precinct captain’s office, I was given the onerous task of calling in the fiasco to One Police Plaza. Even the ordinarily heartless, map-of-Ireland-faced precinct captain O’Dwyer gave me a sympathetic nod before leaving me to my spanking. Having dropped the full payload of bad tidings, I thought my ears would start hemorrhaging from the chief’s tongue-lashing.
I was still licking my wounds in one of the captain’s Ed Koch-administration plastic chairs when Emily came back in from the suspect interview rooms down the hall.
“Same story,” she said, closing her notebook and collapsing into the traffic cone-orange chair next to me. “The bald black guy and the kid were both paid in cash by the mysterious Mark. They describe him as a very burly white biker type. They said he had a red Abraham Lincoln beard and double sleeves of tats. Another disguise, maybe?”
I shrugged.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “After all that, we’re back to square one. Make that square negative one.”
Dan Hastings was gone. The five million dollars was gone. I’d come very close to killing a reckless nineteen-year-old and knocking out a reckless middle-aged multimillionaire. Even for me, this was stacking up to be a pretty bad day at the office.
“We need to get back on track,” I said. “Let’s grab some coffee and go over what we know so far.”
The closest thing to a Starbucks we could find was a Greek diner across from the Bronx County Courthouse.
“We know from the Jacob Dunning abduction that our kidnapper hired illegals to purchase cell phones for him. Do you think he could have used yet another middleman-this Mark guy-to subcontract the money pickup?”
“It’s possible, I guess,” Parker said. “Though from all indications, our unsub seems to be more of a loner. But then again, the more I think about it, the more it sort of makes sense that maybe this was about money. He kills the first two as a calling card to prove to Hastings ’s father that he’s dealing with a stone-cold maniac. Maybe from this point, we should go on the assumption that Hastings was the real target.”
My aching neck actually made a cracking sound as I rolled it. I finally stood.
“Maybe you’re right. Let’s head back to Columbia.”
Chapter 53
From the thirtieth Precinct, we headed directly over to Dan Hastings’s residence hall at Columbia. Because of his disability or maybe because of his father’s connections, Dan Hastings had scored a room at the new dorm on 118th, which was otherwise reserved for law students. One of the Public Safety guys keyed us into his suite.
It was neat as a pin. There were some very expensive-looking custom furniture pieces and a closet full of clothes from stratosphere-priced Barneys. Beside the bed, we found copies of the National Review and the latest Sean Hannity book. Even Dan’s sixty-inch plasma was tuned to the Fox News Channel.
“A closet conservative at Columbia? How do you like that?” Emily said.
As we watched, a report about the Mardi Gras celebration down in New Orleans started. I remembered the forehead ashes on the bodies of Jacob Dunning and Chelsea Skinner and the references to Ash Wednesday. Even though this was starting to look like an elaborate kidnapping-for-ransom plot, I couldn’t completely shake the feeling that the three kidnappings were still related to this somehow.
Back down at the security desk, we got the cell number for Hastings ’s neighbor in the adjoining suite. We called and arranged to meet the first-year law student, Kenny Gruber, outside the gym, where he was playing basketball.
“Wheelchair or not, Dan was superpopular,” Gruber said between chugs of his Red Bull. “He had more friends than anyone I know. He tossed incredible parties. Did you speak to Galina?”
“Who’s that?” Emily said.
“His girlfriend, Galina Nesser. My God, is she hot. A Russian goddess. And a physics major. See what I mean about Dan being a unique dude? I mean, how does a guy in a wheelchair score a quality piece of ass like that?”
“A-hem,” Emily coughed exaggeratedly.
“Oh, sorry, ma’am. Forgot my manners there,” Gruber said. “You want to know more about Dan, you should talk to Galina.”
“‘Ma’am’?” Emily said as we headed for the nearest campus exit. “Do I look like a ma’am to you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “You look like a quality piece of-”
I sidestepped as Agent Parker punched me in the arm.
“What was that for?” I said, rubbing it. “I was merely going to say you look like a quality peace officer. Jeez, what did you think I was going to say?”
Chapter 54
Francis X. Mooney cursed under his breath as his taxi crested the 115th Street rise on Lenox Avenue. Down the low valley toward 125th Street and back up again on the other side, it was nothing but bumper-to-bumper red brake lights for another fifteen blocks.
He stuffed a twenty through the greasy partition’s slot and popped the door latch. He was running unbelievably late. He’d have to hoof it.
He broke into a run as he hit the sidewalk. Christ, what a day, he thought as sweat began to pour down his face. He had so many balls in the air, he could hardly keep count.
He got to 137th Street without a minute to spare. He was headed to the apartment of the death-row inmate Reginald Franklin’s mother. Even with all his plans and all his incredibly important work, his conscience wouldn’t let him forget the doomed man.
Off Lenox Avenue, down from the Harlem Hospital Center, he entered the battered front door of a narrow three-story brick tenement. The barking started the second he stepped through the open inner door and into a rancid-smelling stairwell.
No wonder Kurt from New York Heart had been reluctant to follow up on the case, he thought, listening to the unbelievably loud barks. No matter. Dogs or no dogs, someone’s life was at stake here.
The door to Mrs. Franklin’s second-floor apartment cracked open when Francis X. made the landing. He froze as an enormous dog lunged out of the apartment. It looked like a monster. It was a Presa Canario, the same breed of unbelievably vicious dog that had mauled a woman to death in San Francisco. It had a brindled coat and had to weigh close to 150 pounds.
Francis X. started breathing again only when he saw that there was a taut chain around its neck. It was being clutched by a wiry old black woman.
“I’m from New York Heart, ma’am,” Francis said quickly. “The lawyer advocacy group? I’m here about your son, Reggie. I’d like to try to help him get a stay of execution. Could you please put up your pet, ma’am?”
“You got any ID, white boy?” she said between the earsplitting barks.
Francis showed her his card
from the social services agency. The dog snapped for it, almost swallowing it along with Francis’s hand.
“Okay, okay. Just a second,” the old woman finally said.
Was it him, or did the old African American woman have a smirk on her face?
“You said you was coming, too, right? Must have forgot. Sit tight till I get Chester back in the closet.”
The door shut and opened again. The sound of Chester going absolutely batshit came from the rear of the apartment.
“C’mon in, I guess,” she said, waving impatiently. “Close the damn door behind you. What did you say about Reggie?”
He followed her into the living room. Judge Judy was on the TV. The woman lay down on a couch and put up her feet. She didn’t lower the volume.
“Well? What you want?”
“I heard about Reginald’s latest denial, and I’ve gone to the liberty of writing up a request of stay to the governor. It’s all done. I just need you to sign it. Then I’ll take it to FedEx. A friend of mine from law school is in the Florida State Legislature, and though he can’t guarantee anything, he is going to personally advocate for Reggie. I think we have a real good shot.”
“I gotta pay?” Mrs. Franklin said as she motioned for him to bring her the paper.
“For my legal services? Of course not, Mrs. Franklin.”
“No, I know that,” she said as she scratched her signature. “I meant for the FedEx. That shit’s expensive.”
“No, that’s covered, too, of course.”
“Good,” she said with another little smirk. “Anything else?”
How about a fucking thank-you? Francis X. thought, unable to control his anger. Then he looked around the room. It wasn’t her fault, he realized. Abject poverty made people this way. Mrs. Franklin was a victim, like her son.
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