by Mark Dawson
He followed their footsteps to the end of the road. He was at the gate when the door to the house opened. Manny stood there; he looked out at Rhodes and saw his gun as he pulled it out of his pocket and aimed it ahead.
“Back inside,” Rhodes said, climbing the step and bustling through the doorway and into the house.
He pushed Manny in the chest with his left hand, hard enough to overbalance him so that he dropped down onto the floor. The kid was behind him, clutching a football to his chest.
Rhodes closed the door behind him. He held up the gun so that both father and son could see it.
“Where’s the other guy?” he said. “Smith?”
Manny Blanco looked at the pistol and said quietly, “I don’t know.”
“Why did you come back?”
“My boy wanted his football,” he said.
“Does Smith know you’re here?”
Manny shook his head.
“Take a seat,” Rhodes instructed, indicating the couch. “No shouting and nothing stupid. I’d rather I didn’t have to use this.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We’re just going to take it easy and wait. I got a friend who’d like to talk to you, that’s all. Just a friendly chat.”
97
Milton turned onto Danforth Street and then halted as he spotted a black van outside the Blancos’ house. He saw movement from the door and watched in horror as two men frogmarched Manny and Freddy through the gate, across the sidewalk and into the back of the van. Milton was still fifty feet away as the van pulled out. The street hadn’t yet been ploughed and was slick and treacherous, but he opened the throttle and closed on the van, fighting to keep his wheels from sliding out from beneath him.
The van turned right onto Crescent Street.
Milton hit the brakes and turned, too. He gunned the throttle, the old bike racing up to forty and then fifty, fast enough to draw alongside the van. He had automatically taken note of the plate, but, now, he needed to stop the vehicle.
Milton glanced through the side window. He saw two men: the driver, nearest to him, and a passenger.
He reached into his pocket and took out the pistol he had confiscated from the dealer.
The driver saw him before he could aim, and yanked the wheel in his direction. The van veered toward him. Milton was riding one-handed and, as he tried to mirror it, the bike caught a patch of black ice. The sudden swerve, together with Milton’s lack of control and the icy road, sent the back wheel sliding out. Milton dropped the gun and wrestled with the handlebars but was unable to maintain control. He went down, his shoulder crashing onto the surface and the bike pressing down against his pinned leg. The bike spun through a full rotation, its momentum eventually arrested as the front wheel bumped up against a yellow painted strut that helped suspend the elevated track above.
Milton was dazed, pain pulsing from his shoulder and hip. He pushed the bike off him and looked back for the pistol. It was twenty feet away. He hobbled back to collect it and then stood and turned to face the direction that the van had taken. He just saw it as it completed a hard left turn by Veginos Deli. It disappeared into Etna Street.
Milton had no shot.
“Fuck,” he yelled. “Fuck!”
He put the gun away and hauled the bike upright. He tried to kick-start the engine, but nothing happened. He checked the machine quickly, but saw nothing wrong. He tried to start it again, with the same result. He tried the horn: nothing. The battery was faulty.
He heard sirens approaching from the direction of Atlantic Avenue.
Milton checked the battery terminal connections. There was a loose connection; it must have been jarred by the crash of the impact. He tightened the connections and stomped down on the kick-start again.
The engine growled.
He straddled the bike. He had no interest in talking to the cops. He was carrying an unlicensed weapon that had previously belonged to a drug dealer. He glanced back as he approached the corner of Etna Street and saw the flashing blue lights racing north along Crescent.
He opened the throttle and started forward. He took the turn and kept going.
98
Milton stopped at the McDonald’s on Atlantic Avenue and went inside. He ordered a coffee, took it to an empty table and dialled Polanski’s number.
“Yes?”
“We’ve got a problem. Manny and Freddy have been taken.”
“What?”
“They went back to the house.”
“You said—”
“I wasn’t with them.” Milton spoke over him. “Listen carefully—you need the details. They were taken out of the house by two men. One of them was late twenties to early thirties, medium height. I didn’t get a look at his face. I got a better look at the driver: dark-skinned, a goatee, eyes a little far apart.”
“Okay,” Polanski said.
“The van was a black GMC Safari, unmarked. I got the registration—do you have a pen?”
“I can use my phone. Shoot.”
“It had a New York plate. H54 9KW. It was heading west on Etna Street.”
“Got it. I’ll get it put out on the radio.”
The phone throbbed. “Hold on,” he said. He looked at the display. He had another call. “I’ll call later,” he said, ending the first call and accepting the second.
“Hello?”
“John?”
It was Manny. “Yes,” Milton said. “It’s me. Where are you, Manny?”
“John—you gotta help us.”
“What’s happened, Manny?”
“They got us.”
“Who got you?”
“We went back to the house. This guy was waiting there. He—”
Manny was interrupted, the phone evidently taken away from him. Milton pressed it to his ear, listening for anything that might prove to be helpful—any sound that might give him an idea where Manny had called him from—but there was nothing, just the background chatter of indistinct voices.
“Mr. Smith,” a new voice said, “are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m guessing you care about them? The boy, perhaps? You feel a connection with him?”
“I care about them both,” Milton replied, his fist clenched tight around the phone.
“Good. I’m glad to hear that. It’s up to you whether you see them again.”
Milton heard a change in the background noise of the call: it was the rhythmic thump of a bass line, a little muffled as if it was being played in a nearby room to whomever it was who was on the other end of the call.
“What do you want?” Milton asked.
“I’ll call you later. We’ll speak then.”
The line went dead.
99
Milton rode back to his apartment.
He closed his eyes and tried to put all the information together.
He thought about the call that he had received. He was as sure as he could be that it had been made from inside a building. Whoever had abducted the Blancos had got them into the back of a van; that meant they could transport them with impunity. There would be no reason for them to stop, take them out of the van and then hold them at some halfway house before continuing on to their ultimate destination. The location of the call was, most likely, where the Blancos were going to be held.
Milton took a large-scale map of New York that he had purchased when he arrived in the city and laid it out on the floor. He took a red Sharpie and drew a circle around Danforth Street. The Blancos had been taken at just before nine. The call had come in at 9.45. That meant that they had forty-five minutes to get to wherever it was that they were going. But Milton could amend that figure a little: it was rush hour, traffic was moving slowly because of the adverse conditions and they would have needed a few minutes at their destination to get the Blancos out of the van and secure them. Perhaps that meant they had thirty minutes of travelling time. That would serve as his working assumption.
Milton opened his laptop and navigated to Google Maps. Using Danforth Street as a centre point, he plotted a series of destinations around the points of the compass. He assessed the boundaries of the area that the van would reasonably have been able to reach within thirty minutes, marking each point with a red dot on the paper map. When he was finished, he connected the dots so that he had a rough unbroken circle: it started with the Barclays Centre to the west, included the southern shore of the East River as its northern boundary, continued out to Freeport in the east, and was penned in by Jamaica Bay to the south. The circle contained almost all of Brooklyn save a large slice to the southwest. He regarded it for a moment. That was the beginning of his search area.
He dragged the cursor back to Danforth Street and zoomed in. The van had turned onto Etna Street and headed west. The driver would have been agitated: he would have been full of adrenaline and had just forced Milton off his bike. Milton doubted that a driver as excited as he must have been would have had the presence of mind to engage in subterfuge. If his ultimate direction was north or south, he would have headed to Jamaica Avenue or Atlantic Avenue, respectively. He had turned to the west; Milton would assume that he would continue in that direction.
He took a black Sharpie and drew a second circle that included the parts of Brooklyn to the west, southwest and northwest of Danforth Street. His more focused area included Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Park Slope, East Flatbush and Brownsville.
It was still a lot of territory to cover.
Milton navigated to the website that recorded the movement of the tracking devices that he had bought. He entered the serial number of the device that he had attached to the Ford truck. The website was able to access up to twelve months’ worth of journey reports, but Milton did not need to go back that far; he had attached the trackers on Tuesday afternoon, five days ago, so he configured the interface to show him the journeys made within that particular time frame.
The journeys reported for the truck showed nothing out of the ordinary. Carter had driven from his house in Setauket to the precinct on Sutter Avenue and then back again, leaving at around three in the afternoon and returning around midnight. There were no deviations, nothing suspicious, no diversions out to the west and into the area that Milton had highlighted.
Nothing that Milton might have considered worthy of further investigation.
One down.
One chance left.
He clicked back to the front page of the site and entered the serial number of the tracker that he had attached to the underside of the Ford Fusion that belonged to James Rhodes. Milton changed the dates to show the previous three days’ data and saw, to his disappointment, that it was as mundane as that for Carter. It appeared that Rhodes lived in Rosedale, just to the east of JFK; the car was parked there each night and left for the precinct at three each afternoon.
The pattern was consistent until early this morning. Normally, Rhodes would have driven to Rosedale from the precinct, but, this time, he did not.
It was odd. The car drove west to Prospect Park. It arrived there at 12.30 a.m. and waited there for ten minutes before turning around and heading back to Rosedale. Rhodes’s commute usually took him thirty minutes; he had added an extra forty minutes to his journey home with the diversion. Milton opened another browser window and fired up Google Maps again. The car had stopped on Flatbush Avenue, next to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Milton placed the icon in the same spot and scouted the road to the north and south. Flatbush Avenue was wide, with two lanes in both directions and, at least when Google had photographed it, lines of parked traffic on both sides of the road. Rhodes had stopped here for ten minutes at twenty to one on Saturday morning. There would have been nothing there at that time of day.
It was difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: Rhodes had diverted to Prospect Park to meet someone. It would have been suspicious enough on any normal day—Milton might have suspected a weakness for drugs or prostitutes—but that this had taken place on the same day that Bobby Carter and Landon Shepard had gone missing, when Rhodes would have been one of the last people to see Carter before he disappeared… it set off all manner of alarm bells.
Milton nudged the timeline forward so that he could see where the car went next.
His jaw fell open.
The Fusion had gone to Danforth Street.
It had waited there for eight hours until 9.00 a.m.
And then it had headed east, back to Rosedale. It was there now.
He zoomed in on the location. The car was parked on Laurelton Parkway, an address immediately to the west of the Belt Parkway. Milton entered the details in Google Maps and scouted the locale. The Parkway was separated by a strip of grass and a wire fence. The properties facing it were a mixture of condos, town houses and row homes. Milton checked on a realtor’s site and found that the properties were very reasonably priced; he guessed that the noise from the Parkway and the possibility that the houses were beneath the flightpath for the airport had depressed their value.
There was only so much that Milton could do on his computer.
He would have to pay Rhodes a visit.
100
Mackintosh sat at her desk and stared at the screen. They had lucked out in the investigation into the murder of Alejandro del Cabral. The cameras at Cypress Hills had been serviced two days before the body was found and they were in full working order. Each platform had a camera above the exit to the gates below. She had requested all of the footage for the twenty-four hours prior to the discovery of the body and had got into the precinct at seven so that she could start scrubbing through it.
The coroner had suggested that the body had been in the dumpster for between eighteen and twenty-four hours. She started at the outside edge of that prediction and then rolled forward. Most of the time it was easy. The station was quiet during the day, and the weather had meant that it was even quieter. There were long stretches of time when there were no passengers recorded by the cameras. Trains would arrive and a handful of people would disembark; she would track them from the platform down to the exit and watch them head out onto the street and disappear.
She got to five in the afternoon and saw something to make her immediately lunge forward to stop the recording. It was a Jamaica Avenue train. The doors had opened and a man she recognised had got out.
It was John Smith.
She scrubbed back through the footage and watched again, leaning in closer to the screen.
It was him. She was quite sure of it.
She let the footage run for a moment and was rewarded by a second surprise.
Alejandro del Cabral came out of the car and followed Smith.
She hit pause. There were three ways to leave the station. The main fare control area offered one exit at Hemlock Street and Crescent Street on the southwestern end of the platforms. The other options were the staircases that went down from the tracks to both sides of the street; there were exit-only gates at the foot of each.
The main concourse was the only one with a camera, and she quickly lined up the footage and scrolled through so that the timestamp was five minutes before the time Smith and del Cabral arrived at the station. She reviewed the footage, but didn’t see either man. They had left the station by way of the staircase from the platform.
She went back to the feed from the platform. She played the footage again and then again. Smith exited the train and then, five seconds later, del Cabral followed him. Smith paused just beneath the camera and, she thought, took a quick glimpse behind.
Smith had, at his own admission, been inside Euclid station when González was murdered.
And now, here he was, on the same train as a man who would be dead in a dumpster within the hour. Leaving the station with him.
It couldn’t be a coincidence.
It couldn’t.
101
Milton rode east, taking the Belt Parkway for almost all of the way. The road had been cleared, with huge drifts on either side wher
e the ploughs had sprayed the snow. He turned off at Exit 24B, followed Brookville Boulevard and then the bridge over the Parkway before turning onto Laurelton Parkway. The road was familiar to him from his virtual scouting, and he slowed as he reached the cluster of locations where the Ford Fusion had previously been parked. The car was exactly where it had been marked by the tracker, just outside number 13318. Milton rode on a little farther, parked the bike and came back on foot.
Milton checked the time: it was just after half past eleven.
It was impossible to say which of the properties belonged to James Rhodes. The houses had been built in rows of four, with identical doors set together in pairs, offering access to what Milton assumed were two- or three-bedroom properties. The properties were new and reasonably large and cheap for their size. Milton’s assumptions about their competitive pricing were confirmed first by the steady rumble of noise from the Belt Parkway, no more than fifteen metres away, and then, as he made his way along the sidewalk, by the roar as a big 747 lumbered overhead on its final descent into JFK.
Milton made his way to the south, where Laurelton Parkway met Merrick Boulevard. There was a collection of stores there: on the other side of the road was a Dunkin’ Donuts, a cocktail bar and restaurant identified as Clippers II from its red awning, and a medical centre; on the side of the road where Milton was standing was Merrick Farm, a large green-painted general store that advertised groceries together with housewares, electronics and toys.
Milton was walking toward the entrance to the store when he saw James Rhodes walking toward him.
There was no question that it was him. Milton saw the shock of blond hair, left long at the back so that it reached down to the collar of the Giants-branded coat that he was wearing to keep warm in the cold. He had an NYPD cap on his head and wore black denim jeans and a pair of walking boots that were scuffed and stained with the wetness of the slush underfoot. He was carrying a large paper bag of groceries clasped to his chest.
