Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (29 page)

HUGH L. CAREY TUNNEL
, it said.

CHAPTER
99

WHEN I GOT TO
the spot where Rylan had jumped the rail, I stopped and lifted the bike over it and jogged down the embankment with it like a civilized madman. A multitude of drivers lay on their horns as I hopped back onto the bike on the entrance ramp’s shoulder.

“It’s OK,” I said to them. “It’s all right. I was actually dumb enough to want to be a cop.”

After I skittered over an empty Coors Light bottle on the shoulder, almost wiping out, I pawed for the radio in the pocket of my raid jacket to tell Arturo my location. That was when I noticed something. My radio was AWOL. It had fallen out of my pocket during all my running and jumping around.

I screamed in frustration as I stood up on the pedals and started pumping into the dark mouth of the tunnel for the first leg of my Tour de Brooklyn.

The inside of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, more commonly called the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, was about as charming as you would think. It was humid and dark, the air so thick with exhaust my lungs felt like they were chewing on it. To add some excitement to my recreational afternoon spin, I almost came off the seat as I hit a dip, only a moment later to have an eye-opening seat-to-crotch collision as I hit an unseen metal street plate.

A gust from a massive speeding Verizon reel truck had almost plastered me to the tunnel’s dirty tiled wall when a blue light started bubbling behind me. There was the deafening double bloop of a siren, and I turned to see a sight for sore eyes.

“Mike!” Arturo said from our Chevy’s driver-side window as I hopped off the still-rolling bike and ran for the car.

I shoved Arturo over to the passenger side and pinned it.
Now, this is more like it
, I thought as we roared at top speed.

“What’s up, man? You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” Arturo said.

“Thanks for noticing, Lopez,” I said as I gunned it on the shoulder, siren blasting.

I weaved around the Verizon truck, and after another thirty seconds, I could see light at the far end of the slightly curving tunnel. What I couldn’t see was any sign of Rylan as we came out into daylight by the tollbooths.

Then I did see him out of the corner of my left eye, a speck of light blue as Rylan, running with the bike on his shoulder, hopped over the railing on the opposite side of the Gowanus Expressway.

I hit the switch for the car’s megaphone as I turned all the sirens up to eleven. “Go through the tolls! Now! Move, move!” I called to the three cars I was waiting behind.

We jetted through the tolls and hit the first exit ramp we could find, a quarter mile farther south down the Gowanus. I floored through the light at the end of it, and kept it floored until I saw an underpass in the direction where Rylan had bolted.

We roared through, into a quiet residential Brooklyn neighborhood of brownstones and low buildings, screeching to a stop at intersections to look up and down the blocks. We were stopped at the third one, beside a dry cleaner, when we saw Rylan bullet across the road three blocks ahead. We got to the corner just in time to see him disappear under yet another underpass.

“Now he’s just starting to piss me off,” I said as I raced down the hill.

On the other side of the underpass, the residential neighborhood morphed into an industrial area. There were clusters of windowless industrial hangars behind rusting chain-link on the right, a sole orange Hyundai shipping container in a weed- and rubble-strewn field on the left, and Rylan in the middle of the forlorn street between them, still pedaling madly.

But we were gaining on him now.

Rylan rolled up on the sidewalk to the right and looked back at us once under his left arm the way a jockey would. Then again.

Then he simply disappeared.

There was a guardrail at the foot of the dead-end industrial block, and Rylan hit it head-on at almost thirty miles an hour and went flying up, up, and away over the handlebars and into a stand of high strawberry-blond weeds.

If it weren’t for the ABS on the Chevy, we would surely have hit the guardrail as well. Instead, we skidded to a hard, seat-belt-whipping stop against the raised curb, and I was out of the car and over the rail, scrambling and sliding over takeout containers and Preston cans down a weedy, rocky slope toward where Rylan was doing the doggy paddle in a body of brownish water.

I stared around me in wide-eyed wonder at the seagulls wheeling over the recycling center on the opposite shoreline and the 1950s-era Airstream trailer with plastic covering its rear windows jutting from the middle of the water behind Rylan like a half-sunken art deco sub.

Rylan had been flung into the Gowanus Canal, one of the most polluted bodies of water in New York City and probably on the planet. Despite the afternoon’s heart-attack-inducing chase, I actually felt sorry for the poor guy. Especially after I was treated to the canal’s aroma, which was heavy on the raw sewage, accompanied by strong sulfur notes and a not-so-invigorating waft of burnt plastic.

Rylan, doggy-paddling about thirty feet from where I stood, made a few valiant strokes away, as if he were actually going to try to swim the nearly two-mile-long canal.

“Really, Rylan?” I said, trying to control my gag reflex. “I mean
really?
”

He looked at me again and then lowered his eyes and quickly began swimming back toward me.

CHAPTER
100

AN HOUR LATER, ARTURO
and I were huddled together in a dim closet in the Major Crimes Division squad room watching closed-circuit video of Rylan in interview #2.

The puffy-marshmallow white Tyvek jumpsuit we’d let him change into from his stinking clothes made an annoying crinkling sound as Rylan, arms crossed, rocked back and forth with his head down. With his lean, boyish good looks, he reminded me of an athlete, a closing pitcher angry at himself for having just given up a disastrous home run on the game’s last pitch.

“For a guy who claims he doesn’t know what the heck is going on, he sure seems pretty darn upset,” Arturo said.

Arturo was right.

Rylan had been playing dumb so far, acting relieved when we said we were cops and quickly apologizing for running, claiming he owed some scary guys a gambling debt. He also claimed he didn’t know why in the world we were chasing him and since there seemed to be some kind of huge mistake, it would probably be best to have his lawyer sort it out.

In the meantime, we’d had a chance to go over his priors. We learned that instead of being a burglar in his previous life, Rylan had run a small Wall Street investment firm that had been exposed as a Bernie Madoff–like Ponzi scheme. He’d done two years at a white-collar prison and had gotten out almost two years before.

Rylan didn’t have a Facebook profile, but I managed to google a
New York Magazine
article about young Wall Street hotshots that described his rising from a tough section of Staten Island to become the captain and quarterback of the Columbia University football team.

I shook my head at Rylan on the screen as he rolled his office chair into the corner and began cursing at himself.

“I don’t know how good he was in the pocket uptown at Columbia, Arturo,” I said, “but I don’t think even Eli Manning could scramble his way out of this bloody mess.”

On the other side of the squad room was the office of my boss, Miriam Schwartz, now abuzz with several VIP visitors. The Manhattan DA had shown up along with the chief of detectives. The FBI had even sent over a couple of bank robbery guys. The press didn’t know that we had made an arrest, and we wanted it to stay that way. There were still Rylan’s accomplices to round up, along with the over four million in gems still missing from all the heists.

Speaking of things that were still missing, the contents of the bank safe-deposit box were still a mystery. The bank had told us that the box was registered to one Aaron Buswell. What was curious was that there was no Aaron Buswell in the New York State driver’s license system, and the contact number given was disconnected.

On a brighter note, Brooklyn and Robertson had re-interviewed the young guard at the construction site next to the bank, who broke down and revealed that he had been given five grand to be an accomplice in the heist. Not only had he given Rylan and his partners access to the construction site, he had hidden the clothes they had used in the heist in the guard shack. Fortunately, Brooklyn was able to recover the items. The CSU lab was already in the process of getting DNA off the coveralls to link to Rylan.

Rylan’s legal representation showed up twenty minutes later. He was an intense-looking fortyish blond guy in a beautifully cut dark-gray suit. He looked expensive. Very expensive. As I watched him confer with the brass across the squad room, I wondered if Rylan had bought him with the diamond money.

After watching the mouthpiece’s chat with my boss, Arturo and I escorted him down the corridor to Rylan. When I opened the interview room door, I apparently surprised Rylan, who leaped to his feet so suddenly that he knocked over his chair. He was sweating, red-faced. He looked extremely distraught.

“Whoa! Calm down, Rylan. Your lawyer is here.”

Panic flashed in Rylan’s face when he looked at the lawyer behind me.

“No,” he said. “Forget it. I changed my mind. I don’t want to talk to my lawyer. I, uh, can I talk to you? I want to talk to you, Detective.”

“That’s not advisable, Mr. Rylan,” the lawyer said quietly. “I’m here to help you. You should speak with me first.”

“Screw you!” Rylan said to his lawyer with a sudden explosive anger. “Get the wax out of your ears. I’m not talking to you, so go look for an ambulance to chase!”

CHAPTER
101

I TOLD ARTURO TO
take the lawyer back to the squad room and went in and sat down across from Rylan.

“What the hell is going on, Rylan?” I said. “First you claim you don’t know why you’re here. Then you want a lawyer. Now you don’t? I mean, I’ll give your strategy points for originality, but this is getting a little tiresome, don’t you think?”

Rylan squinted down at the scuffed linoleum floor. “You’ve been a cop for what? Fifteen years?”

“Over twenty,” I said. “Why?”

He began absently thumbing at the doodles and phone numbers scribbled on the chipped Sheetrock beside the handcuff rail.

“I need to know if you’re, like, an old-school decent person, not a corrupt piece of crap out for a buck. Being a cop is a vocation for you?”

“Yes, it is,” I said honestly.

Rylan looked at me intensely for a moment with his intelligent brown eyes.

“I’ll talk,” he said. “To hell with it. I’ll talk to you, but you have to help me. Because I don’t know which direction it’ll be coming from. You don’t understand how powerful he is. I’m going to need protection.”

“Protection from who?” I said.

He looked at me. His face pale. His hands trembling. “The billionaire, Gabe Chayefsky. He’s the guy who hired me to empty that bank box.”

I sat up. Straight.

Chayefsky was the rich hedge fund guy who bankrolled Luminous Properties, one such building being the slum where Doyle had almost gotten creamed.

“It was all about what was in the box from the beginning,” Rylan started. “Frickin’ Houdini couldn’t crack that bank’s high-security vault during a burglary, so we had no other choice than to go in during the day. When we tripped the alarms, we only had a few precious minutes, so we had to have you thinking diamonds. That’s why we did those other jobs. We had to establish a pattern.”

“That was a pretty smart head fake,” I said.
It worked, after all
.

“Yeah, I’m so smart, look where I’m sitting,” Rylan said, rolling his eyes.

“How does a budding young Gordon Gecko know about knocking over jewelry stores?” I said.

“I’ll be straight with you, Detective. Growing up, the closest thing I had to a father was an uncle out in Staten Island who was a nine-to-five real-deal professional thief. I worked for him a few summers, driving up and down the East Coast hitting places. We had this cherry-picker tree-trimming truck that we would use to get onto roofs and cut into joints. Supermarkets, mostly. Pharmacies. I was his apprentice until he died from cancer, and then my mom made me concentrate on school and getting a scholarship.”

“They didn’t mention that in the
New York Mag
article,” I said.

“Listen, Detective—”

“Call me Mike,” I said, hoping Rylan would feel he could tell me anything.

“Well, Mike, my illustrious Bernie Madoff bio is tabloid bullshit. It wasn’t like that. I was legit. Well, maybe not legit, but I wasn’t doing anything that everyone else wasn’t doing.

“Sure, I was down in the books and shuffling investors’ money out the door, but it was to buy time. You don’t think the big firms do it? Grow up. It’s standard operating procedure. Had the feds come in three days later—three days later—the position I had planned would have made everyone whole again plus ten percent.

“But the market was crashing and the feds needed a quick sacrifice to hide the thumb they perpetually have firmly wedged up their ass, and I didn’t have the political juice to make it not be me.”

I nodded.

“What does that have to do with this bank and Chayefsky?”

“Well, when I got out of prison, I wanted to get my life back, clear my reputation, and get back into the financial industry. I loved being a trader, not just for the Lambos and bimbos, but for the juice. The risk. The daily tightrope walk. The best way I could think to do it was to rejoin the Greenwich Road Rats club I’d started back in oh-six.”

“The Road what?”

“So many financial guys are macho ex-NCAA student athletes who’ve never grown up. Like me. I started out with triathlons. I actually came in fourteenth in the 2003 Ironman and then got heavily into cycling. So I created a club for financial types. Which they reluctantly let me back into when I got out of jail. That’s how I met Chayefsky.”