Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (31 page)

“One of my tech companies came up with it. We have a big one we’re working on for the government, about the size of a deer, that can carry five hundred pounds. I love robotics, don’t you? I call this little guy Willis because he has a will of his own, get it? Look at Willis go.”

Willis actually gave her the creeps, but she nodded politely as she took another sip from the bottle. Was this guy some kind of inventor? Definitely an odd duck.

“Hey, how do you like the champagne? Not bad, huh?” Gabe said, rolling his neck.

“It’s very good. It’s like soda. Dom is French, right?”

Gabe nodded quickly as he zipped down the black glass divider that separated them from the driver.
God, this guy is restless
, she thought.
Or coked up, maybe?
The driver was a very smooth-skinned black man who, even seated, seemed to be very tall.

“You hear that, Alberto?” Gabe called up through his big cupped hands. “Look at me. I’m living the American dream tonight, baby. German car, French champagne, and a Ukrainian beauty!”

“Yes, you are, sir. Yes, you are,” Alberto said, grinning.

They both stared at her then for a long awkward moment. The driver from the rearview, Gabe from the left. Both with the same unblinking expression. Flat and patient and rapacious. Iliana thought of a picture from the frayed fairy-tale book at the orphanage in Dnipropetrovsk where she’d grown up. They both looked like the wolf seeing the first of the three little pigs.

There was something between them, she realized. Like they were friends. More than employer-employee. Something weird.

She glanced at the little bug thing as it made the rim of the console and probed and turned around. It suddenly stopped and turned and seemed to stare at her as well. She held her breath, suddenly extremely scared for some reason she couldn’t name.

Rylan had assured her that his friend knew she didn’t do weird. Sometimes men forgot, though. She had been hurt by very cruel, sadistic men her whole life. That was why she carried the stun gun in her purse. The bodyguard she could handle, and this soft American, too, no matter how much money or ego he thought he had. She stared at the metal thing, resisting the urge to smash it with her fist.

Pretty Woman
, she thought, disgusted with herself. She wasn’t even alive in 1990. Get over on this weird bozo and move along.

That was when she started to feel light-headed. She zipped the seat to upright, and when she looked forward at the driver, he was still staring, which didn’t make sense.

The car is moving. How can he drive and keep staring at me at the same time?

“Could we put up the divider, Gabe?” she said, setting the bottle down.

“Alberto, Alberto, Alberto. How many times do I have to tell you? Ladies don’t like it when you undress them with those big eyes you have,” Gabe said as he hit a button and the tinted divider started to rise again like a dark tide.

When it was up, she tried the button for the window to get some air, but it kept clicking uselessly.

“Gabe, could you pull over? I think I’m going to be sick,” Iliana said as she slumped against the white-silk-lined, vaultlike door.

Gabe leaned over and put his long fingers to her neck just below the jawline.

“You’re going to be fine, lliana,” he said as he stared at his watch. “Take a little nap now, OK? I’ll wake you up in a little bit.”

Iliana’s heavy eyelids began to droop. The last thing she saw was the metal bug on the floor, pausing briefly before it began to climb up her white stiletto heel.

CHAPTER
106

BY 10 P.M., WE WERE
speeding down a dark street in the Wakefield section of the Bronx near the border of Mount Vernon. The block of row houses flying by off to my left would have been charming if every single one of them hadn’t had plywood windows.

We were now down to the chicken-with-its-head-cutoff strategy in trying to pinpoint Chayefsky. Robertson, back at the Harlem office, had gotten a list of Luminous Properties holdings and was feeding us addresses.

We were concentrating on the ones in the city’s poorer neighborhoods where Chayefsky might be hosting one of his sick parties. We’d been to three properties already, one in a run-down section of Yonkers and two in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood. But they had all been abandoned.

I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach as we came under the rusted hulk of an elevated subway track on White Plains Road. Chayefsky and the girl could have been in Tahiti for all we knew. I had the sinking feeling we were running out of time.

“There’s Two Hundred Thirty-Ninth Street right there. Make a right,” Doyle said to Arturo behind the wheel.

Half a block east of the elevated track on East 239th, we slowed before a four-story brick tenement that looked abandoned. It had cinder-block-sealed windows and was completely saturated with decades of graffiti.

“Welcome to another fine abandoned crack house brought to you by Luminous Properties,” Arturo said, shaking his head.

“Wait. Look,” Doyle whispered as he flashed his Maglite into the garbage-strewn lot beside it.

There were two cars parked there. Doyle swung the light onto the cars’ hoods to show a BMW symbol, then a Mercedes three-pointed star.

“Go around the block to the back of the lot by that fence,” I said to Arturo.

We circled around and got out on foot. Through a gap in the fence was an obstacle course of random discarded crap. Tires, a drawerless chest of drawers, a bunch of baby clothes in a torn white plastic bag.

As we approached, we saw that parked next to the Mercedes and BMW were three motorcycles, two Suzuki crotch rockets, and a bright-red Denali. We could also hear something now. It was music from somewhere. A rap thump, faint and unrelenting like the working of a giant, distant heart.

The music was coming from an open doorway to the right of the vehicles. I skirted the cars and stayed close to the wall as I took a quick peek inside. A set of stone steps descended into darkness, and as I stood there trying to let my eyes adjust, a bright light came on at the foot of them. Then a person stepped out from the right onto the bottom step. A jacked-up, scary-looking Hispanic guy in a leather jacket with a lot of gold chains stopped in his tracks as he saw me.

“Police! Freeze! Hands! Don’t move!” I yelled at him, pointing the Glock I was already holding in my hand.

He didn’t listen to me. Instead, he turned and bolted back into the corridor whence he’d come, hollering in Spanish at the top of his lungs.

I hit the bottom of the steps just in time to see the big guy slam a door at the end of the rough stone-walled corridor. The rap music cut as I was halfway to the door, replaced by a sudden rabid barking.

Barking!?

I finally arrived at the slammed metal door. There was even more rabid barking. It sounded like there was a kennel on the other side of it.

There was no knob, so I pushed against it. It moved, but only a little. There was something heavy blocking it. I cursed as the barks grew fainter and fainter.
No!
Whoever was in there was getting away.

A roar of one of the motorcycles sounded behind me as Doyle and I finally managed to shoulder open the jammed door enough for me to stick my head in. It was a garbage-strewn boiler room with a fifty-gallon blue plastic trash barrel behind the door, filled with bricks. On the other side of the room, there were some metal steps leading to another door, another corridor.

My eyes fell to a sunken gravelike section in the concrete that was covered in feces and blood. That was when I realized it.

“It’s OK. The girl isn’t here,” I said. “It’s dog fighting.”

We’d stumbled upon some kind of pitbull fighting ring or something.

“OK?” Arturo said. “No, it isn’t. I have a dog. We need to go get those bastards. They need to be locked up.”

“Forget ’em!” I yelled as I pulled him back down the corridor toward the outside. “We just need to hit the next address on the list. We’re running out of time!”

CHAPTER
107

GABE CHAYEFSKY EXCHANGED A
pleased nod with Alberto as he took the coat from the junior senator from Pennsylvania in the soaring travertine foyer of the Old Bronx County Courthouse. Alberto exchanged the senator’s cell phone for a glass of brandy, then deftly escorted the senator’s security detail toward the coffee urn set up by the door.

Gabe nodded as the senator’s fit and fiftyish head security guy, Scotty, gave him a little wave. Scotty was clean-cut, just recently retired FBI, but his dolt of a son worked for Chayefsky’s charitable foundation’s DC office now. Scotty, bought and paid for, knew the drill by this point. Look away, don’t ask, don’t tell. Gabe grinned. He had Scotty by his aging wrinkled balls.

Senator Bob Plutchik put out his palm and then suddenly lurched forward and tried to get Gabe in a headlock with his free hand. As if. Gabe grabbed the former MIT power forward by the fat pinkie of his right hand and pulled, twisting the laughing, howling senator around until he had him in a chicken wing.

“I’m spilling my drink, you dirty bastard,” the senator said, laughing. “Scotty, you seeing this? Shoot this asshole, would you?”

They laughed and hugged for real. Senator Plutchik, Chayefsky’s old roommate at MIT, was the youngest senator in Pennsylvania’s history. He was snotty, sometimes pushy to the point of being aggravating, but there was an undeniable aura of genius about him, an uncanny intuitive awareness of people. He also had the quickest, keenest nose for human weakness and vulnerability Chayefsky had ever seen.

If it hadn’t been for his nontelegenic horselike features, he might very well have made it into the White House already, Chayefsky thought. Bob was a player, all right, not to mention Gabe’s oldest and closest friend since they’d killed the three girls on their business class trip to Prague in ’93.

It was ironic, really, Gabe thought, that with all his money, he actually had a senator in his pocket for free.

“Sorry I’m late,” said the senator, “but as I’m leaving the house for the chopper, that bitch of a wife of mine demanded that I actually change Amanda’s shitty diaper.”

“No apologies, Bob. Relax. Unwind. You haven’t missed anything. She just came around.”

“Oh, shit, don’t tell me that,” the senator said, his cold gray eyes shining like metal in his long, sharp-featured face as he took a sloppy hit of his drink. “You know how much I love standing there when they wake up. The look on the face. Like that cute little black one in the Bahamas when she figured it out. That one was a classic.”

Gabe smiled at the memory from two Christmases before. Classical music and the taste of cool, dry Riesling as he sat on the still-warm sand with his friend before the huge bonfire on the private island’s rocky beach. Alberto, in his pristine, glowing chef whites, sweating as he turned the roasting black girl on the spit.

“You and your theatrical ruins,” Bob said, looking up at the foyer’s crumbling rotunda. “What the hell is this place, anyway? A school?”

“An old courthouse,” Chayefsky said.

“What? How much you pay for it?”

“It was a steal. One dollar. Actually, my foundation bought it.”

“What? A dollar? I know this is the Bronx, but—”

“I promised to turn it into a preschool.”

“You? That’s hilarious. When’s that gonna happen?”

“Never,” Gabe said, and laughed as he put his arm over his friend’s shoulder. “Enough grab-assing, Senator. This way. We’re set up in one of the holding cells downstairs.”

“A holding cell? No effing way, man,” Bob said, slamming him a wide-eyed high five. “Now that’s what I call a hardcore setting. If the holdin’ cell’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’!”

They were halfway down the candlelit basement stairs when there was a chirp from Chayefsky’s Bluetooth.

“What is it, Alberto?”

“A car is at the fence. Three men in it. They look like cops.”

Gabe fidgeted with his antique cuff links as he thought. He was not nervous. He was as incapable of nervousness as he was of compassion. Everything was a matter of thought. The speed of his thought, his ability to stay several steps ahead.

He considered the heist earlier today, the fact that he hadn’t heard from Rylan yet. But he wasn’t supposed to hear from Rylan for another two days anyway. He had people at the networks and two of the city’s rags, and there hadn’t been the hint of an arrest. And if Rylan had been arrested and had decided to cooperate with the police, why send only three men?

It was nothing, he decided as he continued down the stairs. No need to hit the panic button. Just a coincidence. He had spent a year setting this up. It was time to reconnect with his old friend.

“Send O’Brien out to deal with them. That fat bastard is NYPD, isn’t he? I pay that asshole enough. But stay alert, Alberto, as I know you will. If there’s further interference, we simply go to abort mode.”

“As always, sir,” Alberto said.

CHAPTER
108

“CAN I HELP YOU, GENTLEMEN?”
said a big-gutted white-blond guy in a black Windbreaker behind the chain-link gate as we got out of our unmarked.

The fence surrounded the Luminous Property next on our list, a massive, beautiful old square building at 161st Street and Third Avenue in the South Bronx. Behind the fence, parked next to a crane in a cleared-off lot beside the building, were two vehicles, a dark-gray Ford Expedition and a dark-blue Mercedes limo.

Doyle, who was a car nut, had already pegged the Merc as a Maybach, a half-million-dollar billionaire’s car. I took a breath as I stared through the fence up the steps of the templelike old building.

Chayefsky was in there. I just hadn’t thought there would be a security team protecting him.

“Yeah, hi,” I said, smiling as I showed the blond guy my shield. “What’s going on here tonight? Why are those cars here?”

“Hey, chief. How’s it going? I’m on the job, too,” said the guard as he flashed his own shield back at me. “There’s a private party here tonight by the property owners. A discreet party. A lot of rich folks and celebs will be here, I’m told. I actually just got here. I’m working security.”