The Bubble Gum Thief (3 page)

“...not pretentious.” She smiled at him. “Critics must hate you. But you seem to be doing alright.”

He laughed. “Critics do hate me, but they don’t buy paintings—businessmen and entrepreneurs do. So while you’ll never see my work at the National Gallery, you’ll find it all over Wall Street and Park Avenue.”

“And do you actually believe in what you’re painting, or are you just meeting a demand?”

“I believe in every single brushstroke. But what did you think? Did you like the painting?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” And it was true, she thought. “What did Julia tell you about me?”

“Nothing. She just told me to look for the beautiful woman standing all alone, as far away from everyone else as she could possibly be.” He smiled, then shook his head. “I don’t know anything else about you, Dagny Gray, except that you like my art.”

“Then you know a lot.” Her phone beeped—a text message. She retrieved it from her purse and read the screen. “I’m sorry, Mike. I have to go.” She was happy to see genuine disappointment on his face.

“What is it? A client?”

“Nope.”

“Well?”

Dagny flashed open her red leather swing coat. He seemed surprised, but not frightened, by the Glock 23 in her shoulder holster. Now he knew something else about her. Dagny found a pen in her purse, grabbed his paper coffee cup, and wrote her number on the side. She handed him the cup and popped the last bite of chocolate into her mouth. When she got to the door, she turned back and caught his smile. Thank goodness, she thought. He was smitten, too.

January 7—Brooklyn, New York

Everything about Special Agent Tommy Welpers bothered Dagny—from his puffy cheeks and ragged mustache, to the beer belly that poured over his belt, to the single inch-long white hair growing out of his left earlobe. During their six days in the cold abandoned storefront, Welpers had coughed 278 times. In the past hour alone, he had farted four times, twice audibly. Dagny watched Welpers lean back on his chair’s hind legs and silently willed him to fall. He had fallen the day before, and it had buoyed her spirits for hours.

When he wasn’t farting, Welpers complained endlessly about the conditions of the storefront and their “piece of crap” space heater. He complained about his wife and kids. He complained about the president, about illegal immigrants, and about all the people who were “demanding their rights.” She was, it seemed, trapped in a cold abandoned storefront with an AM talk-radio host. No, it was worse than that. She was trapped with an AM talk-radio caller!

And to top it all off, he kept calling her “Dagwood.”

They were watching the Alms apartment building on Flatbush Avenue, near Prospect Park. Dagny remembered looking at an apartment a few blocks away when she’d lived in New York. Things had changed in the past eight years. Now nannies pushed strollers down the sidewalks. Sleek and shiny condos made from glass and steel rose from the earth. Greasy dives had given way to sushi bars. Manhattan was moving to Brooklyn. God help it.

Dagny was pretty sure that eighty-eight-year-old Vincent Milano didn’t eat sushi. The former head of one of the city’s oldest crime families had once lived in a Tudor mansion on twelve acres of Staten Island. Now sick and senile, he lived on the eighth floor of the Alms, in a simple seven-hundred-square-foot apartment. He rarely left the building.

The Bureau wasn’t interested in Vincent, though; it was interested in his grandson, Mickey “the Mouse” Milano, who had steered the family business into a field so vile that few gangsters would touch it. The Milanos had become lobbyists.

The
quid
was a $40 million earmark for the construction of a sanitation museum on a nonexistent plot of land in Queens. The
quo
was $300,000 in cash. The mistake was the attempt to deposit the cash into a Wells Fargo checking account. The idiot who made this mistake was South Dakota representative Phil Jenkins.

When Dagny and her fellow DC agents confronted Jenkins, he confessed. When New York agents confronted young Milano, he fled. Now, working together, New York and DC agents were staking out possible hideouts. The local special agent in charge called them “Mousetraps,” and there were seventeen of them scattered around the city. Dagny was at one of them, sitting next to Tommy Welpers, who was most of the way through a Domino’s pizza. He had eaten seven slices (2,149 calories; 84 grams of fat) to Dagny’s none (0 calories; 0 grams of fat).

Dagny looked back and forth between the entrance of the Alms and the screen of her MacBook Pro. She had installed a
wireless camera on a tree behind the Alms so she could watch the back entrance of the building from her computer.

“Oooh, check her out,” Welpers cooed, pointing at the screen. A young, thin blonde wearing faux fur and high heels was leaving the Alms. “She’s a buxom baby.”

Despite her best efforts, Dagny laughed. “She looks like an escort.”

“I think the Mouse just had a little cheese.” Welpers was convinced that the Mouse was staying with his grandfather.

Dagny wasn’t quite as convinced. “Lots of men live in the Alms, Tommy.”

“Yeah, but they’re all ninety, Dagwood.”

“Yeah, but Viagra.” The buxom baby
was
a good sign, but Dagny didn’t want to give Welpers any satisfaction, especially after he had called her Dagwood again.

A few minutes of blessed silence followed, and then a flash of movement on the computer’s screen caught Dagny’s attention. The Mouse was exiting the back of the Alms, heading north. “Tommy, let’s go,” she cried, slapping his arm. Agent Welpers had fallen asleep.

The space heater must have been doing some good; it felt bitterly cold outside. Dodging traffic and a fierce wind, they sprinted across the street. A six-foot chain-link fence blocked the rear of the alley. Dagny jumped mid-stride and dug her shoe into one of the links, then catapulted over the top of the fence. Welpers wasn’t as agile and fell behind.

The Mouse was running north, cutting toward Lincoln Road and headed toward Prospect Park. Dagny was fast and began to close the gap between them. The Mouse reached inside his coat, turned, raised his gun, and fired a shot. It missed her, but Welpers’s scream suggested it had found another target. She turned and ran back to Welpers, who lay on the ground holding his leg.

“Christ, Dagwood. Forget me. Get him!” Welpers cried.

Dagny patted his arm, then sprang from the ground and continued her pursuit of the Mouse. Maybe Welpers wasn’t really that bad after all.

Prospect Park was more than five hundred acres of simulated wilderness, tamed lightly by a few streets, a zoo, and a number of nature trails. Dagny had been to the park just once, years ago. She’d watched kids race remote-controlled boats on a man-made lake, wondering if, one day, she’d watch her own kids do the same. When the Mouse entered the park, he sprinted toward the lake then turned onto a footbridge where the lake had tapered to a winding creek. The bridge arched in the middle, and for a second he was elevated and exposed. Dagny raised her gun, tracking him in her sights. He had already fired at her, so she could justify a shot. But if she got closer, she had a better chance of landing a nonfatal one. As always, the goal was to capture the subject alive.

The Mouse felt no similar compunction. As she crossed the bridge, he fired at her and missed. Dagny kept running toward him. The Mouse darted up a hill to Center Drive, followed the road to East Drive, and turned left. Fifty yards down the street, he dove into the woods on the left. If he thought Dagny would just stroll up the street while he hunted her from there, he was wrong. It wasn’t 1776, and she wasn’t the British army. Dagny darted into the woods forty yards behind the Mouse, hoping to creep up to him from behind.

Using the tree trunks as cover, Dagny advanced on the Mouse, who crouched at the base of a thick oak just a few feet from the edge of the woods. His gun was still pointed toward the street. She crept carefully toward him, leading with her Glock. If she could hit his right shoulder, he’d drop the gun. But to hit her mark, she’d have to get closer. Slowly, she zigzagged from left to right, hopping from tree to tree, closing in on her target—first fifty feet away, then forty-five, then forty. As the wind died, each
step seemed louder than the last. When she was thirty-five feet away, her eyes fixed on his shoulder. She stepped a foot closer. And then another. One more step and she’d hit the ground on one knee, resting her elbow on her other knee to steady her aim.

Her cell phone rang.

The Mouse spun quickly and shot toward the sound. The bullet hit Dagny in the chest and she fell backward, dropping her Glock. Even with the Kevlar vest, the shot stung.

The Mouse started toward her. Dagny rolled over onto her knees, groping for her gun. Where was it? She rifled through some fallen leaves, feeling for her weapon. The Mouse fired another shot, and it landed near her hand, kicking a fallen branch from the ground. Another shot hit the tree to her left. He was getting closer—twenty feet away, maybe less.

There were two ways she could go, and neither was great. She was fast, but she couldn’t outrun a bullet, so she decided to charge him instead. She barreled into his gut, and he toppled backward, dropping his gun into a blanket of leaves. She dove to the ground, grasping for his weapon. A swift kick to her side tossed her into a tree trunk. The next kick landed on her forehead and drew blood. She grabbed his ankle and twisted until he fell. A flash of moonlight reflected off the barrel of his gun, and she grabbed it. When she spun around, the Mouse was limping through the woods.

With her legs and a gun, it would be too easy. She fired a shot to his left to get his attention. “I don’t want to kill you,” she shouted.

“You’ll have to,” came the reply.

She chased him through the trees, ducking under branches, jumping over rocks. With every obstacle, she gained ground. He tumbled over a drooping poultry-wire fence; she hurdled it in one stride. He stepped over fallen tree trunks; she bounced off them.
Dagny spied the park’s great grassy meadow through the thicket. Once he left the cover of the forest, she’d have a clear enough shot to bring him down alive.

At the end of the forest, he burst into the meadow with surprising speed. She pounded her feet harder, stretching each stride. Three steps out of the forest, her left foot landed on the paved pathway and she slipped, tumbling forward onto the frozen grass.

All at once, her entire body ached. She tried to move, but couldn’t. The blood on her forehead froze and pulled at her skin. Her grip loosened on the gun, and it slipped out of her fingers. The beat of the Mouse’s footsteps grew fainter, then disappeared. Dagny lay there, tired and confused—defeated.

She sat in a small white room at the Bureau’s Brooklyn-Queens office, waiting for the door to open. An hour passed before it did.

“You had your phone on?” Frank Cooper, the assistant director in charge of Dagny’s DC office. Dagny liked Cooper—he was two of her favorite things: smart and quiet. But he wasn’t being quiet now.

“I made a dumb mistake.”

“I’ll say. You’re lucky.” Cooper put his briefcase down on the table between them and took a seat opposite Dagny. He pulled a Glock from his coat pocket and slid it across to her. “They found it.”

Dagny took the gun and holstered it under her arm. “Thanks.”

“I’m not going to make a crack about you losing your gun.”

“Thanks again.” She paused. “I got
his
gun at least.”

“Yeah. Even trade.” Cooper tilted his head and sighed.

“I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for losing her gun or losing the Mouse.

“You came close.”

“I had him. I had him, and he just—”

“Was faster?”

“No.”

“I heard you fell.”

“I did.”

Cooper pushed his chair back from the table a few inches, then scooted it forward again. “I think we need to talk.”

Dagny didn’t like the sound of that. “About what?”

“You know I like you. I mean that, Dagny.”

“I don’t like the start of this.”

“Well, you need to know that. You’re one of the best agents I’ve got. Which makes this—”

“Am I in trouble?”

He took a deep breath. “Did you eat anything today?”

So it was this. “I just slipped, Frank. Maybe there was a patch of ice on the pavement.”

“Answer the question.” He waited, and then repeated, “Did you eat anything today?”

“I can’t remember.”

“That means no.”

“I might have. I can’t remember.”

“Welpers said you didn’t eat anything.”

“Okay,” she said. “I may have skipped a day.”

“Or two. Or three.”

“I ate something yesterday.”

Cooper laughed. “Do you really think you’re going to win this argument?”

Dagny shook her head. “What do I need to do?”

“You need to eat. Isn’t that clear?”

“Frank, I run every day. What I eat isn’t affecting my work. I didn’t fall down because of that.”

“This isn’t about the Mouse. This is about you. You’re starting to look sick. And I’m worried. I think you need to see someone.”