The Crasher (59 page)

She crept around the apartment turning out the lights, eerily methodical, with every one of her senses acutely sharp.

Then she sat frantically thinking for several minutes, until she knew what she had to do. What any person in their right mind
would have done from the start. She dialed the number
on the card that had been left for the second time only a few days before.

“Is Detective Petersh there?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Ginny Walker.” She was asked to repeat her name slowly.

“Does he know what this is in reference to?”

Fear gave authority to her voice. “Of course he does.”

She was put on hold. After a few minutes another voice came on the line. “Yes, miss?”

Be calm, Ginny, be patient; your life’s involved here. Again she asked for Petersh, “… or Detective Reever, if he’s not around.”

Another teeth-grinding wait. “They’re not in, miss. Neither of ’em. Can you leave a message?”

Hoping she was right and the police, if not also the FBI, were tapping her line, she took a deep breath and said loudly, “Ask
one of the detectives to call me urgently. Tell them I know the identity of the man on the third floor with Svank.”

“QP? Are you there? Pick up, if you want to know what you’ve been paying me for.”

“Okay, Okay, here I am. What’s up?’

Freddy Forrester, on die four RM.-to-midnight shift, in the highly technical surveillance van parked a couple of blocks south
of Chelsea Park, was relieved to hear the voice of the man he called his guardian angel. QP, as he called him to his face,
had been paying him well for any extra info on the Svank case and this was the first time he’d been able to deliver anything
the old warrior maybe didn’t know.

“Maybe nothing, maybe something. The Walker girl just called the precinct a minute ago, looking for Petersh or Reever. She
left a message as if she wanted the world to hear it…” Forrester spelled it out slowly: “… that she knows the identity of
the man on the third floor with Svank.”

“Good work, Freddy. Over and out”

Since his dinner with Johnny, Peet had been expecting something like this. He was blessed, or was it cursed, with a
peculiar sixth sense that had rarely let him down. Ambushes, mines, booby-trap parcels, he’d survived them all, because of
his personal antennae. In the last twenty years he could only think of one occasion when he’d been caught totally off guard,
when the fucking Russian bastard, Svank, had started to blackmail him about his take from Colombia, and then, when taken to
task, man to man at the library, had had the audacity to pull a gun on him.

Stern’s arrest had been manna from heaven. It had given him time to plan for his future; to leave the party at the height
when his reputation couldn’t go any higher and he could make the regal farewell he’d looked forward to making, taking gracefully
what the paper thought was such a superb golden handshake.

If they only understood what paupers they all were, in comparison to those in charge of the other world he inhabited, the
underworld of Mephistopheles.

He’d known the Stern break was too good to last, but he’d still hoped he’d be able to leave with nothing changed. Perhaps
he still could.

Freddy had said the girl made a call a minute ago. Peet looked at his watch. Nine thirty-five on a Saturday night. Knowing
the two detectives involved, he was pretty sure one would be at the ball game and the other screwing his black mistress at
his favorite hotel off-Broadway.

If he played it cool, he had time to do what he had hoped he would never have to do. How Ms. Walker had suddenly had this
revelation he couldn’t imagine, but he was not gambling on her making a mistake; he was gambling on getting to her first.
He’d give it five to one.

Hearing the rain outside, not for the first time he blessed the midtown building in which he’d kept a one-room pied à terre,
for the past fifteen years. The elevator whooshed him down eleven floors to the basement garage. Without encountering a single
raindrop, he was on his way downtown less than ten minutes after receiving Freddy’s call.

Across the street from Ginny’s loft, Johnny, in an Avis
Oldsmobile, had already seen Poppy Gan arrive and leave. It hadn’t been too much of a surprise. Seeing Ginny earlier that
evening in such a nervous state, he’d known something was up. Why hadn’t she wanted him to know Gan was coming? What had Gan
been delivering?

After an absence of a few days, hoping to move things along and evaluate Ginny’s frame of mind, he’d stumbled on Gan’s visit
by accident, when delivering the advance copy of the magazine. Now, his suspicions newly aroused, he feared it was a coincidence
he’d live to regret. He still couldn’t believe Ginny was a crook like her cousin, didn’t want to accept it; and until this
evening had been talking himself out of such a terrible idea.

As he waited and watched, Johnny made up his mind. He wasn’t prepared to let another night go by without finding out the truth
about Ginny Walker.

It wasn’t raining so heavily when Poppy left, so he got out of the car to stand in a doorway, trying to decide exactly when
to go back to the loft and take Ginny by surprise.

Shortly after, the lights in the loft went out. At nine-twenty? It was too early for Ginny to go to bed. Was it some kind
of signal?

Renewed rain had driven him back into the car just as a dark sedan pulled up. So the lights had been a signal. Who was arriving
now?

“Ms. Walker?”

“Yes…” A soft, tremulous voice.

“Sergeant O’Neill here…” Even at this tense moment, it amused Peet to use the old rank of the now too-big-for-his-boots, high-and-mighty
CO. “I’ve come to escort you to the precinct”

“Thank God. I’ll be right down.”

Ginny pulled on her old black raincoat and ran down the stairs, thankful to leave the loft, which had become terrifyingly
oppressive. Through the glass panels in the front door, she couldn’t see anyone waiting under the porch. She didn’t
blame the sergeant. Even cops didn’t like getting their uniforms wet She opened the door and saw a dark sedan at the curb,
the passenger door half open. She dashed across the pavement-God, it was coming down hard-and bent down to get in. “What a
night, I’m-” She screamed one high scream as she saw who was waiting inside. There was a high buzz in her brain and the world
went black.

Watching the sedan pull away from the curb with a screech of tires, Johnny heard the scream, Ginny’s scream, and he hit the
accelerator so violently that the Oldsmobile shot across the street and ricocheted off the pavement He thought he’d lost them
right there because the sedan went through a red light at the corner, but Johnny shortly found himself right behind them.

He was on automatic pilot, not aware of the traffic, not aware of anything except the car in front He’d been full of suspicion,
seeing the sedan arrive and Ginny emerge soon after.

In a second everything had changed. He’d heard her scream. Whoever was driving the car wasn’t the person she’d expected to
see. God in heaven, she was being abducted.

As he drove he remembered his father saying, “Cousin or no cousin, Ms. Walker could be in danger… Svank is gone, but the cesspool
he created is still very much there… Why don’t you take her away from the cesspool?”

Why hadn’t he? The cousin was gone, but idiot that he’d been, not trusting his own emotions, he’d transferred his suspicions
to her, his own Ginny. God, help him.

At Fourth and East Houston, at the point where the Bowery begins, the sedan swerved madly to avoid by inches a huge Mack truck
backing out of a side turning. Although the rain was now torrential, instead of slowing down, the sedan began to pick up speed.

Too late, Johnny saw a car pass him and get between him and his quarry. He drove right up behind the interloper, hooting his
horn, shouting, “Move over, you bastard, move over.”
The car didn’t budge, but as long as he could still see where the sedan was headed, he tried to keep his panic down.

He was driving as dangerously as the sedan now, slipping and sliding all over the road. Suddenly, the sedan made a wild swerve
to the left in the direction of the Manhattan Bridge. Where were they going? Who was driving the car like a lunatic in this
downpour? Whoever it was had to have nerves of steel to keep the car on the road.

Who had made Ginny scream? He would get him; he had to get him, no matter what.

Through the driving rain he saw a sign to Kennedy. He shuddered, thinking of the desolate areas around the outskirts of the
airport, the deserted coves in Far Rockaway, the deep waters of Jamaica Bay.

As he followed the sedan onto the bridge he heard a police siren. “Please God,” he prayed, “please God make the car in front
stop.”

The sedan slowed slightly as it went through a giant pool of water, the spray hitting Johnny’s windshield and momentarily
blocking his view. The police car was flashing him from behind; he moved over expecting it to flash the sedan, but it sped
on by, fast ahead.

At the first light across the bridge, Johnny was close enough to get the first few numbers of the registration plate. M 15-but
before he could catch the rest, the sedan took off in another sluice of water.

He was gaining on them when he hit another gigantic pool, obscuring everything for a vital few seconds, seconds in which the
sedan disappeared from view.

He cursed and screamed. There was a phone booth on the corner. He couldn’t do it alone. There was no time to lose.

Johnny’s call was put through to Petersh just as he was leaving Ginny’s apartment. “Slow, slow…” The detective knew the guy
was in love with the girl, but he couldn’t make out a word he was saying.

“Okay. Now I’ve got you. Kidnapped, you say. Repeat the car number… If you see it again, use this code to get through
to me at once.” After being beeped at the ballgame, Petersh had rushed over to Ginny’s apartment where he got only her answering
service when he called.

Now, seconds after crashing the phone down, Petersh put out a general alarm. “Special alert Calling all cars, intercept a
dark sedan, possibly a Pontiac, license plates beginning M 15… traveling southeast on Bushwick, in the direction of Kennedy
Airport. Intercept with caution, driver may be armed.”

Johnny drove slowly now through the rain, the poor lighting on the road where he’d lost the sedan making everything more difficult.
He thought he heard another siren in the distance. He went in that direction. Ginny, Ginny, Ginny, hang on. I’ll find you.
I love you.

As he arrived at an intersection, a car flashed across his vision. No two people could be driving as crazily as that in this
weather. He swerved to miss a station wagon, made a dangerous U-turn and went after the speeding car.

Whoever was behind the wheel was insane, but he knew how to drive all right It made him think of… wait a minute… M 15. His
father’s license plate M IS 67P, always pronounced in the family as M15 after the British Secret Service… and sixes and sevens
to show what his father thought of them. M 15 67P.

Johnny gnashed his teeth. What the hell was going on? His father often drove like a madman, like one with nine lives or--what
had he said about Svank? More like twenty. What the hell was going on?

It was too much of a coincidence to dismiss. He’d told his father Alex had dumped the jewels on Ginny, then retrieved them
the night of Svank’s murder. Had he unintentionally given his father the idea that Ginny could be involved? Had he transferred
his own subliminal suspicions of her to his father? He groaned. What had he done? Was his father using her as bait? There
was nothing his father wouldn’t do for his own ends, Johnny knew that. If his father was putting Ginny’s life in jeopardy
to break the Svank case and be a hero one more
time before his retirement from journalism, he would kill him, he would kill him with his own hands. What had he done? What
had he done… and where were they going?

“D’you pick up the message, Freddy?”

“Sure thing, Pete.”

“Did you pass it on to your pal?”

“What d’you mean!”

“You know what I mean. This is serious stuff, Freddy. I want to know now or I won’t answer for the consequences.”

“Okay, okay. We’ve all done it. What’s the harm?”

“This one’s different. The D.A.’s breathing down our necks, the FBI is breathing down his… So?”

“Okay, okay, yep, I passed the girl’s message on to QP. Thought he’d be in touch with you by now. What’s the problem?”

“I’ll deal with you later.”

“What’s the problem?” Forrester repeated plaintively. “He’s your buddy, too. Never put a foot wrong yet, only helped us as
we’ve helped him. What’s your problem?”

There was no answer. Petersh was on his way.

The weather was getting worse. Johnny couldn’t even be sure that the car he was chasing was the same sedan he’d followed from
Ginny’s apartment. He screamed profanities at the top of his voice to try to keep his panic under control. He was lost; didn’t
even know which road he was on; straining to hear the police siren, hearing nothing but the moan of the wind, the steady splash
as the Oldsmobile dashed through small and big floods.

Now there was more traffic building up. The car he’d seen back at the intersection was three or four cars in front. Where
were they going? They’d passed the turnoff for Kennedy.

Out of the mist came the answer. Now he knew for sure it was his father at the wheel. He knew where he was taking Ginny. He
didn’t know why, but he’d soon find out

A large sign loomed before him: AQUEDUCT RACETRACK,
KEEP RIGHT. One of his father’s favorite hangouts, a place he could find blindfolded, a track he knew as intimately as any
jockey. It would be deserted at this time of night, but his father would know a way in… and so would the police when he told
them.

Sure enough Johnny saw the sedan take the right-hand fork. He started to look for a sign for telephones-it came about half
a mile down the road. Whoever was planning to rendezvous with his father and Ginny at Aqueduct, Johnny was about to ruin the
party.