The Garden of Betrayal (21 page)

He took a hit from his cigarette, sighed as he exhaled, and then dropped the car into gear. We made an illegal U-turn across four lanes of traffic and headed south on York Avenue. I kept quiet as we passed Rockefeller University, not wanting to accidentally dissuade him from his apparent decision to let me ride along. The sun was already down, and the Rockefeller campus was a floodlit oasis, a grassy fifteen-acre chunk of Harvard or Princeton transported to the Upper East Side. I fleetingly wondered where Kate would be at school next year—and where Claire and I would be, and whether we’d be together.

“You’ll do what you’re told, right?”

“Of course,” I replied immediately. “Where is this guy?”

“Staten Island.”

“How’d you find him?”

“Remember I told you that most stolen cars in this part of the world get reregistered with fake VIN numbers or chopped for parts?”

“Right.”

“If you’re going to reregister a car, the easiest way is to pretend it’s coming in from out of state. That way there’s no paperwork for the local DMV to match to.” He clucked irritably as he made the left turn onto the descending ramp for FDR Drive. The highway was jammed in both directions. “I checked out-of-state registrations in the tristate area for the six-month period after Gallegos’s car was stolen. A couple of potentials but nothing that really rang any bells. Again, it’s lucky as hell for us that the M5 is limited production.”

We reached the bottom of the ramp. The cars before us had alternated into traffic, but a shiny black Hummer with chrome running boards was refusing to give way, tailgating the vehicle in front of it. Reggie closed to within eighteen inches, the roofline of his beat-up Chevy level with the bottom of the Hummer’s windows. Shifting his cigarette to his right hand, he popped open the driver’s door and slammed it hard into the side of the Hummer. The driver screeched to a halt, and Reggie accelerated smoothly into the resultant gap.

“Somebody’s going to take a shot at you one of these days,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder. The Hummer owner was out of his car and walking around to the passenger side to inspect it. He looked perplexed. I could hear horns sounding behind him.

“Happened before. At any rate, the other thing I did was to go back through the records and look for chop-shop busts. There’s usually a couple a year. Then I went through the seized property lists to see if anything matched the M5. Again, nothing really jumped out.”

“That’s not much of a surprise, is it? The detectives investigating Carlos’s murder would have been looking for Gallegos’s car also. They must have left some kind of flag in the system.”

“True,” he said, sounding offended. “But the department computer is three monkeys in an orange crate. You got to try the data a bunch of different ways to make sure you’re getting good answers, and you got to be creative.”

“So, what’d you find?”

“I’m getting to it,” he muttered, checking his side-view mirror intently. I hoped he wasn’t sizing up another victim. “Don’t rush me.
The next thing I did was to pull the plate numbers of all the tow trucks owned by the busted chop shops.”

“Why?”

“BMW and other high-end cars have good security systems. Sophisticated thieves don’t bother messing with them. They just hook the car to a tow truck and haul it away.”

“Your point being?”

He reached up and tapped the small white box Velcroed to his windshield below the rearview mirror.

“You matched the tow trucks to their E-ZPasses,” I said, comprehension dawning. “Very clever.”

“Not many chop shops cough up for Manhattan rent, and most vehicles leaving the city pay a toll or get clocked somewhere,” he said smugly. “I figured it was worth a shot.”

“You got a hit?”

“A flatbed truck belonging to an outfit called Frank’s Foreign Cars, sole premises a piece-of-shit garage in Staten Island. The truck was clocked inbound on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge around seven on the evening that Gallegos’s car was stolen, and outbound around ten. Frank was busted for selling stolen parts six months later. The cops found a half-disassembled Porsche last seen in front of Nobu at his place. Belonged to one of the Yankees.” He reached over me to open the glove box and pulled out a manila envelope. “Check it out.”

The envelope contained a grainy black-and-white photograph. I expected it to be of a Porsche, but the subject was a toll plaza at night, shot from a height of maybe twenty feet.

“What’s this?”

“Fourth lane from the left,” Reggie said.

I counted with my finger. The vehicle in the fourth lane from the left was a flatbed truck, and it was hauling a dark-colored car. The car looked like a BMW.

“You got to be kidding me,” I said breathlessly. “Where on earth did you get this?”

“Bridges and tunnels into the city are all covered by multiple security cameras. In the old days, they used to keep the tapes for a year. Post 9/11, they started digitizing everything and keeping it indefinitely. The E-ZPass gave me an exact time to check. Once the tech from the MTA
queued up the right day for me, it only took a couple of minutes to find the shot.”

“And that’s an M5 the truck’s hauling?”

“Looks like one,” Reggie said. “The picture’s not clear enough to be sure. Could just be a regular Five series. The tech who helped me out said the gray scale was consistent with a deep-red color. We can get a more scientific match later if we need to.”

My hands started trembling. If this was the right car, and if what we suspected was true, my son, Kyle, was in the trunk of the car in the photo, dead or suffering.

“Hey,” Reggie said softly, reaching over to take the photo from me. “Don’t sweat it until we know more.”

I took a couple of deep breaths.

“This guy Frank is still operating out of Staten Island?”

Reggie shook his head.

“Nope. Went to jail and got mixed up in a turf war between some skinheads and some Mexican Mafia. Took a shank in the yard. Dead before he hit the ground. But he had a sidekick named Vinny Santore, an eighteen-year-old kid. According to the detectives who worked the case, Vinny was the one who grabbed the cars and Frank was the one who broke them down. Vinny did two years up at the Mid-Orange penitentiary and another two on parole.”

“So, we’re on our way to see Vinny.”

“Right.”

“And you think he’ll talk to us?”

“I got a few ideas on how to persuade him,” Reggie said calmly. “Now, tell me about breakfast with Gallegos.”

We ended up in a semi-industrial neighborhood in Staten Island. I’d been lost since the moment we crossed the bridge, but Reggie seemed to know where he was going. He pulled to the curb behind a green Jeep Cherokee and flashed his lights once before turning them off. A guy got out of the Jeep. I was surprised to recognize Joe Belko, Reggie’s recently retired partner. Joe was a skinny white guy with a monk’s fringe of gray hair, who looked like what he was—someone who spent a lot of time fishing with his grandkids. Reggie lowered his window as Joe approached.

“Hey,” Joe said. If he was surprised at my presence, he didn’t show it. He leaned into the car and offered me his hand. “Good to see you, Mark.”

“And you. Retirement treating you okay?”

“So far.” He glanced at Reggie and made a face. “Car smells like puke.”

“I hadn’t noticed. So, what do you think?”

“Vinny’s working solo, and traffic’s light. I think we’re good.”

“You got the gear?”

Joe nodded.

“Wait a second,” I interrupted. “What’s our plan here?”

“What I told you,” Reggie replied. “To talk to Vinny.”

“Officially?”

“Officially’s not likely to be very productive,” Reggie explained, speaking as if to a child. “Vinny has experience with the justice system. I show him my badge, he tells me to fuck off. I say I want him to come down to the station, he tells me to fuck off. I ask him what he knows about the car, he tells me to fuck off. And then I fuck off, because I got no leverage on him and don’t know that I can get any. That’s officially.”

“What’s unofficially?”

“Joe takes my badge and my car and holds down the front, so nobody bothers us. You and me go around back.”

“The front and back of what?”

Reggie smiled.

“Let’s go see.”

Joe drove, Reggie in the rear seat. He slowed as we cruised past a decrepit-looking gas station. It had an attendant’s booth the size of a garden shed and a single island of pumps. There was a discount beverage center to the left and a used-car lot to the right, both closed.

“That’s him,” Joe said, tipping his head toward the booth.

A shaggy-haired guy sat framed by a three-by-six glass window, racks of cigarettes surrounding him. It looked as though he was talking on a phone.

“What’s behind?” Reggie asked.

“Lot of weeds and a chain-link fence. Fence backs onto a sheet-metal
outfit, also closed. It’s a good setup. There’s an alley runs behind the beverage center.”

I was starting to feel nervous, wondering whether I’d been smart to insist on coming. All the years I’d been watching Reggie break small rules, it had never occurred to me to wonder how far he really went.

“Relax,” Reggie said, reading my face. “I’m not in the business of breaking legs.”

Not breaking legs seemed like a small carveout in the grander category of kicking the shit out of people.

“I’m okay breaking legs if it’s going to help us learn the truth,” I said, hoping my bravado wasn’t too transparent. “But what if Vinny gives us the guy who kidnapped Kyle? What if he is the guy who kidnapped Kyle? What are we all going to say in court when some defense attorney asks us what we did tonight?”

Reggie shrugged.

“Whatever we have to say. That’s how the game’s played.”

Joe reached over to nudge my arm.

“Reggie and I worked a lot of cases together. Anything really bad was going to happen, I wouldn’t be here. Just be cool and back him up.”

I took a deep breath, realizing that I was in deep over my head.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

The alley behind the beverage center was strewn with trash and alive with mysterious rustlings. I stuck close to Reggie, who was carrying a miniature Maglite in one hand and a wooden baseball bat in the other. He’d given me a pole saw with an extendable handle to carry, the kind used for trimming trees. We were both wearing black mesh trucker’s caps pulled low. Reggie turned his light off when we got to the far end of the alley.

“Okay,” he said, peering cautiously around the corner of the building. “Just a nice easy stroll now. No running. And when we get there, remember not to touch anything with your bare hands.”

We crossed the open apron of pavement surrounding the gas station attendant’s booth, the side of Vinny’s face clearly visible through the wraparound window. He’d have seen us if he’d turned his head, but he was still absorbed on the phone. Thirty seconds later we were behind
the booth and out of his sight line. A caged bulb shone overhead, making me feel exposed. Reggie took a black box the size of a paperback book from his coat pocket and touched a switch. An LED on the box glowed green.

“What’s that?” I whispered.

“Cell phone jammer,” he said, dropping the box back into his pocket. “Has an effective radius of about two hundred yards. Borrowed it from a SWAT guy.” He pointed upward. “Landline connection there. I’m going to count to three. When I get to three, you cut the line.”

“Got it.”

I extended the saw and raised it to touch the phone line. Reggie took a two-handed grip on his bat and planted himself in front of the electric meter.

“One, two, three.”

I jerked the saw downward as Reggie swung the bat overhead. The phone line parted and the electric meter crashed to the ground. Every light on the lot extinguished simultaneously. I was blind in the sudden darkness and could hear my heart thumping wildly.

“Now what?” I hissed.

“Shh. Now we wait.”

My eyes adjusted enough to see. Reggie glanced at me and offered the bat.

“Take it and give me the saw,” he murmured. “Don’t make any noise.”

We completed the exchange silently. Reggie leaned the saw against the cinder-block wall of the booth. Another minute passed. My palms were damp on the handle of the bat.

“What if he doesn’t come?”

“He’ll come.”

I heard the door of the attendant’s booth open. Reggie pulled his gun and pointed it skyward. A gray figure shambled around the right-hand side of the booth, an open cell phone held in his hand for illumination. Reggie caught him by his collar and swung him in a wide circle, smashing him into the cinder-block wall.

“What the fuck?” Vinny yelped.

Reggie jammed the gun under his chin, and Vinny got quiet. Close up, I could see that he was chubby and had bad skin. He was wearing
sneakers and ratty jeans and a brown or black leather coat. He looked terrified.

“Vinny Santore,” Reggie said. “Seven years ago, you made a bad mistake. You fucked with the wrong people. It took us a while to find you, but now you have to pay.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Reggie banged him against the wall.

“You been inside, Vinny. You understand how things work. It doesn’t matter what you know. It only matters what you did.”

Vinny’s eyes slid in my direction and then dropped to focus on the bat.

“Whatever it was,” he stammered, “I can make it right.”

Reggie banged him against the wall again.

“Too late to make it right. But you might be able to make it better. And if you make it better, there’s a chance you get to go home in one piece tonight.”

Vinny nodded as much as he could with the gun to his throat.

“What do you want from me?”

“Seven years ago, you swiped a red BMW M5.”

“I swiped a lot of fucking cars. How am I supposed to remember that one?”

Reggie banged him against the wall more forcefully. Vinny’s head bounced off the cinder blocks and onto the barrel of the gun, the impact to his larynx making him choke.

“There was something special about that car. You remember.”

Eyes wild, Vinny looked back to me, maybe searching for an ally. I hoisted the bat to waist level.