Ruby swallowed as she looked at her photo from her military ID.
“You tell me,” he said.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s the FBI wire on you. You’re a hot commodity.”
“Oh, no, no, no... Am I like on the news now?”
“No, not yet. That’s an interoffice sheet. They want to bag you discreetly, if they can.”
“AWOL?” she said as she read the charges. “Bullshit! I’m on leave! And ‘Suspicion of Terrorist Activities’! Are they crazy?”
“Yep, that’s how they do it. If it’s a national security top secret matter, they just go to their rigged secret court and get one of their cronies to rubber-stamp it. They don’t need probable cause or to show any evidence. They just say it’s a sensitive security issue and, boom, they get the warrant.”
“I can’t believe this. Are you being watched, too?”
“Off and on,” Wheldon said. “They don’t seem to like me or my YouTube channel very much. Weird.”
The waitress brought her coffee.
“How the hell do you know all this stuff?”
“I told you I used to work in the State Department. I still know a few people, good people, who have had it up to here with what’s happening.”
“What is happening?”
“We’ll get to all that. We need to get out of here first. I have a friend. You can crash on her couch. You’ll like her. Everybody likes Rebecca.”
“Then what?”
“Then tomorrow, we talk. Trade notes. Figure out your situation. How does that sound?”
“Honestly, sort of crazy,” Ruby said as she stared at her very first personal WANTED poster there on the paper. “Five seconds ago, I was at my sister’s house feeding my new niece. Now the FBI is after me, and I’m here in New York with a conspiracy theorist.”
“Not theorist,” Wheldon said, smiling as he dropped a couple of bills on the table. “Analyst, Ruby. The conspiracy is real. As you know yourself now.”
Ruby took a sip of her coffee as Wheldon stood and yanked open a door beside their booth.
“Are you ready?” Wheldon said.
Ruby looked out the door. Beyond it there was a bunch of garbage bags and beer case boxes and a set of metal fire escape–style stairs heading up. A frigid ear-nipping wind rushed in.
“No, but let’s do it anyway, I guess,” Ruby said as she finally stood.
39
When Reyland woke it was around midnight and there was a sound of violins.
When he opened an eye, up on the big wall-sized screen, he could see men in Civil War uniforms being carried on stretchers. Scarlett O’Hara appeared, looking to and fro, and then the camera panned back to dramatically reveal a sepia-colored train yard filled with the dead and dying as the music turned to a sad strain of Dixieland.
Reyland yawned. Movie night had been his nine-year-old son Jason’s idea. The kids were all off from school the next day because of some teachers’ conference, so they’d all come down with popcorn and Mike and Ikes and blankets. They’d decided after several votes on the vintage Disney classic Freaky Friday, and then after the kids fell asleep, his wife had put on Gone with the Wind.
That had done it for him. He hadn’t lasted through the opening credits.
“Okay, you lazybones,” Reyland called out, clicking off the projector with the remote.
No one moved. His littlest, Sadie, was closest, and she squealed as he tickled her awake at her bare foot with his toenail.
“Mom, make him stop,” she said as everyone finally got up.
At first, he had thought that the theater room the previous owners had done up with red curtains and even a little ticket stand in the hall was the corniest crap he had ever laid eyes on. But even he couldn’t deny how much he actually loved it. The sound system especially. He’d never go to a real movie theater again.
As Jason, Tyler and Sadie zombie-stumbled off to bed, he helped his wife, Danielle, collect the popcorn bowls. He smiled, checking out his wife from behind as they came up the stairs. She’d just turned forty, but she worked out like crazy, and she still had a great rack and an ass you could bounce a quarter off.
She was still the hot LSU cheerleader he’d picked up at the Orlando Hard Rock Cafe after the Citrus Bowl back in the roaring nineties. Or at least mostly. He remembered Christmas in St. Barts two years before when they had left the kids in the hotel and gone sailing. How would he ever forget? Shirtless and tipsy, she had climbed to the bow and done a mermaid impression for him in just her Santa-red thong.
He frowned as he thought about work, Dunning, the missing navy girl.
Why? Reyland thought. Couldn’t life just always be champagne and sailboats and Santa-red thongs?
“Bring up some bottled water, okay?” his wife called by the back stairs as he clicked off the basement lights.
“Yes, dear,” he mumbled into the dark.
He was closing the Sub-Zero when he saw Emerson’s three missed calls on his phone on the charging pad on the other side of the kitchen island.
“Tell me the good news,” Reyland said as he stood at his back door, looking out into the dark yard.
“Everett’s in New York.”
Reyland’s face instantly brightened.
“New York? In custody?”
“No. You’re not going to believe this, boss. It’s not good. She’s met up with that internet jackass Wheldon.”
“Who?”
“You know. Eric Wheldon. He leaked the Oliveras thing about four months ago. He was the reason the Post finally picked it up.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Reyland said, knocking at the French door glass with his Notre Dame school ring. “Tell me we have eyes on them right this second.”
“No, but we’re on this. New York already has a great jacket on Wheldon. We have his apartment and his office. You want me to get a forward team together?”
“Yes. Wake up Ruiz and call aviation. We need a plane three hours ago,” Reyland said.
40
The late morning traffic on the BQE outside of LaGuardia Airport was catastrophic. But as the cab glacially got off the BQE onto the LIE, it did the impossible.
It actually got worse.
From the dead-stopped interchange five miles south of the airport, Gannon looked out, amazed at the evacuation-level volume of work vans and big rig trucks and taxis and cars. Then he looked forward at Manhattan, where the machine belts of vehicles were being fed.
The great gray barbed skyline on the western horizon looked like some giant instrument of torture set and ready for fresh victims.
Gannon zipped up the Carhartt coat he had bought from a sporting goods store in Arizona on the way to the airport.
And look who’s headed straight into the jaws of it, he thought.
Gannon closed his eyes. Damn did this suck, he thought. Especially leaving Declan flat all by himself back at the stadium in Arizona. He hadn’t even had time to stay for the simulated game in order to catch the next direct flight.
But what choice did he have?
What was going on, he didn’t know, except that this wasn’t a damn game. This wasn’t some lucky fantasy scheme where he walked off into the sunset with a secret bag of doper money anymore. He could kiss all that good-night and goodbye.
He needed to get out in front of this and damn quick, he thought as he passed a hand nervously through his hair.
Before he found his sorry ass sitting in a prison cell.
They stopped and sat motionless for so long the cabbie actually put the car in Park.
“It’s worse,” Gannon finally said. “How could it have gotten worse?”
“What’s that?” said the driver, pulling one of the hissing earbuds out of his head.
He was a skinny young Asian dude with a Mets flat-brim
cap and a white North Face vest. He looked like a college kid.
“Nothing. I just hate this,” Gannon said.
“Hate what?” he said.
“This. This city. It’s a crumbling black sinkhole filled with hate and dirt and pizza rats.”
“What? Come on, man. How does anyone hate the Big Apple? That’s ridiculous. It’s the biggest, greatest, most happening city in the world. Like where are you from, bro?”
“Here,” Gannon said, staring out. “I’m from right here.”
They drove for a bit then stopped again. The kid put his earbud back in, but then after a second, pulled it out again.
“If you hate it so much, why come back?”
“This is a onetime shot, believe me,” Gannon said. “I had to come back. I have something to do.”
“Must be something pretty important, huh?”
“Yep.”
“What?”
Gannon took out his phone and looked at it stupidly for a moment then put it back into his pocket.
“I’m not really at liberty to divulge that information,” he said.
“You’re a real man of mystery, aren’t you?”
“Buddy,” Gannon said, looking out at the shark-toothed skyline. “You don’t even want to know.”
41
Just north of Little Italy, the icy breeze was so strong Gannon had to fight the cab door to get it open.
He’d just made the unmarked Chevy on the northeast corner of Orchard Street when its driver’s door opened. The big man who got out of it smiling had shoulder-length dirty blond hair and a black leather jacket.
With his Fu Manchu and big Red Wing boots, he didn’t look like a cop. He looked like a Hells Angel trying to find his lost Harley.
“Mickey, you crazy son of a bitch. Look at you. Mr. Winter Tan. You’re back!” his old partner, Danny “Stick” Henrickson, said, embracing him.
“Look at me? Look at you. You look exactly the same, well, except for this,” Gannon said, flicking at the dusting of white in Stick’s mustache.
“Yeah, I know. It’s horrible, right?” Stick said, smoothing at his whiskers. “You know how vain I am. I was heading to Duane Reade for a new tube of Just For Men when you called.”
Gannon smiled as he pounded his old linebacker-sized partner on the back. He hadn’t been all that great at keeping in contact with old friends after he moved out of the city, but Stick was the exception.
“So should we sit in the car or hit a Starbucks or something?” Gannon said, shivering.
“No, no. For ancient reunions with old maniac partners, I roll out the full red carpet,” Stick said. “Like the hick jacket, by the way. Are you a farmer or something now?”
Stick took out a set of keys and opened up the door of a shop across from where the Chevy was parked. Silver Mine Properties, it said on the door.
“Yeah, I’m a farmer, and you’re what? Moonlighting as a broker now?” Gannon said as they came into a cozy office space with some cubicles and a reception area.
“Actually,” Stick said as he clicked on a light, “my sister’s new husband is the manager of the building here. The last tenant just left, so they’re still trying to lease it out. I coop in the office here when I’m downtown.”
“Oh, I get it now,” Gannon said as he peeked in an inner office and saw the drum set.
Before the cops, Stick had his fifteen minutes of fame as a replacement drummer in Cold Iron Mine, a once famous Staten Island heavy metal band that had toured Europe.
Which actually made sense, Gannon thought, shaking his head at Stick. You had to be heavy-metal-drummer crazy to be an undercover cop.
And Stick hadn’t been just any undercover cop either but one of the greatest NYPD narcotics officers of all time, Gannon knew. Though Stick looked like a big dumb white boy headbanger, his mom, a pretty Puerto Rican lady, had raised him speaking Spanglish in the Lower East Side projects. None of the dozens of Dominican dealers he put away could ever believe how well he understood what they were saying.
“You’re downtown a lot now, huh, with the feds?” Gannon said. “Your last email said you were still with the JTTF, right?”
“Yeah, well, that was like seven months ago,” Stick said as he locked the door. He lay back on a couch in the reception area and put his big Red Wing engineer boots up on a motorcycle magazine–covered coffee table. “I actually had me some second thoughts about it.”
“I thought you were all over it.”
“I was. The OT was great, but two weeks in, you wouldn’t believe the bullshit, Mickey. All the politics and crazy shit. They had us following people who had nothing to do with anything, brother. I mean, it was like gumshoe shit for the politicians or something. I didn’t know what the hell it was. I like to do like real cop work against, you know, dealers and crooks and killers. So now I’m back where I was before.”
“Up in Midtown North?”
“No, I’m at the One Nine,” Stick said proudly. “You’re looking at the new detective squad coleader.”
“The One Nine? The Silk Stocking District? No way!” Gannon said, grinning. “Your mom must be so proud. Drummer boy makes it to Park Avenue! Must be busy with all the drive-bys up there in rich people land, huh? Let me guess. The butler did it?”
“Ha ha. Keep laughing. You’d be surprised how busy it gets.”
“Ever think of this thing, um, retirement, I think it’s called, Stick? You have what? Almost thirteen hundred years in now?”
“Screw your career advice, jackass. I thought you said the next time you came back they’d be playing the bagpipes out in Brooklyn at Ascension for you.”
“Yeah, I know,” Gannon said quietly.
“What the hell is it anyway that makes you darken Gotham’s doorstep again? The suspense is killing me.”
“I won’t even get into the particulars with you, man. Less you know, the better.”
Stick shook his head and laughed at that.
“So what can I do for you, then?”
“It’s going to sound crazy.”
Stick grinned as he put his big palms together.
“Then you’ve come to the right place, brother.”
“There’s a guy on the internet on YouTube. His name’s Wheldon. Eric Wheldon. He’s an alternative news independent reporter. Ever hear of him?”
Stick looked at him strangely.
“Wheldon? Who? No.”
“He walks around the city. Talks about government stuff?”
“You’re trying to contact some conspiracy theory guy?”
“Yes,” Gannon said, taking out his phone and showing him a screenshot. “This is the guy. His name’s Eric Wheldon. I know you know everybody. I was hoping you would know somebody who knows him.”
Because of his legendary undercover status, Stick knew virtually every cop, FBI agent, DEA agent and district attorney from Yonkers to Suffolk County. In addition to a few Yankees and half the cast of the TV show Law & Order, where he used to moonlight as security.
“Ever consider emailing him?” Stick said. “Saves on the hotel and airfare.”
“I did,” Gannon said. “Several times. But he doesn’t answer. This is pretty important. I really need to talk to him. Like now.”
Stick squinted as he tapped at his mustache with a knuckle.
“I actually know a few computer nerds in the department that might be of some use. You need to sit down with this guy pronto, huh? Is this about aliens or something? Ancient aliens maybe? On your new farm? No, wait. I got it. Crop circles.”
“Stick, I just need your help, okay? I didn’t come back up here because I miss the dirty snow. It’s important. I’m begging you to help me contact this guy.”
“Okay. Relax. Relax. Just wondering.”
Stick winked as he took his cell phone out of the lea
ther jacket.
“You just sit back and watch the master at work, Mickey, my boy,” he said. “Your wish is my command.”
42
At only a little over two hundred flight miles from Washing-ton, DC, to New York City, it took the unmarked government Gulfstream twenty-one minutes tarmac to tarmac to land Reyland and his men at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport.
At five after three in the afternoon, they disembarked into the gray and cold and transferred everything off the sleek white jet into the three black Ford Expedition SUVs waiting along the open tarmac side fence.
By 3:10, they were on the Jersey Turnpike eastbound with all the traffic heading into the city. But they didn’t head into the city. Right as the traffic began backing up before the Holland Tunnel, the three dark vehicles swerved onto the litter-strewn shoulder one after the other.
Down at the end of a battered off-ramp was a stop sign they blew past into an industrial area called Kearny. Huge chemical tanks went by on their left. A transmission tower. A looming dark steel railroad bridge.
When they came around a bend, a CSX freight train double stacked with rusty shipping containers was rolling out in the opposite direction.
Getting out, Reyland thought, smiling.
While the getting was still good.
A hundred yards farther south down this godforsaken road, the convoy of tinted-windowed vehicles slowed. The potholed drive they pulled onto had a tall razor-wired fence gate across it with a rusted sign that said KEEP OUT New Jersey State DOT.
Reyland’s driver zipped down the window. He fished into his pocket as Reyland listened to the terrific ocean-like roar from the rushing traffic on the turnpike above. Then the driver finally laid his electronic passkey to the fob reader and the rusty gate slid sideways with a rattle and a buzz.
Beyond the gate were salt sheds and stacks of cement highway barriers and columns of road plows that they quickly skimmed past on their way toward a half-dozen construction trailers and shipping containers that were set up in a horseshoe pattern at the truck yard’s rear.
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