The Betrayer

by Daniel Judson

  “It’s Chappaqua, Donnie.”

  Later, as she got into her Mustang, Cat thought better of just driving up there blind. If no one was home, it would be a waste of time. And if Elizabeth Hall and her husband were both there, well…

  She called Hall’s landline number and listened to three rings before the call was answered and a female voice said, “Hello?”

  Something about the voice told Cat that this woman already knew who was calling.

  But how could she know that?

  Cat identified herself, and before she could ask to whom she was speaking, the woman said, “Is Jeremy dead?”

  So Elizabeth Hall, then.

  “No,” Cat answered. “Not that we know of. But he is missing, and I was hoping you could help.”

  “It’s the same thing that happened to your father,” Elizabeth said.

  Cat hadn’t thought of that till now.

  Her next thought was that this woman knew things.

  “Can we meet and talk?” Cat said. “I could drive up there.”

  “I’d rather we didn’t meet at my house.”

  “I understand. Name a place and I’ll be there.”

  “There’s a coffee shop near the train station here. It’s on the far side of the parking lot. Would that do?”

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The name that Dickey McVicker had written down on the slip of paper he had given Johnny was Charlie Atkins. It was a name Johnny recognized. Atkins was Jeremy’s friend from years ago, back before their father was killed, before Johnny had completely written his brother off as a terminal screw-up. The guy’s just not a Coyle, he’d once told Cat. Harsh, maybe, but Johnny saw things more simply back then.

  And it wasn’t like he hadn’t given his kid brother every chance.

  Everyone had.

  When Jeremy first began to disappear into the city for days at a time, it was always a safe bet that he was with Atkins. And whenever Jeremy got into trouble, Atkins was never too far away.

  John Coyle Sr. had looked into Atkins’s background, learned everything he could about the kid and his family. Atkins was from wealth, had grown up on Central Park West, and attended several prep schools in Connecticut — three, in total, after having been quietly asked to leave the first two. But he managed to graduate and, despite his mediocre grades and history as a troublemaker, got into Yale, though most likely as a legacy — Atkins men had been going to Yale for generations. However, Charlie Atkins had stayed for only two years before dropping out. The last thing his father had told Johnny — John Coyle shared all of this with his eldest son, like a commander would with his trusted sergeant — was that Atkins was simply biding his time till his own father died, after which he would, as the only child, inherit the family fortune.

  The kid had everything, Johnny thought as he entered Little Italy. Every advantage anyone could ever want, could ever dream of having — and he had walked away from it. More than that, he had pissed all over it.

  Just like his kid brother.

  Maybe Atkins had been a primary influence on Jeremy, inspiring him to follow the path of self-destruction he’d been on since their mother had died.

  But Johnny told himself he didn’t care about that. He wasn’t here to understand his brother better, or heal him. He was here to find him and either bring him back to Cat himself, or to let Cat know where he was and then watch over him, silently, till she got there.

  And then Jeremy would be her problem and Johnny would be done with it, would have fulfilled his duty to what was left of his family and be free to go back to Haley and once again burrow deep.

  The bar, called Vincent’s, was on Mulberry Street. Upon entering Johnny saw an elaborately framed print of van Gogh’s The Night Café hanging on the wall behind the bar. He saw, too, that the bar itself was an homage to that painting — pool table in the center of a narrow room that was lit by yellow and red lights, though softer than in van Gogh’s rendering, more somber and less harsh.

  There was a good crowd at the bar, and the dozen or so tables running the length of the opposite wall were all full. Jazz was playing on the DMX — a woman singing in Moroccan-accented French, accompanied by nylon-string guitar, double bass, and squeeze-box. Johnny had studied French in both high school and college, but he couldn’t make out the lyrics over the din of the crowd, not that he really tried.

  He had only just stepped through the door and taken a quick look around when a man seated on a nearby stool stood and approached him. He wasn’t big — not Richter big, or Dickey McVicker big. He was built, in fact, more like Johnny — fit, lean, scrappy. He had a shaved head and pockmarked face, was maybe in his midthirties. A gutter rat, quick and mean, Johnny concluded.

  The man nodded to Johnny, then told him to wait where he was and headed through the crowd toward the back.

  Obviously, the man knew what Johnny looked like.

  As Johnny watched the man, he wondered about him, but only briefly. A few bad turns, Johnny thought, and this could be me, watching the door at one of Dickey McVicker’s places, waiting for my chance to prove myself to him through violence, and, once I did, maybe move up a notch or two in his ranks.

  If not for the woman Johnny loved, he could have easily ended up here.

  That is, if he hadn’t flamed out first in Bangkok.

  There but for the grace of Haley go I.

  The man reached the very last table, at which sat Charlie Atkins — John Coyle’s info on Atkins had included photographs. Leaning down, the man spoke to Atkins, who was with a woman whose back was to Johnny. The woman turned and looked over her shoulder at Johnny, staring at him for a moment. She was beautiful, had thick black hair cut in a flapper’s bob, but she was young, probably too young to be in a bar.

  The woman turned to Atkins as the man with the pockmarked face straightened his back. Atkins stood, touched the woman on the shoulder, and followed the man through the crowd to the front of the bar.

  “Let’s talk upstairs,” Atkins said to Johnny.

  Johnny followed him outside, then through a street door just feet from the bar’s entrance. They climbed a set of narrow stairs, at the top of which was an apartment that was being used as storage space. Just like the apartment below Johnny’s. This one, though, was filled with cases of liquor — many more cases than any legitimate busy bar would need to keep on hand — and dozens of tables and stacks of chairs, as well as kitchen appliances like a dishwasher, fryer, and industrial stove, covered with sheets of clear plastic.

  They stood just inside the door. Atkins positioned himself by a front window. He kept glancing down at the street below as if he were expecting someone.

  A customer, maybe. Or a cop. Or, for that matter, a rival or enemy, even.

  Johnny wasn’t in that life, but he knew the feeling.

  “Dickey told me you’re looking for Jeremy,” Atkins said.

  He was maybe in his midtwenties, just a few years older than Jeremy. Dressed in expensive clothing — European jeans, zip-up sweater, motorcycle boots with absolutely no wear on them. His hair was thick and recently cut.

  Doing well for himself, even without his family wealth.

  “He seems to be missing, yeah,” Johnny said.

  “There’s a big difference between ‘seems to be missing’ and actually missing.”

  “He’s missing,” Johnny said flatly.

  Atkins shrugged. “I’m afraid I haven’t talked to him in a while. Don’t know what help I could be.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “A month, maybe. He called me; we didn’t meet face-to-face. And before that, I hadn’t heard from him in, I don’t know, close to a year.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Not drugs, unfortunately.”

  Johnny ignored that. “What, then?”

  Atkins paused, was clearly enjoying the power he had, the importance his having knowledge that someone else wanted gave him.

&nbs
p; “He wanted to know if I could put him in touch with somebody, set up a meeting.”

  “With who?”

  “Dickey.”

  Johnny hid his surprise. “What for?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “Did you set something up?”

  “He only asked me if I could put him in touch with Dickey, didn’t actually ask me to do it.”

  “Why not?”

  Atkins shrugged. “Don’t know. He said he’d call me back if he needed my help.”

  “And that was the last you heard from him.”

  “Yeah.”

  Johnny thought about that, then said, “You were his dealer.”

  “One of his dealers, yeah. Friends first, of course, back in the old days, but we drifted, as people do. You understand all about that, right? Anyway, after that, whenever I heard from him, it was pretty much business.” Atkins paused. “He was off drugs, though, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “You’re skeptical. I get that.”

  Johnny said nothing.

  “You know, Jeremy talked about you a lot,” Atkins said. “Back when we used to hang out, when he used to come to the city on the train and visit me. I think one of the things he didn’t like about himself was that he wasn’t more like you.”

  “He had every chance to change.”

  “You don’t understand addiction, do you?”

  “And you do, because how else would you profit from it, right?”

  Now Atkins said nothing.

  “Did Jeremy say anything else when he called?” Johnny said finally.

  “He said a lot. He was pretty manic. Or he could have just been excited. Hard to tell.”

  “Excited over what?”

  “He kept saying he was in love.”

  “With who?”

  “Some married woman who lives up in Chappaqua.”

  “Did you get a name?”

  “He called her Beth.”

  “Any last name?”

  “No, but she was decorating the restaurant he was working at. That’s how they met.”

  “Do you know the name of the restaurant?”

  “If he said it, I don’t remember.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Sure. We talked for almost an hour, which I thought was kind of strange, considering we weren’t really friends anymore. Actually, he wouldn’t shut up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. He wouldn’t shut up. He went on about how he’d gone to some hypnotherapist to get help kicking his addiction once and for all. I guess the hypnotherapist helped him with that, and then they started doing this memory regression shit, and all of a sudden, these repressed memories started coming up.”

  “Memories of what?”

  “Names, faces.” Atkins paused, then shrugged and said, “What really happened the night your father was killed.”

  Johnny couldn’t hide his reaction this time.

  He said quickly, “What did he say, exactly?”

  “I pushed him for more, and that’s when he finally shut up. I’m telling you, though, the guy was manic. I think that’s the reason he told me as much as he did. That, and because he was lonely. And I think he shut up when he did because he suddenly got paranoid. Mania and paranoia — not a good combination, if you ask me.”

  “Studied a lot of psychology up there at Yale, did you?”

  Atkins smiled at that, though he clearly wasn’t amused. “Actually, I did, army man,” he said. “But I used to be an addict, too. The weird thing about quitting is that you find out the hard way that there’s a fine line between the clarity they promise you and full-blown mania. They don’t warn you about that going in, but it’s one of the many risks. And the problem is, if you are manic, you wouldn’t even know it, you’d be the last one to realize it. You’d just think you’re seeing everything exactly the way it is for the first time.” He paused. “I wouldn’t believe a thing your brother told me. Not if he’s still in the condition he was in when I talked to him. No matter how strongly he believes it. In fact, the stronger he believes something, the more I’d tend to doubt, just to be safe. At least until I could find out for sure that he’s right.”

  Atkins looked down on the sidewalk below and saw someone or something. Johnny looked, too, but he did so too late; whatever had caught Atkins’s eye was gone.

  Atkins stiffened. It was a reaction Johnny knew well.

  “I’ve got an appointment,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “You don’t by any chance know the name of the hypnotherapist Jeremy went to?”

  “No, but this Beth women probably does.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Apparently, it was her idea that he go in the first place.” Atkins thought for a moment, then said, “You know, Jeremy might not have been a big bad soldier like you and your old man were, but he’s tough. The kid could fight. Particularly if someone pissed him off. He didn’t care how much bigger a guy was, or how many friends he had with him. That’s the advantage of having nothing to lose. Back in the day, when we used to get into trouble, he always had my back. Always. You might want to consider just letting him do whatever it is he’s doing. I mean, would you even care if he got himself killed? You cut the kid loose years ago, right? You wrote him off. What’s changed now? Is there big money at stake or something?”

  Johnny said nothing.

  Atkins turned and stepped to the stairs, then started down. Johnny walked to the top but stopped there. Atkins was halfway down when Johnny finally called after him.

  “Did you tell Dickey that Jeremy had contacted you?”

  Atkins stopped and turned at the mention of Dickey’s name.

  “Of course I did,” Atkins said.

  “Did you tell him what Jeremy wanted?”

  “I told him everything I just told you. He’s fucking Big Dickey McVicker. You think I want to end up dead? Or worse?”

  Atkins continued down the stairs and stepped through the door, but not without pausing first to look through the small window and make sure the sidewalk beyond was clear.

  And even then, when he moved through the door, Atkins did so with the caution of a rodent.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Johnny was walking fast. He had simply hurried out the street door seconds after Atkins, picked a direction, and headed into it. His mind was racing with questions, none of which he could answer or ignore.

  Why hadn’t McVicker said anything about Jeremy wanting a meeting? Even if they hadn’t actually met, McVicker still should have said something when he and Cat and Fiermonte were all together.

  And why hadn’t McVicker said anything about the woman in Chappaqua? A man with his resources could have easily tracked her down, no? Why hadn’t he found her and, through her, the hypnotherapist? Why wouldn’t he want to know about any memories that Jeremy had repressed and only recently remembered?

  Memories of that terrible night.

  Wouldn’t a man who had torn his own organization apart looking for a betrayer do whatever it took now to uncover that still-hidden truth?

  But worse than all that, Johnny wondered, what was he doing trusting this man? Living under his protection? Working for him? Leaving the woman he loved to be watched over by his men?

  By his brutal son?

  Like a cousin to Johnny, but things like that didn’t always matter.

  Johnny looked at his watch and counted the hours since Richter had begun his five-hour shift outside the apartment. He concluded that in less than an hour Richter would be replaced with another man.

  That would be Johnny’s best chance.

  As he walked he determined in which direction he was moving. He realized that it was north, so he changed his course abruptly, heading east, toward the nearest subway station entrance.

  He was on his way to Williamsburg, to get Haley out of the apartment and bring her someplace safe.

  Then, and only the
n, he would decide what to do next.

  Whom to call, whom to trust.

  As he moved, he sent her a simple coded text, one of the several they had arranged.

  One word, easy enough to type in a hurry on a cell phone keyboard.

  Left thumb, right thumb, left thumb, right thumb, and then Send.

  Down.

  A way for her to be safe in the time it would take for him to make his way to her.

  Or so he hoped.

  He reached the subway entrance as he got her reply.

  A simple letter.

  K.

  He pocketed his phone and followed the steps downward. A trash can was just beyond the turnstile. He removed from his other pocket the cell phone McVicker had given him, then tossed it into the trash and walked to the edge of the platform to wait for the train.

  He was lucky, could hear one coming. Looking to his left, he could see through the darkness of the curving tunnel a dancing light that was growing brighter.

  Dickey McVicker was alone at the desk in the study of his home in Great Neck. He had hired two men to tail Johnny — a pair of private investigators he had used a few times before. They were professionals, ex-military both of them, equipped always with the latest cutting-edge technology.

  But better than all that, they weren’t part of his own organization.

  There were times when outsiders — hired hands just looking to make a buck — were more trustworthy than the men who had taken a blood oath of loyalty and obedience, and this was clearly one of those times.

  The cell phone McVicker had handed to Johnny was equipped with a GPS transponder, so being sure not to lose Johnny wasn’t the only goal. The real-time overlay map currently running on the screen of McVicker’s computer showed exactly where Johnny was. He had watched during Johnny’s journey from Williamsburg into Manhattan. McVicker had, in fact, given Johnny money so Johnny wouldn’t need to use the subway, which, McVicker had been warned, would likely cause the signal to be lost, if only temporarily.

  But even temporarily would be too long.

  There was no room for error tonight.

  Too much on the line.