The Betrayer

by Daniel Judson

  “How would they have known where Jeremy was headed?” Cat said.

  “You came back to the room and told me. Remember? Dickey’s men were still listening. That left plenty of time for Dickey to make a call and send Richter and his crew down there.”

  “How do you know it was Richter?”

  “Morris was able to tell me that much. Apparently, Gregorian and his team came from one direction, and Richter and his crew came from another. It was an ambush.” Fiermonte paused, looked at Haley, then back at Cat. “Look, if you want to go somewhere else, we’ll go somewhere else. I’ll just close up and we’ll leave.”

  “It’s been over an hour,” Cat said. “Why haven’t you heard anything more?”

  “I can only assume Morris is busy. I mean, it sounded like it was a fucking war zone down there. But I think we need to brace ourselves for the worst. If Johnny and Jeremy are…gone, then we’re the only ones left who know the truth. Johnny was a threat, but you’re an even greater one, Cat. The daughter of a murdered man can be just as dangerous as the son. Especially when that daughter is you.”

  Cat understood what he meant.

  Dickey would be coming for her.

  Everyone with reason to kill him — and the skills to do so — would be dead.

  Cat thought then of Johnny’s last words to her, as he was getting into the cab.

  Haley will know what to do. Keep her safe till she can do it.

  How could Cat fail to do that now?

  How safe could Haley really be in the company of the two remaining people Big Dickey McVicker feared?

  Yes, Cat thought, it was time to hide, but not here.

  Here felt like a trap.

  She wanted to be somewhere farther away — somewhere she could let Haley go and know she would have a fighting chance, a clear route to wherever it was she would be going.

  Cat was about to take Fiermonte up on his offer to leave this place when he said to Haley, “That cell phone in your pocket, it’s the only way you and Johnny can communicate, right?”

  Haley didn’t reply.

  “You said calling him wasn’t part of the plan. What did you mean by that?”

  Haley remained silent.

  Fiermonte glanced at his watch, then took a step forward. He seemed suddenly conscious of the time — pressed for it, even.

  “I’m trying to help you,” he said. “There’s the chance that Johnny’s still alive. If he is, maybe we can find him.”

  “How?” Cat said.

  “We can use his cell phone to determine his location.”

  “These phones don’t have GPS,” Haley said. “Johnny said never to use phones equipped with GPS.”

  “We don’t need GPS. You just have to call the number, and we’ll know where he is by the last cell tower the call gets handed to.”

  Cat was shaking her head. “It won’t be specific. It’ll be an area, not an address.”

  “It’d be a place to start. And Dickey only has certain locations to choose from.”

  “But we don’t have the equipment to do that,” Cat said.

  “I’m sure we can find someone who does. Get him out here, or go to him, whichever would be faster.”

  Fiermonte was speaking quickly now, urgently, which, Cat thought, was unlike him.

  Cat looked at him for a moment, then said, “There’s something you’re not telling us, Donnie.”

  “I’m just trying to do something, Cat. You want the man who killed your father, don’t you? Because I do. I’ve been waiting three years to get Dickey, and we might not get another chance, not like this.” He said to Haley, “You want Johnny to end up like his father? Hacked to pieces in some warehouse? Because that’s where he is right now, I promise you. And that’s what’s going to happen. Dickey’s got all kinds of crazy motherfuckers whose job is to hurt and kill, and if one of these monsters doesn’t have Johnny right now, he will very soon. But you can stop it. You can save Johnny. You have the means right there in your pocket.”

  “He won’t answer,” Haley said. “He’d know that any call from my phone wouldn’t be from me.”

  “There must be something you could text him that will leave no doubt in his mind that the message is from you. A code, something.”

  Haley said nothing.

  And neither did Cat.

  “You guys have a system. You must. Johnny’s clever, and so are you, right? What if you couldn’t wait for him to call you? Or something happened to your phone, or you lost it? There has to be some kind of fail-safe, some way to communicate with him, some word or phrase or series of numbers you could text him from any phone.”

  Again Haley was silent.

  Fiermonte took a step forward then.

  An aggressive step, the step of a desperate man.

  But something was wrong — something, Cat thought, was decidedly uncharacteristic about this.

  Cat took a step back, moving Haley back — and closer to the door — with her.

  Then Cat moved her left hand away from her thigh and raised it slightly.

  She wasn’t aiming at Fiermonte, instead she was pointing her Sig at the floor between them.

  But her message was nonetheless clear.

  Stay back, please.

  “Johnny wouldn’t need to answer his phone for us to get his location,” Cat said. “Just calling it would show what tower the call ended up at. So if there were a secret code, why would you even need it?”

  “Cat, we’re wasting time here.”

  “What’s going on, Donnie?”

  Fiermonte said nothing.

  It was like a switch flipping in Cat’s head.

  The man facing her — the man she’d known most of her life, the man who had just hours ago awoken her by going down on her — was on the verge of anger.

  Not the reaction of a man eager to help.

  Desperate to help.

  The reaction of a man who wanted something, or was hiding something, or both.

  Without turning around, Cat said to Haley, “We’re leaving.”

  Haley opened the door, and the sound of rain suddenly filled the room. It was a chaotic static. Haley was ready to go, but Cat saw something she didn’t immediately understand.

  It seemed that for a second Fiermonte was looking at something past Haley and herself.

  A quick, involuntary glance, as if something outside had caught his eye.

  Something just beyond the now-open door.

  Cat turned to see what had caught Fiermonte’s attention, and what she saw, what was out there in the darkness and the rain, made no sense at all.

  Two people were standing just feet from the door.

  Two men — one holding a rag to his bloodied mouth, and another beside him, holding his arm as if to guide him.

  Their clothes and hair were soaked.

  The man with the bloodied mouth was looking down at the ground, unable or unwilling to lift his head.

  Despite this, Cat recognized him immediately, and her heart shuddered in her chest.

  This was the man she had seen in the preschool surveillance video.

  The man who had pursued Jeremy, then and since.

  The Russian named Dragoi Gregorian.

  She also recognized the man beside him.

  The smoker she had seen at Dickey’s warehouse.

  The undercover cop named Smith.

  Before she could do anything — get Haley out of the way, raise her Sig and take careful aim — someone emerged and stood between the two men and the doorway.

  A third person, who had been standing to the side of the door.

  Cat found herself face-to-face once again with the young woman from Chappaqua.

  Not blonde now but dark-haired, dressed not in a field jacket but a long black raincoat — enough of a change in appearance to slow Cat’s recognition of her, not prevent it.

  But the confusion it caused, however brief, was enough of a delay for the woman to get the upper hand.

  She stepped forwa
rd — two fast, determined strides were all it took — and pressed the muzzle of her semiautomatic against the side of Haley’s head.

  Roughly, decisively.

  “Hand over the weapon,” the woman said.

  Her accent was Slavic, and her eyes were fixed on Cat.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Johnny followed Dickey to the building on the edge of the Hudson. As they got closer, he could see through the windows that this wasn’t a home but a restaurant.

  And an empty one.

  Inside, Johnny followed Dickey into the center of the dining room area. It was lit by overhead dimmer lights that were set as low as a child’s nightlight. A wall of sliding doors led to a deck on which stood several umbrella tables. Beyond the deck was the Hudson River, its dark surface pocked by the heavy rain.

  A few miles south was the George Washington Bridge, and beyond it, the lights of New York’s west side.

  Dickey gestured toward the bar. “You want a drink?”

  Johnny shook his head. It took all he had to keep from folding, and he could barely conceal the small gasping grunt his lungs emitted through his nose each time he moved.

  He had only moments, he knew that. Now that he was out of the cooling rain, he felt heat returning to his face.

  “You might need a drink,” Dickey said.

  There was no point in dragging this out, Johnny thought.

  “Did you kill my father?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Did you have him killed?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  Dickey smiled. “Who could blame you, right? But why would I kill him, Johnny? He was my oldest friend. We grew up together.”

  “That’s supposed to matter?”

  “It did to your father and me.”

  Johnny thought of those times Dickey would visit the house in Ossining — discreet visits, one or two a year, never falling on actual holidays but being treated as good as holidays — better, even.

  Gifts, food, drinks, laughter, all behind closed doors, all after certain precautions had been taken.

  Johnny was just a boy, Cat not yet a teenager, and Jeremy still a few years away when one day the man they called Uncle Dickey came with his own child, a boy named Richter.

  It was a name that Cat and Johnny secretly ridiculed over the years, till the day they were told why Dickey had named his son that, and then they thought it was too cool and almost envied the boy.

  None of the Coyle children knew at the time what those visits meant, only that their father and his friend cherished them.

  The two men would always sit and talk, after too much wine, about the old days, growing up poor in a place called Hell’s Kitchen, stealing food for their families, fighting side by side with rival street kids, Uncle Dickey finally finding sanctuary from his abusive father with John Coyle and his own father.

  Eventually those visits stopped — had to, was what the children had been told. Presents on birthdays and at Christmas continued, though, especially for Johnny.

  But Uncle Dickey faded from their lives, at least officially.

  For years his name didn’t even come up anymore, not among the children, anyway — until the night John Coyle was abducted and murdered.

  And then it was spoken with reluctance between Cat and Fiermonte.

  He was the last man to speak to your father, called him an hour before he was taken.

  I don’t want to think that.

  Me neither, Cat…

  “You know, you wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for me,” Dickey said. His voice brought Johnny back to the dimly lit dining room. “None of you kids would.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Another time, perhaps,” Dickey said with a shrug.

  Johnny focused his mind, or tried to — he was spent, felt himself wavering just slightly like a man who’d had too much to drink.

  But what had Richter said after giving Johnny his knife back?

  Your night has just begun.

  “You were the only one who could have betrayed him,” Johnny said. “The only one close enough to him.”

  “You’re certain about that, Johnny? That there wasn’t another? Someone who worked closely with your father, and who also knew enough about my business to set me up for his murder?”

  Johnny said nothing.

  “Tambov was my man, yes, and he went looking for Jeremy on my orders. All that is true. I sent him because your father asked me to help. He was desperate to find his son, the one he barely knew, the one he lost years ago to madness. You were back, discharged and pissed off, and your father thought it would be good for both his sons to come home and look after each other. He wanted nothing more than that — nothing more than for the two of you to reconcile. So I gave the job to Tambov, but instead of calling me when he picked up Jeremy, he called someone else.”

  Again, Johnny was silent. He was thinking of the last time he was with his father, on that drive into the city to get Jeremy, his father trying to talk to Johnny about his future plans now that his military career was over, Johnny wanting nothing to do with that conversation because he was too busy feeling sorry for himself, too busy being bitter.

  He’d always regretted his behavior that October night, the way he had shut his father down, the way he couldn’t hear what the man was trying to tell him.

  But Johnny was all too aware of Dickey’s ability to manipulate, so he quickly pushed aside his memories and the regrets they stirred and focused on the present.

  On the man — the dangerous man — in front of him.

  “You heard the recordings, Johnny. Jeremy heard a man talking to Tambov, giving orders, making threats about his son’s immigration status, then promising to relocate them both. Does that sound like me? You know enough about the world I live in, the things I do to stay alive in it. Does that sound like something I’d need to say to one of my own men? One of my most trusted men? Or does that maybe sound like something someone else would say? Someone with connections to the INS, someone whose job is to arrange for criminals who cooperate to disappear?”

  Johnny knew where Dickey was going with this, but he chose to focus on a different matter first.

  “So you have heard the recordings. Which means you got them from Jeremy’s therapist. You had him killed.”

  “No. That wasn’t me. I heard the recordings for the first time two hours ago, when you heard them.”

  “How?”

  “A pair of PIs equipped with a listening device in a watch car outside the hotel. The same men who were following you when you went to talk to Atkins.”

  “Another conversation you listened in on.”

  “And good thing I did, because it was all bullshit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Atkins never contacted me, never told me that Jeremy had come around looking for me. He never told me about the woman in Chappaqua or the memories Jeremy had recovered.”

  “Then why was Richter waiting for me when I got back? Why did he take Haley?”

  “For the same reason I had the two PIs tail you in the first place. To protect you.”

  That threw Johnny, but only briefly.

  “Why would Atkins lie to me?” he said.

  “He was told to.”

  “By whom?”

  “Do I really need to say it, Johnny? Can’t you see it? He’s been pulling all the strings from the start.”

  It took Johnny a moment to say the name.

  “Fiermonte.”

  Big Dickey McVicker nodded. “Fiermonte.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Cat slipped the safety to the on position and surrendered her Sig. She saw then that the wrist of the woman’s free hand was wrapped tight with silver duct tape.

  The wrist itself was swollen to the size of a baseball. And the woman’s eyes — the eyes Cat had seen in the rearview mirror of her Mustang — were bloodshot and bleary.

  She was as worse for wear
as Cat.

  The woman took the weapon with her injured hand and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans. Doing so obviously caused her a degree of discomfort.

  “Turn around,” she said.

  Cat did, and was looking once more into the living room.

  She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see — Fiermonte rushing to throw himself into the fray, or maybe, as he retreated into the farmhouse to call 911 while he still could, no sign of him at all.

  What Cat did see, however, was the last thing she wanted to see.

  And nothing she could have expected.

  Fiermonte was exactly as she had left him.

  In the middle of the living room, his arms hanging at his sides.

  When he finally spoke, his tone was calm but authoritative.

  “Everybody get inside,” he said. “Now.”

  Smith led Gregorian through the living room to a couch, then sat him down.

  The Russian, still holding the rag to his mouth, leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He didn’t lift his head, as if, Cat thought, he didn’t want anyone to see him in his condition.

  Fiermonte stepped to the sulking hulk and placed his hand on his shoulder, the way a coach might when comforting a tired player who gave his all but lost.

  A favored player, even.

  “Just keep your eyes on the floor, son,” Fiermonte said softly.

  It was a whisper meant for just the two of them, but Cat heard what he’d said.

  The Russian nodded obediently.

  Cat knew then that the Russian wasn’t trying to avoid being seen. He was avoiding looking up and seeing Fiermonte’s face.

  Fiermonte was his employer, not Dickey.

  And Fiermonte employed the Slavic woman with the dyed-black hair.

  The woman who had garroted Cat and killed Elizabeth Hall and her husband.