Need You Now

by James Grippando

  Barber pulled his cell from his pocket, but he didn’t dial. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the limo, but Andie was quite sure there was a smirk that needed wiping from his face.

  “You look too young to retire,” he said. “But with one call, I can have you working at far less interesting places than the FBI.”

  “I don’t scare easily.”

  “I don’t scare. Period.”

  He pushed a speed-dial button. A moment later, the door opened and the driver was at the curb.

  He put his phone away. “Next time, I dial ‘M.’ ”

  “For murder? Are you actually threatening to kill me?”

  “No, sweetie. For meter maid. You’d make a good one. Have a good evening, Agent Henning.”

  Andie climbed out and stepped onto the sidewalk. The driver went around to the other side and climbed inside. Andie watched the limo pull away, and as the orange taillights merged into traffic, she was sure of one thing: Operation BAQ did indeed reach higher than the former deputy secretary of the Treasury.

  The only question was how high.

  Andie pulled her scarf up to her chin and headed for the subway.

  41

  I took a PATH train from Manhattan and was in New Jersey by dinnertime. Lilly came with me, which I took as a positive sign that I was indeed on her deserves-to-live list. Just as Lilly had wanted to talk to me before forming any alliance with Agent Henning, I also needed to speak to someone. I phoned Connie several times, but her machine picked up.

  “Call me,” I said, keeping my message short.

  Connie had given me a key to her apartment with a standing offer to stay there. Lilly still had a hotel room, but with Evan Hunt’s shooting, she didn’t feel safe going back there. My place wasn’t an option, either, since her last stay had ended with a phony deliveryman forcing her to escape out the window. After a three-minute walk from Journal Square Station, however, I was seriously wondering how she would feel safer in this part of Jersey City. Things changed block by block, and some streets were easily better than our old neighborhood in Queens. Some weren’t. Connie’s definitely wasn’t. I had never asked my sister how much the zoo paid her, but if it was more than minimum wage, she was socking away a fortune in what she saved on rent. It was no wonder that she leaped at every opportunity to sleep in a tent on scouting trips.

  Connie’s building was like the others on her street. An old three-story unit in need of a paint job. No alley between neighbors. Sheets of plastic covered the windows for added insulation. The buildings were set back from the street, and once upon a time there had probably been a front lawn, but now there were only driveways. With cars parked side by side, two and three deep, it was a safe bet that more people lived in these one- and two-bedroom apartments than they were ever intended to house.

  The sidewalk had not been shoveled, and the cold night air had turned the snow to a crusty ice that crunched beneath my shoes as I climbed the front steps. Lilly waited at the curb, her arms folded for warmth, her eyes darting left to right, as if she were expecting a drug deal to go down at any moment. I reached for the key but decided to knock first, just in case she was home.

  To my surprise, the porch light switched on.

  “Connie?” I called out.

  The light switched off, leaving Lilly and me in the distant glow of the streetlamp on the corner.

  “Probably a motion detector,” Lilly said. “Open up and let’s go in before we get mugged.”

  I heard Connie call out, “Be there in a minute!”

  She wasn’t right on the other side of the door; her voice was more removed, as if she were in another room, perhaps the bedroom. It made me wonder why she hadn’t been answering her telephone, but I gave her a minute. I heard a door slam and what sounded like someone running across a wood floor.

  I leaned closer to the door. “Connie?”

  “Just a second!”

  The door opened, and Connie invited me inside. She seemed out of breath.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” she said, though her voice cracked with nervousness. Lilly and I exchanged glances, clearly sharing the same impression that we’d caught Connie in a romp.

  “Strong procreation gene,” I said, still looking at Lilly. “Runs in the family.”

  Connie blushed. “Oh, you’re thinking that I was… No. It’s not that. There’s no one here. Just me, myself, and I.”

  I heard a thud behind the closet door, followed by a ping and the sound of a penny rolling across a wood floor. I looked down and saw that it wasn’t a coin. I bent down and picked up the bullet that had rolled up against my heel. “What the heck is this?”

  “Nine millimeter, hollow-point,” said Connie.

  Either my hunch about sex had been dead wrong, or my sister was far kinkier than I had ever imagined. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  She drew a deep breath and then let it out, sighing. Slowly, with obvious reluctance, she turned the knob and opened the closet door. Wedged between an assortment of winter coats and camping gear, a man turned his head toward us and shot an awkward wave hello. The face was familiar, and when he stepped into the room where there was better lighting, I recognized him.

  “Scully?”

  I hadn’t seen Agent Scully since I was a teenager, but there are certain people, certain situations, that a person never forgets. Scully had served as the handler for our entire family when Dad turned against the Santucci family. As my father testified before a federal grand jury in lower Manhattan-literally, at that very moment-Agent Scully and my mother sat down with my sister and me at our dining room table in Queens and told us what a courageous thing our father was doing, how important it was to the fight against organized crime, and how, frankly, our young lives would never be the same.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I heard about your father’s friend, Evan,” he said. “So I reached out to Connie.”

  “He’s concerned for our safety,” said Connie.

  “So he’s hiding in your closet?”

  “I can explain that,” said Scully.

  “No, let me,” said Connie. “Patrick, I know how you feel about guns. But your big sister is one of those people who believes that a guy like Evan Hunt might have had a fighting chance if he had kept a gun in his apartment. So when Scully called and asked if there was anything I needed…”

  I looked at Scully. “You brought her a gun?”

  Connie groaned. “See, that’s why I hid him in the closet when you came knocking. I knew you’d be against this.”

  Scully reached into the closet, retrieved a canvas duffel bag, and laid it on the floor. It clanged like an armory. “I brought an assortment, actually.”

  “What are we doing here, forming a militia?” I asked.

  “We’re protecting ourselves,” Connie said.

  “I haven’t picked up a gun since Mom died,” I said.

  “You got pretty good,” said Scully. “Just basic self-defense was all I wanted to teach you.”

  Connie reached inside the duffel bag, pulled out a Glock semi-automatic pistol, and shoved in the ammunition clip like a pro. “I stuck with it. You probably could use a refresher course.”

  Lilly backed away nervously. “I don’t like this. Patrick, you need to regroup with Agent Henning and find a safe place for us to stay.”

  Scully said, “I can stay here as long as you kids want, if you don’t feel safe.”

  It was odd to be called “kids,” but things apparently hadn’t changed from Scully’s perspective, either.

  “I can also teach you to use a gun, Lilly,” Scully said as he pulled another pistol from his bag. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable with the Sig Sauer.”

  “Patrick, let’s go,” said Lilly.

  The image of Evan, faceup in the Dumpster, ran through my mind, and the pain of each physical trauma my body had sustained over the past few days came roaring back-the gun to my
head and powder burns to my neck in Times Square, the wire around my neck and my chin hitting the sidewalk in Battery Park, the knee I’d torn up chasing Evan in Central Park.

  “Agent Henning has offered to help us, and that’s the way I’m leaning,” said Lilly.

  She wasn’t being unreasonable, but I looked at Scully and suddenly felt as though I’d found an old friend.

  “Grab Connie’s phone in the kitchen and let Henning know where we are, if that makes you feel better,” I said. “But take off your coat. We should stay awhile.”

  42

  T he subway ride from Midtown got Andie back to the FBI field office in lower Manhattan before six P.M. Barber had called their limousine meeting “unofficial,” but Andie intended to complete a formal interview report anyway. She was seated at her desk and about to start typing when Supervisory Agent Teese entered her office, closed the door, and delivered the news.

  “We’re pulling the plug.”

  Andie didn’t have to ask, On what? After eight months of investigating the movement of Cushman’s funds through BOS, however, she wasn’t about to simply pack her bags and fly back to Miami.

  “Who made the decision?”

  “Washington.”

  “By ‘Washington,’ do you mean headquarters or someone outside the bureau?”

  “The decision came to me from the director’s office.”

  “That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

  He pulled up a chair and sat facing her, surprisingly contrite. “I’m sorry about this, Andie. It’s not a matter of my backing down to the political will. It’s embarrassing, is what it is.”

  “For the bureau, you mean?”

  “For me, and for everyone else who’s been trumpeting the theory that the actual money in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was one-tenth of the sixty billion dollars that most estimates put it at. I was certain that Cushman was a money-laundering operation with mostly paper losses.”

  “So you’ve changed your tune: Patrick Lloyd was not holding out on us.”

  “Not holding out,” he said.

  “So the final chapter on this investigation will read how?”

  He thought about it, and the expression on his face was like that of a man writing his own obituary. “There was no evidence that Cushman funds were laundered by anyone at BOS/Singapore, least of all Lilly Scanlon.”

  “But getting back to the embarrassment factor: this is not just the shutting down of our investigation into BOS.”

  “No. It’s a wholesale rejection of the theory that Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was a money-laundering operation, and that the only real money was the phony ten percent return that Cushman pretended to pay his investors.”

  Andie was not one to say I told you so . “I think we both saw this coming.”

  “You did. I should have. The reason the ‘paper loss’ theory got any traction at all was because, at first, so little money was recovered for the victims. That’s changing. Every day I get reports that lawyers are hot on the trail of real money-nowhere near the full sixty-billion-dollar loss, but much more than the ten percent that was posited by the money-laundering theory.”

  Andie said, “This probably doesn’t make you feel any better, but there must be regulators feeling more heat than us for missing a sixty-billion-dollar fraud with real victims who lost real money.”

  “Yeah,” he said, shaking his head slowly, as if he’d just heard the world’s largest understatement. “The fallout is going to be huge.”

  “How so?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about.”

  “I’d like to know. I think, after eight months of work, I deserve to know.”

  Teese met her stare, but he was the one to blink. Andie didn’t take it as a sign of weakness. It was just a matter of fairness.

  Teese said, “The view that the entire Cushman fraud was no bigger than six billion dollars of real money was an underlying assumption in the formulation of certain policies at Treasury.”

  “Do you mean Operation BAQ?”

  He hesitated, as if to measure his response. “Operation BAQ dates back over three years-before Cushman’s collapse.”

  Andie connected the dots. “So that means it was known that Cushman was not legit.”

  He didn’t offer a verbal response. Andie didn’t take his silence as a denial; he’d simply said all he could say, and she appreciated that. Even so, she pushed another button. “I met with retired agent Scully,” she said. “The handler for Tony Mandretti.”

  “I know who he is. He worked out of this office for over twenty years.”

  “The things he said about Operation BAQ were frankly difficult to swallow. But this conversation would seem to confirm everything he told me.”

  Again, Teese didn’t answer directly. “Be careful with Scully.”

  “That was my initial reaction,” she said. “But now my impression is that he was simply saying things that a retired FBI agent would tell another agent to make sure she didn’t become the bureau’s fifty-fourth special agent killed in the line of duty.”

  “Scully is trouble,” said Teese. “You’d do well to stay away from him.”

  Andie took the advice for what she thought it was worth. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Wrap it up. Go back to Miami.”

  “What can I tell Patrick Lloyd?”

  “That his cooperation is no longer needed. Nothing more.”

  “What about his father?”

  “He’ll receive medical attention until he passes. That satisfies our end of the deal.”

  Teese rose, and he seemed ready to apologize once more, but he didn’t. Instead, he started for the door.

  “Tell me something,” Andie said, stopping him. “How high does Operation BAQ go?”

  He stood there for a moment, showing no reaction. Finally, he turned away, no answer, and left the office. Andie turned back to her computer, the blank report of her conversation with Joe Barber still up on the LCD.

  That high, huh? she said to herself, answering her own question.

  43

  S cully clocked me at just under eight seconds.

  “Not too shabby, Patrick,” he said. “A shot-to-shot reload of two seconds or less would get you into law enforcement, but not bad at all for a guy who hasn’t touched a gun since he was a teenager.”

  We’d started with basic gun safety instruction, and for the next hour it was a series of dry-fire drills: draw, reload, target transition, and visualization skills. The Sig Sauer had felt a bit small in my hand, so we went with the Glock 9 millimeter. The fit was right, and it was much lighter weight than I’d expected. Everything was still step by step for me: Is the slide locked back? press magazine release → magazine is clear → grab new magazine → insert new magazine with correct orientation → release slide. But with enough practice I would store procedural memory, and the operation would become second nature. At least that was the theory.

  “Tomorrow morning we can get to a range and do live fire,” said Scully.

  “Patrick, don’t you have a job?” asked Lilly.

  Her continued disapproval of firearms came through in her tone, but the question did remind me of the e-mails that were piling up on my BlackBerry since I’d removed the battery.

  Scully dug into his duffel bag again. “Lilly, do you want to try the Sig Sauer?”

  “No, I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can put away your Glock, your Smith and Wesson, your bazooka, and whatever else you’ve got in there. I’m serious, Patrick. Are you going into the bank tomorrow?”

  I didn’t know the answer, didn’t know much about tomorrow at all.

  A knock at the door broke the tension. Our pizza had arrived, a thin-crust, New York-style marvel from Gino’s on Central Avenue. Maybe not the best pizza in the entire universe, but definitely the best in the neighborhood. At Connie’s suggestion, we gathered around the kitchen table and turned the evening into more than just a weapons tutorial. We talked as the slices
of pepperoni with extra-gooey cheese disappeared. Connie had a box of brownie mix left over from her last scout meeting, so she put a batch in the oven. None of us had room to eat them after knocking off a pizza, but there was nothing like the smell of brownies baking to change the mood in a room. Soon we were deep into Abe Cushman and Gerry Collins, four separate threads weaving into a single tale. Much of the focus was on Agent Henning, from my first communications with her eight months earlier, to Scully’s recent conversation. The honesty between Scully and me seemed to loosen Lilly’s tongue, and she opened up about her source. Her voice didn’t quake the way it had the first time she’d talked about him, but I could hear her throat tightening at times.

  “Agent Henning told us that he’s a former government agent,” said Lilly. “He was shot by Manu Robledo.”

  “She heard that from me,” said Scully.

  “What else did you tell her?” I asked.

  “Basically everything I know. He survived the gunshot, but a spinal injury apparently left him in horrible chronic pain. He got addicted to painkillers to the point that he was permanently disabled.”

  “That explains the anger, I suppose.”

  “Henning has offered us protection,” said Lilly.

  “Is that so?” said Scully.

  “You sound skeptical,” I said.

  “You look even more skeptical,” he said, firing right back.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I like Henning,” I said.

  Scully waited for me to say more, then gave me the appropriate prompt. “But…”

  I drew a breath, long enough to focus my thoughts. It was the FBI’s promise of first-rate treatment for my father’s illness that had drawn me into this mess, and at bottom this was still all about my father. Connie and Lilly already knew my position, and I wanted Scully’s view on the fundamental issue that had kept Henning and me from seeing eye to eye.

  “I’ve never been able to get Henning to seriously consider the possibility that my father didn’t actually kill Gerry Collins.”