Need You Now (9 page)

14

I
woke in a strange bed with side railings, a white fluorescent ceiling light assaulting my eyes. An angled mattress had me somewhere between the upright position and flat on my back. Squinting, I propped myself up further on one elbow and peered through a crack in the white curtain before me. It wasn’t a window curtain. It was a room divider that separated my private cubicle from the busy common area beyond, where nurses and doctors wearing green hospital scrubs darted about. I was alone and still in my street clothes, no shoes. I had no memory of coming to the emergency room, but my mind was clear enough to recall a conversation with a park ranger before blacking out a second time.

She must have brought me here.

Details of that conversation suddenly came flooding back—
“My name is Peter Mandretti”—
and in a moment of panic, I checked the hospital ID bracelet on my wrist.

P
ATRICK
L
LOYD,
it read.

I breathed a sigh of relief. The park ranger had apparently dismissed my “Peter Mandretti” slip of the tongue as the incoherent ramblings of an assault victim. Presumably, the hospital had checked my driver’s license upon admission.

My BlackBerry rang, but it wasn’t in my pocket. I was still gathering my wits and adjusting to my surroundings, and I was having trouble locating the phone. I sat up and listened more intently, but by the time I focused on the bag of personal belongings hanging from the bed railing, the ringing had stopped.

I checked the phone. It was 8:35
A.M
. The call was from my team leader at BOS, and the history told me that I’d slept right through four earlier calls from him. I suddenly recalled that the first thing on the day’s agenda had been a 7:30 breakfast meeting with a client who was wealthy even by BOS standards, and it was my job to recommend changes to his portfolio.

The ringing resumed—call number six in the last twenty minutes. With a sense of dread I answered, only to get an earful.

“Where the hell are you, Patrick?”

“I’m sorry. I—”

“I don’t want to hear your excuse. Unless you’re dead or dying, there is none.”

How about under threat of death?
I decided not to go there. “I’ll grab a cab and be there in—”

“Forget it,” he said. “I was able to wing it this time. But if you ever do that to me again, I will fire your ass. Period. Do you hear me?”

He hung up before I could answer. Jay was my best friend when things were going well, my worst nightmare if I screwed up. The harsh tone was a stark reminder that there was plenty to lose even if I didn’t lose my head—literally. Not that it would have helped to explain things to him or to anyone else at the bank. A gun to my head, a cord around my neck, threats with tentacles reaching back to Abe Cushman—all brought about by my decision to become the eyes and ears of the FBI inside the very bank that employed me. Even I was having trouble comprehending it.

The curtain parted, then closed, giving me a start. It wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. Lilly spoke before I could get a word out.

“I know who you are,” she said. Her voice was just above a whisper; her tone, somewhere between pain and anger. “Why did you lie to me?”

I could have played dumb. Lying in an ER bed, I could have turned it right back on her and demanded an explanation of all that had happened since she’d shown up and dragged me into Puffy’s Tavern. But the look on her face left me powerless to do anything but put aside the last forty-eight hours and say what I’d wanted to say for months.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She stood there, silent, just looking at me. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but an
I’m sorry, too
would have been nice.

She breathed in and out, then said, “I don’t even know why I’m helping you.”

Not exactly the mutual exchange of apologies I had hoped for. “Helping me? What do you mean,
help
—”

She shushed me, gathered my shoes from a chair in the corner, and told me to put them on. “We need to get out of here,” she said, her tone urgent.

“Do you know what happened to me?”

“You’re fine. They did a CT scan two hours ago.”

“How do you know?”

“I read your chart when the nurse was away from the desk. Trust me, they wouldn’t have you lie here by yourself sleeping if they thought you had a serious head injury.”

“Hold on a second,” I said.

“No, we need to get going before the nurse comes by to check on you again.”

I took her hand. “Just
wait
, okay?”

She stopped, and our eyes met. If we were going to embrace, this would have been the moment. But things had gotten way too complicated, and it didn’t feel right—not to me, and, I sensed, not to her, either. I let go of her hand.

“Three days ago I would have given anything to see you again,” I said. “You’ve shown up twice since then, which coincides exactly with the number of times someone has tried to kill me.”

“Please, Patrick—or should I call you Peter?”

The dig triggered another pang of guilt. “How did you find out?”

“Don’t turn this around and make it about me,” she said. “When did you intend to stop lying?”

“Lilly, do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”

“All I can tell you is that it wasn’t the people who are after the Cushman money who did this to you.”

“How do you know that?”

She pulled on my shoe, no time to waste. “It’s like I told you at Puffy’s: when they had you in the back of that SUV in Times Square, I promised to deliver their money in one week, instead of two, if they didn’t hurt you. It would make no sense for them to put you in the ER after cutting a deal like that. They’d already made their point.”

That made sense, I supposed. But there was still one major problem. “So, are you any closer to meeting the one-week deadline?”

“Nope.”

“Then how do you plan to keep your promise?”

She stopped and looked me in the eye. “I have absolutely no idea. I’ll figure that out once I get you out of here.”

“I don’t understand. You still have time to get their money. What are we running from?”

“We
aren’t running.
You
are.”

“Me? No. Forget it. I’m not going on the run from some thug who jumped me in the park.”

Lilly peeked out the curtain, then glanced back at me. “You’re talking like Patrick Lloyd. It’s Peter Mandretti who needs to run.”

Her expression was deadly serious, and the fact that we were even having this conversation chilled me.

“How much do you know?” I asked.

“More than I want to. We need to go.
Now.
” She handed me my coat. “We’re going to walk out of here, turn left—
away
from the main desk—and follow the hallway to the exit doors on the other side of the ER. Got it?”

“Sure.”

“Just walk like you’re a visitor and stay with me.”

Lilly stepped out first, and I did exactly as told. We passed several cubicles. Some had the curtains drawn for privacy. Others were open. We passed a man with a broken arm and an old woman with an ice pack to one knee. Another patient was hunched over a bucket with his head down. The odor left no doubt that it was flu season. We passed two nurses as we rounded the corner, but they were too busy to stop and question us. The pneumatic doors opened automatically, and they closed behind us as we exited the ER. We passed the Radiology Department, and the sign on the wall indicated that we were headed in the opposite direction of the main entrance. In fact, this hallway was marked E
MERGENCY
P
ERSONNEL
O
NLY
.

“I’m guessing you have a plan,” I said.

“You guessed right.”

Actually, I was tired of guessing. She’d put me on the defensive with talk of Peter Mandretti, but she wasn’t the only one entitled to an explanation.

“Lilly, why did you climb out the window of my apartment?”

“Long story,” she said.

She quickened her pace, and I kept up. We were leaving through the chute that received patients brought in by ambulance. The long corridor was deserted at the moment, no emergency in progress.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“I left you a note on your computer. Didn’t you see it?”

“Yes. It didn’t explain anything. Don’t change the subject.”

We’d gobbled up a hundred feet of polished tile floor and were near the end of the corridor, ten feet away from the sliding glass doors and the driveway beyond. The walk was clearing my head, but I wasn’t completely myself. I probably should have started with questions about Manu Robledo and the Church of Peace and Prosperity International, but my head was pounding, and honestly the name just wasn’t coming to me.

I stopped her, laid my hands squarely on her shoulders, and looked her in the eye. “Lilly, are you involved in some kind of cult?”

“Cult?” she said, scoffing. “Seriously, do I strike you as a cult personality?”

“No, but . . .”

“But what?”

“The more I get to know you, the less I know you.”

“Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black,” she said.

“Stop avoiding the question. Why did you run away?”

A white commercial van pulled up in the driveway outside the sliding glass doors. “That’s our ride,” said Lilly, pulling me along. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll tell you on the way.”

The glass doors slid open, and a blast of cool morning air hit me in the face. Lilly opened the rear door of the van and managed to get me to climb in first. The door slammed behind me.

Lilly was still in the driveway.

“Lilly!”

I tried to open the door, but there was no handle on the inside. The only windows were in the cockpit, so I couldn’t see Lilly, but I heard her slap the side of the van and shout, “Go!”

The driver put the van into gear, and we pulled away.

I was alone in the cargo hold amid blankets and cardboard boxes. A wire grate separated me from the cockpit, and I pushed away a stack of boxes to get right behind the driver.

“Stop!” I shouted.

“Relax and be quiet.”

I immediately recognized the driver’s voice, and a moment of eye contact in the rearview mirror confirmed it.

“Connie?”

My sister glanced over her shoulder and said, “Who else can you count on to save your butt?”

I caught her drift: certainly not our father.

“Get under the blankets and sit tight,” she said.

I hesitated.

“Do it!” she said. “We have to make sure no one sees you leaving the hospital.”

If Lilly was right—if the danger was to Peter Mandretti, not to Patrick Lloyd—I could see the wisdom in the plan. I grabbed the nearest blanket and found a spot by the wheel well in the cargo hold. The ride out of the parking lot was smooth and steady, not too fast and not too slow—nothing to arouse the suspicion of whoever was waiting to see if and when I walked out the hospital’s front door.

The tires hummed below me as I wondered exactly how Lilly and my sister had teamed up for this stunt. I wondered how long they’d been a team. More than anything, I wondered why Connie would have told her that our last name wasn’t Lloyd.

15

“I
have to get the van back to the zoo, pronto,” my sister said over the hum of the engine. She was driving through lower Midtown, and the zoo accounted for both the funky odors in the cargo hold and the metal grate between the cockpit and me.

Working with exotic animals was the perfect job for Connie, a childhood dream she’d held since the same family trip on which Tony “The Snitch” Mandretti—our dad—had butchered Lewis Carroll’s poetry and offended every East Side nanny within earshot of the Alice in Wonderland sculpture. For all his flaws, Dad was big on family events. That one had turned out to be his last before putting on a wire for the FBI, testifying against the Santucci family, and disappearing into witness protection. Mom had refused to join him. Only after her death—more precisely, after the parole of a certain underboss who literally had an ax to grind with “The Snitch”—did my sister and I enter the program as Connie Ryan and Patrick Lloyd. The different surnames were for added protection. I was a young teen at the time, and my sister acted much older than her twenty-three years. I suppose it didn’t take a psychiatrist to explain why, years after that final family trip, Connie would end up working at the Central Park Zoo, and I would designate Alice in Wonderland as a place to meet my FBI contact.

The van stopped at a red light. Connie reached back, opened the metal grate between us, and offered me the passenger seat.

“We’re a good twenty blocks from the hospital,” she said. “I think it’s safe to say that no one saw you sneak away.”

I buckled up as she steered through the intersection, heading north through Midtown. Even in traffic, the zoo was just minutes away. I had a slew of questions for her, but logistics came to the forefront.

“What’s the plan after you return the van?” I asked.

“Don’t have one. Lilly called and said you were in trouble. Step one was to get you out of the ER. We didn’t get to step two.”

I glanced out the window, then back at my sister. “I didn’t realize that you and Lilly stay in touch.”

“We don’t. The last time I talked to her was when the two of you Skyped me from Singapore.”

“And she just called you out of the blue this morning?”

“She said she didn’t know who else to call. She was pretty much in a panic.”

“Exactly what did she tell you?”

“Basically that you got roughed up in the park last night, and that if we didn’t get you out of the ER immediately, someone would likely stop by and shake hands with your Adam’s apple.”

“That doesn’t sound like something Lilly would say.”

“I’m paraphrasing.”

I circled back to the “they” question. “Did she tell you who ‘someone’ might be?”

“After what happened to Mom, I don’t need to have it spelled out for me.”

The buzz of city traffic filled the silence between us. Mom was a complicated subject. She’d always told us how brave Dad was for turning against the mob, and yet she’d refused to join him in the witness protection program. She’d probably still be alive if she had.

“You’re saying it’s the Santucci family?”

“Who else?” she said. “It seems like every six months one of the thugs Dad put in jail is paroled. They refused to believe Mom didn’t know how to find Dad, and they killed her. What makes you think they’ll stop there? They are never going to stop looking for us.”

The Cushman connection had turned the Santucci family into old news in my mind, but I didn’t think Connie was ready to swallow what this was really about. For the moment, I stayed with her theory, since it provided a nice segue to my visit to Central Prison.

“What if we could convince them that Dad is dead?” I asked.

Her response caught in her throat, and the pained expression puzzled me to the point of concern. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just weird that I wasn’t prepared for that. All these years he’s been gone, and I’ve never thought of him as anything but being very alive, the way I remembered him. It’s upsetting to think of him as dead.”

“I’m just saying, theoretically, if Dad were dead, then these guys he put in jail would stop, wouldn’t they?”

“The key word there is ‘theoretically.’ There’s no way to prove he’s dead or alive. We don’t even know who he is.”

“Well . . . what if we did know?”

She glanced over and immediately caught my drift. “Holy shit. You found him? How? No, don’t tell me,” she said as her hands instinctively covered her ears, “I don’t want to know.”

I grabbed the wheel and steered around a stopped cab.

“Damn it, Patrick! You are going to get us both killed!”

“We’re more likely to be done in by your driving, sis.”

She swatted me and took back the wheel, but she was beyond angry. “We agreed that we would never do this,” she said. “We promised Mom that we would never look for him.”

“Listen to what I’m saying. If I can convince the Santucci family that he’s dead, their search is over. There would be no reason for the mob to chase us, threaten us, kill us, or do anything else to us ever again.”

“Is that what you’re telling me: Dad is dead?”

“Actually, I’m virtually certain he’s still alive. But I can prove he’s dead.”

“Stop playing with me!” she said as she stood on the brake. Behind us, tires screeched and horns blasted. It was a bona fide miracle that we weren’t rear-ended. Connie steered the van to the curb and slammed it into park, her face beet red.

“It wasn’t my intention to rip into you so soon,” she said, “but you obviously don’t understand how furious I am with you. Do you realize what you’ve done? Our only option may be to go back to the Justice Department and get ourselves reprocessed in the program. New location, new identity: square one. That makes me mad, it makes me want to kick your ass, it makes me just want to cry. I like my life. Finally, for the first time since Mom died, I’m happy with who I am. And now I may lose everything all over again because you had to go and stir things up.”

“I didn’t stir up anything.”

Connie looked away. She was trying to hold her emotions inside, but tears were coming, and it was tearing me up to watch her fall apart. I had to tell her. Finally, I had to tell
someone
the truth.

“This whole fear of the Santucci family rearing its ugly head is like being afraid of the bogeyman.”

“The bogeyman doesn’t put you in the emergency room.”

“That had nothing to do with the Mafia. But it does involve Dad. I didn’t want to go looking for him. I really didn’t. It was the FBI who came to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

I took a breath, not sure where to begin.

“Patrick, talk to me.”

She was using her stern maternal voice, the one that made me feel like the fifteen-year-old boy who went to live with his twenty-three-year-old sister. This wasn’t skipping school or getting drunk on prom night, but I felt the same need to come clean.

“Her name is Andie Henning,” I said. “About eight months ago she came to me and said she needed my help with an investigation.”

“What kind of investigation?”

Anyone who had watched the news in the twenty-first century was generally familiar with the Abe Cushman story. Beyond that, I was so far ahead of Connie and the rest of the world that I had to stop and remind myself that the name “Gerry Collins” would probably mean nothing to my sister. More to the point, she had no idea that Tony Mandretti—our father—was Tony Martin, and that Tony Martin had pleaded guilty to killing Cushman’s right-hand man.

“The FBI believes that a big chunk of the Cushman money was funneled through BOS in Singapore. We’re talking about billions of dollars.”

“The FBI asked you to spy on your own bank? Why on earth would you agree to do that?”

“That was exactly my reaction. Until Agent Henning mentioned the name Tony Mandretti.”

I could see her anger rising all over again. “Please don’t tell me that you got suckered into working for the FBI in exchange for some promise of a family reunion. That is the craziest thing I—”

“Dad’s dying,” I said.

She blinked hard, absorbing the blow.

“Not tomorrow, not next week,” I said. “But it’s coming. The good news is that he’s getting decent treatment. That was the deal. I helped the FBI and went to Singapore; they arranged for Dad to get the kind of treatment he couldn’t get in prison.”

“Wait a minute. He’s in prison? For what?”

I paused to soften it, but that seemed only to make her more anxious.

“For what?
” she asked again.

“Murder.”

She closed her eyes in anguish. “I really wish you hadn’t told me.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“Then why is he behind bars?”

“He pleaded guilty to the murder of Gerry Collins.”

Her eyes closed again. More anguish. Or maybe it was a massive headache. “You are not making me feel better.”

“Connie, I’m telling you: Dad didn’t do it.”

“Did the FBI tell you that?”

“No. In fact, Agent Henning is adamant that he’s guilty.”

“Did Dad tell you he’s innocent?”

“Not directly.”

“Don’t be cute. Have you talked to him or not?”

“No. That was one of the conditions of my assignment: no contact between us. This wasn’t about a family reunion, as you put it. The deal was simply to get Dad the medical treatment he needed. He doesn’t know I had anything to do with it.”

She drew a breath. “Patrick, it’s understandable that you would want to help Dad if he was sick, and I can see how it would make it easier to help him if you thought he was innocent. But—”

“That’s not it,” I said. “I didn’t agree to the FBI’s terms and risk my career just to get medical treatment for a deadbeat father who had killed another man. What drove me is that I
knew
he was innocent. I’m not asking for your help or approval. I’m simply telling you that it’s my intention to get him out of prison and let him live his last days the way he wants to live them.”

“We haven’t seen Dad in years. How could you possibly know anything about him, much less whether or not he’s sitting in prison for something he didn’t do?”

I started to talk, then reconsidered. It was beyond my persuasive powers to convince her in this setting. “Let me borrow your phone.”

She handed it to me but asked, “What’s wrong with yours?”

I didn’t have time to get into it fully. “I only have my BlackBerry, and I’d rather not send this message on a bank-issued phone if I can avoid it.”

“Why not?”

“Just drive,” I said.

“Drive where? To the zoo?”

“No, go through the circle and head up Central Park West,” I said, while tapping out a text message on her phone. “Take Terrace Drive through the park. There’s someone you need to meet.”

“Who?”

Connie’s phone chimed with Agent Henning’s response to my text. She was on her way.

“Alice in Wonderland,” I told Connie. “I think it’s time we all got acquainted.”