Vendetta (29 page)

“Hi,” Tess said above the noise. “I hope you can help me. My cousin Paul used to work here but, God, he’s so crazy, he just enlisted in the army and he didn’t get all his stuff before he quit.”

“He didn’t even,” the woman yelled back, and Tess blinked. Was the receptionist calling her on her story? Had she just been busted?

“Didn’t even quit,” the woman elaborated. “Just stopped coming in. The jerk.”

“That
guy
.” Tess shook her head. “Well, he gave me his combination and if I could just get his stuff…”

“Whatever. Mrs. Myers was going to cut the lock off anyways.”

The receptionist waved a hand toward a door. Tess opened it and went down a hall and into a room with a refrigerator, a microwave, and a row of lockers. One was marked paul. Making sure she was alone, she slipped on some gloves and tried the combination.

Open sesame.

Tess let out a whistle. Inside were a T-shirt, a pair of thick winter mittens and some socks, cans of baked beans and tuna, and quite a few plastic bottles containing different combinations of vitamin supplements as well as a prescription anti-anxiety medication. The patient listed on the label was Paul Dickinson.

And there was a picture of Paul with Angelo and a certain scruffy old man. It was the homeless penny-whistle player Tess and Cat had encountered during the blackout. Tess picked up one of the bottles, wondering if this was the medicine the old man had been talking about. Maybe Angelo had paid for all these things for the old guy and Claudia had supplied them. So then Paul stockpiled them and they took them to the old man every once and a while.

Only now, since Paul had turned into a kidnapper, the old man was going without.

In the break room she found a box of gallon-sized plastic freezer bags, put on fresh gloves, and took everything out of the locker. Then she took the lock and peeled off the Paul sticker from the front of the locker. She kept that too.

She thanked the girl and went outside. Her phone rang just as her feet hit the sidewalk. It was J.T.

“Okay, they didn’t bother to delete-delete Reynolds’ message when they captured it,” J.T. said. “What that means is—”

“I know what that means,” Tess said. “Go on. What did it say?”

“‘It only gets worse.’”

Tess made a face. “Two guesses as to what “it” is.”

“Vincent,” said J.T.

“Yeah, I’m thinking.” Her phone beeped. “Hold on. I have another call.”

“Vargas, where the hell are you?” It was Captain Ward. “Did Chandler tell you that you’re off DeMarco?”

“Yes.”

“So you can resume the investigation into Easy Pickin’s. I want you both to go over there now.”

Tess bit back the first word that occurred to her because she was raised better than that and said, “You got it, Cap. On my way.”

Then she called Vincent.

* * *

Gabe was lost.

Correction: Gabe
had
lost.

It was snowing, and he just couldn’t go any farther. He hadn’t had any real sleep in days; he had nearly been killed, then left in the snow for half the night. He thought he might have a concussion. He was completely done.

He was in the middle of a forest on a tiny road that barely registered on any mapping system. The car kept weaving as he nodded off and he was afraid he was going to hit a tree. He had to surrender and get some rest.

It was bitterly cold out but he couldn’t risk running the engine. He piled all his extra clothes over himself, wishing for a blanket, and closed his eyes. The explosion replayed in his mind, and the tear gas, and Celeste. The images shifted in prisms like a kaleidoscope and he felt ill from exhaustion.

I’m probably going to die if I do this.

Just ten minutes.

He set his watch.

* * *

No way
, Cat thought, as she glanced through the window of Easy Pickin’s. Tess was emerging from her car just as Captain Ward pushed through the front door. He saw Cat and gave her a nod.

“Captain Ward,” Cat whispered, “what are you doing here?”

The captain gave a wave to the cashier, a bearded man who looked like a gangbanger, and gestured for Cat to wait with him while Tess entered the store. Tess drew up short when she saw their boss and Cat shrugged and gave her head a little shake.

Captain Ward gestured for both of them to follow him past a row of “private viewing booths”—
blech—
and they trooped into a storage room stacked with cardboard boxes and a mannequin dressed in leather bondage gear.

“You’ll thank me later,” Captain Ward said. “I’m a witness. You are not in contact with your father. You are here with me. By the way, the store owners have agreed to cooperate and you two are going to interview Ralph out there and probably do a search of this storage room. And I’ll be here the entire time.”

Cat tensed. “Is something happening? Have they found my father?”

“We’re here together. Your phone’s put away,” he said flatly. Tess nodded at him; after years of working together, Cat knew how to read Tess’s subtlest gestures: Tess was freaking out. She had yet to tell Cat what she’d found in the locker and now here they were with a babysitter.

Cat’s phone rang, and Ward shook his head.

“Don’t answer it.”

“But, sir,” she began.

“
No
,” he said. Then he looked at her full on. “Chandler, I’m protecting your career. I may not have appeared to support you in the interview room, but I do have your back.” Cat slid a glance at Tess. The wheels were turning, and Tess cleared her throat. She said to Cat, “Drug case.”

“You’re sure?” Cat said, and Tess nodded.

“We’re getting it from all sides,” she said. “And if we could get our witness some fulltime protection…”

Cat followed. Tess wanted to free up J.T. and Vincent so they could deal with whatever she had found in the locker. Cat just hoped Captain Ward would still have their backs after they laid out the case for him.

“Okay,” Cat said.

Tess faced Captain Ward, and Cat positioned herself next to Tess, to show solidarity. “Sir, we have reason to believe that Special Agent Robertson is running a drug ring. We have a victim we believe was falsely imprisoned at Rikers, and we have a family member who is willing to testify. We did not bring this to you sooner because of the precinct’s connection to the DeMarco case, and we were afraid that if we exposed what we knew while were working with Robertson and Gonzales, we would endanger not only ourselves but our witness and the victim.”

His shock was impressive. His anger, even more so. He narrowed his eyes and clamped his jaw and said, “Run it down for me.
Fast.
”

* * *

Half an hour.

Gabe wiped the muzziness from his face as he processed that he had slept through his beeping alarm for twenty minutes. The interior of the car was frigid. He saw his breath in the glow of his phone.

As dangerous as it had been, he was grateful for the extra rest. He wasn’t refreshed, but he was functional, which was the best he could hope for at this point. He unwrapped a granola bar and made himself eat it. As he chewed, he examined the APB site for more Reynolds sightings, preparing to note them on his phone’s mapping function.

Both of the previous responses had notes appended to them. One said
False sighting.
The other,
Inconclusive.
So was he on a wild goose chase in the middle of an ice forest?

Or are they feeding us false data?

At the same time, his phone signaled that he had an incoming message. He punched open his message window. There was nothing there. Then the signal booster made a strange sound, like electrical pulses on a competing channel. Perplexed, he flipped to his message screen again.

A string of gibberish had appeared in the text box, numbers and letters and emoticons… but mixed within the garbage were what appeared to be mapping coordinates: latitude and longitude.

Am I intercepting something?

He checked the map. If he applied the numbers as coordinates, then whoever was transmitting was at an inn thirty miles due west of his position. Had the signal booster made this data capture possible? Keeping it connected to his phone, he gave the object a cursory examination. He mentally replayed the few seconds Celeste had had his phone. Had she done something to it?

He had just survived one trap. Was he so eager to rush into another?

* * *

Tess’s goody bag.

Vincent found it just where Tess said she would leave it—in a trashcan close to his houseboat at the 79th Street Boat Basin. He inhaled a world of scents, including Angelo’s, and nodded to himself as he closed it back up and called J.T.

* * *

J.T. recognized Cat’s ringtone and picked up.

He said, “I was wondering when someone would ca—”

“Hi, J.T,” Cat cut in. “Okay, here’s the deal. I’ve filled in my captain and he’s willing to place our witness in protective custody. We can meet you both at that abandoned subway station on Worth. He understands why we have kept this off the grid and he guarantees he will not pursue any legal action against you.”

“Against
me?
” J.T. said. His other line beeped. “Hold on.” He took the call.

“J.T., it’s Vincent. I want to park Nico with you. Tess left me some evidence and—”

“This is so perfect it’s scary,” J.T. said. “Cat’s on my other line telling me to bring ‘our witness’ to an abandoned subway station. Worth. She and Tess have told Captain Ward about the drug thing and he’s taking Nico into protective custody.”

“You’re right. It is kind of scary and kind of perfect,” Vincent said. “I’m in. I’ll bring Nico to you and then I follow you in, protect you. Worth is a good choice. It’s dark.”

“But what if Nico says something to Ward about
you?
” J.T. asked. “What if he, like, IDs you? He knows where you live. He knows we know each other.”

Vincent hesitated. “We can ask him not to. Cat and Tess can say he’s wrong if he tries to blow my cover. And if worse comes to worst… I run.”

J.T grimaced. “I’m all for saving lives, but this is a huge risk, Vincent.”

“And some things are worth the risk. You’ve risked your life for me for over a decade.”

“And I thought it would have gotten easier by now, not harder,” J.T. riposted. But he knew they really had no other choice, now that the status quo had changed. “All right. I’ll be here.”

* * *

The abandoned subway station reminded Vincent of the Canal Street station, where he had saved Catherine from a speeding subway train after Special Agent McCleary and his goons had ambushed her. He hoped this wouldn’t be a replay of that day.

He kept to the shadows, certain that Catherine knew he was watching over Nico as Captain Ward took custody of him. He saw the way her gaze lasered into the darkness, searching for him. He tried to send her a text message but they were underground. After he was sure the handoff was complete, and Cat, Tess, and J.T were safe, he went above ground and resent it.

Then he headed for the old man’s shed, which Tess had described to him. He found it, but the old man wasn’t there, and it appeared that his little hovel had been ransacked. The food and sleeping bag Tess had mentioned were gone. His pennywhistle was cracked in half and lying on the frozen ground.

Vincent smelled Angelo and Paul Dickinson everywhere. The Angelo-smell that lingered here was of an Angelo on insulin. He isolated the Dickinson scent from the items Tess had collected from his locker. They mingled on a set of three photographs tacked to the wall.

He caught his breath.

The first photograph featured a slightly younger version of Angelo DeMarco, and of a pretty, red-haired girl:

Tori.

He swallowed hard. Angelo and Tori were sprawled in a grungy room that looked like it was in an old warehouse or factory, and there were stacks of paperback books behind them. Angelo was holding a guitar and Tori appeared to be singing. Her head was thrown back and she was laughing. She had not laughed very often when they had been together. On the back, someone had written
torimacto
. According to Cat, that was Angelo’s nickname for Tori.

In the second picture, Tori was posing at the head of a stone corridor with sharp hooks and chains dangling overhead. She was holding her nose and pointing to the hooks. She was pantomiming that something smelly was dangling from the barbs. Meat? Was this a slaughterhouse, maybe a packing plant?

He turned the picture over. There was a scribbled set of numbers.
1293
.

The third picture showed Angelo standing by himself, standing outside a large factory with a falling down sign that read sant meat packing. On this one,
Lantus
was written on the back. Lantus was the name brand of a synthetic insulin for type-one diabetics.

Like Angelo.

Vincent looked inside Tess’s sack again and found a couple of empty plastic freezer bags. Attempting not to add any more of his own fingerprints to the photographs, he slipped the three pictures into a plastic bag.

He did some Internet searching on his smart phone. Then he texted Catherine again:

Tracking. Santangelo meat packing plant. 1293 Egret.

It wasn’t dark out yet. He would have to be carful. Head down, Vincent headed out.

* * *

Fisherman’s Inn wasn’t an inn at all. It was a cheap motel that had never seen better days and never would see them. A white panel van was parked not in the lot but about twenty feet down a snow-encrusted path. Aside from the dead desk clerk and the sentry stationed at the front door of room 103, Gabe was the only person within fifty feet of the motel.

Except for Bob Reynolds, who was tied to a chair inside room 103.

Gotcha
, Gabe thought, as he moved around a pine tree and drew his Beretta.

A branch cracked behind him.

A
fter Captain Ward, Tess, and Cat returned from Worth Street, Pamy approached the group with a sticky note and held it out toward Cat. Captain Ward intercepted the little square of yellow and said, “Who is Shannon Richardson? Oh.” He read the note. “
Detective Chandler, ADA Lowan borrowed my car. Left a msg that something’s wrong w/it? I tried to call him but his phone makes this weird clicking noise. Can you ask him to call me?”