Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [2]
“Nope. I’m not going anywhere near tunnels, chief.”
“Hunts Point?” I offered, letting just a trace of annoyance show through.
“Where in Hunts Point?”
“You know what I’m driving?” I asked him, ignoring his question, trying to feel my way through to him. He talked like a pro, flat-voiced, detached. But what pro snatches a kid, keeps him ten years, and then turns him loose? The cash wouldn’t be worth the risk. He kept saying “I,” as if it were just him, as if I were dealing with the kidnapper himself. But that didn’t ring true. He had to be a middleman, same as me.
“No,” he answered.
“Listen close: 1970 Plymouth, four-door sedan. Painted a dull-gray primer with a bunch of rust blotches on the sides. Outside mirror’s held on with duct tape.”
“Sounds like an old yellow cab.”
“That’s exactly what it is. You won’t see many like it still alive. But the next time you see it, it’s going to have a broad stripe of Day-Glo reflecting tape, orange, front-to-back. No way to miss that in your headlights, right?”
“So?”
“So I drive to Hunts Point. Triborough to Bruckner Boulevard to the Avenue, make a right, okay? Then I go out into the prairie, moving nice and slow, make a few circuits. There’s a thousand places for you to stash a car in there, and I don’t know what you’ll be driving, see? You watch me pass by, you check for tags and wait. Or you pull right out behind me; do it however you want. Soon as you’re happy, you ring me on my cellular.… I’ll give you a number for that night.”
“How’ll I know it’s—?”
“Let me finish. You’ll like it. I find a good spot. I park. You watch me from a safe distance. You sound like a man who knows where to get some night-vision optics. Make your own decision when to come in. Or not. Soon as you’re ready, you tell me what you’re driving so I don’t spook when I see you pull up. We make the exchange, takes about fifteen seconds—me to check for a pulse, you to count the cash, okay?”
“I’ll get back to you,” he said.
He’d done that. And tonight, he was somewhere behind my rear bumper, watching and waiting.
I pulled into a strip of concrete that dead-ended at the river. Some kind of garbage dump or recycling plant to my right, wasteland to my left. I did a slow U-turn until I was facing out the way I’d come.
I saw a pair of headlights blink on and off once, about a hundred yards away. Had to be him. I thumbed the cellular into life.
“Yeah?”
“How’s this?” I asked him.
“I don’t like that abandoned car on your right.”
“If you were closer, you could see it’s wide open. Nothing left but a skeleton.”
“You got a flash?”
“Yes.”
“Get out. Shine it on the car. Light it the fuck up, understand?”
I didn’t bother to answer him. Just pocketed the phone, climbed out of the Plymouth, walked carefully over to the stripped-to-the-bone car, and sprayed it with a megawatt halogen beam. In the ghost-white light, the car looked like an Oklahoma double-wide after a tornado.
“I still don’t like it,” the phone said. “Find another spot.”
I didn’t say a word. Got back in the Plymouth and pulled out … slowly.
He passed on my next choice, too. And the one after that. I went on autopilot, hardly speaking at all, mechanically searching for spots. I left the cellular on, the lifeline between us.
“Change of plan.” His voice cut into my thoughts.
“What?”
“I found a spot. Just past the meat market. Drive back over there.”
“Right.”
It was only a couple of minutes away. But when I drove by, slowly, I couldn’t see anything but a couple of burnt-out hookers waiting on a semi. Or a serial killer. Car-trick roulette, with all their blood-money on the double-zero.
“Keep going,” the voice said.
He must have me on visual now, I remember thinking. I didn’t answer him, just let the Plymouth motor along, a touch past idle.
“See the train?”
Train? I saw what was left of an abandoned railway car sitting on rust-clogged tracks. “Yeah,” I told him.
“Kill your lights and pull in there.”
The ground was all ruts. I drove real slow, like I was worried I’d snag an axle, but the Plymouth’s independent rear suspension