Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [133]
“Nice meeting you, Neal.” I walked around to the driver’s door.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said he’ll kill you.”
Angie chuckled. “And you’ll save us, I suppose.”
“I’m Justice Department.” He placed a palm to his chest. “Bulletproof.”
I looked over the roof of the Crown Victoria at him. “That’s because you’re always behind the people you’re supposed to be protecting, Neal.”
“Oooh.” His hand fluttered over his chest. “Good one, Pat.”
Angie climbed in the car, and I followed. As I started the engine, Neal Ryerson rapped his knuckles on Angie’s window. She frowned and looked at me. I shrugged. She rolled the pane down slowly, and Neal Ryerson dropped to his haunches, rested one arm on her windowsill.
“I got to tell you,” he said. “I think you’re making a big mistake by not hearing me out.”
“Made ’em before,” Angie said.
He leaned back from her door and took a puff of his cigar, blew the smoke out before he leaned back in.
“When I was a kid, my daddy’d take me hunting in the mountains not far from where I grew up, place called Boone, North Carolina. And Daddy, he always told me—every trip from the time I was eight till I was eighteen—that what you had to watch out for, really watch out for, wasn’t the moose or the deer. It was the other hunters.”
“Deep,” Angie said.
He smiled. “See, Pat, Angie—”
“Don’t call him Pat,” Angie said. “He hates that.”
He held up the hand with the cigar clenched between the fingers. “All apologies, Patrick. How can I say this? The enemy is us. You understand? And ‘us’ is going to come looking for you soon.” He pointed the thin cigar at me. “‘Us’ already had words with you today, Patrick. How long before he ups the ante? He knows that even if you back off for a bit, sooner or later you’ll come around again, asking the wrong questions. Hell, that’s why you came to see Nick Raftopoulos tonight, am I right? Hoping he’d be coherent enough to answer some of your wrong questions. Now you can drive away. Can’t stop y’all. But he’ll come for you. And this’ll just get worse.”
I looked at Angie. She looked at me. Ryerson’s cigar smoke found the inside of the car and then the back of my lungs, clogged there like hair in a drain.
Angie turned back to him, waved him off the windowsill with a flick of her wrist. “The Blue Diner,” she said. “You know it?”
“Just a short six blocks away.”
“See you there,” she said, and we pulled out of our parking slot and headed for the exit ramp.
The exterior of the Blue Diner looks really cool at night. The only hint of neon fronting Kneeland Street at the base of the Leather District, a large white coffee cup hovers over its sign in a mostly commercial zone, so that the establishment appears, from the highway at least, like something straight out of Edward Hopper’s night-washed daydreams.
I’m not sure Hopper would have paid six thousand dollars for a hamburger, though. Not that the Blue Diner charges quite that much, but it’s in the ballpark. I’ve bought cars for less than I’ve paid for a cup of their coffee.
Neal Ryerson assured us the tab was on the Justice Department, so we splurged on coffee and a couple of Cokes. I would have ordered a hamburger, but then I remembered that the Justice Department budget was provided by my tax dollars, and Ryerson’s generosity didn’t seem like so much of a big deal.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” he said.
“By all means,” Angie said.
He poured some cream into his coffee, passed it to me. “Where did all this start?”
“With Amanda McCready’s disappearance,” I said.
He shook his head. “No. That’s just where you two came into it.” He stirred his coffee, removed the spoon, and pointed it at us. “Three years ago, Narcotics officer Remy Broussard busts Cheese Olamon, Chris Mullen, and Pharaoh Gutierrez doing a quality-control check of a processing plant in South Boston.”
“I thought all drug processing was done overseas,” Angie said.
“‘Processing’ is a euphemism. Basically, they were stomping the shit—cocaine, that time—cutting it with Similac. Broussard and his partner, Poole, couple of other Narcotics