The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [40]
“Hanging in there. Where are you?”
“At the office.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“I’m kind of busy.”
“Too busy for a beer?”
“I wish I could. I’m buried.”
I heard the sound of a match being lit, suggesting he’d already had at least one drink. Reggie had been a smoker for as long as I’d known him and was always trying to quit. Liquor was his undoing. He exhaled loudly, and I imagined him enveloped by a blue cloud. Roughly the size of a Division 1 offensive lineman, Reggie was a dark-skinned black guy with a square, immobile face, a graying fade, and a permanently mournful expression.
“Joe Belko retired today,” he said.
Joe was Reggie’s partner, a twenty-year veteran of the major case squad. In the five years they’d been working together, I’d rarely heard Joe talk about anything except fishing. It didn’t surprise me to learn he’d pulled the pin. He and Reggie specialized in abductions and disappearances, usually working in concert with the FBI and the state police. I had the sense that Joe, like Reggie, had seen a lot more than he’d ever wanted to.
“That must be tough. They got someone new lined up for you?”
“Not yet. The guys upstairs want to talk to me about riding a desk. If I were going to sit around with my thumb up my ass all day I’d want to get paid some serious money, like that hot-rod crowd you hang around with.”
I gave him the laugh he was looking for.
“So, can I take a rain check and call you next week?”
He sucked on the cigarette again. I felt bad about letting him down. Childless and long divorced, Reggie didn’t seem to have much of a social life.
“It really would be better if we talked tonight.”
I felt a funny catch in my chest, abruptly aware of how still the office was. The only noise was the buzz of the fluorescent lights, a barely audible siren a dozen blocks away, and Reggie’s muted breathing through the receiver.
“You have something to tell me?”
“It may be nothing. Don’t get yourself too excited.”
I got to my feet and grabbed my suit jacket from the back of my chair.
“I’m coming to you,” I said. “Right now. Tell me where you are.”
The address Reggie gave me was a Second Avenue dive in the low sixties, near the Roosevelt Island tram. I entered the small bar beneath a green neon sign with a flashing shamrock. It was a drinker’s place—no jukebox, no cutesy decorations, no waitresses. Just bare walls, a linoleum floor, and a battered tin ceiling. Half a dozen guys were crowded together near the door, watching a silent hockey game on a flyspecked, undersized television. Reggie stood alone at the far end of the room, wearing a gray three-piece suit and a pale yellow tie. He tapped a knuckle on the scuffed counter as I approached and attracted the attention of a tubercular-looking barman.
“Jimmy and Guinney,” he said. “Times two.”
I pulled out my wallet and dropped a twenty on top of the small pile of money in front of him. The barman served up the whiskey and made change, waiting for the heads to settle on the Guinness. Reggie clinked his glass to mine and we both threw back the shots in a single go.
“So, tell me,” I said, feeling the whiskey smolder in my gut.
Reaching into his breast pocket, Reggie extracted a folded sheet of paper.
“An e-mail,” he said. “Sent directly to me. It came in last night.”
I unfolded the page with shaking fingers and scanned past the detailed header information, hunting for the body of the message. It was only two sentences long:
Kyle Wallace was left in the trunk of a red BMW M5 with diplomatic license plates. The car was last seen in a lot at 125th Street and the Hudson River.
My hands sank to the bar, the page suddenly too heavy to support.
“Jimmys again,” Reggie said, as the barman served up the Guinness. He touched his pint glass to mine, and I automatically lifted the black liquid and took a sip.
“We’ve had tips before,” I said, choking slightly on the bitter beer. “Dozens of