Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

One glimpse of the pistol Lathrop withdrew from his left coat pocket silenced him. A long-barreled.45 automatic, its muzzle came up fast and pushed into the soft flesh below his ear.

  “Open your door and get out of the car,” Lathrop said.

  “I don’t understand… ”

  “I told you to get out,” Lathrop said. “Try to take off, I’ll kill you on the spot. You have a problem with those instructions?”

  Sullivan swallowed, felt the pressure of the gun against his jaw.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  Lathrop grinned at him.

  “Good business,” he said.

  * * *

  Sullivan knew he’d set himself up for a ripoff of monumental proportions and was only hoping that would be the worst of it, praying to Heaven above that would be the worst. How on earth could he have been so careless and stupid?

  He stood inside the darkened park house where Lathrop had led him at gunpoint, his back to a cold, graffiti-scribbled concrete wall, his feet awash in crumpled food wrappers, soda cans, tossed syringes and crack vials, and whatever other unnameable filth a scabby parade of junkies and derelict winos had left here over the decades. He was sick to his stomach, overcome with fear and the grossly horrible stink of the place.

  Lathrop, meanwhile, seemed unaffected by their blighted surroundings. He faced Sullivan in silence, a small flashlight in one hand, the.45 leveled in his other. His tall form cutting a dark silhouette against the park house’s barely open steel door.

  “I don’t see why you’d want to do this,” Sullivan said. “I’ve always been straight with you. You’ve got some complaints about money, or my terms, we can work it out.”

  “Wrong,” Lathrop said softly. “We can’t.”

  Sullivan’s nausea rose higher in his throat. It occurred to him to remind Lathrop about the Dragonfly keys, but then he realized that would be a severe blunder and flushed the idea in a hurry. If Lathrop had forgotten about the keys, or thought he didn’t need them, so much the better. He would learn. And maybe then Sullivan could work them for leverage.

  “I won’t try to change your mind,” he said at last. “Take anything you want. Just don’t… it would be a mistake for you to get carried away.”

  “Oh?” Lathrop stepped closer, the gun held in front of him. “Go ahead, Sullivan. You’re a salesman. Sell me on it.”

  Sullivan could hear himself breathing as he tried to collect himself, keep his guts from turning inside out.

  “It isn’t like I can hurt you,” he said, swallowing. “Like I can run to the police. We drive off this garbage heap, go our separate ways, it’s over… ”

  “I don’t drive here.”

  “Whatever.” Sullivan stared tensely at Lathrop in the pale glow of the flash. “I’m just saying you wouldn’t have to think about me causing problems for—”

  “You know I don’t drive to these meetings,” Lathrop said with a flat, latched-on sort of emphasis. “You’ve watched me. Last time we were here, for instance.”

  Sullivan blinked. He felt a penetrating chill that was unrelated to the cold, remembered being sweaty with nerves in his car not half an hour earlier.

  Inside out.

  “That isn’t—”

  Lathrop frowned in disapproval, took another step forward, jabbed the gun barrel between his ribs.

  “Spare me.” He adjusted his flash between them, its beam patching the hollows of his face with light and shadow. “You turned off the FDR on a Hundred and Eleventh and First Avenue, and left your car right outside the playground there. Then you went through the basketball courts, crossed the overpass to the riverside, and walked to that fishing pier about four blocks down. Figured you could wait under the roof in the dark, keep an eye out for me without being spotted. Once you saw me take the footbridge to the island, you went back to the car and followed over the Triboro.”

  An insistent gust pushed the door a little farther ajar and Sullivan heard sleet crackle on the park house’s cement floor. The temperature on the island had crept below freezing, crystallizing whatever rain had been mingled with the icy downpour in the offshore winds.

  “All right,” Sullivan said. His heart pumped. “I’m not going to lie about it. I won’t try denying what I did. But I wasn’t intending to cross you or anything… I was just taking precautions. Watching my back. Of all people, you should understand—”

  “I do,” Lathrop said. “The problem is you’re an excitable boy, Sullivan. And I can’t have that.”

  Sullivan heard the click of the.45’s hammer being cocked, felt it against his body, stared at him with helpless terror. “My God, please, what are you doing—?”

  “Taking precautions,” Lathrop said, and then shot him twice, point blank, in the middle of the chest.

  * * *

  Lathrop gazed out over the river, catching his breath, black oily wavelets splashing the toes of his rubber boots. He’d dragged the industrial drum liner containing Sullivan’s body from the park house, brought it downhill to shove it into the water where the city’s Irish mob had dumped their unwanted human meat for generations — and this particular Irishman hadn’t been a lean slab by any means.

  He stood watching the Hell Gate’s current swiftly carry his discarded burden toward the Manhattan-Queens branch of the Triboro and then on under the huge, partially submerged bridge posts to vanish in the turbulent night. He could see the lights beading the span’s suspension cables twinkle softly through waves of precipitation. See brighter lights in the windows of the public housing projects on the near Manhattan shore, and, a little farther south, in those of the upscale condominiums… so many lighted windows climbing the dark sky in high, even rows.

  Lathrop found himself wishing he could hold a lens to all those distant panes of glass, peer into every room of every apartment. From out here in the night, standing at the water’s edge, he would explore the raw secrets of the lives being led inside them, probe their guarded intimacies, their appetites, their hidden transgressions.

  Of course, he thought, playing with secrets could be a dangerous addiction. One that could kill a man if he didn’t have the know-how and constitution to handle them.

  Lathrop remained there on the riverbank another moment, staring contemplatively at the lights of the city on the far shore. Then he started back uphill toward the Jaguar, aware he had one final task to carry out before the night was done.

  * * *

  It was minutes shy of two A.M. when Lathrop pulled the Jaguar to the curb in front of the middle school on East 75th Street, stopping a yard or two back from the NO STANDING sign near its entrance.

  Turning off the Jag’s motor, he pocketed its keys, inspected the interior for visible trace evidence, and satisfied himself that everything was clean. Then he reached over the seat for Sullivan’s attaché, patted the gemstone case neatly tucked away inside his coat, got out, and closed the driver’s door behind him.

  The changeover from mixed to solid precip had finally worked its way over the river to Manhattan, and Lathrop felt hard pellets of ice rattle his open umbrella as he glanced up at the NO STANDING sign from the pavement. Violators, it warned, would be towed and fined on schooldays, accounting for the absence of any other parked vehicles on that side of the block.

  When the tow trucks made their first passes for illegally parked cars around seven o’ clock in the morning, their drivers would be quick to spot an expensive British sedan they could never afford on their workaday salaries, assume it belonged to some privileged Upper East Side scofflaw, and then put on the boots and cart it across town into impound — spite and envy being two of the sweetest motivators Lathrop had found in life’s big cookie jar. The Jag would sit there in the city yard indefinitely among hundreds of other tows until someone noticed it was missing and went through whatever bureaucratic hoops had to be jumped to find and redeem it. Lathrop suspected that wouldn’t happen for several days, perhaps longer, and overnight was really all the hang time he needed.
/>   Still, he wasn’t about to relax. There were moves he wanted to make, and though exactly what they would be depended on circumstances he didn’t yet know — and the opportunities he could create within them — it was never too soon to get started.

  The attaché in his free hand, Lathrop raised his collar, bent his head low behind his umbrella, and strode off down the empty street in the driving wind and hail.

  TWO

  NEW YORK CITY / HUDSON VALLEY

  “My husband’s been missing for almost a week,” she said.

  Lenny Reisenberg looked at the woman seated across his desk, thinking this wasn’t exactly fast-breaking news to him. He’d known about it since the Nassau County Police detectives arrived only a few days earlier for what they had called an informal chat.

  “They tell me you could be the last person who saw him,” she said. “That you’re the last person he’s supposed to have met…”

  Lenny had also learned that, courtesy of the detectives. His business lunch with Patrick Sullivan on the afternoon he vanished had been Sullivan’s final appointment… or at least the final appointment reminder Sullivan had entered into his office computer’s scheduler program for that particular day. And the two of them had, in fact, connected for a late-afternoon huddle at a down-home Southern restaurant over near the Flatiron Building a few blocks downtown, their shared fondness for sweet-potato fries and corn bread, house specialties, having made it a favorite spot for getting together.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but I wonder… I was hoping you could tell me how Pat seemed when you met,” Mrs. Sullivan went on. “If he acted like anything was wrong. Or gave you an idea where he was heading afterwards. Anything you might have noticed.” She cleared her throat. “I need to find out what in the world’s happened to him… ”

  The detectives had been here for the same essential reason, Lenny reflected. But their interest was dryly professional, their questions delivered in courteous matter-of-fact tones. And he guessed that was understandable; they’d seen enough cases of married men going off on prolonged toots. Lenny had gotten the sense they’d believed this case would eventually resolve itself with hubby showing up at his front door, tussled and unshaven, his front shirttail caught in his fly, the business card he’d been handed with a wink at the Mustang Ranch tossed out of his back pocket somewhere en route from Nevada.

  Patrick Sullivan’s wife obviously felt otherwise. She had come to him in anguish and desperation. This was her husband she was talking about, not a case she’d been assigned by a disinterested squad lieutenant.

  Her husband was missing.

  Almost a full week now.

  Lenny wished he could tell her something useful.

  He kept looking at Mary Sullivan in the quiet of his office, his morning coffee untouched in front of him. She would not have been mistaken for any of his sophisticated female colleagues here on the top floor of UpLink International’s regional shipping headquarters. They knew executive vogue down to the buttons and buckles. But she might have looked right at home behind a reception desk, or at a work cubicle on one of the lower floors where he’d gotten his first break with the company, and maybe his last chance at making something of himself, two decades ago. He’d been some piece of work then. A Regent’s scholarship winner who’d managed to get booted out of college in his first semester. An aimless young man without self-confidence or any immediate plans beyond making his next month’s rent… and barely looking that far ahead.

  A product of Brooklyn to his marrow, Lenny saw the old and familiar in Mrs. Sullivan’s choice of clothes, just as he heard it clearly in her speech. In her late forties or early fifties, she had reddish-blond hair that was a little too sprayed and swept around to look stylish, features a little too blunt to be pretty, and a figure a little too thick around the waist, hips, and thighs to be what most men considered well-proportioned. Everything about her appearance ran true to form. Too much of this, too much of that. Her makeup applied on the heavy side. Her perfume hanging, rather than lingering in that subtle way the most expensive fragrances did. She had professionally manicured fingernails, but they were longer and more brightly polished than women on the Manhattan side of the bridge would envision in their worst nightmares. Her emerald turtleneck sweater and matching scarf were likewise bolder than they should have been, and Lenny thought it kind of a shame. Meant to accent eyes infused with pure Irish green DNA, they accomplished the opposite of what was intended, distracting from her best natural feature through overkill. While the clothes would have designer names attached to them, they were middle of the line, bought at one of those off-price strip-mall outlets. TJ Maxx rather than Bloomingdale’s.

  Lenny recalled noticing her low-heeled pumps when his admin had showed her through the door. The uppers were decent leather, but their soles would be rubber, probably synthetic. And significantly, they weren’t boots. Manhattan women wore boots on winter days. It was a fashion grown out of practicality. They could usually walk where they were going, and did, and boots kept their feet warm and dry out on the street. Women from the outer boroughs had to ride the distance standing on packed subway cars.

  What neighborhood did she come up in? Bensonhurst, or maybe Bay Ridge. One of those blocks of rowhouses along Seventh or Eighth Avenue, Lenny bet. It wouldn’t have been far from his own exhausted cradle of origin. The evidence was right there on the surface. Lenny imagined working-class parents, a drab railroad apartment with the heavy scent of Glade in the air, and framed prints of the Madonna covering exposed plaster on the walls. Her tiny bedroom shared with a half dozen brothers and sisters in bunk beds. Five days a week, she would have stepped down off a cracked marble stoop and walked toward the bus stop in her Catholic school uniform, a white blouse and pleated plaid skirt.

  Lenny got the sense of Mary Sullivan, felt almost as if he’d looked into her sad green eyes before. It made knowing he could only disappoint her that much harder.

  “I’ve been thinking about my lunch with Pat, and nothing odd stands out,” he said now. “I usually get business out of the way first, then make with the small talk. Sort of the opposite of most people…”

  “You want to relax,” Mary Sullivan said softly. “Enjoy your food,”

  Lenny gave a nod.

  “Otherwise I might as well stay in the office and toss down a peanut butter sandwich,” he said.

  She sat there in silence, waiting.

  “I don’t know how familiar you are with the technical side of Pat’s work, but his company supplies the best optical tubing and wafer on the market,” Lenny said. “UpLink uses a whole lot of it.”

  “For fiberoptics? Is that right?”

  “Anything to do with lasers,” Lenny said. “Fiberoptics included, right.”

  Mrs. Sullivan gave him a strained smile.

  “Don’t ask me any more than that,” she said. “An Einstein I’ll never be, but I try to learn as I go along.”

  “Beats most people,” Lenny said. “Anyway, your husband’s company has a shipload coming to us from overseas… Pakistan, for what it’s worth… and we needed to iron out some particulars having to do with the delivery clearing customs. I think we were already into the kibbitzing when our plates hit the table. Covered sports, kids, our usual subjects… Pat told me your daughter Andrea’s been having a great school year—”

  “Donna, you mean.”

  “Oh, I could’ve sworn… do you have more than—?”

  “Just our one. Her full name is Donna Anne, so that might be why you made the mistake.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it’d be just like Pat to brag in advance,” she said. “Donna’s a midyear entrant at Reed and only started classes there last week.”

  Lenny tried to hide his embarrassment. Besides fouling up her name, he’d had the distinct impression Sullivan’s daughter was in elementary school. And maybe seven or eight at the oldest.

  “Well, Pat did say that he was happy with how she was doing,” he said. “Wit
h some other things, too. His job… I think there were some new accounts that had him excited.” Lenny paused. “I remember us talking hockey… guess I don’t need to tell you Pat’s an Islanders fanatic.”

  “No,” Mrs. Sullivan said. Again with that pale, cheerless smile. “You don’t.”

  Lenny was quiet a moment, searching his memory.

  “There was a game at the Coliseum that night,” he said. “Your husband told me he was going to stay in the city to watch it at one of those sports bars. The jumbo screen, you know.” He paused. “Your house is on Long Island… somewhere way out at the end of Nassau County, isn’t it?”

  She gave an affirmative nod.

  “Glen Cove. But it’s a corporate condo. We sold our old home last summer, bought some land in Amity Harbor, contracted on a bigger place. The builders fell behind schedule, so Pat’s employers arranged for us to stay in their apartment complex until it’s finished.”

  Lenny nearly sighed with relief over getting things halfway right this time, though he didn’t recall Sullivan having told him anything about the move.

  “Pat’s mentioned that he uses the railroad to commute,” he said. “When he said he wasn’t heading straight home, I kidded him about being more of a team booster than I’d realized. Because of the weather, I mean. All week long the city’s in a panic over the blizzard that’s supposed to be heading our way, and then the forecast changes in a snap, and we’re hearing it won’t be cold enough for even an inch of snow on the ground. But it was still pretty miserable out, and I could see how there might be icing on the tracks that could make his trip to the Island a stalled mess, and told Pat he might be better off getting his hockey fix on the living-room television set.” Lenny shrugged. “I remember he said that he couldn’t. That there’s a standing appointment with his friend…”

  “Tony DeSanto,” Mary Sullivan said with another nod. “They’ve been like brothers since they were kids, and going out to watch the games together’s a regular thing with them. Every Wednesday without fail, year round. The two of them are real sports fanatics. In the winter it’s hockey. The Isles versus the Rangers, you’d think their lives depend on who wins. Then it’s springtime and the Mets over at Shea. After that, football season. The Giants. Without fail.” Her ample bosom rose and fell as she struggled to contain her emotions. “Tony lives down near Union Square. Every now and then… if there’s a storm like we had the other night, or the games run late, you know… Pat stays over at his apartment…”