Dead Red (37 page)

I didn’t feel normal. I could tell Jack about my visits with Muscles and Ricky T’s therapist and how they got me thinking of my own version of PTSD. Then I thought better of it. If I were going to start talking about my own emotional issues, the first person on the list was not going to be Jack Knight.

My phone rang.

“Robby,” I said. “How are you?”

“You’re in the lobby, Ray?” Robby croaked.

“Yeah. With Jack and another friend. What happened last night?”

Silence. Then, “Best I can remember, the doorbell rang, I told the girls—You know about the girls showing up?”

“Yeah.”

“I told them to go to the garage, and I went to see who it was.”

“Who was it?”

“Never saw him before. And I didn’t get a good look at him. I was too busy staring at the gun he was pointing in my face.”

Right. “He say what he wanted?”

More silence, followed by a deep breath. “I assumed the guns. I think he said something like, ‘Where are they?’”

“
They?
” I repeated. Jack tried to take the phone from me but I took a step back. “What did he mean by ‘they’?”

“I told him they were in the shed, and he made me go back there with him.” He was quiet for a few seconds, and I heard him swallow loudly. “You think maybe he meant the girls?”

“I don’t know, Robby. But why did he shoot you? I went to the shed last night and it was locked. Did he get the guns?”

“I don’t know.” He stopped for a few seconds. “I was scared, Ray. When we got to the back, I pulled my gun on him.”

“You did what?” I said, loud enough to bring Jack over to me. “What gun did you pull, Robby?”

“Ricky gave me one when I decided to stay upstate. He said he was worried about me living up in redneck land.”

I was trying to process this, but I was real tired. “The cops never found a gun, Robby. Was it registered?”

“Yeah. Ricky insisted on that.” He paused. “So the cops didn’t find it?”

“No,” I said. “Whoever shot you must have taken it.” Then I told him the shooter apparently treated his wound.

More silence. “So, he didn’t want the cops to know I had a gun, and he obviously didn’t want me dead. Nice guy.”

Robby started coughing. He may have been feeling a lot better, but getting shot is getting shot, and that takes a lot out of a person. I figured he had told me all he was going to, so I turned back to Jack. “He sounds pretty weak,” I said.

Jack put his hand out. “Gimme the phone.”

I did, and Jack walked away to talk to Robby in private. Edgar came over to me and did a big roll of his hips into a back stretch.

“I’m ready to hit the road, Ray,” he said. “Shit! I gotta call in to work.”

Now he walked away, and I was left standing in the waiting area alone when the front doors opened and in walked Charles Golden, his daughter, and Blake’s guy, Joseph. Golden stepped over to me as Joseph led Angela over to a chair.

“What did you find out from Mr. Torres?” Golden asked.

I gave him a quick recap. He didn’t appreciate the lack of information.

“I need to speak with him,” he said.

“Where’s Marissa?” Angela asked. No one answered.

“That’s not going to happen, Mr. Golden. We were lucky enough to have the doctor take a phone into him. He’s too weak to talk much more. He told us what he knows.”

“Maybe you didn’t ask the right questions, Mr. Donne.”

“With all due respect, sir: give it a rest. You’re not at a press conference. This is a hospital, and they have rules
even you
have to follow. I think you should focus on getting your daughter home and managing whatever flow of information you wish to manage from there.”

Golden blinked his eyes and looked at me as if he were considering what my face would taste like. He took a moment to glance over at his daughter and Joseph sitting against the wall. When he turned back to me, he was calmer.

“You’re right, Mr. Donne. We’ve recovered Angela’s possessions from Torres’s home. I want to get her down to the Williamsburg apartment and sort things out.”

“Good idea,” I said, because it was mine. “We’ll head home now, too.”

“I wanna see Marissa,” Angela said.

“Not now, Angel,” Golden said. “Mr. Knight and Mr. Donne will see how she is and report back to us.”

“We’re not going to be able to talk with Marissa, Mr. Golden. We blew our load talking to Robby. Maybe on the ride home, Angela can explain whatever’s been going on for the past few weeks.”

Golden snorted. “As if she’d talk to me.”

I had no answer to that, so I just shrugged. Jack and Edgar had ended their phone calls simultaneously and regrouped with us.

An orderly came over to our group and held up Jack’s phone. “From Dr. Price,” he said. Jack took it, slipped it into his front pants pocket, and said, “Thanks.”

“Robby said Marissa was told by Ricky to head up here if the shit ever hit the fan,” Jack said. “That’s how they ended up at Robby’s last night. Marissa obviously knew to call Ray.”

Golden nodded. “We’re leaving, Jack.”

“Home?” Jack asked.

“Yes. Raymond suggested that you follow us down to Brooklyn, to the apartment. After last night’s events, I think that would be wise in this situation.”

“You got it, sir,” Jack said.

“Excellent.” Golden walked over to his daughter and Joseph, and explained the plan. The two got up and started walking toward the door. “We’ll be in the parking lot,” Golden said.

“Right behind you.”

The nagging question that had been bugging me since we left the hotel finally sprang forward with an intensity that made the top of my head tingle.

“Jack,” I said. “Did you give Golden Robby’s address?”

“I don’t know Robby’s address.”

“Does Angela strike you as the type of girl who’d remember how to get someplace she’d only been to once in an area she knows nothing about?”

Jack looked confused. “No, Ray. She doesn’t. Why?”

I lowered my voice. “How the hell did Joseph know where Robby lived?”

Chapter 31

ALL THREE CARS SWUNG BY A Mickey D’s drive-through—an obvious step down for Golden, but we all agreed it was best to stay in our cars—got breakfast, and were on the thruway in less than ten minutes. Jack and I were in his car, which left Edgar pouting and driving solo, but I told him that Jack and I had some things to discuss and that we’d all regroup later at The LineUp. That made him smile.

“So,” Jack said after taking a bite from his biscuit sandwich. “How do you wanna play this?”

Excellent question.

“When we get back to Williamsburg,” I began, “we need to somehow get Joseph alone, away from Golden and the girl.”

“Then what?”

“First thing, we get him to tell us how he knew where Robby’s house was.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“That depends on his first answer, I guess.”

I took a bite from my sandwich and thought back to a week ago, when Jack and I were reunited and sharing breakfast from Christina’s instead of McDonald’s.
I didn’t feel twenty thousand dollars richer.
I remembered also that I hadn’t called Allison back. I took care of that after another sip of coffee.

“So you’re on your way home?” she asked. “Jesus, Ray, you didn’t come home last night, and you didn’t call to say your place was safe. I didn’t know what to think.”

I thought about going into some of the last twelve hours’ events with her. On the phone. In front of Jack. Instead, I ignored the point. “Should be back by eleven,” I said cheerily.

“You’re not telling me something, Ray. I can hear it in your voice, and I don’t like it.”

“I’ll explain when I get back, Ally. Trust me on this.”

She made me wait ten seconds before she spoke again.

“My place, right? Your place still isn’t safe, is it?” she asked.

“Yeah. Your place.”

“I can get out of here by five, five thirty.”

“Great,” I said. “See you then.”

After I’d hung up, Jack gave me one of those grins.

“You live a full life, Ray,” he said. “A full life.”

I closed my eyes, reclined my seat, and enjoyed the jealousy in Jack’s voice.

*   *   *

Joseph and Jack parked side by side in the lot behind Golden’s condo. Edgar had been directed to park on the street and told to wait. The five of us entered the building through the back door and were greeted by a different doorman than the one Jimmy Key and I had met a few days earlier.

“Afternoon, Mr. Golden,” the doorman said as he came out from behind the desk. “Any packages with you today?”

Golden held up his hand, stopping the doorman. “No, thank you. We’ll be fine.” He pressed the elevator button, and we all made a protective circle around Angela. The doorman went back to his desk—apparently unaware that the brunette girl was Golden’s missing daughter. The elevator opened and we stepped in. Joseph pressed the button for the fourteenth floor and turned his back to us.

I gave Jack a look and he gave me an almost imperceptible nod. As casually as I could, I stepped in front of Golden; Jack did the same with Angela. I figured we had about ten seconds to the fourteenth floor if the trip was nonstop. It was. When the door opened, Jack put both hands on Joseph and pushed him out. I turned, grabbed the Goldens, and said, “Go back down to the lobby.”

“What the hell?” Golden yelled.

I heard Jack struggling behind me. “Just do it!” I shouted at the Goldens and backed out just as the elevator door shut. Jack was wrestling with Joseph. Joseph was twisting and turning, trying to get Jack into a headlock. I stepped over to them and, with all my might—and all the frustration of the past week—punched Joseph in the face. It hurt my hand like hell, but it did the job. Jack was able to sweep a stunned Joseph’s legs out from under him, wrestle him to the floor, roll him over, then pin Joseph’s arms to his sides by sitting on top of him. Now Jack had his gun out and held it against Joseph’s head. I lifted Joseph’s pants leg and removed a Smith & Wesson from his ankle holster.

“How the fuck did you know where Robby Torres lived?” Jack yelled, inches away from Joseph’s face.

“I don’t know what—”

Jack smacked him in the head with his gun. He looked like he was going to do it again, so I put my hand on Jack’s shoulder to remind him we needed Joseph able to talk.

“How did you know?” Jack repeated.

There was blood coming out of Joseph’s nose and mouth, making it hard for him to talk. He turned his head and spit some blood onto the carpet.

“You can tell
us,
” I said, “or you can tell the cops. And Blake.”

Either way, he was telling the cops. I just wanted the info
now
.

“The girl’s phone,” Joseph managed to say. “As soon as she turned it back on … I was able to track her and her friend. Yesterday.”

“So you went up there to get Angela,” Jack said. “Why the fuck’d you have to shoot Robby?”

Joseph coughed and again spit up some blood. “He pulled on me,” he said. “I just wanted to know where the girls were. He told me they were hiding in the shed and … we went through the backyard. He goes to open the door … and, I’m like, ‘What the
hell
? The girls are hiding in a locked shed?!’ He opens the shed and says, ‘Here they are.’ I went to step inside, and that’s when he took out his piece.”

Jack smacked Joseph’s head, with his palm this time. “So you shot him. He’s a kid. A fucking English major, for Christ’s sake. You’re trained for this shit.”

“That’s why,” Joseph said between heavy breaths, “I shot him in the shoulder. I grabbed his gun and ditched it. I wasn’t looking to kill no one. I went up there to get Mr. G’s kid and bring her back to the city.”

Jack and I looked at each other.

“The city?” I said. “Not Long Island, to her parents?”

Joseph thought about that and said, “I knew about this place. I’ve been here before with Mr. Blake, when he needed some time away from the missus.” He looked at me. “You saw the way she can get.”

I nodded, remembering Mrs. Blake’s raucous laughter at the gala, which I personally found infectious, not threatening. I looked Joseph in the eyes and decided that, even with a gun pointed at him and blood coming out of his face, he was holding something back—telling us everything we asked, but not everything he knew.

“So,” I said, “you called nine-one-one and then what?”

“I got a first aid kit in my car,” he said. “Not one of those shitty drugstore ones. A real one. I figured I had some time to stabilize the kid and get the hell out of there before the cops came.”

“You’re a fucking boy scout, you are,” Jack said. “So you get all the way back down to the city, and then what? Golden calls you? You work for Blake.”

“I work for whoever Mr. Blake tells me to. Mr. G calls me, says he needs me to do some driving? I do some driving. Spent half the goddamned day making round trips to Albany. Thought I’d come back with fifty thousand bucks worth of kid, but it didn’t work out that way, did it?” He looked up at Jack’s gun. “You mind now? You got me, don’t you?”

“I feel better this way,” Jack said, keeping the gun on Joseph, but rolling onto the carpet. “You look around in the shed?”

“Why the hell would I do that?” Joseph asked. “I had to get the hell out of there, and I saw the girls weren’t in there.”

“No,” I said. “But something else was.”

He blinked. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Which girl’s phone did you track?” I asked.

“Whatta you mean?” Joseph said. “The daughter’s.”

That’s what he was holding back.

“Golden ever tell you he had a tracker on his daughter’s phone, Jack?”

Jack gave that five seconds of thought. “Nope. He did not. You think that would’ve come up in conversation, what with all the money he was paying me to find her.” Jack stood up, looked down at Joseph, and touched the gun to his head again. “You tracked Marissa’s phone, you son of a bitch.”

“How the hell—” He stopped when Jack pressed the gun harder to his temple. “Okay,” he said. “I tracked the Spanish girl’s phone.”

“How’d you get her number?” I asked.