the 13th Hour (24 page)

"Did you ever hear of the concept of the perception of value?"

"No," Nick shook his head.

"If I were to hold a box in my hand that I would desperately not part with, you would be curious about its contents. If I wouldn't sell it to you for a million dollars you would have confirmation of its value. But that value may be only personal. Maybe it's my father's ashes in the box. Mere dust that would float away on the wind. Worth nothing to you. But to me . . . its all that I have left of my father. It's priceless."

Dreyfus turned away from Nick. He reached into his pocket, fumbled around, jingling his change for something, and then turned back.

He held out his two hands, one clinched in a fist, the other, palm up, with a quarter resting in its center.

"Look at my hands," Dreyfus said. "Choose one but only one."

Nick looked at the quarter, then at Dreyfus's closed hand, and quickly touched it.

"That is what nine out of ten people do. They choose the mystery. Why?" he asked rhetorically. "For a host of reasons. To learn what is there, always thinking the unknown is more valuable than the known.

"How many people live in the moment? A few? How many people live for tomorrow at the sacrifice of today?" Dreyfus opened his fist to reveal it to be empty. ". . . When tomorrow is never a guarantee."

Dreyfus's words hit Nick hard as he thought of Julia, as he realized they were always looking toward the future at the expense of the moment.

"That is the box. That is why my brother is dead, that is why they will kill me if I don't help them find it. Your wife will be killed to cover their tracks. And they don't even know yet what it contains."

"Dance had a trunk full of gold and yet would trade it for this box, and he has no idea what's in it?"

"The whole thing went bad. Dance and his men were going for the antiques and the diamonds, which would have made them very happy. Then they saw the box. Not knowing what it was, and seeing my brother wanting it so badly, they thought its worth far exceeded what they were taking and thought they were being ripped off. Paid cheap for their help."

"All over a box?"

"We all have a special box, something we hold dear. Something we dare not part with for any price. Yours is your wife, mine is my children. Shamus Hennicot's was in a box; it weighed twenty-five pounds and was passed down from father to son to son. It was said to contain their philosophy, their family secrets." Dreyfus took a deep breath. "We cling to our hearts, to what warms them, to what gives us hope, to things we can look upon and know the world will someday be okay again."

"What could weigh twenty-five pounds and be held most dear?" Nick asked.

"Curiosity is infectious, isn't it? You haven't even seen the box and you want to know what's in it."

"Do you know what's in the box?" Nick asked.

Dreyfus smiled a knowing smile. "You didn't think this whole thing was about a handful of diamonds and some old swords, did you?"

T
HE REAR DOOR
of the Taurus was open, Dance sat in the backseat, his hands cuffed, barely able to contain his anger.

The young National Guardsman stood outside the car, his M-16 in one hand, his cell phone in the other pressed to his ear, waiting for his superior officer to answer.

Dance's mind was working on overtime, looking about, weighing his options before a contingent of weekend warriors came to haul him away. He hadn't come this far to fail.

Dance looked at his missing ring finger: They called it a down payment on his life.

No one knew it, but he had until midnight tonight or he would be dead. And that just didn't fit into his schedule.

Dance had moonlighted on many jobs that were contrary to his profession. The sixty-thousand-dollar salary of a detective wasn't enough to live on, not in Westchester, among the wealthy who looked to the police for protection but treated them as second-class citizens.

Little jobs supplemented his income--the thefts here and there, the shakedown and blackmailing of the young drug dealers, the kids whose millionaire parents would disown them if they knew what Biff and Muffy were selling to fourteen-year-olds.

Dance had robbed, stolen, committed arson for hire, and on two occasions, killed. Ten thousand a head, drug-related hits down county. He wrapped the bodies in nylon reinforced feed bags, wrapped them tightly in chains, and with hundred-pound iron weights strapped to the corpses, tossed them into the East River beside Manhattan. Secured tightly, they wouldn't be found for years, if at all.

No one was wise to his dealings except for Shannon, who knew better than to talk, and Horace Randall, his mentor, who was three months from retirement. Goods were quickly fenced, evidence never found, and if legal suspicions arose, he would use his police knowledge to direct investigations in another direction.

But not all jobs went smoothly.

Fourteen months ago, he had been running a small crew of punks, teens he had arrested and blackmailed into working for him in order to avoid jail.

Two of them had hijacked a panel trunk filled with computers on East Tremont in the Bronx and had driven it to a warehouse in Yonkers where Dance was waiting. The buyer of the stolen notebooks and high-end desktop models paid him forty thousand in cash, five of which he gave to the two teens, ensuring their silence and loyalty until the next job.

A week later the two punks were found dead in an alley, shot through the head, execution style.

The following day, two wide-shouldered enforcers grabbed Dance as he exited his car in the driveway of his two-family house and drove him to a machine shop in Flatbush where they tied him to a heavy wooden chair.

He sat there in the darkened shop for three hours under the silent gaze of the two enforcers before he heard someone enter.

"You stole my truck." The heavily accented voice came from behind him.

Dance sat still, staring straight ahead. He didn't need to see the man, he knew his voice.

"You of all people should know better." The short, black haired man circled Dance's chair, finally stopping in front of him and leaning down into his face. "Now children are dead."

The Albanian had a dead left eye and a horrific scar running down his cheek, an appearance that struck fear into his victims, particularly at night. Ghestov Rukaj was one of the new wave of Eastern European crime lords who preferred using the tactics of terror to control his territories and victims, and did not understand honor or the old Cosa Nostra ways of criminals.

"Wasn't your truck." Dance glared into Rukaj's one good eye.

"I had scoped it out, it was in my territory, my two associates here were just about to grab it when your
children
beat us to the punch."

"Do you have any idea the line you have crossed or what will happen to you? I'm a police officer."

"Do you have an idea what will happen to you, Mr. Police Officer? I didn't realize the law was in the business of stealing and fencing goods."

At a nod from Rukaj, the two granitelike men stepped forward and stood on either side of Dance. Each took hold of a shoulder, and they pressed him down into the seat. Each grabbed a wrist and pressed it to the wooden armrests.

Rukaj sat on the table in front of Dance, reached into his pocket, and withdrew a large switchblade, flicking it open.

"There is a price for the life we have chosen to lead." Rukaj ran his finger down his left eye and trailed it along the thick scar on his cheek. "Our egos, our invincibility, sometimes need a reality check."

Rukaj laid the blade against the second knuckle of Dance's right ring finger.

"Do you have one million dollars, Mr. Policeman?"

Dance remained silent, his face impossible to read, though sweat had begun to appear on his brow.

"You cost me fifty thousand dollars and I would like it back, plus damages. You have access to drug money, to drugs, stolen merchandise," Rukaj said with his slithering accent. "This is not a question."

Dance's eyes were on fire as he stared defiantly at Rukaj.

Without another word or a dramatic pause, Rukaj pressed all his weight onto the blade, severing Dance's finger with a single slice.

Dance's head snapped back in agony and he roared in pain.

"It's okay to scream, there is no shame. I promise to tell no one."

Rukaj wiped the blood-soaked blade on Dance's pants, folded it back up, and tucked it into his pocket.

"You are a valuable man, Ethan Dance, so I will trade you one million dollars for your life. Now before you get all nervous, I'll give you one year. That will give you time to find the right situation to take advantage of. Pay in installments or in one lump sum, whichever you prefer.

"Consider this"--Rukaj held up his severed finger--"a down payment."

It had been fourteen months. Dance heard from Rukaj daily now, reminding him that there would be no more extensions, no more leeway. "Time is up. Time to pay or time to die," Rukaj said every morning.

Now, as Dance sat as a prisoner in his own car, with its trunk full of antiques and diamonds--a fraction of which would pay for his life--he was filled with an anger and rage such as he had never known. He had been betrayed by Sam Dreyfus, who had run off with a box of untold value, he had been arrested by a nine-to-five soldier, and someone else was looking forward to removing the rest of his body parts.

Dance glared at the young private who was playing policeman, who would go back to his real job come Monday and talk about how he arrested a dirty cop and recovered--

"Hello, Colonel?" McManus said into his cell phone, turning his back to Dance as his superior finally came on the line.

Dance leaped out of the open door of the Taurus, threw his hands over the unsuspecting McManus, and violently pulled his cuffed wrists back, crushing McManus's trachea.

McManus dropped his cell phone and released his hold on his M-16, his hands going straight to his throat. He had been trained in combat, trained with a rifle, but as a National Guardsman, he had never seen or tasted anything close to war. The young private had never even been in a bar fight.

Dance leaned back with all of his two-hundred-pound weight, grinding the handcuff chain into McManus's broken throat, driving the broken cartilage of his trachea into the soft inner flesh of his windpipe while cutting off the flow of blood to his brain. He fell back into the Taurus, pulling McManus off his feet and into the car with him, the young man's arms desperately tugging at the chain about his neck, legs flailing, seeking purchase, as a wet gurgling sound of death escaped his now-blue lips.

McManus's struggle finally abated, his arms falling limp. A spastic twitch began in his right leg.

And he died.

On the side of the road that led to a disaster, Private Neil McManus became the 213th death at Sullivan Field.

Dance reached into the dead private's pocket, pulled out the cuff keys, and freed himself.

He threw the dead body into his backseat so as not to draw attention, pulled the jack and spare from his trunk, and changed his tire as if he were on pit-crew time. Two minutes later he picked up McManus's M-16 and his cell phone and threw them into the car. He hopped in the front of his unmarked police car, started up the engine, and peeled out, leaving the jack and the wheel in the middle of the road. He'd dump McManus's body in the reservoir when he had time, but for the moment, there were more pressing matters.

Before he hit sixty miles per hour, he flipped down the keyboard on his police computer and punched in the license plate he had memorized. The owner of the Blue Audi A8 popped up. Nicholas Quinn, 5 Townsend Court, Byram Hills. The picture was a spot-on match to the man who had just run out of the woods to stop him, who had cuffed him and left him to be hauled off to jail. The man who somehow knew the exact contents of his trunk.

He looked down at the address on the Post-it stuck to his dash, the address for Hennicot's attorney, whose offices contained the security video, who had probably viewed it.

Dance had already spoken to her. He had already gained the trust of Nicholas Quinn's wife.

* * *

N
ICK DROVE DOWN
Route 22. As he headed onto the overpass of Interstate 684, he saw the uninterrupted flow of traffic below. It was like another world, cars filling the roads, people chatting within their vehicles, unaware of the disaster just a mile off the highway. It was as if Byram Hills were a dead town, under quarantine, the disaster already pushed from the minds of the world beyond.

Nick continued into the vacant town and pulled into the empty parking lot of Valhalla, his friend's restaurant.

"You sure you don't want to go to the hospital?" Nick asked, as put the car in park.

"I'm fine," Dreyfus said. "I've gotten more banged up from hits in a flag football game."