Eyes of the Innocent

CHAPTER 8

There is something about the female scream that juices my body chemistry. Probably it’s hardwired, a remnant of the days when my more hirsute forebearers clung together in nomadic bands wandering an inhospitable planet. Back then, a woman’s scream meant someone was about to be sabertooth tiger lunch. Or something like that. Whatever it was, I suddenly found myself wired on adrenaline, with my heart pounding and my body primed for large-motor activity.

My hands were shaking, but I managed to force my fingers to call Sweet Thang back, on the off chance it was nothing-like a big spider scared her and made her drop her phone.

But my call went straight to voice mail and, besides, I knew this wasn’t arachnid related. Sweet Thang had made that kind of noise when Akilah jumped her and put a knife to her throat. It was an I’m-in-trouble-come-help-me-now-don’t-dawdle-please kind of scream.

I pulled a screeching U-turn, the kind that involved jumping a curb because the road just wasn’t wide enough, and sped toward Akilah’s house. As I blew through a series of red lights-I thought they were orange, Officer-I called my favorite detective sergeant, in hopes of getting some reinforcement.

“Raines here.”

“I think Akilah Harris knows who killed Windy,” I said. “And I think the killer is after her.”

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, slow down. What happened?”

I relayed what Sweet Thang told me about Akilah knowing more than she let on, then told him about the scream.

Raines was unimpressed.

“All you really know for sure is that your colleague’s cell phone doesn’t work,” he said.

“Come on, you’ve got two young women in trouble, probably kidnapped or worse,” I said, feeling a little frantic that I couldn’t impress on him the gravity of that scream. “Can’t you put out an amber alert or something?”

“I can’t put out an amber alert because someone yelled just before her cell phone battery conked out,” Raines replied. “We would need confirmation an abduction had occurred. And besides, amber alerts are for kids, not adults.”

I knew that, of course. I also knew, thinking as a levelheaded cop-and not an easily addled newspaper reporter-he was right: I had a strong hunch something was wrong, but little more than that.

“If you can get a witness to say they saw a forcible abduction, we’ve got a different scenario on our hands,” Raines continued. “Otherwise, you got nothing.”

“Can you at least ask a squad car to meet me at the house? Something?” I begged. “For all I know, it’s a hostage situation and they’re still holed up inside.”

“Fine,” Raines said. “I’ll ask patrol to send a car over. But I’m a little busy, you know? I got a pretty major investigation here, and I’m going to have to ask you to lose this number if you keep bothering me with half-baked hunches.”

He hung up before I could reply.

Continuing to drive as if traffic signals were mere suggestions, I contemplated my next move, concluding quickly I didn’t have one. I couldn’t exactly charge into Akilah’s house, guns blazing. Not when the the most dangerous weapon I had in my car was nail clippers.

Thankfully, I arrived at Akilah’s simultaneously with a white and black Newark patrol car. Two cops, a tall black man and a short Hispanic woman, got out. I waved to them.

“We were told we got a possible DV,” the guy said. “You the one who called it in?”

DV. What’s DV? Oh, right: domestic violence. Why would Raines tell them it’s a domestic violence?

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said. “I was talking to a colleague of mine on the phone and I heard her scream like she was in real trouble.”

I could tell the guy thought I was wasting his time and was doing his best to suppress an eye roll.

“And she’s in there!” the female cop said, pointing to Akilah’s burned-out shell of a house which, admittedly, didn’t look very domestic at the moment.

“Yeah,” I said. “Her name is Lauren. There’s a woman with her named Akilah.”

“What’s the guy’s name?” the male cop asked.

“I, uh, I don’t know.”

More barely restrained eye-rolling.

“All right,” he said, then turned to his partner. “We’ll check it out. You stay here.”

The cops walked up to the front door-or, rather, the hole where it used to be-and entered. I braced myself for the sound of gunshots, or another scream, or something. But the cops came out two minutes later. The guy looked perturbed.

“There’s no one there,” he hollered from the top of the porch. “You sure they were in that place?”

I was about to answer when I was interrupted by a lady standing on the stoop of a three-family house two doors down.

“They left,” she said, in an African accent. She had a brightly colored shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and I could guess from the slippers on her feet she didn’t want to leave her spot. The male cop took the lead and walked toward her.

“Who left, ma’am?”

“Two women, three guys,” she said. “They got in a black car and drove away.”

I felt the adrenaline rush renew itself.

“See? They were kidnapped,” I said in a voice that sounded more like yelling than I wanted.

The male cop shot me an annoyed look that said, Shut it.

“Could you please describe the women?” he asked.

“One was a pretty white girl, blond hair. The other was small, dark. She was pretty, too, but she looked like a mess. I had seen her before. She lives in that house, but I don’t know her.”

“Now what about the men?” he asked.

“I didn’t look that hard.”

“Did it look like they were being forced into the car?” the cop asked.

She thought for a moment

“Maybe. Maybe not. The little dark one was crying. But they walked to the car and got inside.”

Something unintelligible squawked on the cop’s radio, which he had attached to his belt. Whatever it was, he was suddenly in a hurry to leave.

“All right. Thank you, ma’am. You can go back inside.”

The cop started walking toward his patrol car.

“What!” I said. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”

“You heard her. She said they weren’t abducted.”

“She said she wasn’t sure. There’s a difference.”

I panned my eyes toward the female cop, just to see if there was a chance I’d be able to prevail on her softer, female side … except, apparently, she wasn’t into that stereotype. She seemed more concerned her hat wasn’t sitting straight as she walked toward the squad car and paid little heed to my discussion with her partner.

“She said one of the women was crying,” I pleaded. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“My wife cries all the time,” he replied as he got back into his car. “I’m sorry, sir, we have to go.”

As he pulled away, the shriek of the tires on the pavement made it all the more emphatic: the police were not going to help me on this one.

Better sharpen those nail clippers.

* * *

Not to denigrate Officer Friendly’s interrogation techniques, but I felt there was a little more to be learned from our eyewitness, so I jogged up to the African woman’s house, climbing the steps to her sagging front porch. There were three doorbells. I rang all three.

A window to my left cracked open.

“Yes?” a voice asked. It was the African woman.

“I’m Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions about what you just saw?”

“Hold on,” she said. Soon, she was standing with the front door slightly ajar. She didn’t ask me in, which was fine. I didn’t have time for hospitality.

“Yes?” she said again.

“I’m worried those two women may be in trouble,” I said. “Can you tell me a bit more about the men you saw them with?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get a good look.”

“Please try.”

She closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment.

“Well, two of them were large. They were young,” she said. “The other was old. He wasn’t very tall, but he looked like he had muscles, like a weight lifter.”

She paused.

“He had a beard, a, what do you call it,” she said, opening her eyes and drawing a circle around her mouth with her finger. “A goatee.”

Short. Built. Goatee. It seemed like a description I had heard before.

“Racially, was he white, black?”

“I would say … Hispanic.”

“And how would you describe his hair?” I asked.

“He didn’t have any. His head was shaved.”

That cinched it for me. Akilah and Sweet Thang had been kidnapped by the so-called Puerto Rican man, the one Akilah said sold the mortgage on her house. I had dismissed him as being a product of her imagination, just another piece of her intricate fabrication. But really he was like everything else in Akilah’s world: twisted slightly, for storytelling purposes, but basically real.

It also fit the rough description of the man who had returned Windy’s corpse at Enterprise-Donato Semedo, or whatever his name was-whom Raines had described as short and broad.

“How long ago did they leave?” I asked.

“About ten minutes ago,” she said.

In other words, right after I heard Sweet Thang’s scream. He probably marched them right out of the house. It was a bold move-a kidnapping in broad daylight-but I supposed if Akilah knew something about the murder of Windy Byers, the killer would take some big risks to be rid of her.

And anyone who happened to be with her.

“And you said the car was black?”

“Yes, long and black. Like the cars the men drive to pick people up at the airport.”

“A livery cab?”

“Yes, a livery cab.”

“Thank you, ma’am, you’ve been very helpful,” I said, slipping my card through the door opening. “Please call me if you think of anything else.”

I trotted back to my Malibu, wondering how I could track down a single black livery cab in a city where ten thousand of them came to pick people up at the airport every day.

I had no shot.

At this point, my only connection to the Puerto Rican man was Hector Gomes of Van Buren Street. I had to get to him, fast, with what resources I had.

I made two phone calls. The first was to Denardo Webster. My picture was helpful, but he was the only one who really knew what Gomes looked like. I told Webster about the abduction and instructed him to meet me at Gomes’s house just as soon as he could get his feet off his desk.

My second call was to Tommy, who would be helpful if there was, in fact, a language barrier to surmount.

“Hey, can I pick you up outside the office in five minutes?” I said. “I think Sweet Thang is in real trouble, and I may need your Spanish or maybe even some fake Portuguese.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ve been figuring out some real interesting stuff with these dead donors, by the way.”

“Great. You can tell me on the way.”

Once again, I made the Malibu do things the good people at Chevrolet never intended, which might have bought me an extra minute or two. I jammed the brakes to noisy effect directly outside the building, where Tommy was waiting.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he climbed in.

As I tore off toward the Ironbound, I told him about Sweet Thang’s bone-chilling scream, my inability to convince the authorities to take it seriously, and the existence of the so-called Puerto Rican man.

“I think I know who he is,” Tommy said. “But he’s not Puerto Rican. I think he’s Brazilian.”

“Tell me more.”

“Remember how you asked me to check out all the dead donors and see if maybe there was something they had in common?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I was looking at the names for a while, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. They were just a bunch of dead guys who lived in the Ironbound and they … Red light, red light, red light.”

I looked up and saw, sure enough, a traffic light. And it was red.

“Sorry,” I said, wearing off a layer of brakepad but managing to get the car stopped just a foot or so over the line.

“No problem. Anyhow, after a while I stopped looking at the names and honed in on the addresses instead. You know, like maybe there was a pattern there?”

“Okay,” I said, gunning the car as soon as the light turned.

“And it turned out there was,” Tommy continued. “All of the houses had been flipped.”

“Flipped?”

“Yeah, you know, bought for a low price, rehabbed, then sold…”

“I know what flipping is,” I said.

“Sorry. Anyhow, once I caught onto the pattern, it was pretty easy to see. Basically, after all these old people died, their houses had been bought by an LLC-that stands for ‘limited liability company,’ by the way.”

“I know what-”

“I know, I know, sorry. I just didn’t know what any of this stuff was before I started covering it. Anyway, it’s all these different LLCs, never the same one twice, buying these houses and flipping them for, like, twice the original price or more six months later.”

“Okay,” I said as we passed under the railroad tracks by Newark Penn Station. “So, to play devil’s advocate, who’s to say these LLCs have anything to do with one another?”

“Well, they don’t appear to, except I recognized one of the names: Bahia Partners LLC,” Tommy said. “I remembered from a council meeting I covered not long ago where they were voting on selling some city land to Bahia Group LLC. Then I started looking through the council minutes from the last few years-our library has them on file-and I started seeing a few other land-buying LLCs that turned out to have very similar names to LLCs that had flipped properties. There was, like, Amazonas Associates LLC and Amazonas Company LLC, Esperito Santo Investments LLC and Esperito Santo Financial LLC…”

“I get it, I get it,” I said. “Someone got tired of thinking up new names so they just started recycling the old ones with a small twist on them.”

“Yeah, and it turns out they’re all names of states in Brazil,” Tommy said. “And you’ll never guess who was always proposing the land sales to those particular LLCs.”

“Oh, but let me try,” I said. “Councilman Wendell A. Byers.”

“Very good,” Tommy said. “You’re pretty smart for a guy who thinks khaki is the new black.”

* * *

I had to slow down once we crossed into the Ironbound and onto Ferry Street, the only road in Newark that is reliably crowded at just about any hour of the day.

As we crept along, I assembled the narrative in my head. A house flipper who wanted to get into new home construction knew it would be handy to have a city councilman in his pocket. So he started using the names of dead people to make campaign donations well above and beyond the legal limit. In return, the councilman supports the developer in making city land purchases, likely at generous rates.

It sounded like your garden variety Garden State corruption. So where did that cozy little relationship go wrong?

I couldn’t figure it out. Or, more accurately, I didn’t have the time to give it proper thought. Having passed Monroe, Madison, and several other dead presidents, I finally made it to Van Buren Street. It was one way, the wrong way, so I had to hook around on Polk. He was a better president anyway.

Finally I reached the address, which belonged to a small, wooden-framed, single-family house with no apparent sign of activity.

“Okay,” Tommy said. “What now?”

“Well,” I said. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“Damn. Me, either.”

I looked around for an aging white Datsun and saw it parked down the street, which wasn’t especially surprising. If this guy really was a contractor of some sort, he probably shouldn’t be real busy late in the afternoon on a raw day in February.

Another car pulled onto the block and I recognized it as a city-owned SUV.

“Let’s go,” I said. “That’s Denardo Webster, Windy’s chief of staff.”

“And down low lover?” Tommy asked.

“One and the same.”

I got out of my car and hailed Denardo, who pulled alongside with his window down.

“Okay, here’s the deal: this is the Spanish dude’s house,” I said, pointing across the street. “We need to figure out who his boss is. Then we need to figure out where the the boss is. And we need to figure it out fast.”

“And you’re thinking the Spanish dude’s boss is the guy that killed Windy?” Denardo said.

“I am.”

“All right,” Denardo said. “Just do me a favor: when we find this bastard, I want a few minutes alone with him to explain my grief over losing my friend.”

He could have all year, as far as I was concerned.

“No problem,” I said.

Denardo parked in front of us. He grabbed a city council badge off the dashboard-what was he going to do with that? Table some resolutions? Recommend further study? — and joined Tommy and me.

As we crossed the street to confront an unwitting Hector Gomes, I wondered what we must have looked like to an outsider. There was me, the whitest man in Newark; Denardo, the black man-mountain; and Tommy, a scrawny, nattily dressed Cuban kid.

What an odd trio. Yet here we were, the best and perhaps last hope Sweet Thang and Akilah had at making it to tomorrow.

We reached the front door, and as I considered the etiquette of knocking versus ringing, Denardo lowered his shoulder and barreled into it, grunting as his three hundred-plus pounds connected and splintered the wood around the lock.

“Cheap door,” Denardo said as it gave way. “That’s the problem with these house flippers. They don’t build stuff to last.”

Tommy and I followed Denardo as he stormed into the living room, where we found a slightly built Hispanic man dressed in a thin white T-shirt, frantically pulling up his boxer shorts.

“Police,” Denardo shouted, waving his city council badge. “Let’s see those hands.”

The hands shot into the air, and as we all took in the scene before us-the open porno magazine, the box of tissues, the small tent he was pitching in his shorts-we all quickly reached the same conclusion: Hector Gomes had been fondling his love monkey.

“Oh, that’s just unfortunate,” Tommy said.

“Would you look at this little pervert?” Denardo said. “I mean, what’s this?”

Denardo picked up the magazine, which had been bestowed with the very subtle title ?Gigante Tetas! As advertised, it featured some women whose breasts appeared to have been significantly aided by science. Denardo waved the magazine above his head as if it was evidence of the most heinous turpitude.

“This violates morals laws! There are codes and statutes-you’re breaking the Public Decency Act!”

There was no such thing, of course. And if any lawmaking body tried to render illegal what Gomes had been doing, it would have to first build some pretty big jails, because every guy in America would need to be locked up. But this was not a moment to split legal hairs.

“I ought to take you downtown right now,” Denardo continued. “Hell, I ought to take you to immigration services. You know they’ll revoke your green card for this!”

His erection fast subsiding, Gomes looked miserable. I almost felt bad for the guy. We had just interrupted the best part of his day. But I could also see where Denardo was heading with this, and given the stakes, I wasn’t going to stop him.

“But it happens to be your lucky day,” Denardo said. “Because we ain’t here to bust perverts. We need some information. You think you can play ball with us?”

Tommy couldn’t help himself: “Oh, I think it’s pretty clear he can play ball.”

I brought my hand to my face so Gomes couldn’t see the smile. Denardo didn’t let it break his momentum. He put one foot on the couch and lowered his face until he was a few inches away from Gomes, who weighed roughly one third of a Denardo. I don’t know if Gomes was intimidated. But I was intimidated for him.

“Now, you know who I am, yes?” Denardo said quietly.

Gomes, his hands still in the air, nodded. Obviously, he would have recognized Denardo from the numerous times he had run errands to the Springfield Avenue office.

“And you know who I work for, right?”

Gomes nodded again.

“Okay, now I want to know who you work for. I want to know where all that money you’ve been giving me has been coming from.”

Gomes looked at me, then at Tommy, then cast a forlorn glance at ?Gigante Tetas! But none of us were going to help him with his dilemma. His boss was obviously a bad dude, a man who would not react kindly to an employee’s betrayal; and yet here was this crazed, neckless black man in front of him, spouting off about green cards and other topics that tended to get immigrants, even legal ones, very nervous. Gomes knew he was going have to piss off one of these men. So which one?

But ultimately one threat was only theoretical while the other was directly in front of him, huffing fried chicken breath into his face. Besides, Gomes had been caught, quite literally, with his pants down. He had no will to fight. This was surrender.

He slowly let his hands sink to his sides and then whispered just one word:

“Primo.”

* * *

He said the name reverently, as if we would know instantly who he was talking about. But Tommy, Denardo, and I just stared at each other stupidly.

Denardo recovered first.

“Who’s Primo?” he demanded.

“That’s what everyone call him,” Gomes said, with the medium-heavy accent of someone who started speaking English sometime after adolescence. “I don’t know his real name. No one know his real name.”

“In Spanish, primo means ‘cousin,’ ” Tommy interjected. “But it can also be a nickname, sort of like ‘Buddy.’ I’m sure it’s the same in Portuguese.”

“Well, whatever, he ain’t no buddy of mine,” Denardo said, then turned back to Gomes. “If you don’t know his name, how do he give you a paycheck?”

“Cash,” Gomes said. “Everything is cash with Primo. I always gave you cash. Primo do cash with everyone.”

“So, what, you ran errands for him?” I asked.

“I’m an electrician,” Gomes said, with a small hint of pride. “But sometime he ask me to do things. Primo ask you to do things, you do them.”

“What, he threatens people or something?”

“He don’t have to,” Gomes said. “One time a man try to cheat him on some lumber. He end up floating in the river with three nails in his head. Primo say nothing. But everyone know who kill him.”

I immediately thought of Windy Byers rolled up in that car, nails sticking out of his body at odd angles. In my imagination, he had a look of horror on his face, like he could still feel those stainless steel spikes in his brain.

Then I thought of Sweet Thang. I’m sure she told this lunatic she was a reporter. Everyone knows you don’t just kill newspaper reporters, right? It makes for bad publicity.

Then again, you don’t just kill a city councilman, either.

“Didn’t anyone report him to the police?” Tommy asked.

“No one want to mess with Primo,” Gomes said. “I should no be talking to you. I am as good as dead now. I will have to go somewhere and hope Primo never find me.”

“You won’t have to if we can get to him quickly,” I said. “He didn’t kill a lumber thief this time. He killed a city councilman. There are going to be people who make sure he goes to jail a long time for that. We just need to find him.”

Gomes lit up.

“He has an office no far from here,” he said. “He do all his business there. Sometime I think he live there. I give you directions.”

“Hell no,” Denardo said. “You’re coming with us.”

Gomes acquiesced meekly. He went to grab his pants, which were crumpled on the floor next to the couch, but Denardo put out an arm bar.

“Oh, no, you’re coming like that. I don’t want you running off.”

If Gomes complained, I probably would have let the man have his pants-his dignity had suffered enough for one day. But he just accepted the order. I got the sense the guy was actually happy to be on our side. It didn’t sound like Primo was exactly a joy to work for. Guys like that tend not to take classes on enlightened management.

“Let’s move it,” I said. “We might not have much time.”

If we were the odd trio coming in, we were now the ridiculous quartet: the whitest WASP in Newark, the black man-mountain, the queer Cuban, and an electrician in his boxer shorts.

Gomes hopped in Denardo’s SUV while Tommy and I followed in the Malibu. As we turned back on Ferry Street, heading away from downtown, I saw Denardo’s beefy hand shoot out the driver’s side window and stick a flashing light atop his SUV. Then he hit the siren-no doubt installed for all those pressing city council emergencies-and we were soon zooming down the road’s middle stripe as traffic swerved out of our way.

We veered off Ferry Street onto Wilson Avenue, zipping through an industrial part of town, underneath Routes 1 and 9 and the New Jersey Turnpike, over potholes large enough to jar loose dental fixtures. We took a tire-screaming left at Avenue P, passing the off-airport Enterprise rental car location where the mysterious Donato Semedo-perhaps aka. Primo-had dumped Windy.

At some point, Denardo silenced his siren, though we were still cruising at speeds that would have put us in good company among the Avenue P drag racers. Then he jammed the brakes and turned down a small dirt side street that may or may not have been marked-I was too intent on tailing him to notice.

The street ran along the side of a vast warehouse, the old-fashioned kind made of painted cinder block. Denardo eased to a halt just before the end of the building and pulled over to the side of it. I followed his lead and soon the four of us were joined in a small huddle between the cars.

“The office is over there,” Gomes said in a hushed voice, pointing around the corner. “It’s on the second floor. There’s a parking lot and some stairs that go up there.”

“Can Primo see the parking lot from his office?” I asked.

“Only if he’s looking,” Gomes replied.

He could only see if he was looking. Thanks, Confucius.

“So what’s the plan?” Tommy asked. All eyes were on me.

“Well…” I said, stalling to give myself time to think of something.

“You got two females in trouble,” Denardo said. “I say we bust in. If we jump on this dude quickly, he won’t know what hit him.”

“Yeah, but what if he’s armed?” Tommy asked.

“He’ll only have time to get off one shot, at most,” Denardo said. “There are four of us, so that means three of us will get through.”

I got the sense someone had watched too many action movies.

“Whoah, whoah, whoah,” I said. “This isn’t Little Bighorn. No one is charging into battle to get shot.”

Denardo and Tommy had differing reactions to this: the former disappointed, the latter relieved.

“We need to know what we’re up against first,” I said. “Let me just have a look. I’ll be right back.”

I peeked around the corner and saw a black Lincoln Town Car-the brand preferred by livery cabdrivers and short, squat goateed kidnappers everywhere.

Next to it, I could see a rickety set of metal steps that led to a second-floor office. At the top of the stairs there was a small landing, with a door that had windows on either side. The first story of the warehouse was windowless-just a long brick wall. So I crept along it, staying flush to the building to diminish the chance I could be spotted from above.

I reached the stairs and gently tiptoed up, taking the last few steps on my hands and knees so I could stay below the sightline of the windows, then crawled over to the side of the building. Leaning against the concrete, I stayed perfectly still for a few seconds, just to have a listen. But all I could hear was the wind hitting the dried stalks of grass in the nearby marshland.

Were we too late? Had Primo already done something awful and irreversible? It was possible, but there was no sense lingering on that thought. We had to push forward as if Sweet Thang and Akilah were still among the breathing.

That meant I had to take a look inside. Flattening myself against the building, I quietly eased into a standing position next to one of the windows, then turned and nudged myself, inch by tiny inch, toward the pane. I didn’t want any large movements, nothing that might make the metal grates squeak or catch the peripheral vision of someone on the inside. But slowly, achingly, I got my body in a position, and soon my right eyeball was nearing the point where I would be able to see into the office.

And then, with roughly the same volume as a jet plane taking off, my cell phone rang.

* * *

I jerked my head back and my hand flew to my pants pocket to silence the phone, but I was too slow-it let out two piercing rings before I could find the correct button.

As I withdrew my hand from my pocket, I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I braced myself for the office door to fly open and for Primo or one of his goons to come barreling out, gun first. I considered jumping off the landing-it was only one story down. But then what? It was just me and a nearly empty parking lot. I’d be target practice.

I waited, but there was no barreling. No gun. No Primo. I sank back down against the warehouse wall, thankful for soundproof doors or the wind direction or whatever it was that ensured that the county coroner wouldn’t be listing my cause of death as “Verizon Wireless LG Flip Phone.”

It took me a moment to get my nerve, then I began sliding back toward the window so I could finally have a look inside.

I’m not sure what I thought would be in there-Akilah and Sweet Thang bound and blindfolded, pleading for their lives? Primo cackling while he sharpened a comically large knife? Blood and gore everywhere? — but the first thing I saw was a battered gunmetal-gray desk, heaped with old mail, invoices, and other assorted paper. There was a Chinese restaurant calendar from 2004 taped to the wall behind the desk. A black filing cabinet had been shoved in one corner. In the other corner, a small flat-screen television sat atop a cheap entertainment center. It was sparse, and other than the TV, all the furniture looked like it had been claimed off the side of the road somewhere.

More to the point, there were no people inside, at least none that I could see. They must have been in the warehouse-and the only entrance to the warehouse I could see was inside the office.

I tried the door. Locked. Of course. And Denardo wasn’t crashing through this one-it was steel, with a metal lock guard. I focused on the windows instead. They had bars on them, but maybe if I could break through the glass, I could reach around behind the door and unlock it.

Was I capable of punching through a window? I had no idea. It wasn’t exactly a graduation requirement at Amherst. There was only one way to find out. I hiked my jacket sleeve down over my hand, made a fist, and threw a hard jab.

I connected-it helps when you’re hitting a stationary target-but I’m quite sure it hurt me more than it hurt the window. The pain shot through my hand into my wrist and I recoiled, shaking my arm until the pain stopped radiating. Then I gritted my teeth and tried again, harder. This time, the pain made it all the way to my elbow.

“Dammit,” I said.

“You sure make a lousy action hero,” Tommy said from the bottom of the stairs, where he, Denardo, and Gomes had assembled to watch my effort.

“You got a better idea?” I said, feeling my battered knuckle throbbing.

“I do,” Denardo said. He disappeared around the corner for a second, then came back wielding a large, L-shaped tire iron. He climbed the metal stairs, which rattled and groaned under his weight, then performed a quick appraisal of the window.

“You might want to stand over there,” he said, gesturing to the other side of the landing.

I did as instructed. Denardo swung the tire iron with both hands, baseball style. The glass cracked but did not break. It was thick stuff and, apparently, shatter resistant. He hit it again. And again. As the crack in the glass got marginally larger, our chances of being able to sneak up on Primo were getting rapidly smaller. But, at this point, I couldn’t think of an alternative. This was our only way in. All I could do was hope Primo didn’t hear us.

Denardo bore down on his task, getting some good licks in, grunting at the effort. My phone rang again, but I didn’t bother to look at it, nor was I as concerned about the noise. It was now but a soft tinkle compared to the racket Denardo was making.

Finally, he created a small hole in the window. From there, the rest of it came away pretty easily. He cleared away a few shards that clung to the frame, then reached around and fumbled with the door handle until it opened.

“Nice work,” I said.

Denardo, who was breathing heavily, went inside, straight to the door that led to the warehouse on the far side. He began studying it.

“This thing is for real,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d do anything but dent this one.”

My phone rang again. Again, I reached into my pocket and silenced it.

“Do you know how to pick a lock?” I asked.

“No. Do you?”

“Yeah, me and all the other kids from Millburn.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Think our pal Hector knows?”

“Even if he did, you need tools for that,” Denardo said. “That boy ain’t got nothing but boxer shorts and shriveled balls right now.”

We stared at the door a little more.

“We’re wasting time,” I said.

My phone rang again.

“Why don’t you answer that?” Denardo asked.

“It’s just the office,” I said.

“Maybe they could call a locksmith for us.”

Somehow I doubted any reputable locksmith would walk past a shattered window and pick an interior door with no questions asked. Then again, I was starting to feel desperate and didn’t have a lot of other ideas. It couldn’t hurt.

I fished my still ringing phone out of my pocket. Out of habit, I glanced at the screen before answering it, expecting it would read “Office Incoming.”

But it didn’t. The words on the screen took me a second to parse. Then I felt another one of those primal rushes of energy.

The caller was “Thang, Sweet 2.”

Primo was surprised at how resourceful Byers’s little whore had been at eluding him.

Torching the girl’s house had actually been Byers’s idea-a pointless, pathetic attempt to save his own wretched life. Byers told Primo he instructed the girl to hide the evidence in her house, in a place where no one could find it. So, it stood to reason, destroying the house would mean destroying the evidence. If it took out the girl, as well? All the better.

But the girl hadn’t been home when the fire was set. And that bothered Primo. After all, what if the girl hadn’t hidden the evidence in her house? What if she kept it on her person? What if she left it somewhere else?

It was a loose end and it kept eating at Primo. He realized he couldn’t be sure he committed the perfect crime while the girl-and possibly the evidence-was still out there. So he set about tracking her down and reeling her in. With all the information Byers had given him, it wasn’t going to be hard.

Except it was. He came back to the house the morning after the fire, but she wasn’t there. He rerented the New York thugs and instructed them to find her. But through the next day, they reported only a series of near misses. They chased her all over the city, they said. But somehow the girl managed to slip by them every time.

Finally, Primo came up with a new plan: stop chasing her. Make her think the heat was off. She would show up again at her house eventually-it was the only roof she had, even if it was burned. And when she did, they would grab her.

So Primo and his men set up surveillance near her house and waited. It took twenty-four hours before their patience paid off. The girl came back, dragging a friend. Primo took both of them-the last thing he needed was another loose end.

Soon it would all be over.