Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

Ryerson shook his head. “Nope. Informant for the OCD.” He stepped past me and lit Angie’s cigarette with a black Zippo. “My informant. I turned him. I’d worked him for six and a half years. He was going to help me bring down Cheese, and Cheese’s organization was going to be next. After that, I was going after Cheese’s supplier, guy named Ngyun Tang.” He pointed at the east wall of the garage. “Chinatown bigwig.”

“But?”

“But”—he shrugged—”Pharaoh got hisself iced.”

“And you think Broussard did it?”

“I think Broussard planned it. He didn’t kill them himself because he was too busy pretending to get shot at up in the quarry.”

“So who killed Mullen and Gutierrez?”

Ryerson looked up at the garage ceiling. “Who took the money out of the hills? Who was the first person found in the vicinity of the victims?”

“Wait a sec,” Angie said. “Poole? You think Poole was the shooter?”

Ryerson leaned against the Audi parked beside our car, took a long puff off his cigar, and blew smoke rings up into the fluorescent lights.

“Nicholas Raftopoulos. Born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, 1948. Joined Boston Police Department in 1968, shortly after returning from Vietnam, where he was awarded the Silver Star and was, surprise, an expert-class marksman. His lieutenant in the field said Corporal Raftopoulos could, and I quote, ‘shoot the asshole ring out of a tse-tse fly from fifty yards.’” He shook his head. “Those military guys—they’re so vivid.”

“And you think—”

“I think, Mr. Kenzie, that the three of us need to talk.”

I took a step back from him. He was easily six-three, and his perfectly coiffed sandy hair, his easy bearing, and the cut of his clothes spoke of a man who’d come from money. I recognized him now: He’d been the spectator sitting alone at the far end of the stands in Harvard Stadium this afternoon, long legs hooked over the guardrail as he slouched low in his seat, baseball hat down over his eyes. I could see him at Yale trying to decide between law school and a job with the government. Either career held the promise of political office once the gray had blended in just right around his temples, but if he went with the government, he’d get to carry a gun. Outstanding. Yes, sir.

“Nice meeting you, Neal.” I walked around to the driver’s door.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said he’ll kill you.”

Angie chuckled. “And you’ll save us, I suppose.”

“I’m Justice Department.” He placed a palm to his chest. “Bulletproof.”

I looked over the roof of the Crown Victoria at him. “That’s because you’re always behind the people you’re supposed to be protecting, Neal.”

“Oooh.” His hand fluttered over his chest. “Good one, Pat.”

Angie climbed in the car, and I followed. As I started the engine, Neal Ryerson rapped his knuckles on Angie’s window. She frowned and looked at me. I shrugged. She rolled the pane down slowly, and Neal Ryerson dropped to his haunches, rested one arm on her windowsill.

“I got to tell you,” he said. “I think you’re making a big mistake by not hearing me out.”

“Made ’em before,” Angie said.

He leaned back from her door and took a puff of his cigar, blew the smoke out before he leaned back in.

“When I was a kid, my daddy’d take me hunting in the mountains not far from where I grew up, place called Boone, North Carolina. And Daddy, he always told me—every trip from the time I was eight till I was eighteen—that what you had to watch out for, really watch out for, wasn’t the moose or the deer. It was the other hunters.”

“Deep,” Angie said.

He smiled. “See, Pat, Angie—”

“Don’t call him Pat,” Angie said. “He hates that.”

He held up the hand with the cigar clenched between the fingers. “All apologies, Patrick. How can I say this? The enemy is us. You understand? And ‘us’ is going to come looking for you soon.” He pointed the thin cigar at me. “‘Us’ already had words with you today, Patrick. How long before he ups the ante? He knows that even if you back off for a bit, sooner or later you’ll come around again, asking the wrong questions. Hell, that’s why you came to see Nick Raftopoulos tonight, am I right? Hoping he’d be coherent enough to answer some of your wrong questions. Now you can drive away. Can’t stop y’all. But he’ll come for you. And this’ll just get worse.”

I looked at Angie. She looked at me. Ryerson’s cigar smoke found the inside of the car and then the back of my lungs, clogged there like hair in a drain.

Angie turned back to him, waved him off the windowsill with a flick of her wrist. “The Blue Diner,” she said. “You know it?”

“Just a short six blocks away.”

“See you there,” she said, and we pulled out of our parking slot and headed for the exit ramp.

The exterior of the Blue Diner looks really cool at night. The only hint of neon fronting Kneeland Street at the base of the Leather District, a large white coffee cup hovers over its sign in a mostly commercial zone, so that the establishment appears, from the highway at least, like something straight out of Edward Hopper’s night-washed daydreams.

I’m not sure Hopper would have paid six thousand dollars for a hamburger, though. Not that the Blue Diner charges quite that much, but it’s in the ballpark. I’ve bought cars for less than I’ve paid for a cup of their coffee.

Neal Ryerson assured us the tab was on the Justice Department, so we splurged on coffee and a couple of Cokes. I would have ordered a hamburger, but then I remembered that the Justice Department budget was provided by my tax dollars, and Ryerson’s generosity didn’t seem like so much of a big deal.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” he said.

“By all means,” Angie said.

He poured some cream into his coffee, passed it to me. “Where did all this start?”

“With Amanda McCready’s disappearance,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. That’s just where you two came into it.” He stirred his coffee, removed the spoon, and pointed it at us. “Three years ago, Narcotics officer Remy Broussard busts Cheese Olamon, Chris Mullen, and Pharaoh Gutierrez doing a quality-control check of a processing plant in South Boston.”