Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

I was on the bottom step when he lost his balance and fell forward and disappeared.

CHAPTER 74

LUCKILY, WE FOUND DOYLE after a minute of screaming for him. Disoriented and bleeding and extremely pissed off but thankfully very much alive, he stumbled up from the rear stairs of the basement he’d fallen into. He’d been banged up pretty good in the fall. His face was scratched and his right arm had been sliced open almost from his wrist to his elbow. He was also covered in sewage, which wasn’t doing any wonders to soothe his Irish temper.

“What the hell happened?” Doyle said as we quickly led him out of the death-trap hovel and back outside.

It was a stove that had been airmailed, we found out later. Since he was out of anvils, I guess Roger had pulled a Wile E. Coyote from the structure’s third floor with a vintage Royal Rose oven that he had pushed through a gaping hole in the floor. Another step and Doyle would have been instantly killed by two hundred pounds of falling rusted steel.

I immediately instructed Brooklyn to take Doyle to the hospital for some stitches, not to mention a tetanus shot.

The unkindest cut of all came when ESU finally arrived. The SWAT cops cleared the house twenty minutes later with no sign of Roger. They speculated that he might have escaped over the rooftops and scurried down into the alley at the back of the church. We’d missed him. Again.

I brooded in my car for a bit, feeling sorry for myself, then looked out my window at the deplorable disgrace of a building. Staring at the LUMINOUS PROPERTIES sign, I took out my smartphone. The more I researched, the angrier I got. Twenty minutes later, I left my squad mates at the scene for my morning’s first I’m-mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore moment.

I pointed my Crown Vic south below Ninety-Sixth Street until I shrieked up in front of a pagoda-like glass office building on Lexington near Grand Central Terminal. Still covered in dust from the near-death experience in Harlem, I got quite a few looks from the well-heeled office workers inside.

Luminous Properties was on two. The receptionist was a too-thin, harshly beautiful brunette, her big dark eyes rimmed with garish makeup. She reminded me very much of some of the Russian hookers from the Mob database I’d been searching, so I was a little surprised when she said, “Uh, yeah?” with an accent straight out of Staten Island.

I took out my shield and showed her who I was and then told her why I was there. Five minutes later, I quickly left and took a spin west and then north over to Fifty-Seventh and Seventh, to the site of a luxury condo that was going up beside Carnegie Hall.

The cofounder of Luminous Properties, Maximilian Schlack, looked very much like his glossy photo in the New York Magazine Power 100 Real Estate Edition, so I was able to spot him straightaway as I got off the rickety construction elevator on the site’s unfinished thirty-second floor.

The tan, buff thirty-three-year-old was standing at the orange-safety-netted north edge of the windy, still-open floor. He was with a group of other guys in expensive suits and hard hats, listening intently to a tall, curly-haired exec as he gestured with his hands at the money-green sea of Central Park.

I’d decided to introduce myself to ol’ Max when he suddenly moved off from the group a little ways to type a text. I snuck up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. The look he gave me over his phone was equal parts annoyance and disdain. As if I were a new waiter who’d just tried to clear the cheese course he was still enjoying.

He didn’t seem to like it so much as I stood there silently staring at him.

“And you are? Silent Bob, one of the new contractors? I give up. Try to spit it out, OK? I’m busy,” he said.

His haughty expression switched off instantly, his hazel eyes flashing with a sudden panicked guilt, when I reached into my pocket and showed him my shield.

“Guilty conscience, Max?” I said.

CHAPTER 75

“NYPD? WHAT IS THIS about?” Max Schlack said, quickly leading me away from the group and back down the freshly Sheetrocked corridor for the elevator.

“This is about a dump you own on a Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street,” I said.

He stared at me. We were about the same height. When he took off his hard hat, I saw that his deep, rich tan continued to his cleanly shaved head. He was one of those white guys who actually look good bald. It suited him. He was also broad in the shoulders. I remembered the article saying he had played rugby at Yale. A real stud.

“I own a lot of properties. Who are you, again?”

“Oh, it’s yours,” I said, ignoring him. “I looked it up. Twenty-Seven East One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street is owned by Luminous Properties. You own Luminous Properties, ergo you own the dump on a Hundred Twenty-Seventh.”

He was also the owner of the building we thought Naomi had been abducted from. But I didn’t say that.

“It—like almost the rest of the block—was purchased three years ago. Since then, you’ve been fined thirty-six times for various building and fire code violations. I didn’t make the Power One Hundred list this year, but even to me, that seems like an excessive number.”

“And you’re telling me this because?” the tall, tan GQ-ish guy said, glancing at his BlackBerry again.

I reached out and placed my hand over his device’s screen.

“Because I was just there chasing a suspect into your hazard zone, and my partner almost got greased when the floor collapsed. My partner is in the hospital right now. Do I have your attention now, moron?”

“OK, OK. I think I know what you’re talking about. A Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street is in rough shape. That’s why we’re developing it. Why was your partner on my property, again?”