We were concentrating on the ones in the city’s poorer neighborhoods where Chayefsky might be hosting one of his sick parties. We’d been to three properties already, one in a run-down section of Yonkers and two in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood. But they had all been abandoned.
I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach as we came under the rusted hulk of an elevated subway track on White Plains Road. Chayefsky and the girl could have been in Tahiti for all we knew. I had the sinking feeling we were running out of time.
“There’s Two Hundred Thirty-Ninth Street right there. Make a right,” Doyle said to Arturo behind the wheel.
Half a block east of the elevated track on East 239th, we slowed before a four-story brick tenement that looked abandoned. It had cinder-block-sealed windows and was completely saturated with decades of graffiti.
“Welcome to another fine abandoned crack house brought to you by Luminous Properties,” Arturo said, shaking his head.
“Wait. Look,” Doyle whispered as he flashed his Maglite into the garbage-strewn lot beside it.
There were two cars parked there. Doyle swung the light onto the cars’ hoods to show a BMW symbol, then a Mercedes three-pointed star.
“Go around the block to the back of the lot by that fence,” I said to Arturo.
We circled around and got out on foot. Through a gap in the fence was an obstacle course of random discarded crap. Tires, a drawerless chest of drawers, a bunch of baby clothes in a torn white plastic bag.
As we approached, we saw that parked next to the Mercedes and BMW were three motorcycles, two Suzuki crotch rockets, and a bright-red Denali. We could also hear something now. It was music from somewhere. A rap thump, faint and unrelenting like the working of a giant, distant heart.
The music was coming from an open doorway to the right of the vehicles. I skirted the cars and stayed close to the wall as I took a quick peek inside. A set of stone steps descended into darkness, and as I stood there trying to let my eyes adjust, a bright light came on at the foot of them. Then a person stepped out from the right onto the bottom step. A jacked-up, scary-looking Hispanic guy in a leather jacket with a lot of gold chains stopped in his tracks as he saw me.
“Police! Freeze! Hands! Don’t move!” I yelled at hi
m, pointing the Glock I was already holding in my hand.
He didn’t listen to me. Instead, he turned and bolted back into the corridor whence he’d come, hollering in Spanish at the top of his lungs.
I hit the bottom of the steps just in time to see the big guy slam a door at the end of the rough stone-walled corridor. The rap music cut as I was halfway to the door, replaced by a sudden rabid barking.
Barking!?
I finally arrived at the slammed metal door. There was even more rabid barking. It sounded like there was a kennel on the other side of it.
There was no knob, so I pushed against it. It moved, but only a little. There was something heavy blocking it. I cursed as the barks grew fainter and fainter. No! Whoever was in there was getting away.
A roar of one of the motorcycles sounded behind me as Doyle and I finally managed to shoulder open the jammed door enough for me to stick my head in. It was a garbage-strewn boiler room with a fifty-gallon blue plastic trash barrel behind the door, filled with bricks. On the other side of the room, there were some metal steps leading to another door, another corridor.
My eyes fell to a sunken gravelike section in the concrete that was covered in feces and blood. That was when I realized it.
“It’s OK. The girl isn’t here,” I said. “It’s dog fighting.”
We’d stumbled upon some kind of pitbull fighting ring or something.
“OK?” Arturo said. “No, it isn’t. I have a dog. We need to go get those bastards. They need to be locked up.”
“Forget ’em!” I yelled as I pulled him back down the corridor toward the outside. “We just need to hit the next address on the list. We’re running out of time!”
CHAPTER 107
GABE CHAYEFSKY EXCHANGED A pleased nod with Alberto as he took the coat from the junior senator from Pennsylvania in the soaring travertine foyer of the Old Bronx County Courthouse. Alberto exchanged the senator’s cell phone for a glass of brandy, then deftly escorted the senator’s security detail toward the coffee urn set up by the door.
Gabe nodded as the senator’s fit and fiftyish head security guy, Scotty, gave him a little wave. Scotty was clean-cut, just recently retired FBI, but his dolt of a son worked for Chayefsky’s charitable foundation’s DC office now. Scotty, bought and paid for, knew the drill by this point. Look away, don’t ask, don’t tell. Gabe grinned. He had Scotty by his aging wrinkled balls.
Senator Bob Plutchik put out his palm and then suddenly lurched forward and tried to get Gabe in a headlock with his free hand. As if. Gabe grabbed the former MIT power forward by the fat pinkie of his right hand and pulled, twisting the laughing, howling senator around until he had him in a chicken wing.
“I’m spilling my drink, you dirty bastard,” the senator said, laughing. “Scotty, you seeing this? Shoot this asshole, would you?”
They laughed and hugged for real. Senator Plutchik, Chayefsky’s old roommate at MIT, was the youngest senator in Pennsylvania’s history. He was snotty, sometimes pushy to the point of being aggravating, but there was an undeniable aura of genius about him, an uncanny intuitive awareness of people. He also had the quickest, keenest nose for human weakness and vulnerability Chayefsky had ever seen.