Worst Case (Michael Bennett 3)

An FBI agent with a sense of humor, I thought, listening to the drumroll of rain on the roof. What were the odds?

I put my phone on speaker and was adjusting the no-hands microphone when it rang. It was yet a different number, I noticed, a Long Island 516 area code, the third number so far. Maybe our kidnapper owned a cell phone store, I thought as I folded it open.

“Listen to my instructions. Go exactly where I say,” the kidnapper told me. “Take the Central Park traverse to the East Side.”

I took a breath as we pulled out. It started to rain harder. Against the gray sky, the bare trees atop the park’s stone walls looked black in the rain.

A few minutes later, I said, “I’m coming up on Fifth Avenue now.”

“Keep going to Park Avenue and make an uptown left.”

I sped out of the park down two tony East Side blocks and screeched through the red light.

“I’m on Park Avenue,” I said.

“Welcome to the silk-stocking district, Mike,” the kidnapper said. “Holy one-zero-zero-two-one. Did you know you’re now driving through the highest concentration of wealth in the richest country on earth? In the salons above you, more money is paid over to both of our sham political parties than in any other place.”

We drove on. The only sound in the car was the windshield wipers. I didn’t see any salons. All the buildings outside were just gray smudges.

The last high-profile kidnapping Major Case had handled involved a garment factory owner who was kidnapped back in ’93. They’d pulled him, filthy and starving but, thankfully, still alive, out of a hole in the ground along the West Side Highway. I wondered what kind of hole Jacob was in now. Most of all, I hoped the eighteen-year-old was still alive when we pulled him out of it.

“Where are you?” the kidnapper said.

“I’m at One Hundred and Tenth and Park.”

“Spanish Harlem,” he said. “See how quickly it all turns to shit? When Park Avenue ends, head over the Madison Avenue Bridge into the Bronx.”

The tires slipped for a gut-wrenching second as we sped over the wet, rusting bridge. The Harlem River beneath was brownish green and looked almost solid, as if you could walk across it.

“I’m in the Bronx now,” I announced when I reached the other side of the river.

“Take the Grand Concourse north.”

We slid past project after project. We were passing alongside a lot the size of a city block, filled with stacks of old tires, when the kidnapper started in with more commentary.

“Did you know that the Grand Concourse was supposed to be the Park Avenue of the Bronx?” he said. “Look at it now. At the burned-out, marble-trimmed windows. At the granite facades painted over with graffiti memorials for slain drug dealers. How did we let this happen, Mike? Have you ever asked yourself that? How did we let the world become what it is?”

Soon the area became wall-to-wall decayed tenements. We were in the Forty-sixth Precinct now, I knew. “The Alamo,” they called it. It was the smallest, but the most drug-infested, precinct in the city.

As I stared out at the inner-city blight, flashes of Jacob’s room came to mind. The cross-country-running trophies he kept in the back of his closet, the Dave Matthews Band ticket stubs on his dresser, the shiny Les Paul guitar that hung on his wall. Despite his age, he was a kid, really. I gritted my teeth. This was no place for a

ny kid.

“I’m coming up to One Hundred and Ninety-sixth,” I said.

“Good work,” the kidnapper said. “You’re almost there, Mike. Go right onto One Hundred Ninety-sixth. You’re really close now. Make a left onto Briggs Avenue.”

I cupped the phone mic.

“What are you packing?” I said over to Parker.

“Glock forty-caliber,” she said.

“Unsnap your holster,” I said.

Chapter 11

A HARD-LOOKING BLACK kid in a new North Face jacket twirled a Gucci umbrella on the corner. Behind him down the block at regular intervals, more menacing figures in dark hoodies stood on the thresholds of the rundown brick buildings. Apparently even the rain couldn’t put a damper on Briggs Avenue’s open-air drug market.