Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

Around two on Wednesday, Doyle called with news on the Rafael Arruda drug hit that he needed to share with me in person.

Thirty minutes later, I found him and my other protégé, Detective Lopez, in Washington Heights’ Thirty-Third Precinct’s second-floor break room.

With a grand flourish, I placed on the table, between the Styrofoam cups of wretched coffee they were nursing, the plastic bag I was holding and removed the two huge waxed paper soda cups and perfectly greasy white paper bags that I’d just brought them from Shake Shack.

“Eat, gentlemen,” I said. “And talk.”

“We’d hit a brick wall in the investigation, Mike,” Doyle said between bites of his double cheese with bacon. “No witnesses, no nothing. So we decided to go back and look at all our video that faced the street near the drug building two weeks prior. I mean, it was just hours and hours of nothing. I was thinking maybe we could market the tape as the breakthrough cure for insomnia when we saw him.”

“Who?” I said.

“This neighborhood guy,” said Arturo, smiling. “His name is Sol. Sol Badillo. But everybody calls him Jinete, which means, like, jockey in Spanish, on account of he used to be a horse trainer or something when he was younger.”

“Sol’s one of these hang-around guys you often see in an inner-city hood,” Doyle said. “Divorced, late fifties, lives with his grown daughter. He’s sort of a super’s helper, runs errands in the local stores, deals a little weed on the side. He’s in and out of the barbershop every five minutes. He patrols the block the way a beat cop does, but instead of enforcing the law, he more likely helps the friendly neighborhood crooks break it.”

“Exactly,” Arturo said. “In medieval times, this guy would be, like, the town crier or fool. He shuffles around twenty-four/seven and acts like he’s half homeless or crazy, but meanwhile, he knows everything and everyone on the block. He’s like the block’s memory. Its underground eyewitness news anchor.”

“Go on,” I said, smiling. I liked the sound of this.

“Jinete was actually one of the first guys we canvassed,” said Doyle. “Of course, he said he didn’t know anything, but then we saw him in the video. Two weeks prior to the hit, plain as day, he puts a camera in a car parked across the street from the drug building.”

“The camera was pointing right at the building?” I said.

Doyle nodded, sipping his shake.

“So you’re thinking he was working for whoever killed Arruda?” I said.

“Not thinking,” said Doyle with a wink. “We’re knowing he was involved. We spoke to Jinete again two days ago. We showed him the video, and he finally broke down and told us everything.”

“So who hired him?” I said excitedly.

Doyle took a printout from a folder. It was a blown-up photocopy of a driver’s license. Some blond guy on it. Matthew Leroux, it said, with an address in SoHo.

“Jinete said this guy, Leroux, gave him money to rent a car and the camera and five grand.”

“The guy gave Jinete his name?”

“No,” Arturo said. “Jinete said Leroux called himself Bill. He said he was a slick guy. Spoke fluent Spanish. They met several times. But like I said, Jinete is no fool. He likes to know who the hell he’s working with, so he actually had his daughter secretly follow the guy after one of their meetings. She followed him all the way back to Chelsea.”

“Chelsea,” I said. “I thought the address on the license was in SoHo.”

“Chelsea is where this guy, Leroux, has an art gallery,” said Arturo, wide-eyed. “He must have gotten bored perusing the canvases, so he decided to up and slaughter a drug gang.”

I looked at the photo, a tingle beginning in my stomach. This was good. Damn good. We were finally getting a break.

“Did you speak to Leroux?”

“No, we wanted to talk to you first, of course, Mr. National Security,” Arturo said.

“We do good or what, Mike?” said Doyle, smiling.

“No,” I said, taking out my phone to call Paul Ernenwein. “You did amazing.”

Chapter 47

A reporter was doing a cutaway to get the United Nations in the background when Matthew and Sophie came up the steps on Ralph Bunche Park onto East 43rd.

It was morning, just after rush hour, on Thursday, and the pair was on the hunt.