NYPD Red(32)

Mickey picked up the Walther and passed it back to Gabe. “See how much I trust you?” he said.

“It probably doesn’t hurt that you got your finger on the pressure-release trigger,” Gabe said.

“You mean this?” Mickey said.

He lifted his thumb off the cylinder and the silver button popped up.

Gabriel leaped from the chair.

“Boom,” Mickey said.

“You bastard,” Gabe said. “It was all bullshit.”

“You call it bullshit,” Mickey said, letting loose one of his signature croaky laughs. “I call it special effects.”





Chapter 34



“I TEXTED YOU twenty times,” Lexi said.

“I texted you back on the first one,” Gabe said.

“God, Gabe—if I write ‘what happened?’ you can’t just text back ‘we’ll talk when I get home.’ It’s not a real answer.”

“Sometimes real answers don’t translate to typing on a telephone.”

“Whatever. Did he try to blackmail you?”

“Just the opposite. He wants to help.”

“Help? What kind of help?”

“Remember the original ending I had for this movie?” Gabe said.

“Kaboom!” she yelled, flinging her arms into the air. “That ending?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“It’s the best. I loved it. But you said we didn’t have that kind of money in the production budget, and I said how come Wile E. Coyote can afford to buy all that TNT from the Acme Dynamite Company, and we can’t?”

“I got good news,” Gabe said. “I found Mr. Coyote. It’s Mickey Peltz. He can get us what we need. Cheap.”

“How do you know we can trust him?”

“Lex, I know him. I’ve worked with him before. He’s not going to screw us, and he can get his hands on everything we need. Think of him as part of the production team.”

“How much does he want?”

“Around thirty thousand. But only five of it’s for him. The rest is for the C4.”

“I don’t know why you’re so excited,” Lexi said. “It’s still thirty thousand more than we’ve got.”

“It’s too good to pass up,” he said. “I can get the money.”

“What are you going to do? Stick up a bank?”

“No. A production company.”

Lexi gave him the frowning-schoolmarm look that always cracked him up. Head down, lips tightly pursed, chin tucked to her chest, and her index finger drawn across the bridge of her nose so she could look at him over fake granny glasses.

“Oh, really, young man,” she said in a high-pitched but stern voice that was a cross between Bea Arthur and Lisa Simpson. “Do you actually think you can walk into Paramount, or Fox, or MGM, point a gun at them, and single-handedly walk out with a bag full of money?”

“No, ma’am,” he answered, laying on his Arkansas schoolboy accent. “’Twouldn’t be none of them big-ass studios. It’d be much smaller. And ’twouldn’t be just me by my lonesome neither. I got me a partner in crime.”

Lexi’s face changed, and she slipped out of character. She sat down on the edge of the bed, hurt, deflated. “You and Mickey?” she said, her eyes watery. “He’s your partner now?”

“No, dummy,” Gabe said. “I’m talking about me and you.”





Chapter 35



LEXI JUMPED FROM the bed. “You and me? Really? Are you serious?”

“I told you that you’d be getting a scene to play. This is it.”

“Give me the details. Tell me everything.”

“Remember last week when I was an extra in that courtroom movie? I was Juror Number Seven. We shot it on location down on Chambers Street.”

“I remember,” she said.

“I got friendly with the line producer, Jimmy Fitzhugh. We hung out. Talked motorcycles. He’s got a Zook—a brand-new Boulevard. Great wheels. I’m thinking, since I had to get rid of the Kawasaki, maybe when this is over, I’ll get me one too.”

“Anyway…,” Lexi said.

“Anyway, they’re shooting uptown this week at Fordham University, and the production trailer is parked on West Sixty-second. Every morning Jimmy gets on his bike early so he can cruise in from Rockaway and beat the traffic.”

“Where’s the money, Gabe?”

“He keeps it in the trailer.”

She shook her head. “Not thirty thousand. They don’t keep a shitload of cash around to pay the union   guys on payday anymore. Now they write checks, and a check cashing service comes in with bags of money and a couple of armed guards.”