Jojo didn’t move.
“You deaf?” Salvi said. “Turn on the camera.”
“I don’t know, Pop,” Jojo said. “We have to do what we came to do, but videotaping it—I don’t know if that’s such a good idea—”
Salvi held up a hand. “Don’t think,” he said, his voice a menacingly low whisper. “Your mother has been waiting twelve years. Now turn on the fucking camera.”
“Okay, okay,” Jojo said, tucking his gun in his belt. He stepped behind the camera and pointed it at the two men on their knees. He pressed the red Record button and a red light blinked on. “Whenever you’re ready, Pop,” he said.
“Okay, then,” Salvi said. “I guess I’m the director of this little movie. This is going to be the big confession scene—the one everybody’s been waiting for.”
He stood eight feet away and pointed the gun straight at Dave’s head. “Now, start confessing.”
“This place is going to be swarming with cops any minute,” Dave said.
Salvi laughed. “You are cops. You came to torture this woman. What did you do—call for backup?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Look, Dave, you seem like a reasonable man, so tell me—whose idea was it to kill my son?”
“Your son raped my sister,” Dave said.
“I don’t care if he fucked your grandmother, chopped her up, and fed the pieces to his dog. You both killed him. I know that. Now I want to know which one of you planned it.”
“What’s the difference? You’re going to kill us both anyway.”
“The difference? The difference is that one of you pulled the strings. The other is just a soldier—a follower. One of you made the decision to bash my boy’s head in and hold his face underwater until he drowned. There’s always a leader.” Salvi pointed his gun at Gideon. “Was it him? He acts like he’s in charge.”
Gideon, dripping with blood, stared at Salvi defiantly.
Salvi stared back. “But he’s not,” he said, kicking Gideon in the ribs hard enough to hear bone crack. “He’s not in charge of anything.”
Gideon collapsed to the floor and yowled in agony.
“Aw…does it hurt? Bad news—it’s not the first hit that hurts the most. It’s every breath you take from now on. The good news is you don’t have that many breaths left.” Salvi waved a hand at Tommy Boy. “Pick this piece of shit up.”
The big man grabbed Gideon’s collar and yanked him to his knees.
Dave looked away, and then he saw it—a shadowy figure popped up and peered through the grimy window.
It was Kylie MacDonald.
Chapter 80
Three mornings a week, I try to work out at the precinct gym—weights, treadmill, elliptical. Once a week, I see a yoga instructor. So I’m in good shape—not as good as the SWAT team, but they were weighed down with so much tactical gear that I was able to catch up with the pack.
“We’re not going to make it,” Kylie said as I fell in place alongside her. “Our five minutes are up, and we’ve still got three-quarters of a mile to—”
My radio interrupted. “Monitor to Red Leader.”
I answered it on the run. “Go ahead, Monitor.”
“I’ve got you on traffic cam. There’s transport on Twenty-First Street a block ahead of you. It’s all yours.”
Sure enough, there it was—a big, beautiful blue-and-white NYPD bus.
“Thank you, Monitor,” I said as the team piled in. “What’s the twenty on our target?”
“Our eye in the sky saw them pull into a garage at Eighty-Eight Crane six minutes ago.”
“We’re rolling,” I said as the bus moved out.
Twenty-First, which runs under the el, is a narrow two-way street, but the driver managed to maneuver his way through morning traffic quickly. I just wasn’t sure it was quick enough. If Gideon kept to his five-minute deadline, Rachael would be dead before we got there.
I briefed Alan Rowe, the SWAT leader, on the latest. We Google-mapped 88 Crane, and by the time the bus stopped at the top of the dead-end street, Sergeant Rowe had a plan.
He split the team into three—one to breach the garage door, a second to come through the rear, and two men to cover the side of the building next to the railroad yard.
Every building on Crane Street was covered with graffiti, and all of them looked to be abandoned, including the four-story warehouse in the middle of the block.
We ran almost noiselessly to the end of the street and took our positions. Kylie and I followed Rowe to the front of the garage.
The garage door was about eight by ten feet and made of corrugated steel. “No problem,” Rowe said. “I just heard from the team in the rear and there’s a small door in the back that’s much easier than this one. The breacher is running detcord around each door. On my command, he’ll blow the back one as a diversion. A second later, he’ll take down the garage door.”