This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2017 by Gunner Publications, LLC

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

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eISBN: 9781542097741

Cover design by Adil Dara

CONTENTS

START READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“Please! You have to believe me.”

In response to the stuttering words, Angel Ramos cocked his head with curiosity. His gut hung over tight jeans and tested the strength of the buttons of his pale-blue work shirt. Upper arms like hams, fists rocky, knuckles red (at least at the moment, since he’d been pounding on the jaw and cheek and ear of the man who sat tied to a chair before him).

“Believe you. I have to believe you?” Ramos’s voice echoed in the dank warehouse. He wasn’t being dramatic. He was, in his heart, actually curious why Billy Frey stated, as a fact, that Ramos had to believe him. “Why?”

The slim man gasped. “Why . . . what?”

“Why do I have to believe you?”

“Just, you do. I’m telling the truth. Me and my guys, we didn’t know it was Mr. Fed—”

“Shh, no names.”

“Swear to God. We didn’t know it was his . . . somebody else’s territory. That ’hood was, what wouldya say, unclaimed. That’s what we thought. Swear.”

Yeah, as if there was any open ’hood left around Fell’s Point, the artsy neighborhood on the Baltimore waterfront. Or in downtown, for that matter. Even the dullest gangbanger’d know that the intersection where twitchy Billy Frey had set up his drive-by oxy shop was probably claimed . . . and that the claimer was Andre Hector Federico.

Billy Frey whined, “I keep telling you this.”

“Hm.”

“And you don’t believe me.”

“Hm.”

The tears were real. He was scared, clearly. But Angel Ramos didn’t care. Sure, the man had brought his game to Mr. Federico’s turf. Happened from time to time. No biggie. You pay your fine, you go your way.

You had to look at the broader picture, though: Billy Frey was a skel who’d just shot a teenage girl because she’d copped some rock from him. Yeah, she was a meth ho, a bitch, straggly, bleedy, yellow toothed. Pretty useless. Ramos was part of a crew that made their living turning people into zombies too, but he wouldn’t’ve killed a girl.

Still, it wasn’t for Ramos—or God—to decide the mortal fate of Billy Frey. His survival or unsurvival was exclusively Mr. Federico’s call. The man would be standing, at this moment, at a pay phone in a strip mall thirty miles away, conferring with another associate and debating whether Billy Frey, out of Columbia, Maryland, was a threat or just a mosquito.

Shivering from fear and the cool April air, Billy whispered, “I’ll leave town. Gone. Out of here.”

Well, that was going to happen one way or the other. For sure and certain.

Ramos’s mobile hummed.

The pay phone’s number popped up.

He hit “Accept.” But didn’t say “Hi,” much less “Sir,” because, on the remote chance that they—police, FBI, rival gangs—had tapped the phone, the s-word would suggest Ramos was on the line with his superior, who would be, everybody knew, Andre Federico. Ramos hit the number 1, then the number 3 on his phone.

There was silence. Mr. Federico would be listening to the line. Once, he’d told Ramos in a weird whisper that he could hear wiretaps. This was, of course, bullshit, but nobody told him so. The man had said, years ago, when he was thinking of hiring Ramos, “All communications between me and you, everything, will happen in person or by code. And if it’s in person, I’m going to wand you with a scanner.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And even then, we keep our words vague, keep them ambiguous. You know what ‘ambiguous’ is?”

Angel Ramos had believed he should be insulted at that. But with Mr. Federico, you let a lot slide. He’d said he did know the meaning and he would take the advice to heart (and he’d also chosen, wisely, not to point out that saying “vague” and “ambiguous” was pretty much redundant).

Now, in this grim warehouse, mobile pressed against his ear, Ramos heard three tones as Mr. Federico pressed the buttons of the pay phone. Ramos had memorized the pitch of the keys. This was 999. Ramos pressed 2.

The line disconnected.

“What?” Billy Frey asked. Then cried, “Tell me!” His voice was high and loud, but the walls of the waterfront warehouse were thick. No one outside could hear. Ramos lifted a black Glock pistol from his back waistband. No need to work the slide; a gun without a round in the chamber was a brick.

Billy Frey stared at it. “No! You can’t do it! You can’t!”

I must believe him. I can’t do this.

Well. Angel Ramos stuffed spongy orange plugs in each of his ears, stepped close to Billy Frey, and fired. Twice was enough, but Ramos opted for one more. Thinking of the girl.

The session that Alan Seybold had just concluded in the main ballroom of the East Coast Writers’ Conference had been pretty good.

The signing afterward, even better.

Seybold finished the last of the autographs—there’d been nearly two hundred in the queue, not bad—and stretched. He doused his hands with Purell sanitizer and enjoyed both the cooling sensation on his sore digits and the thought of the deaths of the million germs that’d leapt from his fans’ fingers to his during the obligatory handshakes.

One of these fans now circled back and asked, breathlessly, if she could take a selfie with him, and Seybold said, “Sure.” He brushed his thinning brown hair back and tugged his dark-gray sport coat together to cover the bit of belly he’d developed in the past year or so. Book tours and writing about serial killers for three or four hours a day—all that ass time could take a toll. Still, for a balding forty-five-year-old, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, he believed he was holding his own.

He put his arm around the fan’s shoulder and felt her trembling with excitement.

After the shot she turned to him. “Mr. Seybold, I wanted to ask a question at the event but I didn’t get the chance. You said a big studio’s doing a movie of The Girl on the Ship.”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, that’s so cool!” A frown. “I don’t think you should’ve killed Steve’s partner. She was a nice lady.” The intense smile returned. “But I forgive you. I wanted to ask, who’s going to play Steve?”

“I can’t really talk about it.”

“Even if you just whisper it in my ear?”

“Sorry.”

“Bad boy.” She winked, charmingly adoring and flirty, and vanished.

Seybold glanced at his watch. The conference wasn’t finished for the day; the awards banquet was later this evening. But now he had a few hours of downtime for a shower and a scotch.

A woman’s voice from behind him: “That was great, Alan.”

He turned to see Maggie Daye, the local Baltimore author he’d just been “in conversation” with onstage, as the ECWC program described it.

“Hey, yeah, enjoyed it.”

“Think it went well,” she said, her blue eyes looking steadily into his, which were hazel.

Yes, it had been a good session, he reflected once more. He’d enjoyed the back and forth as they batted around their assigned topic, “Story versus Character in Today’s Crime Fiction.” They were a good blend of authors too, because they approached the craft of writing commercial fiction differently. Maggie was a “plotter,” outlining her books extensively ahead of time, while he was a “pantser” (as in seat-of-the)—an author who just started writing and let the story take him where it wanted to go. Her books were more intellectual puzzles; his were more go-get-’em action tales. She wrote her first draft by hand, he by computer. The fans seemed to get a lot out of the conversation.

The blonde, in her late thirties, he guessed, had a pleasant smile and a figure that he’d call voluptuous but that Maggie herself would probably consider pudgy. She reminded him of a grade school teacher, as sweet as could be, and he’d been amused when a fan had asked where she’d come up with the idea of using molten lead as a murder weapon in her latest book. He hadn’t read her stuff. Maybe he’d pick one up.

“Can I buy you a drink?” she asked. Then smiled. “I have an ulterior motive. I wanted to pick your brain about Europe.”

The subject of foreign sales had come up in the session. Seybold was far more famous than Maggie; he sold his titles in thirty-seven countries. Translation rights were a lucrative but tricky part of the publishing world and she’d be looking for advice from a seasoned pro.

His face tightened into a faint wince. “Oh, sorry. I’ve got some things to do now.” Shower and scotch. “But maybe at the reception before the banquet?”

“Ah, I’m passing on that.” She shrugged and offered a rueful grin. “Didn’t make the award short list.”

“Your day’ll come.” Seybold had won the Best Novel prize twice at this gathering and was up for another this year. “But shoot me an email? Happy to give you any advice I can.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks again.”

They shook hands and she walked off. Seybold felt a bit bad about declining. Still, he couldn’t help everybody. This was the nature of being an author of popular fiction at Alan Seybold’s level: always on the go, giving advice to neophytes about writing, attending conferences, signing books for fans, appearing at literacy fundraisers. Oh, yeah, writing the books too. Time was his most precious commodity; he had to make sure people didn’t take advantage of him.

On the other hand, there were some individuals that you made sure to fit in.

Like the tall, coiffed man approaching now, holding up a gold police badge. He was wearing a well-cut charcoal-gray suit and perfectly starched white shirt. The tie was lustrous crimson. “Mr. Seybold? I’m Maryland State Police detective Bradley Reynolds. This is my partner, Louis Phan.” A slim Asian man nodded to him, offering a badge too. He wore a dark suit as well, though it was more modest and less tailored than Reynolds’s. Phan was Vietnamese, to judge from the name (Seybold’s books were bestsellers over there and he’d been to the country once, on book tour).

“Okay.”

The two badge cases vanished into the men’s pockets.

“We’re with the Organized Crime Task Force. We’ve got a situation, and we’re hoping you can help us.”

“We’re not sure anyone else can,” Phan said.

Intriguing. Thoughts of a shower vanished. So did thoughts of Johnnie Walker Black.

And that was saying something.

Seybold looked around. “I sometimes get a little, well, mobbed by fans. It doesn’t sound very modest but it does happen. Can we find someplace quiet?”

Starbucks in downtown Baltimore.

Five blocks from the hotel, five blocks from the fans. Oh, he loved them, sure, but sometimes they thought they owned you.

Even if you just whisper it in my ear . . . ?

“Mr. Seybold, now—”

“Alan’s fine.” He sipped his cappuccino, the officers, regular coffee.

“Okay, I’m Bradley.”

“And Louis.”

Reynolds was the image of a cop about whom, had Seybold put him in a book, his editor would have said, “Too much of a cliché. Too upper-crusty. Scruffy him up. Roughize him.” (The editor had a unique, sometimes irritating approach to language—but when someone pays you a million dollars a year, you build up an immunity to irritation pretty fast.)

“Alan, we’d appreciate it if you’d keep this to yourself.”

“Sure.”

“You know Baltimore?”

“No. I live in California. I’m just here for the writers’ conference.”

“Well, we have our share of criminal activity.”

“That I’ve heard.”

“We have two main organized crime gangs that’ve been vying for power on the waterfront and downtown. One is headed by Andre Federico. He’s sixty-two. His legitimate business is trucking and storage. His gang—where he makes most of his money—is the number one in terms of revenue, geographic reach . . . and body count. The second crew is run by Jack Kelley. He’s thirty-five. He and his wife own a bar and a chain of payroll loan shops. Federico and Kelley, they don’t run your typical urban crews. They’re the new face of OC.”

“Organized crime,” Phan offered.

Which, of course, Seybold knew. Steve Cameron went after mobsters, as well as terrorists and serial killers.

Reynolds said, “It’s not white versus black versus Hispanic anymore. Fact is, these assholes don’t really care about old family ties or race or national origin. All they care about is their members producing. If you can score Walter White–quality meth and you’re willing to tag somebody and dump the body in a secret hidey-hole where it won’t ever, ever be found, you’re in the club. Black, white, Chinese, Latino.”

“Orthodox Jew,” Phan said.

Seybold had no idea if he was joking. He supposed so, though neither of the cops smiled.

“Okay. Andre Federico—second-generation Mexican Swiss, go figure—lives in Chevy Chase. Multi-gazillionaire. Responsible for easily two dozen bodies we’ve found and who knows how many we haven’t. Kelley’s crew’s up-and-coming but they’re small potatoes. Not as many in his stable as Federico has and they’re not as nasty. We’ll take out Kelley at some point, but now it’s Federico’s crew in our sights. Those boys’re bad—particularly one shit named Angel Ramos. They love playing around with pliers and soldering irons . . .” Reynolds’s voice faded. “Sorry, sir . . . Alan. You don’t need the gruesome details.”

Thinking once more, enviously, of Maggie Daye’s clever use of molten lead, Seybold smiled. “Doesn’t bother me. I write this stuff for a living.”

“Well, actually, sir,” Phan said, “that’s why we’re here.”

Seybold lifted an eyebrow.

Reynolds took over again. “We want Federico behind bars. We want him bad. He and his crew’re ruining the waterfront, people’re dying of meth and opiate overdoses, children are getting shot in crossfires. I’m going to stop him.”

Seybold noted how the pronoun had switched from first person plural to singular: I’m going to stop him. He now had a handle on Bradley Reynolds, a classic protagonist in noir crime fiction. He was a force of nature, someone who said to hell with propriety and procedure in his quest to stop the bad guys. But his ambition bled beyond his daily police work. He had expensive tastes—look at the suit and gold Rolex—and feeding those appetites meant he needed wins, big ones, like collaring high-profile OC perps. He’d need those victories, as well, to land an expansive office in city hall or the state capitol.

“You know what a CI is?” Phan asked.

“Write about ’em all the time. Confidential informant. Snitch.”

Reynolds: “We’ve got a guy inside the Federico organization. He’s good, reliable.”

“Great, actually,” Phan said.

“But there’re limits. He can finger some lower-level muscle and we can take them down. But he can’t get us anything implicating Federico himself. The man’s way too careful—totally paranoid.”

Seybold brushed at his salt-and-pepper goatee. “So . . . what’re you asking? You think in the research for my books I’ve found something that might help you?” A shrug. “My hero, he’s a cop in San Francisco. Nothing to do with the East Coast.”

“That’s not why we’re here.”

“No?”

Reynolds said, “A couple days ago this CI—Stan Walker’s his name—Stan and I were talking. A takedown we’d tried to put together’d just fallen apart.” The detective paused. A dramatic pause. “Then Stan says, you know, kind of joking, ‘Hell, to put Federico away, you need somebody smart as Steve Cameron.’ And I go, ‘Who the hell is Steve Cameron?’”

Seybold couldn’t help but smile.

“And then he tells me about you. You’re his favorite author.”

Seybold was flattered, despite the fact that this Walker was a gangbanger, a snitch, and maybe a murderer.

A fan’s a fan.

“And I go out and buy a couple of your books. Loved ’em.”

“Thank you.”

“And I got what Walker’s talking about.” A grin. “Damn. The assassination plot in Bloody River. I never saw that big twist in the middle coming. And the robbery in Two Days to Die? Man, it was like a fine-tuned engine.”

Reynolds added, “Sure hope we’re going to see Steve Cameron on TV. I’d binge on that series, I tell you.”

Seybold grinned with tight lips. “Well, there’s a movie deal. The Girl on the Ship?”

“Congratulations. Didn’t read that one, but I’ll bet it’s great.”

“So tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

“The three of us and this CI—we all sit down. We give you the info we’ve got on Federico and his operation and you come up with some idea about how to lure him out of his safe zone and collar him. Just blue sky. Have some fun and see what you come up with. Now, we can’t entrap, we can’t plant evidence. We’ve got to play by the rules.”

As Seybold well knew. He was thinking of the subplot in Sunday’s Orphan, where Steve Cameron had to surrender his gun and badge after it looked like he’d planted a fingerprint of a serial rapist at a crime scene.

“Of course,” Phan said, “we’ll keep your name out of it.”

“Appreciate that,” Seybold replied. But an idea floated into his thoughts. “Say it works out and he gets busted, this Federico. What do you think about me writing a true-crime book about it? I’d do it under a pseudonym.”

Visions of massive bestsellerdom—and a movie deal—pirouetted before his eyes.

“I don’t have any problem with that at all,” said Reynolds, who undoubtedly was already casting an actor for his role.

“When should we get together?”

“Tonight. The sooner we bring this guy down, the better for everybody.”

Alan Seybold was probably the only nominee for the ECWC Thriller of the Year award, in the history of the convention, who didn’t care a bit that he’d lost.

Now he could skip the after-party and meet with the cops and the CI at a motel ten blocks from the writers’ conference.

He ducked out after the last speech and made for the exit through the lobby. He noticed Maggie Daye, the fellow author, in the bar, sitting by herself. Hell, had he agreed to have a drink with her afterward? He didn’t think so. Still, he kept his head down and moved quickly outside into the cool April evening, the air redolent of the oily, fishy scent of harbor.

Enjoying the invigorating walk, Seybold passed a boarded-up tenement, next to a store selling bizarre-looking lamps. The cheapest price tag showed $600. Just beyond that was the battered façade of a bar that looked as if it had been here since Revolutionary times.

A few blocks farther down the busy commercial street, he came to the motel where the cops had taken a room—they used the place often to meet with CIs and witnesses, Phan had explained. A few minutes later Seybold was in the modest room. He doffed his coat and nodded greetings to Phan, Reynolds, and the third person present.

Stan Walker wasn’t what the author expected. He wasn’t a shifty, twitching little guy, but a calm, confident-looking young man, late twenties, with a Maryland drawl and ready smile. His eyes were shrewd, though, and suggested a quick mind. Which, the author imagined, was an important prerequisite in the confidential informant profession.

Walker pumped Seybold’s hand fiercely. “You’re my favorite author, sir. I have all your books. I mean, all of them.”

“Call me Alan, please,” he replied. The fan beamed.

“Any chance?” Walker produced two of his thrillers and Seybold signed them, adding “Best wishes” above his signature on the title page, which was a pretty lame sentiment, considering the absurdly dangerous position Walker was in.

The men sat around the coffee table of the suite and for two hours the officers and the CI fed Seybold a catalog of information about the gang boss. He took dozens of pages of notes. At one a.m. they called it a night, and the author snuck back to his hotel—more concerned about tipsy fans than Mafia hit men.

In his room he tossed his coat on the bed and dropped into the desk chair. With a scotch in hand, he read and reread his notes, absorbing the details about the man the police wanted behind bars so desperately. Andre Federico was the CEO of F&S Industries, Inc., a legitimate trucking and storage space company based in Baltimore. It was also a front for one of the biggest methamphetamine and opioid operations in the Northeast, grossing $490 million last year, it was estimated. He had affiliate relationships with the South Bay gangs in Boston and crews in Harlem and Philly and Washington, D.C.

Seybold had been curious about how Federico, the “new face” of organized crime, had chosen this path. The answer, Reynolds told him, wasn’t “the stuff of compelling fiction.” Federico’s father had owned a small landscaping company that had gone out of business, plunging the family into poverty. Federico’s only sibling, a younger brother, had died from pneumonia after the emergency room staff at a local hospital had failed to treat him promptly. Federico’s mother was never the same after that. His father repeatedly ran into trouble with loan sharks he borrowed money from in an effort to get a business going once more and keep it running. Several times he was badly beaten when he missed payments.

When Federico was in his midtwenties, the young man apparently decided, with simple and undeniable logic, that having money meant health and comfort. The other revelation, a bit thornier but equally logical, was that if those with money could beat up struggling businessmen like his father and let youngsters like his brother die, then it was morally fine to take that money away from them.

Young Andre had loved working for his father’s company, and so he began to take day jobs for landscapers in nice suburbs. He enjoyed the work—planting, raking, hoeing, trimming. But he enjoyed far more the money he made selling information about the clients’ security systems and gate and garage codes to professional thieves.

As the years passed, Federico decided that if you were going to break the law and risk going to prison, you should make sure the compensation was as high as it could be. Revenue from stealing jewelry, art, and silver paled in comparison to the gross income from selling drugs.

Which is the path he chose.

Simple and undeniable . . .

And a very successful path it was. Several times a week his crew met with buyers in the Baltimore/Washington area. A big buy going down tomorrow on the Baltimore waterfront was typical: Federico’s crew would deliver a shipment of opioids and walk away with a couple of million in cash from a gang out of Boston.

The mobster conducted all his illegal business from various remote locations, using pay phones exclusively. And even then he used the keypads to send codes, avoiding the risk of voiceprint identification. He sometimes met with associates in person but scanned them for listening devices and insisted they speak in euphemisms, never saying anything incriminating. His caution was so ingrained that, once, he walked away from a three-million-dollar deal, ordering the money be left behind, because of a “hunch” there might be some way to trace the cash to him.

The paranoia paid off, though, Seybold had to admit. Federico had no criminal record, which was almost unheard of for a mob boss at that level.

As for his personal life, Federico had been married for three decades. He was devoted to his children. Raine, 26, lived in Ellicott City, Maryland. His father had pulled strings to get him admitted to the best schools in the D.C. area. The son was smart, and he lived a high life as a broker for a securities firm on M Street, D.C. Kathy, Federico’s daughter, 19, was studying fashion at Tulane in New Orleans.

His wife and the children were completely isolated from the organized crime operation, per Federico’s orders, though Raine had shown an interest in the crew, according to the CI, Walker. The times he’d tried to hang out with them, his father had shooed him away, sometimes angrily. It was clear, though, he did this because he loved his boy deeply.

Seybold knew that personal faults were delightful weapons (ask the characters in his books, or his exes). But Federico seemed to have none. He wasn’t unfaithful, didn’t have a temper, wasn’t egotistical, was a moderate drinker, and was a supporter of good causes (from his church to cancer research to NPR). He never touched the products he made and sold. His hobby was gardening.

Seybold sat back and looked over his notes once more, waiting for inspiration. As a novelist, he often said there was no such thing as writer’s block; there was idea block. If you thought about your plot problem long enough, a solution would occur to you.

But nothing jumped out immediately.

Federico was smart and cautious, rich, a solid family man, few faults or vices . . .

Seybold rose and paced back and forth. He paused from time to time, hunching over the desk, and jotted notes. He crossed some out and jotted new ones. Some of those he crossed out too. Back to pacing. This was exactly how he wrote books: juggling ideas, like Steve Cameron’s partner dying at the hand of the villain, the love interest betraying him, the thief hiding the bomb in the banker’s study.

Sometimes the plot points came fast, sometimes he’d hit a brick wall . . . and, stiff from all those hours of pacing through his San Francisco loft, he’d call the limo to come around and take him to his favorite bar or club in Nob Hill or South of Market.

Then he’d return home, to the chain gang of the word processor.

Breaking rocks to unearth those ideas.

He smiled to himself and ditched the embarrassing prisoner metaphor.

Okay, Mr. Federico, how do we bring you down?

And finally, an hour later, an idea blossomed, accompanied by a tap in his gut—so clear and sudden it seemed almost audible. Alan Seybold knew how to send Andre Federico to prison for the rest of his life.

He was amused to realize that he’d had the answer all along; in fact, he’d come up with it years ago.

“A book of mine,” Seybold said, “The Forgotten Sin.”

The time was nine a.m. and he was at the Maryland State Police’s Baltimore Organized Crime Task Force—specifically in Bradley Reynolds’s spacious corner office, which offered up one hell of a view of the harbor. Seybold, Reynolds, Louis Phan, and Stan Walker were clustered around the detective’s polished rosewood coffee table.

“A key element in the book is a father who sacrifices himself for his son. Now, Federico has no weaknesses we can exploit. But there is something we can use: his children. Rather than risk getting arrested, he’d walk away from everything—look at the time he abandoned that three million bucks. But abandon his son or daughter? Never.

“So we exploit that. And between the two, I’d pick his son. I imagine that Federico’s got a male, father-son thing going on. Think about his reaction to his father’s beatings. It affected him fundamentally. Oh, he loves his daughter, but he can’t wait to marry her off, I’ll bet. His son, though? See how he kept him close to home, the schools he picked? All local. So. Here’s my thought.” Seybold looked to Walker. “Can you find out the exact details of that drug sale today? On the waterfront?”

“Well, sure. But, with all respect, sir . . . Alan, what good does that do us? Federico never has connections with the shipments personally. He’s never close to either the money or the drugs.”

“We’re going to get him close. Using his son. Now who’re the players? What’s exactly going down?”

The officers looked to Walker, who said, “Federico’s crew, probably that asshole named Angel Ramos, is going to deliver two million bucks’ worth of opioids to a runner driving in from Massachusetts. It’ll go down at a warehouse near Fell’s Point. Pier 8.”

“When it does, you bust ’em,” Seybold said to Reynolds.

“Ramos’s not going to turn. Nobody dimes out Andre Federico.” This from Phan.

“No, that’s not what’s going to happen,” Seybold said. He was excited, sitting forward and gesturing with his hands. “We use Ramos’s phone to text his son and ask for a favor. What does Ramos drive?”

“Black Lexus.”

“Okay, you text Raine something like, ‘Do us a favor, kid. The Lexus’s at Pier 8. You’d be the man if you could drive it to your dad’s. We’ll take care of your wheels later . . . then you and me, we can hang out. We’d totally owe you. Keys under front seat.’ Oh, and I’d say MAN in all caps. Chest-bumping guy thing. Now, you can’t say you’re Ramos. That’d be entrapment, I’d guess.”

“It probably would,” Phan said.

“So don’t identify yourself. He’ll assume it’s Ramos.”

Reynolds laughed. “And everything you just said, in the text, could apply to us too. He’d be doing us a favor. We’ll take care of his car later. We’ll all hang out. And he’ll be the man because he’s helping us—put his father behind bars.”

Phan said, “Brilliant.”

Reynolds said, “He still might be suspicious.”

Seybold continued, “The kid’s dying to play gangster and now he’s going to take his first baby step. People’s suspicions vanish when it looks like they’re going to get what they want.”

“That a line from your book?” Reynolds asked.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

Phan asked, “What if Ramos’s phone’s locked?”

Seybold had plotted this out too. “Right after the deal, Ramos’ll send one of those codes to Federico, right? To the pay phone?”

“To make sure it went okay, yeah.”

“The minute he disconnects, you’re on him—before the screen saver activates. Go to settings and disable the lock. Now, one other thing you have to do,” Seybold continued. “Get a warrant to suspend Federico’s phone service—mobile and landline—temporarily. Otherwise Raine might call daddy and ruin everything.”

Now it was Reynolds who had some problems. “Good up to a point. We get Ramos’s car on Federico’s property with two million and some drug residue in the trunk. But what’s the charge against Federico? A defense lawyer’ll have a field day tearing apart any case we try to put together. We can’t drive evidence up to a perp and force it on him.”

“Ah, that’s the brilliance,” Seybold offered, before deciding it wasn’t the most modest thing to say. “We don’t bust him. We bust the kid in front of him. Federico sees his son in cuffs. I guarantee he’ll confess to whatever charges you want if you let the boy go. Anything to save his son.”

Another line from the book.

The two officers and the CI shared a look. Reynolds finally spoke. “I’ll say one thing.”

“What’s that?” Seybold asked, concerned there was something he’d missed.

“I think we’re damn lucky you’re working for us and not for him.” The detective grinned big and shook Seybold’s hand. “Let’s put this thing together. We don’t have a lot of time.”

There was one problem with Seybold’s plan, though. In his view.

Reynolds wouldn’t let him come to the bust.

The author protested, “What about those ride-alongs? You see those on TV all the time.”

“That’s because it’s TV,” Phan had said. “All staged. This is real.”

Reynolds had been adamant. “It’s too dangerous. I told you, Ramos is a sadistic piece of shit. It could turn into a firefight. That happens, I don’t want to be distracted worrying about you.”

Seybold reluctantly agreed and wished them good luck. He left the officers and the CI at headquarters, where they would put together the details of the operation, coordinating with the tactical force. The deal was scheduled for four p.m. and it was now noon. They would have to race to make sure all the elements of the risky takedown were in place.

The author headed back to the hotel to have some lunch.

To answer some emails.

To dodge fans.

And to dress in camouflage—that is, black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a dark bomber jacket. A baseball cap too.

His acquiescence to Reynolds was purely for show. There was no way in hell he wasn’t going to the bust. He’d created the plot and he was going to be there when it went down. There was another reason for his presence too. He was going to record every minute of the operation in photographs, to use as illustrations in the pseudonymous book he planned to write about the case.

At three that afternoon, Seybold drove his rental car into a parking garage across the street from Pier 8. He continued to the top level and climbed out, then looked down thirty feet to the waterfront and adjacent areas. This neighborhood, though close to trendy Fell’s Point, was rough. There were, however, signs that it was changing. Among the decaying warehouses and trash and overturned Dumpsters and rotting piers were fancy pleasure craft tied up at secure docks. Construction was underway too—condos and retail space. He thought he saw the logo for a Bed Bath & Beyond.

Seybold glanced around him and noted no one present, then found a good vantage point between a couple of SUVs, where he’d have an unobstructed view of the warehouse beside Pier 8. He set up his big Sony A7, fitted with a telephoto lens, on a tripod.

For ten minutes he maintained his surveillance, crouching and ignoring the shooting pain from legs that spent more time in desk chairs than on treadmills. At one point he heard footsteps behind him and rose fast to see a fit, blond man in jeans and a navy-blue windbreaker about thirty feet away. He was looking toward Seybold. He wasn’t smiling and there was something unsettling about his stony gaze.

Did Ramos have someone checking out the area?

Hell, he hadn’t thought about that. And he should have; a careful author would have worked a character like this into the story—an associate of the paranoid mob boss, looking over the site of a deal. And Blondie had seen him with the camera. Maybe he’d think he was police and he’d figure there was a sting going on.

Oh, hell. I’m dead.

Or worse.

Pliers and soldering irons . . .

Seybold started to unscrew the camera from the tripod, planning to hightail it back to the car. But, looking about, he paused. Blondie was gone.

Scanning the area. Nothing. No sign of him.

I’m as paranoid as Federico.

Seybold returned to the vantage point and clicked the camera on, focused it carefully.

After a few minutes, a white van pulled up and a squat man in jeans and a gray sweatshirt got out of the passenger seat, studying the place. Seybold dubbed him “Boston.”

The camera clattered softly as it fired away, ten frames per second.

Boston said something to the driver, then pulled a white plastic bag from the passenger seat floor of the van. He started for the warehouse. The bag, which would contain the buy money, seemed heavy. Seybold recalled Walker saying it was two million.

All at once a half dozen cops appeared from the warehouse: While Reynolds subdued and cuffed Boston, Phan and several uniformed officers raced to the driver’s side of the van, and others to the rear. Simultaneously they ripped open the doors, then dragged the driver to the ground, cuffing him and pulling him inside the warehouse. Reynolds pulled on latex gloves and crouched, checking out the money. Then the detective rose and leaned close to Boston, threatening or negotiating or both.

Finally, it appeared that the terms of the betrayal were reached—a reduced sentence, probably, if he played along to give them a chance to subdue Ramos. After the cuffs were removed, Boston stuck out a hand. Reynolds scoffed and pointed him to his marks, like an actor. Reynolds handed the bag of cash back to him and he sheepishly retreated to the shadows under the awning.

Nothing happened for a very tense ten minutes.

Then came Act Two, and it unfolded fast. Angel Ramos pulled up in his black Lexus. The big guy, gut rolling over an invisible belt, climbed out of the car, looked around, and nodded to Boston. It was hard to see for sure but it appeared that Ramos wasn’t the least suspicious. He strode forward, handed the drugs to Boston, took the money, and pitched it into his trunk. He didn’t count it, but Seybold guessed it would be a very stupid criminal who shortchanged Andre Federico.

Ramos ambled toward the front of the Lexus, his phone in hand. He paused and leaned against the car and typed a number on the mobile. Listened. Then typed more. Presumably giving the good news to Federico via the keypad code. The instant he disconnected, Reynolds, Phan, and the tactical officers charged from the warehouse and swarmed him. Reynolds grabbed the phone and stepped aside, while the others cuffed him. The detective hunched over the mobile and typed; he’d be disabling the screen lock function. He looked to Phan and nodded. Ramos, his fat face red, muttered to the cops. Reynolds laughed and gestured toward the street. The tactical officers took him, the driver, and Boston to the detention center transport vans that had just arrived.

The boring part of the story, as Seybold thought of it, came next. He called this “shoveling words.” Nothing sexy, nothing exciting, but taking care of the necessary arrangements to make the plot work. Phan was on his phone arranging for the warrant to shut down Federico’s mobile and landline service. He disconnected and nodded to Reynolds; Seybold assumed the warrant had been approved. Reynolds was then going to text Raine with a request to pick up the Lexus. But he’d have to wait to do this until Federico returned home from the pay phone he’d used to communicate with Ramos about the “successful” buy. Stan Walker had said this would take about twenty minutes. Finally, Seybold noticed, Reynolds looked down at Ramos’s phone and typed the text.

You’d be the MAN . . .

The author’s palms began to sweat as he waited for Act Three to begin. All of the parts of his plot were important, of course, but this one—getting Raine to agree and then to show up—was vital, because if it didn’t work, Federico would know the whole thing was a sting and grow even more paranoid. This might be their last chance to nail the mob boss.

Seybold noted the pronoun that he’d just used.

Well, why not? I’m part of the team now. He gazed back at the street, thinking, Come on, Raine. Help poor Angel out.

And, sure enough, Federico’s son came through.

A purple Maserati pulled off the street and eased up to the warehouse, parking beside the white van. A man got out. Raine Federico was tall with a triangular build, broad shoulders tapering to athletic hips and legs. His dark hair was thick and trim and, God bless him, he wore cool-guy shades despite the overcast weather, just like a true Goodfellas made man. Raine walked up to Angel’s Lexus, then paused, staring into the driver’s side.

Was he suspicious?

Had Seybold overlooked something?

But then the young man brushed at his jacket and straightened his tie; the son of a bitch was admiring himself in the reflection. He opened the door. He bent, fished for the keys, and dropped into the front seat.

The black car pulled into traffic. In three unmarked cars, Reynolds, Phan, and two tactical teams followed at a discreet distance. Seybold also noticed a helicopter, which he hadn’t thought of, but probably should have. In High Wire Steve Cameron took the controls of a police chopper—after the pilot was killed—and pursued the villain through the streets of San Francisco, even though he’d never flown one before. (The critics had thought that a bit of a stretch, but, screw ’em, the fans loved it.)

Seybold slung the camera over his shoulder and returned to his rental car.

He started the engine and headed toward the garage exit. At the bottom ramp, just before turning onto the street, he happened to glance into the rearview mirror. He believed he saw a figure looking his way, as he stood—or hid, more likely—between two parked cars. He thought it was the blond guy he’d seen earlier.

Seybold hit the brake and spun around in the seat, his heart pounding.

But, as before, Blondie had vanished . . . if he’d been there in the first place.

Pulling into traffic, he thought: Just my imagination. That’s all. Lord knew he definitely had a ripe one.

Andre Federico loved his gardens.

His colonial house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, was modest by some standards, this being the suburb of senior Washington officials, hedge fund managers, and international corporate CEOs. But his large yard was, thanks to his own efforts, spectacular, a work of art. Now, early spring, there wasn’t much to do in his “back forty”—yards, not acres—where he grew the veggies, so he was planting bulbs and flowers in the front yard.

The elements had been kind this year and already he was seeing swathes of budding yellow black-eyed Susans, columbines, Virginia bluebells, and plenty of violets.

His favorite flower in the garden—for name, not necessarily appearance—was the pale-purple annual honesty, also called the money plant.

And, being near D.C., of course, there were a number of cherry trees; the pink snowflake blooms were presently on lush display.

Federico was wearing gardening garb that was as unstylish as it could be. Baggy peach slacks, a pale-green shirt, and a soiled vest with a dozen pockets that hugged his stocky frame—he loved his meals and spent calories on food, not liquor. On his head was a floppy straw hat.

He tugged up a few weeds, took another sip of iced tea. His life was good, he reflected. Angel Ramos had confirmed the deal had worked out and the money from the Boston crew would soon be on its way to a “laundry” in Philadelphia.

Yes, a good life.

Complicated and hidden, much of it. But that was a comfort. Why, he had only to glance at the barrier trees in his side yards: junipers. This variety’s root systems extended deeper than nearly any other tree’s—more than a hundred feet into the ground, some even deeper. Because of that invisible foundation, they were perhaps the most stable and impregnable plant on the face of the earth.

Complicated, hidden . . .

Federico took one more sip of tea as he looked over the small garden in front of him, listening absently to a car approaching.

He paid little attention at first. There was a fair amount of traffic on the street. But then he noticed the sedan was pulling into his driveway. He gasped, dropping the iced tea. His wife had served it, as he liked, in a proper glass. It shattered into a dozen shards when it hit the flagstone at his feet.

The car was Angel Ramos’s Lexus.

The one that he drove to and from various assignments, like killing Billy Frey the other day and the opioid sale to the Boston crew, the deal that had gone down just an hour ago.

What was he doing here? The man had absolute orders never to drive this vehicle anywhere near Federico’s home or the company’s legitimate office.

But then he saw through the front windshield that the driver wasn’t Ramos. It was his son.

Oh, no . . .

Raine got out of the car and grinned. “Hey, Father. Love the flowers. Are those new?”

Federico whispered, “Raine, what have you done?”

The young man’s smile dissolved. “Angel said he wanted me to drive the car over here. I mean . . .” His voice faded. “I tried to call you, to let you know when I’d get here. Your phone was off.”

Federico fished his mobile from his pocket.

No Service.

So. The police had disabled it to make sure the boy didn’t get through.

He knew the money from the deal was in the trunk, if not the drugs, though there would be plenty of residue of meth and opioids that the clever sniffing equipment would pick up. He knew his son’s fingerprints were all over the car. And he knew the police would have been smart. However they’d managed to engineer getting the boy to drive here, they would have been very careful to make sure he hadn’t been entrapped.

Despairing, Federico knew something else too. Although he couldn’t see them, a number of police cars were speeding here at this very moment.

“What’d I do, Father?”

Federico said with a wan smile, “It’ll be all right.”

And here they were. Sirens chirping, lights flashing. A half dozen officers were climbing out, trotting toward Raine with drawn guns. Pointedly, they ignored Andre Federico himself.

What an act, he thought, both disgusted and dismayed.

Raine blinked in shock. “Wait! No! I haven’t done anything wrong!”

No, he hadn’t. But that wouldn’t stop an ambitious prosecutor from doing everything he could to land a conviction of the boy. And by the time he was acquitted, or the charges were dropped, his reputation and his future would be destroyed.

“Raine Federico, you’re under arrest for trafficking in controlled substances. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

The officer issuing this command was Bradley Reynolds, the prime-time cop, as he was called—so photogenic, so handsome. He wore such a beautiful suit, his hair was so carefully coiffed. And here was Federico, in his bulky peach-and-green gardening outfit, looking like hired help. He was ashamed.

His shoulders angling downward, Federico glanced at the officers and then nodded to Reynolds. The detective nodded back. He called to the tactical trooper about to cuff Raine, “Hold off on the kid.” Then to Federico, “Let’s you and me have a little talk, Andre. What do you say?”

Alan Seybold was having a beer in a Fell’s Point sports bar and watching the news. It was a sedate place—no games were on at the moment—and the patrons were chatting pleasantly and enjoying their cocktails and baskets of fried clams, chips, and quesadillas.

As an author, Seybold was quite the voyeur and enjoyed observing people out in public, people who might inspire plotlines or characters. Tonight, though, he was more interested in the TV that hung over the bar, specifically the story that the brunette anchorwoman was reading.

“Authorities have long suspected that Andre Federico was a kingpin in one of the East Coast’s most dangerous drug and organized crime operations. For years, he eluded capture, but today his luck ran out, and he was caught red-handed with nearly one and a half million dollars—payment for the sale of thirty pounds of opioids that his syndicate had manufactured.”

The image on the screen changed to a conference room at the Maryland State Police, Baltimore headquarters. Filling the TV was the impressive figure of Bradley Reynolds, towering over his partner, Louis Phan. “This was one of the most challenging cases I’ve ever worked,” Reynolds said.

I’ve ever worked.

Love those pronouns.

“I can’t go into details, but the strategy that resulted in Mr. Federico’s capture, well, you could almost say it was worthy of a bestselling thriller.”

The detective looked directly into the camera when he said this—almost as if speaking personally to Alan Seybold. The author had mixed reactions. Of course, he appreciated Reynolds’s private nod his way. And naturally his name couldn’t appear in the story, for fear of retribution by the Federico clan.

Still, he wasn’t accustomed to hiding in the background.

The news moved on to other topics and Seybold tuned out. He finished the beer. He still had a session at the writers’ conference tonight. But he didn’t need to prepare. The author he was appearing with was even less well-known than Maggie Daye. Seybold could spend most of the time talking about his career and what was coming up—the new Steve Cameron thriller, a work in progress.

He thought about the true-crime story he was going to write pseudonymously about the Federico arrest. He’d get the proposal for it to his agent as soon as he got back to California. Have the man shop it around to the big publishers. It’d be a challenge. His name couldn’t be used, which would make the project a tough sell for a big advance. But the agent would just have to roll up his sleeves and do it. Earn his commission.

And get it to the subagent in Hollywood. He could—

Seybold froze. He had glanced into the mirror behind the bar and seen, in the reflection, a man on the street outside, looking into the place. Looking directly at him.

It was Blondie, from the parking garage!

Jesus.

Of course, the man was an associate of Federico’s.

I’m dead, he thought—for the second time today.

Leave. Now. Get the hell out of here and back to San Francisco on the first flight available.

He rose and pulled his jacket on. He scanned the bar and noted a back door, through the corridor that led to the restrooms. He didn’t know this part of the city very well, but there had to be a parking lot or alley he could escape through. Find a cab a few blocks away.

He started for the back of the place.

“Sir?” the bartender asked, an edge to his voice. Seybold stopped. “You going to pay your tab?”

“Yes,” he stuttered and slapped a twenty on the damp wood. He continued toward the back door.

“Sir? Don’t you want your change?”

“No.”

Then he was sprinting down the corridor and pushing through the back door, which slammed shut behind him. He was in a small alley filled with weeds and trash. At the end, fifty yards away, traffic was streaming past, a few yellow cabs among the cars.

Go!

He began to jog. Behind him, he heard the sound of the bar door slamming closed again. He glanced back. Blondie.

Holding a gun.

Sprinting all-out, Seybold fished for his phone. He’d called Reynolds recently and the detective’s number was high on the recent call list. Then: The hell am I thinking? 911!

He burst from the alley, staring at the phone, and slowed before he got to the street, which was filled with speeding traffic. He hit 9. He hit 1.

And it was then that a speeding bicycle messenger slammed into him full-on. The bicyclist, the bike, and Seybold went sprawling onto the sidewalk in three different directions.

“Oh, man,” he moaned and rolled over on his back, racked with pain in, well, just about every part of his body.

He then saw Blondie breaking from the alley in a trot. He stopped, looked right and left, and, spotting the author, strode toward him. Pedestrians screamed and scattered, seeing the gun.

Seybold realized there was only one thing to do.

It was foolish, suicidal. But staying here was certain death. Wincing against the pain, he leapt to his feet and lunged directly into the speeding traffic.

Bradley Reynolds sipped a red wine—a pleasant merlot—and disconnected the call with yet another reporter. Damn, he could talk to them for hours.

He walked out onto his deck, overlooking ten acres of field and forest in an unincorporated part of Montgomery County, Maryland. The house was an A-frame, a classic country home in the modern style. His wife would have liked something more traditional and closer to the shopping centers, but he preferred being out of the chaos of bigger cities.

Reynolds enjoyed the attention he’d been receiving lately. A hero’s attention. Oh, he liked it very much. From the reporters, from the public, from state police headquarters . . . and from city hall.

All of this was good; he had his eyes set on a political career. But someday, not yet. He wasn’t through with his mission of making a name for himself by cleaning up Baltimore. He’d gutted the Federico organization. But some of the man’s crew still remained. And with Federico arrested, Jack Kelley and his gang were going to try to fill the vacuum. Reynolds’s next task was to stop them too. He’d been fishing around for a CI within that organization, somebody who could help him get inside information the way Stan Walker had breached the Federico crew. So far nothing, but he’d keep at it.

The detective was startled by a frantic pounding on his front door.

Frowning, Reynolds strode to the hallway and peered out, hand near his weapon. “The hell’s this?” he whispered. He opened the door and let in a disheveled and bruised Alan Seybold. Blood spattered his sleeve.

“Jesus. What happened to you?”

The man didn’t answer, but instead just nodded to his car outside. “Open your garage. I have to get it out of sight.”

Reynolds tried to make sense of this. “Sure, I guess. But what—”

“Please. I have to get it hidden now!” He ran back to his car.

Reynolds watched him with curiosity, then stepped into the garage and hit the opener. The door rose with a grind and Seybold pulled in fast, practically leaving skid marks. He climbed out and gestured toward the door.

“Close it.”

The detective did so. He could see Seybold relax, his shoulders softening.

“How’d you know I was here?” the detective asked.

“Louis Phan told me. I had to see you.”

“Take it easy. What’s going on?”

“Somebody’s after me. Somebody in the Federico crew. A blond guy. Thirties. You know who it could be?”

Reynolds shrugged. “He’s got dozens in his gang. I don’t know who’s blond and who isn’t. But how would he know about you?”

Seybold grimaced. “I went to the bust. At the pier.”

“You did what? I told you not to.”

“I know, I know. I just wanted to see if my plan was going to work. And snap a few pictures. This guy, he saw me. Please. You’ve got to protect me. I’ve got to get out of town. You have a private plane that’ll get me back to California?”

“Uhm, no.” Reynolds smiled. “We don’t have private planes.”

“Well, what about an armored car to the airport? And have somebody drop my rental off for me?”

“Ditto armored cars, Alan. But I could get you an escort. And, yeah, somebody can handle the rental. Aren’t you being a little paranoid?”

“No, you should’ve seen his eyes. He was going to kill me. I know he was.”

“All right. I’ll get it in the works. Let’s go inside. You can get cleaned up in the bathroom. What airport?”

“BWI.”

They left the garage and went into the house. Reynolds pointed out the guest bathroom to Seybold, and proceeded into the kitchen, where, instead of arranging for a car to the airport and returning the rental, he poured two scotches.

He was determined to convince the author to stay in Baltimore for a while longer and come up with another plot, or two, this time to help Reynolds bring down Jack Kelley. Thinking: the fact is, Seybold’s books really weren’t that good. But when it came to ideas on how to take down the bad guys, that man had a true gift.

Alan Seybold certainly could use a bit of cleaning up, but now was not the time.

As soon as he heard Reynolds walk into the kitchen, he slipped silently back into the garage and hurried out the side door.

He ran breathlessly down Reynolds’s lengthy driveway and only slowed when he came up to the three Maryland State Police squad cars and two unmarkeds, hidden around a bend in the asphalt. Seybold slowed to a walk, catching his breath.

He nodded to the person in charge. It was Blondie, the man who’d spotted him in the garage near the drug bust, the man who’d pursued him from the sports bar.

And the man who was not in fact a hit man for the Federico crew, but a cop. He was State Police Internal Affairs detective Richard Kale.

His department had received a tip that busting Andre Federico was not all Bradley Reynolds had on his agenda: his tagalong task was to skim a significant sum of the buy money at Pier 8 for himself. The anonymous tip, they suspected, came from Louis Phan, probably tired of living in the pompous detective’s shadow for the past few years.

But tips don’t mean proof, and Kale started dogging Reynolds, including surveilling the scene of the bust from the parking garage—where he’d spotted Seybold. But he hadn’t been able to actually see the detective slip money out of the bag the buyer from the Boston gangs had brought.

Kale had wondered how Seybold was involved and began following him. He’d checked him out and learned he was an author, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in Federico’s pocket. He’d decided to approach him at the Fell’s Point sports bar, but then Seybold had fled. Kale had pursued—and, just to be safe, had drawn his weapon.

Seybold’s attempt to escape through busy Baltimore traffic, following the bike accident, had been as misguided as he’d suspected—that part about suicidal. He’d leapt back to the sidewalk after nearly getting squashed by a garbage truck and dropped to his knees, begging Kale not to kill him.

Kale had flashed a badge, calming the author, who explained how he’d been approached by Reynolds and Phan and asked to come up with an idea to trap Federico.

Kale had thought it bizarre, no, downright weird. But Phan confirmed it.

“You really think he’s crooked?” Seybold had asked, dumbfounded, after Kale had explained IA’s concerns about Reynolds.

Kale had replied, “The CI inside the Federico organization said the price for the drugs was $2 million. When Federico’s son was stopped at his dad’s house, there was only $1.5 in the Lexus trunk. We can’t find the missing $500K anywhere. Raine didn’t stop en route. The money disappeared at Pier 8. Reynolds was the one who checked out the cash there. Nobody else touched it, except the buyer from Boston and Ramos, and they didn’t have it on them.

Kale had then looked directly into Seybold’s eyes. “Look, sir. I don’t read your books. I’ll be honest about that. But I looked ’em up online. All your fans like them because the good guys win. Will you help us? It’s looking like Reynolds has gone rogue. Help us win one for the good guys.”

At first, the author was reluctant to get involved further. But then a thought occurred to him. What a damn good twist to the story for his true-crime book: the cop who uses an author to plot the downfall of a criminal mastermind is himself crooked.

Surprise endings don’t get any better than that.

The plan to find out if Reynolds was crooked or not was so simple that even Maggie Daye could have come up with it. The tipster reported that Reynolds might have smuggled the money out of the warehouse wrapped in a tan raincoat of his. And that it might be hidden in Reynolds’s garage at home.

The problem, Kale explained to Seybold, was that there was no probable cause to get a warrant to search Reynolds’s house on the basis of a tip alone. But, under the law, if somebody—like Seybold—entered with permission and noticed the raincoat there, he could swear in an affidavit that he’d seen it and a magistrate could issue paper for a full search.

Now, standing in the driveway of Reynolds’s country house, still catching his breath, the author said to Kale, “It’s there, in the garage. The raincoat. Kind of hidden against the wall in the back. But I could see it clearly. And I’m pretty sure I could see some cash in the folds.”

As Seybold signed the affidavit that was then emailed to the magistrate, Kale gazed at the house; he did not look entirely happy that he’d caught his prey. Seybold had written about internal affairs officers in his Steve Cameron novels, and he knew that the men and women who did the necessary but difficult job of investigating their own were usually troubled by their fellow cops’ lapses.

A moment later Kale’s phone hummed in his pocket. He glanced at it and called to the others. “Got the go-ahead. Let’s pick him up.”

Kale turned to Seybold. “You might want to watch your back. We’ve kept your name out of the public eye, but the Federico operation, well, it’s crippled, but there’re still some bad actors out there. And”—he nodded toward the house—“Bradley Reynolds may’ve had some buddies on the force who’re on the take. They won’t be too happy about what’s going to happen to him.”

Seybold’s gut churned at this news. He said softly, “I’ll do that.”

Kale paused and turned. “Some other advice, sir?”

“Sure, what?”

“You might want to stick to writing books in the future. Leave this sort of thing to the professionals.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Seybold whispered. And watched the IA detectives and tactical team storm Reynolds’s house and take him into custody.

Two hours later—after a fair amount of back-watching on the way to the hotel—Alan Seybold was packing his suitcase and watching the news on his hotel room TV.

Yet another anchorwoman—this one a redhead—was saying, “Maryland State Police detective Bradley Reynolds, an eighteen-year veteran of the force, has been charged with corruption and a number of other counts arising out of the recent arrest of suspected mob boss Andre Federico. It’s alleged that Reynolds skimmed five hundred thousand dollars of drug money during the arrest. His attorney has stated that the detective denies all charges.”

Seybold stared at the video of Reynolds on a perp walk to booking. His perfect hair was mussed, his clothing wrinkled. His expression was grim. And bewildered.

Seybold had finished packing and was walking to the door, rolling his suitcase behind him, when he stopped short.

The anchorwoman was saying, “Alan Seybold, a well-known author of crime novels, aided police in coming up with a plot, you might say, to arrest Federico. Seybold also assisted in the arrest of Detective Reynolds on the corruption charges. Seybold wrote the bestselling thriller The Girl on the Ship, which, he recently announced at a writers’ conference in Baltimore, was going to be a major feature film. The studio holding the option on the book, however, reported that it lapsed months ago and there are no plans to renew it. In other news—”

Shit. He clicked the set off.

Who the hell had leaked the story of his working with Reynolds? Well, maybe no one would notice. This was a small, local TV station, not—

His mobile began to ring.

The hotel room phone too.

I’m dead, he thought yet again.

At the elevator, pushing the button repeatedly, as if that would magically speed the car to his floor, he wondered how far his savings would go in the Caribbean or South America.

Alan Seybold stabbed the elevator button once more.

The Stag and Hound was, at heart, phony.

Sure, the Baltimore waterfront bar reeked of Galway and Dublin and Gaelic and the Clancy Brothers and the Pogues, but in fact the pub had started life thirty years ago as a falafel house, with the meaningless name of Al Kasimbah. The owners were two Romanian brothers. The cuisine never caught on in Fell’s Point, so the restaurant became a punk rock venue briefly, then, after seeing Riverdance (twice), the bros gutted the place and turned it Irish.

They hadn’t intended to sell, but when one patron made an offer, they accepted instantly. For two reasons. One, the money was good. Two, you always gave Jack Kelley what he wanted.

This afternoon, Kelley, a compact, slow-moving man of thirty-five, was sitting at the owner’s booth in the back of the Hound, which for some reason was what the locals called it. Never both names together, never Stag.

Kelley had freckles and a lean face and a shock of blond hair. He was more Germanic than Hibernian in appearance and demeanor. He wore suits exclusively and open-collar shirts. Today he was in a navy two-piece and his shirt was shark gray. As was his habit, he dabbed at the dust on his black Oxford shoes from time to time with a cloth napkin.

Kelley was sipping Michelob Ultra, a brew that was to him what tap water was to everyone else. He hated Guinness and Jameson and Bushmills, though Midleton—the upscale distillate—was okay if you couldn’t get a margarita or daiquiri. Which were his faves.

The Hound was mostly empty—another testament to its inauthenticity. A righteous Irish bar in New York, Philly, or, my God, Boston, would be full of pickled drinkers waxing eloquent and long about politics and the IRA and movies and music and neighborhood gossip and anything else that tripped through their soggy minds. But not here. Just a few barflies perched on chairs or stools. Drinking. Silent.

The way Jack Kelley liked it.

He was reflecting on the recent events in Baltimore: the arrest of Andre Federico and his psycho associate, Angel Ramos. Another bust too: that of Detective Bradley Reynolds, late of the Organized Crime Task Force in the MSP’s Baltimore office.

Kelley’s thoughts were accompanied by a near-giddy sensation of victory. As an orphan consistently ignored by his foster parents and bullied by the other, bigger boys in the home, Jack became addicted to TV, watching hour after hour. Later, he tried to decide if he became who he was because of the crime shows he watched or because one or both of his parents, whoever they were, had been missing some important wiring. Both, probably. But the end result was that little Jackie decided at a pretty damn young age that he was going to be the number one crime boss in this difficult, vibrant city. His city.

He’d made important inroads, putting together a good crew and building a solid drug, money laundering, juice, and numbers network. But in the past year, a brick wall. Federico had ruthlessly expanded his power in the region, severely limiting Kelley’s opportunities. He had been losing ground to an old man who’d never been properly drunk in his life and who liked to garden. It was galling.

Then there was Bradley Reynolds, an ambitious crusading cop who’d stop at nothing to clean up the city—since it would boost his cred on his way to city hall. Reynolds was more concerned about Federico, but had Kelley in his sights too.

These two obstacles had to be removed for Kelley’s dream of empire to come true.

Killing Federico was always an option, but that’d lead to an all-out war, the last thing that Kelley needed. His boys were good, their guns as wicked as those of Federico’s men, but he was outmanned. No, he needed to get Federico removed some other way. He needed him in prison.

As for Reynolds, well, killing a cop was always a no-no, even one as pretentious and obnoxious as this particular detective. Kelley needed him behind bars too.

Quite a problem, quite a conundrum.

Which proved too challenging for Jack Kelley and his crew of earnest but pedestrian thugs to solve. So he turned to outside help—a friend who very likely could come up with a sharp plan to eliminate both of those problems.

And that person was walking through the door of the Hound just now.

“Hey, there,” Jack Kelley said to thriller writer Maggie Daye. “Lemme buy you a drink, lass.”

Daye sat down beside Kelley, gave him a hug. Then she lifted her eyebrow and offered a smile to the waitress, across the room.

Nikki, the server, smiled back and turned quickly from the booth where she’d been jotting on her pad, leaving a gaggle of college boys in order interruptus. They didn’t seem happy and tossed some glares Daye’s way. Her cold blue eyes turned slowly toward them, and they quickly took to busying themselves with menus they’d already selected from.

Jack Kelley said to her, “It worked, lass. Worked like a charm.”

Daye had always been amused by his phony Irishness. He had absolutely no brogue, and his ethnic roots had dissolved generations ago; the “lass” was the only Celtic affectation he’d adopted, and he used it only with her.

The server brought her beverage—the White Russian she always ordered here—and Daye and Kelley touched glasses.

“I was pleased,” Daye said, sipping and settling back into the comfortable booth.

A year ago, the Hound had become a home away from home to her. A home away from a very silent and very lonely home. The Fell’s Point townhouse where she and Sam had lived after getting married had been such a wonderful place. Decorated by the two of them. Filled with laughter, filled with the aroma of exotic and sometimes hilariously disastrous dinners, filled with the soft whispers of making love.

It was the place where futures had been planned. Babies and vacations and careers.

But then, the accident. The quiet, bookish couple became, in a split second, half that. And the quiet, bookish woman was forced to begin a new life alone.

In her grief, Maggie Daye had taken to wandering the streets and parks of the city, going anywhere to escape the spiny solitude of home. Occasionally she would stop into the Hound for a few drinks.

Then more than occasionally and more than a few.

One night Jack Kelley sat down beside her. “Listen to me, lass. You’re too smart to kill yourself this way. Can’t you think of something more creative?”

The ice was broken, and Kelley and his wife and Daye had become friends. She knew what they did for a living. She didn’t care. At one point in her life she might have, but no longer. Thanks to the couple, she dialed down the alcohol and, with their encouragement, decided to devote her life to what she and Sam had so loved: books.

She began selling her mystery novels to a New York publisher and had some modest success. Critics soundly praised her intricate, clever plots, though occasionally wondered about the excessively gruesome means of murder her villains employed.

One day she’d read an article in the Sun about a man who had been killed in a workplace accident. The victim, who’d fallen to a horrifying death from a crane in Baltimore harbor, was the same man whose car had swerved onto the sidewalk during an impromptu drag race and struck and killed Sam. The driver’s charges had been dismissed on “technical grounds”—which Maggie Daye had learned meant that his father was a labor leader with ties to city hall.

After reading the story, she’d walked into the Hound and sat down. Nikki brought the White Russian, and Daye had gestured Jack Kelley over to her. “You have people working the docks.” She fixed his eyes with her own.

“Do I?”

“On the cranes.”

“I may, lass.”

“Where that guy fell from.”

“What guy?”

There’d been a pause.

She’d squeezed his hand and said, “I owe you.”

“For what?” he’d said, smiling. And headed off to deal with a drunk at the bar.

Three weeks ago, as Daye was nursing her sweet drink and editing a manuscript, Kelley had slipped into the booth beside her. He said, with a coy smile, “I’ve got an idea for a book myself. Can you believe it? I’m hoping you can help me, lass.”

“Of course.”

I owe you . . .

“What it’s about is two men who want to control a neighborhood. Think The Wire. Think Homicide.”

“The Sopranos.”

Kelley’s expression twisted a little. “Well, that’s Jersey. But if you want.”

“Gangsters.”

“Exactly. Two of them. Rivals. I want one to take out the other—and this crusading son-of-a-bitch cop too. But I don’t exactly have any plot ideas. Think you might be able to come up with something for me?”

“Sure, Jack. Give me some more details.”

He’d laid out the scenario, using hypothetical names of Drug Lord F, a paranoid kingpin in Chevy Chase who was determined to drive the other gang leader out of business. “Now, he owns a bar. And he’s a good-looking guy. Mr. K, we’ll call him. Bit of a criminal, but really has a heart of gold.”

“Is he Irish?” she’d asked.

“Maybe. I haven’t thought on it much, now, have I?” Kelley’s attempt at a brogue was hilarious. He continued. “Then there’s that fanatical cop, Detective R, who wants to close down both of them.”

Daye had said, “Good ideas to start with. I’ll do some thinking.”

She’d gone home and, as with her novels, used Post-it Notes on a bulletin board to come up with the structure of the plan, all the plot points, the twists, the ending. At midnight, she sat back and gazed at the tiny yellow squares.

“Yep,” she’d said to herself and smiled. “That’ll do.”

The next day she’d returned to the Hound and told Kelley she had some ideas. He’d inspired her, in fact.

“Me?”

“Yep. Asking a thriller writer to help plot something in real life. See, there’s an author appearing with me at a writers’ conference in Baltimore coming up soon. Egotistical bastard. Alan Seybold.”

“Think I’ve heard of him. Something about a movie being made.”

“I’ve been on panels with him twice and he never remembers me or any of the other panelists, never reads our books ahead of time. Last year he promised he’d give me some advice about selling my books overseas. I emailed him twice. Never heard back. I want to use him.”

“Okay with me, lass. I don’t like him already.”

“Now, I’ll need somebody inside the Federico operation. Somebody to be a confidential informant.”

“I’ve got a guy already. Stan Walker. Nobody in Federico’s crew has any idea he’s on my payroll.”

“Good.” And then she’d laid out her plan.

Walker, the CI, would approach Bradley Reynolds with a proposal to take down Federico. Because the man had proved so difficult to catch, Walker would suggest that maybe an author he liked, Alan Seybold, could come up with a plot to take him down.

As with all of her books, Daye had researched the hell out of Federico and shared the relevant information with Walker. He, in turn, would sit down with cops and Seybold and feed them selected facts that would inspire, she hoped, the author to come up with a plot to nail the man. She thought using the son, Raine, was a good approach, since Seybold had written a potboiler about a father who sacrifices himself for his kid. And, it turned out, this was the tack that the author took.

As to Reynolds, Daye had an idea for that too. Much simpler than the Federico scam. Walker would tell Reynolds that the drug buy was for a half-million dollars more than it really was. When the cash was seized, it would turn out to be $1.5 million, not the $2 million that Walker reported. Internal Affairs would get an anonymous tip that Reynolds had planned to steal the $500K. An IA detective would set up an operation to find out, using Seybold, whom Reynolds trusted, to get inside Reynolds’s garage, where one of Kelley’s men had hidden a half million from the gang’s operating fund. Kelley declared that the expense was a good business investment.

And, yep, both plots had worked like a charm.

Hence, the toast between Kelley and Daye . . . and the celebratory dinner his wife was cooking that evening.

The gangster now said to her, “I heard that Seybold’s disappeared.”

“I heard that too.”

“Can’t blame him. His name was on the news, you know, reporting he was the guy who brought down Federico.”

“On the news,” Daye repeated absently. “That was bad luck. Federico’s in jail. So’s Angel Ramos. But they have friends on the outside. I’d guess a lot of them’d love to pay Seybold a visit.”

“Maybe some friends of Reynolds’ too.”

They sipped their drinks in silence for a few minutes.

Kelley said, “Wonder how the reporters heard about him.”

“Hm,” she replied. “Wonder.”

Kelley said, “Guess he’s going to have to give up writing.”

Maggie Daye considered this for a moment. She shrugged. “Probably. But frankly, no great loss to the world of literature. See, the thing about Alan Seybold is, sure, he tells a pretty good story, up to a point. But his books always fall apart in the last few pages. He couldn’t come up with a surprise ending to save his soul.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Jerry Bauer

Jeffery Deaver is a former journalist, folk singer, and attorney whose novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the New York Times, the Times of London, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times. His books are sold in 150 countries and have been translated into twenty-five languages.

The author of thirty-nine novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book, as well as a lyricist of a country-western album, he’s received or been short-listed for dozens of awards.

His book The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers association, and his Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window and a stand-alone, Edge, were also nominated for that prize, as was a short story published recently. He has been awarded the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association, and he is a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award and the Nero Award. The Cold Moon was named the Book of the Year by the Mystery Writers Association of Japan. In addition, the Japanese Adventure Fiction Association awarded The Cold Moon and Carte Blanche their annual Grand Prix award. His book The Kill Room was awarded the Political Thriller of the Year by Killer Nashville. And his collection of short stories Trouble in Mind was nominated for best anthology by that organization as well.

Deaver has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention and the Raymond Chandler Award for lifetime achievement in Italy. The Strand Magazine also has presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Deaver has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as an Anthony, a Shamus, and a Gumshoe. He is currently the president of the Mystery Writers of America.

His audiobook The Starling Project, starring Alfred Molina and produced by Audible, won the Audie Award for best original audiobook of the year in 2016.

He contributed to the anthology In the Company of Sherlock Holmes and Books to Die For, which won the Anthony. Books to Die For recently won the Agatha as well.

Deaver’s most recent novels are The Burial Hour; The Steel Kiss; a Lincoln Rhyme novel, Solitude Creek; a Kathryn Dance thriller; and The October List, a thriller told in reverse. For the Dance novel XO, Deaver wrote an album of country-western songs, available on iTunes and as a CD; before that, he wrote Carte Blanche, a James Bond continuation novel and a #1 international bestseller.

His book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Lifetime aired an adaptation of his book The Devil’s Teardrop. And, yes, the rumors are true: he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As the World Turns. He was born outside Chicago and has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University.

Readers can visit his website at www.jefferydeaver.com.

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