Worst Case

He hung up after I gave him my number.

“It’s over?” Du

I watched Du

Unfortunately, I wasn’t as optimistic. The individual who’d taken Jacob seemed highly organized. He wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to just give him back.

What was filling me with even more dread was the way he kept changing the subject when I asked about Jacob.

I could tell by the skeptical look on Parker’s face that she was thinking exactly the same thing.

Chapter 10

AN UNMARKED BLACK Impala was gassed and waiting in the cold rain around the corner on Central Park West. In the front seat, I handed Parker one of the Kevlar vests draped across the dashboard and slipped into the other.

We would be the lead car, with Schultz and Ramirez loosely tailing us. Aviation had been called, and a Bell 206 was en route from Floyd Be

“What was that about the wings?” I said to Parker as we sat there waiting for the kidnapper to call back.

“I think it was a poem. It’s on the tip of my tongue. My college English professor would kill me.”

“Where’d you go to school?” I said.

“UVA.”

“ Virginia. So that explains the down-home accent.”

“Accent?” Emily drawled. “Y’all Yankees are the ones with the accent.”

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 a

“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 i

“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.

“Whoop, whoop,” came the warning cry as I turned the car onto the avenue, and my unmarked was immediately made. “Five-oh,” one teen spotter hollered down the block helpfully to his coworkers through cupped hands. “Yo, Five-oh!”

I sca

Where the hell were Schultz and Ramirez? I thought, glancing into my rearview. I felt like a sheriff who’d made a wrong turn into the wrong mountain pass.

“Stop at two-five-oh Briggs,” the kidnapper said.

Emily tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a building up the block. I didn’t have time to look for a parking spot. I spun the wheel and bumped the Impala up onto the sidewalk in front of it.

With swirling architectural embellishments around its entrance, 250 Briggs Avenue, like a lot of old Bronx buildings, had once been a stately residence. Since then, one of the entrance’s Doric columns had been shattered, and there were smoke stains on the brick above most of the boarded-up windows of the third story.

I got soaked to the bone while I retrieved flashlights from the trunk of the detective car. So did Emily as we walked across the cracked sidewalk and pulled open the building’s broken front door.

“I’m here. I’m in the lobby of two-fifty now,” I said into the phone. My words echoed eerily back at me as I played the beam over the dim lobby. The walls were marble, but the low ceiling was bloated, pregnant with water stains and mold. A feeling as desolate as my surroundings enveloped me. I had the sudden desperate feeling that time was ru

Where are you, Jacob? I thought.

“Did you know that people actually live here?” the kidnapper said in my ear. “Rats run through the halls. Some of the tenants on the third floor don’t even have doors after a recent fire. Is it any wonder at all that this area has the highest incidence of childhood asthma in the country?

“The slumlord who bought it last year, along with eighty percent of this block, has let it get like this because he’s trying to force out the rent-controlled tenants. He bought it at a HUD auction, despite his company’s history of thirteen hundred housing-code violations. This is happening here in the richest country on earth, Mike. This is happening right here, right now in America.”