The racist line, though, worked every time. As did the thing Lange did with the hundred-dollar bill to make the driver wait for him. He’d seen it in a movie.
“Here,” he said to the kid, ripping the bill in two and offering him half. “You get the other half when I return.”
The drivers might have been young, idealistic liberals, but they were also money-loving capitalists. God bless America.
“Okay,” said the kid, eyeing half of Ben Franklin’s face in his hand. “But make it quick.”
Lange guaranteed him he would. After all, he had this routine down cold.
It wasn’t always the same dealer, but it was the same alley behind the same Chinese restaurant, which was lit by nothing more than the light from whichever rundown apartment overhead had a lamp on. Most of the time, there’d be a couple of dealers hanging out behind a rusted Dumpster. Other times there’d be only one. Tonight was one of those other times.
“Hey,” said Lange, approaching the guy. He was barely more than a silhouette.
The guy said nothing. They always said nothing.
Lange asked for a “pillow,” which was slang for a bundle of ten glassine bags, each one containing a hundred milligrams of heroin. Usually Lange would buy less, if only to stave off the temptation of doing more than he could function on—i.e., so much that he could no longer throw his ninety-eight-miles-per-hour fastball or his devastating 12–6 curve—but the team had an extended West Coast road trip coming up, and he had to make sure he was covered.
Again, the guy behind the Dumpster said nothing.
That wasn’t the problem, though. It was that he also did nothing. No reaching into his pocket, no holding up one finger to confirm the price, which Lange was putting at a hundred dollars. Cheap as that was, he’d still be overpaying. Not that he and his eighty-million-dollar contract really cared.
“Problem?” asked Lange.
“As a matter of fact…” said the Dealer.
Chapter 52
LANGE STOOD perfectly still in the darkness, unsure of his next move. How big of a problem could it be? Maybe it wasn’t one at all. Maybe this guy was just messin’ with him.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the Dealer.
Lange didn’t. The only thing he knew was that he’d never scored from him in the past. The other dealers were always younger, more like the kid’s age back in the Prius. This voice was older.
Lange squinted to get a better look at him, something more than the silhouette. Best he could see were the whites of his eyes, not a single other feature on his face. The reason why became clear as Lange leaned in a bit. The guy was wearing a ski mask.
“There’s been a mistake,” said Lange.
“No,” said the Dealer. “No mistake. This is fate.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a closer, too.”
Tingle was too delicate a word to describe the feeling that shot up Lange’s spine. Shock, though, was too strong. I’m a closer, too? In Lange’s world, that line was a purpose pitch. A brushback. Something to get the legs jumpy and the mind racing. A reason to be scared.
But fear was always what the other guy felt, not Lange. He was the badass, the unflappable one. Standing sixty feet and six inches away from home plate, he still got right up in your face with his famous death stare while notching another save.
Only Lange still couldn’t see shit.
It occurred to him, however. Forget about disguises: if he couldn’t see this guy, then this guy couldn’t see him.
Yet he said closer, didn’t he? No way that was a coincidence.
“How do you know who I am?” asked Lange.
“It’s so much worse than that,” said the Dealer. “I also know what you’ve done. The real story. Not what you made everyone else believe. This moment? You and me? This has been a long time coming.”
The urge to run overtook Lange in a heartbeat, but faster still was the Dealer’s hand. He jabbed the stun gun under Lange’s nose, the jolt dropping the baseball player to his knees. It was a nifty bit of foreshadowing.
Stun guns and real estate share the same mantra: location, location, location. Aim for the nostrils, with all those nerve endings, and a stun gun does more than merely stun.
Lange yelled out in agony, grabbing his face, the pain unlike anything he’d ever felt. He couldn’t fight back. He was helpless.
The Dealer was only getting started.
His hands still covering his face, Lange couldn’t see the bucket rising over him. He heard it, though. The liquid sloshing about.
Then he felt it—cold at first, as it drenched his entire body. Then some of it seeped past his fingers and into his eyes, which immediately began to burn like hell. Some of it got into his mouth, too, but by then he already knew what it was. The smell was unmistakable.
The Dealer lit a match and tossed it, the gasoline igniting Lange into a giant flame. He then grabbed a milk crate, turning it upside down on the ground to make a chair for himself so he could watch as well as listen.
Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns.
Chapter 53
IT’S NOT easy getting a cab to take you to Harlem at four in the morning. The first guy I flagged told me he was at the end of his shift and Harlem was too far away. The second guy didn’t even bother to lie. He lowered his window, asked me where I was going, and simply shook his head no before driving off.
I’d seen enough.
I walked two blocks to the place where I garaged my motorcycle, handing a five-spot to the late-night attendant—a new guy—who pulled it around for me from a couple of levels down. He swung his leg off the bike and gazed at all the original Triumph parts, restored to perfection. He wasn’t the first to say it, and he wouldn’t be the last.
“Man, I should be tipping you,” he said.
Around three blocks away from the address Elizabeth had texted me, there was no longer a need to check the street signs. The slew of cop cars with their cherries flashing was tantamount to a giant neon sign. DEAD GUY HERE.
“You a Yankees fan?” asked Elizabeth, breaking away from a fellow detective once she saw me.
“Mets, actually,” I said. “I don’t follow minor league teams.”
I could tell that joke in my sleep and practically was. Serial killers are murder on the circadian rhythms.
Of course Elizabeth wasn’t making idle ESPN chitchat. Nor was there going to be anything amusing about what I was about to see. That much I knew, no matter how tired I was.
“He had one of those fancy aluminum wallets, like a cigarette case. Otherwise we’d be waiting on dental records,” she said as she led me around a corner, under some police tape, and down an alley that put all other alleys to shame on the fear-for-your-life scale. Were it not for all the cops around, I’d sooner be walking the streets in Kabul.
We reached the end of the alley, the portable floodlights creating an almost surreal mix of glare and shadows. I’d taken just enough chemistry back in high school to know that that wasn’t smoke still rising off the victim. That was the heat of his charred corpse mixing with the chill of a September night. Good old-fashioned steam.