Jeffery Deaver - The Deliveryman

“True, kid. We were buddies, me and your dad.” Coelho was smiling, though the expression looked somewhat sinister to Morales. “I want the assholes who killed him as much as you do. I find ’em, they’re fucked.”

Connie frowned and clicked her tongue.

The ATF agent said, “He’s heard the word before, ain’t you, kid?”

Javier swallowed and gazed from face to face. “He call you Mr. Morales.” Confusion filled his small face.

“We’re just pretending to be the Abbotts. We’re borrowing their house here.”

“Where are they?” He looked around the rooms.

In the basement in garbage bags, soon to be in the Jersey swamplands, according to the plans Ortiz had made.

“They’re away for a while. They agreed to help us. We have to be careful. Because the men who killed your father are very dangerous. We have to stay undercover. You know undercover, right?”

“Men who killed him?” Javier shook his head. “I only saw one man. That’s all.”

“But we think he was working for others.” Morales was adlibbing but he thought he sounded pretty reasonable, and even a little scared, and the boy seemed to buy it. He nodded and fiddled with his tablet. “Why you don’t, you know, go to the police?”

Connie said, “We’re working with them, Javier. That Detective Amelia. She knows who we are. She’s just keeping up the cover when she called us the Abbotts.”

Morales nodded. “Remember what she asked you? Where you and your father were yesterday? That’s what we’re trying to find out. How’re you coming with the pictures?”

“I couldn’t remember very much.”

Morales had looked at the tablet earlier. The boy had done some cartoon sketches but none related to the redheaded cop’s assignment.

Morales said, “My associate here, Mr. Ortiz, has found out almost everywhere he went. Except for an hour about three p.m. Three in the afternoon. Do you know what delivery he made then? If we can figure that out we can figure out who killed him. And catch him.”

“Them,” the boy said. “You said ‘men.’”

“Them.” Morales smiled.

But Javier was shaking his head. “I dunno. I was drawing. Just hanging in the truck, you know.”

“Think back. At around two thirty he made a delivery at...?” He looked at Ortiz.

“Tony’s Auto Supply. It’s on Fourteenth and the river.”

Morales smiled. “That’s near the garbage scows. You remember that? There’d be seagulls. Thousands of seagulls. And the place stinks too.”

His eyes narrowed. “Yeah. Birds. All those birds. There, yeah.”

Morales’s wife, Connie, pointed out, “And at three thirty he dropped off something in Chinatown. You know Chinatown.”

“Yeah. I ’member that.”

“What delivery did he make in between? Around three?”

“Nothing. Didn’t drop nothing off.”

Morales’s face revealed no emotion. He studied the boy closely. He wondered if he was lying and if Coelho should go to work on him. “But it wouldn’t take an hour to get from the river to Chinatown. We’re sure he made a delivery.”

“No.” Then stridently: “He didn’t.”

Morales sighed. “So he didn’t stop anywhere ?”

“Sure, we stopped. But he didn’t deliver anything. You asked me if he delivered something and he didn’t.”

Morales laughed. The kid was right. He’d been asking the wrong question. “Where did he stop?”

“The church.”

“Church?”

“Yeah. After the place with all the birds we drove for a while and he went into this church and then we left and drove to Chinatown.”

“Church? Was your dad religious?” Coelho asked.

“Huh?” The boy was frowning.

“Did he go to church Sundays, to mass?”

“No. That’s why I thought it was, you know, weird.”

“Can you show us where the church is?”

“I guess. Only, can I get my paper and pencils?”

“We don’t have time to worry about that now,” Coelho snapped.

“My daddy gave them to me,” the boy said defiantly.

Morales smiled. “Sure, son.” And Connie climbed the stairs to fetch the set.

Getting away from the building without being seen was the hardest part: Up to the roof, over three buildings then down again.

Morales was worried that the boy would freak out at the heights, and cry out in fear, even if they weren’t near the edge. But, no, he was fine, though he was upset when they told him that Officer Lamont, the bodyguard, was actually working for the men who’d killed his father and they couldn’t trust him.

Morales was feeling a little bad that he’d have to kill the kid as soon as they got their hands on the delivery. That was one hit he wouldn’t do himself. Stan Coelho would. The ATF agent would ice anyone, any age, any sex. He suspected the man was psycho. Though that condition had come in helpful from time to time.

Once on the street, and nowhere near the surveilling cop, the five of them slipped into Connie’s Lexis SUV and headed off, downtown.

Javier told them that he could not remember exactly where the church was, but once they arrived in the vicinity of Chinatown and started driving in lazy circles it took only ten minutes for the boy to sit up and cry out, “There!” He pointed excitedly to St. Timothy’s, a grimy gothic Catholic church near the Bowery.

Ortiz and Connie smiled, but Morales shook his head as he eyed the place carefully. It was small and without a back entrance or loading dock. There was a service door but in the front; you reached it via the main sidewalk, which was crowded now and would have been just as congested when Rinaldo had been here, around three yesterday afternoon.

Morales muttered, “How could he get two tons of... product through the door and not be seen?”

It was then that Ortiz laughed. “What if he wasn’t going to hide the shipment itself?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were nervous about a sting or surveillance. Maybe he was too. He meets the truck in the armory, tries out a product or two, makes sure they’re all there. But he’s worried and wants some escape plan. So he’s arranged for the guy who picked up the shipment at the Jersey train depot to keep it and take it to, I don’t know, a self-storage unit somewhere.”

Morales was nodding. Smart. It was a smart plan.

Connie added, “He writes down the details, the address of the storage place and combination to the lock, in the church. That’s what he hides here.” A nod at the church.

Morales had to laugh. He looked at the boy. “Your papa knew what he was about.”

“Unless,” Stan Coelho was saying, “it’s a red herring.”

“How so?”

“Just trying to lead off anybody following him.”

Morales noticed the agent’s eyes were on the boy’s pencil box.

Coelho asked, “Where’d you get that?”

“It’s mine,” he said defiantly.

“I didn’t ask that. I want to know where you got it.”

“My daddy gave it to me.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Shit, that’s got the information in it. The storage space. Probably the key. He’s had it all along.” He reached for it.

“Mine!” Javier cried. “There’s no key in it.” The boy pulled away. “My daddy had one but he didn’t give it to me.”

Morales waved his hand and Coelho backed off. “Your daddy had one what?”

“A key.”

“Where did he get it?”

“When we stopped here, he took it out of the glove compartment thing, you know. And he took it into the church.”

“You know where he put it?”

“No. I stayed here and drawed. Came back just a minute later and we drove off, to Chinatown.”

Morales said, “Let’s go. We’ll all go to look.” They climbed out of the SUV and headed for the church. Coelho kept his hand on Javier’s shoulder. If the key wasn’t here, Morales would tell the agent to go to work and get the boy to talk. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time.