Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,38

He took the elevator down and walked out of the condo onto Collins Avenue, found a piece of shade next to a parked U-Haul truck, and poked in a number.

The phone was picked up on the second ring. “Yeah?”

“This is me. I need to talk to the guy.”

“Hang on.”

There was a moment of silence, then “Hey.”

“Hey. You know those two guys we were talking about? They got in touch with my barber and they were asking about the rest of the girls.”

“Goddamnit! Where’d you hear this?”

“Barber called,” Cattaneo said.

“They’re bringing pressure. They’ve been all over town, the way we hear it,” the guy said.

“They’re something new, and they’re asking about Patty Pittman,” Cattaneo said.

Down the sidewalk, a disheveled street woman had been pushing a shopping cart along, and now she stepped next to a hedge, pulled down her pants, and took a dump. A half block from his condo, for Christ’s sakes. Neighborhood was going to shit, literally; maybe they should sell the place.

“That’s . . . not good, but I don’t think we have any exposure there, not after this long. I’ll figure something out,” said the guy on the phone. “Have a nice day.”

Cattaneo clicked off, put his cell phone in his pocket, walked down the street to the woman, who’d finished and pulled up her pants. He could smell what she’d left behind, and he said to her, “You ever do that again, I’ll break your fuckin’ arm.”

“Kiss my ass, shitbag,” she said. She was radically thin, her face seemed to be mostly nose and cheekbones, and gray with dirt.

Cattaneo grabbed her by the arm with one hand—she seemed no heavier than a bird—and with the other, balled into a fist, hit her hard under the armpit and felt the ribs crack. The woman gasped and whimpered and he pushed her behind the hedge where she fell on her back, crying, and he walked away.

Fuckin’ trash, he thought. Where were the cops when you needed one?

* * *

Cattaneo continued on to the deli, where he had a corned beef sandwich with a ton of mustard and red onions, and a small salad, so that he would, he hoped, smell like a fuckin’ lettuce leaf when he got back home. He was licking his fingers when the burner rang and the guy asked, “You at home?”

“Down at Brill’s.”

“Good. You need to come on over here.”

“Give me fifteen minutes? I’m walking.”

“See ya.”

The caller’s name, God bless him, was Michael Behan, as Irish American as ever was, because if one thing was true about the new Mafia, Jersey version, they might be assholes, but they weren’t bigots; well, except when it came to black guys.

Cattaneo put on his sunglasses and hat and ambled back out on the sidewalk, looked both ways, as if he were undecided where to go next, then turned left and took his time walking eight blocks down A1A. Halfway to Behan’s, he stopped at an ice cream stand next to a hotel walkway to the ocean and bought a double-dip strawberry cone.

Behan lived in a two-million-dollar condo that he’d bought when the buying was good, back in 2009. The condo had two floors, the top being a living room, an entertainment area with a wet bar and a wall-sized television, and a kitchen.

The lower floor, where Cattaneo had never been, comprised bedrooms and a private office, or so he’d heard. Though Behan was an excellent criminal, he was not so good with fashion and furnishings—Cattaneo thought he might be color-blind, though he’d never asked, and worse, he wore white athletic socks with sandals. He’d equipped his two-million-dollar condo with furniture from an online furniture store, guided by two low-rent designers from Lighthouse Point. The furniture had all arrived two weeks later in a truck from North Carolina, had been installed in two hours, and had never been changed or even moved around.

Cattaneo got off the elevator on the thirty-second floor, stepped out into a hallway, where there were only two doors, and pressed the bell for the door on the right. A guy he knew opened the door and said, “C’mon in, big guy.”

“Matt, how you doin’?”

Behan was occupying a love seat in a conversation pit that looked out over the Atlantic. He called, “Jack: did you bring me a fuckin’ cone?”

“It would have dripped to death by the time I got here,” Cattaneo said, finishing the last of it.

There were three other men sitting in the conversation pit. Cattaneo said, “Marc, Jimmy, Greg, you’re all