Page 25 of Paranoia

CHAPTER 38

KEVIN DOYLE DIDN’T know the Bronx like he did Manhattan and Brooklyn, and even Staten Island. The Bronx seemed more alien to him. It was harder for him to blend in and keep a low profile here. Plus the neighborhood people tended to know one another and were wary of strangers.

Doyle still couldn’t stop thinking about Elaine, the pretty neighbor he’d killed when she saw him coming out of Roger Dzoriack’s apartment. He’d barely slept in the two days since. The image of her lifeless eyes staring up at him after he broke her neck kept returning to his mind and weighing on him.

The retired cops he had killed recently were bad enough. At least he understood the reasons behind the orders. But poor Elaine was just being nice. She was checking on an elderly neighbor. Did she have a boyfriend? What would her parents do? Doyle tried not to think about her loved ones. Especially because of thefact they would never have any idea what happened to her. No closure at all. She was just collateral damage on one of his assignments. Amir and his friends would dispose of the body so that there would be no trace of Elaine left.

Even when he’d been posted to Afghanistan, he’d felt regret for some of the lives he had taken. At least there it was him or them.

He could even justify some of the CIA contract work. He recalled the guy in Morocco who’d released the names of four locals who had been working with the Agency. They were commonly called informants but were really just sources of intelligence. One of them, a twenty-one-year-old seamstress, had been raped before her throat was cut. She had been left in the streets of Rabat as a message to anyone else thinking of working with the CIA.

Doyle had put a bullet in the head of the asshole who’d killed her. From three feet away. Then he’d left the man in the street as a message to others tonotbother CIA informants.

Even though killing Elaine still bothered him, he pushed those thoughts out of his head. He was back on his assignment. At least this time it wasn’t a former cop. In fact, the guy he was looking at right now, José Silbas, looked like a cancer on society. Just judging from the intelligence sheet he had on the target, Doyle realized he wouldn’t have many qualms about killing this guy.

Silbas was fifty-four years old. He’d been born in New York and arrested nine times. Some of them were drug offenses. There was also one for aggravated assault, another for attempted murder, and the last one for kidnapping. He had pleaded guilty three times and was sentenced to probation each time. He went to trialon the attempted murder charge. Apparently, he had choked his ex-wife unconscious. If a Marine on leave hadn’t intervened, it would’ve definitely been a murder. Silbas spent six years at Groveland Correctional. His ex-wife mysteriously “disappeared” while he was upstate. Doyle suspected Silbas’s criminal friends.

Doyle parked today’s stolen car, a Honda this time, down the street from Silbas’s apartment building. He used his pair of Tasco mini binoculars to count three windows over and one window up from the main entrance. He was looking directly into an apartment but couldn’t see anyone. He was pretty sure it was the right apartment.

Doyle wasn’t trying to make this complicated. He had a tool he’d bought from a hardware store in Queens. It was used in carpet installation. Heavy and straight with a deadly sharp point to it, it would be perfect. All he had to do was catch Silbas in the open and he’d be done. No one cared about making drug dealers’ murders look like suicides. These guys met violent deaths all the time. The two he’d already handled were easy enough. He’d made one look like autoerotic asphyxiation, where the guy choked himself to death in a sex game gone wrong. The second one he’d made look like a heroin overdose. There was another name on that list, but that guy had coincidentally died of an overdose on his own, weeks before Doyle arrived in New York. Go figure.

Doyle noticed a couple walking down the street. They weren’t so much a couple as a male and female walking together. He’d been around long enough to recognize a couple of NYPD plainclothes detectives. They went up the stairs and into the building.Shit.

He brought his binoculars up to the apartment he was looking into before. He could make out someone walking into Silbas’s apartment.

Doyle didn’t know what the cops wanted with Silbas. He didn’t care, but he couldn’t do anything right now.

He would wait to act.

CHAPTER 39

ROB TRILLING ATTEMPTED to read a file on his phone as he kept pace alongside Terri Hernandez. He wanted to mention to her that she could have given him the file ahead of time. But he decided things were already tense enough. So he was trying to fill in the blanks before they talked to a drug dealer named José Silbas. The man had done six years at Groveland Correctional but didn’t appear to have caused any problems in the three years since his release. He worked for a shipping company on the night shift. Unless that was some kind of cover.

Hernandez stopped right in front of the apartment building. She turned to Trilling. “This shouldn’t take too long. Then I thought we could check the warehouse to see who’s coming and going. Do you have anything going on tonight?”

Trilling said, “I have dinner plans.”

Hernandez let a smile slip out. “Really? Good for you.”

She took the steps up to the building without another word. Hernandez rolled her eyes at him when Trilling held open the front door. That was how he was raised. It was hard to break lifelong habits. To be fair, Trilling tried to hold the door for anyone walking into a building with him.

As they walked down the second-floor corridor toward the apartment, Hernandez turned to Trilling and said, “Just a reminder. This ismycase. You’re assisting me. I’ll ask the questions. You keep your eyes open for any threat. Got it?”

Trilling nodded.

Hernandez knocked on the door firmly. Even the way she knocked sounded official. A few seconds later, a bleary-eyed man wearing a white undershirt and shorts answered the door. He was balding but kept his hair long and wild on the sides. A stubbly gray beard grew in patches across his chin. He stared at Trilling and Hernandez but didn’t say anything.

Hernandez held up her ID and said, “Mr. Silbas, I’m Detective Hernandez and this is Detective Trilling with the NYPD. We need to ask you some questions about the death of James Reyes.”

Silbas looked more interested when he heard the name Reyes. “Why do you want to talk to me?” His voice had a rough edge to it, like he had smoked most of his life.

Hernandez said, “We’re not trying to make a case on you. Reyes’s mother said you were his godfather. We just want to find out who shot and killed your godson.”

“You and me both. But ifIfind out who it is, there won’t need to be a trial.”

Trilling noticed that Hernandez let Silbas’s threat of a potential felony slide completely. Silbas turned and motioned theminto his apartment. Trilling stifled a cough from the smell of stale cigarettes and beer.

All three of them sat at a small round table next to a window in the living room.

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