Page 70

KEVIN DOYLE SAT in the comfortable Kia he’d rented under the name Dave Allmand. He rarely rented. It was tough to explain to Avis how a bumper got damaged. He preferred to use a stolen car when committing a crime. He had a discreet little electronic device that got him into almost any somewhat newer model, and he went old-school with older models. But some days, like today, he just needed a nondescript vehicle he could use to check out a number of places around the five boroughs.

He was parked in a loading zone. The sign didn’t matter because he didn’t intend to leave the car. Doyle just sat there, staring at the message on his burner phone. His employer wanted him to keep an eye on an NYPD detective named Bennett. They told him to make a contingency plan in case the detective got too close. There were two attachments to the text, intel sheets just like the ones that had been provided for his other assignments here in New York. One was on Bennett, and the other was on another NYPD detective named Robert Trilling, an Army vet. Shit. This assignment kept getting worse. Just when he thought he’d almost finished, they threw this at him.

Doyle looked up from his phone. There were very few people on the street, for some reason. Usually this part of Brooklyn had more foot traffic. It did give him a clear line of sight to the building he’d been watching for the last hour: the diner where Tammy worked. He was stuck on her. There was no way around it.

This particular position gave him a view of both the front and the rear of the diner. The wide windows on the side of the building let him look all the way inside. There were two people at the counter and two occupied booths. He had caught a couple of glimpses of Tammy running food out to the booths or chatting with the men sitting at the counter.

Then he saw the back door open. An older man shuffled out and tossed something into the dumpster at the rear of the building. He was big. Maybe six foot four and a little overweight. This had to be Tammy’s tyrannical uncle. He wore a white T-shirt and blue work pants with an apron. It had to be him.

He lingered by the dumpster, just a few feet from the road. Then the man took a pack of cigarettes from his chest pocket and lit one.

It felt like God was testing Doyle. It would be so easy to drive by and pop a couple rounds into the man. Or maybe wait and let him get close enough to the street that Doyle could hit him with the car. But not this car. This was a rental that would get examined upon return. Even though he’d used a fake name, Doyle never would let someone come that close to his real identity. No, he needed to think this through. He had enough to do for the time being without worrying about someone else’s problems. It didn’t matter how pretty she was.

He glanced in the diner and saw Tammy leaning close to one of the men at the counter. Doyle picked up the monocular he’d bought from his Israeli contact and zeroed in through the window. Everything was crystal clear. He hadn’t been steered wrong about this monocular. Unfortunately, what he saw was Tammy fawning over a big biker-looking dude with a sleeve of tattoos on his right arm. Then Doyle noticed the Harley parked on the street a little farther down from the diner.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out why Tammy was all over this guy. It made him a little angry. Maybe jealous. That was not something he was used to.

Doyle took a moment to look at the rear of the building just as Tammy’s uncle was walking back inside.

He threw the Kia into gear and cruised past the diner slowly. His face burned as he saw Tammy flirting with the biker.