Sunrise Highway Read online

  55

  NOVEMBER

  2017

  It made it slightly easier to deal with the pain when the doctors told her that the cervical herniation they kept mentioning had nothing to do with her actual cervix. She was less pleased when she heard it might require surgery. She also had a concussion, a herniated disc in her lower back, a dislocated right shoulder, a fractured collarbone, numerous cuts and bruises, and a strained Achilles tendon. But once the morphine drip kicked in, it was all good.

  Until her sister was shown in.

  “Oh shit. You’re pregnant? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Lourdes winced as she tried to prop herself up on the pillows and piece the world back together. The East River was outside her window. There was a clip on her finger connected to a heart monitor that had just started beeping. She could hear Mitchell and Soledad talking to nurses out in the hall. Right before the door shut, she caught a glimpse of Sullivan looking even more grim and purposeful than usual. She realized she’d been at the hospital nearly twenty-four hours and had been unconscious for most of them.

  “Be happy for me, mi hermana,” Izzy said. “It’s what I always wanted.”

  The borrowed clothes would have looked tight on her even if she hadn’t been carrying a child. Ysabel was back to her shut-in weight, maybe even a little heavier. Her skin looked rough and patchy from months on the street, doing whatever she had to do to survive. Her eyes looked tiny and wayward, which meant it was back to the drawing board in terms of a treatment plan with prescribed medication. But when she put her hands over her big belly, her smile lit up the room.

  “Lo siento. I’m sorry I ran away, Lourdy. I knew you’d be mad.”

  “I’m not mad,” Lourdes said hoarsely, her mouth desert-dry. “I’m glad you’re all right. I love you. That’s why I spent so much time looking for you. Now tell me, who the fuck is the daddy?”

  “You wouldn’t know him.”

  “Try me.”

  “He’s not in the picture.”

  Izzy was doing that semi-autistic staring at the floor number. The way she did when she’d broken something. Or was about to break it.

  “What does that mean ‘not in the picture’?” Lourdes asked, struggling to focus.

  “He’s not around anymore,” Izzy mumbled.

  “Whaddaya telling me? Like he left or he’s dead?”

  “The latter.”

  “What?” Lourdes grimaced, trying to tuck pillows behind her so she could sit up. “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t want to get into it now.” Izzy shook her head. “Something happened in New Jersey while I was with him. The police were looking into it. That’s part of the reason I ran away.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Lourdes sighed with druggy exhaustion and felt her eyes rolling back in her head, imagining all kinds of terrible scenarios. Like her sister telling some Lothario she was carrying his baby and then clobbering him with a tire-iron when he said he wouldn’t stick around. Which would explain her sudden disappearance.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and it wasn’t like that,” Izzy said. “I’ll tell you about it another time. Right now, you just need to rest and get better.”

  “Shit…” Lourdes sank back on the bed, temporarily overwhelmed. “Just tell me this much. What’re you gonna do about the baby?”

  “I’m keeping it. Of course. Almost nine months. I’m not getting rid of it or giving it up for adoption.”

  “And who do you think is gonna help you raise it?”

  Without a word, her sister took Lourdes’s hand, which was blackened and taped up from the IV needle, and put it on her stomach.

  “Feel anything?”

  Lourdes pressed gently, eyes practically rolling back in her head.

  Her aunt Soledad, who had a crazy sister of her own, had once told her, “Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.” Which had never made sense to Lourdes, given where people like themselves came from. But now it did.

  “Yeah, it’s beautiful, Izzy.” She nodded. “Kind of like a miracle.”

  Exactly. A miracle. The kind that made you feel like crying and laughing at the same time. After all the back-and-forth and agonizing about whether to have a baby, and her bipolar sister shows up with the fait accompli. And now somebody was going to have to deal with the thing.

  “Hey, Iz,” she said wearily. “I’m super-happy for you. And we got a lot to talk about. But can you give me a little time here?”

  “Sure.” Her sister gave her a beatific smile that made Lourdes feel like curling into a fetal position of her own. “I’ll go wait out in the hall. But I know there’s an old guy who’s been waiting to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  Izzy opened the door and Sullivan gave Izzy a long, appraising look as she slid out past him.

  “Jaysus,” he said, placing a vase of flowers on the radiator. “Like you don’t have enough on your plate?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  His hand rested on one of the rails surrounding the bed.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  “It’s going to be a while until I get back to yoga.” She covered his paw with the hand that had the pulse clip on it. “But I’m not retiring.”

  “You sure? You go out on three-quarters disability for a line-of-duty injury.”

  “And do what? Stay at home all the time, helping my sister raise her baby? I’m not ready for that yet, boss.”

  Sullivan frowned. There was no other word to describe what was happening to his face. It was something that could only occur in white men of a certain generation. Not just an expression of disapproval, but the look of someone witnessing the collapse of a whole value system, a crumpling of a map that would need to be carefully straightened and smoothed again.

  He took his hands back, went over to close the door, and then returned to sit in a chair beside the bed.

  “We have something else to discuss,” he said quietly.

  “Sully, before we get into anything, I need to talk to the doctors about these drugs they’re giving me…”

  “No.” He silenced her with a Mount Rushmore look. “This can’t wait. I need to get something straight with you right now.”

  “Okay.” She pressed her palms into her bedsheets, backing up.

  “Joseph Tolliver was a bad man and we both know it.”

  “Right.” She felt a tingling down her left leg, a sign that her pain was starting to wake up.

  “He killed at least seven or eight women over the course of forty years. He had a major police department, a raft of local politicians, and God knows how many regular citizens terrorized and under his control so he could get away with almost anything.”

  There was a growing sting in her right shoulder, where the doctors had popped the joint back into its socket while she bellowed like a gored ox.

  “And now that he’s dead and people aren’t scared of him, we’re probably going to find out even worse things he did,” Sullivan said, in that methodical brick-by-brick voice he used to wall in suspects. “The state attorney general is opening a countywide corruption investigation into what’s been going on all this time. Brendan O’Mara has gone missing and Kenny Makris just announced he’s retiring to spend more time with his family—which means he’s expecting to be indicted any day now. All the rats are leaping from the sinking ship.”

  “So what’s the problem, Sully?” She thrust her jaw out, defying both him and the pain as it tempted her to reach for the morphine again.

  “We both know what you did, Robles.”

  “What did I do?” She kept her chin up.

  “We both know he was out cold. You didn’t need to keep choking him.”

  “Says you.”

  “There’s a right way and a wrong way,” he said.

  “And the right way would’ve been to turn him over to the system that’s been protecting and supporting him for forty years? So they can cut him a break and turn him loose to ke
ep doing it again? No thank you, amigo. I like my way.”

  “What I saw there in that car wasn’t police work.”

  “Don’t even try that, Sully. He was a goddamn serial killer that nobody was stopping and everyone was helping. You’re seriously going to blow me in for making sure he was over and out?”

  “I was on the job in the old days, when they threw the book out the window and did whatever the hell they wanted sometimes. Hung people out windows by their ankles. Strangled them in the back of squad cars. Beat their heads in with the Manhattan Yellow Pages. And I didn’t like it. Because it was like the department that Tolliver ran. Above the law. And people like you were usually the victims.” He clasped his hands in front of him and leaned forward. “The attorney general’s office is interviewing me later today,” he said softly.

  She looked up at the heart monitor, to see if the rate had gone up. “What are you going to say?”

  “I don’t know. All the years I was on the job, I did a lot of things I question now, but I never lied under oath.”

  “Come on—”

  “No.” For the first time ever, he was truly angry at her. “Everybody thinks cops have to lie sometimes, but that was where I drew the line. That’s how I was brought up. That’s who I am. And that’s who I intend to be when I go to see my wife and son again. You’re asking me to change that.”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t have let him get away with it again.”

  “I expect better from you.” His voice stopped her like a slap in the face.

  “You just told me it was like that in the old days…”

  “That’s not good enough,” he raised his voice. “Don’t you get it? You’re supposed to be better than me.”

  She looked down. “You don’t think they’d let me slide?”

  “Not if I tell the truth, they won’t.”

  “Sully…”

  “But if I lie for you, and say you choked him out during an active struggle? With my record and reputation?” He shook his head. “They’ll believe me.”

  “So what’re you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know.” He sucked in his lips. “You were my partner. I have to stand by you. But it doesn’t sit right with me. Not at all. Especially not when I have stage 3 prostate cancer and I’m thinking about the life I lived. You can laugh, but a part of me still thinks a lie like that can keep a man out of the place where my wife and son are waiting.”

  “Sully, I don’t know what to say.” She put her hands over her face, trying not to cry. “This isn’t how I wanted it to end up.”

  He got up without looking at her and wiped his hands on his pants. “Don’t say anything. Just remember, if I do this for you, we’re even now.”

  She sniffed, forcing out a laugh. “If you do it, we’ll be more than even.”

  “All right then.” He ambled toward the door. “Enough said. For now.”

  “I fucking love you, Kevin Sullivan,” she blurted out. “If that baby is a boy, he’s getting your name.”

  People in the hall were staring as he opened the door.

  “Christ.” Sullivan hurried out, ears bright pink as he passed Mitchell. “Look after her, will you? I think your girl’s gone mad.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would first like to thank my agent Richard Pine and my editor Kelley Ragland for their continuing support and enthusiasm.

  Honor and dangerous duty pay is due to Marisa Silver, Elizabeth Keyishian, David Denby, and Peg Tyre for reading early drafts and offering their thoughtful comments.

  I also want to acknowledge Jesse Kornbluth. Although the book you have in front of you is a piece of fiction, the seed for it was planted many years ago by Jesse’s excellent nonfiction work. I should note that the epigraph comes from the song “Neat, Neat, Neat,” lyrics by Brian James.

  Much appreciation to Dr. Jonathan Hayes, who was there when I needed his sage counsel at the beginning and the end of this process.

  I was further aided and abetted by the following accomplices:

  Peter Fiorillo, Tania Lopez, Reed Farrel Coleman, Tim Hardiman, Kevin Fox, Sophie Hagen, Lonnie Soury, Maggie Callan, Matthew Perez, Richard Firstman, Michael Quartararo, Thomas Maier, Bruce Barket, Hector DeJean, Paul Hochman, Robert Trotta, Andrew Martin, Joseph Brosnan, Rob Mooney (him again!), Jim Nuciforo, Frank MacKay, Paul Gianelli, and Rob Maitra.

  ALSO BY PETER BLAUNER

  Proving Ground

  Slipping into Darkness

  The Last Good Day

  Man of the Hour

  The Intruder

  Casino Moon

  Slow Motion Riot

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PETER BLAUNER is an Edgar-winning, New York Times bestselling author of seven other novels, including Slow Motion Riot and The Intruder. He has written for such TV shows as Law & Order: SVU and Blue Bloods. A former journalist and lifelong New Yorker, his most recent book, Proving Ground, was also published by Minotaur Books. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Peter Blauner

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SUNRISE HIGHWAY. Copyright © 2018 by Slow Motion Riot Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

  Cover photograph by Silas Manhood; texture © Evannovostro/Shutterstock.com

  The Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-11741-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-11743-4 (ebook)

  eISBN 9781250117434

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Depart
ment at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].

  First Edition: September 2018