Free A Dark and Broken Heart by R.J. Ellory Page A

and Ron Callow and a dozen others. Some rumor that three or four of them had lifted a crate of Zegna suits from Evidence, sold them on to whoever was interested. Those suits had gone missing for sure, but it wasn’t the suits that were the item of interest. The suits went into a furnace, and the six kilos of grass that has been vacuum-packed in coffee cartons and buried at the bottom of that crate had been trafficked into the network within twelve hours of leaving Evidence. That hadn’t been Madigan’s gig. Weed was bullshit. Six kilos? Jesus, you could make that much money off of three ounces of coke if it was cut right.
    No, Duncan Walsh had nothing, and hell, the guy was out of there within three months if the grapevine was anything to go by. He’d move on up, gold shield clutched in his greedy, sweaty paws, and end up behind a desk in the chief of police’s administrative division, bullshitting war stories from the good old days when he busted cops for smoking reefer in the precinct garage.
    Madigan was off-track. Thinking about Walsh and IA and Zegna suits was avoiding the issue. Sandià had called.
    You gotta come see him .
    That meant nothing. It inferred and implied and gave away nothing. The message was always the same, the same tone of voice, the same kind of call. Didn’t matter what you were doing or where the hell you were. Your kid’s first birthday party, and if you don’t stay your wife is going to divorce you. Your daughter’s marriage, and you’re right there in the damned church about to give her away to some slick-haired dentist out of Yonkers with a brand-new Lexus and a weekend chalet on the edge of Blue Mountain Lake. It didn’t matter. You were summoned by Sandià, you went. End of story.
    Despite the lithium, Madigan’s nerves were all over the place. He thought about taking another, but he didn’t want to be drooling and tongue-tied like some hopeful kid on prom night.
    This was it.
    Showtime.
    He turned left at the lower end of Paladino Avenue and started on up toward Sandià’s tenement. Sandià was up top, right there at the peak of the mountain, six floors beneath him filled with Hispanic junkies and hookers and dealers and loan sharks, the topmost level a fortress of solitude and safety. You wanted to get to Sandià you had to walk a gauntlet of security like no other. The mayor, the chief of police, the state senator? Not a prayer. The security around such people was a tissue-fine web of nothing compared to that provided for Sandià.
    Madigan parked fifty yards away. In and of itself, there was no concern that his car would be seen and identified, either by his colleagues or the assholes that prowled this neighborhood and kept Sandià informed of who was around and what they were after. Madigan was supposed to be in the area. He was looking for the girl. That was the official line. The unofficial line? Well, anyone who was anyone in the Yard knew that he and Sandià had a working relationship. In reality, it would take six divisions of cops and most of the National Guard to bust open Sandià’s tenement. It was a castle. Perhaps it was the last bastion of real opposition to the mayor’s progress machine. There would be no gentrification here. Perhaps Sandià was paying the world to take no notice. Madigan knew some things, but not others. He knew more than most, but when it came to whatever working relationship that might have existed between Sandià and the real powers that be, well, Madigan was in the dark. There was an uneasy alliance, a tenuous rapport, and for as long as Madigan could remember it had held in this part of the city. Raids happened, of course, but it was always the little guys who bit the bullet. It was in the dealers’ houses, in the crack dens, the cluster of dilapidated condos where Sandià’s hookers plied their trade that the busts were made. Never here. Never up close and personal.
    Madigan started walking back the way he’d come. He’d left both his