Hard Hit by J. B. Turner

Author:J. B. Turner [Turner, J. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542006651
Published: 2019-04-25T05:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Three

The following morning, just before lunch Reznick met up with Tom Callaghan at the Old Town Bar in the Flatiron District. Inside, it was all dark wood and low lighting. A few barflies looked up from their beers.

A big, stocky guy signaled him from across the room. It had to be Callaghan. He wore a short-sleeved white linen shirt with a couple of pens in the top pocket, jeans, sneakers. “Nice to see you.”

Reznick shook his hand.

Callaghan ordered a couple of Heinekens. He handed one to Reznick. “Wanna sit down?”

Reznick nodded and followed the journalist to a quiet booth at the far end of the bar. He sat down opposite the journalist. He felt as if he was being scrutinized. He looked around to get his bearings. “My kind of place.”

“Favorite haunt of mine. Spend way too much time in here, my wife says.”

Reznick sipped the froth off the top of the beer. His gaze wandered around the bar before he looked across the table at Callaghan. “Here are the ground rules: no photographs of me or my daughter.”

“Not a problem.”

“Also, you can’t identify either of us, do you understand?”

“I just want to say that I have a daughter myself. And I can only imagine what you’re going through. It’s a terrible situation.”

Reznick nodded. “Appreciate that.”

“What’s the latest on your daughter?”

“Still in an induced coma.”

“Really sorry, Jon. Listen, can I say where you’re from?”

“You can say I’m from Maine. And that my daughter was visiting New York. She’s a college student, that’s all I can say. That is accurate but doesn’t reveal our identities.”

Callaghan leaned across the table. “Fine,” he said, lowering his voice. “Is it OK if I record this conversation on my cell phone so my editor has a verbatim account of our conversation?”

“Do not identify me. Am I clear?”

“Totally. That’s fine. I want you to be comfortable. And I want to assure you that I protect my sources. This is important to me. Underpins what I’m all about.”

Reznick sighed. “What do you want to know?”

Callaghan took out his cell phone and started recording. “Tell me what happened, in your own words.”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you get involved with Aleksander Brutka?”

Reznick took a gulp of beer before he began a broad-brush overview of events, beginning from the moment he was told by cops that his daughter had been in an accident. He talked for nearly an hour, trying to fill in as much as he could. The surveillance of Brutka’s building, gaining access through the Realtor, and telling Brutka to leave town at gunpoint. And he also mentioned what Acosta had revealed about the cell phone photo of Brutka lying passed out, discovered at the dead girl’s apartment in East Harlem.

Callaghan was taking shorthand notes, flicking through page after page. “That’s wild.”

Reznick then went on to talk about how he got pulled over by the NYPD Hercules counterterrorism team when he put Brutka’s apartment under surveillance. Then about attacking Brutka inside the UN.

Callaghan took a few moments to reply, as if assessing exactly what he’d been told.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.