“I got to tell you,” he said. “I think you’re making a big mistake by not hearing me out.”

“Made ’em before,” Angie said.

He leaned back from her door and took a puff of his cigar, blew the smoke out before he leaned back in.

“When I was a kid, my daddy’d take me hunting in the mountains not far from where I grew up, place called Boone, North Carolina. And Daddy, he always told me-every trip from the time I was eight till I was eighteen-that what you had to watch out for, really watch out for, wasn’t the moose or the deer. It was the other hunters.”

“Deep,” Angie said.

He smiled. “See, Pat, Angie-”

“Don’t call him Pat,” Angie said. “He hates that.”

He held up the hand with the cigar clenched between the fingers. “All apologies, Patrick. How can I say this? The enemy is us. You understand? And ‘us’ is going to come looking for you soon.” He pointed the thin cigar at me. “‘Us’ already had words with you today, Patrick. How long before he ups the ante? He knows that even if you back off for a bit, sooner or later you’ll come around again, asking the wrong questions. Hell, that’s why you came to see Nick Raftopoulos tonight, am I right? Hoping he’d be coherent enough to answer some of your wrong questions. Now you can drive away. Can’t stop y’all. But he’ll come for you. And this’ll just get worse.”

I looked at Angie. She looked at me. Ryerson’s cigar smoke found the inside of the car and then the back of my lungs, clogged there like hair in a drain.

Angie turned back to him, waved him off the windowsill with a flick of her wrist. “The Blue Diner,” she said. “You know it?”

“Just a short six blocks away.”

“See you there,” she said, and we pulled out of our parking slot and headed for the exit ramp.

The exterior of the Blue Diner looks really cool at night. The only hint of neon fronting Kneeland Street at the base of the Leather District, a large white coffee cup hovers over its sign in a mostly commercial zone, so that the establishment appears, from the highway at least, like something straight out of Edward Hopper’s night-washed daydreams.

I’m not sure Hopper would have paid six thousand dollars for a hamburger, though. Not that the Blue Diner charges quite that much, but it’s in the ballpark. I’ve bought cars for less than I’ve paid for a cup of their coffee.

Neal Ryerson assured us the tab was on the Justice Department, so we splurged on coffee and a couple of Cokes. I would have ordered a hamburger, but then I remembered that the Justice Department budget was provided by my tax dollars, and Ryerson’s generosity didn’t seem like so much of a big deal.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” he said.

“By all means,” Angie said.

He poured some cream into his coffee, passed it to me. “Where did all this start?”

“With Amanda McCready’s disappearance,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. That’s just where you two came into it.” He stirred his coffee, removed the spoon, and pointed it at us. “Three years ago, Narcotics officer Remy Broussard busts Cheese Olamon, Chris Mullen, and Pharaoh Gutierrez doing a quality-control check of a processing plant in South Boston.”

“I thought all drug processing was done overseas,” Angie said.

“‘Processing’ is a euphemism. Basically, they were stomping the shit-cocaine, that time-cutting it with Similac. Broussard and his partner, Poole, couple of other Narcotics cowboys, bust Olamon, my boy Gutierrez, and a bunch of other fellas. Thing is, they don’t arrest them.”

“Why not?”

Ryerson removed a fresh cigar from his pocket, then frowned when he noticed a sign that read NO CIGAR OR PIPE SMOKING PLEASE. THANK YOU. He groaned and put the cigar on the table, fingered the cellophane wrapping.

“They don’t arrest them, because after they burned the evidence, there was nothing to arrest them for.”

“They burned the coke,” I said.

He nodded. “According to Pharaoh, they did. There’d been rumors floating around for years that there was a rogue unit of the Narcotics Division that had been given a mandate to hit dealers where it hurt the most. Not with busts that would give the dealers street cred, news coverage, and a very dubious conviction rate. No. This rogue unit was alleged to destroy what they caught them with. And make them watch. It was, remember, a war on drugs, supposedly. And some enterprising Boston cops decided to fight it like a guerrilla war. These guys, rumor had it, were the true untouchables. They couldn’t be bought. They couldn’t be reasoned with. They were zealots. They ran a lot of smaller dealers out of business, ran a lot of newcomers straight back out of town. The bigger dealers-the Cheese Olamons, the Winter Hill gang types, the Italians, and the Chinese-pretty soon started factoring in these raids as the price of doing business, and ultimately, because the whole drug business went into a downswing, and because the raids never proved all that much more effective than anything else, the unit was rumored to have been disbanded.”

“And Broussard and Poole transferred to CAC.”

He nodded. “Some other guys did, too, or stayed in Narcotics, or transferred to Vice or Warrants, what have you. But Cheese Olamon never forgot. And he never forgave. He swore that one day he’d get Broussard.”

“Why Broussard and not the other guys?”

“According to Pharaoh, Cheese felt personally insulted by Broussard. It wasn’t just the burning of his product, it was that Broussard taunted him while they did it, embarrassed him in front of his men. Cheese took that to heart.”

Angie lit a cigarette, held out the pack to Ryerson.

He looked at his cigar, back at the sign that told him he couldn’t smoke it, and said, “Sure. Why not?”

He smoked the cigarette like a cigar, not really inhaling, just puffing, allowing the smoke to roll around on his tongue for a moment before exhaling it.

“Last autumn,” he said, “Pharaoh makes contact with me. We meet, and he says Cheese has something on that cop from a few years back. Cheese, he promises me, is playing Payback’s a Bitch, and Mullen has intimated to Pharaoh that everyone who was in that warehouse that night and had to sit by and be humiliated while Broussard and his boys burned the coke and laughed in their faces is going to enjoy this one. Now, besides everything else, I’m a little confused why Mullen and Pharaoh are suddenly so chummy that Mullen would intimate anything to him. Pharaoh gives me this bygones-be-bygones shit, but I don’t buy it. I figure there’s only one thing Pharaoh and Chris Mullen would bond over, and that’s greed.”

“So there was a palace coup in the works,” I said.

He nodded. “Unfortunately for Pharaoh, Cheese got wind of it.”

“So what did Cheese have on Broussard?” Angie said.

“Pharaoh never told me. Claimed Mullen wouldn’t say. Said it would ruin the surprise. The last word I ever got from Pharaoh was the afternoon of the night he died. He told me he and Mullen had been dragging cops all over the city the last few days, and that night they were going to collect two hundred grand, humiliate the cop, and go home. And as soon as that was done, and Pharaoh could figure what it was exactly that the cop had done, he was going to rat him and Mullen out to me, give me the biggest collar of my career, and then I’d be off his back for good. Or so he hoped.” Ryerson stubbed out his cigarette. “We know the rest.”

Angie gave him a confused frown. “We don’t know anything. Shit. Agent Ryerson, have you come up with any sort of theory as to how Amanda McCready’s disappearance plays into all this?”

He shrugged. “Maybe Broussard kidnapped her himself.”

“Why?” I said. “He just woke up one day, decided he wanted to kidnap a child?”

“I’ve heard of weirder things.” He leaned into the table. “Look, Cheese had something on him. So, what was it? Everything keeps coming back to that little girl’s vanishing. So let’s look at it. Broussard kidnaps her, maybe as a way to force the mother’s hand, come up with the two hundred grand Pharaoh told me she embezzled from Cheese.”