Beach Road by James Patterson

call, and a couple minutes later, Artis is on the line, but he’s chillier than I

expect. “If you’re calling about that night at the basketball court, I wasn’t there.”

“Artis, if I have to, I’ll subpoena you.”

“First you got to find me.”

“Dante’s facing the death penalty. You know something, and you’re going to keep it to yourself?”

“You don’t know Loco. I’ll do time rather than testify against him. But as long as you understand that I

was NOT THERE, I might be able to help.”

I describe the man lying on the bench, and Artis knows who I’m talking about right away.
    “You’re looking for Manny Rodriguez,” he says. “Like everyone else, he’s an aspiring rapper. He told me

he works for a tiny label called Cold Ground, Inc. I bet they’re in the phone book.”

Beach Road

Chapter 48
    Tom

OKAY, SO NOW I’m an amateur detective. And I’m back in Manhattan because Cold Ground, Inc., turns

out to be in a funky postwar building right below Union Square.
    A mirrored elevator drops me on seven, where a thumping bass line pulls me down a maroon-and-yellow

hallway and the scent of reefer takes me the rest of the way.
    Inside the last door on the left, a little hip-hop factory is chugging industriously. What had been the living

room of a one-bedroom apartment is now a recording studio.
    Behind a glass wall a baby-faced rapper, his immaculate Yankee cap precisely askew, rhythmically spits

rhymes into a brass microphone.
    I ice him and vanish
    No trace of what I done
    Finding me is harder
    Than finding a smoking gun
    The artist looks no more than seventeen and neither does his girl, who sits on the leather couch on the other

side of the glass with an infant on her lap dressed just like his dad, right down to the cockeyed cap and

retro Nikes. A dozen others are scattered around, and whether dazzlingly elongated or powerfully compact,

they all seem like the fullest expression of who they are.
    Who is in charge.
    No one that I can tell, and there’s no desk or receptionist in front.
    “Manny’s making dupes,” says a tall woman named Erica, and she nods helpfully when a cable-thin guy

with a jet-black ponytail steps out of a back room.
    In Manny’s arms is a stack of what look like pizza boxes. “Got to deliver these to another studio,” he says,

heading out the door. “Come and we’ll talk on the way.”

In a crosstown cab, Manny lays down the plotlines of his frenetic life. “I was born in Havana,” he says.

“My father was a doctor. A good one, which meant he made a hundred dollars a month. One morning,

after a great big breakfast, I got on an eight-foot sailboat, pushed off from the beach, and just kept going.

Twenty hours later, I almost drowned swimming to shore fifty miles south of Miami. I was wearing this

watch. If I died, I died, but I had to come to America.”

Three years later, Manny says he’s a break away from becoming the Cuban-American Eminem. “I’m

dope, and I’m not the only one who knows it.”

I suspect he’s confused about why I’m here, but I’ll set him straight in a minute. We get off on West

Twenty-first Street in front of a Chelsea townhouse, and he drops his tapes at another apartment-turned-

recording-studio.
    “I’m not going to be doing this much longer,” he tells me.
    I offer to buy him lunch around the corner at the Empire Diner, and we take a seat at a black-lacquered

table overlooking Tenth Avenue.
    “So what label you with?” Manny asks once our orders are in.
    “I’m not with a label, Manny. I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing Dante Halleyville. He’s falsely charged

with killing three people at Smitty Wilson’s court in East Hampton. I know you were there that night. I’m

hoping you saw something that can save his life.”

If Manny is disappointed that I’m not a talent scout looking to sign him to a huge deal, he keeps it to

himself. He looks at me hard, as if he’s