by Robert Pobi
Lucas looked at the self-contained crime scene. The weather had probably saved some people’s lives; on any other day, the tram would have been filled to capacity, and one of those nifty little armor-piercing rounds could have punched through half a dozen brainpans.
Behind them, the medical examiner’s people rolled in with enough Pelican waterproof boxes to contain the instruments for a full-size orchestra. They were flanked by more federal agents.
Graves thanked the two cops, told them that one of the agents would take their statements, then steered Lucas to the tram car.
Up close, the murderous artwork was even more unsettling. Her legs were splayed at that awkward angle that those who spend enough time around the dead eventually get used to.
Lucas was doing his best to ignore Graves’s posturing but the man wouldn’t let it go. “Hartke in specific or Americans in general? Like I said, Hartke was a fluke. Especially since the next victim is a housewife from Roosevelt Island—I was wrong about her neighborhood, but same difference.”
Lucas took a deep breath and waited for Graves to finish digging himself into a hole.
“Of course, going by your theory, it’s possible that the shooter was aiming for one of the two uniformed officers standing beside her.” Graves had the sarcasm dialed up with the volume of victory. “But I don’t think so.”
“Neither do I.” Lucas crouched down and pushed back the flap of the woman’s once white coat with an aluminum finger. A pistol in a pressure holster was clipped to her belt alongside a badge from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—both decorated with strings of blood. Lucas stood up and moved away so the medical examiner’s people could take her away before she froze into a meat pretzel. “But it still makes you wrong.”
18
Midtown
Connie had been waitressing at the Amphora Diner since her second week in New York, a little under three years now. She had earned prime hours on the good tables through a combination of hard work and occasionally letting Nick, the owner, fuck her face in the basement. Nick was a family man—the father of six little mustachioed girls—and after throwing it down her throat, he always made a point of stating that he was staying with his wife (as if Connie gave the tiniest little morsel of a fuck). She couldn’t care less if fat old Nick decided to step in front of a snowplow as long as he left some postdated checks stapled to his suicide note. Nope, theirs was a relationship of mutual benefits.
Connie bused an order of blintzes and a chicken fat sandwich to the old Jews at table three and gave them an I’ll be back with your water. She cleaned up the coffee cup and half-eaten BLT from table seven, along with the two singles he left as a tip, and headed back to the bar. She dumped the coffee cup in the plastic dish bin and wrapped the half sandwich in tinfoil; Kirby would be by on his way to work, and she liked to have something for him for lunch. Combined with the potato latkes she had saved from a drunk that morning, he’d have a decent meal today.
She checked the G-Shock on her wrist: Kirby would be out back in four minutes and fifteen seconds. Of all the things the army had hammered into his brain, nothing was as second nature to him as being on time. You could set the digital clocks in Times Square to the way he lived his life. Which meant he had learned at least one useful skill during his two tours shooting Hajis over in Idontgiveafuckistan.
She took an order from a group of jamokes sporting hard-core midwestern mullets—three orders of bacon and eggs (all scrambled), toast (all white), hash browns, coffee, and juice. All on one check. She liked serving like-minded individuals; it was so much easier than dealing with people who made their own choices. As she spiked the order, she saw Kirby cross the street and walk by the side window to the back door.
She served the three coffees, then got Kirby’s lunch from the counter. Nick was busy, and she slipped by the kitchen without him noticing; she and Kirby had a deal that the boss was never to see him. It would cause all kinds of trouble for her, especially if he knew she was feeding him—it didn’t matter if it was with food that was destined for the dumpster.
Kirby was at the back door, bundled up in his old army parka and carrying that guitar case he never left home without. He smiled when he saw her, a shy farm boy who had seen exotic places but still looked like the Midwest mulletards at table five.
“Hey, baby,” he said.
She gave him a kiss and held out the bagged lunch. “Half a BLT and some latkes.”
“That them greasy pancake things?”
She nodded.
“You put in ketchup?”
“Of course.” She crossed her arms. It was cold out here in short sleeves. “You left early this morning.”
“I had something to do.”
Nick called her name from inside. “I gotta go.”
“Me, too.” He gave her another kiss and headed down the alley, the guitar case and army jacket making him look like a Bob Dylan album cover.
For all their time here, he still looked like a farm boy in the big city. But what did she expect with a guy like Kirby? He wasn’t good at change. She was just happy he didn’t hit her too much.
19
The Queensboro Bridge
The wind whipping up the East River felt like it had been generated in a black hole, adding more cruelty to an already miserable experience. You would have to be insane or desperate to walk the bridge. So here he was, last man on earth, staggering across the frigid snow-scoured span.
The victim’s name was Carol Kavanagh. She was a senior agent with the New York branch of the ATF. Lucas hadn’t read her file yet, but like Hartke, she was a career law enforcement officer. She had been with the FBI in the Chicago office before switching to the ATF. Colorado before that.
The tram married mechanics with physics, ferrying Roosevelt Islanders to Manhattan. Four towers, strategically spread out over three thousand feet, supported the eight wrist-sized cables. Two cars did the duty, a twenty-hour schedule that started at six in the morning, seven days a week. Four massive General Electric turbines steadily pushed out eighty thousand pounds of torque, keeping the whole beast running.
Like the night before, no one could shake the specter of a shooter somewhere nearby.
And an exercise that should have been nothing more than basic geometry once again appeared to fuck with the laws of physics.
They had the exact time the bullet struck from the CCTV surveillance footage taken inside the tram, but that was all they really had. They knew that the round punched through the front window at precisely eleven seconds past 6:04 a.m., but there was no way to say where—precisely—the car had been at that exact tick of the clock. Which made reverse engineering the bullet’s path impossible. The tram had been both advancing and descending when the bullet struck, so without knowing where the target was at the exact instant of impact, the margin of error in elevation was seventeen feet three inches. And when you factored in that both wind and temperature affected the speed that the cables moved through the massive turbines, the entire equation was pooched beyond any reasonable result. And all of that ignored the very real problem of intermittent visibility in this weather. So Lucas was out here walking the westbound span of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, Whitaker following thirty paces back in the big polished SUV.
He followed the pedestrian walkway that skirted the chain-link fence designed to keep jumpers from flinging themselves into the afterlife. He was coming up on five hundred feet when Whitaker pulled forward and opened the window. “What are you looking for?”
“The meaning of life.”
“Oh. Sarcasm. Thank you.”
Lucas ignored her. The world was reduced to windswept asphalt and snowdrifts and ice-covered girders. Eighty feet later, he stopped at a length of flagging tape tied to the fence. The ribbon was light blue, about a foot long. It reached north over the river, snapping in the wind. That, he said to himself and pulled the phone from his pocket, dialing Graves.
“Yeah, Page, whatcha got?”
Whitaker rolled the window down again. “What was that?”
“Wind gauge!” he yelled.
Out here, with only two things to shoot at—him and Whitaker—the possibility of bad things happening was not lost on Page.
If you wanted to scare an urban population, few tools were as effective as a faceless man with a rifle. There was a long list of shooters who had exploited that particular loophole in the human fear department. Of course, most of them were short-lived spurts of violence that ended within hours. Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Joseph Whitman belonged in that column. But they had effectively demonstrated how a man with a rifle could change the world. Both Oswald and Whitman were early prototypes of eventual archetypes. And both had irrevocably damaged the American psyche with nothing more than a rifle and a defective personality.
But the ones who scared Lucas were the other kind—the long-game types. Fast-forward through the wormhole to John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, a tag team that had remained at large for twenty-three long, media-intensive, murderous days. Their kick (besides the obvious one of killing) was in spreading out the suffering. In a way, they had stretched time.
And now it looked like this guy most definitely had a long game planned. And he was fast. Which meant a lot of bad things could be on the way unless they could put him in a box—either the concrete or the pine variety.
The cold was messing with his mobility, and the wind kept pushing him against the fence. The far end of the bridge was lost in white, and the superstructure overhead disappeared into the snow coming down.
Exactly three hundred feet later, he found the second wind gauge. He called it in to Graves, took more photos, ignored yet another question Whitaker yelled from the Navigator, and continued.
The worst part of getting used to his new self had been the weird little neural jolts his phantom limbs threw at him without warning. The doctors said they were connected to literal muscle memory, but Lucas suspected that a deep-rooted denial about what had happened was the real culprit. It had taken a couple of years and a whole lot of determination, but he had finally scared them away, a bit at a time. Along with any desire to go back to his old life at the bureau.
Yet here he was.
The last marker was at 1,165 feet, and the shoreline of Roosevelt Island was barely visible below. This ribbon was bright orange instead of blue. He called it in, then turned back to the city.
Manhattan blinked intermittently through the storm, little more than a flashing series of shadowy blocks that looked like a geological formation. How the hell did you make a shot through the visual noise? You would need x-ray vision to peer through the weather—which was impossible. How had he done it?
This particular junction was where the tram—doing 17.9 miles an hour according to the maintenance engineer—dropped twenty-five feet in a few seconds. Lucas knew certified police snipers who wouldn’t be able to make any kind of a meaningful shot in this weather, let alone at a tram car doing 17.9 miles an hour on an incline through a snow cloud above a river.
There was no other way to see it—this guy was intentionally trying to fuck with their heads.
Lucas pulled the scope out of his parka and turned, sighting Manhattan in the limited field of view. He had to wait for a window through the snow and just as quickly as the city appeared, it was gone, and all he saw was a wall of white. He dropped his arm and looked down at the marker. Then up at the tram lines.
How the hell had he made this shot? The weather had to cooperate at precisely the right time, down to a tenth of a second. Which required more than skill—it required luck.
He took a step back as the air pressure changed and a sudden surge of wind hammered the air. Visibility dropped to nil as a helicopter emblazoned with the call letters of a local news affiliate rose up beside him like some giant mechanical insect.
He wanted to give them the finger, but that was poor form. Where was a sniper when you needed one?
The downdraft kicked up the snow piled on every surface of the bridge and the whiteout must have interfered with their photography, because the aircraft banked away, bobbing up two hundred feet upriver. Lucas raised the scope back to his eye and sighted the tram station, visible for a second, then gone in the storm. There was a lot of math to do, and your timing would have to be better than perfect, almost preternatural. And the storm would have to cooperate, at least for a split second, which was something no one could depend on. All accomplished less than half a day after delivering death onto Hartke from the rooftop of an office building.
The image of Manhattan back in the distance flickered through the snowstorm. There were plenty of high-rises to take a shot from, so Lucas closed his eye for a second and filled his lungs with cold air.
Then he opened his eye and the city before him was gone, leaving a swirling tumbler of code pulsing in the storm.
He stood still, and the angles and geometry and distances in front of him snapped, crackled, and popped, morphing into a meaning that only he could see.
And then he blinked.
And it was gone.
With the chopper still hanging over the river, Lucas climbed the railing between the pedestrian path and the westbound lane. Whitaker reached over and opened the passenger door as he walked around the vehicle. He got in and cranked the heat up as far as it would go, looking for 11 on the dial.
“And?”
Lucas called Graves. When he answered, Lucas said, “There’s an apartment building on Third and Fifty-ninth. It’s the roof.”
“You sure?” he asked.
Lucas hung up.
Whitaker spun the big SUV around in a tight arc and lit up her smile. “I could actually hear the bionic sound coming from your brain out there. You know, that weird springy dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit. That’s a pretty impressive trick in real life. If you’re right, that is.” Whitaker didn’t sound convinced one way or the other.
Lucas held his left hand over one of the vents blowing hot air, and the needles in his bones began to thaw. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“If I am right, I never have to see your face again.”
“It’s not an act with you, is it? You really are a son of a bitch.”
“It’s the company,” he said and shifted his focus to the news helicopter following them.
His iPhone buzzed with his home number, and he swiped the screen. “Yes?”
“Hey, baby. You busy?”
“I’m in the middle of—”
“The Queensboro Bridge in a shiny black SUV? Yeah, I know. You’re on CNN.”
He turned away from the window. “Fuck.”
“They got some pretty good shots of you out there looking all John McClaney and stuff. Wolf Blitzer deducted that you—hey, stop laughing!”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t picture Wolf deducting anything.”
“Well, he did. Or at least his producer did. He said you were probably an FBI sniping expert judging by the highly sophisticated military optics you just used. That guy’s a tool.” Erin sounded angry.
Lucas preferred a good pair of Steiners, but binoculars weren’t optimized for people with one eye; a scope was designed to carry a full optical load. Besides, the scope was a way to view the world the same way their shooter did, which was the closest thing to a Vulcan mind-meld he could manage; with this guy, every little bit would help. “I couldn’t agree more. Call me if they get the shooter on film.” And he hung up.
After a few seconds, he turned to Whitaker and said, “I don’t want to see a chopper in the air next time. It’s for my sanity, but
the official line will be that it’s for their own protection. Which it is.”
“Next time?” Whitaker glanced sideways at him before turning her attention back to the empty bridge. “Why is it that you never have anything positive to say?”
“That was positive.”
“Which part?”
“The part where I left out that he’s going to shoot another law enforcement officer.”
20
Manhattan
Kehoe and Lucas sat in the back of one of the dozen black FBI SUVs that peppered the streets in the space between the tramway station and the apartment on Fifty-ninth. Whitaker was up on the roof of the building, watching the forensics people cast their bones.
Kehoe had lost none of his intensity from the night before, and Lucas wondered how much of it came from having to answer to the men pushing wrong solutions across the table. He was a bureau man right down to a genetic level, and trying to get a crime to fit someone else’s confirmation bias had to be bending him into a knot. No matter how you looked at Kehoe’s position, there was no good way for this to finish; he’d end up looking incompetent, obsequious, or insubordinate.
Kehoe had changed his suit and shaved since the night before. Probably showered as well. But the scrub hadn’t softened any of the stress fissures etched into his facial topography.
Lucas gave Kavanagh’s file a reading as they talked. He flipped through the fresh printout, stopping every now and then on a random detail. Kavanagh had been a five-star asset to the bureau before she transferred over to the ATF. Lucas closed the file and looked over at Kehoe, who was silently sipping his tea and watching him for … what, exactly?
“And?” Kehoe said, once again taking reductionism to its furthest possible point.