Against the Law

by Against the Law (epub)

  His feet started to hurt; he needed to sit, but felt like he had to keep moving, so he climbed to the train and rode into the city, descending into the darkness under the river. He surfaced finally in Columbus Circle, walking uptown now, lost in thought, drifting up Broadway, until, thinking he should be heading somewhere at least, and that it might be good to try talking to someone other than himself, he called Frank. He didn’t sound happy to hear from him.

  “Oh hey kid what’s up?”

  “I’m in your neighborhood, well almost, and I wanted to see what you thought about something. Can I come by?”

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something. Is it urgent?”

  “You could definitely say that.”

  “Okay. Give me like half an hour to finish this up and I’ll make coffee. Do me a favor and pick up some milk?”

  So Joe walked the rest of the way to 125th Street, the main drag in Harlem, where Frank had kept his studio for more than thirty years. It was a large space, half a high floor of a building that had once been offices, then illegal dwellings, and now luxury apartments above and cool offices below with trendy retail—an organic market, a silly clothing shop, a fusion restaurant, a chain café—on the ground floor. Joe got on the elevator with a blond family, a bearded dad and slim mom both in expensive jeans, with one kid in a stroller and the other holding mom’s hand and gazing up at Joe.

  “You’re sweaty,” the little girl said.

  “Shhh . . . that’s rude,” the mom said, and smiled at Joe. “Sorry.”

  “Not at all,” he said and smiled at the kid. “You’re right. I am. Stinky too I bet.”

  She giggled.

  The dad noticed that he’d pressed ten and said, “You’re going to see Frank Jones?”

  Joe nodded.

  “I want to see Frank!” the little girl yelled. “Let’s visit Frank!” The baby seemed to agree, gurgling and shaking his rattle.

  “Frank’s busy honey,” the mom said. “He’s uh . . . got a friend visiting.” The elevator stopped at their floor and she smiled apologetically as they got out, the husband still looking back curiously.

  “Yeah the kids like me, because I’m always covered in paint,” Frank said when Joe told him this, “but the parents hate me. They paid millions for their lofts and I still pay less than it costs them to park their cars. Plus I’m always covered in paint.” He was wearing house slippers, worn cotton pants that had frayed at the cuffs, and a T-shirt so old it was disintegrating, revealing gray chest hair through the holes, with a blue Cuban-style guayabera shirt over that, leaning on his cane. Everything was indeed covered in paint.

  “Fuck them. You were here first,” Joe said, following Frank down the hall to the big open raw space, which commanded a view of 125th Street and the city beyond. There was an easel with a half-finished nude, larger than life–size, an iron-framed daybed—pictured in the painting—an armchair with the stuffing falling out of the cracked leather, a straight-back chair, and a bunch of tables, shelves, and stools, all covered in heaps of brushes, tubes, rags, books, papers, magazines, cans, cups, art supplies, and other random debris.

  “It’s not just money though,” Frank went on. “It’s guilt. Harlem is like an Indian reservation. First the white folks said, you better stay up here. Now, a century later, they’re saying, actually we need that space. Deep down they know it and feel bad. Which they resent me for. I’m hanging around, haunting them like the ghost of Harlem past.”

  “Coffee’s ready.” A woman came out from the curtain that separated the living quarters from the larger work space. She was a voluptuous white woman in her early thirties, with red hair loose to her waist, barefoot and wrapped in a kimono that slid from one bare shoulder as she carried out a tray that held a French press full of steaming coffee and three mismatched, chipped cups.

  “Eva,” Frank said, “meet Joe.”

  “Nice to meet you Joe.” She set the tray down on top of some old newspapers.

  “Hello Eva,” Joe said. He set a quart of milk on the tray. “Thanks for the coffee. Here’s some milk.” He realized that Eva was the nude in the painting. “Sorry if I’m interrupting.”

  “You’re not,” Eva said, pouring the coffee and adding milk to hers. “I’m about to take a shower. Then Frank is taking me to an opening at a museum.”

  Frank groaned. Eva laughed and waved as she wandered back behind the curtain with her cup. Frank shook his head. “Goddamn openings. Too crowded to see anything. Too noisy to hear anything. And a bunch of people you don’t want to see or hear anyway.” He lifted both cups and handed Joe his. Neither took milk.

  “Sounds like she still wants to go,” Joe said.

  “She has to. She’s the director of the museum.” He sipped his coffee. “Makes better coffee than I do too. Have a seat.”

  As always, Joe took the straight-back chair and Frank sprawled in his armchair.

  “So . . .” Joe cleared his throat. “Well . . . when I told you that I worked as a bouncer at a strip club for a living, that was only party true.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  “I mean I really do work there.”

  “I believe you.”

  “But sometimes I get asked to . . . help out in other ways.”

  “Right. A man of your talents.”

  “Yeah. So to speak. But right now I’m afraid those talents aren’t cutting it . . . I need help . . . it’s kind of a bad situation . . .”

  Frank waved his cane. “For fuck’s sake kid, spit it out already.” So he did. More or less. He told him about Toomey, the uranium, the truck bomb, and the 9/11 memorial.

  “Jesus fuck,” Frank said when he was done. “You weren’t kidding. That really is a bad situation. You better catch this guy. What the hell are you doing wasting time here?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Mine? True, I’ve seen some shitbag officers like him. And back in the day I would have fragged this bastard no problem. But I’m an old man with a bum knee. I can’t do shit about shit.”

  “I need your brain. I’ve got no leads, nowhere to look. The FBI accidentally let him go, the asshole who he worked for got taken out, and everyone else who worked for him or knew him . . .” Joe shrugged guiltily. “I might have already killed.”

  “Damn Joe. No wonder you get bad dreams.”

  “No shit. But what I need now is someone who can help me think like he thinks. Figure his next move.”

  “How the hell do I know? I just hope he doesn’t decide to blow up a museum opening. Okay, okay . . .” Frank leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “No chance he’s just gonna say fuck it and go home? Retire and coach Little League?”

  “No way. He’s a fanatic.”

  “You know him?”

  “I know the type. So do you. Gung-ho and juiced up on all that warrior code bullshit. He’s just full of rage and looking for a reason to destroy. Thinks he’s serving a cause, but really it’s just an excuse.”

  Frank cocked an eyebrow. “That does remind me of someone a little.”

  Joe looked at him in confusion. Frank leaned forward on the cane. “Look. He’s hard core, right? Special Forces badass, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So. You’re the only other Special Forces badass sitting here. What would you do? Let’s say you’re dropped behind lines, on a mission, search and destroy, and it goes to shit. You can’t reach the primary target. Would you just pack it in and go home?”

  Joe narrowed his eyes. “I’d proceed to the secondary.”

  “Right.”

  “So when Donna—I mean the FBI agent—chased him away from Ground Zero and he was driving that truck bomb . . .”

  “That was his primary, sure.”

  “He told her he’d park it and come back.”

  “He fell back and got in position for his secondary target. So where did he go?”

  “Someplace he could park and not get towed or messed with. A parking lot? A vacant? No, he needs another high-va
lue target. Someplace busy, with people.” Joe stood and pulled out his phone. “A building with underground parking.” He dialed. “I’m going to call the FBI. Tell them to start checking.”

  “You do that.” Frank stood, too. “I’m going to get changed and go to an opening. And pray you take this motherfucker out.” He clapped Joe on the shoulder as he limped by. “De Oppresso Liber, brother.”

  43

  DONNA HAD THE SAME idea, more or less. After trying and failing to convince Gladys to take a trip out of town—“I live here so might as well die here too, hon”—and insuring that her mom was taking Larissa to an amusement park in New Jersey (she said it was because of a measles outbreak that had been kept out of the news), she had headed back toward her office. Thinking about the time interval from when Toomey tried to get what she now knew was a truck bomb into the memorial, and when he returned on foot—was it an hour? A bit more?—she called and suggested to Tom that they begin searching soft targets where a truck could be parked without suspicion, like indoor parking structures or busy streets that had legal parking that day. Tom assured her that they were on it, then ordered her to go home. She’d been wounded yesterday and had her ex-husband killed in her arms today; officially she was off-duty until she could be de-briefed and cleared by a shrink. She’d even had to turn in her gun after it was fired.

  “You’ve done good work, Donna,” Tom said, using her first name for the first time she could recall. “Excellent work. But we’ll take it from here. And who knows? If Toomey’s got half a brain he is long gone by now. He knows we’re onto him.”

  Fusco, who never agreed with the bosses about anything, sort of agreed: “We’re on it. The whole force is out, for Parks. Working with the FBI and even the goddamn CIA with no bullshit for once. We’ve got hundreds of people to go door to door if we have to.”

  Finally, she headed home and was on the subway when Joe called her, but she was in a tunnel and the signal was too weak. So she got off, and checked her voice mail in the station. He’d left a message, more or less suggesting the same plan. She thought about getting back on another A uptown, but what would she do then? Sit in her now-empty apartment and wait by the window for a mushroom cloud? Watch CNN? Go to the local church and pray? Not her style. She needed to be doing something, to work—though she might throw a few prayers in there too along the way.

  So, okay, back to basics: when you lose the trail, what do you do? Go back to the last clear spot, the last solid link in the chain and find a fresh clue. It worked before in this case, when she checked a license plate and it led to Sergey. What the hell, she was just a short walk from the Wildwater building, anyway, so she left the station and walked over.

  Joe was on the train heading downtown. He was not sure why. He’d already called Donna to suggest she look into large buildings with underground parking, and he doubted the cops were going to let him help with the search, but his instincts drove him to move toward the center of the crisis. Standing still was unbearable and walking away felt like . . . walking away. He knew it was in large part his conditioning, his training, and he knew that in some ways it was a dubious, even bedeviling, impulse: a strength that became a weakness in the wrong hands. That’s how you ended up like Toomey, perhaps. Because the people who sent people like Joe and Frank and yes, even Toomey, into the shit, turned out to be people like Richards. That’s why Joe knew that, despite the scars on his body and the still-unhealed wounds in his mind, he was one of the lucky ones; he had kept his soul. De Oppresso Liber indeed. Free the oppressed. And start with yourself.

  That’s when Joe froze, right in front of the train doors as they opened, so that the person behind him bumped right into him, and had to divert, muttering, “Damn tourist.”

  “Motherfucker,” Joe said aloud, more in amazement than anger. The guy who’d bumped him looked back, insulted, but by then Joe had started running, pushing through the mass of people who were waiting to board the train.

  “Fucking asshole!” the guy shouted as Joe sprinted up the stairs to the street. Joe pulled out his phone, dialing 911 as he began to run down the street. He knew where Toomey had parked the truck.

  Richards’s office was still taped off and there was a young cop standing guard, but he respectfully lifted the tape when Donna showed her ID. The place seemed more than just physically empty. Even its opulence, its preening and power, seemed hollow now, a pointless charade. A bunch of big shots, trying to run the world as they saw fit, and taking it to the edge of ruin. What else was new? It would be a joke, this extra-toxic brand of vanity if it weren’t so deadly to so many. Mike’s face flashed in her mind. Why did he take a bullet? Was it for her? For Richards? How could he be that man and also the one who’d tormented her? How did love and hate, insecurity and honor, fear and rage get so hopelessly tangled? What the fuck was wrong with men?

  Then, as if on cue, her phone rang again. Speaking of fucked-up men, it was Joe. She sighed and answered.

  “Where are you?” he asked, out of breath.

  “Back at Wildwater . . .”

  “Meet me in the basement. I know where the truck is.”

  “Where?” she asked, but just then the uniform ran in.

  “Ma’am!” he yelled.

  “Hold on,” she told Joe. “Yeah?”

  “We’ve got to evacuate. A bomb threat.”

  She nodded and spoke into the phone. “Never mind. I’m on my way down.”

  “Good. I’m a block away,” he huffed and she realized he was running. To the bomb not from it.

  “Joe?” she asked, louder into the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “No,” he said and hung up.

  The irony was not lost on Toomey, although his patience was wearing thin. For as long as the Wildwater building was a crime scene, swarming with cops and feds, surrounded by reporters and gawkers, he couldn’t gain access and actually commit his intended crime. So for most of the day he wandered the surrounding streets, imagining what it would all look like destroyed, once the device he had in his truck turned the Wildwater tower into a flaming torch, a column of smoke rising into the sky, visible for miles and miles, like a beacon of destruction, sending out shock waves that would flatten all these blocks, shattering the stores, apartments, restaurants around him, the schools and offices, blasting them into bricks and stones and girders, blowing them into dust, sending the trucks and buses and cars flying like toys, like specks of dirt through space, tossing them like a tornado, along with trees and streetlamps and benches. And the people, the people who walked around him now, talking, laughing, cursing, eating, drinking, minding their own business or butting into someone else’s, each busy with his own thoughts, her own problems or desires or joys or fears, dressed in every kind of clothes, from suits and dresses to shorts and rags, every kind of person, every race, religion, class, gender, type, and taste, strangers gathered by chance in this one place on this one day—they would all die together. Most before they knew what happened, vaporized instantly or melting into air. The less lucky slowly and painfully, from fire or wreckage. And then, last of all, the lingering deaths of the radiated.

  That would wake them up. Perhaps there would be a statue of Toomey in this place one day. A monument to victory this time and not a remembrance of defeat, like down in Ground Zero. For this, his strike, would be the opening blow in a final battle for the soul of America and the future of the world. It would be a battle cry, leading the forces of civilization, white Christian civilization, to final victory, and to a glorious future. And the rabble who died today? Expendable. Ready to be flushed out and erased, plowed into the earth from which the new world would rise.

  Feeling good, Toomey ate a couple of hot dogs and a soda from a stand and then felt not so good—the goddamn foreigner who sold him this crap probably hadn’t washed his brown hands—and then he had to pay for a coffee at a diner just so the bitchy tattooed waitress would let him use the john—probably a freak wit
h those piercings, or a lesbian. Then, finally, feeling better, he walked back over and found the building open again. Thank God, he could finish up his mission and go. He’d had a bellyful of New York.

  So he went through the revolving door and took an elevator down to the parking levels in the basement. The bomb in his truck was remote-activated, and he had the control, but no cell or radio signal would reach it underground unless he was close—another inconvenience caused by the loss of his primary target, and his own relatively basic bomb-making skills. He was a fighter, not an engineer. His plan now was to set the timer and then walk away, leaving plenty of time for him to get on a subway and be out of the blast area and deep underground by the time it went off. If he rode the train under the river, he could even pop out in safety and watch the smoke rise from the other side.

  44

  DONNA WAS ON THE elevator going down to the basement, while the cop went floor to floor on the stairs, herding people out. But too many people were now trying to desperately jam onto the elevator, which was completely full but still stopping on every floor, like a local train at rush hour. So she got off and ran down the stairs to the underground garage instead, then began searching among the cars, looking for Toomey’s Jeep, working her way down the levels, trying to call Joe, though there was no signal on her phone. Then, on the bottom floor, she saw him, standing in front of the truck. He’d broken a side window, the one with the Special Forces sticker on it, and opened up the back. And now he was just standing there, staring, holding an unfolded camping knife in one hand. Then she got close and saw why.

  “Hey,” she said, softly now, catching her breath.

  “Hey,” he answered.

  They were both looking at a very large explosive device—cakes of uranium, stacked in metal canisters, wired to dynamite that was taped in bands around it, with a detonator on top.