This is the unselfish thing he’s doing for her. Not being there. Not pretending, not trying, not considering . . .
Barnes aches for his father every day of his life. For what his mother might have been, if tragedy hadn’t struck. Now for Wash, slipping from his grasp.
Every day, he meets people who are desperate to find lost loved ones. It doesn’t matter to them if the person left willingly. In the end, it’s the same. If someone was there, and then gone, you miss them. You look for them. For the rest of your life.
You can’t miss what you never had.
The nurse escorts him back down the hall, leaving him at Delia’s room.
The woman lying in bed bears no resemblance to the one he met back in March. The blood vessels around her eyes have burst. Her hair is matted. She’s huge. Swollen legs and feet poke from beneath the blanket on one end, swollen face on the other, with a hump rising between.
She looks up to see him gazing at that stomach, wondering if there might be some mistake.
Nearly nine months, papers from a lawyer, a precious pink girl down the hall, and she says . . .
“Fluid.”
“Huh?”
“I still look pregnant. They said it’ll go down. You can sit.” She gestures at the chair by the bed. “Did you see Shareese?”
“Who?”
“The kid.”
“Shareese?”
“She’s named after Alma’s sister. She died in August.”
“Alma?”
“Shareese! The first Shareese. Alma’s here. Downstairs, getting something to eat. Long night. You like it? The name?”
No, he doesn’t like it. Not that he has a say.
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
“Yeah.” A pause. “You never called.”
A stronger man, a weaker man, a different man—might apologize.
She isn’t the first woman to tell Barnes he never called. But she’s the first one who gets more than a shrug and a “What’d you expect?”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t get the messages?”
“I got them. I mean I didn’t know why you were calling.”
A sound escapes her fleshy throat—something between a laugh, a snort, and a sob—and she looks at the concrete wall opposite the window.
Just like Barnes’s apartment. This city is full of walls, and people trapped behind them. People who stare out bleakly and can never escape. And people who do, and it’s his job to find them. He has to get back to work, dammit.
“If you knew I was pregnant, you’d have called me back. No, wait. I know. You’d have gotten on your white horse and rescued me. You’d have gotten down on your damned knee and given me a diamond ring.”
“Is that what you—”
“Hell no! I don’t want to marry your ass.” She makes eye contact at last. “I just want you to own your mistake.”
“My . . .” He thinks of the tiny pink princess down the hall. “Don’t call her that.”
“Isn’t that what you’re thinking? You made a mistake, did a stupid thing, and now you have to pay for it? You’re an officer of the law. You know how it works. You do the crime, you serve the time.”
“So you’re punishing me?”
“I just want what’s mine. I want . . . I just want you to help me.” Tears spill into the angry scars around her angry eyes. “I don’t want to get all up in your business, and I don’t want you all up in mine. I just need to make sure Shareese has everything she needs. You understand?”
He nods. But understanding what she’s asking doesn’t mean he’s capable of following through. How is he supposed to come up with the money to support another person—two, from the sounds of it—when he can’t even support himself?
He plucks some tissues from the box on the bedside table and hands them to her.
She wipes her eyes and blows her nose, hard. “I got nothing. No job. No money. No—”
“No money? You hired a lawyer.”
“He’s just Alma’s cousin, doing me a favor.” She resumes counting off on her fingers. “No insurance. Nowhere to live. No husband. Bobby said—”
“Wait . . . Bobby? He’s your husband?”
Delia nods. “Ain’t seen him since New Year’s. I been staying with Alma.”
“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. And I’m going to do everything I can to make this right.”
On the way back down the hall, Barnes stops to take another look at his daughter in the nursery. This time, he notices the card taped to her transparent cradle.
Wait a minute. Her name isn’t Shareese. It’s Charisse.
That spelling changes everything. C-h-a-r . . .
The first four letters of his father’s name. Delia had no way of knowing that.
“Hey, Charisse, you’ve got a guardian angel,” he whispers, adding as he walks away, “And, baby girl, you’re going to need one.”
Red cracks an eyelid and surveys the familiar stretch of Ninth Avenue beyond the cab’s open back window.
Bathed in a neon-muting early-morning sunlight, Hell’s Kitchen is a shade less seamy than usual, its ubiquitous layer of grit rain-washed into gutters and storm drains. The depraved characters who prowl the neighborhood at most hours have retreated into their subterranean tunnels, or wherever night creatures go when the rest of the world stirs to life.
Red shifts on the uncomfortable seat and fights a yawn. The second pill has worn off, drowsiness slinking in like a silken temptress.
The cabbie, silent for the duration of the ride in from Queens, stops at a light and dares to speak, calling out to be heard through the plastic partition. “One more block. East side of the avenue, or west?”
Red hesitates. Home is to the east, coffee shop to the west. Exhaustion wages a fierce battle with hunger. When you’ve gone twenty-four hours without food and twice as long without sleep, which craving is more pressing?
“West.”
“Near corner, or across Forty—”
“Near!”
Questions, questions . . .
“All right. I’m just trying to do my job. Get you to where you want to go.”
Red says nothing, clenching the hidden knife handle. It would be so easy to just slide the window open again and reach out and . . .
The light changes. The cab tears along the final block as if the driver can’t wait to be rid of his passenger.
Don’t worry. It’s mutual.
The meter reads $20.85. Red pulls a twenty from the wad of cash Wayland handed over and hunts for smaller bills, coming up with three dollars and a ten. One is too little, the other too much.
“Need change?” the driver asks as Red thrusts the twenty and ten into the slotted compartment between the seats.
It’s one thing to have given Barb an excessive tip. But for a random taxi driver, that would be just as memorable as a measly one.
“Five back.”
An agonizing wait as the cabbie digs it out in ones. “. . . four, and five. There you go. Need a receipt?”
Red bolts from the cab, shoving the money into the pocket that contains the knife and cursing when the blade slices tender flesh. The good riddance is mutual, the taxi barreling on south toward the next intersection. Wincing, Red pauses outside the coffee shop to examine the bleeding thumb tip.
“Coming in?” A police officer holds the door open, then spots the open wound. “Hey, you okay there?”
“Yeah, I just . . . Guess I cut myself on the edge of the door when I got out of that cab.”
“Might want to get some antibiotic ointment on it right away so you don’t get an infection.”
“Will do. Thanks, Officer.” Red steps past him, into the vestibule, sucking blood from the throbbing wound. It tastes of rust and salt.
Had Tara and Emily and Kevin tasted their own blood in their last moments? Had Mother? If this small cut stings so, they must have died in agony.
Caught between after-hours drunks and early-morning r
egulars, the place is quiet. A few solo diners sit along the counter, where pie wedges rotate in their glass dome. Someone is vacuuming in back, by the booths.
A napkin dispenser sits beside the register and a row of cans with slit plastic tops, labeled with every charity known to man. Coalition for the Homeless, Famine Relief, AIDS . . .
Don’t they know it’s too late?
Scowling, Red plucks a napkin and wraps it around the cut, watching a cockroach saunter along a row of gumball machines.
“What’s new, pussycat?”
Barb is smiling, her eyes and mouth radiating a network of fine trenches etched by years of cigarettes and laughter. She’s wearing her blue uniform with tan panty hose and thick-soled white rubber shoes, her dyed yellow hair pulled back in the usual stubby ponytail.
“Hey . . . what is this, BYOB day?”
“What?”
“Bring your own breakfast.” She gestures at the McDonald’s bag that conceals Red’s napkin-wrapped thumb.
So much for unobtrusive.
“Oh. No.” Red searches for further explanation—why?
I don’t owe her anything.
She leads the way to a booth without further comment, though not without further questioning. “You must have exciting plans to be out of bed this early on a Saturday. What’s on the agenda?”
“Chores, errands . . . maybe a nap.” Red smothers a yawn.
“That’s what Saturdays are—Oh! Did you cut yourself?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Looks like something to me. We have a first aid kit somewhere out back. I’ll go see if anyone knows where it is. Need a menu, or having the usual?”
“The usual.”
“I always ask. You never know when someone’s going to shake things up.”
“I like things the same.”
“Me, too.” Barb points her index finger. “Apple pie, warmed not hot, coffee with a little milk, not cream, and three sugars, coming right up.”
“You always get it right.”
“I make it my business to remember everything about my customers, pussycat.”
That could be a big mistake.
Half an hour later, back in the apartment with a belly full of apple pie and coffee, Red tosses the morning papers on the table and waters the spider plant drooping in its plastic container on the windowsill.
“And it was said unto them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree, but only such men as have not the seal of God on their foreheads.”
Revelations. One of the first passages White had shared last spring, after they’d been reunited.
“Only the chosen few have the seal. You do, Red. That’s why I had to find you again, after all these years.”
“To save me.”
“Yes. Time is running out.”
“How long do we have? Hours? Days? Weeks?”
“If I could tell you, I would. When it happens, we need to be ready. That’s why we need to destroy these outliers.”
As it turned out, we means Red.
Still no sign of the stairwell murder in the tabloids, but Perry Wayland’s disappearance is front page news.
The Post headline, Might as Well Jump, is a nod to the Van Halen song. It’s printed above a photo of the George Washington Bridge.
Billionaire Boys Suicide Club, screams the Daily News. The article about Perry Wayland’s disappearance is accompanied by sidebars about a despondent broker who’d jumped in front of the number 5 train at Wall Street yesterday afternoon, and another so-called stock market suicide earlier in the week. The tabloids are prone to exaggeration.
Not according to Newsday. There, he’s a mere Missing Millionaire, grim-faced in a family photo, surrounded by his wife and three daughters—all blonde, beautiful, and smiling like they don’t have a care in the world.
“They won’t even miss me,” Black had said when they discussed the bridge ruse White had conceived after following Red to the top of the World Trade Center. “Kirstin’s life will go on as usual. Shopping, Jazzercise, lunching at Maxim’s. I’m just a meal ticket.”
“Not to me. You’re a prophet.”
Noting Black’s prompt satisfaction, Red felt a prickle of misgiving. White is proficient at telling him whatever he wants—needs—to hear.
But it’s not that way with me. We go way back. We were there for each other in our darkest days. We love each other. White said so.
Red tosses the papers onto the coffee table, thumb throbbing, dark splotches staining the beige bandage Barb had insisted on providing back at the diner. In the kitchen, Red peels it back and washes the wound beneath the faucet, wincing at the sting of soap. The cut is open and oozing, sending a river of pink coursing over the porcelain sink.
Blood . . .
Kevin Donaldson had flown into the air and hit his head on the pavement. He’d most likely been knocked unconscious, perhaps even died on impact. But what agony did Tara and Emily experience? Their cuts were deep, severing their carotid arteries, as White had instructed.
“Do that first, and then live it up. Have a little fun with the knife. Just make sure your first cut is the deepest.”
“Yeah, like the song,” Black said. “Rod Stewart.”
“No, Cat Stevens.”
“I don’t think he sang—”
“He did. In 1967.” White was curt, unappreciative of contradiction. “Trust me, I know.”
“How?”
“Because it was my father’s favorite song, okay?”
“Okay. Sorry.”
Remembering Black’s chagrin, Red smiles and opens the bedroom nightstand drawer, where the square metal tin of Band-Aids resides along with a loaded revolver, Vietnam dog tags on a beaded metal chain, and a Bible with a corner page folded to Revelations 6:3–4. Red opens it.
When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come and see!” Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword.
More like a switchblade, but . . .
Everyone has a purpose, White said long ago.
White . . .
Red flips back to 6:1–8.
And there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.
And 6:5–6.
There before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!”
Finally, 6:7–8.
There before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
Spelled out neatly here, all so easy to grasp.
Red, White, Black . . .
“Why don’t you call him ‘Pale’?” Red had asked White, early on. “Why do you call him by his real name?”
“Because in ancient Aramaic, the name Oran means pale. That’s why he’s powerful, and we need to serve him and carry out his orders. He was born to be the first horseman.”
Chapter Thirteen
Barnes stops at the coffee cart near the precinct and greets the Pakistani vendor who’s there seven mornings a week, always polite, always smiling, rain or shine.
“Good morning, good morning! Breakfast special?”
“Yep.” Barnes hands over two dollars in exchange for a plastic-wrapped buttered Kaiser roll, a small regular coffee, and two quarters in change. He detours to the pay phone on the corner outside Duane Reade, anxious to call Wash to tell him about the baby without being overheard by anyone at work. A beefy man is already parked in the phone kiosk, holding a roll of quarters. Clearly he’s going to be a wh
ile.
At the precinct, Barnes finds Stef on the phone giving a press statement about the Wayland case. He gestures that he’ll be off in a few minutes. Barnes finishes his coffee, chucks the cup into the garbage, and goes to the kitchenette, a brightly lit nook tucked into a corner by the restrooms.
Marsha is there, pressing buttons on the microwave. “Morning,” she says.
“So I hear.”
“You want coffee?”
“Need is more like it.”
“You sure?” She picks up a grimy glass coffeepot that’s nearly boiled away on the hot burner, and sets it down again. “Looks more like molasses today than motor oil. I’ll pass.”
“Not me.” Barnes fills a white foam cup with the treacly muck, takes a sip, and wrinkles his nose.
“Rough night?”
“They don’t come much rougher.”
“Good for you, lover boy.”
He should tell her that it wasn’t like that, but then she’ll want to know what it was.
Instead, he asks what she’s working on. She tells him about a drug bust; he tells her about the Wayland case.
“Yeah, I saw that in the papers. He went to Brown. Andrea did, too, around the same time.”
Marsha talks even more frequently about her roommate than she does about her dog.
The microwave dings, and she removes an oversized, steamy muffin. “Want half?”
“Is it chocolate?”
“Fat free oat bran.”
“God, no. Can you ask Andrea if she knows Perry Wayland? Maybe she can shed some light on his past.”
“She’s at work. I can page her, but she might not call me back till later, and she probably won’t know him. Do you know how many people there are at Brown? It’s not small.”
“I know, but maybe she knows his wife. She went to Brown, too. Her name is—”
“Kirstin Eaton Billington Wayland, of the Mayflower Billingtons,” she says, peeling away the muffin’s fluted wrapper.
“How do you know that?”
“It was in the Daily News. I wonder if she knows—”
“The Mayflower Madam?” Barnes cuts in, grinning. “Says she doesn’t.”
“Bet she’s lying. Andrea says all those blue bloods are all intertwined one way or another. And maybe she did know the Waylands at Brown, since they’re all rich WASPs, Andrea included.”
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