Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  “Get me the plate number on that van,” said the team leader.

  “Okay,” said the security guy.

  “And go back into the lobby as they leave. The view from behind the desk.”

  The security guy tapped a few keys and changed the view and scrubbed back in time, and then stopped the vision and they watched the two step across the lobby.

  “Freeze it there,” said the team leader.

  The picture stopped midstride as the two people passed the front desk. The blond woman’s face was partially obscured, but it wasn’t her face the team leader was looking at. He was focused on the other face.

  “Who is that?” said the guy at the back of room again.

  The team leader said nothing. But he grinned. He knew the face. He knew who it was, and it explained a few things.

  He said, “Show me the guy.”

  The security guy did his thing and the video picked up in the elevator lobby and followed the man on screen as he did a tour of the hotel—the rooftop bar, the lobby bar, the restaurant. Then he came to a stop in the lobby. He looked at his phone and just stood there, not moving. It looked like the picture was paused. They got a good look at him. And the team leader knew this face too. He knew this face better.

  “Fontaine,” he said to himself.

  “Who?” asked the security guy as the video continued and the man set off running.

  “Get me that license number. And find out where that guy goes,” said the team leader, walking out of the room. He took out his phone as he walked. “Fontaine’s here. Someone got in before us.”

  “Who?” said the person at the other end of the line.

  “I know who. We need to check all calls to the woman’s office between the San Francisco meeting and her leaving for DC.”

  “That will take some time.”

  “Fast as you can. He’s not going to get away this time.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Flynn flicked his collar up as he hit the street, and shrugged his daypack onto his shoulder. It felt good to be on the move, to be proactive rather than reactive. His Glock was tucked back in his trousers against the small of his back. It was no comfort. It wasn’t part of the plan to use a gun in such a populated area. But there was no telling where this particular blanket thread would lead.

  The wind had dropped off some, but it was still plenty cold, and putting their collars up was what people did. Hutton wound a scarf around her neck in an intricate knot and adjusted the strap on the courier bag she had wrapped around her. They headed north from Hutton’s building. Crossed 17th Street. Walked a half block and stopped outside a restaurant. It was a hamburger joint. The kind of place one could build their own burger like it was a construction project and pay five times the price for the privilege. They looked at the menu in the window, and Hutton glanced back down and across Park Avenue.

  “The Yukon has pulled away from the curb,” Hutton said.

  Flynn said nothing.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s watching us.”

  “How often is Hedstrom wrong?”

  “Not often.”

  “There you go.”

  “But not never either. And we need to be one hundred percent sure these are the guys.”

  “Wait for it.”

  She waited. She watched the Yukon pull a wide U-turn across traffic. Slow like an ocean liner.

  “It’s done a U-turn.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  “It’s pulled over again. Just this side of the lights.”

  “Let’s go,” said Flynn.

  They walked north along Park Avenue. Like Manhattan in general, Park Avenue had many faces. Twenty-five blocks north, it was New York glamor. Grand Central Terminal and then Upper East Side money. But downtown it was the gateway to the Lower East Side. The buildings were older and the restaurants had more Formica and the convenience stores stocked the lower end of the liquor spectrum.

  Flynn and Hutton stepped into one such store. The lottery was heading for a big jackpot, so there was a long line for tickets. Flynn didn’t see the logic. A bigger pot didn’t improve your chances of winning. You were more likely to get hit by lightning. Twice. In the same spot. But the human mind held power that it hadn’t even yet shared with itself. Dreams were powerful. So people were lined up. Flynn waited his turn.

  “How many?” said the guy behind the counter.

  “I don’t want a ticket.”

  The guy behind the counter looked at him.

  “A fifth of Irish whiskey,” Flynn said.

  The guy took a moment to process the request of anything other than a lottery ticket and then turned to find the bottle. He didn’t ask which brand. The cheapest possible was the biggest seller.

  Hutton frowned. “Really?”

  Flynn nodded.

  The counter guy turned back with the bottle, and Flynn said, “Actually, make it two.”

  The guy huffed like he’d just painted a house and had been told the owner didn’t like the color. He turned and grabbed a second bottle and put it on the counter and offered Flynn a face that asked if he was going to cause the guy any further unwarranted hassle. Flynn just handed him the cash and the guy made change and slipped each bottle into its own paper sack, and Flynn slipped the sacks into his daypack.

  Flynn stepped out onto the street and took a moment to position his collar just so. It was a good distraction. It allowed for more body movement than was necessary. Allowed for a good look around without taking a good look around. He saw the Yukon parked down the street. It was as obvious as a billboard on Times Square. It might as well have had neon in the window saying I’m watching you.

  The driver felt exposed. The street was lit like a football stadium. Not a side street or an alley. Park Avenue. Even a dark vehicle stood out. Especially a truck, and especially one that kept stopping on every block. He had to drop back. He had no choice. Even an amateur would notice him, sooner or later. He told his partner what to do, and the twitchy little guy dropped from the vehicle to the sidewalk. He shrugged his shoulders to settle his coat on his light frame and then walked on. The driver waited. He saw the target and the woman walk north, and soon they were lost in the pedestrian traffic. He followed his partner and hoped his twitchy little eyes could keep the target in sight.

  They slowly made their way up Park Avenue. He stopped at red lights and watched his partner walk on, hands in pockets. He had a bouncing gait, like a young pony or Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. But plenty of people in New York walked with an attitude. So he looked like just another guy, and his speed and direction suggested the target was making no attempt to evade a tail. He clearly didn’t know they were behind him.

  The driver crawled north, cars behind him sounding their horns at his slow pace. It was a concern to be attracting so much attention. But in Manhattan, the noise of horns blaring angrily was part of the cacophony that was the sounds of the city. He kept his eyes on his partner and saw him turn right toward the river. The twitchy little guy glanced back to make sure the Yukon was following, and the driver sent up a silent prayer that his partner wouldn’t get too close to the target and get made.

  They headed east. This street was much less busy than Park Avenue. Like most of the east-west streets in this part of town it was one-way, but unlike most, it didn’t really go anywhere. It didn’t end at an important park or reach a bridge or even bank onto the FDR. There was traffic, but it wasn’t busy. Not Manhattan busy. He liked that. Enough cover for him, but less annoyed traffic behind. After a couple of blocks he saw his partner standing on the sidewalk, hands in pockets. He had the stiff posture of someone looking in a restaurant window, deciding whether or not to go in, whether or not the place had exactly what he had a hankering for.

  But there was no restaurant. As the driver got closer, he saw that his partner was looking at a vacant lot. Such lots came and went in a city constantly reinventing itself. Buildings were vacated, razed to rubble and then built again. But the driver had heard s
tories. The planning process was a nightmare. A bureaucracy fit for only the bravest souls to navigate. He recalled something about air rights. How high a building could be. He found the idea ridiculous in a forest of skyscrapers. But he had heard stories. Planning permissions denied, or investors getting skittish or even running out of money before rebuilding could begin. Sometimes lots sat vacant for decades waiting for a white knight to ride in and save the day. Sometimes the knight never came.

  The lots moved location around the island, but they moved slow. And the hobo network moved fast. Homeless people found plenty of vacant land to camp on, even in Manhattan. When the ownership of land was in dispute, there was usually no one to take responsibility for security or fencing. Groups of men would gather around fires in spaces that sprouted green at a surprising rate. Sometimes the NYPD would move them on. More often the NYPD had bigger problems to deal with.

  The driver stopped a half block down and pulled out his burner phone. He called the second of two numbers stored in it. Saw his partner pull his hand from his pocket and answer the call.

  “Where are they?”

  “They had a fight.”

  “They what?”

  “A fight. They were arguing.”

  “About what?”

  “Not sure. I think the guy had some booze, and she wasn’t happy about it. Didn’t like him drinking.”

  “So what happened?”

  The twitchy little guy turned to look toward the Yukon. “The woman took off. Kept going toward the river.”

  “Where’s the guy?”

  The little guy looked back at the vacant lot. “In there.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see him. I guess he’s drinking.”

  “Well, go in and find out.”

  “I’m not going in there. It’s full of bums.”

  “Who aren’t going to care about you. Now go. Try to be cool.”

  The driver shook his head and ended the call. The twitchy guy looked at his phone and then back at the Yukon. The driver shook his head again. The guy was going to get them busted.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The vacant lot was more like a field. Long grasses waved in the breeze like an early crop of wheat. Pathways had been trodden through the grass, leading deep into the lot and breaking left and right. The right side of the lot was lit by the adjacent building, except for a copse of trees, which made the guy wonder how long the lot had been vacant. The left side butted against the brick wall of another building, red bricks that had been whitewashed and then had some kind of advertising painted on them and then been whitewashed again. Only the very top section of the brick wall was lit. The lower portion of the lot was dark.

  The twitchy little guy shrugged his shoulders into his coat and shivered involuntarily. He pushed up a section of chain-link fencing and stepped under it and into the lot. Looked around. Right, left or straight? The right was lit, so he went that way. Most of the lot was undisturbed, as if the homeless men were honoring some code to keep off the grass. He followed a path where the grass had been crushed down to the perimeter of the space. Came upon a man lying on a large piece of cardboard the size of an unfolded refrigerator carton. He was wrapped in newspapers and snoring loudly. His arms were wrapped around a black garbage bag. Perhaps his worldly possessions. He made the little guy think of an abandoned dog. The guy was tempted to give the hobo a kick, just for the hell of it. But he might screech and holler, and the guy didn’t want to draw attention to himself, so he wandered on.

  The right property line of the lot was marked by another chain-link fence that separated it from a lane that ran beside the next building. Along the fence line, men had made camp. Some in groups of two, most alone. They were spaced out enough to give each some version of privacy. Most of the men were sitting silently. A couple were muttering to themselves. One man sat cross-legged with a small dog in his lap. He fed what looked like bologna sausage to the mutt. The little guy felt colder the further he walked. It wasn’t the air as much as the silent stares of the men that chilled him.

  They all watched. He was coiled and ready. Ready for what, he didn’t know. He expected some begging. Got a quarter? Or was it a dollar now? He didn’t know the going rate for panhandlers these days, and he wasn’t giving anyway. He kept the fence behind him to make sure none of them got the bravado to attack.

  But no one spoke. They didn’t ask for anything. They just watched him. As if it were a zoo, and it was he rather than they that was on display. He shivered again. A nervous twitch. He reached the far-right corner of the lot and found no sign of the target. He looked across the lot and considered just trooping across the long grass to the other side. It was only a vacant lot, but it felt like a minefield. He turned and retraced his steps along the worn path.

  The left side of the lot was different. There were more groups of men against the wall of the next building. He heard their whispers as he approached. Four men sat around a small fire burning in a pit dug into the earth. They fell silent as he stepped into the light. He was reminded of cowboys around a campfire, way further west and way back when. The men around the fire watched him. One of the men lifted his bearded chin. He was wrapped in a long coat and looked as old as the hills but might have been no more than forty. He held a bottle of Irish whiskey that was mostly full. Perhaps he had just arrived.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  As if a homeless bum could help him. The little guy looked toward the dark corner of the lot.

  “You see a guy come through here? Big guy, ski jacket.”

  The homeless man looked at him as if considering the question. As if they were sitting on Broadway and he had to go back through a thousand faces that had passed by in the previous ten minutes.

  “There was a guy. Headed back there.”

  The man nodded toward the dark corner of the lot. The little guy sniffed and looked again. And he shivered. Without a word he stepped along the path. There were more men sitting against the wall, dropping their whispers as he passed by. He moved slow, looking at each of the hobos. Lots of big guys but no ski jackets. He carefully moved into the dark reaches of the lot. Let his eyes adjust as best they could. The back end of the wall was exposed red brick and absorbed the light. He felt like he was walking deep into a cave. Someone had made a makeshift shelter out of cardboard boxes. It had collapsed on itself, so it was more a pile of trash. Perhaps they used it to start their fires.

  He saw two more guys. They were huddled deep in the lot, as far from the outside world as they could get. They had no fire and their skin was putrid and the only light the little guy could see was reflected in their eyes. They were sharing a bottle of Irish whiskey. Mostly full. He wondered if they had a stock somewhere. He doubted it. He glanced around. There was no guy. No one hiding in the shadows. The big guy had vanished.

  Flynn waited. He was good at waiting. He had waited plenty in his previous life. In jungles and deserts and dirty abandoned apartments. Waited and waited and waited and then pounced. A few minutes was nothing. Even crouched low on his haunches. He kept his weight back on his heels and up through his core. It would take an hour for the first twinge of pain from his quadriceps. And he wasn’t planning on being there that long. He looked up through the hole in the cardboard and watched. He liked the dark corner. He liked that the two men had no fire going. For more reasons than he wanted to admit. The little guy was looking at the two homeless men in the corner. Then he looked back across the lot. And Flynn launched.

  He sprung from his low position like a jack-in-the-box. Pushed hard, out and up and was moving fast by the time he took the two strides necessary to reach the little guy. In a movie he might have been screaming or yelling, expelling the anguish in his guts as he thrust toward one of those responsible for killing Beth. But he wasn’t in a movie. He moved silently, the rustle of falling cardboard the only noise.

  His right fist hit the side of the little guy’s head. Hard but not too hard. It took s
ome concentration because every fiber in his body wanted to drive the punch on through the guy’s temple and out the other side. To crush his skull like a car in a compactor. But he needed the guy to keep the gift of his short-term memory and the power of speech. So he held back.

  The little guy’s head snapped and he was launched sideways like a wide receiver catching a ball on the sideline, dragging his feet to remain in bounds. He fell like a cut tree and landed hard, his momentum only broken by the thick matting of grass.

  Flynn was on him before he could think to move. But the guy wasn’t thinking or moving. He was seeing stars, or in Flynn’s experience, blue and red swatches of color. Concussed but not completely out of it. Flynn rolled him onto his front and pulled his coat down to the middle of his back so his arms were useless, and then rolled him over. The little guy was blinking hard. He was ugly up close. Hair thinning in patches and pockmarked cheeks. His face had the texture of cauliflower. He took a couple more hard blinks and then his eyes stopped on Flynn’s face. The beginnings of a snarl split his lips and Flynn saw defiance in him. Defiance that would make it a lot easier for him to do what he was going to do next.

  He punched the guy in the face. Not too hard. More a right jab than a full-on haymaker. No broken bones. It sent a message. We can do this such that there is no end to it. It was a cheap shot, a ruthless move. But it always got their attention.

  “How many of you are there?”

  The guy blinked hard and said nothing.

  Flynn punched him again. His head snapped sideways and he spat blood. Flynn grabbed his ear and pulled him back so they were eye to eye.

  “How many?”

  He could see the answer on the guy’s lips, but it didn’t come. He wasn’t a brave one. He was just stupid. His brain wasn’t working some clever plan to get out of his situation. Flynn punched him again. This time it was hard. It hurt. Both of them. Flynn felt the pain stab through his fist. The guy’s eyes grew large. He was working some stuff out. Flynn reached into his left pocket and pulled out a chunk of concrete. It was all that remained from when the lot been razed. It was the size of two baseballs, side by side. Jagged and rough. No point breaking his fist on a cheekbone. He held it up so the guy could see it. Pulled back his left arm ready to launch.