Keeper

by Greg Rucka

  “Did you tell this to the police and FBI?” Bridgett asked.

  “I told them something similar,” he said to me.

  “He told them something similar,” I said to Bridgett. “But he didn’t tell them the same thing. Because knowledge that a crime is going to be committed, and not telling the police about it, that’s called being an accessory.”

  “It’s called being an accessory,” Bridgett told Crowell. She offered him a red Life Saver.

  “If I did know, I said. But I do not.” Crowell smiled.

  “You wouldn’t tell me if someone was planning to murder Dr. Romero?” I asked.

  “We’re talking about letters, not murder.”

  “No,” I said. “We’re talking about murder. Is that what happened? Somebody thought they were shooting Felice and murdered Katie by mistake?”

  “Your implication is that I know who shot the girl,” Crowell said.

  “Very good. That’s exactly my implication,” I said, leaning forward.

  Barry tensed to move, but Crowell kept his eyes on me, and if he was intimidated, he didn’t show it. “This interrogation is over,” he said evenly. “I have business to attend to.”

  “The letters come from your group,” Bridgett said. “Someone in Sword of the Silent is mailing these letters, possibly several people. That means that someone you are responsible for wants to stop abortion, and thinks that killing Dr. Romero is the way to do it. And maybe that someone murdered Katie Romero by accident this morning. Doesn’t that bother you at all?”

  For the first time since we’d walked into the room, Crowell’s eyes rested on her. Very carefully he said, “If I were to subscribe to your theory, young lady, then my only possible answer would be, yes, it does. Just as it should bother you and Mr. Kodiak that Felice Romero has murdered thousands of preborn children this year. If I am culpable in this thing, then you are equally culpable in that.” He looked at his watch. It had a gold band and looked exceptionally expensive. “You can show yourselves out,” Crowell said. “And I expect I’ll see you on Saturday, Mr. Kodiak. At the conference.”

  I helped Bridgett gather up the letters and then we stood and Crowell stood, and nobody offered anybody a hand. We walked to the door and Clarence Barry cut in front of us to open it.

  As I went out the door after Bridgett, Barry leaned in to my ear and hissed, “You’re dead and you’re mine.”

  The sky had filled with clouds the color of fresh bruises. Bridgett strode right across the street, again ignoring the traffic, and I thought she was going to her car, but instead she went for the stone wall separating the rest of Manhattan on the west from Central Park. She perched on the wall and searched her pockets with one hand, waving me toward her with the other. She started in on another candy, offering me one from the roll. I took it and felt my mouth suddenly cool.

  “Tasty, huh?”

  “Why don’t you smoke?”

  “Can’t stand cigarettes,” she said. “Don’t mind the occasional cigar, though, if it’s from Cuba.”

  I looked up at Crowell’s windows.

  “Well?”

  “They’re up to something. You didn’t catch it, but your boyfriend in there looked more than a little worried when his boss said they had business to do.” She looked up at the sky and squinted. “Looks like rain.”

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Crowell’s going out, you heard him say it. I want to follow him.”

  “Good luck. He’ll make you the second he leaves. You’re not exactly inconspicuous.”

  She tapped her nose ring. “You’d be surprised.”

  “If he starts on foot, you’re in trouble.”

  “This is Manhattan. There’s always a cab when you need one. It’s the law.”

  “You trying to get rid of me?”

  “You didn’t want anything to do with me, remember? You head back to your people, check on Romero.” She fished another pocket and came out with a business card and a pen. She scribbled something on the back, then handed it to me. “My home number’s on there. Give me a call tonight.” The card had Agra and Donnovan on it, her name below, and Investigator beneath that. The agency’s address was listed on Fifth, and there were two phone numbers, office and car. She’d written her home number on the back.

  “You really should have a backup,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re that good?”

  “I’m better,” Bridgett Logan said, and she wasn’t joking.

  The discussion became academic because at that moment Crowell and Barry appeared in the doorway, stopping to chastise the doorman. It looked like Crowell was doing most of the chastising, and they didn’t seem to have noticed us across the street. Some of the angry notes Crowell hit made it through the traffic to us.

  Bridgett saw them when I did and spun on her backside, dropping over the wall and into the park. I felt like an idiot as I followed her. We sat for a moment with our backs to the stone. An empty bottle of malt liquor dug into my leg. At least it wasn’t broken glass. I hoped I wasn’t sitting in dog shit.

  “Should I call you Rockford or Spenser, maybe?” I asked.

  “Eat me.” She turned and stuck her nose over the wall, dropping the folder with the letters in it on my lap. An elderly black woman in a pretty summer dress stopped and stared at us as she walked an Airedale along the path. I smiled at her. She smiled at me. The Airedale licked its nose.

  “Nice day,” I said to her.

  She nodded and said, “Looks like rain, though.” They continued on.

  “Well?” I asked Bridgett.

  “They’re done with the doorman and now they’re talking to each other out front. They didn’t see us.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  “Wait—wait—a Cadillac just pulled up.”

  I peeked over the wall beside her. The driver’s window was down and Rich was at the wheel. “The third man,” I said.

  “Looks like Rich,” she said.

  “Looks like Rich,” I agreed.

  Crowell opened the front passenger’s door and got in. Barry shut the door for him.

  I ducked back down as Bridgett lowered her nose and backed up on all fours a few feet until she could stand without being too obvious. “I’m going to go for my car,” she said. “Follow Crowell.”

  “Better hurry.”

  “Call me, stud,” she said, and took off up the path parallel to where she had parked the car. I watched her vault the wall and disappear.

  I sat with the folder on my lap feeling stupid. Then I decided what the hell and took another peep over the wall. A bus had pulled up across the street, and I couldn’t see either Crowell or Barry, and Bridgett’s Porsche was disappearing to the south, so I stood up and brushed the seat of my pants off. They were damp, hopefully with nothing more offensive than water. The bus roared as it pulled away, and revealed no one recognizable in front of Crowell’s building. Enough with this, I decided. She’s the PI, let her do the tailing.

  As I went over the wall and started up to the subway stop at Ninety-sixth Street, the sky opened. By the time I crossed at Ninety-fourth to catch the downtown track none of me was dry, and the folder had transformed into a limp cardboard sandwich. My glasses started to fog, my sneakers squished, and my pants clung to my legs, the seams chafing as I walked. The steps down to the train were cracked tile, slippery and treacherous. I pushed my token in and stepped up to the platform, listening to the water falling down the stairs. My hair stuck against my neck, dripping water down my back, and I shook my head to move things around, but it didn’t do much good.

  One comer of my shirt was not absolutely drenched, having been tucked in, and with it my glasses became functional again. After putting them back on I shot a look down the tunnel, trying to spot the advancing train. The tunnel was empty.

  Waiting behind the yellow line, I looked across at the uptown platform and saw Barry leaning against a pylon, smoking. He was looking at his feet and as he shifte
d his glance around I turned, trying to conceal myself.

  Uptown was the clinic. There was a stop on 135th, I knew; I’d been using it. My gut went tight, apprehensive. Bridgett was supposed to follow Crowell, and according to her, Barry hadn’t been pleased about their going out for “business.” The odds were he wasn’t going to another prayer meeting. On top of that, Barry was a hard case, a son of a bitch, and I wasn’t going to give him the chance to throw another bottle, to be party to the murder of another girl. I wasn’t going to be scared off by his threats. That wasn’t going to happen.

  By the time I had concluded all of this, I was vaulting the exit turnstile, charging across the street to the uptown track. Vaulting was stupid, and I slipped when I landed, losing my balance and nearly cracking my head on the tile.

  Overcompensating, I used the hand holding the folder to stop me from tipping into the wall, nearly kicking a vagrant as I did so. The folder crumpled with my weight but nothing fell out. The vagrant cursed and then fell back asleep. Water splashed up my pants as I ran up the stairs, looked both ways, and sprinted across the street. The rain was coming down so hard and so fast it seemed to be jumping skyward from the pavement.

  From the uptown entrance came the sound of the subway train crushing air out of its way as it entered the station. Down the stairs two, three at a time, I jumped the entrance turnstile, enraging the girl working the change booth. Whatever she screamed was lost in the bulletproof glass protecting her from the rest of the world, and I caught the doors on the train just as they started to close.

  The doors met on my left arm, sighed, jerked open again, and let me through.

  Thing with New York, most people don’t pay attention to anything out of the ordinary. It’s not that they don’t see it, they just don’t want to confront it. So it was with me, standing inside the door, wet and clutching a sodden and tom manila folder, trickling a puddle at my feet. The only person in the car who paid me any mind was a toddler in her father’s lap. She pointed at me and giggled. Her father stared straight ahead. The train lurched forward, and the driver announced our next stop as something that might have been Saskatoon, but which I translated as 103rd Street. Using one of the handgrips to steady myself, I looked for Barry. He wasn’t in the car.

  I’d come in at the south end of the train, and checked that end first. Looking through the connecting door into the other car brought me a pretty full view, but left the near comers vacant. Halfway to the north end of the car it struck me that I was being exceptionally dim. If I was so certain Barry was headed for the clinic, all I had to do was get out at 135th, so I sat down and tried to get my glasses dried again. I succeeded in making the big drops turn into smaller streaks, but that was it.

  It was my luck to get an air-conditioned car, too, and by the time we hit 135th Street I was shivering in my wet clothes. Getting back onto the humid platform was small relief turned great when I glimpsed Barry as he started up the stairs. I followed a group of Latino kids out of the station and into the downpour. A bolt of lightning lanced the sky, thunder flowing over it. The kids shrieked, then laughed, joking in a babble of Spanish.

  Barry wasn’t worried about being followed. He headed straight as a lame bull on a charge to the comer, then surprised me by turning right and heading to Eighth Avenue. Halfway down the block he turned into a diner, and I crossed to the opposite side of the street. He gave no sign of having made me, but from across the street I could barely read the lettering on the diner’s window through the rain, let alone see anything inside. After waiting five minutes I crossed over, coming at the restaurant from the right comer of the awning. A steady stream of runoff from the rain gutter doused me as I looked in the window. It had begun to steam up, but it was possible to make out faces inside.

  Barry sat at a full booth, his profile to the window, making points to the rest of the group with a meat-tenderizer of a hand. I recognized one other person in the booth, then another when a woman joined them. The woman was the same small, bitter one who had accosted Alison on our way out after her abortion, the one who performed elective surgeries on toy babies. It took a few seconds to be certain about the other one. None other than the bushily bearded man I had straight-armed into the street. He was the hardest to recognize; he had shaved off the beard. Without it, his chin looked naked and soft. I realized as I hadn’t when we’d tussled that he was overweight, perhaps by as much as thirty or forty pounds.

  Barry produced a small walkie-talkie from his drenched suit jacket and showed it to everyone at the table. They nodded in complete understanding or agreement, and he keyed it and spoke briefly to the grille.

  A much-abused pay phone hung against a building three doors east, but I didn’t want to be that close in case anyone came out. Back on the other side of the street was another phone, between a video rental closet and a liquor store, and I dodged cars and cabs and people with umbrellas to get to it. I didn’t have any coins other than subway tokens and rushed into the liquor store for change.

  The counterman was surly and demanded I buy something. I grabbed a tin of Altoids and gave him a five. He took all the time in the world to make change, and didn’t seem to understand that I wanted quarters. While he played with his register, I looked out the door and saw people leaving the diner. As far as I could see, Barry wasn’t among them.

  “I thought you wanted change, man,” the counterman snarled. I went back to him and he gave me my bills first, the change after, coin by coin. I almost asked him if he was on Crowell’s payroll.

  Barry stood in the doorway of the diner talking to one of his cronies when I stepped out of the store. I put my back to them at the phone. The quarters were clumsy between my fingers. I dialed the clinic and turned around, waiting for somebody to pick up while keeping my eyes on the front of the diner. Barry was heading back inside, and down 135th I could see the troop of Crowell’s Christian foot soldiers, doggedly putting one foot in front of the other, heads down in the rain.

  But Barry hadn’t left yet; he was waiting for something. The diner could have a back door, in which case I was screwed, but I didn’t think that was the planned exit. They had done their tricks and thought they were clean. They wouldn’t be pulling anything more out of their hats.

  “Women’s LifeCare, may I help you?”

  “Lynn, this is Atticus. Put Sheldon on.”

  Delfleur put me on hold fast, and I was afraid she’d thought it was a prank call and cut me off. As I waited, Barry emerged from the diner once more, starting a cigarette, using the building to shield his lighter from the rain. Then he went to the pay phone, and with the smoke dangling from his lips, brought out his walkie-talkie again. What I would have done for one now I didn’t think about; it was lying on my futon at home.

  Barry spoke into the radio, then brought it to his ear to listen to the reply. At that point Sheldon came on the phone. “What’s up?”

  “What’s it look like there?”

  He didn’t waste any time. “We’ve got a small group of the moderates, here, you know, offering post-abortion counseling, but they’re well outnumbered by SOSers. About one hundred of them out front, maybe more. The back alley’s had people moving in and out of it all day; we’ve got maybe twenty-five there, now. Some are carrying backpacks, sacks, looks like they’ve got equipment. Building’s secure, not a whole lot of patients today, seeing as how the doctor isn’t in. We’ve had people shouting at us all day, since the news broke, you believe it? Feminist Majority is here, too, preparing to counter if anything should happen. There are a few ‘We loved Katie’ signs.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That FBI guy is here, says they’ve got intelligence that something’s going down. Neither he or I like the Ryder truck that’s been parked across the street for the last two hours. Nobody’s opened it up yet. We’ve got some cops here with hats and bats, and there’s a VW van unloading more people as I speak.”

  “I’m looking at one of Crowell’s lapdogs right now,” I told him, watc
hing Barry pick up the pay phone and dial. “He’s just met with a group of protesters and sent them back to the clinic. I don’t know—”

  “Hold on,” Sheldon said. Over the receiver I heard him say, “Keep him on the line—keep him on the line, and use the checklist, and find the FBI dude.” He came back to me. “Got to evacuate. Bomb threat.”

  I dropped the receiver and the folder and sprinted across the street to where Barry was still speaking on the phone.

  “—in the abortuary room,” he was saying. “It’ll blow every fucking one of you into pieces.”

  Well, maybe Crowell wouldn’t be polite enough to roll over when faced with my and Bridgett’s double-teaming interrogation, but this wasn’t bad, and it was all I needed. Barry caught me reflected in the window as I moved, but too late. Taking his left shoulder with my right hand, I spun him back around, then drove my left forearm up under his chin, pinioning him against the wall. His face flushed, and he started to bring his fist around to punch, but I put my right knee into his stomach. He would have doubled over if I’d let him, but instead my forearm kept him upright and the air came out of him like foul exhaust, bitter smoke and bitter thoughts. His nose was broken from our first dance, when he had kissed asphalt, so it couldn’t be easy for him to breathe.

  The phone swung on its cable, and I could hear a tinny voice asking if he was still there.

  “Bomb threat, Clarence?” I asked Barry, patting him down with my right hand. He was carrying his radio on his hip and I pulled it off his belt and dropped it on the pavement. His eyes darted to it, then back to me. They were opened wide, the small blood vessels revealed above and below his corneas, and his eyes repeated what they’d said earlier: He hated me. “Moving up from just one murder, huh, shithead? Going for double digits, now? Bomb threat? Is it real? Is it real, Clarence?”

  He didn’t say anything. I kept moving my hand, finding his wallet and dropping that, too. I found his gun, exactly where I’d seen it earlier. It was a semiautomatic pistol, a Smith & Wesson, and it slipped easily from its holster. I brought it around to his stomach, shielding the weapon with my body. We locked eyes and listened to the rain for a second or two before I said, “Nice gun.”