by S. J. Rozan
“Did he buy it?”
“Patino did.” Said cautiously.
“Meaning the NYPD’s still looking for me, right?”
“Of course they are! And every second you don’t come in makes it worse.”
“I’m not coming in. Stop. That’s it, Mary, that’s all. I called to say I have a peace offering. There’s a girl at St. Vincent’s, another of Lu’s hookers. See if you can get to her before Lu does, maybe she can tell you something.” About Kevin, I almost added. But I bit that off: the NYPD didn’t have his name yet.
“What girl?”
“She’s supposed to be dead. The lunatic doesn’t know she’s not. He doesn’t know the tailor shop girl’s not, either. I’d like it to stay that way.”
“Why are you giving me this?”
“St. Vincent’s will have called the cops already anyway.”
“Bill—”
“I’ll call again.”
I clicked off, gave Linus back his phone, then made the call I’d been thinking about when Mary called us.
“You’ve got Hal Ross.” Autopilot, slurred.
“It’s Smith.”
“Oh. Oh, I’m supposed to care?”
“Listen to me. Kevin’s going to leave you another set of clues. Another bag. I don’t know if it’s going to be him or he’s sending someone else, but I want—”
“You want. Who gives a rat’s ass what you want?” In the background, clinking, talk, the fuzzy sounds of a sportscaster. He was in a bar. Not home, not where the clues were headed.
“Hal—”
“Anyway it doesn’t matter. That chickenshit isn’t coming and he isn’t sending anyone.”
“Yes, he is.”
“No, genius, he is not.”
“Yes—”
“Listen to me!” Hal roared. “He already called.”
“He— What?”
“He told me you’d be calling and I should wait until you did. There, happy now?”
“When?”
“Few minutes ago.”
I wondered if Hal was sober enough to know a few minutes from a few hours. “Why didn’t you call me right away?”
“Hello? Because he said to wait.”
“And you listened to him?”
“Do I have this wrong, or isn’t this the guy who’s got your partner someplace? Who’s blowing shit up? Maybe you don’t want to piss him off. Maybe he’s got my cell phone tapped and he’d know when I called you. ‘Hi, Kevin, how’re you doing, you fucking asshole?’ ”
“You could’ve gone out. To a pay phone.” Unless you were too drunk to move. “And how do you know he’s blowing shit up? He told you about that?”
“I saw it.”
“You were there?” A voice, calling my name, just before the blast. “How the hell did you know where to go?”
“ ‘West Street. Close to Jim’s.’ Someone said that in my kitchen. I wonder who?”
“You got there fast.”
“After you, though. I was outside trying to figure out what the hell to do next when you came out and the place went blammo.”
“So you saw?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I saw. So when fucking Kevin says wait for you to call, I think it’s a good idea to wait. Okay with you?” He raised his voice. “Okay with you, too, fucking Kevin?”
“He told me you’d call me.”
Hal brayed. “And he told me you’d call me. Asshole. Funny game.”
“All right. What did he say when he called?”
“Oh, you care?”
“Yes, I care!”
A pause. “Okay, now, pay attention. You paying attention?”
“Yes!”
“I wrote it down because it made no fucking sense. But he said it twice the same way. He said he knows you like old fart music, so I’m supposed to tell you, ‘Hurry, get on, now it’s coming, and I have a broken dream, so lay down your sword and six-gun.’ ” He stopped.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. Pile of bullshit, huh? But that’s what he said.”
“No plastic bag?”
“Yeah, it came through the phone and I pulled it outta my ear. What do you think?”
“Say it again.”
He blew a raspberry, but he repeated it. “ ‘Hurry, get on, now it’s coming, and I have a broken dream, so lay down your sword and six-gun.’ What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know. Where are you?”
“In a bar up Hudson Street. First place I found. Needed something to steady my nerves.”
“And how are they, Hal? Your nerves?”
“Fuck you. When you figure out what this hurry shit means, you’re going to tell me, right?”
“If Kevin calls again, you’re going to tell me, right?”
And that was how we left it.
“So, dude?” Linus asked. “No bag? I heard that.”
“Song lyrics.” I made a quick right, headed west, to the highway.
“Where are we going?”
“Harlem.”
18
I ran through Kevin’s gibberish as Linus and I raced uptown. Woof had his face out the back window, sampling the breeze.
“Dude. That sword and six-gun thing, it sounds kinda like ‘lay down my sword and shield,’ from church. But the other stuff . . .” He shook his head.
“No,” I said. “It’s good for us. Kevin was improvising because he wanted to use Hal. So I think it’s pretty straightforward. ‘Hurry, get on, now it’s coming,’ that’s from ‘Take the A Train.’ ” Linus looked at me blankly. “Billy Strayhorn,” I told him. “The song’s about how you get to Harlem.”
Linus knit his brow. “Oh. Well, the sword and six-gun, if it was sword and shield, the next line of that is down by the riverside. You think? The riverside in Harlem, that’s where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
“But where? Harlem, that’s a big riverside. Both rivers. And the six-gun? That doesn’t belong at all.”
“No, that’s it, the six-gun: the wild west. So, the West Side: the Hudson.”
“The Hudson. Okay, that’s still a long—”
“A hundred and twenty-fifth street. Martin Luther King Boulevard.”
“I have a dream!”
“A broken dream. ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’ Just in case.”
“ ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams!’ Oh, dude! I know that one! Green Day!” He launched into a tune and a set of lyrics I barely recognized.
“Sort of,” I said, and kept driving.
Getting off at 125th Street, I paralleled the chain-link fence, searching for a way onto the broad apron of cracked concrete west of the highway. At a broken gate sagging on twisted hinges I swung in, skirted a rusted front-loader and a flat-tired, old-style garbage truck. There was no sign anyone but us had been here in years. In New York’s tougher days the waterfront was all like this: ragged, abandoned, adrift between bare-knuckled past and gentrified future. Once, a shadowed cove on a no-man’s coast—rusting steel, collapsed piers, sun glinting off debris-locked oil slicks, saltwater scent folded into the stench of floating garbage—would have been easy to find. But not now. Whatever Kevin had planned here, he must have looked long and hard for a piece of the harbor as desolate as this.
I wasn’t sure how much weight the piers under the asphalt could bear, here where everything was crumbling, so I parked a distance from the edge and Linus and I got out. At first we saw nothing, no sign this was the place Kevin meant. Slowly, we walked closer to the water’s edge.
“Oh, shit,” Linus whispered, standing next to me on the potholed concrete. He stared ahead, toward a half-sunken wharf. “Shit. What the hell is that, in the water there?” He started forward.
“Don’t move.” I grabbed his arm. “We don’t know how it’s wired.”
He froze. I squinted at the contraption bobbing in the shadowed water about fifty feet from shore. Now we could see why Kevin had chosen a place so deserted, so derelict: he needed to be sure he wouldn’t b
e interrupted during the time it took to construct the device we were staring at, and then to place the prize on it. He needed somewhere he could leave a young Asian woman bound and gagged on a floating scale, and be sure no one would notice.
“It’s a seesaw,” I said. “We do this wrong, she drops in the water.” I stepped carefully forward, looking for trip wires, switches, buttons, something that would make our mistake before we began. I found nothing, got to the edge, took my sunglasses off, stared across the water to examine Kevin’s insane device.
An empty oil drum, fixed out there to the rotting wharf so it wouldn’t float away, supported a wide plywood platform. Fastened beneath the platform, two smaller barrels, one on each side, floated on the water’s surface, keeping the seesaw balanced. That worked while the tide was high. But now it was going out. Once the tide fell below a certain level, the small barrels wouldn’t be supported by water anymore. Then the seesaw would tip. The young woman, clearly heavier than whatever was on the other end, would slide right in.
“It’s all right,” I called to the trussed-up woman, looking at her huge and panicked eyes. “You’ll be all right. Just don’t move.” Whether she heard me, whether she spoke English, whether she was out of her mind with terror, I couldn’t tell. But she didn’t move. She must have not moved for hours. At the beginning she must have been made to understand that if she moved, she’d drown.
And that someone would be coming to save her.
“Dude,” Linus said. “We have to do something.”
That was for sure. The solution seemed easy, if unpleasant as all hell: swim out and get her. But this was Kevin. I took another minute to scan the water.
“Son of a bitch.”
“Dude, what?” Linus came up beside me.
A length of chicken wire fencing stretched through the water perpendicular to the seesaw’s platform, toward us. It was staple-gunned, as far as I could see, to a row of rotting pilings. Flimsy, but enough of a barrier to keep you from making it from one side of the seesaw to the other if you were in the water. I pointed to the other end of the platform, the one the woman wasn’t on. Resting there, set to slide into the water the instant the woman’s weight was gone, was an orange plastic bag.
“Holy shit!” Linus exploded. “But dude. I thought this was the fourth quarter. Isn’t that what Mr. Crazy said? That’s what he said! There’s more clues? That’s wack! Shit, dude, that’s lame! The freak—”
“Linus? Are you remembering not to flip out?” I spoke quietly, steadily. “We need to do this.”
He swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, you’re right. But that freak! I tell you right now, dude, you don’t kill him when we find him, I’m gonna do it myself.”
“You’ll have to take a number.” I took off my jacket, my shirt, dropped them on the concrete. “All right. The good part is, he didn’t know there’d be two of us. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to swim out there. One on each side of the fence. I grab her, you grab the bag, at the same time.” I crouched, unlaced my shoes. “You up for it?”
“Dude?” he answered in what may have been the saddest voice I’d ever heard. “I can’t swim.”
That stopped me, one shoe off. CAN’T SWIM? Who the hell can’t swim? What kind of goddamn stupid— Hey. I forced myself calm. Dude. Are you remembering not to flip out? I took off my other shoe and stood.
“Dig, dude, I’m sorry. For real, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay. Let me think.”
I thought. Nothing happened. The tide slipped lower and the woman begged with her eyes.
“That’s what he wants, isn’t it?” Linus said, not really a question. “That freak. Whatever’s in the bag, it’s probably just enough, you take it off, in she goes. He wants you to get the bag, and let her drown.”
“Make her drown. He wants me to kill her.”
“But dude, water? He used water already.”
“Not water. That’s secondary. Choice. What would kill her would be choice.”
Another minute, during which no brilliant idea occurred to me. I said, “I have to get her. Any second, that thing’s going to tilt.”
“The bag.”
“I know. Maybe it’ll float long enough—”
“You know it won’t.”
“Then it won’t.”
“Then what about Lydia?”
“Jesus Christ, you think I’m not thinking that?” He flinched; I brought my voice back under control. “Linus, what the hell else can I do?” I crouched at the edge, ready to slip into the slimy water.
“Wait! Dude, wait!”
I turned, about to tell him that I’d dive under for the bag, or it would get caught on some floating debris, or we’d get around needing it the way we’d gotten around Kevin’s clues about Jim’s apartment, or some other bullshit more for myself than for him; and that he shouldn’t even consider something crazy like jumping in and trying anyway, because I couldn’t save both of them. But he wasn’t beside me. He’d raced to the car, and now he was running back. With the dog. “Woof!” Linus shouted. “Woof can swim!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Great. But he can’t—”
“He can!” Like a banner, Linus waved the plastic bag we’d brought from Hal’s. It was empty, and he knelt, scooped up a chunk of broken concrete, dropped it in, tied the bag. “We’re gonna do, like, a split-second precision elite military rescue operation. Like Navy SEALs.”
He explained what he had in mind. It was nuts. But I had nothing in mind.
So we tried it.
Step one: me in the water.
I tried to brace for the shock of the cold but it hit me like a hammer. Pulling in short, shivering breaths, I breaststroked through debris-clogged murk. I made slow progress, probing the water as I had the land for trip wires and traps. Styrofoam cups and water-polished wood circled me, along with other, less identifiable junk; but though some scraps clung to my skin, as though they wanted to be rescued, too, nothing seemed to be designed to hold me back. I reached the woman on the seesaw’s end, spoke to her gently, examined her as carefully as I could without touching her or the device to make sure she wasn’t bound to the plywood in any way. Her pleading eyes grew even bigger and behind the duct-tape gag she made tiny wordless sounds, but she remained as still as stone. I could imagine Kevin placing her here, smiling and explaining that someone would come to save her and all she had to do was not to move at all until he did. And I could imagine what he’d expected her to feel when I swam for the bag on the other end instead.
And what he’d expected me to feel as she sank.
Treading water, I turned to the shore, signaled Linus. He waved back, picked up a jagged wooden slat, held it for Woof. Woof bounded and barked. Linus flung the slat into the water. Without a second’s hesitation the dog jumped. I held my breath: submerged wreckage was a danger here, which was why I’d gone in so carefully. “Yeah, but you explain that to a dog,” Linus had said. “Jumping in, that’s part of chasing it. Dude, he’ll do fine.”
He did. Swimming straight for the stick, he grabbed it and paddled back. He heaved himself on shore, shook off, and wagged madly. Linus spent a few moments telling him how wonderful he was, then showed him the plastic bag, cocked his arm back to throw it. Now the game was established; Woof jiggled in anticipation at the water’s edge. Linus made a switch, threw a lump of concrete instead. The dog took off. When he got to where it had splashed in and sunk—right at the seesaw—he circled, searching for his plastic bag. Linus called his name. The dog looked up, and Linus lobbed the weighted plastic bag. At the second it hit the water, I grabbed the terrifed woman from the seesaw. I was holding her, keeping her head out of the water, sidestroking to shore; I didn’t see the critical moment. But I heard splashing, shouting, Linus yelling to Woof that he was a good dog, that he should bring it here. By the time I got near the concrete apron, Woof was already out and bounding around, shaking himself, barking for me to get out of the water so he could show me his orange plasti
c bag.
“Dude! Dude!” Linus was practically bounding, too. “How great was that! What a dog! Awesome! Superdog! Get him a cape, he’s gonna save the world!”
“He did it?”
“Of course he did it! What a genius!”
That was actually backward, because the whole plan revolved around the dog’s inability to tell one plastic bag from another. But Linus’s joy was justified and I didn’t interfere.
“Help me here,” I said, handing the woman in my arms up to him. She was looking wildly from me to him to the dog. He bent and took her, then put her down on the concrete as I pulled myself out. Woof came over to sniff her, and then me, as well he might. She, I, and Woof himself were all soaked and stinking. Now that Linus had held the woman and hugged the dog he was no model of germ-free sanitation, either. I bent and gently removed the duct tape from the woman’s mouth, something I was getting good at. “Shush,” I whispered, and she made not a sound even when her lips were free. I took out my knife to cut through the tape on her wrists and ankles. She sat up woozily.
“Take her to the car,” I said to Linus, heading toward Woof who was once again standing with pride over his prize.
“Back to St. Vincent’s?”
Good question. I was about to tell him, no, St. Luke’s this time, it’s closer and they don’t know us there. But I stopped, frozen. Linus froze, too. Woof didn’t. He jumped around, barking either in welcome or warning, because he didn’t know whether the black SUV slamming on its brakes two inches from Linus’s car was friend or foe. I did, though. I leaned and grabbed his collar before he had a chance to go charging over and try to defend us from Ming, Strawman, and Lu.
19
“Well.” Lu stood planted on the broken concrete, flanked by his mountainous minders. “Look at this. It’s Dead Man. I thought you had nothing to do with it, motherfucker. Wasn’t it supposed to be a lunatic kidnapping my girls? Strawman, go get her.”