“I really thought he was going to say he’d found something,” Rocky told Ange as she handed him his gold wedding band, which she’d worn for safekeeping while he was under anesthesia.
“I thought so, too,” Ange said. “He wasn’t his jolly self. And even the nurse was acting funny when she came out to the waiting room to get me.”
As soon as they got into the car and turned on the radio, they knew why.
Rocky’s impulse was to get the hell downtown, but Ange, who was at the wheel, insisted he was in no condition—after all that anesthesia and two days without food—to go anywhere just yet.
She was right, of course.
She had been right, too, when she discouraged their three sons from following in their father’s footsteps, as Rocky had.
That’s how it works in this city, or at least in the blue-collar Bronx neighborhood where Rocky grew up and still lives. Sons follow their fathers into the NYPD or FDNY, whichever is the so-called family business.
Rocky’s father and grandfather had been cops; he expected his own boys to join the force. But Ange insisted on sending them all to college first. The boys balked at that as much as Rocky did, but Ange was boss. They went away to school, even Donny, their youngest, who’d worn a toy police badge and gun belt for about as long as he’d been walking and talking.
One by one, to Ange’s relief and Rocky’s disappointment, their sons had broken with tradition and settled into lives that didn’t revolve around law enforcement in New York.
Donny, the one who’d had his heart set on being a cop, grew his hair down to his ass, started a band, and plays the bar scene in Austin. That wasn’t okay with Rocky until today. No one is flying planes into bars in Texas.
Unlike several of their childhood friends, especially those who had followed their fathers into the FDNY, the Manzillo boys were all safe in distant states when the World Trade Center collapsed.
When Rocky got out of the car back at home after the colonoscopy, he was so light-headed he nearly passed out. By the time he’d finally pulled himself together and was feeling strong enough to head downtown, it was mid-afternoon. Before leaving the Bronx, he stopped off at his church, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, to light a couple of candles.
Over one votive, he prayed for all those lost souls, sensing—though he didn’t yet know for sure—that some of his friends and their sons were among them.
Over the other, he offered a prayer of thanks. He might have been lost, too, had he not been at the hospital when the buildings collapsed.
That damned colonoscopy had saved his life—but not in the way it was intended.
At the precinct, he found a couple of cops holding down the fort. Everyone else, they told Rocky, was down at ground zero.
“What? Ground zero?”
“That’s what they’re calling it now.”
“They, who? The press?” Rocky asked.
“Everyone.”
“Not New Yorkers.”
“Everyone.”
For some reason, that irked Rocky. Somehow, it felt like an admission that the terrorists had forever claimed a piece of New York. He vowed not to call it ground zero; he refused to think of it as anything but the World Trade Center.
“Anyone heard from Murph yet?” Rocky asked, wondering about his longtime partner T.J. Murphy, whose kid brother Luke is with the FDNY. The two forces—NYPD and FDNY—have had a longtime rivalry, but it’s a friendly one where the Murphy brothers are concerned.
Rocky had been trying to call Murph, but his phone kept ringing into voice mail.
“Talked to him earlier. Luke’s missing” was the chilling—and perhaps inevitable—answer to Rocky’s question.
Murph had to be distraught. Luke was a good fifteen years younger. Murph was more father than brother to him, their father having died on duty before Luke was even born.
Rocky was a few blocks above the site, making his way south through a dust-shrouded ghost town littered with burned-out cars and abandoned ladder trucks, when sirens and unintelligible bullhorns erupted. A panicky wave of humanity surged toward him.
“What’s going on?” he asked a couple of rescue workers who scurried past, wearing white facemasks and hard hats.
“Secondary collapse. They’re evacuating. C’mon, you gotta get outa here.”
Rocky turned and went north again. Ran north, remembering the billowing tsunami that engulfed this spot yesterday as each tower came down.
But this collapse, thank God, was nowhere near as devastating. This time, the office tower was half the size of the Trade Center towers, and there were no people in it.
Rocky waited for the all-clear with a group of fellow NYPD officers who had been down at the scene. They briefed him on procedures at “the pile,” and told him what he could expect to find when he finally got there. They also added scores of names to his running mental list of personal friends and acquaintances, all of them first responders, who were missing.
By the time the rescue operations resumed, Rocky had absorbed the barrage of new information. He steeled himself for what lay ahead, certain he was prepared.
After all, he’s a homicide detective. On any given day, he anticipates coming face-to-face with the worst horrors imaginable.
But this . . . this was unimaginable; you’re never prepared for something like this. It was as if Rocky’s worst murder scene had collided with his experience in Saigon; civilians don’t die by the thousands here in America on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Rocky had been drafted and plunged, without basic training, directly into the front lines of a vicious war.
This, like war, was hell.
This . . .
This was ground zero.
Two hundred and twenty floors of steel and glass, walls, doors, carpets, desks, computers, couches, files, paper . . . all of it had vaporized into dust and smoke drifting like mist in glaring searchlights.
Hundreds of volunteer medics were poised to tend to the survivors, undaunted by the lineup of refrigerated trucks that had dispatched soldiers carrying body bags. Those soldiers emerged in somber twos and threes carrying the bags between them, loading them onto the trucks for the long trip uptown to the morgue as the medics stood by, idle and helpless.
Flames burned undeterred by blasting fire hoses. Bulldozers and plows pushed at the mound and cranes lifted mangled chunks of building out of the way. Power saws and blow torches cut at the mangled beams in an effort to gain access to the survivors who had been buried alive.
Barking rescue dogs nosed through the ruins; robots and cameras were lowered into dangerous crevices; firefighters and cops descended via ropes into the yawning pit to find only torn, burned, and dismembered bodies, emerging soot-covered and sobbing. Hundreds of firemen alone were among the missing. Hundreds. Thousands of civilians. Thousands. The numbers were staggering.
Someone handed Rocky a mask and he joined the bucket brigade. Tears ran down his face as he passed along heavy containers bearing chunks of concrete and insulation and tangled wire and twisted metal. Every bucketful of debris that was dug away from the pile increased the chances of finding someone . . .
Or so Rocky thought at first.
But as time wore on, he realized he was wrong; every bucketful seemed to drive home the futility of their efforts to save a life, even just one.
There were fragments of lives—shoes and desk photographs and computer disks and papers—and there were fragments of people. But not a single living soul emerged.
Everyone kept saying they just had to find the pockets where the survivors are buried alive, just had to get the fire under control, just had to stabilize the wreckage, just had to dig down deep enough . . .
Rocky talked the talk and walked the walk. But as the eerie, surreal night gave way to harsh daylight, and the dreadful day marched on toward darkness again, he gave up hope that anyone was
going to come out of that smoldering tomb alive. The search, he realized, was fruitless, and yet it went on, because it was the only thing anyone could do. Search, and hope.
He looked everywhere for Murph, but didn’t spot him. A few guys said they had seen him earlier, and he was, predictably, distraught. For all Rocky knew, Murph was still there on the pile somewhere, but the scene was just too chaotic to find him.
Then, out of nowhere, as the sun set over the dusty, smoky city, came the call that catapulted Rocky back to the real world; an equally grim, but infinitely more familiar, world.
There had been a homicide in his district.
A homicide? What the . . . ?
All in a day’s work, but Jesus, this was no ordinary day.
In the wake of the mass murder of thousands of New Yorkers, crime was down, way down, all over the city. Hordes of Good Samaritans filled the streets; looters were nonexistent.
Yet someone had come into Kristina Haines’s apartment and hacked her to death with a knife that might have come from her own kitchen, judging by the ransacked drawers.
It had happened sometime Tuesday night or early this morning—after the attack on the city.
It takes one sick bastard to steal yet another life—and in such a gruesome way—in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that killed thousands.
But hunting down sick bastards—this is Rocky Manzillo’s specialty. This, he can handle. This murderer will not slip through his fingers. Few have, over the course of his career.
In fact, only one major case in recent history comes to mind—a perp Rocky privately dubbed the Leprechaun Killer. A young woman was killed in her apartment in the wee hours after Saint Patrick’s Day by a man who followed her inside and was captured on the building’s security cameras. The apartment was ransacked and it looked like a robbery, but the body was so hacked up that Rocky suspected there might be more to it. Either the guy hated this woman, or he was projecting his hatred for someone else. Rocky was even more troubled by an ominous clue that was found at the scene and never released to the press or the public: a green boutonnière. He suspected it was a serial killer’s calling card and braced himself for another murder, but it hadn’t happened.
Yet, anyway.
Eighteen months later, the Leprechaun Killer is still at large. The fingerprints that were lifted from the flower were run through the database and came back without a match.
But this new search, Rocky vows, will not be fruitless.
On a regular night, after working at the building on Greenwich Street, Jerry would take the subway back up to his apartment in the West Thirties. But this isn’t a regular night, and when he gets to his usual station, the gates are closed and the globe light is red instead of green.
He stops, confused, wondering what to do.
“Station’s closed,” a police officer tells him. “Trains aren’t running from here. Walk up to Union Square and get on there.”
“I . . . I don’t know how to go from Union Square,” Jerry tells him.
The officer looks closely at his face. “Just ask someone when you get up there. They’ll help you.”
Jerry walks uptown. But when he gets to Union Square, he sees the barricades and the soldiers and the police officers, and he keeps going. They called him a retard.
“I’m not a retard,” he mutters. “I’m not a retard.”
He walks all the way home through streets that are mostly deserted and much too quiet. The quiet bothers him, but he can’t listen to music on his Walkman the way he usually does, because he gave his CD to Marianne.
He wishes he hadn’t done that, because she was mean to him.
And because music—like cake—helps to calm his thoughts, keeping his mind off things he doesn’t want to think about.
Today, there are lots of things he doesn’t want to think about. Like Marianne. And Kristina. And the airplanes crashing into the towers and making them fall, and the big mess that made. And Mama.
No, he doesn’t like to think about her at all—even now that she’s gone. When he thinks about Mama, he gets a scared feeling inside, like something is going to happen to him. Something bad.
It’s dark by the time he reaches the big apartment building. The neighborhood is called Hell’s Kitchen, but Jerry doesn’t know why. The streets are lined with regular buildings and nothing reminds him of a kitchen or hell—not outside, anyway.
It’s nice here. A lot nicer than where he and Mama used to live, up until a few years ago. That was in New York, too, but not Manhattan.
That was where Jerry met Mr. Reiss’s wife, Emily—back in the old neighborhood. She was a nice lady with long brown hair and big brown eyes that reminded Jerry of a doll he’d seen somewhere once, a long time ago; a doll in a frilly pink dress. Emily never wore a pink dress, though. She just wore regular clothes, and an apron, because she volunteered at the soup kitchen, handing out hot meals.
You didn’t even have to pay for the food, and that was good, because back then, Jerry didn’t have a job or any money.
He mentioned that to Emily one day, and she asked him if he would like a job.
“I might be able to help you out,” she said, “if you’re willing to work hard.”
Jerry was excited. “I am! I want to be a fireman!” he told her, and she laughed.
“I don’t know about that—but maybe my husband can give you some work. He owns some apartment buildings, and he always needs help. He’d probably pay you under the table, if that’s all right.”
“That’s all right,” Jerry said, though when he pictured himself and Mr. Reiss crouched under a table, he wondered why he would want to do that.
He was disappointed that he couldn’t be a fireman, but he soon got over it. He felt important, going to work almost every day and getting paid.
It was funny, though—Mr. Reiss never paid him under a table, the way Emily said. He paid Jerry wherever he happened to see him, like in the hall, or out in front of the building, or in the boiler room. He would just reach into his pocket and he would count out some bills into Jerry’s hand.
“You don’t need money,” Mama told him when he started working. “You don’t even know how to buy things.”
She was right, so every time Mr. Reiss gave him his pay, Jerry gave the cash right to her. She saved it all up, and that’s how they moved into this building.
Now, he puts the cash into a drawer so that Jamie can use it.
Jerry takes out his key ring. It’s heavy. On it are keys to the building where he lives, and to all the buildings where he works, and to some of the apartments, too, in those buildings.
Mr. Reiss said he doesn’t have to carry all those keys around with him all the time, but he likes to. It makes him feel good, knowing that he can unlock things whenever he wants to.
He just wishes he could use it to unlock the front door of his building sometime. It’s supposed to be locked, but it never is. Jamie says the lock is broken. Jerry would fix it if he worked here, but he doesn’t.
He walks through the unlocked door and is glad, as always, that he gets to use a key to open the metal box for the mail.
There are bills with Mama’s name on them. Jamie takes care of the bills now that she’s gone. Jamie takes care of everything.
Jerry walks to the elevator bank and presses the button, anxious to get inside and take off his shoes. His feet hurt from all the walking, and his head is starting to hurt again, too.
On his floor, Jerry unlocks the door and starts to tiptoe inside. Then he remembers. She’s gone. He doesn’t have to sneak in anymore, hoping she won’t hear him and yell at him—or worse—for something he did or didn’t do.
This apartment has two bedrooms—tiny, but Jerry has his own private space.
In the old apartment, there was only one bedroom, and it was Mama’s. There was nowhere for Jerry to go to ge
t away from her, nowhere to hide.
In that apartment, he slept in the living room, on a pullout couch with big hard lumps in it and a bar that hurt his back. There were bugs, too, a lot more bugs than there are here. Sometimes he felt them crawl over his skin in the dark.
That terrified him. He hates bugs, all kinds of bugs—bugs that fly and bugs that crawl and even bugs that Jamie says aren’t really bugs, like worms and spiders.
Some nights, when Jerry was young and living in the old apartment, he was too uncomfortable to sleep at all, and so he lay awake, afraid, until the morning light chased away the shadows and the bugs.
“I was there with you—don’t you remember?” Jamie asks sometimes, but Jerry doesn’t remember that.
Jamie tells him about things that happened to him in the old apartment. Usually, the things Jamie tells him aren’t nice at all, and Jerry is glad he doesn’t remember.
He likes to remember nice things—like Mama making cake. Mama made the best cake. Most of the time, she didn’t let Jerry have a piece, but once in a while, she did. Sometimes, when she was sleeping, he even snuck some out of the kitchen. Just a little bit, so that she wouldn’t know it was missing. He was careful not to drop any crumbs, not just because Mama would know, but because he knows now that bugs and rats like the smell of rotting food.
Mr. Reiss taught him that. He taught Jerry a lot of things, but not as much as Jamie taught him.
“Do you miss Mama?” Jamie asks sometimes, and Jerry wonders what would happen if he said yes. Would she come back?
He doesn’t miss Mama. Mostly, he was afraid of her.
“I was, too,” Jamie said. “I was always afraid of her.”
“Did she hurt you, too?”
“Yes, but mostly, it was you.”
“She still does. She hurts me a lot.”
“No, Jerry. That’s over. That’s not going to happen anymore. She went away, remember? And now I’m here, and nothing will ever hurt you again.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I won’t let it. Just like when you were a kid, Jerry, and I would try to make sure Mama didn’t hurt you. Don’t you remember that at all?”
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