Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

  The old man grumbled, but he was pleased. He encouraged them to follow, and walked into the darkness. The gloom was oppressive. The old man never stumbled, because his eyes were adjusted to dim light. Guthrie and Vasquez slid in the gravel, and caught their feet on ties or track when they crossed spurs. They had to study the ground with their lights, while the old guy had to pause to wait for them. He navigated among the coaches without entering the pools of light, avoiding the other people in the carousel as easily as a cat winds around furniture.

  Most of the people they saw were grimy enough to pass for vagrants on the streets above. Some were hard-eyed, armed with sticks and attitude, while others were drunk and indifferent. Snatches of laughter and music drifted from coaches when doors opened and closed. The old man paused and made them turn off their handheld lights when a dozen men with bright lights marched from another train tunnel. They crunched purposefully across the gravel. Their bright clothes were undirtied by the darkness, and they soon disappeared into a coach.

  On the far side of the train yard, the roof swooped down to form a succession of archways, further broken up by low dividing walls. Heavy wooden trestle tables still held gear and parts. Flaps of hanging cloth created tents beneath some tables; laundry lines stretched between posts; fires winked at odd moments through gaps in the dividers. Faces appeared and vanished before they could be recognized, and the old man kept moving.

  Beyond the open bays were the dark doorways of ancient storerooms. The air was wet and greasy. The old man led them like a string of fireflies, and unseen people rustled in the darkness beyond their sight. The old man stopped and pointed to a long loading bay alongside a loop of spur track. The tracks were empty. Crisscrossed heavy timbers supported the decking of the bay. Quiet still held, but without the succession of faces, the loading bay seemed abandoned.

  “He lays under there,” the old man whispered. “Likely watching right now.”

  Guthrie folded a half dozen fifties together and handed them to Vasquez. “Give him that when I get something,” he said. “You stay put for a minute, old man, while I find if you’re lying to me.” He doused his light and walked slowly toward the wooden dock, not stopping until he was well outside the light from Vasquez’s flashlight.

  “Eddy, are you drunk?” he called out. Silence came back. “You ain’t running from me, you know. You carried the ghosts with you. How many tours did you pull?”

  Silence.

  “How’d you keep from throwing up when you saw that little round-eye covered in blood? You swallowed enough vodka to forget?”

  “Shut the fuck up, little man!” The drifter’s rough voice boomed from beneath the timbers. Vasquez handed the old man the money, and he turned and ran for the flops.

  “Who killed her, Eddy? I want an answer,” Guthrie said.

  Laughter floated out, and then quiet thickened the darkness. The scrapes of someone big shifting to his feet followed faintly. “I want some quiet. Don’t have me shut you up.”

  “You gotta talk to me, Eddy. People need this. If I go away, somebody else’ll come instead.”

  “If I wanted to talk about it, I would see a doc-tor.” The drifter’s rough voice had a sarcastic edge. “You’re not a doc-tor, are you? You gonna make me feel bet-ter?”

  “I don’t need you better—unless that’s what you want? That’s why you’re making me chase you? First time in a while anybody’s given enough of a fuck to look for you? Feels good?”

  “You little son of a bitch! Shut the fuck up!”

  “I got all night. And the next, and so forth. You’re gonna be hearing from me. This ain’t gonna change until you talk.”

  Low cursing beneath the dock accompanied some scraping. Guthrie pulled his big floodlight from the cargo pocket on his field jacket and snapped it on. The sudden glare caught movement among the heavy crisscrossed timbers. The little detective steadied his light and started jogging that way. Vasquez lit her big light and followed. The big halogen lamps were like miniature suns. Ghost Eddy hustled through the timbers beneath the dock like an anxious recruit rushing an obstacle course. He had a lead. Guthrie hurried to catch him.

  The gray-bearded drifter burst from beneath the dock, then paused to hurl a bottle. The bottle sailed end over end, flickering in the lights. Guthrie dodged. Ghost Eddy sprinted again. The liquor bottle slashed gravel and rang like a chime on a rusty rail, but it didn’t break. Vasquez ran along the rail spur, trying to make up distance. Her light cut sudden arcs, but the little detective kept the drifter pinpointed.

  Beyond the loading dock, an archway yawned with a dark throat. Ghost Eddy lumbered toward it, and Guthrie gained distance. The smaller man was quicker. Vasquez turned off the spur, stretching her legs like a hurdler. The drifter disappeared into the archway, with Guthrie a few dozen feet behind. The archway swallowed his light like a fire-eater and spit out the sound of boots slapping stone.

  Vasquez rushed through the archway and swept her light around the room. Coal dust blackened the floor, with a few faint scuffs aiming like an arrow at the far wall. A wide pan on the floor was fed by a chute. Her light swept across the chute in time to see Guthrie’s legs disappearing as he climbed up the rusty shaft. She hurried to the base of the chute and shined her light into it. A moment of silence was followed by a soft curse from the little detective, then a booming clang, and finally rough laughter. Guthrie’s boots scraped on the rusty metal.

  “You’re quick, little man. A regular round-eye Charlie.” Hard iron walls magnified his menace.

  “You got good tricks for a fat man,” Guthrie rasped. “Cut and turn works.”

  “I’ll kill you, you know,” the drifter wheezed.

  “Don’t die on me, you fat bastard. When’s the last time you ate a salad?”

  “Fuck you. Sound like my daughter—a girl.”

  “’Cause I listen to ’em.”

  “Smart fuck.”

  “Don’t hang on to it, Eddy.”

  “I got no help for you. Maybe it was you. It was a little fucker. Coulda been you. Now leave me the fuck alone!” The drifter’s rough shout boomed in the iron shaft.

  “I know people you might like, Eddy,” Guthrie said conversationally. “They went back across the water.”

  Silence followed for a long moment. Then softly: “Shut the fuck up, little man.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  On the eighth of August, the city woke up like a man with a fever. Dawn seemed as hot as dusk, enough to confuse anyone as to whether they should be getting up or going to bed. Guthrie waited outside Vasquez’s tenement so long that he changed his mind twice about getting out and walking up to knock on her door. She came down, slid into the passenger seat, and ignored him while he started the Ford, then drove down until he could turn back onto Grand. The little man looked like he felt the same. They’d come out from underground early enough the night before that he wanted to start an ordinary day, but they were both in the position of their feet still trying to catch up with their good intentions. With the heat, they looked deep-fried. The morning sky above Manhattan glowed like a fresh lemon, but the air smelled like an old, dusty-dry garbage can.

  By the time Guthrie drove past Union Square, Vasquez was testing the coffee and doughnuts. A sleepy frown twisted her eyebrows, and she kept glancing at Guthrie. Finally, she said, “That bothered me all night. What happened in the chimney?”

  “You heard it,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “You mean before?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “He almost got me. You didn’t hear that? The old bastard tried to splatter my brains with a pipe.”

  “I heard a clang,” she said. “Lucky he missed. I don’t think you can spare your head.” She smiled. “You wouldn’t make four feet without it, you know?”

  The little detective shook his head. “Wasn’t luck—I was listening. All of a sudden, I couldn’t hear him, so I knew he’d stopped. I had just poked my head out the feed end of the c
hute, and I didn’t hear him, so I drew back. He had that set up, running there with a pipe waiting. I drew back just as he swung.”

  “You heard he wasn’t making noise? That don’t sound right.”

  “Ain’t it?” Guthrie grinned. “I used to chase things when I was little—don’t say it—and rabbits got this sudden stop trick. When you’re barreling along behind them in a rough patch, they’ll stop. They cut the other way once you shoot past. You have to listen for them.”

  “Did the rabbits do something to you?”

  He laughed. “I just wanted to see if I could catch them. That came along after seeing if I could find them.”

  The Garment District was in the early stages of waking up when Guthrie and Vasquez parked on Thirty-fourth street. A roll-up door slithered in its track like a rack runner call to arms, but the street was quiet when they went inside. While they finished coffee, they raided photos from Web sites, the DMV, and the video clip Guthrie had shot in the Columbia University food court. They mixed in extra faces, looked for candids to match the style of the video clip, and found driver’s-license photos for some of the college students to make a credible lineup.

  Guthrie and Vasquez drove down to the Village to see the Overtons. The front of their narrow town house on Grove Street was still wet from the hose. One of the steps was coated with a slick, shallow puddle. Phil Overton answered the door as soon as they knocked. Jeannette had seen them through the window. Phil brought lemonade and cookies while they sat in the front room with Jeannette.

  The old couple continued playing gin while Jeannette looked at the pictures. She studied them slowly, and Phil took advantage of the distraction to score some victories. Two piles of pictures grew on the edge of the card table. One was much larger than the other, but even the smaller pile had several prints. Afterward, she led them through the pictures she had chosen; all were of Greeks from Columbia University. “A few times,” or “Often,” or “I recall seeing him once,” or “He reminded me of my cousin Bert,” she said before she ended with a single picture in her hand: one of Justin Peiper.

  “This one was very determined,” she said. “He courted continually, until the good boy came along. Almost every day, this young man came to visit, even if it was only briefly. For a long time, I thought he had won her. Months.”

  Outside in the midmorning, the sky shone like polished silver, with the hot sun invisible but powerful overhead. The smoothly running engines of the city’s cars purred in the distance, away from the quiet nieghborhood. Guthrie paused on the sidewalk in a puddle of shade to consider. The little detective was upset; Jeannette Overton had eliminated Peiper for the murder. After explaining to Vasquez that the old lady knew Peiper well enough that he couldn’t be the deliveryman, he said, “He’s dirty for something, and I’ll find it out. That leaves me wondering about the computer. That’s next.”

  Guthrie used a computer geek who worked in Brooklyn to do his programming and setups, like the kill switches in the palmtops and office computers. They made two stops on the way to Brooklyn. At the office, they took Bowman’s hard drive from the strongbox, and then Guthrie stopped to buy two liters of Norwegian vodka at a package store. They crossed the Manhattan Bridge on the top deck, mixed into a motorcade of drivers packed up for Long Island, with their cars full of anxious kids. The dog days were melting the city, and people were heading to the beach.

  Barney Miller’s, the electronics store, was as dark as a cave. Out front, a faded, barely legible sign showed a blond boy in red coveralls offering an ancient radio. The boy had tiny projecting antennae on his head, like a 1930s pulp-book Martian. The interior of the store was divided into two bays. On the right, a roll-up door in the back admitted a corona of light, and a handful of men in dark coveralls crawled in, on, and under a chromed lowrider. The lowrider’s system blared intermittently as the techs tested the installation, harried by shouts from a skinny black man with a long goatee and a row of shining silver stripes on the sleeves of his dark coveralls. Shelves crammed the remainder of that side, loaded with a junker’s selection of system components, wire, fittings, conduits, and rows of dusty, archaic junk—analog televisions, cartridges for obsolete video games, refurbished toasters, and old record albums.

  On the left, a second bay looked like an old pharmacy. The shelves held fire alarms, lightbulbs, remote controls, game controllers, headphones, and patent medicines in a mix of dusty packaging with ancient stickers and neatly printed handmade tags. A tattooed Latino kid wearing a brown skullcap and a ragged T-shirt was browsing the shelves and laughing to himself. In the back, a wire cage surrounded some hanging droplights that floated in a cloud of haze. The wire walls were blockaded by more shelves inside, all loaded with electronic components, with attached and detached cables bundled like sluggish snakes. A tan baseball cap with an upturned bill floated in the smoke like a sentry peering above the shelves.

  Guthrie led Vasquez around the corner of the cage, where an opening served as a door. A gigantic Korean sat perched on a high stool at a worktable littered with components and supplies. Fat-Fat’s arms were the size of an ordinary man’s leg, and he had heavy shoulders to hold up a head like a small laundry basket. The ball cap sat high on his forehead like a joke. He glanced up when the detectives rounded the corner.

  “Yo, Guth, what’s up?” he said as his gaze dropped back to his work.

  “Brought you something I need looked at,” the little detective replied. He found an open spot on the table to lay the hard drive and vodka.

  “Gotta finish this mission,” Fat-Fat said. A circuit board rested on the palm of his wide hand, held beneath a circular magnifier clamped to the worktable. A hot iron smoked faintly in his other hand, held between his fingers like a cigarette as he rotated a chip under the magnifier to align it. A bank of flickering oscilloscopes on his left made his outline wink like a hologram, and his eyes were red slits against the haze of flux smoke, but his hands were deft. His iron tapped like a woodpecker, shifting and settling, rotating down his fingers like a Vegas shuffle each time he reached for test probes or a brush. After a short quarter hour he holstered his tools with a sigh.

  “I gotta get out of here, Guth,” Fat-Fat said.

  “Now?” Guthrie asked suspiciously.

  “No, man,” the big Korean said, and grinned. “Just the usual. I keep dreaming about jumping off New York Life, and that’s just crazy. Too short, and I don’t figure I bounce back from that splat.”

  “So where you going?”

  “I ain’t done Angel Falls yet,” Fat-Fat said. “I’m gonna base Angel Falls, just as soon as I get airfare.”

  “Then I got some help for you. If you get locked up in South America, though—”

  “Don’t call you? Come on, man. My dad keeps saying that, too. You old guys are all alike.” He tugged open the brown paper bag from the liquor store and saw the glowing white necks of the vodka bottles. He rubbed his belly and grinned. “Must be something special, huh?”

  “I ain’t sure,” the little detective said. “I want to know if somebody went into it and cut any files out.”

  The Korean’s eyebrows shot up. “No idea what’s on it?”

  “Or what it is, beyond somebody told me the owner was careful.”

  “Mystery,” Fat-Fat said softly. He picked up the hard drive. “Okay, this’s a high-end case, about the biggest you can get on a desk.” He undressed the machinery and looked it over with his magnifier. “Looks factory, but these pricey ones can come out clocked and all that now.” He screwed the case back together carefully, wiping as he went, and winked at the little detective. “Speaking of going to jail, right?”

  “I should’ve thought about that, Fat,” Guthrie said. “Now I wish I’d asked you to put on gloves.”

  “Shit! Seriously?”

  “That thing might end up being evidence, depending.”

  The big Korean frowned and wired the drive into his system. He had a bundle of cables for power and busing attached at th
e worktable, and a keyboard to prop in a space he swept clean with one huge hand. A monitor winked on when he flipped a switch. He scrolled through the directory, pronouced it normal, and then opened his toolbox to begin an examination. After a few moments of operations, Fat-Fat’s monitor colored, and he whistled.

  “This’s something,” he said. “Can’t go in the ordinary way.”

  Fat-Fat’s system emitted a low beep and then began repeating every few seconds. The monitor cycled color again. Fat-Fat killed the power to Bowman’s hard drive, then began typing furiously on his keyboard.

  “That thing’s got teeth, Guth,” he said when he stopped.

  Guthrie grunted.

  Fat-Fat typed some more, until his system stopped signaling. “That thing’s lethal,” he said. “I could try opening it from a couple of different software platforms to see if it has keys to attack them, but it’s real slick. Somebody good put that together.”

  “So what won’t it do?”

  The big Korean shrugged. He repowered and gave the drive a string of commands from within the system. The files wouldn’t open or delete. He tried a lock pick inside the system, and the pick ran without triggering a counterattack. “The hardware’s been tinkered with,” he said. “I could maybe bypass by switching chips, but I knew a guy one time built a drive that made files only it could open, even after they were transferred. Like it has a special tool to signal the file—take out the chip, and the file wouldn’t open because it doesn’t hear the signal.”

  “That might be the case here?”

  “It’s something in the hardware,” Fat-Fat replied. “Some of the hard-cores picked up on it a long time ago, like Jobs. You keep things proprietary by making sure the query and the mailbox are a hard fit, and that don’t need much tinkering in the ROM. Wait, got something.”

  One of the alphabet-soup files ballooned open on the monitor, disgorging a multitude of tiny pictures, each wrapped in a line of text and numerals arrayed like a date, time, and names. Fat-Fat’s cursor skittered on the screen, guided by his fingertip on the touch pad. “Some of these are small—here’s a big one,” he mumbled a moment before his selected image amplified.