He’d chained his Honda Forza to the bicycle rack a dozen feet away. After many trials and even more errors, he’d decided a motor scooter was the best way to tail a car in the city. He rarely had to worry about getting trapped behind stopped cars at lights, and the Forza could roll up to 95 mph if necessary. Best of all, the law required him to wear a helmet, so he made sure his was equipped with a heavily tinted, identity-concealing visor.
The helmet had become a super-important accessory. Yeah, concealing your features from your quarry was always important but, because of his heritage, especially so in Tier’s case. His pure-blood Mohawk features—the black hair, the black eyes, the reddish skin, the high cheek bones, and hawk nose—tended to leave an impression. One of his Army buds had said he looked like a cigar-store Indian. Tier hadn’t taken offense—truth is true.
He checked his email and saw that his Word of the Day had arrived:
Grandiose
Adjective—gran-dee-OHSS
1: characterized by affectation of grandeur
or splendor or by absurd exaggeration
2: impressive because of uncommon
largeness, scope, effect, or grandeur
Not too bad. He’d find a way to use that by the end of the day.
As promised by the weatherfolk, the Arctic Express had arrived. The average New Yorker might consider this a frigid morning, but Tier hailed from Kahnawake on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. And prior to moving here he’d done a couple of tours in the frozen mountains of Afghanistan. Compared to them, today was positively balmy. So, he found it no chore to hang out along this stretch of Central Park West.
Besides, he loved the architecture, especially the Allard. His appreciation went beyond the family connection. A graceful twelve-story art deco tower, capped with an impressive, heavy-duty antenna, jutted from the roof of the blocky, sixteen-story base. The tower held the primo apartments, each taking up the whole floor with a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the city.
So much for the good part about the Allard. The bad part was its location: overlooking the Sheep Meadow. He’d found himself experiencing a sort of adverse reaction to that simple open field. He never wanted to hear that sound again—at least not close up like yesterday.
Get over it. You’re on hound dog duty. Eyes open, nose to the wind.
He checked himself out. Had he forgotten anything? Part of his line of work was being unobtrusive. So, he kept his hair short and dressed like the average white dude—khakis, LL Bean coat, work boots, knit cap. But still he got stares. Add the ruddy complexion to the cheek bones and nose and he stood out like, well, a classic cigar-store Indian.
Thus the cycle helmet whenever he could make it work. A chore sometimes, but part of the game.
His gaze roamed the façade of the Allard, trying to guess which apartment belonged to Madame de Medici. Had to have monster bucks even to think of living there. He wondered where she got her money and if she owned one of the tower apartments or just rented. The view… an apartment with a city view wherever you looked had to be something else.
No, wait. It had to be grandiose.
Yes! Not yet 9 a.m. and he’d already found a use for it. Gonna be a good day. He could tell.
At least he hoped so. This Medici gal was not his typical quarry. He subscribed to a number of in-depth criminal databases and dark web search engines that could ferret out damn near anything about anybody. But his searches for Madame de Medici had come up pretty much blank.
Considering how he didn’t know her date of birth, her place of birth, not even her first name—unless it was “Madame”—he felt lucky to have found her at all. Fortunately for him she was consistent with using that unique designation and so a search for “Madame de Medici” did trigger a few hits. Very few.
Those hits revealed no direct Internet presence, but a mostly passive involvement. From all appearances she limited her web-based activities to subscribing to newsletters from Internet auction sites that specialized in Old World and Middle East antiquities and occasionally browsing their websites. Beyond that, nothing. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Pinterest. Her email had an AOL address. Those tended to belong to early-adopter Boomers who started using the Internet in the ’90s, and she didn’t look at all like a Boomer.
Tier didn’t trust anyone with such a sketchy identity. He had no doubt she’d stolen Roland’s Bagaq, and he was going to find it.
All he had to do was wait.
He’d never had a problem with waiting. Waiting had been his forte as a kid when he’d go hunting deer in Kahnawake and, later on, hunting Taliban in the A. Both of those waits tended to end in death—animals in the former, human beasts in the latter. Tier didn’t miss killing deer, but he did miss killing Taliban. Oh, how he’d loved killing Taliban.
Too much so, the Army had thought, the shrinks pressing him for some sort of guilt, some kind of PTSD.
Nope.
Wanted really bad for him to be suffering nightmares.
Nope.
After all, a guy with that many kills had to feel some guilt, didn’t he?
Nope.
Would he kill again?
Nope. Not unless he came across Taliban in America.
Thoughts of the Taliban triggered memories of Lamiha.
Tier had been assigned to the Tora Bora base at first, just outside Jalalabad. While patrolling past a small village he came upon a little girl named Lamiha. Her forehead was a mass of scar tissue reaching down and into her left eye. The Taliban had intended to blind her for trying to learn to read. They’d only half succeeded.
A loner by nature, the Army was where Tier discovered how much he disliked other people. He pretty much loathed on sight everyone he’d met in his battalion. Esprit de corps? He couldn’t imagine it.
But after seeing little Lamiha, he realized he didn’t hate his fellow soldiers, he merely hated being with them. He reserved his hatred—nurtured it, stoked it—for the people who had scarred that child. He loathed no beings on this Earth more than the Taliban.
Which was why, when assigned to Combat Outpost Keating in Nurestan Province, not too long before they closed it down, he decided to hunt the Taliban like he’d hunted deer back home in Kahnawake.
Soldiers weren’t allowed to go wandering off on their own, especially at night, but Tier would sneak off into the mountains and hunt down camps of Taliban. They never knew he was there until he opened fire.
And after they were down, he’d go from one to the other with his 1911 and send a .45 slug through the left eye of each, point blank. Then he’d leave them there to be found the next day or whenever, but not before taking a picture of the bodies with his phone. Whoever found them had to wonder about those left eye hits. It became Tier’s signature.
When his superiors finally caught on to his night-tripping, they wanted to know what the hell he was doing out there. He showed them the photos.
Why the left eye coups de grâce? they wanted to know.
For Lamiha, of course.
The story got around the outpost, and the good fallout was that the guys tended to give the crazy psycho killer a wide berth, which was fine with Tier. He kept going out, but he didn’t have to sneak anymore.
The Taliban may have sussed out that the left-eye assassin was operating out of Keating. Maybe that was why 300 of them overran it in 2009. But he’d shipped out by then.
He was done with all that now. These days he limited his hunting to wild game, and didn’t do much of that. Though he had a carry permit, he wasn’t interested in killing. Today he was hunting Roland’s Bagaq. Locate and report—no more. In the process of tracking it down, he’d learn all about the mysterious Madame de Medici. And when he did, she’d be a mystery woman no more.
2
They’d said to look for a silver Honda Odyssey parked on Seventy-first Street just east of Amsterdam Avenue. Coincidentally, just a hop and a skip from where Weezy recently had rented an apartment.
He’d placed
the call around noon and spoken to a guy who’d identified himself as “Dr. Hess.” Jack had suggested Julio’s but Hess said the information was too sensitive to risk discussing in a public place where they might be overheard. Thus, the assignation in the soccer-mom van.
By 6:30, sunset was already two hours old, leaving the windswept streets dark and cold. Jack didn’t think he had anything to fear from two scientist types who hadn’t known he existed until Burkes told them. And Burkes still hadn’t mentioned his name. So, to these two he was just a “lad” who could get the job done.
But that didn’t stop Jack from removing the Kel-Tec backup from its ankle holster and palming it. He found the van just where they’d said; he checked out the cargo area and the rear seats before tapping on the passenger window.
The guy on the other side jumped, then lowered the window an inch.
“Burkes’s man?”
“That’s me. Hess?”
“No, I’m Monaco.”
The rear door popped and did a slow rearward slide. Jack got in and sat in the middle of the rear seat as he waited for it to reclose. Both men half turned to face him. The courtesy light was off but enough light filtered in from the street and passing cars to give him a look at their faces. Not much to see. Both clean shaven. The driver wore a wool knit hat and had a big nose. The passenger was nondescript except for his Yankees cap.
“What do we call you?” the driver said.
“Jack’ll do.”
“As I’ve already told you,” said the passenger. “I’m Doctor Monaco. This is Doctor Hess.”
What was it with guys with doctorates? Always wanted to be called “doctor.” Was that what their mothers called them? Their wives? Their kids?
Nobody asked for Jack’s surname and nobody offered to shake, all fine with Jack.
“Well, let’s get to it,” he said. “Burkes tells me you’ve got a missing person problem.”
“Before we get into the specifics,” Monaco said, “we must insist that what we say here be held in the strictest confidence. Can we count on that? Because loose lips sink ships.”
“I’m not about to sign an NDA,” Jack said. “But confidentiality goes without saying. I’m your priest and this just became my confessional.”
They looked at each other, then Hess nodded.
“Good enough, I suppose,” Monaco said. “Here’s our problem: The missing person isn’t exactly a person. It’s an animal.”
“Whoa! You’ve just wasted a lot of my time. I’m not equipped for anything like that.”
He searched for the door-open button. This was total bullshit. Wait till he got hold of Burkes. He’d—
“Wait-wait-wait,” Hess said. “Just hear us out.”
Jack paused. He was barely equipped to find a human being and not at all to track down an animal, but he’d come this far, so why the hell not?
With a sigh he leaned back and folded his arms. “All right, but be quick about it.”
Monaco said, “I’ll do my best. The creature—”
“Why are you calling it a ‘creature’? It’s gotta fit somewhere in your zoo. Bear, wolf, lion, tiger—what is it?”
“That’s just it: We don’t know.”
“How the hell can you not know?”
“It’s something new,” Hess said. “It was trapped in Manitoba, up near Hudson Bay. Nobody knows what it is. A new species, we think—we hope. We have a grant from the Museum of Natural History to study it and identify it—you know, map out its genome, work on its taxonomy. We live for that stuff. It was on its way from Canada to the Bronx zoo where we planned to cage it and start the testing.”
Monaco took over. “Only it never made it to the Bronx. We had it tranqed—I mean, heavily sedated—but somehow it woke up, broke out of the transfer van, and ran like the wind.”
“Well, I’m sorry for your bad luck, but this changes nothing. I’m not an animal tracker.” Hell, he didn’t even consider himself a people tracker. “What you want are the cops, or at the very least, animal control.”
“No-no, please,” Hess said. “It’s a delicate matter. That’s why we went to Burkes. We need help outside the usual channels. He recommended you.”
“I understand that, and under different circumstances—you know, people circumstances—I might be your guy, but—”
“If word gets back to the museum that we’ve lost its specimen, our grant is toast.”
“You guys aren’t listening,” Jack said, getting annoyed. “The discretion you need, the threat to your grant—none of that matters where I’m concerned. Because none of it makes me more capable of tracking your missing animal. It’s not my thing. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Not even if we gave you a tracking device?” Monaco said.
Okay, this was interesting… mildly so.
“How’s that?”
“Before transport, the creature was electronically tagged.”
“You mean like they do with Great Whites?”
Hess said, “Oh, no. Those SPOT tags they use on sharks are much too big; they need to be detectable from satellites. The one we used is much more compact—small enough to be inserted under the skin between its shoulder blades. The downside of that is it has a much more limited range.”
Monaco reached through the space between the front seats, extended something that looked like a cellphone. “Here’s the tracker.”
A glowing street map of the Upper West Side occupied the screen, dotted with dozens of little pings.
“All these dots…?” Jack said.
“New Yorkers love to tag their dogs,” Monaco said.
“Then what good—?”
“Swipe down from the top of the screen.” Jack obeyed and a list appeared. “Now tap H3.”
When Jack did, the map reappeared, but sans dots.
“What happened?”
Hess said, “Our beastie is tagged ‘H3.’ Its official designation is H3730, but we call it H3.”
“According to this it’s not here.”
“That’s because it escaped in Queens,” Monaco said. “You’ll never get a ping at this range. But if you were driving around Queens, you’d eventually see a blip on the screen, and you’d have its location. H3 can run, but it can’t hide.”
“Why aren’t you driving around Queens?”
Hess said, “Because we have jobs and we have to be on the job pretending that everything is just fine and the creature’s transport has been unavoidably delayed.”
“Besides,” Monaco said, holding up a pistol, “we’re lousy shots.”
Jack reacted without thinking—the muzzle of his backup pressed against Monaco’s forehead.
“Are you tired of living?”
Monaco’s jaw worked soundlessly, then, “J-j-just a tranq gun—for you.”
“Yeah? Hand it here.” Jack took it, then leaned back to inspect the pistol. “You shouldn’t wave a gun around a stranger.”
Monaco’s voice was hoarse. “I’ll remember that.”
Jack had never handled a tranquilizer pistol before. This one had a Lugerish look.
“CO-2 powered?”
“Right. We’ve had it hanging around the lab for years—you know, just in case. Never had to use it, so we put in a fresh gas cartridge just to be sure.”
“It doesn’t have much range,” Hess added, “so you’re going to have to get within a dozen feet or so. Tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure I’d miss within six feet. That’s why we went looking for someone like you.”
“Got darts?” Jack said.
“Of course.”
Monaco handed over something that looked like a pub dart, but instead of vanes on the tail, it had what looked like a mini feather duster. After half a minute of experimenting Jack had it loaded and ready to fire
Monaco handed him three more, saying, “They contain a fast-acting neuromuscular agent that causes profound weakness.”
“How fast?”
“Up to five minutes.”
&
nbsp; “You call that fast? An animal can cover a lot of ground in five minutes—as in charging the guy who shot it.”
“It’s usually quicker, but H3 might not respond quite the same as other mammals.”
Well, at least they’re talking about a mammal.
Hess added, “The agent in the darts acts about as fast as they come. Sedatives can take much longer. The more active the creature is after it’s shot, the faster the agent will circulate and do its work. So, the farther away you are, the better. Which is why neither of us is a good choice.”
Jack could buy that. Both of them looked wimpy and myopic.
Monaco said, “I suggest hitting it twice. We don’t know how susceptible it’ll be.”
Twice?
“Swell.”
Something missing here…a feeling these guys weren’t leveling with him.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Hess looked offended. “I beg your pardon?”
“Why do I get this feeling you’re leaving something out?” When they stonewalled him, he added, “‘Fess up or I walk.”
After an exchange of glances, Monaco said, “We haven’t been able to do an in-depth evaluation of H3, but it seems to be relatively intelligent.”
“Aggressive?”
“Only when provoked. The tranq dart will sting but I can’t see how it will be perceived as an attack.”
Jack was running a few scenarios through his head and, despite certain nagging doubts, beginning to think this job might be doable.
Hess said, “But we can’t emphasize enough the importance of discretion along with a speedy resolution to the problem.”
“Yeah, your grants and all that.”
“More than that. H3 is a unique creature and, well, a bit unusual in appearance.”
“That was my next question,” Jack said. “What’s it look like?”
“I was afraid you’d never ask.” Monaco fiddled with his phone, then handed it to Jack. “We knew you’d need to know, so we came prepared.”
The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel Page 5