Fire in the Blood

  —

  Coop passed through a revolving glass prism and into a crowded marble lobby. He explained to the receptionist that he was hoping to see Mr. Theo Bellante. The receptionist told him he would need a visitor’s pass. On top of her computer monitor was a digital camera, and she angled the pod in Coop’s direction, telling him to smile, then printed out a bar-coded temporary badge.

  “Fifteenth floor,” she said, already ushering the next person in line.

  Coop rode the elevator up to a smaller lobby, where he encountered another receptionist. This woman was younger, about his age, wearing a black dress suit and rectangular metal glasses. Behind her was a high wall of frosted glass with the embossed logo of Bellante/Vancetti.

  “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said, after Coop had explained who he was looking for. “Mr. Bellante is currently on leave.”

  “I see,” said Coop. “Listen, it’s pretty urgent. Is there a way I can reach him?”

  The receptionist raised a skeptical eyebrow. “What exactly is this concerning?” she asked.

  Coop sucked air through his nostrils and summoned every ounce of indignity available to him. He placed his hands on the desk and leaned forward, trying to squeeze out vapors of condescension through his mismatched military gear and secondhand hospital clothes, through the battered colors of his face; even through his eye patch.

  “It’s a family matter,” he growled.

  Indecision danced in the receptionist’s eyes. “Excuse me,” she said, and pivoted out of her chair, disappearing through a door in the glass.

  Coop leaned on the desk. He felt much improved after taking a few more painkillers and washing them down with coffee, but he was still weak. A few minutes passed and the receptionist still hadn’t returned. Coop peeked over the wall of her desk. There were papers and envelopes stacked in upright metal files, including a bin for outgoing mail. Glancing around to make sure he was truly alone, Coop began sifting, and there amid the letters and glossy mailers and padded manila packages he found a rubber-banded stack of envelopes bearing Theo’s name. Coop saw that each piece of mail had been stamped with a forwarding address. Stuffing one of the letters into his coat, he limped back to the elevator and punched the button for the lobby.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Theo’s forwarding address was just ten blocks from his office, a glass-fronted apartment complex with a doorman standing on the sidewalk. Coop walked past, scoping the entrance, then circled back. He decided to wait. Gusts of cold wind blew down the narrow streets and he could feel his bones clattering with hypothermic pain.

  The cold is just a state of mind, Coop told himself. You don’t need to shiver. Shivering is how the body fights against the cold, when the trick is to accept it: I am cold, this is how I feel right now. I can live with that. There are homeless people sleeping in this weather, he reminded himself. You’re a United States Paratrooper, and if the hobos can hang, so can you.

  In an effort to distract himself, Coop looked at his map again, wondering where the ruins of Ground Zero were located. He had been expecting something obvious and totemic, as in the photos Kay had obsessed over during the crazy months following the attacks. Pointing at images on her laptop screen: graveyard jags breathing smoke, broken stalks of rebar, a monster footprint.

  “This is my city,” she would say. “I used to live here.”

  That day had begun for Coop in the predawn hours, his whole unit piled into cattle trucks to go searching for a lost pistol. Some cherry lieutenant had dropped his weapon during a night jump, and all of Fort Bragg would remain on lockdown until the handgun was located. Coop remembered drifting back asleep with his head against the window, purple light just starting to show over the trees. They drove to DZ Bastogne, a miles-long field used for airborne training. Coop and the rest of his unit formed up into a long one-man column, each grunt standing at arm’s length from the next, and they began marching with their heads down across the field. An enterprising NCO had suggested they might clean up while they were out there, so each soldier had been issued a small clear trash bag, which each of them was expected to fill by the time he arrived at the other end of the drop zone. Every few feet someone would stop to pick up litter from past training missions: a glowstick, a shell casing, a tube of camouflage, a shred of plastic from an MRE bag. Like everyone else, Coop griped about these bullshit details. But he was also privately awed by the effect, all this manpower casually deployed to hunt through a few dozen acres of raw North Carolina scrub. It was a thing you could only do with soldiers, felons, or slaves.

  As the sun rose and the search continued, Coop gradually became aware of a disturbance within the ranks. He heard distant, raised voices, and for a bright moment Coop thought someone had found the missing weapon. But then, in a shocking display of mutiny, the line began to dissolve. Soldiers were coming together in clumps, talking excitedly.

  The first thing Coop heard was “Planes are falling out of the sky.” A weird thing to hear spoken in an Airborne unit, Coop remembered thinking. An inversion of the natural order. The planes don’t fall, he thought. We do. Just last week Coop had jumped into the sky over this very drop zone, twisting under the belly of a C-17 Globemaster, unreal in its whale-like enormity, Coop floating suspended in an underwater silence as the planes grew smaller toward the horizon, leaving rows of bobbing white jellyfish in their wake, each carrying a soldier toward the ground. And now these soldiers came together to trade rumors on the field. A few minutes later the trucks began honking and they rushed back to the parking lot, loaded up, and hung on, piling out at the barracks to fetch their go-bags and sprint to Company, where they would be briefed on the terrorist attacks, then ordered to draw weapons and paint their faces in camouflage, all in preparation for a no-shit, honest-to-God airborne invasion of somewhere.

  It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that Coop had gotten a chance to call Kay.

  “The buildings just keep falling down,” she had said to him. “I’m watching the TV and they just keep falling, and people I know are definitely inside those buildings, Coop, do you understand? Everything is going to change.”

  Coop did his best to comfort her, but privately he felt that everything had already changed. He shared nothing in common with the person he’d been that morning—a purposeless half soldier, picking up trash after fake battles—and the Coop of now. And even though his unit didn’t get deployed that morning, or that month, even though it took two years for him to finally get orders, Coop knew he was already different. They both were.

  Before the attacks, Kay had been fixated on the global land mine problem. In a year and a half Coop would finish his enlistment, and Kay’s plan had been for them to start a nonprofit together. The idea was that they could work in Vieques, or Vietnam, or some other exotic locale strewn with munitions. She would handle the organizational development side of things, Coop would bring the technical expertise. It was one of Kay’s habits that had driven him to private fury, before the attacks, how she always talked about his military service in terms of what he might do with it, as if she couldn’t believe his years in the Army might possess stand-alone value. Then, in a single morning, Kay’s view of the world had been sliced open with a box cutter. And deep in the ugly recesses of his heart, Coop had been glad. Finally, he thought, watching the black fires over New York. Finally the world is worthy of my rage.

  Afternoon came to lower Manhattan. It was cold despite the sun, but still Coop waited, hoping to catch Theo. His mind tricks had failed and now he shivered freely. Eva would not approve, he thought, as he walked up and down the block to keep the blood moving, never letting his eyes off the entrance.

  Then through a vented cloud of steam across the street Coop spotted a familiar figure. Detective Melody, holding a walkie-talkie up to his mouth while he fixed his stare on Coop. While Coop tried to make sense of this, Melody limped out into the street, raising one
hand to halt an oncoming taxi so he could cross. He came up onto the sidewalk and stood in front of Coop, stuffing the walkie-talkie into his coat pocket. He looked Coop up and down.

  “Fuck,” Melody finally said. “What happened to you?”

  “How did you know I was here?” said Coop.

  “One of these bystanders reported your suspicious ass, and I heard the call about a potential lurker. Seeing as I was already in the neighborhood I told patrol I’d check it out.”

  Melody’s face went flat, no trace of his usual bullshit smirk. “What are you doing here, Coop?”

  Before Coop could answer, Melody leaned in closer, dropping his voice. “You know what, don’t say anything yet, just come with me.”

  Without another word, Melody crossed the street toward the massive glass building. Coop lingered for a moment. Down the street he saw an NYPD patrol car turn onto the block and start drifting through traffic in his direction.

  “Hey,” said Melody, talking back over his shoulder. “You want to come upstairs, or stand out here in the friggin’ cold? Either way is fine by me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Melody fixed his tie in the polished steel door of the elevator while a counter ticked through the floors: 22, 23, 24…Coop’s stomach lurched as they rushed up through the innards of Theo’s building. Melody had hit 34, the highest button on the panel. Coop was starting to feel like he’d made a mistake, following Melody with no idea what might be waiting for him on the top floor.

  “What did you say on the radio?” said Coop.

  “I informed the patrolmen you were just another confused vagrant, and that I successfully moved you along with the courtesy and professionalism for which the NYPD is legendary.”

  As the elevator passed 30 they began to slow. Melody used both hands to tuck his shirttails into his pants, and when he lifted his jacket Coop caught sight of a small black revolver holstered in his waistband.

  “What is it?” said Melody.

  “Am I in some kind of trouble?” said Coop.

  Melody met Coop’s eyes in the reflective steel.

  “You tell me, Coop.”

  The elevator eased to a stop and the doors slid open on a dimly lit, unfinished hallway. One of the brick walls had been torn open to reveal ancient plumbing, and the walls and floors were covered in plastic tarps. Melody led Coop down the hallway toward a big pair of industrial fire doors. He stopped just short of the doors and put a big hand on Coop’s shoulder.

  “I want you to listen to me for a second. There are things you don’t know, and in my opinion it’s not right you don’t know them. Which is why I’m bringing you in on this. But doing that means I’m putting my ass in the wind, you understand? So when we get in there, you need to be straight with us.”

  Coop tried to keep his face blank. His mind raced to make sense of what Melody was telling him. “I don’t know what you mean, Detective,” he said.

  “See, that, that’s exactly what I mean. Don’t do that. And please, spare me the ‘detective’ shit. Right now it’s just Melody.”

  Melody yanked open one of the big fire doors and they stepped into an enormous open loft. Factory windows filled the apartment with the red light of dusk. Arranged near the windows were a tufted leather sofa, a bar cart, and two gnarled blocks of wood, each of which had been roughly hollowed out to make a seat. Theo Bellante sat on the sofa facing the sunset.

  The doors clanked shut behind Coop, and in response came a sudden high-pitched yapping, followed by an explosion of black fur across the floor.

  “Goddamn,” said Melody, dancing to avoid a little dog as it scrabbled past them, barking in alarm.

  “Chaplin, sit,” said Theo.

  The dog ignored him, snatched up a stray slipper from the doorway and thrashed its little head, shaking the slipper like a dead rat.

  “Bad dog!” yelled Theo. He scooped a chunk of ice from his drink and threw it at the dog. Chaplin abandoned the slipper and chased the skittering cube to the other end of the loft.

  “Wait till he gets bigger,” said Melody. The detective had gone straight for the bar cart and was pouring himself a whiskey. “I told you, you put down these nice wood floors, that dog’s gonna tear them up.”

  “That’s as big as he’ll get,” said Theo, his eyes still tracking the dog.

  Coop followed all of this with a dazed sense of unreality. His brain was still returning to him through a long and cold tunnel.

  He realized Theo was looking at him.

  “What?” said Coop.

  “I said, how are you liking New York?” Theo wore a tight smile, but there was a wild glimmer behind his eyes.

  “Let’s sit down, for fuck’s sake,” said Melody. He squeezed himself into one of the wooden cubes while Coop perched on the other block, still wearing his coat. Under his patch Coop’s eye was throbbing. He felt aware of all the bandages on his face.

  “Okay, gentlemen, I think we ought to start this meeting of the minds by putting some shit on the table. Coop, we get the sense you’ve been busy since you got to New York, am I right?”

  Coop stared silently back.

  “Because here’s the thing,” Melody continued, “we’ve been pursuing what you might call a parallel course of inquiry. Which is why we have some sense of what you’ve been up to.”

  Melody was running the show, but Coop noticed that he kept glancing toward Theo, like he was checking to make sure he had permission to keep talking.

  “So here we are this very night, myself and the young master Bellante, preparing to close out this chapter, when you show up outside. And we thought, here’s an opportunity for all of us to get on the same page, so we’re not stepping on each other’s dicks.”

  “Great,” said Coop. “Why don’t you two start?”

  “That seems fair,” said Melody. He cleared his throat. “So lemme begin with some background. Several days back, Mr. Bellante here was approached with an offer.”

  “At the funeral,” said Coop, picking up the thread even as he spoke the words. “The guy with the envelope.”

  Theo gave a reluctant nod. “That’s right.”

  “So who was he?” said Coop.

  “Guy’s an immigrant from Albania,” said Melody. “Part of a crew. Small, but we’re talking serious players. Connected back to the Balkan syndicates, from what I gather.”

  “You said they had an offer. What offer?”

  “These Albanians claim to have information about the person responsible for Katherine’s death. Further, they claim to be in possession of said person.”

  “Possession,” Coop repeated. His words sounded far away.

  Theo finished his drink and set the glass down hard. “A fucking junkie,” he said. “Someone she was working with.”

  Coop chewed it over. Things began to take shape, connections flashing from deep in the caverns of his confusion.

  “This junkie,” said Coop. “His name Sean Hudson?”

  Melody’s eyebrows went up.

  Theo stared at Coop. “How do you know that?”

  “These Albanians,” said Coop. “What do they want?”

  “What does anyone want?” said Melody.

  “I don’t think we should be going into much greater detail,” said Theo. “The important thing for you to know is things are being handled.”

  Coop tilted his head back, looking at the bare steel beams that ran across the ceiling. The loft had been stripped down to its bones, then polished to a clean finish. The illusion of exposure. He stood up.

  “I think you two are full of shit,” he said.

  “C’mon,” said Melody.

  “So what, you two got worried I was getting close, figuring out this deal of yours? Thought you’d bring me up here, spoon-feed me just enough so I’d stand down?”

  �
�Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what we’re saying,” said Theo, his voice rising. Melody shot him a look but he didn’t notice. “We are very, very close to ending this. And we don’t want you fucking it up.”

  “Easy, easy,” said Melody.

  But Theo was on his feet now too. His drink sloshed as he pointed the glass toward Coop. “This guy just shows up at Katherine’s funeral, doesn’t even tell us he’s coming. Two days later he appears on my aunt’s doorstep, asks for Katherine’s old phone, and just walks off with it. Just steals it from my aunt, a grieving mother.”

  “Okay, sure, but maybe now we hear it from his side,” offered Melody. “That’s why we’re here, right? Exchanging what we know.”

  “He doesn’t know anything. Look at him.” Theo stalked back over to the window, putting his back to Melody and Coop. “He’s a liability,” he muttered.

  “Whoa,” said Melody, patting the air with his hands. “Let’s try and settle, okay? Maybe remember we’re all here for the same reason?”

  “Actually, why are you here?” said Coop. “I don’t get it. You’re a fucking cop.”

  “Me? I’m keeping the peace,” said Melody. He jabbed at his chest. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Don’t forget getting paid,” murmured Theo.

  “You know what, Theo, you’re right,” said Coop. “I’m one of those people, in the military we call it having a bias for action. I’d rather have information. Orders. Something to go on. But somebody out there killed my wife. And Theo, you don’t need to like it that Kay and I were married. What you do need to accept is that I will keep taking action until I understand what happened.”

  The room fell into a hostile silence. Through the windows Coop watched the sun as it fell across Warren Street, lighting the harbor in a fierce orange glow.

  “Man says he needs orders,” said Melody, watching Kay’s cousin.

  “Fine,” said Theo. “Let’s see where it goes.” He went to the bar cart, poured himself another drink, and returned to the couch.