Before they even settled in their seats, both men couldn’t help but notice the woman serving at the other end of the bar, whose beauty was not ostentatious but was still too obvious to miss. Everything about her was attractive, but what became most noticeable, as she approached their side of the bar, were her fair, slightly freckled complexion and shining ice-blue eyes. They contrasted strikingly with her dark shirt and hair, which was half-gathered so that wisps of it graced her forehead and accentuated those amazing eyes even more.
“Wow,” Halladay said as soon as she stopped across the bar from them.
“Thank you,” she said, as if she was used to it, with a medium-pitched and slightly coarse voice. “What can I do for you guys?”
Halladay grinned at Jon, who responded with a slight frown and shake of his head.
“I’ll try to restrain myself,” the big cop said, “and I’ll just ask for a BrewDog ale. If ye have it.” He turned up the brogue on the last phrase.
“Aye, we do,” she said with a smile, then turned to Jon. “And for you?”
“Well, since it’s my first drink in the city, I guess I’ll have a Manhattan.” Jon laughed nervously, half because of the woman’s effect on him and half because he couldn’t believe he was feeling it. He was usually too preoccupied with his work to even notice anyone.
When she left to get their drinks, Halladay turned to John and said, “Damn.”
“I thought you were a family man,” Jon said.
“I am. I’m thinkin’ for you.” He nodded at Jon and raised his eyebrows.
Jon looked back at the woman, who seemed about his age, and actually had to shake his head to clear it and remember why they were there.
“What’s your name?” Jon said, when she returned with their drinks.
“Mallory Cassady,” she said, putting her hand out.
“Jon Phillips,” he said, and took it, feeling more sparks despite the fact that he was telling himself how ridiculous it was. “This is Frank Halladay.”
She shook Halladay’s hand, too, and said to him, “Speaking of names, yours sounds familiar. But I haven’t seen you in here.”
“Do you own the place?” Halladay asked, smart enough to know that if she was here most of the time, she probably did. And she was smart enough to tell that he had evaded her question, so her demeanor changed ever-so-slightly when he did.
“I do, along with my father. Why do you ask?”
“I really like the name.”
“We’re MPD, Mallory,” Jon said, trying to be as straight up and nonthreatening as possible. But her demeanor changed noticeably this time, as if she felt threatened anyway.
7
“You’re not a suspect,” Jon said, “if you’re worried about that.”
“I’m not worried about anything,” Mallory said, almost convincing him.
“We’re wondering about those little wet naps, actually,” Halladay said, pointing to the small bowls of them at two spots on the bar. “Has anyone suspicious taken any of them recently?”
“No,” she answered, a little too quickly. “Like … what do you mean by ‘suspicious’?”
“Military or ex-military, maybe?” This was Jon, and Halladay looked at him strangely again, wondering what he was on about.
“There’s a serial killer on the loose,” Halladay interrupted. “As I’m sure you know. And sometimes you can just tell when you meet them, that there’s something not quite right.”
“Huh. I can’t imagine.” Then she said “Excuse me for a minute,” and left to tend the other end of the bar again. Jon wasn’t sure whether he saw anyone come in, or signal for her, or not.
“I’d like to interrogate her,” said the family man, draining the rest of his beer. “I’ll just say I was at The Office. Heh.” Then he looked at Jon, who had barely finished half of his small drink. “Why did you say, ‘Military or ex-military?’”
“A hunch,” said the younger man.
“If you’re implying GS again, because they have a lot of those types, forget about it. The Princess told me on the phone that she checked into it, and there’s no way a GS copter could have dropped someone on top of those buildings. The Mayor keeps strict tabs on their aircraft. The only possibility for an entrance like that would be MPD or maybe a private company across the river. But there’s too much surveillance on top of other buildings even for that.”
“We get a very boring clientele here,” Mallory said as she returned. “Hardworking, well-off people from this district. And they’re usually pretty happy while they’re here, even if they didn’t come in that way. So no serial killer types.”
“Probably not,” Jon said. “But we’d like to get a copy of your security tapes, just in case.” He gestured with his head toward a camera that was barely visible in the top corner of the room, and she stood a little bit straighter.
“Okay,” she said. “But I don’t have anything to copy them onto. Not here, anyway.… I have some flash drives at my apartment across the park that would be big enough.” She leaned down closer to Jon. “You can provide some public service and walk me over there, keep me safe from that killer you’re looking for.”
“Hey, am I chopped liver over here?” Halladay said. “What about me?”
“You could walk me home later, when my shift is done.”
“What time?” the family man said, but Jon interrupted him.
“It’s tempting,” Jon said, and meant it. “But we’re very short on time. Frank, would you please call Amira and have her bring a flash drive to you halfway, so we can get on with this?”
The big man grimaced, grunted, and murmured something like “Damn right it’s tempting” as he stepped off the stool, pulled out his phone, and headed for the door.
“Can you show me where the cameras feed into?” Jon asked when Halladay was gone.
When she’d led him into a small back room with two screens, and their bodies were pressed close together in the confines, he had to admit that he wanted to walk her home. This was the last thing he’d expected to happen on the first day of a new job in a new city, especially in this current situation. And worse, he knew that the faculty of reason he relied on so much could be adversely affected by feelings like this. He knew that he should get out of that dark room as soon as possible, but he had to wait a few minutes for Halladay to return, so he tried to use them to his advantage.
“If you’re worried about the police,” he said softly near her ear, “I can protect you from them. I’m a cop … but I’m not from here.”
“Why don’t you come back at two when I get off?” she said at his ear, leaning into him as she did. “You can pick up the tapes then, and you can walk me home.”
Jon couldn’t help but make a mental note of the time she mentioned, and think to himself that he might be alone for a while around that hour, if he couldn’t keep Halladay from going home and wasn’t allowed to go with him. But Jon’s commitment to solving the crimes was still overriding any other considerations, no matter how appealing they might be.
“I’ll take them now,” he said, “when my partner returns.” But he didn’t comment about the two o’clock proposal. “Is there some reason you don’t want us to have your security videos?”
“No, we don’t have anything to hide,” she said, again too quickly, but then added, “I mean, sometimes when a customer’s had too much, I don’t give them change. I figure it’s their fault, you know. And I only did that in the early days. Now that we’re doing better…”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Jon said, and she remained quiet for a while until Halladay clambored through the half-open door, and looked around in the cramped, dark quarters.
“What’re you two doin’ in here?” he said with a chuckle.
“Pulling up the files,” Jon said, and held out his hand for the high capacity drive that Halladay had brought with him. He gave it to Mallory, telling her how far back he wanted her to go and that he would test the files before he left to make s
ure they had been copied. No one said anything in the minute or two this all took to happen, but finally the bartender spoke up as the men turned to leave.
“See you later,” she said. “I hope.”
Outside the bar, Halladay shook his head and said, “If you don’t get some of that…”
“You will, I suppose?” Jon said.
“I was gonna say you’d be a fool,” the sandy-haired cop answered.
“Did it ever occur to you,” Jon said, frowning at him, “that she might have ulterior motives?”
“Nah.” Halladay shook his head and pointed to it. “I wasn’t thinking with this.”
On the walk back to the Flatiron Building, Jon was ruminating on what it must be like for people to live in a city of endless night, never seeing the sun for more than ten years, when they passed a small “health store” that wouldn’t have existed before the darkness fell. There were signs on the front windows with pictures of vitamin D products like fortified milk and orange juice, several kinds of fatty fish, and the usual bottles of pills. Others advertised the psychiatric medications that were only available by prescription in other places, but were allowed to be sold over-the-counter here. The signs indicated that D deficiency was known to cause depression, memory loss, and even schizophrenia.
Jon glanced over at Halladay and wondered if his partner was taking any of those drugs, or whether he should be.
When they reached the lab at headquarters, they gave the external drive to Amira and asked her to run facial recognition software on the customers who took wipes from the bar. And Jon told her to scan the staff, too. When she told them how long it would take, Jon said he would wait in the shooting range and motioned for Halladay to follow him as he headed out of the lab.
“The range is in the basement,” he said. “Right?”
“Yes,” Halladay answered, but then stopped in the hallway. “Damn me if I didn’t forget because of that bartender … but I need to go home.”
“Don’t you want to know if anyone interesting turns up on the tapes?” Jon asked.
“I’ll find out when I come back in.”
“When’s the last time you’ve been to the range?” A stab in the dark. “I made a vow that I’d practice with my left for a hundred hours, since it almost got me killed.”
“It’s been a while,” the big man admitted.
“Wait … you didn’t practice up for when the daylight started breaking through, even though you knew it might be dangerous?”
“I wasn’t working when that happened.”
“Where were you?”
“At home, where I need to go now.”
“Nope,” Jon said, shaking his head and pulling on the big man’s arm. “You definitely need some preparation. In less than twenty-four hours, we’ll have almost a full day of sunlight, and we’ll have to be out there working. No hiding from this one. Come on…”
Halladay reluctantly went with Jon, probably because he knew there was some truth to what he said, but also because he actually was tired—almost too tired to argue with the persistent younger man. They practiced at the range for a while, then took a break outside of it at the snack machines when they realized Amira hadn’t called yet. While they were hanging out, Halladay said hello to a man who walked through from the custodian’s office nearby, and introduced him to Jon. His nickname was “Poppy,” and Jon asked how he had come by it.
“My father was the super here before me,” the man said, “His name was Sunny, spelled with a ‘u,’ but people thought it was Sonny, like someone’s son, ya know, so they started calling me Poppy. Thought it was funny, I guess.”
“This is a cool building to take care of,” Jon said.
“Yeah, well, it was a lot cooler before you guys moved in.… No offense. Now we have all this extra security. Used to be able to fix shit right away ourselves, now we got all this fuckin’ red tape. Used to be able to show people around, like tell ’em about the fancy restaurant that was down here way back, or the big old boiler room thirty feet down with the big old generators, looks like some kinda movie set or something.”
“I read that the Flatiron used to have hydraulic elevators,” John said. “Water-powered, right?”
“Yeah, that old generator’s down there, too. A lot of the buildings in the city had that. My dad said it used to break sometimes, water would gush out into the elevators and offices up there. Heh.”
“What do you think about Gotham Security?” Jon asked him. “And what do you hear from others who work here, and around the city?”
“How ya mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it seems that someone like you might have his ear to the ground. Have a good sense of how the vote will go on Tuesday.”
“Still got a thing for GS, huh?” Halladay said to Jon.
“Huh?” Poppy said.
“Nevermind him,” Jon said, “What do you think the chances are that Gar Render will be running this city in a couple days?” The man looked hesitant, so Jon added: “You can be honest.… We don’t have a dog in the hunt.”
“Well, I want the Mayor to win,” he said, looking around. “She’s been good to us here, and I think she means well. But if more people die when the Dayfall comes, I don’t think she has a fuckin’ chance. People are scared.… They know that the Big Man rebuilt the city, and they think he can keep ’em safe. A lot of ’em think that the only reason he hasn’t stopped the killings is because his hands are tied, with the rules against his cops and all.”
Jon thought it was interesting that Poppy conceived of Render’s private army and the police as merely two different sets of “cops.” That fact alone was probably a guarantee that his grassroots prediction would come true.
8
DAYFALL MINUS 20 HOURS
Amira finally called them, and Halladay went back up with Jon to the lab out of curiosity to see the results from the facial recognition software. She told them that there were only four customers who were found to be in the government database they were using, and one was inconclusive because she was obviously a woman but had come up under a male name. And none had a criminal record for anything worse than traffic citations. Jon put pictures and info for all four on his phone and told Halladay that it was time for them to talk to Gar Render, the Gotham Security boss.
Now that the big man’s curiosity had been slaked, however, he insisted on going home (“For the last time!”).
“You can go talk to Render alone,” Halladay said. “Or wait until I’ve gotten some rest and come back on duty.”
Seeing that his partner was more resolute this time, Jon played his best hand.
“If you go home before we talk to Render,” the younger cop said, “I’ll have to go with you.”
“What?” Halladay said, then added, “You don’t want to let me out of your sight, do you?”
“I told you,” Jon said, “I really need two pairs of eyes and ears on this.”
The clear implication was that if Halladay went with him to meet Render, Jon would let him go home, by himself, in peace. The young cop let him think that for reasons of his own, and the older one agreed. So they started across the park to the Gotham Security Building.
On the way, Jon noticed that the blue-green wash of UV light was more pronounced near the grass and trees in the middle of the square, since the industrial lamps were attached to the sides of the tall light poles there. He also noticed the proliferation and variety of the environmental masks worn by many of the adult pedestrians, and most of the few children he saw, who were probably coming or going with their parents from the playground at the north end of the park. Jon also noticed a street vendor who had set up a small portable table in front of the statue of William H. Seward and was hawking “Dayfall survival equipment” like protective glasses, head-to-toe plastic ponchos, and extra door locks. Halladay swerved a little out of their way to flash his badge at the man, who promptly folded up the table and moved deeper into the park (where he would probably set it up again, if no
other competitors were there already).
“It’s funny.… They used to sell all kinds of stuff related to the darkness,” the older cop explained. “Like drugs and light-trackers for your health, and rip-off glasses that are supposed to help you see in the dark, but really don’t. Now they’re pushing sunlight stuff.”
“Supply and demand,” Jon said.
“Sometimes they’ll have guns and knives underneath,” Halladay said, apparently unconcerned whether that one did or not. “Or at least they’ll have business cards telling people where they can get them.”
“I guess some things are always in demand,” Jon observed, then he asked, “Gun control is another big difference between the Mayor and Render, right?”
“Yeah,” Halladay answered. “When people get scared they want to be able to protect themselves, or think they can anyway. That will get him a lot of votes, especially if tomorrow’s a bad day.”
The Gotham Security headquarters at Eleven Madison seemed even more formidable up close, definitely a symbol of both strength and a connection with the New York past, as opposed to the Flatiron, which was only the latter. But despite its fortress-like appearance, Jon was surprised to see that there wasn’t much security at the main entrance, other than some ex-military types in suits stationed near the doors. Perhaps there was some kind of hidden surveillance equipment, or invisible scans running, but no one confronted the two cops about the guns they wore underneath their coats, and they walked freely into the interior of the building. Jon wondered if this was intended to make GS seem more open or secure than the relatively inaccessible police headquarters. But when they got inside he realized that Render probably wanted to show off the amazing lobby of the historic building to those who visited.
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