by Joseph John
“Road’s closed, back up. Back up!”
“Hey, buddy, go around!”
The rest of the firefighters and police made their way toward the crowd and casualties, followed by a trio of paramedics carrying blue duffel bags. Mason shook hands with one of the uniforms and gestured theatrically as he described what had happened. The firefighters spread out and draped sheets over the dead. A few uniforms started taking statements while the paramedics tended to the wounded. One strode toward Sam.
“How is he?” he asked. He knelt beside Jaffe and unzipped his duffel bag.
“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “I told him not to move.”
“I feel fine,” Jaffe said.
“Uh huh. Can you tell me your name?”
“Shawn Jaffe.”
“Okay, Shawn. I want you to follow my finger with your eyes without moving your head. Were you hit? Please, keep your head still.”
“Sorry. No, I wasn’t hit.”
“What? How were you not hit?” Sam asked, his words dripping with incredulity. “What’ve you got, the reflexes of a goddamn cheetah?”
The paramedic reached into his bag and untangled a stethoscope, hung it around his neck, and pressed the diaphragm against Jaffe’s chest. “Give me a deep breath in. That’s good. Exhale. Good. So what happened?” he asked Sam. “You think drunk driver or…?”
“It was no accident.”
“Jesus. He aimed for the crowd?”
“He aimed for me,” Sam said, then jabbed his thumb at Jaffe. “This guy pushed me out of the way. Miracle he didn’t get himself killed.”
“You didn’t see it coming,” Jaffe said. “I had to do something.”
Everything had happened in the space of a heartbeat. One second the van had filled Sam’s vision like a charging bull, and the next Jaffe had shoved him and he’d sprawled onto the concrete. The crash of the van as it slammed into the brick wall was like that of lightning splintering through an oak tree.
“Bastard was right on top of me.”
“Like you said, reflexes of a cheetah.”
The paramedic palpated Jaffe’s neck, torso, and limbs. When he finished, he sat back on his haunches and placed his hands on his hips. “You don’t have a concussion. No broken bones or fractures.”
“So I can get up?”
The paramedic shrugged. “Far as I can tell, you’re fine.”
As for Sam, the paramedic applied antiseptic to his palms and wrapped them in bandages. Besides that and a strawberry burn on his forehead, he checked out okay.
As the credits rolled on the afternoon’s tragedy, he and Jaffe shuffled back to the detective’s car. To the west, the sun strained at them from its prison, caged not by steel bars, but by skyscrapers.
Sam stopped outside his door as Jaffe walked around to the passenger side. “Why did you…” The words trailed off like smoke.
Jaffe looked at him across the roof of the car. “Because you would’ve died,” he said.
Sam nodded, but the voice in the back of his mind persisted. No way he had time to move. No one is that fast.
They got in the car. Sam thumbed the ignition, and the engine came to life. He paused, one hand on the gearshift and one foot on the brake. The shadows stretched out across the city, creating the illusion of a world melting around them.
“What is it?” Jaffe asked.
“I need you to tell me again you don’t know what that guy was talking about.”
“What guy?”
“The guy at the restaurant who said ‘they’re watching you.’”
Jaffe studied Sam’s face. “I told you, I don’t know what he meant. You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you.” And this time, he honestly did.
Chad Dodd sat at the head of a conference table in a windowless office with unpainted concrete walls and floor. He was a tall man, well-built, with a blond crewcut shaved above the ears in a low fade. He wore hiking boots, tan cargo pants, and a long-sleeve tactical shirt the color of volcanic ash.
On the opposite side of the room, a glass multi-touch interface covered the length of one wall and displayed several news channels and feeds. Alongside it stood a sprawling desk and high-backed leather chair. No other extraneous adornments or furnishings cluttered the expansive room, and the entire ceiling glowed with a soft sterile light.
Chad folded his hands and scanned the faces of the three people seated at the table with him. They were the primary staff for the company’s NYC cell—two men, one wearing a plain black suit and the other a blue pinstripe, and a woman in a white blouse and gray slacks.
“What do you mean, he’s still alive?” Chad asked through clenched teeth.
The man in the black suit cleared his throat. “After we secured Gary Reed’s body, we tracked Harrington to the medical center. We were gonna take him out when he left the building, make it look like an accident—hit-and-run, maybe a drunk driver. But he left through the delivery exit in the rear of the building. Our team scrambled to intercept, and we lost track of the Delta. Turns out he was with Harrington. They decided to try to take out the detective anyway. It was a judgment call.”
“Pretty piss poor judgment. Lemme take a wild guess. The Delta interfered?”
“He knocked Harrington out of the way. They weren’t expecting him to react so fast.”
Chad sighed. “Have they not read the case file?”
“Of course they’ve read it,” the man in the black suit said.
“Then what the fuck?” Dodd slammed his fist down on the table. The others seated around it flinched, and their images flickered. “You think I told you to wait to engage Harrington until he was isolated from the Delta just for shits and grins? No, it’s because I know what the Delta is capable of. And now we have a giant shit sandwich on our plates, and I sure as hell am not eating it alone. We’re all gonna cut ourselves a piece and choke it down until it’s gone.”
Chad turned to the man in the blue pinstripe suit and said, “I want you to move up the timeline. How soon can we be ready to activate the Delta?”
The man rubbed his chin. “We’ll have to rework the script to account for the additional hours he’s active,” he said. “If we push it, I’d say early tomorrow morning.”
“I want him activated tonight.”
The man in the blue pinstripe suit shook his head. “That’s impossible. Even if everything goes according to plan, the activation protocol isn’t in place.”
“So we’ll add it ourselves and deliver it hard copy,” Chad said. “It’s not like we have a better option. Harrington’s a wild card we can’t account for. We need to take him out, but after the fiasco at the medical center, no one with half a brain is gonna believe it’s another accident and the poor bastard got struck by lightning twice in one day. And if the cops put two and two together, they might decide to bring the Delta in for questioning. If he’s in custody, it could blow the op. We can’t chance it. We have to activate him tonight.”
The man in the blue pinstripe suit bit his lip, then nodded. “It won’t be easy, but lemme see what we can come up with.”
“No one said this was gonna be easy.” Next, Chad turned to the woman. “I want Lark Morton cleared out ASAP. Get them gone. Empty their offices and purge all online records. I’m talking not a single hair left on the carpet or digital fingerprint to be found. Vanish them.”
She nodded once. “Understood.”
“Same goes for the Delta,” Chad said. “As soon as he’s activated, wipe every record of him from existence.”
“What about Harrington?” The man in the black suit asked. “Should we wait until the Delta is activated to take him out?”
Chad stroked his chin. “It doesn’t matter if the Delta is activated or not. We need to hit the detective when he’s most vulnerable. Wait until he leaves work. In fact, let’s wait until he gets home. Let him get out of his car, and don’t engage him until he’s on foot. Try to keep collateral damage to a minimum, but our priority is to en
sure this operation’s success, regardless of the consequences. Come up with several scenarios and brief me in an hour.”
The man in the black suit nodded.
“Any questions?” Chad asked.
There weren’t.
“Then get to it.” Chad tapped an icon on the conference table, and the other three individuals winked out of existence as their holographic images disappeared.
The detective set the radio to a classic R&B station, and Bruno Mars drifted out of the speakers. Shawn Jaffe tuned it out and tried to sort through the madness.
His thoughts kept returning to the accident—the whine of the engine, the heat and the stench of oil, the grille behind which he’d find not a radiator but eternal perdition. Time had taken on the consistency of molasses, and he’d seen everything with perfect clarity—the rocks wedged into the tire treads, each dent in the chrome and chip in the paint, every blemish of rust and splatter of insect gore. Then he’d closed his eyes, thrown himself sideways, and braced for the impact and that final bright eclipse of pain, followed by nothing at all. The van had been right on top of him. He could’ve reached out and touched it.
The remains of a butterfly stared back at him.
Maybe it swerved at the last second to keep Harrington in its sights.
Fluttering in the wind.
It was possible.
“Where’d you want me to drop you off?” Harrington asked.
Shawn rubbed his eyes and reoriented himself to the present. “Here’s fine.”
Harrington pulled to the side of the road. “I’m gonna put a car on your apartment tonight,” he said. “They’ll be outside if you need them.”
“You think I’m in danger?”
“Probably not, but I’d rather play it safe,” Harrington said. He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t get it. The guy from the restaurant this morning said you were being watched.”
“And that nothing I know is real,” Shawn said.
“But why? What do you do in your free time, when you’re not working? Maybe it has something to do with that.”
“Not much. I mean, I go out to eat. Some sightseeing. Maybe grab a drink. You know, nothing unusual. Nothing illegal.”
“What about before you moved here?”
“I was in college. Just graduated from Ohio State.”
“Any chance it’s related to something that happened there?”
Shawn frowned. “I doubt it. I mean, I haven’t done anything worth watching.”
Harrington tugged at the bandage on his left hand. “I still wanna go over your schedule for the past month or so. See if we can come up with any leads. Can you swing by the precinct tomorrow morning?”
“Sounds good. I’ll see you then.”
“Take care.”
Shawn got out of the car, and Harrington sped away and disappeared into the backdrop of the city.
Towering over him, the countless windows of the Post Toscana reflected the fiery orange of the setting sun. Its cavernous lobby was empty. Shawn hurried toward the elevators, and the staccato echo of his footsteps followed him. Or was it more than an echo? He glanced over his shoulder. There was no one there, no one following him, but the hair on the back of his neck prickled. He wasn’t alone. He could feel them watching him.
He told himself it was his imagination.
The maglev elevator floated up to the seventeenth floor of the high-rise, and when the doors opened, he hustled toward his apartment. The security system’s facial recognition software unlocked the door as he approached, and he threw himself inside and bolted the door behind him.
He exhaled forcibly and tossed his briefcase on the table, his keys on his briefcase, and poured himself a scotch, straight. To cold comfort and better days. He toasted the empty apartment and downed the contents of the glass. Feeling better and more relaxed, he poured another and opened the freezer.
Why they called these frozen dinners Healthy Option was beyond him. Each meal had enough fat and carbohydrates to feed a small African village for a week. He slipped the tray out of its cardboard box, placed it on the laser oven’s rack, and thumbed the start button.
Shawn stripped off his suit and changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt before falling into the leather couch. “Video on,” he said, and the paper-thin holo-screen unfurled before him and came to life, revealing a series of app icons. “Play news,” he said, and the screen changed to a 3-D rendering of a war correspondent dressed in fatigues and body armor stepping through the rubble-strewn streets of a bombed out city. The banner at the bottom of the image read, Breaking news—US Troops take Palmas.
“—heavy losses in the battle. Miguel Silva, the President of Brazil, says he won’t hesitate from using nuclear retaliation if the United States continues to pursue its war of aggression. Meanwhile, US troops push south toward the capital…”
When the laser oven dinged, Shawn used an oven mitt to transfer his dinner to the kitchen table. As he shoveled a spoonful of potatoes into his mouth and followed it with a swallow of scotch, his door buzzer chimed, echoing throughout the room and vibrating his smartphone. He jerked in surprise and choked on his drink, which sloshed over the side of the glass.
He wiped his hand on his pants and pounded a fist against his sternum until the coughing fit subsided, then turned on his smartphone. The screen displayed a panoramic video of a narrow-faced police officer standing in the Post Toscana’s lobby.
Shawn clicked accept. “Hello?”
The uniform squinted and leaned toward the video camera. The fish-eye lens gave his features caricature-like proportions. “You Shawn Jaffe?” he asked, his words muffled and tinny.
“How can I help you, officer?”
“Name’s Clint Nelson. I hear you had a spot of trouble earlier.”
“It was all pretty crazy.”
On the screen, Nelson glanced over his shoulder, his eyes following something Shawn couldn’t see, then looked back at the camera. “Word on the street is, Harrington owes you big time.”
“I don’t know who told you that. It was no big deal.”
“Harrington told me that.”
Shawn shrugged. “I just did what anybody would’ve done in my shoes.”
Nelson snorted. “Buddy, you got a whole different opinion of human nature than I got. Look, the detective gave me your number. I’ll send you mine. You run into any trouble, gimme a call. Me and my partner are right outside.”
“Thanks, officer.”
Nelson gave a two-fingered salute and disappeared from the screen. Shawn turned off his smartphone and collapsed back in his chair, his body sagging under the weight of the day. He was a man lost at sea, treading water with nothing to cling to, but in the end, he didn’t think it would be exhaustion that did him in but strong hands wrapped around his neck, pushing him under.
Someone knocked on the door, a single, thunderous blow like a coffin slammed shut. Shawn Jaffe jerked and sat up, wiping at bleary eyes. He’d fallen asleep, but he had no idea for how long. He tensed and waited for the door to burst open and someone to charge into the room waving a gun or a knife and wearing a vicious sneer.
Shawn held his breath. Silence followed. He used his smartphone to check the door-mounted security camera. The hallway outside his apartment was empty.
He stood and took a step toward the door. Another step. Licked his lips and swallowed hard. He crept across the hardwood floor without a sound and pressed his palms against the door. Listened. Heard nothing but the thump of his own heart. He glanced at his smartphone again. The hallway on the other side of the door was still empty.
He considered calling Clint Nelson, the uniform he’d spoken to earlier, but if someone had tried to get past the Post Toscana’s secure lobby, the cops would have seen and stopped them. Chances were it had been a neighbor who’d tripped and stumbled into his door or something ridiculous. If that was the case and he called for help, they’d think him a fool jumping at shadows. Then again, maybe better to cry wolf than for
Nelson to find his door standing open and him on his back with stiffening limbs and lifeless eyes.
But he was tired of being afraid. Leaning his weight against the door, he unlocked it and waited for another blow, this one hard enough to send him stumbling back, arms pinwheeling for balance, but it didn’t come. He cracked the door open and scanned the hallway. To the left, nothing but walls painted white and beige carpeting, and to the right, more of the same. Somewhere, an air conditioner hummed. Something at his feet caught his eye. A copy of the New York Times lay there like a benign offering.
The laughter came in a shaky explosion of breath as unsteady as a straw hut in a hurricane. Shawn bent and fetched the newspaper and threw a final glance up and down the hallway before pulling the door shut. If he’d called the cops—oh, that would have been rich.
We found this suspicious-looking character lurking outside your apartment. All we got out of him was the economy’s a mess, ocean levels are on the rise, and Justin Bieber and his kid are in rehab again.
He shook his head and tossed the newspaper onto the kitchen table. A part of his mind screamed a warning that he didn’t have a subscription, and the Times didn’t do home deliveries.
But another part of his mind told him not to worry, it was fine, everything was going to be fine. It was impossible to resist, and a wave of calmness washed over him like a drug.
He sat down, turned to the classified ads, and began to read.
Back at the precinct, Sam Harrington slumped into the chair behind his desk and turned on his monitor, revealing a desktop cluttered with icons strewn about like casualties on a battlefield. Sam clicked one of them, and the footage from the security camera in the lobby of the NYU Medical Center filled the screen. Tiny people scurried into and out of the frame, and he squinted and looked for anyone or anything that didn’t belong—someone with a baseball cap or hood pulled low, someone who glanced over his shoulder one too many times, someone with a package tucked under an arm.
Shawn Jaffe was telling the truth. Sam’s gut told him that, and he believed it, because when someone risked his life to save yours, it put a whole new perspective on things. At the same time, the hit-and-run with the van was no coincidence. Whoever had gripped the wheel had fixed Sam in his sights because of this case.