by Andrew Case
Leave it to the zealot to be rational. Because Leonard was in no position to call this one in. After what he had done that night, he couldn’t walk up to the NYPD, the FBI, and show them what he’d found. He’d be in solitary before they ever looked at the file. But there were places to go other than law enforcement. He tried to sound reassuring when he spoke.
“I have someone who can help. Someone who knows about this all.”
“That isn’t it, Leonard. Look.”
She scrolled to the top of the page. Printed in neat small letters above the schematic was the phrase “Target Schedule.” And a date.
“You see, Leonard, there just isn’t time. That isn’t even tomorrow anymore. That’s today.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
SKETCH
Ralph Mulino kept a chair by his workspace to prop his right knee up. It hurt if it wasn’t elevated, but he couldn’t turn into one of those people that went whole hog and actually put his feet up on the desk. Carving out a private workspace in Property had been challenge enough. He’d had to agree to an early tour, and had been at Gold Street before six. He would lose even this meager perk if anyone thought he looked sloppy. He was piecing together a picture of the cop he was looking for, based on the people he had spoken to on the Ferry. Medium build, curly hair. A couple of people had mentioned that the cop had funny-looking eyes, but no one could quite describe why. It was a picture of an ordinary rookie, like a thousand others who had come out of the academy and got fed into a precinct to figure out for themselves if they were going to be the right or the wrong kind of cop. Most officers know within a year, and most stick with their choice their whole career. If this guy was sneaking off the Staten Island Ferry with people who turned up dead not so long later, though, he was more than the ordinary wrong type of cop. Mulino sipped on his coffee and turned the portrait around on his knee.
“Did you hear?” It was one of the newly reassigned officers. You never ask what they did to get dropped here. Some kind of Russian name. Mansky. They make Russian cops now. Once upon a time, Mulino smiled to himself, they didn’t even have Russian criminals.
“I didn’t hear anything.” Mulino swung his knee down from his chair. Standing in the doorway, Detective Mansky couldn’t have been more than five-foot-two but had a thick neck and shoulders that could lift a truck. He had been at OCCB too. All of twenty-five years old, he already had his detective’s badge and was ready at a moment’s notice to go out on the street and start busting heads. Probably had busted one too many before getting word he was going to the Property Clerk. Mulino remembered what that felt like. Mansky had a copy of the Daily News in his hand.
“A cop got killed last night.”
He dropped the paper on Mulino’s desk. The massive typeface screamed out: COP DROPPED SIX STORIES. The obligatory photo of the body in the street, far enough away and covered with a sheet so that it still seemed tasteful. So you couldn’t see the blood or the pieces of tooth and the arms bent the wrong way like it must have looked when they first found him. And an inset picture—the academy graduation photo of the poor sap. Taken just before he threw his cap in the air and set out for that miserable first assignment standing security in Times Square. Fourth of July if you’re the summer academy, New Year’s Eve if you’re the winter. Either way, the Force gets to show you that being a cop means standing around somewhere uncomfortable for hours while other people get to have a good time.
Mulino picked up the paper and stared again. He knew that photo. He had spoken to that cop. The curly hair, the silly grin. The kind of spacey eyes. He should have figured it out to begin with. He nodded to himself; he didn’t want to tip off Mansky that he had seen anything in the story other than what everyone else could find. Mulino looked down and confirmed the officer’s name. Joey Del Rio. The Harbor Patrol. He picked up the paper.
Detective Mansky shrugged at him. “Don’t bother asking or anything. I’ve already read it.”
“Thank you, Detective. I’ll get it right back to you.”
Mulino opened the paper and looked at the inside story. The cop had been thrown out the window of the apartment where Commissioner Davenport used to live. He scanned down the page. They had a sketch here too, based on a description given to them by the guard at the building, who said someone who seemed to be a plainclothes cop had been up at the apartment.
Mulino looked over the sketch. That one looked pretty familiar too. It was a face he’d seen a lot recently. Mulino sprung up from his seat and ran out of his office.
CHAPTER FORTY
AWAKE
Leonard stared into Joey Del Rio’s face, awash in pepper spray, suspended in the dark. The cop was floating, holding steady as though he were bobbing in surf. He cocked his head to the side, squinting through the pain, and he whispered. Leonard leaned out over the railing, straining to hear. He wondered what was holding the cop in the air—he wasn’t hanging on the railing and there was nothing but dead air below him. As Leonard moved closer, Del Rio smiled sickeningly and grabbed his arm. The cop’s face suddenly contorted, and as Leonard looked down, his arms caught, he was staring at Roshni Saal. They both flew over the edge together. She grabbed Leonard tight as they fell toward the sidewalk below, coming at them quick, hard, and final.
Leonard shot up onto his hands and knees on the floor of the deserted office. His breath was fluttering and he couldn’t slow his heart. He had slumped off of the chair and onto the concrete floor sometime in the night. The dream had seemed all too real. Del Rio’s face was too much like the one that had actually sped toward death the night before. Roshni didn’t know the danger she was in by helping him. Leonard’s body was still sore, but his head was suddenly, brutally clear. He was still hot. He was thirsty and he had slept in his clothes. But he was a wanted man with a murder to solve, so there was no time to rest.
He stood and looked around. It was early, not much past six, but daylight already was scorching the office. It was hot and bright and would just get worse from here. The computers were humming away, scouring the world for little tragedies. The one he and Roshni had been staring at before he crashed was still open, Davenport’s data still up. Idlewild Construction. A new building, one he and Roshni had both recognized. A series of schematics. It was happening today.
He had already started to put together a plan. But he was sweaty and his clothes were old, and he wouldn’t be surprised if you could find blood if you looked closely at them. Roshni herself was nowhere to be seen. He felt a quick jolt, a sudden convulsion like you sometimes get on the verge of sleep, and it snapped him awake. His first thought was the weapon; he looked to the counter. It was still there. Next to it a cell phone. Next to the cell phone a written note. A four-digit security code and a single sentence. I can always say you stole it from me. Good luck. Roshni.
So she wasn’t going to be part of his plan after all. Maybe it was the gun. Or maybe she had checked the news this morning. It was certain to be out there by now. It wouldn’t have taken her long to put together what had happened. Either she didn’t want to join him because she was afraid for her safety or she didn’t want to join him because he had killed someone. Or both. It didn’t really matter. But she was willing to help a little. To leave behind the phone. He had ditched his own so he wouldn’t be traced. The police wouldn’t think to track hers. Or maybe they had been tracking it for years; keeping up with activists and critics was part of their business. But they wouldn’t know it had anything to do with Leonard Mitchell. Leonard turned on the phone and entered the code. It sprung to life, fully charged. He scrolled through the apps and found at least one thing that was sure to be useful. Maybe even more useful than the gun.
The gun was necessary, even if Leonard looked guilty as hell with it prying open the back of his pants. He untucked his shirt. As long as he stood very straight, the shirt would drape over it so you wouldn’t notice. He checked the time on the phone. Nearly seven. He had only been
asleep three hours, but he felt more refreshed than ever before in his life. He had a purpose now. He slipped the phone into his pocket, secured the gun, and stepped out to meet a ready world.
He set out for the subway, crossing toward Whitman again, careful to stand rigid so that no one could make out the silhouette of the gun in the back of his pants. As he approached the project, the smell of rotting trash was now constant. Overnight, more loads of garbage had been dumped helter-skelter across the sidewalks. Heavy black contractor sacks had been ripped open by rats or vagrants. Kitchen refuse spilled open into the street, strewing empty cartons from microwaved meals, specked with hardened bits of melted cheese.
Leonard walked into the Whitman courtyard and the scene was worse. At the base of the building, on the two sides where anyone still lived, people had simply thrown their trash out the windows. Along the curtilage, ramparts of waste had piled up: broken beer bottles, diapers leaking stool, shoals of plastic packaging, greased paper towels. It all seeped into the abandoned flower beds clinging to the building. Leonard couldn’t pass by without starting to retch. He walked through the underpass with the tail of his shirt over his face and mouth, hoping to catch a whiff of the expressway and the relatively pleasant diesel exhaust. He remembered that he couldn’t hold up his shirt without exposing the gun and let it drop.
The residue of poverty lay crumpled alongside the gutters of the building—condoms, sure, and a couple of spent shells, and torn pieces of clothing, broken CDs, and a dog collar. No needles to speak of; the cops put enough heat on the residents to ensure that drugs were kept indoors. Leonard crept past the courtyard. It was still and quiet, no sign of cops filing past to figure out who may have dumped a body in the river. Not yet. The streets were a mess and those unlucky enough to be out and about were stumbling through the general stench.
Leonard crossed the street and headed toward the subway. He had a dead cop’s gun and a missing woman’s phone. The only thing he had that was his own was his badge. He had the rest of the day to stop a disaster and clear his name. He would need help, and the people most likely to want to help him were dead or vanished. He pulled out the phone and thought a minute. There was one person he had to call before heading out into the world.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
WALL STREET
Wall Street was in full gear by ten past seven, but not with bankers. As Leonard stepped out of the subway, the corner of Wall and Broad bellowed with the breakfast-cart men, the shoe shiners, and the parasites who hawk statuettes of the Twin Towers wrapped indecorously with a pink ribbon. Every day these stalwarts ply their trade with the sunrise. Leonard watched the parade from above the fray on the steps of Federal Hall. No one looks up in New York, especially not on Wall Street. He stood behind the statue of Washington, checking the crowd to see that he hadn’t been followed. It was safe to use the phone, at least for the moment. Scrolling through it that morning, before making the phone call to set his plan in motion, he had seen that Roshni had a membership at a fancy gym. The silk suits had to come from somewhere, and wherever that was, it was paying for a raft of little luxuries. The gym was only a block away. Veronica’s office was just up the street.
He set out through the crowd. Stiff carts were piled with thin coffee and thick donuts, the small men inside them sweating onto their tin floors. Bored cops with M-16s stood in front of the Exchange, assigned to elite units with hubristic names—“Hercules,” “Samson,” “Archangel”—wishing desperately to lean toward each other and gab about the Yankees like everyone else. And hurried men in blue trading smocks, their oversized numbers pinned to them like tags on so much livestock, snuck cigarettes before dashing inside and running madcap from one terminal to another at the behest of the suits floating around them. A short lull in the carnival, before the whole thing started up again inside. No one had looked up. No one had noticed him. He was safe for the moment as he sidled through the revolving door.
The gym was howling with noise—the midlevel functionaries who keep the Street rolling and can’t step out for a long lunch spend their morning pedaling or running or treading to prepare themselves for a grueling day sitting at a desk. Leonard took out Roshni’s phone and walked toward the turnstiles. He acted as casually as he could while scanning the phone and grabbing a towel. A profile blinked up on her display, a picture of Roshni in the top left corner. Leonard prepared for a minute to explain—plenty of people show up for their trainers looking disheveled and broken, trying to nudge themselves back toward looking like the person in their picture. But not too many show up about six inches taller and the wrong gender and race. But the woman just nodded at the beep and barely looked up from her copy of the Daily News. The cover sported a body lying on Perry Street, covered in a sheet. And an insert of a cop’s academy photo, his curly hair popping out from around his hat, framing his spacey eyes. The byline by Leonard’s old friend Tony Licata. Leonard stared at the ground and double-timed his steps into the showers.
They would have some kind of picture of him after the fold. A sketch if they had spoken to the guard, or a photo and his name if they had lifted prints. There would certainly be a description of what he was wearing. He made a quick adjustment to his plan. Getting a shower would not be enough. Leonard looked around before sliding the gun into a locker. No one had noticed. He wriggled out of his clothes and laid them on top of the weapon. He turned off the phone and left it in the locker. He padded toward the shower and turned it on.
After two days where he felt as though he was one step from living on the street, the shower was pure bliss. The blast ran his sweat off of him, the grease behind his ears slid away, and whatever had collected under his fingernails and between his toes rushed down the drain. The wound in his shoulder seared with pain as the water rushed over it. He stretched his arm. Only when it was fully extended did he feel any pain. He indulged in the water as it brought his skin and sinuses back to life. But he couldn’t linger.
He toweled off and combed his hair. He opened his locker. The cell phone would only take him so far. The clothes were rancid and probably part of a description to boot. He looked down the row of lockers. There was no one in the room. Only about half of the lockers had locks on them. He tried one of the open ones, then another. Nothing inside. He opened the third one and saw an undershirt, a pink dress shirt, a suit. The uniform of a man too important to lock up his clothing at a place like this. Leonard checked the suit; it was a 42. Maybe a little bulky, but he couldn’t be picky. One quick glance to be sure no one was watching, and he slipped into the outfit. He turned to his own locker and grabbed the cell phone and the papers from the Harbor Patrol. He was pretty good at getting a suit on quickly. As soon as he had the coat on, he twisted over and tucked the gun into the back of the waistband. A cop’s favorite place to sense a bulge. A suit jacket covered it better than his shirt had, but still not well enough. He pulled a pair of shoes from the stolen locker and started to slip his feet into them. They were too small.
“Hey.”
A soft little man, a few inches shorter than Leonard, stood wrapped in a towel, about four feet away. Leonard looked up. He looked out the door of the locker room. He might be able to make it, but he didn’t have any shoes on.
“That’s my suit, man. What do you think you’re doing?”
Leonard played dumb. It could buy him twenty seconds, no more. “Really? I didn’t even notice. I guess I’m thinking about too many other things.”
“You just put my whole suit on. What do you mean you’re thinking about other things?”
The man was too surprised to be suspicious of Leonard. He walked just close enough, and Leonard reeled back and landed a roundhouse, hard but a little high. He had to swing with his left hand and he only grazed the man across the forehead. The banker dropped his towel and splayed naked on the floor. Leonard ran to his own locker and whipped out his beat-up shoes before dashing out into the gym. No time to put them on. The man was alrea
dy standing up running after him.
“Hey! That guy stole my clothes!”
Leonard ran out into the gym at full speed. People’s arms were glued to their ellipticals and their eyes were pinned to the morning news, so he had a jump start before anyone heard the shouts from the locker room. Or before they saw the naked man running out after him, jiggling too much to be a regular.
The woman at the front desk was looking up from her paper now. She was the only one between Leonard and the revolving front door. His shoes in one hand, he barreled toward her, the naked man gaining behind him.
“Sir, you have to stop. I can’t let you—”
He feinted to the left and she took a step to stop him before he doubled back to the right and hurdled the turnstile into the gym’s lobby. He rushed through the front steps and out into the busy street. His feet hurt on the pavement, and he was already starting to sweat again, but he couldn’t turn back now. His shoulder was a dull ache, without the stinging pain that had been shouting at him for the last two days. He rushed around the corner to the subway, darting through the crowd. He had left the phone behind, but at least he still had the gun. And the evidence from Davenport’s apartment.
A new migration was starting outside on the street. Bankers sweeping softly from the trains to the towers on leather-soled shoes that never seemed to touch the ground. Crisp ironed men bounced from subway to revolving doors, wearing suits and ties in the summer without breaking a sweat. Leonard barreled through the crowd as though he were just another merchant trying to catch the bell. Even the heavily armed cops patrolling the stock exchange barely looked up at another man in a suit rushing down the street. They were on the lookout for terrorists, and only terrorists. Minor crimes like snatching a wallet or bilking investors or ripping off the local sports club wouldn’t register with them, particularly when the guy who is being chased down the street doesn’t look much like an Arab.