Soft Target

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Soft Target Page 11

by Rachel Brune


  Eddie stood up and stretched. He wasn’t used to hunching over a computer for long periods. He had learned the basics of several computer applications in a prison course a couple of years ago, but hadn’t been able to afford his own machine that he could sit at all day. But since Alan had given him this new project, and the laptop he was using, that seemed like all he had been doing.

  Alan looked down at the map spread across the table. The New York City subway sprawled across the page in various colors. About five major subway hubs were circled in red with a series of numbers next to them.

  “You figure out Atlantic Avenue yet?” asked Alan.

  “No.” Eddie frowned. “I might need to pick a different hub.”

  “Let me know what you find,” said Alan.

  “This would be easier if I could just go there,” said Eddie, wiping at his eyes.

  “Absolutely not,” said Alan.

  “Why not?” asked Eddie. “It would probably be faster than this.”

  Alan stared at him. “No.”

  Eddie waited. Alan didn’t elaborate.

  “Fine,” said Eddie. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Good,” said Alan. “I’ve got to leave this afternoon. When I come back, I want to see what you have.”

  “Yes, boss.” Eddie watched as Alan went into the living room and disappeared into his room. He and Abdel emerged a short time later and headed out the door. Once they had left, he waited another ten minutes to make sure they were gone. He got up from the table, opened the cabinet beneath the sink. He stepped back in case any of the creatures that lived under there decided to make a break for it. Satisfied there’d be no invasion, he reached behind the pipes and pulled out the two bottles he had stashed there earlier.

  Eddie walked into the living room, wiping the dust and grime off of the bottles. Marcus and Dodger lounged on the sofa, smoking and watching a baseball game. Eddie handed them the beers.

  “Hey man, thanks,” said Marcus.

  “No problem,” said Eddie. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but Alan’s got a bug up his ass about the beer. Those two guys he’s got are getting on his case or something.”

  Marcus snorted. Dodger thought up an ethnic slur, but didn’t get a chance to interject it into the conversation.

  “Sit down, man,” said Marcus.

  “Can’t,” said Eddie. The television caught his eye. The Yankees were down by two, with runners on first and third base. As they watched, the batter tipped a pop fly to center field, handily caught by the Red Sox outfielder. “Shit.”

  Eddie turned back into the kitchen and sat down at the computer. He stared into space, then back down at the map. He pulled a pad out of from under the map and looked at what he had written. Two columns of block letters were centered on the page. The first column was a list of ten subway stations, all of them large hubs where two or three lines came together. The second column, matched closely with the first, was a list of internet cafés and their addresses.

  Alan hadn’t told Eddie why he was looking up these addresses, but had only directed him on what he needed to do and which Web sites he could use. Sighing, Eddie pulled Google Maps up on his browser. This project reminded him of doing homework, a task he had successfully avoided during school. At least this time, he was getting paid for it.

  Using the search engine, Eddie typed: “atlantic ave subway station.” The screen brought up a map of the city, with small icons denoting the stations. He found the option for “Street View” and was slowly taken to a traffic camera-eye view of the station and the surrounding streets. There was a good mixture of a wide street and a narrower side street. Eddie pictured the area at various times of the day. There might be a problem with heavy traffic, but Alan had specified that he should look at the area in terms of walking and running. Whatever was happening, there apparently wasn’t going to be a getaway car. Eddie sighed. He hated walking.

  Using another feature of the site, Eddie typed “internet café” and waited a short while for the search engine to find what he was looking for. Alan had paid for the internet, but it wasn’t the best, and with each security precaution the boss added, the slower the connection ran. Finally, the search results resolved on the screen. He picked the closest address and then wrote the station and the café in their appropriate columns on his pad. The café was more than five blocks away from the station, but it was the best he could do. He hoped the walk wasn’t too long; otherwise, Alan’s timing was going to be upset.

  Eddie closed the laptop, folded the map, and stashed them in one of the few cupboards with a door that closed all the way. He wandered into the living room and sat down again.

  The door to Alan’s room opened and Said walked out. Dodger and Marcus immediately dropped their hands to hide their beers. Eddie stared at Said, met his glance. The two looked at each other for a long time.

  “You need something, man?” asked Eddie.

  Marcus and Dodger stared intently at the television.

  “No, I’m just going out to run an errand,” said Said. His English was thickly accented. Eddie wasn’t used to asking questions, but this man made him uneasy. “Your television is very loud.”

  “Game’ll be over soon,” said Eddie.

  “Ah,” said Said. He hesitated, as if there was something more he wanted to say, but instead, turned and walked out. Eddie waited until the door slammed behind the other man before turning back to the television.

  “Damn,” said Marcus. “That man is one freaky dude.”

  “Raghead,” said Dodger, finally getting to contribute to the conversation.

  “Whatever,” said Eddie, and used the remote to turn up the sound on the game.

  The others became engrossed in the game again, but Eddie turned once more to look at Alan’s room. Said had left the door ajar.

  Eddie tried to go back to the game, but the sliver of light coming from behind the door proved too much. He had never claimed to be overly smart, and he knew it was dumb, but he stood up and walked softly over to the room.

  “What are you doing, man?” asked Marcus.

  “Nothing,” said Eddie. “Just going to check something out.”

  He pushed open the door. His eye fell across the one bed, neatly made up. In the corner of the room, two sleeping bags were rolled neatly. Three small rugs, also rolled, were lined up next to them. There was no closet, only a small dresser with three drawers. Atop the dresser, Eddie spotted a closed laptop. It sat next to the bag of firearms.

  Eddie spared one last glance over his shoulder, then slipped into the room. He skirted the cans of ammunition stacked against the wall and walked to the table. The drone of the television in the next room covered the panting from his suddenly dry mouth. Atop the dresser, papers sat piled neatly next to the laptop. Eddie left the laptop where it was. Alan’s paranoia probably had it locked down tight, and his own skills were barely past the level of turning on the computer and opening a Web browser. Instead, he moved a small Turkish-Arabic dictionary off of the pile and began paging through the papers on the dresser.

  Most of the papers were clipped together in three- to five-sheet stacks. The first few sheets were in either Arabic script or a half-familiar language with letters marked with strange accents and slashes. The last papers in the small stack looked somewhat familiar. Eddie had only flown once in his life, down to Dover Air Force Base when his brother’s body was flown back from Iraq. Alec, who had traded one gun for another, was flown home six months before Eddie went to prison, and Eddie had shepherded his grandmother through the airport, the flight, and the funeral.

  Eddie shook his head and kept looking. He didn’t know what Alan had in mind, but the flight itineraries didn’t make it seem like he was planning on a round-trip. Thoughts of buildings burning flickered in the back of his mind.

  He opened the top drawer of the dresser and began pawing through it. Jammed into the back of the drawer were subway maps and a stack of folded bus schedules. He pushed around these quickl
y, then pulled out four individually-wrapped Metrocards. Eddie picked them up and looked at them closely, but they seemed perfectly normal. He spared a thought to wonder why there were only four, then dropped them back in the drawer and pulled out the subway map. Unfolding it, he began tracing the familiar colored lines of the New York City subway. He noticed something different.

  Eddie held the map up to see better, intrigued at the small shaded circles in different colors than he had ever seen before on a subway map. They looked almost like they were printed on the map in their regularity and even shading, but upon closer examination, he realized they were carefully traced and shaded with fine-tip marker. The five small, shaded ovals radiated out from various points in the city, three in midtown, one in Union Square, and one a little further downtown. Eddie didn’t really hang around those areas, but he knew what was there.

  The silence in the other room began to drown out the effort of making the connections the map offered. Eddie cocked his head. His heart rate sped up, without his realization or knowledge. He only realized his fingers had begun to shake when he had trouble folding the map back into place.

  Eddie cringed to one side as he felt Alan’s fist swinging toward the back of his head. He dropped the map and scrambled backward, hands flinging up in front of his face. Alan’s follow-up caught him square in the face and the sudden sharp pain teared his eyes and started the slow drip of blood from his nose. Grabbing at his face, swatting ineffectually at Alan’s punches, Eddie crabbed sideways toward where he thought the door had been. His fingers touched the doorjamb, then were shoved away. Confused, Eddie pushed again, and Said pushed him back into the room. Over his shoulder, Eddie glimpsed Marcus and Dodger, silently watching.

  Alan’s punch landed on the side of Eddie’s head, and he felt his knees wobble. He clutched the door, and Alan grabbed his head again and rammed it twice, hard, into the molding. He let go and Eddie sat down hard. He frowned. His arms and legs twitched, not in the direction he was trying to go. He looked up, confused.

  “Stay out of here,” said Alan.

  “Yeah, man, all right,” said Eddie. It came out “walllrrrah,” and he spit blood after it.

  Alan hunkered down, held his head, forced him to look up. “Come in here again, and I’ll kill you.”

  Eddie slurred his consent.

  Said pushed him the rest of the way out of the room, then closed the door behind him.

  He spoke softly, in Arabic. “Do we have something to worry about?”

  “No,” said Alan. He took the map off the floor, folded it neatly, and placed it back in the desk. He shuffled the stack of papers into the drawer and locked it. “There was nothing here for them to see and no one for them to tell.”

  In the living room, Marcus and Dodger tried to lead Eddie to the couch, but he shook them off. He pushed them away and staggered into the kitchen. He ran some water over a towel and blotted away most of the blood on his face. Throwing some ice in the towel, he put it to his cheek and ear, where Alan had placed the punch that almost knocked him out. He sat down at the kitchen table, rested his head on the ice towel, and passed out.

  * * *

  “Did you know your roommate is handcuffed to his bed?”

  Scott ignored Mark’s question. The television was tuned to the Fox News Channel, and he was watching a piece on the preparations a shelter was making for Thanksgiving Day for homeless veterans. Mark turned to watch the footage, noticing that some of the men lined up outside the shelter were not much older than him. He wondered if there was a story in that, in the changing face of the American combat veteran, then dismissed the idea to the ghost of Taggert’s laughter.

  The story faded to an infomercial for some new kitchen gadget, and Scott refocused on Mark standing by his bed.

  “What do you want?” asked Mabry.

  Mark nudged the wheelchair next to him. It moved forward a bit. Scott stared at it with distaste. A plastic bag rustled in the seat.

  “I came to get you out of here,” said Mark.

  “I’m not leaving in that,” said Scott.

  “Doctor’s orders,” said Mark.

  “You’re a butt-ugly nurse,” said Scott.

  “Yeah,” said Mark. “But I’ve got your hall pass out of here.”

  Mark held up the bag.

  “What’s that?” asked Scott.

  “Clothes.”

  Mabry stared at him in horror. “You went clothes shopping for me?”

  “You want to leave here naked, hero?” asked Mark.

  Mabry grunted. Holding his stomach, he pushed himself to a seated position. He wondered when in his life Mark had become the guy to come get him out of the hospital.

  “Whoa,” said Mark. “You sure you’re okay? The doc said you could leave, but I can come back tomorrow.”

  “I’m fine.” Mabry held out his hand for the plastic bag. Mark gave it to him. He looked inside. Mark had brought him an extra large NYPD sweatsuit. “Gee. Thanks.”

  Mabry shuffled carefully into the bathroom to change. Even with the larger size, he had some trouble fitting the sweatshirt over his shoulders. He pulled on the black knit cap Mark had brought. The cheap sneakers the reporter had bought were the only problem. Try as he could, he couldn’t fit the back of his heel into them. He finally threw them back in the bag and came out.

  “Let’s go.”

  Mark pushed the wheelchair toward him.

  “Oh no.” Mabry shook his head. “Forget it.”

  “I’ll call the nurse,” said Mark. “He’s a pretty big guy.”

  Scott sighed and assessed the situation. Whether he liked it or not, the outcome was going to be pretty much the same—him, wheeled out of the hospital, going home in his socks. As much as it bothered him, the pain lodged behind his eyes and radiating out from his midsection outweighed any difficulty he was willing to endure to get his way, and so he ungracefully ceded to Mark’s directions.

  There was an energy to the city and it filtered up past the lamplit gloom, through the fast-falling twilight, into the brightly-lit fluorescents of the nurses’ station. It reflected in the quick, efficient movements of the hospital workers as they went about their rounds. Scott Mabry drifted through the sterile halls, growing numb under the influence of the medication he had accepted at checkout. He had briefly attempted to act his way through the discharge, but the doctor had handed him a small bottle of a few pills, and he hadn’t put up as much resistance as he planned.

  On the sidewalk, Mark helped him out of the wheelchair and into a yellow cab. He handed Scott money for the ride. Scott thought about protesting, but the words died somewhere in the realization that he had no idea where his wallet and keys were.

  “Hey,” said Scott. “Did they give you my wallet or keys?”

  Mark flushed, embarrassed as he dug in the pockets of his trench coat and handed over the items.

  “Thanks,” said Mabry.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Mark.

  There was an awkward silence. Mark closed the door and cab pulled away.

  From inside the cab, Mabry looked up at the rolling canyons of mid-town Manhattan. The neon lights glowed and whimpered, and he gazed past black-clad crowds hurrying their ways into the labyrinth of the city. Scott loved New York, and couldn’t imagine moving or living anywhere else. But his time away outside the city made it harder each time to come home.

  Chapter Twelve

  Christmas was on its way. Even the homeless veteran panhandling for change at the subway interchange was wearing a Santa hat. It was only November 30th, and Scott was already heartily sick of the holiday spirit.

  Scott wasn’t a television cop. He took his suspension from the Task Force seriously and stayed away from the Manhattan offices, instead filling his days working at his Army Reserve unit.

  It wasn’t a drill weekend, but Mabry had found that as a company commander, even a Reservist CO, if he didn’t come in on some extra days, the amount of administrative and organizational work he ne
eded to take care of would get out of hand. Even a Reserve unit could not be completely unmanned all the time, and this Friday, his active duty regulars were holding down shop. Specialist Fitch, an administrative specialist, and Sergeant Fuentes, his supply sergeant, were around somewhere getting ready for the influx of weekend warriors. This coming weekend, the military police Reservists were slated to drive in a convoy to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to conduct two days of training at the mock internment facility there.

  Mabry poked his head out of the office. “Fuentes!”

  There was no answer. Mabry sighed and looked down at the paperwork. He was pretty sure they had ordered enough blank ammunition for the weekend, but it wouldn’t hurt to double check. All he needed was a bunch of hapless Reservists running around yelling “Bang, bang!” at each other because someone forgot to order ammo. He would have laughed at the thought, except it was a true story. He sighed and tried again: “Fuentes!”

  “Here, sir.” Sergeant Fuentes came around the corner eating a microwaveable calzone.

  “Can you interpret this for me?” Mabry asked.

  The sergeant looked at him, then put the calzone down and slowly wiped his fingers. “Yes, sir, too easy.”

  As Mabry listened to Fuentes explain the columns and how they added up, he felt himself fading away, anchored only by the uniform he was relieved to put back on each morning. Finally, he realized that Fuentes had stopped speaking. The silence was instead filled by the noise of a saccharine Christmas commercial. Mabry felt the bile rise in his throat. It was about the fifth one in as many minutes.

  “Okay, thanks,” said Mabry. “Listen, if anyone needs me, I’ll be down in the motor pool.”

  Scott intentionally let the door to the motor pool garage slam behind him. As he suspected, his entrance caused the three soldiers clustered around the open hood of a Humvee to jump in guilty surprise. It wasn’t that they were doing anything wrong, but they had already accomplished most of the small amount of work to do and were counting the empty hours until the end of the day.

 

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