Half-Past Dawn

CHAPTER 19

After finding out about the ominous warning on Jack’s arm, Frank, Jack, and Joy agreed that there was one thing that held the answers they needed. Whatever was in the evidence case had frightened Mia as if it were death come to claim her soul. Jack beat himself up for respecting her wishes and for not forcing her to tell him what she was involved in, the gift of hindsight condemning him. The three agreed that the answer to finding Mia was not in the tattoo on Jack’s arm; it was in the case.

It was just after 12:30 when Frank walked through the lobby of the Tombs. There was no need to flash his badge, as he was greeted by his first name at every checkpoint he went through.

“Your disappearance from the force was just a rumor, hey?” the skinny guard with washed-out skin said as he stood up from the central reception desk.

“Good to see you,” Frank said as he offered his hand, shaking Larry’s warmly.

“I knew you wouldn’t be gone for long. You’re here about sublevel five?”

Frank was shocked that the young guard would know where he was going. “As a matter of fact…”

“I hate when the feds go sniffing around in our business.”

Frank didn’t respond, although his mind was already spinning.

“Surprised they didn’t call you in earlier.” Larry flicked the button under his desk, releasing the security lock to his gate and allowing Frank to enter the central lobby.

Frank walked through and headed for the bank of elevators against the far wall, then turned back to Larry.

“Thanks, Larry.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Larry said with a nod before returning to his post.

As Frank hit the elevator button, he knew that things were about to go far off track. If the feds were in sublevel five, the situation that couldn’t get worse was already well past that point.

As the elevator doors opened on sublevel five, Frank saw yellow police tape stretched the length of the small lobby. Several black rolling cases of various sizes sat in the corner as if someone was moving in. Two men in dark suits said nothing as they stepped into the cab, not waiting for Frank to disembark, and hit the button for the ground floor.

Frank walked out, shaking his head. He ducked under the tape and stepped to the glass window, pulling out and placing his ID flush with the glass, rapping on the window with his knuckles.

Charlie spun around in his desk chair, his usually cheery face awash in grief.

“Frank,” Charlie said with relief.

“Hey, Charlie.” Frank nodded.

“This is god-awful.” Charlie’s usually perfect tie was askew, his hair mussed, making him look like someone at the end of a forty-eight hour shift. But Charlie had just arrived. “Their poor kids, both parents, how do you tell a kid their mother and father aren’t coming back?”

Frank nodded, wishing he could wipe away the pain with the simple truth, but that was out of the question for the moment.

Charlie glanced at Frank’s ID and buzzed the door. Frank pulled open the steel security door as the release buzzer screamed in his ear and headed straight into Charlie’s small office.

“Police tape?” Frank said. “What the hell?”

“Feds are here, looking for an evidence case they say belongs to them.”

“And that would be down here because…”

“They say Jack Keeler hid it down here for his wife.”

“Did he?” Frank wasn’t sure how much Charlie was involved.

“They’re not going to find anything,” Charlie said in unspoken understanding. “They come down here thinking they’re smarter, that we’re just a bunch of cops out of a Keystone movie.”

“The feds are always so charming.”

“Yes, we are.”

Frank turned to see a tall man, thin and wiry, standing ramrod-straight in the doorway, his head seeming a little large for his body, what little hair he possessed buzz-cut short. The exhaustion in his eyes left no doubt that the man hadn’t slept in days; the dark circles and humorless expression were not what anyone was accustomed to seeing in Gene Tierney. The FBI’s assistant director in charge of the New York field office was known for his sense of humor, a dark, dry wit honed over a twenty-five-year career, which Frank had come across on several occasions. Frank would never consider Tierney to be a friend, but he respected him, which was something he could only say about one other FBI agent, and nobody knew where she was right now.

“Since when are you back on the force?” Tierney quickly said.

“What the hell’s going on?” Frank asked.

Tierney stood there, troubled, mulling over Frank’s question. “We’re looking for an evidence box that Mia Keeler had, and it seems to have disappeared.”

“And why would it be here?”

“Mia’s smart. We believe she asked her husband to hide it down here.”

“So you think Mia was hiding evidence and Jack was committing political suicide?”

“No, I didn’t say that. But as with everything, there’s more to the story that none of us knows.”

“Do you know what’s in the case?”

“Evidence from a murder investigation.”

“And you think Jack and Mia are somehow involved?”

“Nobody is accusing them of wrongdoing. I’ve known Mia since she was a senior in high school, and her father forever. If she did something like this, she did it for a reason.”

“So all this to figure out that reason, you just come in and take over?”

Tierney took a moment, running his hands through his bristly hair. “We got the mayor, the governor, and we have a warrant, which I haven’t needed to wave around, because everyone is trying to work together on this. We’re not saying Jack or Mia did anything wrong, but something got them killed. And we need that evidence case.”

“So what’s taking so long? You’ve got a whole team down here, and you can’t find it?”

“Nothing is in the system,” Charlie cut in.

“He’s smart. He didn’t log it in, which means either someone was helping him”-Tierney paused as he looked from Charlie to Frank-“Or he tucked it into some other case file.”

“The DA’s office has thousands of active cases. Are you telling me you’re going to go through every evidence file?”

“Welcome to my hell,” Tierney said as he took a step into the evidence room. Frank followed him into the enormous storage space. Frank had been in there too many times to count.

“Do you mind if I take a walk around?”

“Yes, I do,” Tierney said, a tired tone of suspicion in his voice. “Until you tell me why someone who was so anxious to retire and get away from all of this is back.”

Frank stared at him a moment. “You and I both know it was no accident; otherwise, you wouldn’t be down here.”

“It’s no coincidence that we’re both here right now. I know what I’m looking for. Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for?”

Frank’s mind was scrambling. He was never one for lies, always spitting out the truth before his mind could hold it in check.

“I heard you guys were here, something that’s never happened before. Like you said, no coincidence.”

“We’ve spent the entire morning looking at every ongoing case that Keeler was working on.”

“And nothing is missing.”

“Nothing’s missing.”

“You really give a shit if I look around?”

“Actually, I do, unless you’ve got something to offer, something that might point us in a direction?”

Frank nodded, looking down the corridor at the rows upon rows of enormous shelves of evidence. A group of white-shirt analysts sat at four makeshift tables, computers and boxes before them. They checked each and every case, pulling out files, guns, bags of drugs, whatever the box might hold, logging the information on their clipboards and computers. Two young agents wandered around, each one no more than thirty, eyes alive, their pistols visible on their belts.

Frank turned his eyes back down the central aisle, all the way to the end, all the way down to row Y, where he knew the case was hidden away. Second shelf from the top, seven feet up, Jack had said, a white bar code sticker on the top.

“No offense, Frank,” Tierney said.

“It’s OK, I understand.” He did understand, but he was seething nevertheless. Mia’s evidence case just slipped further away. “What the heck happens to any cop looking to log evidence in?”

“We have no problem with anything coming in,” Tierney said. “We’re not going to interrupt the process of law, but this place is under lockdown. Nothing goes out until Monday, and that’s after being thoroughly inspected.

“Your suspicions only further confirm ours. Someone is after this case, and I think we’ve seen how far they’re willing to go to get it. So, I’m keeping a team here until we get to the bottom of this. You guys may have great security, but a few extra guns never hurt. If that box is down here, it’s not leaving with anyone but me.”

Jack sat in Frank’s Jeep. Joy had nodded off beside him, the ordeal of his death and resurrection exhausting her. Jack stared at the rear entrance to the Tombs, feeling impotent, completely and utterly helpless, trapped within a car while Frank did what he should be doing: retrieving Mia’s evidence case. Yet all the while, Jack suspected that the real answer to everything-how he got back to his house, who helped him, who wrote the tattoo on his arm-lay somewhere in his own mind.

As he looked out at the city of New York, at its skyscrapers, its bustling sidewalks, the traffic-filled streets, he knew the search was not out there. The search was within, and all of his efforts should go to cracking open his memory. It was like some cruel puzzle, images, flittering impressions of the night before remaining just out of focus, like waking from a dream that he could no longer remember. While the tattoo was a mystery and the box that they had hidden away held some answers, Jack knew that if he could just recover his memory from after the crash, he would have his solution to find her.

He wondered if his memory loss was from the cancer, the small tumor in his brain manifesting itself in blackouts. Of all places to hit, of all times to attack-Jack thought the twist of fate was beyond cruel. A man known for his mind, for his memory of everything back to his earliest youth, was now rendered a mnemonic cripple. His greatest asset and skill was in solving problems, seeing solutions where others only saw frustration. And now, in his most desperate hour, he was like a novitiate without a guide, no map, no clue to what direction he should take.

It had been nearly fifteen minutes since Frank had ventured inside the Tombs. There was no word, no call on his cell phone, and the silence only confirmed the worst. Mia’s evidence case was deposited two days ago in the one place they both thought secure. She had been insistent on hiding it away from the world, on keeping it out of reach of the people around her, all the while being terrified of its contents-which she never explained. But now that he thought on it, maybe she had. Maybe she had told him everything, what was going on, what scared her, what was in the box, and he just didn’t remember. Jack wanted to scream.

Trying to calm his mind, he once again looked around the bustling streets of downtown Manhattan, and his focus was drawn to a blue Crown Victoria, the standard cop-issue, law-enforcement vehicle, that had come to a stop across the street. There were several of them parked in the reserved NYPD spaces, among the cop cars and prisoner-transport vans, but this one in particular drew his attention for a single reason. The man inside was staring at Frank’s car.

Jack felt it in his gut, deep in his belly. He remained low in the passenger seat, comfortable in his anonymity behind the smoked windows, watching as the man’s eyes alternated between the Jeep and the side door to the Tombs.

A heavy rumble shook the street, the subway that wound its way beneath the city reminding him that much of life was hidden beneath the surface. The man stepped out of his car. He stood just under six feet, his muscled arms stretching the sleeves of his short-sleeved shirt. His blond hair fluttered on the summer breeze, and all at once, Jack realized whom he was looking at.

Joy stirred beside him, opened her eyes, and looked at him staring intently out the window. She followed his gaze to the man across the street.

“Who’s that?” Joy said, her voice hesitant, as if not really wanting the answer.

Jack didn’t break his stare, the moment dragging on to almost the point of forgetting the question. His voice was low and steady as he answered her, although his tone was filled with vengeance. “That’s the man who killed me.”

Frank stepped into the elevator with far more questions than answers. Whatever Mia had stumbled upon was worse than he had imagined. The effort mobilized to recover the case was being overseen by Tierney personally, and the assistant director only took on-site charge of an investigation when the matter had far-reaching implications.

The elevator ride back up into the world seemed to take forever, which suited Frank fine. His mind was churning with scenarios, thoughts, and ideas. He had no intention of leaving the Tombs without the case, no matter how many feds were down there.

As the doors to the lobby opened, Frank pulled out his cell phone, quickly dialing as he continued out into the rear hallway to get cell service.

In the car, Jack sat glaring at the man who shot him at point-blank range, who helped send him hurtling off Rider’s Bridge. Rage clouded Jack’s mind; thoughts of unquenchable revenge were all he could think of. He wanted to leap from the car and kill the man with his bare hands. But his thoughts were interrupted by the ring of his cell phone. He saw Frank’s number and quickly answered it.

“Got it?”

“No,” Frank said, pain in his voice.

“What?”

“It’s a nightmare down there. Seems the whole world is looking for your box. The feds took the place over.”

“Dammit.” Jack slowly exhaled, trying to balance his nerves and focus as his only link to Mia slipped away. “We need that case-”

Jack stopped talking as the rumble of the street momentarily distracted him, but this time it wasn’t the subway. He glanced in the rearview mirror to see a sanitation truck make its way down the road, two workers clinging to the white garbage truck’s side, leaping off, grabbing and dumping waste cans that had been left for pickup. There was a line of cars behind the slow-moving vehicle, windows down, drivers cursing, laying on horns, which, as anyone who lived in a city knew, only made the truck move slower.

Jack turned his attention back to the man across the street.

“Jack?” Frank’s tone was filled with concern.

“Jack,” Joy echoed Frank. She could see the look on her boss’s face and knew it all too well.

But Jack was lost in thought, staring at the blond man who now leaned on the Crown Victoria until he finally tilted the phone toward his mouth. “I’ve got to go-”

“Go?” Frank’s voice grew loud with anger. “Go where?”

“There’s someone I need to talk to-”

“Don’t you dare get out of that car-”

Jack slammed the phone shut, stuck it back into his pocket, and watched the sanitation truck crawl up the street toward him. It finally came to a stop in the middle of the road, clogging traffic while obscuring his view of the Crown Victoria and the man who stood beside it.

“Jack,” Joy said, “don’t even think about it-”

Suddenly, on instinct and against reason, Jack leaped out of the car. Using the large white sanitation truck as cover, he stayed low and circled back around the Crown Victoria.

Just as Jack rounded the back of the truck, coming out behind the blue car, the blond man noticed his approach. The man’s eyes grew wide with shock. He reached for his cell phone, quickly dialing, but before he could lift the phone to his ear, Jack was upon him, knocking the phone away, thrusting him against the car.

“Where’s my wife?” Jack said through gritted teeth, his body like a coiled spring ready to release.

“I watched you die…” the man said in disbelief. He reached for his gun, but Jack snatched it from him, tucking it into the small of his back.

“Where is she?” Jack wrapped his hands around the man’s throat. “I’ll snap your neck.”

While the element of surprise gave Jack the advantage, it was only temporary. The man quickly recovered his wits and, with lightning motion, swept his arms up, freeing himself from the stranglehold. His hand clenched into a fist and in a continuous arc struck Jack in the side of the jaw, stunning and knocking him backward.

The man took off, racing up the street. Without breaking stride, he grabbed his phone from where it lay in the gutter and kept running, dialing on the fly. Jack quickly recovered, regained his footing, and took off in pursuit. He couldn’t afford the world knowing he was alive, not yet. He ran for everything he was worth, knowing that if the call went through, Mia’s already meager life expectancy could drop down to minutes. He pressed on, pushing his legs to the limit.

The man cut across Center Street, up Chambers, and hung a right onto Broadway. He was fast, but Jack was faster, quickly gaining on him. They bobbed and weaved through oncoming traffic, as cars locked up their brakes and tires screeched, trying to avoid the two crazed men who ran through the streets of New York. The blond man leaped a fraction of a second before the front end of a yellow cab plowed into him, his butt sliding across the hood of the car, then practically landing in stride on the street as he fled. Jack didn’t miss a beat as he leaped onto the hood of the cab, jumping to the roof of the next vehicle and back to the sidewalk, landing inches from his prey.

Jack reached out, a hair’s breadth from grabbing him, when the man cut left and raced down a flight of subway entrance stairs, taking five at a time, stumbling but quickly gaining his footing. The man jumped the turnstile and charged along a darkened platform.

Jack never lost distance, hurdling the turnstile, never breaking stride. A moment of panic filled him as he watched the man charge the closing doors of a departing subway car but was quickly relieved as the doors sealed up and the car left the station.

Alone on the vacant platform of the subway, the man jumped onto the tracks and never stopped, the sound of his racing feet echoing through the shadowy, cavernous tunnel as he disappeared into the darkness.

Without hesitation, Jack also jumped to the tracks, the stench of urine and filth filling his lungs as he sprinted and gasped for breath, struggling to keep up with the man ahead of him. The footing grew precarious, the gravel fill intermittent and scattered and the gauged rail ties uneven with his stride.

They were both swallowed by the dark, the only light coming from the green and red subway lights affixed to the walls, their unnatural glow casting staccato shadows.

Jack’s heart pounded in his ears. He had been sprinting for three minutes full-out, farther and faster than he had ever pushed himself.

But the rhythmic thrum was soon obscured. The heavy roar of an approaching train grew by the second, shaking the ground on which they ran and making it even more treacherous.

And then it was there, up ahead, rounding the corner to bear down on them, the wail of the train’s horn shredding their ears as its harsh light blinded them. The subway brakes locked up, sparks flew, and the seized metal wheels let out a screaming cry. There would be no stopping the train in time.

But the blond man never stopped. His silhouette, ten feet ahead, seemed to accelerate as if playing chicken with the thirty-ton train. And then, suddenly, he cut left through an opening in the wall as if he knew it was there all along. The train bore down on Jack, only feet away, milliseconds from crushing him.

He dove through a hole in the wall just as the train roared past, a mix of shrill brakes and rumbling motors. He could feel the heat of the lead car as it barely missed clipping his back.

Jack found himself in an adjacent tunnel, this one without the benefit of the red and green directional lights. The blackness felt like a veil over his senses. He lost his bearings as he turned around, listening for any sign of the man who had shot him. He caught a glimpse of light ahead, coming from above, and approached what he realized was a sidewalk grate.

By the time he felt the man’s presence behind him, it was already too late.

The garrote had already wrapped around his neck.

Frank stood on the platform as the express train roared through the station without stopping. He had caught sight of Jack racing up Center Street and took chase, his body forgetting his age until he was forced to stop and wait for the train to pass. He doubled over, hands on his knees, swallowing air in large gulps. He was in good shape, but he was no match for Jack, who was fifteen years his junior. As the train continued by, Frank took the brief interlude to clear his mind of his anger. He couldn’t have been more specific when telling Jack not to leave the car under any circumstance. After enduring the sight of the evidence room filled with feds and not getting his hands on the evidence case, he was floored to emerge from the building and find Jack out of the car, tossing some stranger against a Crown Victoria.

Before he could shout, the blond man had taken off with Jack in full pursuit. As Frank took up the chase, running with everything his half-century body had, he hoped to God no one recognized his friend; otherwise, what little advantage they had was gone.

As he stared into the dark tunnel where Jack had vanished, he feared the worst. The Lower Manhattan underground was a maze of subway tunnels, viaducts, and abandoned passages dating back almost 150 years, a world where one could get lost forever.

“Where is it?” the man screamed in Jack’s ear.

As the garrote dug into Jack’s neck, he could feel the warm moisture of blood trailing down his back. He struggled, his arms flailing, his head throbbing while his brain screamed out for oxygen. The man had taken him by surprise, positioning himself in the shadows beneath the sidewalk grate, lying in wait.

And then, with the thin wire wrapped tightly around his neck, the man kicked Jack to the ground of the abandoned tunnel, crushing his face into the dirt, where puddles of stench-filled water dotted the ground.

Jack’s rage and anger were no longer directed at the man but were turned on himself for being so easily captured, where he was now about to die, where all hope for saving Mia would die along with him.

“Where is the case?” the man growled in his ear.

The question shocked Jack, and the tables turned as the man slammed his face into a puddle while tightening the garrote. But then the man lifted him out of the water and, to his surprise, loosened the garrote. As Jack gulped for air, drawing in a big breath, his face was shoved into the puddle, where he gasped nothing but water into his lungs. Reflexively choking, the man retightened the garrote, drowning Jack with a mouthful of water.

Jack’s lungs burned as his mind began to turn black, darkness flowing in from the periphery of his vision. He could taste death as if he already knew its flavor.

But then a singular thought filled his mind: it was Mia in all of her beauty, in all of her grace and perfection. If Jack was to die, then she would have no hope, no chance of living, for her captors wouldn’t be letting her go.

Despite all of his valiant thoughts, he lacked the strength to escape his captor. He would die in the darkest recesses of Manhattan, never to be found or heard of again, as if he had already died in the Byram River.

Again, his face was jammed into the puddle, the severe lack of oxygen kicking his body’s automatic response to breathe when the garrote was released. The water flowed deeper into his lungs this time, burning like nothing he had ever felt before. But this time, under the pressure of imminent death, he didn’t see the proverbial light or his family before his eyes; his life didn’t replay like all of the myths.

What Jack saw in a burst of memory was the night before, as if the curtain was momentarily pulled back, allowing him a brief glimpse of something forbidden. Not vivid, more like a recaptured dream. The river raged beneath him as he lay on the shore. The world was filled with shadows beneath the driving rain. All around him were shattered trees and rocks. And the pain came charging back at him as if it had just happened, as if his body had a memory of its own that it couldn’t suppress. The pain below his shoulder was like hot steel, his head throbbed, and the teeming rain poured down on his face as he struggled to breathe. He caught glimpses of debris on the soaked shore around him,

And he saw a man emerge from the woods, his face cloaked in the night. He looked around at the raging river, up at the bridge, skyward as the rain began to stop, while shafts of moonlight pierced the parting of the clouds. Jack could hear his own voice crying out.

“You have to help me…”

The man looked at Jack but said nothing.

“I think I’m dying, but my wife… I have to save my wife…”

Jack’s recollections were suddenly shattered as the garrote grew tighter around his neck, and a knee jammed into the small of his back, pulling him out of his memories to dangle him at the edge of death.

His captor held his cell phone in his other hand, thumb dialing. The signal that struggled through the grate was weak, intermittent, the call static-filled. “Hey, it’s Gallagher… Gallagher!” he repeated. “Listen to me. You’re not going to believe this…”

Frank trudged his way through the tunnel. He hated the dark; he was terrified of it. With the unworldly sounds that permeated the lower depths of the city, his mind filled with images of rats and dead bodies, of the unknown lurking in the shadows. He kept his ears attuned for any sound of Jack, for any indication of an oncoming train, not knowing where Jack could have possibly turned within the confined space of the tunnel.

With the help of the red and green glow of the subway lights, he could see the disturbed gravel, and the intermittent footprints along the rail ties confirmed that he was heading in the right direction.

“Listen to me. You’re not going to believe this.”

Frank heard the voice up ahead, his ear pinpointing the distance. He drew his gun and caught sight of a small service opening in the wall.

“He’s alive.”

Frank felt like a moth drawn to the flame as he crept through the opening on silent feet. He stepped through the dark, catching sight of Jack and an assailant in the checkerboard light wash that poured in from above.

“Jack Keeler…”

Frank raised his gun as he saw Jack facedown in a puddle, a wire dog-tied around his neck, his assailant atop him with a flexed right arm wrapping the wire, his cell phone held in the other hand, pressed to his ear.

“Tell him Jack Keeler is alive.”

Frank pulled the trigger, the report of his Sig Sauer sounding like a cannon in the confined space as the orange glow of the barrel flame momentarily lit the space.

The man fell to the ground, the sounds of death leaking from his mouth, from the exposed side of his head.

Jack rolled over in the puddle, gasping, rubbing his own neck as if it would impart air quicker. He heaved, his lungs expelling water with gut-wrenching coughs that echoed in the abandoned tunnel. He lay on his back, his eyes closed, his mind without focus, as his body struggled to recover from near death. Blood seeped from the razorlike wound that wrapped his neck, the surrounding skin swelling up.

Frank tucked his pistol back into his holster and leaned over the body of the dead man, rifling through his pockets, pulling out keys, a clip of bullets, his wallet. He picked up the cell phone, briefly looking at it, and tucked it into his pocket. He rolled the man over and removed his gun from his holster. He examined it, shaking his head before laying it on the ground.

Frank turned and knelt beside Jack, helping him to sit up. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blotted the blood on Jack’s neck, holding it to help stanch the flow of blood. “Jesus, are you OK?”

Jack nodded in reflex without thought of his condition. He finally looked up at Frank, looked into his friend’s eyes, his voice hoarse, his throat raw. “I remember.”

Frank stared at him. “What?”

“There was someone else there with me last night.”

“Can you remember what they look like, a name, maybe?”

“No.” Jack shook his head. “But whoever it is… he scares me.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve got an even bigger problem. You sure this is the guy who drove you off the bridge, who kidnapped Mia?”

Jack nodded.

Frank held up the man’s billfold, letting it drop open to reveal a badge and an ID that made Jack’s blood run cold.

Steven Gallagher was FBI.