Gone Tomorrow

FORTY

I checked all the celebration pictures, very carefully. The guy from the subway was in all of them. Different angles, different years, different victories, but it was definitely the same guy, literally at Sansom’s right hand. Then a page bustled into the office and two minutes later I was back on the Independence Avenue sidewalk. Fourteen minutes after that I was inside the railroad station, waiting for the next train back to New York. Fifty-eight minutes after that I was on it, sitting comfortably, leaving town, watching the dismal rail yards through the window. Far to my left a gang of men wearing hard hats and orange high-visibility vests was working on a section of track. Their vests glowed through the smog. The fabric must have had tiny beads of reflective glass mixed into the plastic weave. Safety, through chemistry. The vests were more than highly visible. They were attention-getting. They drew the eye. I watched the guys work until they were just tiny orange dots in the distance, and then until they were completely lost to sight, which was more than a mile later. And at that point I had everything I was ever going to get. I knew everything I was ever going to know. But I didn’t know that I knew. Not then.

The train rolled into Penn and I got a late dinner in a place directly across the street from where I had gotten breakfast. Then I walked up to the 14th Precinct on West 35th. The night watch had started. Theresa Lee and her partner Docherty were already in place. The squad room was quiet, like all the air had been sucked out of it. Like there had been bad news. But no one was rushing around. Therefore the bad news had happened somewhere else.

The receptionist at the bullpen gate had seen me before. She turned on her swivel chair and glanced at Lee, who made a face like it wouldn’t kill her one way or the other whether she ever spoke to me again, or not. So the receptionist turned back and made a face of her own, like the choice to stay or to go was entirely mine. I squeaked the hinge and threaded my way between desks to the back of the room. Docherty was on the phone, mostly listening. Lee was just sitting there, doing nothing. She looked tip as I approached and she said, ‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘For what?’

‘Susan Mark,’ she said.

‘Any news?’

‘None at all.’

‘Nothing more on the boy?’

‘You sure are worried about that boy.’

‘And you’re not?’

‘Not even a little bit.’

‘Is the file still closed?’

“Fighter than a fish’s asshole.’

‘OK,’ I said.

She paused a beat and sighed and said, ‘What have you got?’

‘I know who the fifth passenger was.’

‘There were only four passengers.’

‘And the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese.’

‘Did this alleged fifth passenger commit a crime somewhere between 30^th Street and 45^th?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then the file stays closed.’

Docherty put his phone down and glanced at his partner with an eloquent look on his face. I knew what the look meant. I had been a cop of sorts for thirteen years and had seen that kind of look many times before. It meant that someone else had caught a big case, and that Docherty was basically glad that he wasn’t involved, but a little wistful too, because even if being at the heart of the action was a pain in the neck bureaucratically, it was maybe a whole lot better than watching from the sidelines.

I asked, ‘What happened?’

Lee said, ‘Multiple homicide over in the 17th. A nasty one. Four guys under the FDR Drive, beaten and killed.’

‘With hammers,’ Docherty said.

I said, ‘Hammers?’

‘Carpentry tools. From the Home Depot on 23rd Street. Just purchased. They were found at the scene. The price tags are still on them, under the blood.’

I asked, ‘Who were the four guys?’

‘No one knows,’ Docherty said. ‘That seems to have been the point of the hammers. Their faces are pulped, their teeth are smashed out, and their fingertips are ruined.’

‘Old, young, black, white?’

‘White,’ Docherty said. ‘Not old. In suits. Nothing to go on, except they had phony business cards in their pockets, with some corporate name that isn’t registered anywhere in New York State, and a phone number that is permanently disconnected because it belongs to a movie company.’