B y the time Milgrim had finished shaving and gotten dressed, Brown was holding a meeting in the adjoining room. Milgrim had never known Brown to have a visitor before, and now he was having three, three males. They had arrived within minutes of Brown having made his call, and Milgrim had gotten brief glimpses of them as they’d filed into Brown’s room. From what little he’d managed to see, he knew that they were white and conventionally dressed, and that was it. He wondered if they too had been staying here, particularly as two of them were in shirtsleeves and carried no coats or jackets.
He could hear them talking now, conversing quickly, but couldn’t make anything out. Brown was making various decisive sounds, yeas or nays, and periodically interrupting to reel off what Milgrim took to be revised strategic requirements.
Milgrim decided to treat this as opportunity to pack, and having considered the circumstances, to re-Rize. Packing consisted of putting his book in the pocket of his overcoat, and seeing to toiletries. He rinsed and dried the blades of his blue plastic razor. He used a piece of toilet paper to tidy up the threads and cap of his small tube of Crest toothpaste; replacing the cap, he carefully furled the tube to its shortest possible length, watching it plump out satisfyingly as he did so. He washed and rinsed his white toothbrush, dried its bristles with one piece of toilet paper, and then wrapped them loosely in another. He considered taking the small bar of New Yorker soap, which lathered up nicely, but then he wondered why it was that he assumed they wouldn’t be coming back.
Something was up. Afoot. He remembered reading Sherlock Holmes, centuries before. Leaving the bar of wet soap on the edge of the soap-and-whisker-speckled sink, he tucked the rest of his possessions away in the various pockets of the overcoat. He assumed that Brown would still have the wallet and identification he’d confiscated on first picking Milgrim up (he’d pretended to be a cop, and Milgrim wouldn’t have doubted it, not on that first meeting), but otherwise these grooming aids, and his book, plus the clothes he was wearing and the overcoat, comprised the whole of Milgrim’s worldly possessions. Plus two 5 mg tablets of Rize. He thumbed the pack’s penultimate dose into his palm and considered it. Was this a worldly possession, he wondered. Unworldly, he decided, swallowing it.
Hearing Brown’s meeting conclude with what sounded like a determined slapping of palms, he walked to the window. No need to see them, really, or they him. If indeed they weren’t already quite familiar with him. But still.
“Move it,” said Brown, from the door.
“I’m all packed.”
“You’re what?”
“‘Game is afoot.’”
“You want a broken rib?”
But Brown’s heart wasn’t in it, Milgrim saw. He was distracted, focused utterly on his impending operation, on whatever needed to be done now with regard to IF and Subject. He had his cased laptop in his hand, and his other black nylon bag slung across his shoulder. Milgrim watched him pat himself down with his free hand, locating pistol, handcuffs, flashlight, knife, whatever other empowerments he didn’t leave home without. Spectacles, Milgrim recited to himself, testicles, wallet, watch. “Ready when you are,” he said, and walked past Brown into the hallway.
As his benzo-boost kicked in, in the elevator, Milgrim became aware of a not unpleasurable excitement. Something really was afoot, and as long as it didn’t mean another four hours in the laundry on Lafayette, it promised to be interesting.
Brown marched them across the lobby, to the main entrance, and out into surprisingly bright sunlight. A bellman was holding open the driver’s door of a recently washed silver Corolla and proffering the key, which Brown took, handing the man two dollars. Milgrim rounded the back of the Corolla and got in. Brown was placing his laptop and other bag on the floor behind the passenger seat. When they rode together in a car like this, Milgrim knew, he rode shotgun, probably because that made him easier to shoot. Was that why they called it that? He heard Brown power-lock the doors.
Brown headed east on Thirty-fourth. The weather was fine, bespeaking some genuine onset of spring, and Milgrim imagined himself a pedestrian, strolling pleasantly. No, he thought, a pedestrian strolling with a mere 5 mg of Rize on hand. He reframed the image, hanging Brown’s black bag over his shoulder. Wherein, he assumed, was kept the brown paper bag with the Rize supply.
“Red Team One,” Brown said, firmly, as they took a right on Broadway, “south on Broadway, for Seventeenth.” He listened to some distant voice.
Milgrim looked over and saw the gray plug in Brown’s ear, the gray wire vanishing into the collar of his jacket.
“I’m going to leave you in the car,” Brown said, touching something at his collar, a mute control. “I’ve got Transit Authority tags that’ll keep the traffic cops off it, but I’m thinking I’ll cuff you.”
Milgrim knew better than to offer an opinion on this.
“But this is New York,” Brown said.
“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, tentatively.
“You look like a junkie. Cop thinks you’re doing a Transit Authority car, then sees you’re cuffed to it, alone, not good.”
“No,” said Milgrim.
“So no cuffs.”
Milgrim said nothing.
“I’m going to need these cuffs today,” said Brown, and smiled. Milgrim couldn’t remember having seen Brown smile. “You, on the other hand, are going to need the dope in this bag, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Milgrim agreed, having already come to the same conclusion, a few minutes before.
“I get back to this car and your ass isn’t in it, you’re finished.”
Milgrim wondered what Brown thought constituted deeper shit, for Milgrim, in his current situation, although having benzo-seizures while homeless and penniless on the streets of Manhattan actually did fully qualify, by Milgrim’s own standards, and maybe Brown knew it. “I hear you,” Milgrim said, trying for a tone that would match Brown’s, but not antagonize him. He had a feeling, though, that Brown’s “finished” meant dead, and that was a more peculiar feeling than he would have expected.
“Copy,” Brown said, to the voices in his ear. “Copy.”