Clawback (16 page)

I looked up, and saw the pilot’s door start to open. Not good. One-handed, he could easily point a pistol down and fire until he hit me. I was in no position to do anything except cling and pray. The helicopter’s turbines screamed.

Ahead I saw that monster parking garage on the river, at Houston. We were only a little higher—I could see the bizarre brilliant green of the soccer fields on its roof, white lines forming a bull’s-eye in the center.

Uh-oh. The pilot apparently had a very bad idea, because we immediately lurched, dropping to a height that would skim the fence around the artificial turf.

It rocketed toward us at a hundred miles an hour.

He was trying to scrape me off, like mud from his boots. I yelled and swung my legs up, twisting away from the steel spikes. The chopper bucked again, the lunatic pilot taking us right between two light poles, no more than two yards of clearance on either side. Ten feet above the roof—if we hadn’t been moving so fast, I could have almost stepped off, as if I were disembarking from a train.

We cleared the far side, rising slightly, and I looked up again.
Above me the madman’s door swung wide, opened by centripetal acceleration as the helicopter turned sharply. His hand appeared, holding the pistol.

I looked down and saw the bank of the Hudson, dropping away to blue choppy water.

I let go.

“O
uch.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey…fuck! That
hurts
!”

“Try to stop moving around.”

“Ow!”

Me, embarrassingly enough. Shock endorphins had worn off long before, and all I had now was pain and self-recrimination.

“I don’t see anything except this bruise.” Clara gently probed my ribs.

“It’s a
big
bruise.”

“If anything was broken, you’d be hurting worse.”

Not much of a bedside manner, though I had to agree with the diagnosis.

“It must have been fifty feet to the water,” I said.

“You were lucky.”

And that was the understatement of the year.

I’d landed only about twenty yards from the shoreline, slamming into the water like a rock. But I didn’t lose consciousness, so I
struggled to shore and dragged myself up onto the boulders that formed the base of the river wall. Then I just collapsed, utterly spent, for about five minutes, until I realized nobody knew I was there.

The parking garage that had almost been my doom was three stories tall, sitting in between the greenway and the Hudson’s edge. The entire incident, from the gunman’s first shots at Faust all the way to my swan dive, had lasted a few minutes, tops. No one on the West Side Highway saw me fall, because the garage was in the way, and no one else noticed or realized what was happening or believed their eyes if they did see it.

Emergency responders were focused on the dead and the wounded back at the scene. Clara and anyone else thinking about me would be trying to track the helicopter, which was probably headed across New Jersey, at top speed, toward the wilds of eastern Pennsylvania.

While I figured this out, I began to shiver. I pushed myself to my feet, walked over to the cycling path and stood, watching bicyclists and joggers and traffic go by.

Home was too far to walk, if I even wanted to go there. Official attention would be keenly focused on my role in the escapade. Clara had more sense than to start lying outright about who I was, so it would only take a question or two before the police had my name and address. Detectives were probably talking to my neighbors already. It didn’t matter that I’d been on their side. Unless they had evidence revealing the assassin’s identity, they’d be chasing every other lead, with all the urgency that only a spectacular attack on the very rich could command.

I still had my wallet, and the money inside was usable—nobody likes the look, but all that new anticounterfeiting technology makes for surprisingly durable polymerized paper. Close to seven hundred dollars. Because I avoid traceable payments whenever possible, I tend to carry more cash than most people. Muggers aren’t really a concern.

The sun shone bright in a cloudless sky, and even by the river the breeze was light. I was cold, but a brisk stroll would warm me up and help dry the clothes at the same time.

So it was decided. I waited for the pedestrian signal at Watts Street, then set off crosstown, heading for one of the small, not-quite-awful, almost-cheap SRO hotels scattered throughout the East Village. In the anonymous company of drunks, doghouse husbands, European backpackers and midwestern tourists who really shouldn’t have booked the cheapest place possible, I’d dry off, rest up, and plan the next step.

Clara showed up four hours later. I’d checked in, left her a message from the front-desk phone and barely gotten the soggy clothes off before falling into the bed. She woke me up by banging on the door, carrying a takeout container of steaming hot ramen noodles—almost as good as chicken soup.

“The Mallory Arms,” she said, watching me eat. “It sounds nice, but I don’t know…”

Scratches and holes in the plaster, a gritty floor, one thin blanket on the bed—she had a point.

“Cheap, though.” I watched her watch me. It was
good
having her there. “What happened?”

“Faust died.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Want to bet the ballistics are the same as Marlett?”

“You don’t know?”

“NYPD isn’t like Old Ridgefork. A box of donuts doesn’t get you anywhere.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” I splashed broth in the plastic container, not adept at eating the slippery noodles with chopsticks. “The chief himself was probably on scene.”

Clara handed me all the napkins from the paper sack. “You might need these.”

“Nah.”

“The detective interviewed me for half an hour,” she said.

“Oh?”

“You, they’d
really
like to talk to.”

“They know who I am?”

“I couldn’t tell them much.”

I was in the middle of drinking off the dashi and didn’t reply.

“Because I don’t
know
much.”

On the room’s small flat-panel television—bolted to the wall in an aftermarket steel frame, thank you very much—CNN was showing the fireball footage yet again. The sniper had landed the helicopter, only a few minutes after losing me, at an oil-tank farm just over the Hudson in New Jersey. He set down directly on top of one of the tanks, shot up the pipework until there was oil and gas spewing everywhere, then fled down the access ladder. Before he escaped, he set it all on fire—possibly with an explosive charge, since fuel oil doesn’t actually ignite all that easily.

The tank was forty feet tall, so he might have used a grenade
launcher, though I wasn’t sure how it would have fit into that bookpack he’d been carrying. In any event, thick smoke from the resulting conflagration shut down three highways, two rail lines and enough air traffic to snarl flights across the country.

Of course he’d also burned the entire helicopter down to a few carbonized fragments. No forensic evidence there. I almost had to admire the choice he’d made. He could have snuck quietly away, at the cost of leaving a few clues behind. Instead, he’d completely obliterated his tracks—and was now the target of every law enforcement agency on the eastern seaboard.

Not to mention he’d stolen the helicopter in the first place, once he realized his first escape route was problematic. Improvisation and luck, working together.

His actions were effectively insane, but the fuck had style.

“I’m a tax-planning consultant,” I said.

“You mentioned that.”

“But I’ve taken on a few other assignments. Over time. In certain specialized areas of expertise.”

“I gathered.” Deadpan.

Sometimes you have to trust people. I spend too much time with sociopaths as it is—most high-ranking Wall Streeters are awash in psychopathology, unsurprisingly. You can’t lie all the time and make any kind of normal human connections. A relationship that has any value requires honesty, which may be why I don’t have many.

I didn’t want Clara to slip away.

“You could think of me as a forensic accountant,” I said. “Except written for TV—more guns, fewer spreadsheets.”

“I got some interview tape from those doormen who saw you
take on the assassin. They made it sound like Jason Bourne, watch out.”

“Oh, that wasn’t anything.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You saved
my
life, too—and three against one.”

Pause.

“I thought you were unconscious during that.”

“I figured it out.”

“Well, I—” Wait a second. No lying. “No. You’re right.”

“Yes?”

I thought about the attack on her, in the park. “The thing is, they could have killed me then, easy. Once he pulled out the pistol, standing over you, I was dead—except he didn’t feel like it, I guess.”

“He had a gun?” She sounded surprised.

“Yeah. Probably the same one he was waving at me on the helicopter.”

“What? It was the
same man
?”

Oh, right. I forgot—nobody but me knew that. I sighed. “Let me tell it again,” I said. “I’ll try not to leave out anything this time.”

And I did. Clara listened, and the few questions she asked were keen and to the point.

When I was done, she picked up the takeout container and the chopsticks and carried them to the bathroom’s wastebasket. I was still sitting in bed, against the headboard, blanket pulled up. The river’s chill was slow to dissipate.

Clara came back and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d brought my fleece jacket, the one I’d tossed her before taking off after the
mad sniper. I put it on. The room was small, with no additional chairs.

“You’re a hero,” she said.

“Ah, fuck.”

“No. Even the detective interviewing me thought that, though he didn’t say it. I could tell.”

This was too depressing to think about. The TV vans were probably all outside my door now.

That’s the problem with being a hero—you lose the rest of your life.

“I’ll never be able to work again,” I said. “Assuming I don’t go to jail.”

“Not necessarily.”

“No. Once the cops start digging around, they’re going to find out far too much about me. Then some department blabbermouth will call the
Post,
and I’ll have to hire on with some merc company and ship out to Yemen.”

She put both hands on the mattress and leaned forward, facing me. “I didn’t tell them your name,” she said.

My turn to stare.

“Or where you lived. Or anything.”

“But, I thought you said—”

“I told the detective I’d run into you on another story, just a face in the crowd. I didn’t even remember you when you came up to me outside Faust’s building—but I try not to alienate potential sources, so I was polite. It was just chitchat, mostly with Darryl. Then the shooting started, and you ran off, and that’s all I could tell him.”

“That wasn’t smart. You lied to a cop.”

She lifted her hands to shrug, and sat back. “I told him I needed to go through my notes, see what I could find that might help with details about you. I have to call him back later.”

“Uh.” The situation did give her total blackmail control over me, but we could worry about that later. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“Because you saved my life,” she said. “Don’t you listen?”

“Not enough, I guess.” I wiped my hands and face and chest, and blanket and pillow, too—somehow the ramen had dribbled everywhere—and tossed the wadded napkins vaguely toward the bathroom. “Not enough.”

“Work on that.”

Conversation faltered.

I noticed smudges of dirt on Clara’s cheekbone. Her hair was no longer neat, strands falling across her forehead and over one ear. Her collar had folded under.

The kiss was sudden and hard, both of us going in simultaneously. Her arms around my back, pulling me forward, while I caught one hand behind her and the other swept aside the blanket. A groan, mine—a moan, hers. Our faces switched sides, then again. Pain from my bruised chest was distant and unimportant. We started to fall onto the mattress, conveniently placed beneath us.

Clara pushed back.

“Not now,” she said.

We were both breathing hard.

“Not
now
?”

“It’s not the right time.”

“Yes it is!”

“No it’s not.”

“But—” Wit seemed to have deserted me.

“I don’t…I’ve rushed into a few too many things. You know?”

I was thirty-five years old, single, formerly in the military and now nine years resident in Manhattan. Of course I knew what she was talking about.

“No,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.” She stood up from the bed, sort of pulling herself back together.

“Don’t know what?”

“How big a mistake you are,” she said.

And five seconds later she was gone, the door closing gently behind her.

T
he night proceeded through degrees of ache and discomfort. Painkillers seemed like a bad idea—even the informal kind, the sort that comes in a flat glass bottle—since I was worried about being found. I needed to be sharp if the police showed up. Or the press. Or Ganderson.

Or my death-from-the-sky mad sniper.

My chest sure was sore, and movement was stiff and slow, but I had to get out. Hardly any bruising on my face, fortunately, so no second glances. I rode the subway uptown, the Sunday-morning passengers mostly quiet, all of us keeping to ourselves. Some kids on the platform were horsing around, a hundred feet away. A middle-aged couple shared a
Times,
dumping unwanted sections onto the train’s floor as it rattled from one local stop to the next. Everyone else sat deep in their cellphone shells.

The garage booth was empty, but when I hammered on the utility closet’s door—metal and solidly locked—Goldfinger opened up. He was dressed and awake, holding a radio in one hand. Sports talk, the usual posturing and jabbering.

“Hey, funny you showing up,” he said. “I was gonna call.”

“Good.” I pushed in, pulled the door shut. The room smelled of food going bad and open liquor, though I couldn’t see any. “What’s up?”