Reapers (24 page)

Ash leaned over his horse's neck and glared at Nerve in disgust. "Man, I can take it from you whenever I want. Hey, I'm the mayor of Central Park! What are you going to do? You going to fight me for it?"

Nerve rolled his eyes at the sky. "We'll offer the farmers more goods for lower prices. What's your plan then? Chain them in the park? Plead with them to buy local?"

The man's high voice took on a pronounced edge. "We'll see how eager they are to bargain-shop after we break a few of their kneecaps."

"So then when we
do
ride in, they join us and rise against you too."

Ash spit on the pier, scolded his horse, and wheeled around. A couple other riders spat, too. The dock workers eased down their rifles but waited behind the barricade until the rattle of the hooves faded to the north.

"Security team, take alert position," Nerve said. "Rest of you, let's get back to work."

The man beside Lucy shouldered his gun and stood. "We get paid extra for this?"

Nerve stared him down. "The next time they ride in, would you prefer to remain unarmed?"

He strode toward his restaurant headquarters. Lucy supposed he'd just ordered her back to the rooftop with the lantern, but she jogged after him.

"Who was that?" she said.

Nerve glanced back. "I'm not paying you to ask me questions."

"A well-informed workforce is an effective workforce, right? You really think that dude is going to sit on his thumb while you squeeze him out of business?"

"I made him doubt. Winter's coming. He won't want to fight. He'll wait until spring. And discover it's too late."

"Does he run the Kono?"

"Like he said, he makes it move. If he digs in his heels, the old man won't be able to push forward."

Nerve entered the restaurant. Kerry barred the way for Lucy. She gave him the eye and walked uptown and climbed back up her tower.

She saw nothing there but birds, clouds, and the bucket-like water towers on top of nearly every old apartment and office. There was no sign of the Kono the next day, either. Maybe they were huddled uptown, arguing their next step, burning time while Distro undercut them one string at a time. Nerve had done a convincing job. Lucy wasn't privy to the ins and outs of Manhattan politics, but messing with Distro sounded like a bad idea.

The day after, she had a rare day off, so instead of crouching on top of an apartment block watching for the Kono, she spent it crouching on top of an office block watching the Empire State Building.

Traffic was at its relative heaviest in the morning. Men and women dribbled out on bikes and on foot. Two heavy-hitters emerged from the parking garage with horse-drawn carriages. A few of the non-VIPs pulled enough weight to warrant bodyguards, or at least boyfriends whose overprotectiveness extended to the carrying of automatic weapons. Including chauffeurs and armed guards, the day's total departures numbered less than fifty people. Manhattan wasn't quite the metropolis it used to be.

An hour before noon, she descended and crossed the street and entered the Empire State Building's revolving doors. Inside the regal stone halls, a thick-set man blocked her way.

"Pass?"

"That's my plan," Lucy said.

"You don't got a pass, or a face I know, you swing right back out that door."

"And what if I make it worth your while to take a long look at the ceiling?"

The man didn't hesitate. "You want to bribe me? Sure. Did you know the Empire State Building now features a prison?"

"I don't see how it's a crime to want to see my friend. She lives upstairs."

"You want me to ring her up?"

Lucy gritted her teeth. "You know, I just remembered she's at work. Maybe I'll try back tonight."

The man smiled wanly. "See you then."

She went back to the rooftop across the street. She liked the feeling of looking down on people. She did just that for several hours more until, in the middle of the afternoon, Nerve rode down the street on a horse, tied it to the iron railing of a sidewalk planter, and removed a bouquet from its saddlebags. He adjusted the collar of his snappy powder blue suit and walked inside the tower.

Lucy hissed between her teeth and descended to the ground floor to watch through the lobby windows. After ten minutes of waiting, she sat crosslegged on the cool tile floor, umbrella across her knees. A fat man walked outside and brushed Nerve's horse. The horse defecated. An hour and a half after he'd gone inside, Nerve walked out the front door, glanced over his shoulder, and spoke to someone in the lobby.

Lucy popped up and stalked across the street. She didn't trust horses, not at all, but she walked up beside Nerve's and patted its neck and stroked its mane.

Nerve finished his conversation and turned toward his mount. He registered Lucy but didn't break stride.

"What were you doing in there?" Lucy said.

"Careful," he said. "My horse bites."

"Business? Or pleasure?"

He shook his head and reached to untie the reins but she moved in front of him. He glanced back toward the doors, then advanced until their faces were just inches apart. "You've fucked up your own business too much to think you can inject yourself into mine."

She didn't pull back. "You stay away from her. Plenty of other girls in this city who
aren't
my friend."

"You think she's your friend?" He laughed and shuffled around her to unloop the reins. "You live in a different world, don't you? If it hurts to bump into reality, maybe it's time to go back home."

He slung himself into the saddle and clipped down the street, bouncing rhythmically. She watched him go, then glared through the clean glass windows on the ground floor of the Empire State Building. She envisioned stomping inside, shotgunning the guards, clocking Tilly on the head, slinging the girl over her shoulder, and jogging across the bridge to her car.

But she knew that was a fantasy. A way for her brain to soothe the piercing sting of powerlessness. The truth was that she was alone in a strange place surrounded by tribes of violent men. Tilly was lost and didn't want to be found. Lucy could no more wrestle her off Manhattan than she could swing Nerve around by his feet and fling him into the next borough. This whole trip was a farce. A delusion of her vanity.

As soon as she had the thought, she backed away from it, the way you'd back away when you turned a bend in the stream and saw a bear fishing the other side. Once she was at a safe distance, she started down a new path.

You didn't always have to crash through the front door gun in hand. Not unless you
wanted
to shake hands with Death. Lucy had that much to thank her mother for: the old bitch had taught her to walk in darkness.

She watched the Empire State Building until twilight, but didn't see Tilly come out once. In the morning, she dropped by the piers before sentry duty and ran down Kerry.

"Hey, you know how the main office has all those carriages and things?" she said. "Where do they keep the horses?"

He shrugged. "In the garage."

"Right there in the building?"

"Sure. I dunno, not my area. What makes you ask?"

"Seems wrong, that's all." She scowled at the flat gray river. "A horse should run around in the sun."

Atop the tower overlooking Twelfth Avenue, she had plenty of time to think, but didn't get far. Theoretically, Tilly might never have to leave the building. Surely she left for walks and things now and then, maybe even on a schedule, but Lucy wasn't exactly swimming in the free time necessary to observe these things.

Two days later, there was a fight up at the park. A Distro soldier had been stabbed. Might not make it. Everyone at the pier was surprised the brawl hadn't been much worse. There was talk of reprisals. Assassinations. Rolando Quiroz, one of the men she'd suspected of being the mole, went so far as to suggest exactly how Nerve should do it.

"Forget about a gunfight," he said to the circle of stevedores on the pier exchanging opinions on how best to do Nerve's job. "None of that Rambo bullshit. Konos drink coffee too, right? Buy vodka from the dude downtown? You find their shipment and you put some arsenic in it. Bam. Half their crew's dead before they know it."

"No way," croaked a woman named Kara. She had that apple-headed look of someone who'd spent a couple years on the meth, but Lucy had heard her speak before and knew she'd been to college. "How you going to get them all to drink it at once? Throw them a party, then go all Red Wedding on their asses?"

Rolando didn't let it go. "Then you do like the aliens did. Infect them and let the disease do the work."

"You got any spare smallpox, smart guy? What's the plan, invite somebody with cholera to drop a deuce in their well?"

It was pretty much moronic, but it gave Lucy an idea. Early that afternoon, with no sign of anything more threatening than a few skinny pigeons, she left her post and rode to the coffee house on the other side of the island. She asked around for Reese, the dirty-faced dude who'd tipped her off to Tilly's involvement with the Kono, but he wasn't in. She left a message with the cowboy behind the bar and biked back to her post.

That night, as she readied for bed, she heard a faint voice calling her name. For a split second, she went stiff, imagining it was her mom. The voice called again. She went to the window and cranked it open. A man waved from the street.

"Hey Lucy! It's Reese!"

"I see you," she said. "Quit hollering and I'll be right down."

She put her pistol in the back of her waistband, tromped down the steps, and let him inside the foyer.

He grinned wide enough to show his dead molar. "Heard you were looking for me."

"I'm looking for drugs. Roofies would be best, but I'll take anything strong enough to throw a person for a loop."

"What are you offering in trade?"

"I still got some tobacco. Bud too, if you prefer."

He looked her up and down. "I was thinking something we might both enjoy."

She gave him the eye. Scrub the dirt off his face and he might be halfway handsome. And it might do her well to zap her mind with a good orgasm. But if all she wanted was sex, she could get that from one of the men at the dock any time she liked. Swapping it for a couple of pills wasn't her idea of a great trade.

"Not this time. But if this works, then we might have something to celebrate about."

He nodded at the gritty entryway. "Should I ask what it's for?"

"This city traffic is just so loud at night," she said. "A girl needs her sleep."

Reese smirked and waved. It was three days before he returned with the pills. In the meantime, she kept watch for the Kono by day and for Tilly after hours, posting up outside the thousand-foot tower with binoculars at hand. She didn't see Tilly leave once, but one day at dusk, Nerve trotted up on his horse and didn't leave for two hours.

Reese arrived with her pills, let her know she could use them on him any time, and departed with six hand-rolled cigarettes. Lucy had been hoping for a less circuitous way to get to Tilly, but the girl was too much of a homebody. Or it could be Nerve no longer allowed her out. Either way, Lucy was going to have to get stupid.

The following morning, she lingered on the pier, waiting for Nerve to leave, but a surprise showed up instead. In the parking circle fronting the docks, a black limousine squeaked to a stop. Tiny American flags fluttered on its hood. Six men in black suits and mirrored sunglasses piled out like the world's soberest clowns and jogged toward the docks, clearing away the laborers. They returned to the car and escorted an old bald white man to the restaurant. Lucy sighed and headed uptown to her post.

After her shift, she headed back, but Kerry stood in front of the restaurant doors and shook his head. "Nobody sees him. Not today."

"This about the old bastard in the limo?" Lucy said. "Who was that?"

Kerry laughed. "You mean to say you don't recognize the President of Manhattan?"

"I guess I missed his last State of the Union. Nerve must feel honored."

"Not exactly. Feds caught wind of our little disagreement with the Kono. President warned us to knock it off or face sanctions."

"Sanctions?" she snorted. "Like what? You got to pay them an extra dollar to walk across the bridge to New Jersey? My God, by this time next year, you could be out five dollars."

"They could raise tariffs on our imports. If they press hard enough to cut profits, someone's got to eat the loss: the men on the docks, or the ones in the tower."

"It ain't never the ones in the tower."

"You ever read Machiavelli? That sort of thing? When your people are starting to turn on you, you redirect them against an outside enemy. Maybe Distro decides to take a short-term hit from the Feds and wipe out the Kono. Or maybe they buddy up with the Kono and take down the Feds instead. Either way, it's enough to make a guy like me reconsider his career."

Lucy crossed her arms. "Sounds like
you
should be running this place."

"I used to be a campaign manager." He glanced up at the rotunda. "Nowadays, you take what you can get, you know?"

For a moment she was sad, but she didn't have time to spare on Kerry's wasted potential. Things were headed for a blowup. One way or the other, Distro was going to war. By hook or by roofie, she had to get Tilly out of Dodge before the cannons began to roar.

That meant getting inside Nerve's office. While he wasn't there.

It was another three days before she got her chance. She had a day off and was hanging around the piers watching the river and chatting with the workers, who were expecting a shipment of goods late that morning. Noon came without sign of the boat. Around two, a red-faced woman ran down the dock and into the converted restaurant. Five minutes later, Nerve walked out the front door and hustled toward the street.

Lucy beelined inside the building. From somewhere around back, the furious voice of the woman who kept the records berated whomever had wronged her, but the stairs were clear. Both eyes out for Kerry, she headed up to the rotunda.

It was vacant. She made a quick pass at the file cabinets, looking for older stuff, something he wouldn't miss any time soon. Within two minutes, she had her piece: a lengthy report, dated three years ago, detailing the failure of the someone to accomplish the something. Didn't matter. All that mattered was it had enough of Nerve's handwriting for Lucy to learn and forge.