The Big Fear (22 page)

CHAPTER FORTY

AWAKE

Leonard stared into Joey Del Rio’s face, awash in pepper spray, suspended in the dark. The cop was floating, holding steady as though he were bobbing in surf. He cocked his head to the side, squinting through the pain, and he whispered. Leonard leaned out over the railing, straining to hear. He wondered what was holding the cop in the air—he wasn’t hanging on the railing and there was nothing but dead air below him. As Leonard moved closer, Del Rio smiled sickeningly and grabbed his arm. The cop’s face suddenly contorted, and as Leonard looked down, his arms caught, he was staring at Roshni Saal. They both flew over the edge together. She grabbed Leonard tight as they fell toward the sidewalk below, coming at them quick, hard, and final.

Leonard shot up onto his hands and knees on the floor of the deserted office. His breath was fluttering and he couldn’t slow his heart. He had slumped off of the chair and onto the concrete floor sometime in the night. The dream had seemed all too real. Del Rio’s face was too much like the one that had actually sped toward death the night before. Roshni didn’t know the danger she was in by helping him. Leonard’s body was still sore, but his head was suddenly, brutally clear. He was still hot. He was thirsty and he had slept in his clothes. But he was a wanted man with a murder to solve, so there was no time to rest.

He stood and looked around. It was early, not much past six, but daylight already was scorching the office. It was hot and bright and would just get worse from here. The computers were humming away, scouring the world for little tragedies. The one he and Roshni had been staring at before he crashed was still open, Davenport’s data still up. Idlewild Construction. A new building, one he and Roshni had both recognized. A series of schematics. It was happening today.

He had already started to put together a plan. But he was sweaty and his clothes were old, and he wouldn’t be surprised if you could find blood if you looked closely at them. Roshni herself was nowhere to be seen. He felt a quick jolt, a sudden convulsion like you sometimes get on the verge of sleep, and it snapped him awake. His first thought was the weapon; he looked to the counter. It was still there. Next to it a cell phone. Next to the cell phone a written note. A four-digit security code and a single sentence.
I can always say you stole it from me. Good luck. Roshni
.

So she wasn’t going to be part of his plan after all. Maybe it was the gun. Or maybe she had checked the news this morning. It was certain to be out there by now. It wouldn’t have taken her long to put together what had happened. Either she didn’t want to join him because she was afraid for her safety or she didn’t want to join him because he had killed someone. Or both. It didn’t really matter. But she was willing to help a little. To leave behind the phone. He had ditched his own so he wouldn’t be traced. The police wouldn’t think to track hers. Or maybe they had been tracking it for years; keeping up with activists and critics was part of their business. But they wouldn’t know it had anything to do with Leonard Mitchell. Leonard turned on the phone and entered the code. It sprung to life, fully charged. He scrolled through the apps and found at least one thing that was sure to be useful. Maybe even more useful than the gun.

The gun was necessary, even if Leonard looked guilty as hell with it prying open the back of his pants. He untucked his shirt. As long as he stood very straight, the shirt would drape over it so you wouldn’t notice. He checked the time on the phone. Nearly seven. He had only been asleep three hours, but he felt more refreshed than ever before in his life. He had a purpose now. He slipped the phone into his pocket, secured the gun, and stepped out to meet a ready world.

He set out for the subway, crossing toward Whitman again, careful to stand rigid so that no one could make out the silhouette of the gun in the back of his pants. As he approached the project, the smell of rotting trash was now constant. Overnight, more loads of garbage had been dumped helter-skelter across the sidewalks. Heavy black contractor sacks had been ripped open by rats or vagrants. Kitchen refuse spilled open into the street, strewing empty cartons from microwaved meals, specked with hardened bits of melted cheese.

Leonard walked into the Whitman courtyard and the scene was worse. At the base of the building, on the two sides where anyone still lived, people had simply thrown their trash out the windows. Along the curtilage, ramparts of waste had piled up: broken beer bottles, diapers leaking stool, shoals of plastic packaging, greased paper towels. It all seeped into the abandoned flower beds clinging to the building. Leonard couldn’t pass by without starting to retch. He walked through the underpass with the tail of his shirt over his face and mouth, hoping to catch a whiff of the expressway and the relatively pleasant diesel exhaust. He remembered that he couldn’t hold up his shirt without exposing the gun and let it drop.

The residue of poverty lay crumpled alongside the gutters of the building—condoms, sure, and a couple of spent shells, and torn pieces of clothing, broken CDs, and a dog collar. No needles to speak of; the cops put enough heat on the residents to ensure that drugs were kept indoors. Leonard crept past the courtyard. It was still and quiet, no sign of cops filing past to figure out who may have dumped a body in the river. Not yet. The streets were a mess and those unlucky enough to be out and about were stumbling through the general stench.

Leonard crossed the street and headed toward the subway. He had a dead cop’s gun and a missing woman’s phone. The only thing he had that was his own was his badge. He had the rest of the day to stop a disaster and clear his name. He would need help, and the people most likely to want to help him were dead or vanished. He pulled out the phone and thought a minute. There was one person he had to call before heading out into the world.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

WALL STREET

Wall Street was in full gear by ten past seven, but not with bankers. As Leonard stepped out of the subway, the corner of Wall and Broad bellowed with the breakfast-cart men, the shoe shiners, and the parasites who hawk statuettes of the Twin Towers wrapped indecorously with a pink ribbon. Every day these stalwarts ply their trade with the sunrise. Leonard watched the parade from above the fray on the steps of Federal Hall. No one looks up in New York, especially not on Wall Street. He stood behind the statue of Washington, checking the crowd to see that he hadn’t been followed. It was safe to use the phone, at least for the moment. Scrolling through it that morning, before making the phone call to set his plan in motion, he had seen that Roshni had a membership at a fancy gym. The silk suits had to come from somewhere, and wherever that was, it was paying for a raft of little luxuries. The gym was only a block away. Veronica’s office was just up the street.

He set out through the crowd. Stiff carts were piled with thin coffee and thick donuts, the small men inside them sweating onto their tin floors. Bored cops with M-16s stood in front of the Exchange, assigned to elite units with hubristic names—“Hercules,” “Samson,” “Archangel”—wishing desperately to lean toward each other and gab about the Yankees like everyone else. And hurried men in blue trading smocks, their oversized numbers pinned to them like tags on so much livestock, snuck cigarettes before dashing inside and running madcap from one terminal to another at the behest of the suits floating around them. A short lull in the carnival, before the whole thing started up again inside. No one had looked up. No one had noticed him. He was safe for the moment as he sidled through the revolving door.

The gym was howling with noise—the midlevel functionaries who keep the Street rolling and can’t step out for a long lunch spend their morning pedaling or running or treading to prepare themselves for a grueling day sitting at a desk. Leonard took out Roshni’s phone and walked toward the turnstiles. He acted as casually as he could while scanning the phone and grabbing a towel. A profile blinked up on her display, a picture of Roshni in the top left corner. Leonard prepared for a minute to explain—plenty of people show up for their trainers looking disheveled and broken, trying to nudge themselves back toward looking like the person in their picture. But not too many show up about six inches taller and the wrong gender and race. But the woman just nodded at the beep and barely looked up from her copy of the
Daily News
. The cover sported a body lying on Perry Street, covered in a sheet. And an insert of a cop’s academy photo, his curly hair popping out from around his hat, framing his spacey eyes. The byline by Leonard’s old friend Tony Licata. Leonard stared at the ground and double-timed his steps into the showers.

They would have some kind of picture of him after the fold. A sketch if they had spoken to the guard, or a photo and his name if they had lifted prints. There would certainly be a description of what he was wearing. He made a quick adjustment to his plan. Getting a shower would not be enough. Leonard looked around before sliding the gun into a locker. No one had noticed. He wriggled out of his clothes and laid them on top of the weapon. He turned off the phone and left it in the locker. He padded toward the shower and turned it on.

After two days where he felt as though he was one step from living on the street, the shower was pure bliss. The blast ran his sweat off of him, the grease behind his ears slid away, and whatever had collected under his fingernails and between his toes rushed down the drain. The wound in his shoulder seared with pain as the water rushed over it. He stretched his arm. Only when it was fully extended did he feel any pain. He indulged in the water as it brought his skin and sinuses back to life. But he couldn’t linger.

He toweled off and combed his hair. He opened his locker. The cell phone would only take him so far. The clothes were rancid and probably part of a description to boot. He looked down the row of lockers. There was no one in the room. Only about half of the lockers had locks on them. He tried one of the open ones, then another. Nothing inside. He opened the third one and saw an undershirt, a pink dress shirt, a suit. The uniform of a man too important to lock up his clothing at a place like this. Leonard checked the suit; it was a 42. Maybe a little bulky, but he couldn’t be picky. One quick glance to be sure no one was watching, and he slipped into the outfit. He turned to his own locker and grabbed the cell phone and the papers from the Harbor Patrol. He was pretty good at getting a suit on quickly. As soon as he had the coat on, he twisted over and tucked the gun into the back of the waistband. A cop’s favorite place to sense a bulge. A suit jacket covered it better than his shirt had, but still not well enough. He pulled a pair of shoes from the stolen locker and started to slip his feet into them. They were too small.

“Hey.”

A soft little man, a few inches shorter than Leonard, stood wrapped in a towel, about four feet away. Leonard looked up. He looked out the door of the locker room. He might be able to make it, but he didn’t have any shoes on.

“That’s my suit, man. What do you think you’re doing?”

Leonard played dumb. It could buy him twenty seconds, no more. “Really? I didn’t even notice. I guess I’m thinking about too many other things.”

“You just put my whole suit on. What do you mean you’re thinking about other things?”

The man was too surprised to be suspicious of Leonard. He walked just close enough, and Leonard reeled back and landed a roundhouse, hard but a little high. He had to swing with his left hand and he only grazed the man across the forehead. The banker dropped his towel and splayed naked on the floor. Leonard ran to his own locker and whipped out his beat-up shoes before dashing out into the gym. No time to put them on. The man was already standing up running after him.

“Hey! That guy stole my clothes!”

Leonard ran out into the gym at full speed. People’s arms were glued to their ellipticals and their eyes were pinned to the morning news, so he had a jump start before anyone heard the shouts from the locker room. Or before they saw the naked man running out after him, jiggling too much to be a regular.

The woman at the front desk was looking up from her paper now. She was the only one between Leonard and the revolving front door. His shoes in one hand, he barreled toward her, the naked man gaining behind him.

“Sir, you have to stop. I can’t let you—”

He feinted to the left and she took a step to stop him before he doubled back to the right and hurdled the turnstile into the gym’s lobby. He rushed through the front steps and out into the busy street. His feet hurt on the pavement, and he was already starting to sweat again, but he couldn’t turn back now. His shoulder was a dull ache, without the stinging pain that had been shouting at him for the last two days. He rushed around the corner to the subway, darting through the crowd. He had left the phone behind, but at least he still had the gun. And the evidence from Davenport’s apartment.

A new migration was starting outside on the street. Bankers sweeping softly from the trains to the towers on leather-soled shoes that never seemed to touch the ground. Crisp ironed men bounced from subway to revolving doors, wearing suits and ties in the summer without breaking a sweat. Leonard barreled through the crowd as though he were just another merchant trying to catch the bell. Even the heavily armed cops patrolling the stock exchange barely looked up at another man in a suit rushing down the street. They were on the lookout for terrorists, and only terrorists. Minor crimes like snatching a wallet or bilking investors or ripping off the local sports club wouldn’t register with them, particularly when the guy who is being chased down the street doesn’t look much like an Arab.

A man in a suit can get away with anything in New York, even elbowing past crowded commuters while holding his shoes in his left hand. Leonard slipped down into the subway and reached into the wallet of the stolen jacket. There was a MetroCard. He slid it through the turnstile just as a train was pulling in. He slipped onto the train and found a seat in the corner. He looked out the window to see if the woman from the gym or the naked banker had followed him this far. He was safe for the moment. He put his shoes on the floor. His badge rattled around inside one of them. He smiled. He was lucky not to have left that behind either. He settled his feet into the shoes and leaned back into the bench. He positioned himself in a corner, head down, doing his best to look like a tired but hardworking professional, and meeting no one’s gaze. Now he was just another anonymous man in an ordinary suit heading uptown on the express train.

He stepped out of the uptown train at Union Square and jostled through the crowd and over the stairs to the downtown platform. He would rejoin the street with a new cohort of commuters, none of whom had seen the barefoot man only minutes before. He would be just another man in a plain gray suit. Of course, he thought as the metal extension of the platform scraped into place with its abominable hiss, he would be the only suit on Wall Street who looked an awful lot like the picture of a cop killer in the paper.