The Big Fear (9 page)

If nothing came from the precinct though, even after an in-person from the detective, then that meant that they didn’t have his back. That they didn’t see him as worth protecting. And that was its own kind of mystery. Leonard slipped into the car he had borrowed for the night from the city, lurched forward into the wicked heat, and turned toward home.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SHORTS

The numbers streamed past on the terminal, blinking and changing faster than Veronica Dean could keep track of them. Mineral deposits in Asia, recycling plants in New Jersey, a reinsurance company in the City of London. Ten years ago she had kept a tight watch on a few sectors, but as things had gone to hell and back she needed to keep both eyes open. Once upon a time she’d actually gone out to see the companies. Visiting gold mines in Indonesia, impressing the hardened prospectors by not flinching when she was bitten by a bug the size of a sparrow. Standing shin-deep in mud and whipping out a flip phone to tell New York that the reported core samples were all a fraud, that the operation itself was one big swindle, and thereby getting out of the scandal before any of the big investors. Not to mention that she’d made it back to the airport alive after telling the man with a machete that she was on to him and that her investors would be pulling their funding that very day. She was remembering it wrong, maybe. The mud couldn’t have been much past her ankles. Still, nowadays she wouldn’t even float down to the sidewalks for lunch; the days were spent pacing the pristine carpet and looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows from Wall Street to the two bridges and Brooklyn beyond. A trace of mud was unthinkable.

She had sensed something about the woman who had looked in this morning. Dull. Severe. Some sort of prosecutor or regulator or lawyer coming by to slap Eliot very gently on the wrist and pick up complimentary tickets to the opera, no doubt. There had been enough of them through the oak office over the past few years. Enough at first that Veronica had dared to hope. That maybe someone would find out and then the whole mess would be over. She would be able to speak up. But each one left with a smile and a backslap, leaving Veronica locked down in her own little terror. Speaking up would only make it worse.

Veronica never went into the field any more. She visited her companies over the wires, occasionally calling in reinforcements on the ground, eager apprentices that someday hoped to wield her power. They would fly off to remote mines and villages to stomp around and report back on the facts behind the rumors of foreign speculators. Even these kids had it easier than she did; they could use their digital toys to call in a videoconference at a moment’s notice. When she had hit the trails it had been without 3G, without a satellite phone, just her and the toothy man who told her that he had found real gold and dared her to call him a liar.

She was watching one number as it flashed by. Every few seconds a little bit lower. She would have to time it just right. From twenty-two to eighteen, to seventeen, to fourteen. The panic was under way. Panic was something that Veronica understood. Panic was different than fear. Fear would gnaw slowly, cloud your judgment, lead you to do something you knew you shouldn’t. Panic was clear and straightforward and meaningful.

Together, all of the prices flowed into unfathomable noise. But if you could pull out one stream of numbers, keyed to one price, and you knew that price’s final destination, that was when everything was worth it. She had been watching the news for the past two years as much as anyone. She knew that all was not right with the newly reborn metropolis. It was easy to point to a host of villains—and Veronica knew that as a speculator on the eighteenth story of a Wall Street office, she was everyone’s idea of a villain in the new regime. She thought she was part of the solution, or that she could be, if she could come out from underneath the fear. If only someone could give her a chance to explain. The number dipped again.

Little downfalls might be terribly sad for the people involved with them, but for Veronica they were just another opportunity to turn a quick profit. The toothy man with the machete, when his gold mining fraud had been exposed, had jumped out of a helicopter as it surveyed his ruined fortune from a height of eight hundred feet. It wasn’t Veronica who’d killed him, she reasoned. She had only let a gullible world know that he had been lying. His own deceit had been his cause of death.

The numbers were dropping further. Twelve, then a huge jump to nine. At seven and a half, it was almost down to a third of the price it had been less than an hour ago. Veronica smiled and leaned into her terminal. There would never be mud on her shoes again. It was time to make some money.

She didn’t hear him come into her office. You never do. Eliot’s soft pale face barely registered. He always floated in silently, awash in expensive clothing and designer accessories, taking in the world he had built.

“All right.”

He was holding a thin vinyl binder, crisp tabs taunting her from it. It looked unusual on him. She had never seen him touch a computer or a telephone. The dull facts of the tabs, the binder, the paper, jarred against his gentle fingers.

“When you have a moment, I’d like to talk to you about some of these.”

She looked up. She knew it was a mistake as soon as she’d done it. He had marked up the pages. With a pen, maybe even the calligraphic one he kept on his desk that looked ceremonial. She couldn’t tell anything from the markings but she turned her face back to the computer as quickly as she could, hoping he hadn’t noticed her fear. This is how they do it. They find a fall guy. Nothing to see here, just another corpse out the window. So if you have to, take action first. Hit back before they even hit you. It wasn’t so much about what Eliot knew about her, but what she knew about Eliot.

But don’t give any indication. She squinted at her machine, feigning confusion. “Sure. I’m busy until close-of-market on this, but tomorrow morning?”

“That would be fine.” He tucked the binder under his sleeve and pirouetted back toward his office, shutting out the howl of the modern machines that worked so hard to bring him so much.

Veronica noticed a single pulse of sweat wriggling down her temple, past her cheekbone and on to her chin. She didn’t deserve to be afraid. She had done everything right. No one she had met in the corridors of power was as frightening as the man she had stood down in the mud eight years ago. But deserve it or not, she was afraid.

And she knew why too. She carried all the fear because she was carrying all the risk. It had started so simply, it had been so easy, it had gone so well. But it’s the easy ones that hook you. The first one is always free. And before you know how deep you are into it, you cannot turn around.

The droplet skidded off of her chin and onto her desk. It seemed out of place in the dull meaningless office. Too much life. Veronica had never had so much as a plant on the windowsill or a photograph of a pet. The office was angular and anonymous and if she didn’t come in one day, they wouldn’t need to change anything more than the name on her door. And that day was coming, one way or the other. She knew that much, as her eyes locked in on the machine.

Veronica reached to whisk away the sweat with a tissue and tossed it into her pristine wastebasket. Under the muffled hum of the machine, she gave a short soft sob. She had always been afraid, and she still was. But for the first time in a long while, she was no longer in doubt. She knew what would happen next. She turned back to the demanding hum of her terminal. It would all be over soon.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LEAKS

Tony Licata sweated past the plaza and up the steps to City Hall. When they ask to talk to you at night, you have to go. It won’t do to pick up the phone. Licata had always walked to get his stories. When he had started, it had been the only way. He’d been assigned to courts, which meant the first stop each day was the clerk’s desk at Manhattan State Supreme to read the filings from the night before. Nothing hits the wood like a lawsuit. One girlfriend suing to get back jewelry that her married boyfriend had given to another girl he was dating. A Queens shoe salesman suing his pediatrician for making the moves on the daughter. You need sex, money, and a certain ick factor that people think they don’t want to hear about. But people don’t really know what they want to hear about.

Licata would read the filings and tart them up for scandal. Every aggrieved widow desperate. Every girlfriend a starlet in the making; if you find a way to suggest she was a stripper, even better. And every target a Wall Street big shot—you could bust out the dollar signs in the headlines so long as the guy had some kind of connection to finance, even if the closest he came to the big time was manning the residential mortgage servicing desk at the Bank of Nova Scotia.

Now the filings were all online, and most of the shops hired some law-school dropout to read them all at nine o’clock and flag any that the paper could use. The kids didn’t understand what made a story worthwhile, so Licata never read what they sent out anyway. They loved rock stars getting arraigned for not paying child support. That’s never front page. None of them had read a tabloid a day in their lives before working at one. Licata had moved on to crime, the city desk, but he kept one of the clerks at Manhattan State Supreme on his payroll just in case. They knew their own dockets better than the kids did anyway. Fifty bucks for anything that makes it in the paper. Two-fifty if it hits the wood. Licata could track down the angry plaintiffs and explain that, by cooperating, their case would be worth a lot more money. Bring a photographer if the woman is the least bit attractive. Licata still got a court byline once a month on average. As often as not, they were cases that the kid working for the paper had missed.

But the courts beat was just a side gig to him now, a way to get himself a little extra juice when leaning on frustrated detectives or ambitious deputy commissioners. Information in city government was usually a buyer’s market. Or it always had been. The price of paperwork was usually a hearty meal and a couple of rounds at the Blarney Stone. Tony knew which detectives at IAB could be counted on to photocopy their closing reports and slip them under the table while telling raucous stories of locker room antics. Guys who’d been passed over for narcotics or homicide teams and took their revenge on the whole department for sticking them in Internal Affairs. But that was before e-mail, before cell phones, before the department could call a service provider and find out who every detective had spoken to over the past six months. You so much as call an IAB detective and leave a message nowadays and your editor gets a call back from his lieutenant. Guys knew they were being watched: even their print jobs were logged and tallied. It was too much of a risk for a cop to walk out with a stack of papers under his arm nowadays.

So in twenty years Licata had slowly been pushed to the outside. Once upon a time, if one cop had shot another, Licata would get a call from a friendly source and be standing at the scene before the EMTs had swept away the body, taking off-the-record statements from the lead detective. Now he was stuck in line with the cub reporters, trying to put the best spin he could on the dead statements released by the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information. And in that game he was behind the cubs, who thought journalism was about taking whatever information the public officials deigned to release and adding their own clever comments. Kids took press releases and mocked them up on their blogs and said they were journalists. Licata still thought that the purpose of being a reporter was to report—to get information that no one else had access to and disseminate it. But he knew he was falling behind. In the digital age, the information market favored the seller after all. And when the seller called you, you had better show up.

Which was why Tony Licata was hiking up the broad stone stairway into City Hall after sunset. His daily copy was filed; he ordinarily would have been at the Blarney Stone telling a few stories about the good old days himself. Tonight he was all ears.

There was no guard at the front desk; security was set at the perimeter and anyone who made it as far as the plaza was presumed safe to head into the building itself. Licata passed the swinging wooden gate that led to the prim ceremonial Blue Room on his left, like saloon doors you had to pass through on your way to every press conference. But he wasn’t going to a presser today; he swung up the marble staircase to the official offices. The hub of the biggest city in the country and you’d think that somewhere there would be an elevator. At the top, he turned left, away from the City Council chambers and toward the executive suite.

The new administration had swept out the old bullpen and re-established the hierarchy of executive administration. No more sea of cubicles for even the most senior officers and the mayor himself; the new progressives insisted on the trappings of authority. Sturdy cherry doors now closed off the populists from the world they promised they were bettering. Tony Licata stepped through the empty antechamber and toward a door left just a smidgeon open, decked with a trim chrome nameplate: Deputy Mayor Victor Ells.

One knock was enough. “Is that you, Tony? Come on in.”

Licata pushed open the door and saw Ells posturing behind his desk. A broad man with a politician’s smile that you couldn’t help but believe even if you knew it was fake. The casually rumpled suit that signaled he was always hard at work, and smooth silver hair—hair that looked as though it had been ironed and pressed. From the beginning, this man had always seemed to be as much in charge as his boss. He had nothing to say from behind a podium, he didn’t deliver speeches or even get mentioned in them, but when deputy commissioners needed to quietly resign, it was a call from Ells that would make it happen. The rest of the floor was empty. Even at the highest levels of power, city employees get to go home to their families at some point. Licata stepped inside and took a seat.

“I’m glad you could come by and talk to me.”

“Yeah, well it’s been a pretty dry week. Only a cop shooting a cop and your office of misconduct is walled up on it.”

“I thought they were going to move you over to Sanitation. You could cover the strike.”

It was Ells’s way of showing that he had sources too. Just that morning Licata’s editor had floated the idea of him moving off of the police desk and covering Sanitation. A great gig for the next two weeks if they end up striking. Then you’re stuck the rest of your life reporting on whether the snowplows came out on time or not.

“They haven’t hung me up just yet. Maybe they never will. If I come in with something worth their while.”

“That’s right. Give me the hard sell. I invited you here, after all.”

Licata always found out the terms up front. When a deputy mayor has a secret, the price is higher than a round of Killian’s. “What are you looking for me to do?”

Ells slid a small stapled packet across his desk. “That’s Detective Mulino’s statement. He didn’t know the color of the day. He says he saw a gun, but you know they didn’t find one. He was bumbling his way through the whole thing.”

Licata didn’t reach for the paper. Touching it would mean accepting the terms, and he hadn’t been given any terms yet. “And what do you need?”

It was the deputy mayor’s turn to lean out, to take in the room. He had a broad smile and a sharp pair of eyes and if he didn’t look much like a natural politician, he looked like a natural leader. “You’re going to want to sit on this too. You know there have been some rumors that my boss might be hanging it up after the one term. With the little disasters, the crime. It may just be too much for him. I just want you to remember, when the time comes for the right person to make an announcement, who has helped you out along the way.”

So, he could get the confidential file from a deputy mayor so long as he promised to puff that deputy mayor up when he took the next step and announced he was running. There were worse things. If Ells won, after all, then Licata would be in a position to get strategic leaks directly from City Hall. Ells knew that, of course. It was all part of the bargain.

“I can live with that.”

“I knew you could.”

Licata reached across the desk to pick up the file. Ells smiled. The deal was struck.