Winter and Night (39 page)

"—or you do; it may be my case but I'm not proprietary about it. You're welcome to have bright ideas, too."

"Thank you, this is mine. Let's go home."

The wind pushed her hair across her forehead again, and this time I smoothed it for her. "You know," I said, "if this were your case and your nephew and I said let's go home, you'd break my kneecap."

"Undoubtedly."

I looked into her eyes as the wind turned again, whipped across us from the other direction. I wanted to be with Lydia someplace else, on a broad empty field like this but someplace where the wind was still and the air was warm and sweet and the sky was covered with stars. I brushed her hair back one more time although it didn't need it, felt its silkiness under my fingertips. I thought I smelled the freesia scent she so often wears, though in the wind, in the cold, that wasn't likely.

"Okay," I said. "Home."

* * *

We had brought both cars so we each drove alone, along a highway much less crowded, going into the city at night, than it had been leaving it at rush hour. I didn't know what Lydia was doing in her car: maybe she had the radio on and she was catching up on the news, or she'd found some local college station where they played freshly burned CDs by garage bands from around the neighborhood; or maybe she was on the phone, talking to her mother, or a brother or a cousin, checking in with her family, sharing her day. I usually drive with music, but now my speakers were silent, the CDs stacked in the holder between the seats. I had the window open, and I felt the cold push of the wind, the damp heaviness in the air. I tried not to think, just to drive, beating the traffic around me but not by much, pulling into the right lane occasionally for drivers— usually young men— whose need for speed was greater than mine.

I was almost to the tunnel when my cell phone rang. I slipped it out, thinking it might be Lydia, and flipped it open. "Smith."

"Linus Kwong, dude. He's back."

"Back?" The wind roared into the car; I pressed the button, sent the window up, so I could hear. "What do you mean?"

"Premador, dude! I've been, like, scanning his chat rooms and message boards. You know, in case. And just now, I found a post. From, like, today."

"When today?"

"No way to tell."

"What does it say?"

"Basically: Yo, and remember, you knew me first."

"First?"

"He says he's about to be famous. His name's gonna be everywhere, he says."

"When? When is that going to happen?"

"Doesn't say. That's all of it, dude. You dudes knew me first, remember that when I'm famous."

"He doesn't say what he's going to do that's going to make him famous?"

"No. You got a clue what it's about?"

"Maybe. Linus, can you get in touch with him?"

"I already posted to that board, but he didn't answer yet. It could have been hours ago, he may not even be online on anymore."

"You can't tell? You can't talk to him?"

"It's a board, dude, not a chat room."

"What does that mean?"

"It's not real time," he said, sounding a little suspicious, as though this must be a trick question because the answer was so obvious. "You post your message, it comes up later. You could be signed off or somewhere else, by then."

"But there are places you can talk in real time?"

"Yeah, sure. He has rooms he goes to. I've been scanning, but he's not around."

"Is there a way to find out where he, uh, posted from?"

"You mean, physically?"

"Yes. I mean, where he is."

"Sometimes. But you gotta go through the service, though. I mean, it's not something I can do." He sounded embarrassed at this admission.

"Who can?"

Even more uncomfortable: "Cops can," and I remembered why Linus was so available, this semester, for this kind of work.

"What information do they need?"

"They need his screen name and the URL of the board. They got to find the administrator, somebody at the service provider and maybe if they're using a remailer—"

"Linus, you could be speaking to me in Chinese. I'm going to give your number to a cop I know."

"Oh, hey, dude—"

"It's okay, Linus. Just tell him whatever it is you were just telling me. Tell him everything you know about Premador, the Web sites he goes to, everything. You won't get in any trouble."

"I—"

"You wanted me to stop this guy," I said. "If he's about to be famous, I don't think it's for anything good."

Pause. "Yeah, okay. But if I get in trouble again, you got to talk to my mom."

"I promise. And don't worry about it. You can always move in with your cousin Lydia."

"Oh, dude, that is so not happening! Her mom's a crazy lady!"

"Yeah," I said, "tell me about it. Listen, Linus? Good work."

"Hey, thanks, dude."

"And keep looking. He might turn up somewhere else."

"Yeah, I know. I'm all over it."

I called Sullivan again.

"Goddammit, Smith—"

"Christ, Sullivan, you're a hard guy to help. Picked up the coach yet?"

"Smith—"

"Okay, okay, don't hang up. Your computer expert from Newark show up?"

"Just got here."

"Tell him—"

"Her."

"Even better. Tell her Premador's back online."

"What the hell—"

"I was just talking to a kid who found a post from him on a message board," I said, hoping I had the words right. "From today. He says he's going to be famous soon."

"Shit," said Sullivan.

"Right. Here's the kid's number." I gave it to him. "He can tell her how to find the bulletin board, and he thinks she may be able to trace where the post came from. The physical location."

"She might, but that kind of thing takes time. He may be long gone from wherever that was."

"Yeah," I said. "Or he may not."

Sullivan said he'd get on it. By then I was at the tunnel. I closed the phone, waited until I was threading through the streets of Manhattan to call Lydia. I told her about her cousin and what Premador had said.

"Oh, no," she said quietly.

"It's not like we weren't expecting it."

"No. But I was hoping."

"I know," I said.

We met, as planned, at a Shanghai-style restaurant we both liked in Chinatown, where we ate cold smoked fish and four-flavor bean curd and fried pork dumplings. The food was as good as always, and I was hungrier than usual, but even after a beer I still felt that edge, that tight-drawn sharpness I couldn't shake. A busboy behind us dropped a glass and I spun round in my chair, ready.

"Christ," I said to Lydia, turning back.

She smiled. "I know. We have that in common."

"We have something in common? God Almighty, what?"

"We both hate being on the bench. Oh, no, did I just use a sports metaphor?"

"Don't let your mother know. She'll send you back to China for reeducation." I waved to the waiter, pointed to my empty beer bottle. "I just feel so goddamn useless. Gary asked me for help," I said.

Lydia said, "Jared Beltran asked Nick Dalton for help."

I stared at her. "What are you saying?"

"I'm not sure. Just that it isn't straightforward. You do your best, but that doesn't mean the result will be something you wanted."

The waiter brought my new beer and I took a long drink. "Is this a way of telling me to lay off?"

"I think what I'm saying is, we've come to a point where there's nothing we can do for a while, and we think that's a bad thing, but it might not be."

"Sit down, let the first-stringers play."

"It's the reality of the job, Bill. The police have the people, the access, the resources. Sometimes it's our job just to get them to take a case seriously. Then we step back and they go to work. If we insist on staying in, we really can screw things up."

"Where did you pick up crap like that?"

She smiled again. "You taught me."

"You know," I said, "there are times when a talented rookie would be better off ignoring a know-it-all veteran."

"I was young and impressionable then. I ignore you all the time, now."

"So I've noticed." I signaled for the check. "All right. I'll be a good boy, go home and go to bed. But if Sullivan doesn't call by morning I'm going to go out there and pick up Ryder myself."

She nodded. "I'll go with you."

I walked Lydia home, kissed her at her door, watched her disappear inside the building where she's always lived. Then I turned and kept walking, not going anywhere, not paying much attention to where I went. The wind kept up, blowing grit and papers through the air, making street signs shiver. On a sidewalk in SoHo two young women left a trendy bar, laughed as the wind sneaked up from behind and wrapped their coats around them; in the East Village, theater patrons trying to steal a smoke between acts cursed as the wind waited for them to light matches and then blew them out. As I crossed into the Seaport the wind brought sprinkles of rain. When people opened umbrellas it gusted harder, turned them inside out to make them useless. At Battery Park the rain started to come down hard; by the time I reached Laight Street I was soaked.

I stopped in front of Shorty's, then walked past, to my door. With my key in the lock I changed my mind, turned and headed back. Inside, the bar was warm, smoke-filled, smelling of burgers and of wet cloth and leather; I wasn't the only one who'd been caught in the rain. Quiet talk shared the air with the TV's low-volume commentary on a college football game. I watched the TV screen above the bar for a few moments as I stood in the doorway: It was an unimportant game in an unimportant conference, but it had been chosen by ESPN for this Friday's broadcast, putting these kids on national TV for what would be for most of them the first and last time. The home team was clobbering the visitors as the third quarter wound down.

I made my way to the bar, found a stool near the end. Shorty, behind the bar as always, looked my way; I nodded and he brought me a Maker's Mark over ice.

"You're all wet," he said as he set it down.

"I usually am." I picked up the drink. "Can I ask you something?"

"About what's going on?"

"How do you know something's going on?"

"You looked like hell last time you were in here. You said you'd tell me about it next time I saw you and then I didn't see you." Shorty's voice was raspy, the way it had been as long as I'd known him. I listened for accusation, searched his face for anger, found neither, just fact.

"When I was fifteen," I said. "What I did."

"What about it?"

"You and Dave, the other guys, you always said it was right."

"So?"

"Was it?"

"Yes."

"I sent my father to prison."

"Your father was a lunatic. He almost killed you."

"He was my father."

"That wasn't your fault."

"It didn't work out. My sister didn't come home."

"It was still right."

"Whether or not it worked?"

"Since when is that the judge?"

His eyes caught mine. I nodded. I finished my drink in silence after that, and then I left.

Twenty-Six

Upstairs, I poured another bourbon, turned on ESPN, watched the end of the game. The visiting team couldn't dig out from under; they lost by over twenty points. I left the set on, caught the commentary, which was short because there wasn't much to say. As I finished the drink I drifted with the station into a late-night rewind of some set of Extreme Games held earlier that day somewhere in New Hampshire. I watched as young men, and a few women, flew through the air on mountain bikes, leaped on Rollerblades over parked cars. They were going for both speed and danger, and I remembered that, remembered thinking at that age that the risk was worth the thrill, because you don't understand what you're risking. Manic announcers called the events, their shouted half-sentences tumbling over each other as though broadcasting were another Extreme sport.

After a beer commercial came the main event: skateboards racing down and then up a pair of huge concrete ramps. The competitors tried for flips, twists, airborne jumps as they sped between the two. The third kid to start, reigning champ according to the broadcaster, pulled off the double somersault he was going for but wiped out on the landing, his board flying one way, he another. He hit hard and didn't get up. Medics swarmed around him, and other kids did, too. One brought back his board. He held it out as though the sight of it would be enough, could make the kid rise, could roll the clock back just far enough to make this a mistake, a ref's bad call that could be rethought and revised. "You hate to see this," the commentator said in a hushed voice, the same guy who'd whooped and shouted, "Yes! He's going to try it!" when the move began. And I thought, do we? Do we hate it, or is it seeing this— the football player rushed off the field in a cervical brace, the race car bursting into flames as it smashes the wall— is it this that gives us the limit, reminds us of what we forget as we go through our days: that something is actually at stake here? Sometimes the only way to know where the line is, is to cross it. Is this young kid, motionless at the bottom of the ramp, the threat and the promise we keep coming back for?

The kid moved his arm, blinked his eyes, tried to sit. The camera was right there to record it all. Two medics helped him up, walked him off the ramp, his eyes empty, his legs stumbling. "Looks like he's going to be all right," the commentator said. "Thank God. They're clearing the ramp, and Lachappelle's up next." I turned the TV off and went to bed.

I slept badly, the room too hot and then too cold, the sirens too loud in the street, the lighted dial on my clock too bright. Dark images from the depths of my dreams kept forcing me to the surface, but vanished before I could catch them, hold them, look at them straight on. I was half-awake, drifting, waiting to sink again, when the cell phone rang.

I'd left it beside the bed. I groped for it, flipped it open. "Smith," I rasped, coughed, reached for a cigarette. The clock said 7:30; I registered that as I heard Linus Kwong's voice.

"I got him, dude! He's right here!" The echo told me Linus was on a speakerphone.