Delgado could find no words.
“It’s the drops I see,” Bourque said. “Whenever I close my eyes, I see the drops.”
“You should talk to someone.”
Bourque looked at his partner. “I’m talking to you.” And when he breathed in, they both heard a whistle.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
He took his inhaler from his pocket and uncapped it. Before he could put it to his mouth, it slipped from his fingers and landed in the footwell in front of him.
“Damn thing slips out of my hand half the time,” he said. The inhaler was beyond his reach. He briefly unbuckled his seat belt so he could shift forward to scoop it up.
He took a couple of hits from it before tucking it back into his jacket.
“If you didn’t have that thing, what would happen?” Delgado asked.
“Asked my doctor the same question,” Bourque said. “He never really gave me an answer.”
Twenty-Eight
Chris Vallins said to Barbara Matheson, “Here.”
He’d stopped in front of the doors to a plain, white brick apartment building on the south side of East Twenty-Ninth Street between Second and Third.
“My place,” he said.
Sitting on the sidewalk, his back supported by the apartment building, was an unshaven man in his forties or fifties, a paper coffee cup on the ground in front of him with a few coins in it. His clothes were worn and dirty, but he was wearing a blue pullover sweater that looked relatively new.
“Hey,” Chris said to the man, who gave every indication of being homeless.
He looked at Chris and smiled. “My man!” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad,” Chris said. “You?”
“It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,” he sang. “A beautiful day for a neighbor. Will you be mine?”
Chris grinned. “How’s the sweater working out?”
The man gripped the front of the sweater, gave it a tug, then let go. “Mighty fine. Nice to have when there’s no room at the inn overnight. Got any more?”
“I’ll look through my closet again. In the meantime,” Chris said, taking off his gloves, “you might as well have these.” The leather on the fingers of the right glove was torn in several places from when Chris had hit the pavement.
“No, I couldn’t,” the man said, but reached up anyway to take them.
“The right one’s a bit ripped up, I’m afraid.” Vallins glanced at his bruised knuckles. “Me, too, apparently.”
Barbara looked at Vallins’s hand. “I’m sorry. That’s because of me.”
Vallins shrugged, his attention still focused on the homeless man, who was already trying the gloves on for size. “They fit?”
The homeless man grinned and said, “Not bad. Got a receipt in case I need to return them?”
“Think I lost it,” Vallins said.
The man finally looked at Barbara and said, “He’s a keeper.”
She said, “Oh no, we’re not—”
“This is a friend of mine, Jack. Barbara.”
“Hi, Barbara.”
“Hello, Jack,” Barbara said.
“Jack served his country with honor and distinction in Afghanistan,” Chris said.
Barbara gave the man a solemn nod as Chris opened the door and said, “See ya later, Jack.”
The homeless man gave them a thumbs-up.
As they entered the lobby, Barbara said, “I should have given him something.”
Chris shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Drop a buck in his cup on the way out if you feel like it.”
They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, walked to the end of a hall, and entered his apartment. Chris went straight to the kitchen. “Take the tour while I find some ice.”
He shuffled things around in the freezer compartment of his refrigerator while Barbara admired the view from his apartment window.
“If you look between those two buildings over on the left,” he called out from the kitchen, “you can see a small sliver of the East River.”
“I bet when they advertised this place, they touted the river view,” she said, one arm crossing her midsection so she could hold her elbow.
“You guessed it. Allowed them to add another two hundred a month to the rent,” he said.
“When a boat goes by, it’s like looking at it through a keyhole.”
While the view was not spectacular, it was a decent apartment. Spacious enough living room, a sliding glass door that led to a balcony big enough for two chairs. A peek down the hallway showed three doors, so a bathroom and two bedrooms. Not bad. Barbara would have killed for an extra bedroom that she could have turned into an office, instead of always using her kitchen table to do her work. The furnishings were modern, and there was the obligatory wall with the flat-screen TV, audio equipment, and shelves for speakers, CDs, DVDs, books, and a few framed snapshots.
Barbara ran her finger across the spines of the books. She never went into a house without seeing what the residents read, or at least displayed. Vallins’s taste ran to mostly nonfiction. History, politics. He even had a copy of that sports star’s memoir, the one Barbara had ghostwritten.
Maybe I should autograph it, she thought.
She stopped and looked at one of the photos. A young, grinning Chris, maybe seven years old, standing between what she presumed were his mother and father, the three of them leaning up against a rusted minivan. It looked like a vacation shot, and whoever’d snapped it was one of those amateur photographers who thought you must show the entire person, from shoes right up to their heads. All three were in cutoffs, short sleeves, and sneakers, and there was what looked like camping gear strapped to the roof racks. Everyone looked happy. You didn’t need to vacation at the Ritz to have a good time.
Barbara glanced into the kitchen. Sleek cupboards, small granite-topped island, Wolf stove with the red knobs, Sub-Zero fridge. If Vallins had come from humble beginnings, he appeared to be doing okay now.
Vallins pointed to the small, round table tucked into the corner of the kitchen by the window. There were two open laptops with darkened screens sitting there. “Let me make some space,” he said, closing them, setting one atop the other, and moving them to the kitchen counter. “Sit,” he ordered.
Barbara sat.
He brought over a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer, set it on the table, and gently lifted Barbara’s arm and rested her right elbow on it.
“Oriental stir fry,” she said, glancing at the bag. “So this is like Chinese medicine?” She winced. “Fuck, that’s cold.” She’d rolled her sleeve up, but the bag was too cold on bare skin. She rolled her sleeve down and put her elbow back on it.
“I still think you should go to the hospital.”
“I’m not dying.” She almost managed a grin. “I’m not that bad. You tackle like a girl. What about your hand? Doesn’t it need some frozen veggies, too?”
He waggled his fingers in the air. “They work fine.” He went back to the freezer. “Hey, this might be better.” He held up a pliable, blue-gel ice pack.
“The veggies are doing the job,” she said.
He closed the freezer. “You want a coffee? I got a one-cup maker.”
“You never have company?” she asked.
Vallins ignored the question. “Yes or no on the coffee?”
“Actually, just some water, and some Tylenols, if you’ve got them.”
He opened one cupboard to get a glass, and another to get a small bottle of pills. He filled the glass from the tap and shook out two pills onto the kitchen table. She popped the pills into her mouth and washed them down with her free hand.
“I’ve yet to encounter a problem that can’t be solved with drugs and/or alcohol,” she said.
“So you want a beer with that, then?”
She shook her head. “Water’s fine.” She paused. “Tell me about your friend.”
“Nothing to tell, really. Served his country. Came back. P
TSD. Couldn’t hold a job. Lost his family. No support. End of story. There’s a million of them.”
“But you help him,” Barbara said.
He shrugged. “Not really. Not as much as I could, or should.”
Barbara narrowed her eyes as she looked at him, as if intensifying her focus would provide some greater insight.
“So,” she said slowly.
“Yeah?” Chris looked at her with raised eyebrows.
“You were following me,” she said.
“Nope.”
“You had to be.”
He shook his head very slowly. “You think you’re that important?”
“Why are you dressed like this?”
“Like what?”
“Baseball cap. Leather jacket. Jeans. Give me a break. You didn’t want to look like you did in the limo yesterday.”
“On my day off,” Chris said, “I lose the suit and tie.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“The mayor has weekend events. Sometimes I work Saturday or Sunday. So I get a day off midweek instead.”
“Not buyin’ it,” Barbara said.
“Okay, so let’s say I was following you, which I was not. This kind of blows my cover, doesn’t it?”
Barbara considered that. “Maybe the whole thing was a setup, a way to gain my confidence. So you rescued me.”
“Yeah. I cleverly arranged for that truck to come along at just the right moment as you were crossing the street, and you helped immeasurably by staring at your phone the whole time like a complete and total idiot.”
Barbara bit her lower lip. “Okay, so, where were you going if you weren’t following me?”
“There’s a bar up the street where I have lunch sometimes.” He cast a suspicious glance her way. “What are you doing in my neighborhood? How do I know you weren’t nosing around up here looking for me?”
“Please,” she said.
“Let me ask you this,” Chris said. “Is this your routine when someone saves your life? Interrogate them? A simple thank-you would do.”
Barbara was quiet for several seconds, as though working up her nerve to say something nice. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Thanks. And I’m sorry you scraped your hand.”
“Stop gushing,” he said. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“You could still have been following me, but had to do the right thing when I nearly bought it. Felt you had no choice. That’s why you tried to take off without my seeing you.”
“The veggies working?” he asked.
She lifted up her elbow momentarily. “I think a piece of frozen cauliflower is digging into a bone.”
He got up, went to the freezer, and brought back the proper icepack. As she set her elbow on it, he tossed the bag of frozen vegetables back in.
“You got any real food here?” she asked.
He opened the fridge compartment wide enough for her to see. It was nearly empty.
“This could be my place,” Barbara said. “You don’t get to the store much?”
Vallins shrugged.
“Let me ask you something,” Barbara said.
“More questions about how I staged your near-death experience?”
She shook her head. “Sit down.” He did. “So, Headley. What exactly do you do for him? What’s your title?”
“I was recently knighted, so you might want to call me Sir Vallins.”
“Funny, I would have pegged you for the court jester.”
“I’m an assistant to the mayor. I assist.”
Barbara smiled. “In what ways do you assist?”
Chris leaned in closer. “Any way I can. Security, policy implementation, research, whatever.”
“Security?”
He nodded.
“You got a conceal and carry license?”
“I’m sorry?”
Barbara rolled her eyes. She knew he knew what she was talking about. “Are you packing?”
“Did you seriously say ‘are you packing?’ Are we in a Scorsese movie?”
“Show me your gun,” Barbara said.
“First of all,” Chris said, “I am not going to answer that question, and if I were packing, which I am not saying I am, I wouldn’t be doing it on my day off.”
Barbara sighed. “Fine. So you assist the mayor. So following me around, that would fall into the category of assisting.”
“You’re a one-trick pony.”
“Okay,” she said, switching gears. “Tell me about him.”
“Off the record?”
“Off the record. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Vallins shrugged. “He’s an asshole.”
“I wouldn’t call that a keen insight. A lot of us have figured that out.”
“But even if he is, you don’t get how things work in the real world.”
“I think I’ve heard this speech before,” Barbara said.
Chris said, “Nothing gets done in this town without cutting corners.”
“Cutting corners shouldn’t mean rewarding people who donated to your campaign.”
“Did you ever get a job because you knew somebody? A friend who put in a word for you? Do you know anyone who hasn’t, somewhere along the line, gotten a job that way? One hand washing the other?”
“It shouldn’t work that way at City Hall.”
“Suppose, right now, you became mayor. Or … I don’t know, managing editor of the Times. Who would you bring in to help you run things? People you’d worked with in the past, people whose abilities and reputations you knew? People who’d supported you along the way that you wanted to help out in return? Or total strangers, so as not to look like you were practicing favoritism? And then those total strangers turn out to be total fuckups?”
She decided to go in another direction. “What’s the deal between the mayor and Glover? Who hates who more?”
Vallins spoke slowly, as though choosing his words carefully. “The father-son dynamic can be a complicated thing.”
“Diplomatic.”
“Glover … never stops trying to impress his father. It’s not easy.”
“Because Headley’s hard to please, or the boy’s just not up to it?”
“Bit of both.”
Barbara nodded. “Why are the feds involved in the elevator crashes?”
Vallins blinked. “I think I just got whiplash there. We’re done with Glover?”
“Is it Homeland?”
“What are you talking about?”
“At least one set of relatives who lost someone in yesterday’s crash was told not to talk about it or ask questions. By a guy in a dark suit with a dark SUV who sounded like he was right out of central casting. Everything but the Ray-Bans.”
“I’ve got no idea,” Chris said. “So ask Homeland. What do you want to talk about next? It’s like you’ve got this list in your head, you’re checking things off.”
Barbara looked into his brown eyes for several seconds. “What’s your story? Who are you? Where do you come from?”
“Grew up in Queens. Moved into Manhattan in my twenties.”
“What’d your folks do?”
“Dad worked construction, died when a beam landed on him. My mom was a traditional wife until he passed and she went out to work for a couple of years.”
Her face softened. “Sorry.”
He shrugged. “I was ten when my dad died.”
“College?
Chris shook his head. “No money for that. Whenever I need to know how to do something, I find someone who already knows and learn from them. Did all kinds of jobs from the age of, like, thirteen. Even before then, I had an aunt who helped me as much as she could with money, but she wasn’t rich or anything. Worked in a butcher shop, computer repair store, did some security work in my twenties. Sometimes I’d be doing them all at once, finishing up one shift at one gig and heading off to the other.” He smiled. “I’m a quick study. Show me how to do something once, I’ll know it forever.”
“So, you never played c
ollege football, then. Where’d you learn to tackle?” She smiled.
“Tackling girls just comes natural.”
“How’d you connect with Headley?”
“Worked low-level on a campaign, got discovered. Like a movie star.” He shrugged. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
Chris moved in closer. “Why are you so angry?”
She scowled. “I’m not angry.”
“Please. I’ve been reading you for years,” he said. “You are one pissed-off bitch, and I mean that as a compliment. The best writing comes from outrage, right? You use words like a weapon.”
Barbara shifted her elbow on the icepack. “It’s not anger,” she said defensively. “I just don’t like injustice and hypocrisy.”
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “It goes deeper. Something happened to you. Something changed you. What was it?”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” she said.
He studied her for several seconds. “You think who you are doesn’t come through in everything you write? I may not know your shoe size, but I know who you are.”
“And who’s that?”
“Someone looking to settle a score,” he said. “Let’s have a look at that arm.”
He gently took hold of her wrist with one hand, as though she might try to escape, while he lightly touched her elbow with the other. Barbara made no effort to stop him.
“So this bald thing you got goin’ on,” she said, looking at his scalp. “You after the Dwayne Johnson look? You shave it, or did you lose your hair before your first prom?”
“I don’t have money for combs and conditioner,” he said, still holding her arm.
They didn’t say anything for several seconds.
“I don’t sleep with the enemy,” Barbara said.
“Did I ask?”
“No,” Barbara conceded. “Not yet.”
“I’m heading into kind of a busy week and don’t think I could handle anything more than heavy petting.”
She appeared to be considering it, then glanced at her elbow. “And I do my best work with this arm, and until it mends …”
She pushed back her chair and stood. She handed Chris the icepack. “Gotta go.”
Elevator Pitch (UK) Page 17
