by Robert Pobi
He tried to concentrate on the dishes, but his attention kept creeping back to the television.
The blinking screen usually lent an intangible warmth to the kitchen, but tonight it added a creepy, shimmery blue to the stainless steel and marble. He had the sound low as the news anchor in his peripheral vision did his best James Earl Jones. And with every little detail, his old machinery squeaked as it tried to start up.
He was wiping down the sink when that same figure from before caught his attention. Same silhouette. Same clothing. Only one man looked like that.
Lucas turned off the water, wiped his hands, and turned up the volume. He was leaning against the island when Erin came in. “What’s with the news?” She froze as she saw his expression and turned to the television, then back to him, tractor-beaming him with one of her looks. “Luke?”
He watched her stare flick back and forth from his good eye to his bad one—it was something she only did when she was angry or disappointed, and right now he knew that she was both. There were a lot of things he could say, but the last thing he wanted was to sound defensive.
Anderson Cooper was now sharing the split screen with Wolf Blitzer back in the studio. Blitzer was doing his best to look grave as Cooper came back with vague answers about the unknown suspect, unknown motive, unknown victim, unknown type of weapon—the only certainty being that the weather would hamper the investigation.
Lucas nodded at the screen when they ran the loop, just as that figure crossed the street behind Cooper. “Remember him?” he asked.
Erin grudgingly shifted her focus to the screen. When she saw the figure he was referring to, her posture stiffened.
Maude called from the front hall. “We’re ready!”
But Erin didn’t move. She just watched the events unfolding on the screen. “That’s Brett Kehoe,” she said flatly.
“Yeah.”
Maude called again.
“In a minute!” Erin snapped, quickly updating it with a softer, “Give me a minute, okay?” But she was still staring at the TV. “Does this involve you?” she asked Lucas.
Kehoe was now walking toward a group of men and women in FBI parkas. “I don’t know.”
Erin took the remote from the counter, snapped the television off, and tossed the controller back onto the marble. The battery cover flew off, rolling triple-As out onto the floor. “Well, stop watching that crap. It’s story time.”
Fifteen minutes later, images of the Ghost of Christmas Past had evaporated, and Lucas read from a Sesame Street book. The kids had lapsed into the usual almost-calm that followed playtime and preceded bedtime. The book was a little dated, and he had trouble doing voices other than Mr. Snuffleupagus, but the children always got a kick out of his singing.
Maude was doing homework at the oak library table—no doubt final prep for her algebra test tomorrow—and Erin was in the big Morris chair by the fire. Damien and Hector were on the floor by the tree, deeply immersed in a made-up game with the Ouija board (only they called it the Luigi board), and Alisha, who had been with them for three days now, was curled up with Laurie and the dog in the window seat. Alisha was making friends with Laurie, who enjoyed her role of being a big sister for the first time. Erin’s body language had softened a little, no doubt in response to Lucas’s Grover impression. And it was one of those moments where all seemed well in Page Land—almost.
He was in the midst of a very bad rendition of “The Alphabet Song” when Alisha’s and Laurie’s attention shifted out the window. At first, they just looked curious, but when Alisha’s arms tightened around Lemmy, Lucas stopped singing, “J is for a jar of jam,” closed the book, and went to the window. Behind him, Erin’s reflection unfolded from the chair.
Two police cruisers bookended a pair of black SUVs at the curb. The cars were double-parked, and the lights pulsed. The doors on all four vehicles opened simultaneously, and more than enough manpower to field a football team stepped out into the snow. There were six police officers divided between the two cruisers and eight warm bodies between the SUVs. The only one that Lucas recognized was the well-tailored figure from the television—so make that seven warm bodies plus Brett Kehoe.
Kehoe broke off from the group and headed for the front door. The rest took up positions on the sidewalk that Lucas recognized as strategic; as always, Kehoe surrounded himself with good people.
Lucas put his original hand on Alisha’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, sweetie; they’re not here for you.”
Behind him, Erin said, “Phooey,” and he was amazed that even with the small army on the sidewalk, she was able to keep it together in front of the kids. More of that magic that attracted him to her.
But he knew to avoid looking at her as he went to the door.
The bell rang, and he took a few deep breaths before opening the massive slab of oak and stained glass to the FBI’s special agent in charge for Manhattan. Four overcoated clones came up the steps behind him.
Kehoe didn’t say hello. Or smile. Or even extend a hand. All he did was ask, “Have you seen the news?”
5
Lucas unloaded the dishwasher as Kehoe went through his sales pitch. He didn’t offer to take Kehoe’s coat; he didn’t want him to start feeling at home. Lucas didn’t have anything more to give these people. Not unless they needed a little resentment.
Kehoe didn’t start with an apology, and he didn’t ask for one, and either would have been understandable. But a decade was a lot of time, and Kehoe wasn’t an intellectually lazy man; he had no doubt worked out his own feelings on the way things had unfolded.
If he had any.
Of course, the net result was that none of it had been anyone’s fault. There had been no meaning or purpose or even intent in what had happened. The universe had simply opened its arms and handed out one of those meaningless fuck-yous that history wouldn’t even remember. All because they had been at precisely the wrong place at exactly the right time.
Kehoe put a diagram down on the table. It was a crime-scene mock-up with measurements and elevations penciled in, all in CAD-generated accuracy—more of that Kehoe efficiency. “The victim was westbound on Forty-second and got hit as he emerged from the Park viaduct. The shot came in from the south.”
Before he could stop himself, Lucas put his aluminum finger down at the transept where the two routes overlapped. “Through this trough?” The diner under the overpass was one of the places he often took the kids for breakfast after their Sunday morning outing to the library. “Where, specifically, did the shot come from?”
“All we know is that he got hit in the intersection, and witnesses say the sound came in a full two or three seconds later.”
Witnesses were notoriously bad judges of time, but the delay between impact and the sound wave had been big enough to be noticed, which meant that there was some distance in the equation. It also said that the shooter hadn’t used a noise suppressor of any kind.
“Caliber?”
“The round went through the vehicle, and we haven’t found it yet.”
“You mean it went through the window.”
“No, I don’t. It went through the car.”
Now he knew why Kehoe was standing in his kitchen.
Lucas thought about the corridor up Park, a trough of high-rises and windows that offered a million and one vantage points for a man with a rifle.
“A second victim was hit by the car after the driver lost control. She was with the New York Ballet. She’s dead.”
With each little Lego that Kehoe snapped into place, his motivations became clearer. This was the kind of event that could very quickly undermine the public’s belief in the powers that be. And in a closed ecosystem like New York City, the implied social contract of the inhabitants was the only thing that truly prevented the experiment from descending into chaos.
“I see your problem but not how I can help. I was quit when you came in, and I’m twice as quit now,” he said, doing a pretty good Rick Deckard impression.
Kehoe watched him for a few moments, and Lucas knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t done. This was where Kehoe would try to get his fingers inside Lucas’s head. So he waited for it.
“One more thing.” The way Kehoe opened, Lucas could tell that this was the big sell.
Lucas stared back with his good eye. “I told you—I’m quit.”
Kehoe reached down and picked up the elevations. He rolled them up, nodded solemnly, and looked like he was really about to leave when he paused and smiled sadly. “You should still know that the victim was your old partner, Doug Hartke.”
6
Forty-second Street and Park Avenue
Lucas stood on Forty-second in the shadow of the Park Avenue Viaduct with the vector printouts. They were laminated and organized in a one-inch binder with the bureau’s logo embossed on it. All neat and tidy and waiting for him when Kehoe’s SUV came to a stop outside the big Blue Bird command vehicle parked at the scene. They were also very much useless.
Forty-second was closed in both directions, and Park had been shut three blocks south, tying traffic into a knot usually reserved for July. The street was upholstered in NYPD cruisers and FBI SUVs, the flashing lights bouncing off the snow and concrete and glass, giving the whole show a netherworldly disco effect.
It was freezing, and the wind funneled between the buildings, riding up Park Avenue and stirring up snow devils that at any other time would have been beautiful. The asphalt was covered in a dirty frozen crust that crunched like potato chips, and Lucas had trouble negotiating the uneven footing. His ankle always stiffened up in low temperatures. The prosthetic itself was mostly aluminum, but the joint pins were stainless steel and some of the other hardware was titanium or carbon fiber, and each alloy contracted at a different rate, which hampered mobility. To compensate, he added a hop to his good leg, giving his gait an idiosyncratic signature in the cold.
When they arrived on-site, Lucas asked about the food chain, and Kehoe pointed to a large crucifix of a figure near the evidence tent that he recognized as the unmistakable form of Grover Graves. He and Lucas had never hit it off, one of those bad chemistry dislikes that all the handshakes, smiles, and best intentions couldn’t overcome. Graves was also the single known exception to Kehoe’s rule of using only the best people, and having him in charge of a case of this import didn’t feel like one of his moves.
After Lucas and Graves nodded hellos from opposite sides of the street, Kehoe told Lucas that Hartke had been working under Graves for the past few years, a detail that surprised him. Hartke had hated stupid almost as much as Lucas did, and Lucas couldn’t see the man taking orders from Graves, no matter what the situation. But it was a possible explanation as to why Kehoe had Graves leading the investigation—it was making him take responsibility for his own people.
But Lucas wouldn’t have to work with Graves. Or Kehoe. He was here as a favor to his old partner. Hartke was a lot of things, some of them not very pretty, but he had been a friend. Which meant that Lucas owed him. So here he was. Standing out in the street and waiting to slip into character.
The two agents Kehoe had sent with him were hanging back, near the corner, eyeing him with the preprogrammed disinterest of their kind. One of them was a typical bureau type who looked like he had been pulled from central casting—forgettable and bland; the other was a black chick who moved with the slow, deliberate patience of a badass. They were both quiet and professional, and they stayed out of his way.
After a few seconds of taking in the topography, he realized that he had moved behind a lamppost, which meant that his operating system was updating automatically. It was amazing how fast that kind of thinking became instinctive—and even more amazing how long it lingered after it was no longer necessary, like some phantom limb. After the hospitals and operations and rehabilitation and nightmares, it had taken him almost a full year to be able to walk through a crowd. It took time, but the fear had slowly dispersed into the ether. Until now.
But a little caution out here wasn’t just smart, it was essential; when put into perspective, nothing was worse than hunting a man with a rifle in a city of windows.
“Fuck it,” he said at church volume, and stepped into the intersection.
The victim—his former partner and onetime friend—still sat in his car. The vehicle was hidden from the world by a crime-scene tent, but Kehoe had walked him through, and Lucas would not forget what Hartke looked like. Taking the top off a human skull released a fountain of blood operating at 1.5 pounds per square inch with a reservoir of nearly two gallons. In an enclosed area like a car, that translated to enough bad dreams to last a lifetime. And Lucas already had a pretty good collection of those.
He hadn’t sat down with Hartke in three years, but they’d exchanged Christmas cards and the occasional email, all embellished with the threat of visits that rarely materialized. Lucas couldn’t blame the man; what had happened to him was simply too much of a reminder about just how wrong things could go in this line of work. And law enforcement people, especially old-schoolers like Hartke, were notoriously superstitious—even if he would never admit it, some part of his reptilian brain had to be worried that Lucas’s luck might be retroactively contagious. So Lucas never held it against him.
He sighted up the street and took a deep breath, pushing the weather and the flashing lights and the army of men in blue and the giant Christmas ornaments and the tent hiding his dead former partner away.
Did he still have it in him? After all, if what everyone said was true, he couldn’t really do the things he claimed. Not with a human brain.
There was only one way to find out. So he closed his eyes and waited for it to begin.
He thought about what he had seen back in the evidence tent. About the shattered car window and his friend’s shoveled-out brain. About the dashcam footage Kehoe had shown him and that four-second window framing the round that had come screaming in. About where he was and why he had agreed to come.
Then he opened his eyes, and the world slipped into context.
Instantly.
Automatically.
And the street came to life in a way he hadn’t seen in so long it felt like he had entered someone else’s hallucination.
The world was suddenly reduced to an intricate geometry.
The smaller components of the city took on values—the bricks and blocks of stone becoming units of measure. These units connected to the larger planes—the windows and doors and lampposts—which in turn displayed their own numerical meaning, each relative to the others, and suddenly everything was one, and the city became a matrix of interconnected digits, a mosaic of numbers that stretched to the horizon.
Lucas stood in the intersection, lifted his arms, and slowly rotated in place, absorbing the city in a numerical panorama that pulsed and danced and flashed through his head. He took in the numbers around him, feeding the data into a series of instinctive algorithms that even he did not understand. It was an immediate process, fired up with an automaticity he could not explain. It was like being at the center of a vortex, and the lines of code carpeting the landscape swirled around him at a speed too fast to absorb in any conscious way.
By the time he had completed a single rotation, he could no longer see the buildings or sidewalks or police cruisers or flashing lights. He forgot the cop cars lining the street and the men and women in blue parading up and down the snow-covered pavement. All he saw, all he was able to relate to, were the numbers.
Everywhere.
Representing everything.
And then.
It was over.
He blinked and the circus shut down. All of it—the numbers, the geometry, the distances. All that was left was a frigid winter scene with too many cop cars and not enough traffic.
Lucas sighted down Park Avenue, and his mind connected the components. He no longer heard the honking of rerouted traffic, felt the mother-in-law’s kiss of winter chill, or squinted into the snow coming down. All
he could do was stare at the spindle of brick rising out of the earth like Kong’s mountain home. It was the only building on the avenue that had been designed on a cant, its orientation offset by a ninety-degree twist. One of its corners reached out, towering over Park. It was 772 yards from the point of impact, give or take a handful of inches.
And perfect.
He turned to the woman. “What’s your name?”
“Whitaker,” she said, her friendly tone in direct contrast to her badass impression. The only visible features were her teeth hidden in the shadow of the FBI hood.
“Whitaker, tell Kehoe I know where the shot came from.”
Lucas nodded at what he knew was a building in the distance but had turned back into a series of geometrical planes connected to the rest of the city by numbers. He raised his aluminum hand and pointed at the tower. “The roof of number 3 Park Avenue.”
7
Although designed by the same architectural firm that had birthed the Empire State Building, number 3 Park Avenue possessed none of the grandeur of the company’s crowning achievement. An unappealing monolith that rose precisely 556 feet into the Manhattan skyline, the building resembled a condo development. It lacked the chutzpah to be Trump ugly but still managed to look like it was trying too hard. It could have been built anywhere in the world and still not be nominated for any kind of an award.
The rooftop was the size of a football field, with two outbuildings housing access doors and various utilities, a water tower, and a bank of tractor-trailer-sized HVAC units that were running so hard the deck vibrated with their energy. The roof was set up like a medieval castle—or a prison yard—a twenty-foot wall enclosing the sky-high courtyard like defensive ramparts. Wind funneled down into the walled space, fueling an atmospheric turbine that created a self-contained snowstorm.
