"You crossed the line a couple questions ago, Richie."
"It's just, Mike ... I kind of hate having to write up this scrawny little subway piece about a guy with your history."
A voice said, "Tell 'em, Mike."
I turned and saw Pat Chambers at my side. Police personnel aren't supposed to do some things. They don't give up details easily. They protect their own premises with wolflike tenacity. They don't take easily to reporters even when the newshounds are backing them.
So when Pat Chambers, Captain of Homicide, gave me that odd look that expressed nothing but said everything, and stated quietly, "Tell them who the shooter was, Mike," I knew this was going to be bigger than old Goliath himself.
So did the pair of graveyard-shift reporters, print men—no TV cameras had responded to this chickenshit story, even if the name "Mike Hammer" that used to mean so much was smack dab in the middle of it. Hard to describe just how tired, old, seen-everything eyes could snap open like they had just spotted the Titanic floating to the top.
There was something else, too. They knew it. They could feel it. The one thing they always wanted—the Big Story—was about to be dropped right in their past-their-prime laps.
I said, "The gunman was a suspected terrorist. Illegally in the United States. Known to the authorities."
Both reporters looked at Pat and his face was calm. He said, "I can confirm that."
It took almost ten seconds for Richie to find his voice. "Something's screwy here."
"Check it out," Pat suggested.
"Where?"
"Try the Feds."
"Aw come on, Captain," the other reporter blurted. "They're clamsville."
Pat shrugged. "We've provided you with the details. The terror ist was broke and tried to do something about it. That's what it looks like, anyway."
Very softly, Richie said, "In this country, terrorists aren't broke. There are enough religiously motivated lunatics loose to keep guys like this well funded and damn highly motivated. They have unlimited funds from sources overseas, and all kinds of cash from their money-laundering resources right here!"
I said, "Should I be taking notes?"
The reporters cursed at me, and Pat raised a hand. "All you get tonight."
When the pair of reporters had scooted, I told Pat, "They won't leave this thing alone—you know that."
Pat wore a Cheshire cat smile. It was a look I'd seen before, dating back to his early days in Homicide. "Good. We're going to need all the hands we can get on this thing. The media covers a lot of bases we can't reach, so if we can call in a few favors, let's do it."
I asked him softly, "What do you know that I don't, Pat?"
Pat looked over at a desk where Velda was talking earnestly to the two kids; he lowered his voice. "Interagency communications are pretty fast these days."
"Yeah, I know. It's gotten better."
"We'll have some big answers in a matter of hours."
"You going to tell me, Pat?"
"If it's public information, sure."
" Thanks a bunch, pal. Didn't I get a hold of you right after that guy got splattered?"
"Good to see you living up to your civic duty, Mike. You do realize who those kids over there are, don't you?"
I shrugged. "Brother and stepsister. His father married her mother. Both grad students at NYU."
There was a subtle twist at the corner of Pat's mouth. "That's not what I mean—Hurley, Sheffield? Do anything for you? Top scientists in the academic field. Both have been considered for the Nobel Prize. Sound familiar?"
I shrugged. "Nasty incident, clean subjects."
Pat's head bobbed slowly. "Delicate situation."
"Why ' delicate'?"
"Well, for one thing, there's a wild man in it."
"Named Goliath?"
He gave me a grin that also dated back to early Homicide days. "Named Hammer."
Chapter 3
This time Richie and his pal surprised me. The next morning's papers, under those two knowledgeable bylines, just picked up the official police reports on the subway affair. With all the action going on in the sand hill of the Middle East and the rash of suicide bombings in the Israeli-Palestinian sectors, one New York subway shooting wasn't much of an event at all.
But I knew they hadn't dropped it. Oh, they'd dropped a hat on it, all right, shelved it, to wait for the right moment. They had the oddity of a corpse in this suspected terrorist, dead by accident but with a bullet-damaged foreign rod near his limp hand. And they had a gun-toting Good Samaritan in the middle of it who used to be big news back when crime was really organized and needed some good old-fashioned wiping out.
So Richie and his friend would simply wait for more truth to spill out. Some things were just too big to hide. Even the Atlantic Ocean couldn't hide the Titanic, right? And man's footprints are still on the moon.
The only newsworthy surprise that hadn't been mentioned by Pat or me was the name of the guy who used to stride around on that leg those kids brought home.
If that's who it was.
Far as I was concerned, a big bone was just a big bone. I wasn't convinced yet that it belonged to the biggest bad boy of them all.
Pat had played the game with no pretense. No charges were filed against the kids, and he let them call their parents and arrange for a reunion at NYU, where the couple researched and taught. Just to keep it clear and clean, the conversations were on speakerphone, with a few detectives listening in with half an ear because the call was being recorded, anyway.
Now it was a new morning. The sun was battling the cold and a thaw was setting in that would soon turn the white city gray. Sun splashed in the window and painted my desk gold.
I was in my swivel chair drinking coffee and gnawing a doughnut, both purchased at a corner joint since Velda was not around to nurture me. She'd taken the two kids under her wing last night. And her wing included a .38 revolver and an attitude worse than mine, so they were safe enough.
Right on time, Pat shambled into my office. I'd bought him a java, too, but he avoided doughnuts on general principles. He was wearing that fedora of his that was as out of date as my porkpie hat, but he also wore a faint expression of satisfaction. He dropped into the chair across from me and tossed the fedora on my desk.
"The Feds gave up a positive ID on the shooter." He tented his fingers and grinned at me through them.
"Who was he, exactly?"
"An Iranian college student on an expired student visa."
I sipped the hot liquid. "A college kid out to hit other college kids. Nice."
"Not so nice. That terrorist connection still sticks. We have a name and possible link to a suspect in the 9/11 attacks."
You stand at the heart of New York City and look east to where the twin monuments once stood, gargantuan edifices that reached into the sky, proclaiming wealth and power and hopefully indicating peace. There's an oddball silence there now, not the absence of noise, but the stillness of sounds that people make, like laughter and satisfaction. As they go by that once-busy avenue that housed the magnificent businesses of the world, they avert their eyes, their voices become subdued but, if you listen real close, you can hear someone swear at the bastards who tried to murder a city. It's an empty space now, but someday the snakes who live for destruction across the ocean in their own empty spaces of sand and caves would meet the snapping teeth of the avengers.
"Mike? Mike, you went away there, for a minute. You okay, buddy?"
"Sorry, Pat. I was just wishing I could lay my hands on Bin Laden's throat."
"Take a number. Anyway, the suspect your shooter was connected to was just a hanger-on, the Feds say."
"Hanger-on how?"
Pat shrugged. "Suspect lived on the same block as one of the 9/11 accomplices."
"Any record?"
"Beat up his wife twice." Pat made a face. "Some people from that part of the world have an attitude toward women that makes me sick."
"So do some peopl
e born here."
"Mike, I'm not painting all Muslims from Middle Eastern countries as—"
"It's their own zealots who are doing the painting, Pat." I grunted. "Damn, that's a war that's never going to end, is it?"
"Give it another couple thousand years."
"Or till Armageddon comes."
His eyebrows hiked. "You don't have to say that like you're looking forward to it." Pat got up. "So what do you say we go pick up Velda and those kids, and get ourselves a college education?"
"A little overdue where I'm concerned, don't you think? But they say you're never too old to learn."
Pat slapped on his fedora. "Mike, you've always been too old to learn."
The sprawl of NYU in Greenwich Village included a certain six-story glass-and-steel building with glass doors and an anonymous feel where the parents of Matthew Hurley and Jenna Sheffield did their work.
Matthew and Jenna were dressed as before. We hadn't given them a chance to pick up a change of clothes. Matt in his Western-style sheepskin coat hugged the brown-paper package like it was his child. Jenna in her fur-trimmed suede coat had her arm in his. Brotherly and sisterly love, my keister.
Velda and I were in our matching trench coats. Pat said the sight of us was cute enough to make Santa Claus puke. His topcoat was a heavy-duty woolen deal, but the point was, these kids and that bone couldn't have had more firepower backing them up short of a SWAT team.
Even with our IDs, all that hardware made the security check- point an endurance test. The armed guard at the metal detector passed Pat through fast enough, and he knew who I was, all right. But he had his orders and he played them right. Before he had to ask, I eased my .45 out of the shoulder holster, thumbed out the clip, and jacked the live round out of the chamber.
The other two full clips I laid on the little table beside the blued-steel rod, initialed the sheet he held out, and shook my head when he asked me if I was carrying an ankle piece. Hell, the metal detector would have picked it up if I'd had it. What kind of slob did he take me for?
Velda had to leave her gun behind, too, with only policeman Pat approved to carry in these hallowed halls. There was a time the looks those guards sneaked at Velda would have offended me. Now I felt kind of proud, a doll her age perking up a couple youngsters like that.
Matthew and Jenna escorted us to the elevators where we dropped down a floor and came out into a concrete vault of a corridor marked by metallic doors every twenty feet or so, with no handles, no key locks, and no hinges. Whatever was behind those shining slabs had to be pretty damn private and very damn expensive. Everything seemed state-of-the-art electronic and those doors had to slide into the concrete bulwarks to open.
Velda and Pat fell in behind us as I walked alongside Matthew and Jenna.
I asked the kid, "Nice place to go to school?"
Matthew, clutching the bulky package, nodded solemnly.
"You're still a grad student here?"
He nodded. "Jenna and I are just finishing up. We don't have many hours left, but we're still helping my father on his projects."
His father, I noted. Not his "parents."
I asked, "Helping how?"
"Sorry, Mr. Hammer. It's a limited-access situation."
Nice to have the confidence of your clients.
"Where down here do your parents work?"
Jenna responded for her brother, since his hands were full with the bulky package, and pointed down to shining steel double doors at the end of the hall. "That's their domain down there—the Antiquities lab."
That sounded like a place where you went in and cooked yourself up some antiquities.
"And that's where the bone will find a home?"
Matthew picked up the ball. "Yes. Under very tight security."
He wasn't kidding.
The four of us stood inside a circle painted on the floor in front of a gleaming door reflecting distorted images of ourselves back at us while a strange humming seemed to engulf us. I knew we were being photographed or scanned or some damn thing, but never spotted a lens. For five unsettling seconds, a tingling sensation ran across my body that had nothing to do with my own nervous system. I knew Matthew, Jenna, Velda and Pat were feeling it, too, but I made no remark since I realized the two kids must have known what it was.
When that stopped, the door slid silently on metallic tracks into the wall and, when we had gone on through, closed again soundlessly. A chill hit us immediately, well-suited to the stainless steel and glass surroundings, an area that looked more appropriate to a hospital than an instructional center. Nobody made a move to get out of their winter coats, and I was halfway surprised our breaths weren't pluming like outside.
A faint chemical odor wafted through the chamber to complete the medical identification, and somehow I connected it with the morgue down at the old Manhattan Center.
A balding thirtyish male attendant in a starched blue smock with a tag that said BRYAN led us around the small cluster of laboratory tables to the far side of the room, where a tall man and a small woman in white lab coats were going over brittle-looking documents with foreign-looking script encased in clear Mylar sheets and spread out on the steel countertop.
The big man turned with a broad smile and came toward us holding out his hand. "I'm George Hurley, Mr. Hammer, Matthew's father."
I wasn't surprised he recognized me. I've been in the media enough. And I surely recognized him: Eerily, he and his wife might have been Matthew and Jenna several decades later, each having a strong facial resemblance to his and her biological offspring.
He gestured to the beautiful woman who remained back at the counter with the documents, though her attention was on us now. She was a petite and, even in the drab lab coat, shapely specimen of what a woman in her late forties might turn out to be with a little luck and the right genes. Her eyes were large and dark brown, her short, curly hair a golden blonde that shimmered under the glare of the laboratory lights. If this was a university professor, maybe I should have matriculated.
"And my wife, Charlene..."
She nodded and beamed at us. Her daughter beamed back, but Matthew's face stayed blank, I noted.
As I shook George Hurley's hand, I introduced Velda as my business associate. She was more than a secretary now, but I wasn't sure it was relevant to mention we were engaged. Or were my eyes too full of Charlene Hurley to remember that right now?
I introduced Pat, who came forward and did the official bit. He held out his shield, flipped open his police ID folder, but said, "Don't let the 'Homicide' designation spook you—I just came along as a bodyguard for that bone your son is lugging."
Pat and our host shook hands.
"We're both doctors," George Hurley said, as his wife stepped forward to shake hands all around, too. "But we'll all get confused if you don't just call us 'George' and 'Charlene.'"
"Fine, doc," I said, and that made the big man smile. I liked him already. For a brain, he was unpretentious.
Charlene Hurley, at her husband's side now, fig-leafed her hands and said, "My daughter told me on the phone that you saved her life, Mr. Hammer. And Matt's."
"I intervened during a holdup attempt," I said. "I was glad to help."
"Well, I hope you know we're very grateful."
George Hurley said, "And I understand our two favorite lab assistants have hired you to assist them ... and us?...in the matter of this incredible discovery of theirs."
"They have," I said.
With friendly skepticism, Charlene asked, "What sort of help, Mr. Hammer?"
"Make it 'Mike.' Let's not get ahead of ourselves, okay? I think Matt here is going to fold up if he doesn't set that darn thing down."
Hurley laughed embarrassedly and went to his son. "Mike's right, Matt—what are we doing, letting you stand there like the UPS man at the front door! Here, son ... over here."
Father helped his boy move the precious package to a metal examination table where the three-foot—long object in crin
kly brown paper could rest.
We all walked over to the table, crowding around like kids under a tree on Christmas morning and with the same wonderment and expectation. Velda was at my side, and Pat and Charlene Hurley were opposite us. The two kids were at one end of the rectangle of shining steel and George at the other. With latex-gloved hands, he used a little surgical knife to cut the strings, then with no ceremony at all he ripped the paper off the contents.
And there it was.
Time hadn't seemed to have eroded it.
Animals hadn't seemed to have nibbled on it.
It was blanched white and silky dry with the spidery traces of age lines and the smooth but gentle curvatures of natural bone formation. And for some reason you knew what it was right away: a human thighbone. The ends of the structure made an immaculate display of engineering, this development into a device that fitted one bone against another with cushions of ligament lubricated with natural fluids thousands of times more efficient than petroleum distillates, a design that no man could possibly duplicate.
And it was huge!
It had joined hip to knee in a man so big he simply must be that champ who went down for the count with an underdog's creek rock in his forehead ages ago.
Hurley's eyes were wide and glittering, but then I suppose that was true of all of us. He asked, "What do you think, Mike?"
A little grin touched my lips. "Goliath was one big sumbitch, all right."
Matthew said, in a small, quavering voice, "Then you're convinced, Mr. Hammer? This is Goliath's bone?"
"I can't say it isn't. I wouldn't mind hearing a more educated opinion than mine."
Charlene asked, "Do you realize what this means, Mr. Hammer?...Mike?"
I said, "My education was a little more mundane than you and your husband's ... but I get the picture."
George's eyes left the bone and looked at me. "Are you sure, Mike?"
For a few seconds I thought about it, then said, "Planes are flying into buildings, anthrax spores are showing up in the strangest places, we've gone to war against Afghanistan and Iraq, with Iran waiting in the wings ... and now your kids have found a bone. Damned big one, too."
[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone Page 4
