"Yeah? What is he, big for an Arab? Six foot maybe?"
"Mike—he stands seven feet three inches."
I can't claim I loved the sound of that. "I'll alert the Knicks."
"This may be just a rumor—the idea that al-Qaeda, which is known to work slowly and methodically, would rush their top assassin into America simply to deal with one man—it frankly borders on the fantastic."
"Right. So does the original David and Goliath yarn, Leon. But I bet you believe it."
"I do, Mike. I do."
We said our good-byes. Then I called Pat and Velda in and they took the client chairs opposite me.
I said, "Looters are digging around the site where the bone was found—not Israelis, and backed up with firepower."
Velda frowned. "Why?"
"Looking for another stray giant bone, probably, but in the millennia since Goliath got knocked off, Mother Nature no doubt distributed his remains all over the place. Those diggers have one hell of a job ahead of them."
Pat had been sitting there quietly, saying nothing, but his strained expression said he had something on his mind. All I had to do was look at him and he said, "Here I am, damn near retired, one of the most honored public servants in the history of this city, and I have to sit and beg table scraps from a private nuisance."
"You can have all the table scraps you want, buddy. Just don't ask for a big bone."
"Mike, we got full lab results back from Washington on that .22 Hamerli target pistol you were good enough to give me. The slugs that hit the Hurley girl's handbag came from that gun, all right. Same gun shot Lonnie Hartman and Wallace Washington."
"Who?"
"Jellybean."
I grunted. "A .22 took out George Hurley, too."
"Yeah," Pat said, shaking his head as if contradicting himself. "But a different gun killed Hurley."
"I could have told you that."
"But of course you didn't."
"Come on, Pat! I told you at the scene that Hurley's death was not a hit, and you gave me chapter and verse why it was. Give me a break, buddy."
He shrugged and nodded. "But isn't it time you leveled about who the shooter was?"
"Did I say I knew who the shooter was?"
He just looked at me.
"Okay," I said. "A hit man from out of state. He wasn't very smart, and neither were his employers. He didn't know this city, he didn't know our people, and now he's going to be a statistic on the books, if he isn't already." I shrugged. "When he's found, he'll be dead ... but at least I can make a physical ID on him."
"Where out of state?"
"Chicago."
"Just a hit man. A run-of-the-mill hit man."
"Well..."
"A wiseguy, Mike? That what you're saying? Outfit hitter? What family was he from?"
I couldn't help myself. I grinned. "Al-Qaeda."
"Damn you."
"Truth is, he thought he was doing the hits for al-Qaeda. Something else entirely may be behind it."
"What're you holding back, Mike?"
"Nothing."
"Oh, please..."
"Pat, if I tell you any more, like how I got all this information out of that shooter, you'd be jeopardizing a retired cop's pension fund, get it?"
Pat drew in a breath. "Bozo Jackson?"
"I didn't say that."
And now my old friend's demeanor shifted. He shrugged and said, "Fine. Now I'll do you the kind of favor you don't want to do me on this case."
"Yeah?"
"We're getting rumbles on the street I don't like to hear. You'd better get your tail out of town, Mike. These al-Qaeda goons are coming at you. You're just a plain loner with no backup, no social standing, and the wrong kind of connections."
"Like you, you mean?"
"When you keep me mostly in the dark, I'm no good to you."
"I still have my .45."
Pat leaned forward confidentially. "One of the guys on our burglary squad heard talk that some kind of super assassin is heading your way. You'll love this, Mike—he's called Goliath."
The word was really getting around, but my conversation with Leon was confidential, so I just said, "You believe such foolishness?"
"I heard the same thing from my Arab-American pal with Army Intelligence. And he heard that some foreign national has put up a wad of cash to go to anybody who hits you."
"Since when do you worry about me, Pat?"
"We're not getting any younger, kiddo."
"I got Velda. And I got a feeling you'd come through in a pinch."
"A trio of soon-to-be retirees, bucking an open contract and taking on the top terrorist assassin in the world—that's a laugh." He pointed at me. "You've been designated the key to the whereabouts of that relic. Mike, the talk is flying on this thing—a ton of meetings and action going on in some of the big mosques with reference all being made about their hero, Goliath."
"The bone or the assassin?"
"Does it matter?"
I shrugged. "Doesn't your department have units that cover all that?"
"Sure, but the number of NYPD personnel who speak Arabic is damn few. Incidentally, when you leave here, there are a couple of undesirables loitering close to the entrance and another couple I recognized stationing themselves on the corner."
"They looking for me?"
"Who else?"
"Thanks for the info, Pat. Would you mind shooting them for me on your way out?"
Pat grinned despite himself, then told me, "Al-Qaeda has money, connections, and can fade right into the woodwork, Mike. Don't play them down—there are Islamic-extremist sympathizers right here in this city. Half of them came up under Saddam Hussein before they bought their way over."
The phone rang and Velda reached over and got it. She gave the standard Michael Hammer Investigations greeting, listened, then said, "Hello, Paul. Yes, he's right here."
She gave me the phone.
"Mike?"
"What's happening?" I asked.
"The triplets and their mom were released from the hospital yesterday."
"Where are you?"
"On your side of town."
"Can you get out for the night without the neighbors spotting you?"
"Sure. I got my drinking buddies with me."
"And you brought the kids?"
"Yeah. They're behaving. All newborns should sleep this sound. Where do we meet?"
"The same place as last time. You still working for UPS?"
"No, I got a job with FedEx. Pays better. See you soon?"
"See you soon."
When we disconnected, I called the lobby to say I was expecting a big FedEx delivery. Velda's bland expression told me she'd followed all of that from just my end of the conversation: Paul had arrived at the private airfield accompanied by Secure Solutions guys, and they would be arriving with the "triplets" and "mom" in the guise of FedEx delivery men. But it all went over Pat's head.
He was leaning forward. "I got one other thing for you, and maybe this will make you take notice."
"Yeah?"
"That guy that took the fall in the subway, when you shot the rod out of his hand..."
We were coming full circle.
"What about him?" I asked.
"The Washington boys and their cohorts overseas finally got a complete ID on him, pulled down from a very modest tattoo he had in a very modest place on his torso."
"And?"
"And he was al-Qaeda, confirmed. One of their top-notch assassins."
"Top-notch, maybe. Clumsy, certainly."
"The informer said somebody else would be taking his place. That would likely be this Goliath character."
"That's just talk, Pat. You really think there's a modern-day Goliath, a big giant Arab, out to get me?"
His answer was indirect: "You are still carrying?"
I patted under my left arm. "Loaded with one in the chamber. All I have to do is thumb the hammer back."
Velda frowned. "It's loaded, all right�
��I caught him stuffing the clip with that ancient ammo his shifty old pal Dick Mallory sent him."
I waved that off. "Tell her ammo lasts forever, Pat."
He gave me a long stare. "Nothing lasts forever, Mike."
And he thanked Velda for the coffee and Danish, and went out.
The box was as tall as me and wider, stamped FILE CABINET several places on the cardboard, brought up on one hand truck wielded by Paul Vernon himself, aided by one of two Secure Solutions employees and trailed by another, both obvious ex-military police, young, tough and ready. All three wore navy FedEx uniforms that looked authentic enough, and the only thing vaguely suspicious was that there were three of them. They rode up the service elevator, but this delivery didn't require my signature, as Paul rolled the cart right in.
The two guards went back downstairs to move the truck to the building's basement parking garage, where I'd prepped the attendant-on-duty to expect them. They would wait in the van for Paul.
After locking us in the office, Velda went to get a blanket from the closet. Paul and I had a brief reunion consisting of exchanged grins and handshakes and got right to unpacking the four stacked boxes within the larger file-cabinet box. Soon four identical cardboard boxes about five feet by two feet were side by side together on the floor near the blanket Velda had spread out like a picnic was about to happen.
One by one, Paul opened each cardboard box, then lovingly lay each of the four anatomically perfect giant femurs on the blanket. All four objects appeared to be absolutely identical. Their weight seemed the same, their size too, the color a darkish, mottled gray-white.
They were as finely tuned as any artificially reproduced segment of a museum's prize dinosaur. Paul had worked on some of the most delicate artifacts ever discovered, even making duplicate parts of fossil skeletons that could barely be told from the original.
Now he'd outdone himself.
The father of these children was smirking at us. "Which is the original, Mike? How about you, Velda—can you tell?"
I said, "Impossible, Paul. You've done one hell of a job here."
"Well, you two are just the general public. But we can put it over on lots of professionals, too. The weights are all exact to that of the original, the color would fool anyone except a top-notch professional duplicator, and the feel of the surface would give a longtime undertaker the squirms."
"You sold us, Paul. Which one is the real Goliath?"
Paul moved along the edge of the blanket as if he might pick any one of the big bones. Finally, he knelt at the one at the far right, reaching out, putting his hands under the length of death-colored white antiquity, then cradling it in his arms before handing it to me.
You don't hold something like that without feeling yourself lost in a time warp. This wasn't New York, this was the Valley of Elah. Great armies were on either side of me, and I was privy to previously unheard murmurings from rows of armed fighters, spectators to a new moment of history, witnessing a sight never before beheld.
"Hold it up beside you," Paul suggested.
Carefully, I twisted the bone in my arms so that it was vertical, then set it down next to my foot. There was a silkiness in the feel of the thing, as if it were still wet from the body fluids that had once surrounded it. My hands could feel the slight curvatures of the mighty object, almost sensing a lifelike warmth in its length.
Paul nodded, his eyes on my own, and he indicated with a hand movement that I should lift it in place.
Velda was holding her breath.
With utmost care, my fingers folded around the giant's femur until one end was at my knee, alongside my own right thigh—only Goliath's stopped at my chest.
"Big feller, wasn't he?" Paul said with a grin.
I rested the gigantic femur back on the blanket, my hands almost reluctant to leave this great piece of historical evidence. When I touched the others, no similar sensation kicked in—they were just duplicates, copies of the real thing. Cold. Totally lifeless. But you had to handle the real thing to realize that.
Only then did I completely understand what master showman Harold Cooke had seen in the Goliath bone. No museum could ever contain the noxious aura the bone emitted. It needed thousands en masse to sense the power it had once held in reality, and was trying to assume again. It was a dead thing trying to come alive through the beliefs and obsessions of those living now.
There was an almost Satanic temper to the thing, and I knew in my gut something my head had already told me: This was one piece of history that should never have come out of the ground. It had no life, and no power at all, except what zealots might try to attribute to it.
Paul said, "What are you grinning at, Mike?"
"Nothing funny," I said.
He nodded thoughtfully.
Velda knelt over the four exhibits, carefully inspecting each grisly specimen. But while she ran her fingers along the lengths of the duplicates, she wouldn't touch the actual Goliath bone itself.
"It won't bite you, doll," I said.
She shook her head with a small motion. "I can feel the contamination on that evil thing."
I knew what she meant, but I said, "Hey, it's just a relic."
"A relic is the past, Mike. This thing is in the present."
"But it's been dead a long time."
She looked up sharply, arching an eyebrow. "You sure?"
"Want me to put a bullet in it to see if it bleeds?"
She ignored that, then after a few moments of strained silence, said, "I'm just a little nervous about this, is all."
"Don't be. A fanatic's shot at an archduke's head started World War I. This dead slob's partial corpse is trying to start World War III. And we won't let it."
Paul broke up the discussion when he said, "What do we do now? You never said what you were going to do with the dupes."
"One I'm going to sell to a showman and make some bucks for those kids. The other goes back to the university for their research purposes, and we'll stash another here in the office."
Velda rose and her eyes and nostrils flared. "You're going to hide one here? When we know we've been compromised?"
Paul gave me a look.
I said, "Somebody made a wax impression of Velda's spare office key." To Velda, I said, "Right, and they'll swipe one of the bogus bones and head home and be off our backs—for a while, anyway."
Velda was frowning. "But sooner or later, they'll know they've been had."
"Maybe. Which will result in one of two things: Whatever bunch swipes this phony will go running home heroes only to wind up with their heads on sticks. And/or al-Qaeda will announce to the world that they have the one, the only authentic Goliath bone—and who can contradict them?"
Eyes narrowed, head tilted, Paul asked, "What do you have in mind for the actual Goliath bone?"
"Maybe I'll keep it somewhere easy to get at."
Velda's brow knit in curiosity. "You have a safe place in mind, Mike?"
"Absolutely."
"Where?"
"I was thinking of tucking it in bed with me."
A sudden quiet met that remark, then Velda said, "For once I'm glad we waited to get married."
New York City isn't an easy place to try to follow someone. There are thousands on the streets no matter the time or occasion. When somebody said, "New York never sleeps," they were speaking the truth—all lights stay lit, the neon and flashing signs on the faces of the buildings lining Times Square pulse like life blood through the arterial streets and avenues that move with taxis and personal traffic and, like corpuscles, pedestrians.
I had made a trip to a friend in Brooklyn who did special work for me, a master craftsman where furniture was concerned. I'd ordered up a special wedding present for Velda before heading back to my car where one of the Goliath dupes nestled in its cardboard box and bubble-wrap skin in my trunk. I had already called Dr. Charlene Hurley's cell phone and found she was working late at the university, and alerted her to have their security personnel at
the back door waiting for me when I dropped by in an hour or so with a package for her.
When I got back to the Hackard Building, I went in the lobby and shook the rain off my hat. The doorman winked at me. That meant nobody had been looking for me and the elevator was empty. At my office, I checked the tiny sliver of paper by the lower hinge, made sure it was the way I had left it, put the key in the lock, and opened the door. The desk light was on and Velda was asleep on the outer-office couch. She'd make a good wife, all right—she didn't snore at all.
In my office, I picked up the phone, dialed the private number Harold Cooke had given me, and left a message for him to call me ASAP. Outside, the rain was drizzling to a stop. It didn't make any difference at all to the night people.
The office door was locked and the knock rattled the frosted glass. I heard Velda rustling out there and called, "Careful! Should be Harold Cooke, but you never know."
About ninety seconds later, a wonderfully mussed-up Velda, her. 38 in hand, ushered the impeccably dressed Cooke into my office. The big handsome silver-haired showman with the money-colored eyes was smiling uneasily, glancing at the gun the big brunette was flashing.
He came over and held his hand across my desk and I shook it without standing. He was grinning. "The media never get tired of our story, do they, Mike? You know about the big discussion at the UN?"
I shot Velda a look that said to give me and my guest some privacy, and she shut us in the inner office.
I said, "Just some TV chatter. Why?"
"Seems somebody found something of historical significance on foreign soil, and the honorable members want to determine who it actually belongs to."
"Gee, I wonder what was found."
"They all seem to know," he said, "but nobody wants to say. You didn't ask me over to talk international politics, though, did you, Mike?"
"Well, in a way I suppose I did. Here's what I want to accomplish, Harold. I want to try to keep the Goliath bone out of the hands of the people who want to use it for rabble-rousing and warmongering. But I also want to turn a nice dollar for Matthew and Jenna Hurley."
A fast grimace crossed his mouth. "Pity about their father."
[Mike Hammer 14] - The Goliath Bone Page 18
