A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  OTHER TITLES IN THE HOLLOW CITY SERIES

  The Big Fear

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Andrew Case

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503938922 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503938921 (paperback)

  Cover design by Brian Zimmerman

  For Claudia

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Twenty-four stories up, Wade Valiant could only barely hear the sirens. Every few months, a new job would start, each one a little bit deeper into Brooklyn. Now, past Empire Boulevard, in the low sprawl that used to be called only Flatbush, Wade was working on his fourth build this year. Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, they had named it, with a debate about where precisely to put the hyphen. Developers can get into an argument about anything.

  Another squad car zipped through the light below, dashing to whatever small injustice had appalled a new arrival. Wade had seen the same story from above over the past decade: Carroll Gardens, Prospect Heights, and now here. The new buildings go up and the new buyers bring Manhattan with them, complaining about their neighbors’ drums or the local roti shop’s late-night parties. The offenses get pettier and pettier, and soon hardened officers are mediating disputes about where to put the recycling.

  The crowd below hustled along over the powder of broken leaves. Wade knew the neighborhoods he looked down on by their foliage. Cobble Hill had its ginkgoes, with the dry berries that stank putrid when you stepped on them. Elms in Park Slope, and out here, oak. No one in the crowd saw Wade or knew what species of leaves they were walking through; they never looked up. Time is money, after all, and no matter what the politicians said, money was still king in New York.

  The view down had never troubled him. From his first day on the job, stepping out onto an I-beam five short stories up on what passed for a skyscraper in Trenton, Wade had been comfortable in the air. Something in the genes, he figured. From Plattsburg, Wade had a little Mohawk in him, just like the men who built the towers of Manhattan in its first heyday. Skywalkers. He was as comfortable on an elevated crane at twenty-four stories as the drones below him were at their desks, so many honeybees nestled in place, brewing money.

  Under his helmet, behind the jet-black mask, Wade’s face was covered in sweat. Even in November, welding was hot and mean and uncomfortable. Not like the later work, hauling the wiring and plumbing and innards into place, skipping across the I-beams, empty space below him and brooding sky above. But that would have to wait until spring. There were only a few weeks left before the job would be called for the winter. The arc flared; the joint sealed. Wade leaned back into his narrow platform and pressed the joystick to move himself another four feet.

  The platform slid to the next set of joints and set itself in place with a mechanical thud. Wade knew the sounds of all the iron skeletons through which he clawed and clamored. He could hear, when he banged with a C-wrench, what was solid enough to hold and what needed another few ounces from the torch. But he still didn’t know or trust the sounds of the crane. He couldn’t tell which creaks were natural and which should give him pause.

  It had been his busiest two years on the job. Since the edict to add affordable units had come down, there hadn’t been a glass tower that the Department of Buildings wasn’t happy to green-light. There wasn’t a developer in town who hadn’t eaten from the trough of the Department of Finance. Wade’s own split-level in Baldwin had been paid for by money he had made splicing together one anonymous skyscraper after another. Wade was at a loss as to why the hordes scuttling to the subway below would rather own eight hundred and fifty square feet on the fourteenth floor in Flatbush than a two-story house with a backyard in the suburbs. But it was their party.

  Steady at the next joint, Wade leaned out and clamped down his mask. The silly security railing on the platform nudged his upper arms as he bent in. The heat was getting to him. He opened up the flame and pressed harder into a thick iron joint, watching as the metal gave way, started to boil, and smoothed itself into a familiar scar. He pressed further, lurching forward. Then a sudden jolt. His platform swung from below him and into the I-beam.

  Wade held the cheap railing as he rebounded from the I-beam. Something was wrong. He should grab onto the beam. But as he lunged to grip it, he dropped his torch. It tugged his belt and jerked back to him, springing toward the clamp on his safety harness. He swung his leg to protect his shin; even though the flame shut off, the barrel was hot and heavy enough to break a bone. If it had fallen, that would have been the end of it. But his harness was always in place. Safety first. Not just a slogan when you’re crisscrossing the tops of construction sites all day long.

  Wade gathered the torch and turned it off. He settled himself as he thought on what happened. The crane had banged into the I-beam. The platform had been thrown off its level and now his right foot was a few inches higher than his left. That needed to get fixed. You don’t want anything out of whack at this height. Wade reached for his radio to call the guy in the booth below.

  “Manny? You want to tell me what went on down there?”

  Static. Then quiet. The equipment isn’t perfect but usually you can at least hear something. Either the radio was shot or Manny just wasn’t answering. Wade stepped to the edge of the platform and looked down. The cab of the crane stood squat and quiet. No sign of Manny. Not in the cab, not on the avenue, all the way up to Empire Boulevard and then the park. Across the street was a dull yellow brick conversion. Once a bank or a bakery or a warehouse, now cobbled together into a discount store, a gym,
and a liquor store. They would get hold of that one soon enough. Across Empire Boulevard, Wade saw the Ebbets Field Apartments. Hulking, powerful, and dull. If the developers could ever empty that out, the zoning would let them put up almost an entire city.

  Wade slung the radio back up. “Manny, if you can hear me, go ahead and take me down. Something went wrong with the platform. We should check it out.”

  Silence. Static. Wade wasn’t worried. There are always safety redundancies on the job. The platform had a bright red switch to signal descent. Wade held it down, and it started to buzz. If Manny was in the cab, he would hear it too. Wade would be down in a few minutes. The platform still wasn’t plumb.

  Nothing. Wade took off his helmet. The artificial heat was gone and the sweet November cold was sliding inside him now. But he was still sweating. No longer the fierce sweat of work or heat or electricity, now it was a dull sweat. For the first time since he had been on the job, Wade felt the stirring of something like fear. For the first time, he looked over the edge of the platform and saw how far he really was above the ground.

  There was a final fail-safe, of course. A manual switch to bring the platform down. It wasn’t ideal; you can’t see below you. You could get tangled with someone on the street if you weren’t paying attention. But now it was the only way. Wade popped open the plastic case and pulled the switch to descend. The platform lurched, then started down slowly, steadily. The crisp beeping below gave pedestrians their fair warning.

  And then it stopped. He was on the eighteenth floor, maybe, beside a set of welds he put in just last week. He pressed the switch to start down again. Manny, or whoever was in the cab, had overridden the command. The crooked platform started rising again. The clueless commuters kept on their way, munching their precious cranberry scones.

  The platform lurched. Wade reached over it toward the beam. The building seemed safer than the crane now. He wrapped his arms tightly around the I-beam and started to pull himself off the platform. He’d sit on the building until help arrived. He didn’t care how long. He was comfortable up here, after all. As he hoisted himself onto the beam, he breathed out. The sweat stopped. He took in the long view, the trim townhouses on Guilder Street, the rotting Victorians to the south waiting to be torn down and replaced by glass and steel.

  He heard it before he saw it: a sick metallic crunch, metal on metal, loud and low pitched. The sound of bones breaking, only the bones were made of chromium-infused steel. The crane swung toward the building once more, twice more, and the girders loosed the platform from the crane itself. It was twisting sideways now, about to tumble from its perch and onto the unsuspecting crowd.

  Wade watched from the girder, planted above the crumbling crane. Only as the platform finally twisted and began its fall did he realize his mistake. Safety first. Just as he had hitched his tools to his belt with a security line, he had hitched himself to the crane platform. In case he slipped over the edge.

  Too late he saw the wire run taut as the platform slipped. Too late he reached for the carabiner on his belt. As his belt yanked him off the beam, he reached hopelessly to tug himself back on. His fingers cracked and slipped past the sharp edge, and he was alone, in flight, looking up at his perfect creation as six hundred pounds of metal carried him down toward the crowded street.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Leonard Mitchell was always at ease in a cheap suit. He didn’t mind the pinch in the shoulders or the sag at the waist. He had learned the power of anonymity. A year ago, it had just about saved his life. He had been investigating a police shooting when the wrong sort of bad cops had come after him. He had stayed just hidden enough that he didn’t end up dead. But it hadn’t saved his job, and it hadn’t kept him from doing six months in jail. Some thanks for uncovering a conspiracy of dirty cops. But life goes on.

  Leonard smiled as the subway skidded to a halt and commuters filed onto the outdoor platform. The station was below ground level, but open to the sky. From here, the line reverted to a local, creeping through Ditmas Park, Midwood, and Sheepshead Bay before petering out at Coney Island. That made it the last stop that catered to Manhattan exiles. Express over the bridge and you could be at Union Square in twenty minutes on a good day.

  Leonard waited as the crowd slipped out. There were suits much nicer than his; there were expensive bags carried by kids in one creative industry or another; there were a few lawyers who worked in the kind of firm where you could wear jeans. Leonard, happily invisible in crowds like this, let them hurry out into the night air, whipping phones out of their pockets to check if anyone had texted since they crossed the bridge fifteen minutes ago.

  Leonard smiled to himself. He had been getting off at this stop for over a decade, ever since he’d moved into the Ebbets Field Apartments. With rents rising, and stuck with a city salary at DIMAC—the Department to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption—he’d had no other options. The building had the massive, grim feel of a housing project, but it had been decades since it was famous as its own little crime capital.

  Now, the pickings were even slimmer. Crown Heights had long ago filled up with tech executives and preposterous rents. Even Flatbush was on its way, complete with newly nicknamed mini-neighborhoods designed to put buyers at ease. Every week, another West Indian restaurant or discount tailor closed its doors and was supplanted by an expensive soap-and-candle shop. After the past two years, Leonard was lucky enough to be staying, even at Ebbets.

  Stepping out after the commuters, he thought about last summer. It seemed like years ago and it seemed like it hadn’t been five minutes. His old boss at DIMAC had been murdered days after she had left for the comfort of the private sector. Leonard had been investigating whether Ralph Mulino was justified in shooting another detective on a container ship, and ended up discovering that Mulino was the only clean cop in the whole soup. A dozen officers had been sabotaging the city. And for what? To scare people into thinking they needed the police more. Fear as a political strategy; terrify people into electing a strongman as their mayor.

  And when Leonard and Mulino had sorted the whole thing out, what Leonard got was six months in Moriah Shock. He had walked away from a dead cop, but that’s the sort of thing you do when there are cops trying to kill you. The district attorney, keen to keep up appearances, hadn’t seen it that way.

  Technically a prison, but a work camp in practice, Moriah Shock is where you go to keep your nose clean and promise never to get in trouble again. It wasn’t as though he’d wanted a parade, but going to lockup for thwarting a terror attack hadn’t felt exactly fair.

  After that, Leonard hadn’t even tried to go back to DIMAC. The mayor had cleaned house, and now the place was run by Barry Schaeffer, a former personal injury lawyer who wore his uncombed white hair just past the collar and wasn’t ashamed of his cognac nose. He had made millions suing swimming pool manufacturers over drowned children, or amusement parks where the roller coasters flew off the rails. Investigating cops seemed a natural progression. When Schaeffer found a big case, he could kick it back to his law firm. There was big money in corruption nowadays.

  A few kind words and a handshake landed Leonard as the press secretary at the Parks Department. The biggest story of the year was announcing when there was enough snow to go sledding. After a decade in the corruption business and six months in prison, Leonard welcomed the change. Every couple of days he would tout a newly opened dog run, a freshly graded softball field, or a repaved playground. He pushed soft and pleasant stories that were barely newsworthy, and didn’t even call in to complain if the papers didn’t run them.

  But every now and then, there was a real bit of crime. A body dumped in Great Kills. A drowning at Orchard Beach. A rape in Flushing Meadows. Nothing like twenty years ago, of course. Nothing like the Central Park jogger, wildings, or the screaming headlines of the early nineties. Still, he always picked up his step on the nights he hit a crime scene. Nights like tonight.

  It hadn’t happened in the park proper,
but he had been getting calls about it. A construction accident on Ocean and Flatbush, at the latest condo building going in on top of the subway station. Park views, Wolf ranges, Sub-Zero refrigerators: the works. A crane had split in half, dragging a skywalker to his death, and leaving two injured on the ground. The police had the block cordoned off all day.

  Leonard had referred the papers to the NYPD spokesman, but knew his commissioner would want to make a statement tomorrow. And it was an easy layover: three blocks from his house. There was nothing like getting on the scene and taking the word directly from the investigators.

  The rumor was that there was going to be trouble for the Department of Buildings. The crane had passed its latest inspection two weeks ago. That meant the inspector had missed something, or someone had tampered with the crane, or the inspection had never really been done at all. Given the reputation for corruption at the Department of Buildings, the last option was most likely.

  Leonard knew from his time at DIMAC how often inspectors filled in paperwork affirming the safety of scaffolds and cranes and windowsills they had never looked at. It was a lot of work, running around from construction site to construction site. Much easier to kick back and take a long lunch at a local bar. And when a developer is willing to give the inspector a couple of hundred bucks to have that lunch instead of coming around to the site, it’s easier still. Aside from the Corrections Department, where guards gleefully smuggled straight razors and heroin into the jails for the price of a cup of coffee, Buildings was the most corrupt agency in the city.

  As he trundled up the stairs toward Flatbush, trailing the long crowd, Leonard figured it would be an easy case. He would find out that the inspector had never looked at the crane. That the bolt had been weak for months. Buildings would run out tomorrow and inspect about fifty cranes. People could safely walk past construction sites and into the parks. And by the way, the Parks Department inspects its own equipment regularly. Maybe Barry Schaeffer would get his chance to file charges against the inspector. Or maybe he would just make an angry speech about it and head back to the upper seventies to nurse a single malt and congratulate himself.