Before long—he didn’t plan it—Diaz’s feet had carried him back under the bridge, to the path beside the parkway. He knew he shouldn’t be there, that it was drawing him like those women from mythology—what did you call them?—sirens. Oh, yes, sirens. That was funny. How did it come to be that sirens now meant something that drove you out of the way?
He thought all those things in earnest, with hints of self-awareness, but yet he stepped over the concrete barrier anyway.
A cold wind had picked up. It flapped his coat with a certain violence as the cars roared by, made him wonder how close the fabric was coming to those headlights. Had a Range Rover just clipped him or was that a whip of the wind?
Another car went by, real close. Crazy close. If his coat caught in a bumper, it would mean the end of him. This is nuts, Diaz thought. I’m nuts. He saw Hernandez in his mind, jumping out of the car. “You okay?” The look of surprise on his face—surprise mingled with a kind of consternation—a narrowing of the eyes that said, “I don’t need this shit.” Of course, because that’s how they rolled, thirty-eight guys all in this thing as a team, you drop a banana peel and it’s not some stranger who lands on his ass, but one of your buds. Why was that so hard for Diaz to grasp these days? He’d sure known it in Iraq.
He thought of the bozo in his apartment right now, putting the wood to Jennifer. Wasn’t it Gandhi who said, “Hate the action, not the man”? Something to that, Diaz thought. Sort of like by making the world safe for women and children, you also made it safe for some jerk to stand inside your own kingdom and bend your roommate over the couch, and no one could separate the two actions because they both fell on some kind of continuum. Hell.
The cars flew by. Diaz thought about those two guys on the street with their limbs twice blown off, their bodies penetrated by ball bearings, how they fell to the sidewalk with their eardrums punctured, once and for all cut off from the world’s pain but also from its love.
An aspect of that image snapped Diaz back from the dark place he’d been inhabiting. He stopped in his tracks and turned to face the cars and became scared of his own stupidity, looking into those headlights in the growing darkness.
In one quick motion he leapt over the concrete barrier, back to the safe side. He returned to the walking path and found his way to the bar on St. Nicholas Avenue.
“Usual?” the bartender asked.
Diaz frowned. “Just a beer.” He had to kill time but he wanted his head to stay clear.
He looked at his watch. After eight o’clock. Give her another hour and then she’d have to understand, if she didn’t already, that it was his apartment, too. But Diaz no longer had it in him to be angry. He was willing to figure that she just mistimed her little romp, lost track of the hour, or had expected him later. There could be a million explanations besides her rubbing his nose in it. And why would she intend to do that, anyway?
The bar had another old cop movie playing on the television tonight. Diaz didn’t pay it any mind. He thought of the TV news crews that forced themselves onto the scene of every bombing, of the twice-daily press conferences at City Hall, people staring at the National Guard troops from across the street. They all ate it up. Deep down they all wanted something to happen, to remind them with the threat of death that they were all alive. And the voice in Diaz’s head intoned, “Is it any different for Manny?”
THE GUY WAS GONE WHEN Diaz walked into the apartment, Jennifer on her bed in those terrycloth short shorts and a printed t-shirt with sparkly gold lettering. She was freshly showered, and soapy steam permeated the living room air.
Diaz called hello to her and changed into sweatpants and a torn button-down shirt. With the heat pipes knocking, he sat on his bed and propped himself against the wall on some pillows and broke into the middle of a fitness magazine that he had lying around. Really should get back to work on those abs.
“Penny for your thoughts.” Jennifer stood in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest.
“I was thinking that I need to hit the gym more,” Diaz said truthfully, tossing the magazine to the floor, atop a pile of several others.
“Those pictures aren’t real, you know. Airbrushed.”
“What’s next? You gonna tell me that South Park is just a cartoon?”
“That’s right. Tom Cruise didn’t really come out of the closet.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Can I sit?”
When Diaz nodded she perched at the foot of the bed. Even without trying, Diaz thought, she looked sexy as hell. She was wearing no bra, and her bare legs glowed like well-oiled weapons.
“You’re home on the late side tonight. More trouble in paradise?”
“There’s always trouble, whole city on high alert, running around all day x-raying empty packages. But I got home around six. You were occupied so I took off for a while.”
She blushed then. He wasn’t sure he’d ever witnessed that before.
“I’m not seeing that guy anymore.”
“That was quick. You sounded like you were having a good time just a couple of hours ago.”
“It started out that way but he turned out to be a jerk. He’s a dentist, you know, has an office in the Chrysler Building.”
“Are those three things related?”
“I warned him that we had to be quiet out of respect for Manny.”
Diaz wanted to say that it’s hard to be unobtrusive when you’re screwing on the living room furniture, but he let it go. The new him.
“So he produces this contraption,” she went on, “some kind of anti-tooth-grinding mouth guard with padded, like, cheek things. It resembled a—” She circled her hand in the air, searching for it. “One of those things you put on a horse.”
“Like a bit and bridle?”
“Yes, for a carriage horse or something. He wanted me to bite down on it, like he was going to ride me. Made me feel like an animal—and not in a good way. Asshole.”
She looked down at her hands and Diaz adjusted himself on the bed and studied her some more. Her ears were small and they directed the eye straight down the curve of her neck to her collarbone. Her arms had a hint of baby fat and her breasts looked plumper and more seductive through the t-shirt than they had when fully exposed to him. In spite of himself, he tried to picture that moment again, to freeze it in time, but the details had already faded. Only the awkward feeling remained.
She caught him looking at her, didn’t move but said, “Why do men have to be such jerks? Half of them want to drag a woman into the gutter and the other half want to preserve her in amber.”
“And your last real boyfriend, which kind was he?”
“First one kind, then the other. I was nothing but arm candy after a while. He always wanted me looking perfect. Like a butterfly in a case.”
“Which is dead.”
“What?”
“The butterfly in the case is dead.”
“Exactly.”
Manny felt philosophical. He said, “Beauty is best when you only see parts of it, like the butterfly flitting around. In real life, you don’t often get a full look. In the display case, it’s just too much. It overwhelms your senses and makes itself trite. The specialness goes.”
She looked pleased. “I didn’t know you had this kind of wisdom, Manny.”
“I’m surprising myself. But I was just thinking—” He caught himself. “I don’t want to sound like one of those jerks.”
“You won’t. Just tell me.”
He took a breath. “When I saw you the other day in the bathroom, sounds insane but it was only one breast and the other was hidden behind the door. The hidden one made the other one that much more beautiful, because it left something for another time, something unknown. Same just sitting here. You’re ten times sexier with your clothes on.”
“Are you coming on to me, Manny?”
“No.”
“It sure sounds like you are.” She touched the arch of his bare foot. “You know, I really l
ike you, Manny. Maybe not just as a friend.”
He reached out a hand and they interlaced fingers. But when she twisted herself onto her knees and began crawling to him, he stiffened his arm, holding her off. There’d been a time, not beyond memory, when he’d have begged the gods for what she was offering him. Now he just pebbled his chin and met her beautiful liquid eyes.
“The thing is, J-Fo...I can’t get it up.”
“Huh?”
“I’m impotent.”
There it was. She flinched, stunned, like he’d just hit her across the bridge of her nose with a stick. He had to laugh at that.
“So you’re joking.”
“Not at all. You just looked so gobsmacked. Why’s it so hard to believe?”
“You’re so—so virile, I guess. Is it a war injury?”
“You could call it that if you want. It’s nothing physical. My mind just don’t want my pecker to go on alert anymore. It’s retired.”
“And it won’t ever come out of retirement?”
“I don’t know. Not any time soon.”
“How can you tell for sure?”
“Let’s just say I’ve tested it on more than one occasion.”
“Maybe they weren’t the right girls.”
“I don’t think that explains it.”
“So when you saw me the other day…”
“Nothing.”
“Is that what made you angry?”
“Could be. Or something else. I got a lot on my plate right now.”
“But what could be more important than this?”
“Lots of things, Jennifer. A whole heap of things.”
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK
9.
DAY FIVE—Light
DIAZ HAD A FRIEND WITH an old Nissan that rarely got used. It sat out in the elements on a vacant lot in Harlem, paint faded, dashboard cracked. But there was air in the tires and the engine always started on the first try.
The radio worked, too, still the original one after all these years. Nobody stole car radios in New York anymore. Diaz had his theories on that.
At half past five on Sunday morning, he opened the creaky driver’s door and climbed in behind the wheel. By six-thirty he had it gassed up with the fluids topped off. At a few minutes after seven he accelerated onto the Harlem River Drive, heading for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Despite the sense of crisis, Kahn had insisted that he follow his schedule and take the day off, making Diaz wonder whether all of his progress with the sergeant over the past day had been illusory. Either way, the case of the veterans ate at him. With nothing else to do and J-Fo heading to her parents’ house in Jersey for the day, he couldn’t bear sitting around the apartment. He’d decided on a working weekend.
As usual, a good bit of I-95 by the Connecticut border resembled a parking lot, though at this time of year you couldn’t blame beach traffic. Maybe skiers, Diaz thought. Once he got past New Haven, snow lay on the ground in the shadows of roadside trees.
At nine he followed the blue signs and pulled into a Burger King parking lot. He took out his phone and called Nunez. “Hey, I need a favor.”
“You didn’t solve that case yet?” the MP jibed.
“I’m a slacker. Can you help me out?”
“I’m beginning to feel like part of the team.”
“You’re one of the good guys, Nunez, no question. But still unofficial. Our A and E man is a cop named O’Shea. One of them redhead types. Lanky and old school.”
“Don’t tell me. His grandmother used to run guns for the IRA.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe she made bombs. Maybe he’s doing his penance on Avenue C.”
Nunez laughed. “I could come to like you, Diaz. So what about O’Shea?”
“He’s point man and I’d like you to fax him something, if you don’t mind. That nurse who’s stateside—Sallye Ritchie—and the doc who went to the Far East—”
“The surgeon’s a dead end.”
“That right?”
“Turns out he’s been promoted to colonel and he has some big job in PACOM. He’s got more on his plate than a sumo wrestler at dinner. No way he’s got time to moonlight building bombs.”
“You sure?”
“Maybe if this was going down in Hawaii there’d be an outside chance. But not in New York. If he’s set foot in that city at all in the past few years he’d be surrounded by half a dozen aides.”
“Okay.” Diaz let out a breath. He thought about telling Nunez where he was headed, but decided against it. “Is the nurse still a possibility?”
“I’m neutral on that.”
“Fine. What I’d like O’Shea to have is a list of all her patients while at Landstuhl. Can you pull that together for us?”
“Take a bit of work but I don’t see why not. Probably in a computer file somewhere. If not, they’ll have paperwork, patient records.”
“I got a notion that O’Shea’s team can cross-check her patients against vets known still to be in New York. Maybe we can anticipate his next victim.”
“Good idea,” Nunez said. “I’ll do it.”
Diaz hung up and hit the Burger King drive-thru, working his way through an artificial-tasting breakfast as he rode along. The highway had opened up, so he made good time the rest of the way, arriving in Bedford just before noon.
He stopped into a diner in an old clapboard house on Great Road, left a pee and took a sweet coffee to go. Although he had the address of the VA hospital in his phone, he asked directions of an elderly woman on the sidewalk. Easier to get it from a local than to drive around with his eyes off the road.
Before he headed to the hospital, though, he dropped into the police station, which had been wisely located next to the high school, an open admission that teenagers were the source of most trouble in a town of this small size. He introduced himself to the officer in charge, acknowledged that he had no warrant, but said out of courtesy he just wanted someone to know he’d be poking around.
“You got a gun?”
“My service weapon,” Diaz said, pulling back his overcoat and showing the holster.
“Okay,” said the officer. “If there’s a bomb involved, though, that’d be the state troopers.”
“I doubt it’ll come to that,” Diaz said, though he doubted his own doubts. “But I appreciate the heads-up.”
In a few minutes, he’d pulled into the cold, bleak parking lot of a sprawling brick federal facility. The old part reminded him of a Nineteenth Century mental hospital and the new part looked like every plain municipal box of the Fifties and Sixties, before the government decided to make its buildings even uglier. He knew places like this—had spent half his life within their walls—and he also knew that the people inside rarely lived down to the bleakness of their surroundings. Against all percentages, the human spirit wanted to rise.
Without identifying himself as a cop, he told the receptionist he was looking for Ms. Ritchie. Was she on today? The elderly receptionist kindly called someone in administration, who informed her that the nurse should just be getting off shift.
“Does this involve one of her patients?” the receptionist asked.
“No,” Diaz said. “It’s personal, but I’d really like to catch her. Where would she get out?”
The receptionist didn’t show a hint of suspicion, maybe because Diaz had chosen to don a suit and tie for the occasion. If she did become suspect, he’d show his badge, but he’d rather not cause people to talk. She directed him to the employee parking lot and he hung around by the door, asking anyone not too old whether she was Sallye Ritchie.
At twelve-thirty, a nurse with bandy legs and an open wool coat stepped out the door and began walking toward the parking lot. She was remarkably thin and she still wore her uniform.
“Excuse me,” Diaz said for the tenth time, “can you help? I’m looking for nurse Sallye Ritchie.”
He saw immediately that he had her. And she also must have known by her hesitation that she’d given
herself away. “That’s me,” she admitted. “Who is it wants to know?”
Diaz showed her his badge and introduced himself.
“What’s this about?” she said, clutching her coat closed against the chill.
“I’d like to—” It was then he noticed the bruises. She’d done a good job with the pancake makeup—to a point, anyway—but you’d have to be blind not to see that someone had beaten her up, and not long ago. One eye still had bad swelling around it and the white was mottled yellow and red. The bridge of her nose was swollen, too.
“Listen,” Diaz suggested, “can we sit down somewheres? Get a sandwich and a cup a coffee?”
Her eyes darted, looking for a way to evade him, but Diaz decided right there not to make threats that would turn her more skittish. His instincts told him to play it soft. “Please,” he said. “I drove all the way straight from New York City this morning.”
She wouldn’t look directly at him, but she gave a strained smile. “That where you got that accent, Detective?”
“Born and bred in the city, ma’am.”
Ritchie chewed the inside of a lip and shrugged. “My car’s just there. Can you follow me?”
Diaz readily agreed. He supposed she could bolt, but there’d be no point, now that he knew for sure where she worked.
He watched her climb gingerly into her navy blue Ford Focus, her white sneaker the last thing to disappear. Before he started his car, just to be safe, he wrote down her license plate number.
IT WAS A LEISURELY DRIVE, Diaz figuring that the nurse drove slowly to gather her thoughts. But he wondered what those thoughts contained. She’d just had a visit from an out-of-state cop and she had no idea what he wanted. Or maybe she did have an idea.
He followed her to a place outside town, a greasy spoon toward the end of a strip mall farthest from the road. She parked between a car and a handicapped space. Diaz pulled through an open spot in the middle so his grille faced out. He was turning off the ignition when his phone rang, O’Shea calling.
A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 Page 16
