Half-Past Dawn

by Richard Doetsch

  The cab door closed and began its descent

  Instead of continuing to climb up onto the roof of the cab, Jack simply turned to his right and snatched a canvas shopping bag, pulling it back into the cab, and quickly closed the hatch.

  He quickly sat in the wheelchair and affixed a surgical mask to his face while Frank draped his shoulders and legs with a large white blanket that covered the bag in his lap.

  As Jack had ridden up from the depths of the basement in cab four two hours earlier, leaping onto the handrail, opening the elevator cab ceiling to see the red security lasers in the shaftway, he had made a decision. With Cristos giving chase and the authorities not far behind, he feared he would be trapped and captured.

  So he had dumped the contents of Mia’s case, along with everything in his pockets-his wallet, the letter he had written to Cristos, his cash, keys, and the jewelry box, everything except his gun, Charlie’s rabbit foot, and Aaron’s key-fob device, which scrambled the security camera’s signal-into the canvas shopping bag he had taken from Charlie’s box of food and weapons and stored it atop elevator cab four.

  After depositing the few contents of Aaron’s bag into the evidence box for ballast, he tucked it into Aaron’s black bag, jumped back into the elevator, securing the trap door, and led Cristos off on a wild-goose chase around the city, pulling him as far from his goal as possible.

  All the while, Jack knew he would have to go back, and there would be only one way back in.

  He was counting on being captured.

  The door finally opened to the main lobby, which was abuzz with forensic personnel, mapping bullet trajectories, digging fragments out of the floors and walls, and consulting. Without hesitation, Frank wheeled Jack along the back wall to the rear hall and the rear service entranceway.

  As they rounded the corner and rolled down the fifty-yard hallway, they came upon an armed New York City policeman at the rear door, with two others at the desk.

  Jack could see the security monitors, ten of them showing different angles of the lobby, of the upstairs, and of the four elevator cabs. He prayed that Aaron’s key fob had worked. Otherwise, he was about to have a very short conversation with law enforcement.

  His heart began to race as all eyes fell on him. The surgical mask was a silly disguise, yet Frank continued to wheel him down the linoleum-tiled floor toward the exit.

  The desk guard spun around to face them. “Frank,” he said in his Bronx-accented voice. Sergeant Johnny Seminara stared at him a moment. “I’d ask why the camera in your elevator went on the fritz, check you from stem to stern, but seeing it’s you, I’m sure it’s an issue for maintenance.”

  Frank continued toward the rear door.

  “You want to leave the wheelchair or take it with you?” Johnny asked.

  “Thanks.” Frank nodded.

  Jack hopped out of the chair, holding tight to the blanket as it wrapped the canvas bag, and followed Frank through the rear door of the Tombs to find Joy behind the wheel of Frank’s car with the engine running.

  “So, I heard you’re dying,” Frank said as he walked with Jack toward the open car door.

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Jack climbed into the back while Frank jumped into the passenger seat.

  “I don’t know, Jack. You’ve always been kind of a miracle man. I don’t see something like cancer taking your life.”

  Jack looked at Frank and smiled. Some people poured out emotion and sympathy when dealing with a friend’s troubles. Some put up a selfish wall, remaining silent, as if acknowledgment of the disease would somehow infect them. Others just disappeared. And then there was Frank. His gruff exterior filtered his warmth and friendship, but his simple words were all Jack needed to give him a moment of hope.

  “By the way, they said I was crazy.”

  “It took how many doctors to come up with a conclusion I’ve known since I met you?”

  Jack smiled. “They said it was the tumor, pressing on my brain.”

  “Of course,” Frank said with a smile. “We all have something to blame our faults on.”

  “So you wanted to get arrested?” Joy asked from the driver’s seat.

  Jack nodded. “Kind of had to.”

  “That’s rich.” Frank laughed.

  “I’m not even talking to you about all this shit,” Joy said. “Cancer, stealing, psych wards. If we don’t all get thrown in jail, I’m thinking of finding another job.”

  “Thanks, Joy.” Jack smiled.

  “Do you mind telling me where I’m going?”

  “Yeah, to see an old friend.”

  CHAPTER 36

  FRIDAY, 12:30 A.M.

  Joy drove up the West Side Highway toward Riverdale, nervously sipping her bottle of water. Frank watched the traffic silently, hoping they weren’t being followed.

  Jack turned his attention to the canvas bag, the one that held the contents of Mia’s evidence case. It had been the desire of so many, yet it lay on his lap now. He looked at it, pondering the answers it held, the secrets that Cristos spoke of, the fear it created in Mia.

  He dumped the contents into his lap. He wasn’t going for the slow reveal.

  He looked at the objects, so simple, yet their meaning meant the difference between life and death. He pushed aside a credit card, money, a quill pen, and a room keycard and directed his attention to the more substantial objects.

  There were two nearly identical prayer books, just as Jimmy had described. Red leather covers, one hundred fifty or so pages in each, pages torn out of the back of one.

  “So, what the hell was in Mia’s evidence case that has everyone so interested?” Frank asked from the passenger seat as he looked back at Jack.

  Jack ignored his friend as he continued examining the objects. He ran his thumb over a prayer necklace of marble-sized beads, simple polished wood with a glossy gemlike sheen. There was a bejeweled dagger looking to be of considerable value, but his focus was drawn to the passport.

  He opened it and examined the picture. The man’s face was strong, free of wrinkles or blemish. His eyes were caring and warm under close-cropped black hair. Jack pondered the man and his untimely death, his last earthly possessions in Jack’s lap. He didn’t deserve to die.

  And as Jack continued to look at his face, he felt a tugging on his memory, a familiarity with the man, yet he couldn’t place it. He was sure he had seen him before, but he wasn’t sure if it was just his mind playing tricks or wishful thinking, attributing the vileness to Cristos while assigning a purity to this man, as if they were night and day, good and evil. Jack thought it silly to think in such terms, like some philosopher or director from a 1940s movie.

  He thumbed through the passport pages, looking at the visas, and saw the man’s recent worldly travels.

  He finally flipped back to the first page and looked at the diplomat’s name. He did a double take before the confusion set in. Marijha Toulouse was the name of the member of the UN Peace Council who had sent him the blue necklace, the blue necklace that he gave to Mia the night before.

  Jack’s mind was on fire as he realized that the man who was murdered early that week, whose murder Mia was investigating, whose belongings lay in his lap, was Toulouse.

  But even more earth-shattering to Jack’s already fragile mind was the fact that the man known as Marijha Toulouse was Nowaji Cristos’s father.

  • • •

  “You and your team will continue to help him get that box,” FBI Director Lance Warren said in a measured tone of anger.

  Warren sat at his desk inside his Park Avenue apartment, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, the phone pressed to his ear at this late hour. He had changed out of the suit he had worn to the bridge earlier in the day when he escorted Sam Norris. He had played the part of the concerned friend, because despite everything, he still considered Sam his friend. It was unfortunate that Mia had become involved, but he valued his own life and freedom above anyone else’s, even the daughter of his closest frie
nd.

  “My team is growing weary,” the man on the other end said.

  “With the money you are all paid, you can’t afford to be weary.”

  “Six of our own are dead already.”

  “A risk they all knew when they signed on.”

  “What is in that box?”

  “A book,” Warren said.

  “A book?”

  “A book containing everything, everything Cristos has ever done for us, foreign and domestic, every hit, every assassination, every plot, every coup. We don’t get that book, multiple agencies are going down. Do you understand me?”

  “But he’s the enemy.”

  “Not at this moment, and need I remind you that this enemy works for us?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “We will have no more communication until that case is safe in our hands. Too many people are involved already. I don’t want you even to fart within a fifty-mile radius of me.” Warren slammed the phone down.

  Cristos stepped out from the shadows.

  “How the fuck did you lose that book?” Warren shouted.

  “I never said I lost it,” Cristos said calmly. “It was stolen from me.”

  “By a diplomat to the UN? Don’t bullshit me.”

  “I don’t bullshit. ”

  “You realize the shit storm you have created by killing that man?”

  “You have no idea who that man was.”

  “I don’t know who you really are, either.”

  “That’s best for all concerned.”

  “Why would you write such things down?”

  “Accountability.”

  “What?”

  “Without leverage, what’s stopping you from killing me?”

  “If we wanted you dead, you would have died in prison, on schedule.”

  “You know what I found disturbing? While I was in prison, you checked out my bank accounts, tried to access them. You betrayed me.”

  “That was not my department,” Warren said dismissively.

  “What, were you looking for a refund? You traitors made me. That doesn’t mean you can unmake me.”

  “You’d be amazed at what we can do to you.” Warren glared at Cristos as he sat forward in his chair.

  “I’d be careful if I were you. You see, I’m dead. I don’t exist. Remember that?”

  “Vividly,” Warren said with a scowl.

  “And if I’m dead, then I can’t possibly be accused of murder.”

  “What murder?”

  “Yours.”

  And Cristos raised his gun.

  CHAPTER 37

  FRIDAY, 1:00 A.M.

  As they continued north on the Saw Mill Parkway, Jack tried to wrap his head around the fact that the items before him belonged to Toulouse, a man he had contact with not even a week earlier. Jack at once knew the necklace was not some token gesture by the UN but something far different. When Joy had researched him, it was in the context of the UN Peace Council and its mission, with no possible connection to Cristos.

  Jack knew now who killed Mia’s priest, the man he knew as Toulouse. It was Cristos, his son. He had revealed to Jack on the roof of the highrise whom the contents of the box belonged to. Jack knew how desperate he was to possess the case and knew the man would stop at nothing, even patricide, to gain it. All of the pieces fell together.

  As Jack continued to ponder the implications of the Cotis priest’s identity, he turned his focus to the other items before him. He put aside the prayer necklace and picked up the bejeweled dagger, ornate and deadly, its hilt covered in rubies and sapphires that glimmered under the lights of the highway. There were the two red prayer books, which, according to Griffin, held secrets and answers to mysteries that many desired to gain. But Jack’s eyes were drawn to something else, two drawings, incredibly lifelike.

  Jack picked up the first, and his world began to spin.

  “Jack, I know this isn’t the time, but if we’re to help you find Mia, we need to know what we don’t know. What aren’t you telling us? What are all those things?” Frank pointed to the object in Jack’s lap. “You go running off into the Tombs with this Cristos, leaving me not only to try and figure out where you are but to save your ass… twice, I might add. Then the cancer bombshell gets dropped in our laps, we overlook the insane-asylum thingy-”

  “Pull over,” Jack said quietly.

  “What?” Joy said. “No, we don’t have time to-”

  “Pull over!”

  Joy threw the wheel hard right onto the shoulder, locking up the brakes in an angry skid stop.

  Jack leaped out of the car.

  Frank threw open his door in a fit of rage. “What the hell was that all about?”

  “You think I know what’s going on?” Jack shouted.

  “More than I do!” Frank yelled back.

  Jack yanked up his sleeve, pointing at his tattoo. “I think we’ve got this all wrong. I think we are being played. I don’t know how. I don’t know who’s pulling the strings, but there is a bigger picture here that we are not seeing.”

  “What are you talking about it?”

  “These items that Mia so desperately wanted hidden away… the murder she was investigating-the man is Cristos’s father.”

  “You sure?”

  “The necklace that Joy mentioned before, the one I gave to Mia, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was sent to me by the same man, this Marijha Toulouse.

  “OK, as much as that is freaking you out, at least now we’ve got something to sink our teeth into.”

  “I think we know only what people want us to know. As I said, we’re being played.” Jack reached back into the car and pulled out the two drawings.

  “Played by whom?”

  “Explain to me how this was in the case at least two days ago.” Jack shoved the first drawing into Frank’s face.

  “What the hell?” Frank said as he backed up, annoyed by the closeness of the image. He glared at Jack before finally turning his attention back to what he now realized was a picture. His eyes slowly focused on a drawing, done in ink and charcoal pencil by an expert hand. The detail was intricate and refined, as if replicating a photograph. It was an outdoor scene, nighttime, a rushing river under a dark, cloud-ridden sky, and then he saw the body, the face pale, still, eyes open yet devoid of life. There was a bullet wound in the upper left chest. The face was dotted in small wounds, the hair and the clothes soaked.

  An impossible drawing that predated its subject.

  When Jack’s eyes first fell on the drawing, he shrugged it off. As the DA, he had received countless threats on an almost weekly basis. Whether by phone, by letter, or in person, they were always turned over to the police and found to be nothing more than attempts at intimidation. So, when he saw the image, even though he was shocked at the detail, at the near-photographic realism of the depiction, his reaction was minimal. He understood how it must have disturbed Mia, seeing him depicted as dead, understood how it scared her. He had not once told her of the numerous threats he had received. He never wanted to worry her, much in the same way that she minimized the dangers of her own job.

  But when he looked closer, his mind exploded in a wave of disorientation. For the image drawn days early and sealed away in Mia’s box depicted him in the exact condition he was in early that morning, lying on the riverbank, a bullet in his chest, the cuts on his face, a spot-on match down to the smallest detail. It was as if the hand of fate had rendered him on the canvas, as if everything that transpired the night before was his destiny.

  He was a pawn, or at least Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole.

  He studied the picture again, its exacting detail down to the clothes he wore, the rushing river that lapped the bank. And that’s when he saw the shadow. It was next to him, faint yet distinct. Whoever had drawn the picture with foresight, with an attention to exacting detail, they were sure to include the singular shadow… there was someone else there.

  Jack d
idn’t believe in fate; he didn’t believe in God or the hereafter. He didn’t believe in magic, ghosts, answered prayers, or superstitious mumbo jumbo. Yet this day had thrown it all into question. He refused to believe it, and so he cast the facts aside and focused on Mia.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Frank said. “This is some trick. Cristos must have slipped it into the case to mess with your head.”

  “He never had the case; no one has touched the case since I put it down in the Tombs two days ago, before I was shot, before I crashed through the guardrail and awoke on the riverbank.”

  Frank stared at Jack, lost for words before finally realizing. “You didn’t make us pull over to show us this picture. What the hell is going on?”

  Jack held out the second drawing. Frank stared at it but didn’t touch it, as if doing so would somehow render it real.

  What troubled Jack far more than the fateful image of himself was the one in the second drawing. The picture was of a beach, the first rays of morning peeking over the horizon; gulls hung suspended in the air, scampered along the sand in search of food; gentle waves lapped the sandy shore. And on the rocks was a woman’s shattered body. Jack felt his heart crumble in his chest. No doubt drawn by the same hand, it was a depiction of the future in much the way Jack’s image had been rendered. But this picture drew everything Jack was doing into question, casting doubt on his chances of success, of ever saving his wife. For the picture of the dead woman was of Mia, her lifeless body awash in the first light of dawn.

  • • •

  “Cristos said that our lives are preordained, that certain people within his religion can remember the future in the same way we remember the past.”

  “Bullshit,” Frank said from the passenger seat. They were back in the car, heading north, with Joy at the wheel.

  “I agree,” Jack said. “But then how do you explain the drawing of me?”

  “Why do I need to explain it?”

  “If there’s truth to them, then Mia will die at dawn tomorrow.”