In any other situation Jon would have seen this as a sign that they were meant to be together, but in this situation he knew that neither of them could trust anything the other said. In fact, before they fell asleep next to one another afterward, to get the rest they both needed, Mallory had made sure her phone was password locked before she put it on her nightstand, and Jon had stuck his under the pillow on his side of the bed, along with his gun.
They both woke at the same time after a few hours, as if neither could allow the other an advantage, and the conversation was nothing like what lovers usually share in such moments.
“Are you sure you don’t want to change your story?” Jon said, while stroking her hair gently.
“Why would I want to do that?” she said with a puzzled look, resting her hand on his hip.
“I wouldn’t want anything to come out that would keep me from being able to walk you home again … because you were locked up somewhere.”
“I have nothing to hide,” she said, gently moving her hand up and down his side. “And you wouldn’t do that anyway.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t. But somebody would.”
“But you wouldn’t let them.”
“Maybe I would.”
At this Mallory pulled her hand away and rolled onto her back, so her hair was now out of his reach.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “You want something?”
He said, “Okay,” and they each dressed in silence on their own side of the bed. Then there was a lot more silence as she made some eggs and toast in the kitchen with him sitting on a stool on the other side of a bar, not unlike the way they had met a few hours earlier.
“What’s with the kids on the fridge?” Jon asked. There were several pictures of young children with obvious disabilities. One little boy was severely bow-legged, and another’s smile showed her obviously diseased teeth.
“They’re children in the city who have rickets,” Mallory explained, “because they’ve never had any sunlight and their parents didn’t give them the nutrition they need. I sponsor them so they can get help.”
“How could people who live here not give their kids vitamin D?”
“Welcome to humanity,” she said, spreading her hands. “A lot of them are single parents, and they’re sick themselves with addiction or depression or whatever.”
“Why don’t they just leave?” Jon was about to say “this hellhole,” but then stopped himself when he realized who he was talking to, and added, “Why haven’t you left?”
“My dad doesn’t want to,” she answered with a shrug, “and we have the bar. Every year we think the sun might come out again.”
“But didn’t the scientists say how long it would take?”
“Yeah, but I never know what to believe. Plus, it might sound trite, but this is our home, so why shouldn’t we try to make it better and not just give up on it?”
“Hmm,” Jon said, nodding. “Well, I think it’s cool what you’re doing for those kids.”
She looked at him thoughtfully for a few moments, and then said, “I’m thinking this might not be the time to play games with each other.”
“What do you mean?”
“I feel like something really bad is going to happen tomorrow when the day comes. It seems like the end of the world, at least around here.”
“Is this just a feeling,” Jon said, “or do you have some reason—”
“I’ve read some of the stuff that’s been written about it, seen some stuff on the news. But my dad says that’s all bullshit, or conjecture at least, so I don’t know who’s right about what exactly will happen and why. But I just have this … intuition or something, that it’ll be bad. And if it is, isn’t that a game changer?”
“I remember my father,” Jon said, “quoting some famous person who was asked, ‘What would you do if you knew the world was ending tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘The same thing I was planning to do today.’ I think he even said, ‘plant an apple tree.’ I understand the first one; not sure I understand the apple tree thing.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Mallory said. “But it just seems wrong to keep covering up, to play games with each other, like I said, when we might be dead tomorrow. I don’t even know if I should keep the bar open after tonight.… I don’t know if it’ll ever be open again.”
“So where are you going with this?” Jon asked, abandoning his breakfast and watching her beautiful ice-blue eyes. They looked away and then back at him.
“Would you be up front with me if I was totally honest with you?” she said.
“How have I not…,” he started, but then stopped when he saw her shoulders droop. “Okay, I guess so. This has been a day of firsts for me, why not another one?”
“Okay, I’ll start,” she said, seeming invigorated. “I don’t want to tell you everything I know about my customers, because I trust Gotham Security more than the police.”
“Go on.”
“Long story short … my boyfriend—he was my fiancé, actually—disappeared and was found dead two years ago. The cops were utterly useless, but it was Gar Render’s people who broke the case. They found Tom’s killer—it was a carjacking—and they avenged us.”
“They killed him?”
She nodded resolutely, and said, “No one ever deserved it more. And that was something else the cops could never do, even if they had found him.”
“Were you involved in the … execution?”
“No, they just told me about it. But I was, and am, eternally grateful. So I signed up to be a ‘Friend of Gotham,’ as they call it. I do what I can for them, because I think they’re what the city needs, to keep us safe.”
“What have you done for them?” Jon asked.
“Your turn now,” she said, poking him in the chest. “Are you gonna be one of the cops who works for GS when they take over, or are you gonna be exiled by them because you’ve been a bad cop? Are you a part of the corruption they say has been the most abiding tradition among New York police, or will you be a part of the new force that actually cares about the city?”
“Well, first of all,” Jon said, taken aback by her idealism, “remember I’ve only been here a day.” His first instinct was to tell her what she wanted to hear, so he could get any information from her that might help in his investigation. But then he thought about his promise to her, and his heart strangely warmed to it. It was somehow becoming more real to him than when he had first said it.
“So I haven’t had enough time to sort all that out,” he said. “But I’m not convinced that Gar Render really loves the city as much as he wants power over it.”
“I’m sure there’s some of that in there,” she said. “But I’ve talked to him personally, and I really think … there’s that intuition thing again … that he’s mostly on the level.”
“Funny, I felt the same thing with the Mayor.”
“Oh, she might be sincere, or at least mostly sincere, like Render is. But she’s sincerely wrong … taking money away from law enforcement to put into the arts and such, tying the hands of the police by limiting how much force they can use. Render will fix all that, like he fixed my problem.”
The references to the law and Render made him think of a question he was curious about. “What do you think about the city employing Muslims, like in important jobs with security access?”
“I don’t have a problem with it per se,” Mallory said quickly, having obviously thought about the issue before. “But only if there’s a thorough enough background investigation, etc., to establish that the person’s not a risk, and I’m not confident Mayor King has the balls to do that.”
“Yeah.” Jon smiled. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have any balls.”
She laughed, then said, “So if I tell you what I’ve done for GS, will you drop it and trust me?”
Jon thought for a few seconds, then answered, “If it’s not pertinent to my investigation.”
“Oh, it’s not. In fact, it’s about GS doing your
job for you, and better. Because they can’t do police work legally on the streets yet, they have to do it on the sly. So the management gives lists of people who need protection or other help to a middleman like me, and we pass them to one of their agents. In my case they come into the bar, of course. Render doesn’t want the police to know because they’re resentful of someone working on their turf, and I don’t want any of you to know the details, so there’ll be no hindrance to them helping others like they helped me.”
“So you’re not going to tell me who the GS agent is,” Jon said, “the one that comes into the bar?”
“No.”
“I thought we were being honest.”
“We are being honest. I’m honestly telling you why I’m not telling you.”
“Okaaay,” Jon said, shaking his head. “Can I see one of the lists you passed on?”
“Don’t have them,” she answered. “They’re on a piece of paper.”
“Can you take a picture with your phone and send it to me, the next time you get one?”
“Why?”
“So I can make sure there’s no relevance to my investigation.”
“I’ll think about it.”
They sat and stared at one another, their breakfast long forgotten and this particular conversation apparently over.
“While we’re being honest,” Jon finally said, “were you actually attracted to me when I first came into the bar?”
“Not really. Not any more than other good-looking guys who come in.”
“So the invitation to walk you home?”
“Self-protection,” she said, pondering it. “I got scared, knowing what I do for GS and having two MPDs asking questions. I didn’t want you to ask more, and maybe get in the way of what they’re doing, so I used the only tools I have to try to get you to forget about it, and not take it any further.”
Jon nodded cheerfully, but inside he was disappointed, despite the fact that he had already known what she would say, if she was truly being honest.
“What about you?” she asked him. “Would you have walked me home if you didn’t want information from me?”
“No,” he said, part of him wanting to stick it to her in return. But then he remembered his promise of honesty. “Not while I’m in the middle of something like this, anyway. But at some other time, I might. I would…”
He let the thought trail away because she was looking at him differently than she ever had previously. And then she took his face in her hands gently and started kissing him. He responded and did the same, and they continued for several minutes, slowly and affectionately in contrast to their frenzied physical passion when they had arrived in the apartment. This time they didn’t even give a thought to things like phones and guns—until they were interrupted by Jon’s phone beeping with a message from Amira, which said that another avenue of investigation had yielded a suspect.
Jon apologized and pulled himself away, but he was thinking on the way out that those few minutes on the tall seats, fully clothed, were way better than anything that had happened earlier on the bed. The feeling of dread was still somewhere inside him—the one that was saying he had been brought to this city to fail at his job. But now there was another emotion bubbling up with the faint hope that there might be another reason for him to be here.
12
DAYFALL MINUS 10 HOURS
Halladay wasn’t answering his cell phone, so Jon couldn’t tell him from the car what Amira had said, nor could he warn him that he was coming back to the apartment. When the young cop arrived at Three Hundred Lex, the lobby was busier with hookers and clients than it had been a few hours before. Initially Jon thought this might be because it was around eight o’clock at night, but then he remembered that it was always night in Manhattan and so time probably had very little to do with the cycles of activity in the brothel.
He banged on the door to Halladay’s apartment and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer, so he located the house key on the chain he had taken and let himself in. The living room was as he’d left it, and the same type of music was still playing loudly in the back room. He called Halladay’s and Nina’s names as he proceeded in that direction, but no one answered, so he opened the door gently and peered inside. The music was even louder than he thought it would be, which explained why they couldn’t hear anything, and they were both sound asleep on the bed.
Jon stepped softly to Halladay’s side of the bed and grabbed the gun off the nightstand next to him, to test the older man’s cop instincts and make sure he didn’t get shot if they were good. Sure enough, Halladay woke up and furled his thick sandy eyebrows in Jon’s direction.
“I hate to interrupt your nap,” Jon said, leaning down close to him. “But we have a suspect.”
“Wait out in the living room,” Halladay finally said after climbing back into full consciousness.
Jon left the bedroom, but took the gun with him to make sure the tired older man didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep. In a few minutes Halladay appeared from the back room, fully dressed. Jon handed the gun to him and they made for the car.
“Amira did a search through the depositions of civil lawsuits connected to the chaos crimes, like I asked,” Jon explained as they headed west across the city. “She found one where a junkie who got hurt in a panicked mob tried to sue the city for not keeping him safe, and as a part of his testimony saying how terrified he was, he mentioned a ‘big hairy guy’ who he saw knifing someone in the crowd. Seems he recognized the guy because he buys drugs from the same dealer at a club, and—you know how these people talk—he’s heard rumors that the guy kills for hire to pay for his meth habit. The junkie’s testimony is all over the map, but since that slice fit my criteria, Amira questioned him and found out the name of the club, the name of the dealer, and even the name of the big hairy guy.”
“Which is?” Halladay said.
“Shinsky. So Amira looked it up and, sure enough, there’s a guy with priors who fits that description. He was a football lineman when he was younger, so he shouldn’t be hard to recognize by his size, but here’s his picture.” Jon held out his phone to the yawning Scotsman.
“Yeah, he’s big,” Halladay said. “And hairy. But that’s hardly a crime, and this junkie doesn’t sound very reliable. Did you really have to wake me up for this?”
“If you have a better lead, let’s hear it. Dayfall is about ten hours away.”
“He’s also too big to be the perp from the office building,” Halladay said. “The one we saw on the video was a lot shorter.”
“So there might be two killers—at least. Fits a theory I have.”
They drove on in silence in the darkness of the Sunday evening, with Jon thinking about what might happen in the next ten hours, during the heavy thunderstorm that was predicted to roll in through the night and dissipate enough of the dense cloud cover for the sun to shine all day on Monday.
Another kind of shine was emanating from their destination when they reached it. Lit up like a carnival, Party Row was one of the hottest spots in the post-flagger economy of Manhattan. It stretched for a whole block on both sides of Twenty-Ninth Street in between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, club after club jammed in next to each other in two large industrial buildings that had been abandoned by businesses because they were too close to the water after the River Rise for the tenants to feel safe enough there. The only thing between them and the Westside Wall, in fact, was the truncated stretch of the High Line that still remained because the Wall was built along the outer side of that elevated train platform, which had been made into a public park before the flagger.
The businesses that formerly occupied these buildings could never have dreamed of raking in as much money as the thirty-plus establishments that had taken their place. The never-ending night of New York brought continual waves of partiers to the Row, and the light emanated from bright signs lining the streets on all sides of the massive buildings, and from spotlights and UV lamps shining from their roo
ftops. There were too many pedestrians and taxis on the streets for Halladay to do his parking trick here, so they had to take a spot in an adjacent garage and walk to the club where Shinsky’s dealer reportedly worked the crowd.
The Starlight was on the east end of the block in the north building, farthest from the High Line and the Water Wall. While some of the clubs in the Row were rather narrow or sat on top of one another, this one was a single large atrium room that stretched from the ground floor all the way up to a transparent ceiling at the roof. Jon figured that the stars had never actually been visible through the roof, because the club was built after the black clouds had descended, and they probably never would be due to the preponderance of light in the area. But the owners obviously were concerned with the sun coming through the next day, because when Halladay flashed his badge along with a picture of the dealer to various employees and managers, they all said something about how they were asking for a heavy police presence during Dayfall. This was the first evidence Jon had seen that the fears about it had definitely taken hold at the street level.
None of the employees were helpful in any way—they had probably been told not to assist the police in finding anyone, especially someone like a drug dealer who provided a commodity important to the club experience. But in response to directions from a random customer they questioned, the two cops made their way up some stairs to one of the raised balconies surrounding the main dance floor. As they did, Jon realized that the Starlight apparently had a sci-fi theme, with otherworldly lighting and some replicas of movie spaceships hanging from the walls. And the dealer they were approaching seemed to fit right in with the theme, because he looked like a vampire.
“Balo Spenser?” Halladay said to the white-skinned man sitting at the table.
“Call me Éric Le Boursier please,” he responded. “That’s my sang name.”
Dayfall Page 8
