“With all due respect, sir, I only care about solving crimes. Why do I fit the bill so well? I’ve never even been to New York.”
“Precisely because you’ve never been there, and don’t care about anything other than solving crimes. Mayor King can’t fully trust anyone in the PD up there right now, she wants some new blood. There are forces vying, a lot of temptations for the cops…. She can explain it to you. She asked for someone good who’s also ‘incorruptible,’ I think was the word she used.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, sir,” Jon said. “But I don’t think I’m the right man for the job.”
Versa smiled slightly and leaned forward in his seat.
“Here’s why you’re gonna go, and why you’re gonna like it: The only serial killer that’s been worse and gotten more press than our own Full Mooner is the Dayfall Killer in Manhattan. That’s who Mayor King wants you to stop, that’s your only job, and when you do it you can punch your ticket anywhere. Or live off the consulting and book royalties…”
Or open a PI office wherever I want, Jon thought.
“Plus it plays into the whole Dayfall situation,” Versa continued. “Everyone is watching to see what happens in New York when it hits there first, to find out what other big cities up north, and in Europe, need to be ready for.” He sat back in the chair. “You not only get to go mano a mano with a very bad criminal, but you get to be a part of something bigger.”
Jon sat still and silent in the hospital bed—no more shifting around or protesting now. He didn’t care much about the “bigger picture,” but he did care about catching the criminal, and he sensed that Commissioner Versa had a subtle wisdom. The old cop was dangling the carrot of competition, which he knew Jon couldn’t resist, and at the same time challenging him to do something more with his life.
“By the time they let me out of here,” Jon said, “won’t there be only a day or two before the Dayfall thing happens up there? And isn’t the Mayor about to get voted out or something?”
“She has a good plan for all that, like she always does. As I said, I’ll let her tell you about it.
“Besides,” Versa continued, the slight smile returning, “you can’t stay on a police force around here anymore. You pissed yourself twice that night in the cemetery, you know—‘cold diureses’ they call it. Comes with hypothermia.”
“Didn’t notice, actually,” Jon said. “But why would that keep me off a force?”
“Well, that’s gonna get out, and you know how the guys are always giving out nicknames, which tend to stick. You’d be PeeWee or Mr. Dependsable, or some other moniker you wouldn’t want to live with.”
“Good point,” Jon said, and chuckled enough that his chin hurt again. “Like they call you Nurse Versa?”
“They do?” the man said, feigning surprise, then knitted his brow. “Now you definitely have to leave the area.”
3
It was dark on the Saturday night that Jon flew into Manhattan for the first time, but not just because it was around midnight. He knew it would be dark during the morning and afternoon hours as well. The island had been perpetually shrouded in night for more than ten years, until just recently. During the last two weeks, some daylight had broken through for a few brief stretches of time that were growing successively longer and would soon culminate in an event dubbed “Dayfall,” which was expected to take place after the storm system currently above the city erupted on Sunday night, clearing the sky of the last of the black clouds that had caused the constant darkness. This would allow the sun to return on Monday morning for a full twelve hours, according to the scientists, but until then the mixture of the storm clouds and the remaining sun-blockers would keep the inhabitants in one more day of night.
Jon stared in awe at the city from the passenger seat to the left of the helicopter pilot, as they approached it over the water to the south. The heart of New York had always been an impressive sight, but the recent changes to its famous skyline added a surreal quality to the view and made it even more astonishing to the young detective.
Floodwaters on the edges of the island had decreased its size by almost 20 percent, and a wall had been built to protect the remaining parts from the threat of the rising water level. This had all happened because Pakistan and India had a nuclear conflagration (commonly called “the flagger”), which changed parts of the global environment to an extreme degree. Catastrophic ice-melting in subarctic areas and Greenland caused the rising water levels, and the effect on the atmosphere caused both “nuclear night” and “nuclear winter” to fall on some of the Northern Hemisphere. Much of the northeastern seaboard of the United States, including Jon’s home area near Philadelphia, had to adjust to colder temperatures, shorter days, and the gray color of the snow that had been stained with his blood at the cemetery. But the perpetual darkness, like the flooding, had only reached the coastline of the US.
New York City was at the very outside fringes of the effect, and therefore would soon be the first major city to experience full daylight, as Commissioner Versa had mentioned. Boston and Portland (Maine) would be liberated from the darkness within a few weeks, and then the northern European cities like London, Berlin, and Moscow after a few months.
Jon found himself shaking his head with incredulity that the world’s most famous skyline could have changed so dramatically from the pictures and videos that he’d seen in his childhood. But then he remembered that at the turn of the century a similar transformation had occurred when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed. He knew that people had been just as astounded then that such a thing could actually happen, but he still felt stunned that it could happen twice in such a relatively short time.
In addition to the smaller size of the island and the dark ring of the Water Wall along its outer edges, he noticed that much more light emanated from the buildings in the center of the oval than the ones farther out near the wall. Those buildings had survived the not-so-sudden apocalypse of the “River Rise,” as it was called, unlike their adjacent counterparts that had flooded and been torn down to use as raw material for the wall. But obviously many residents and businesses hadn’t trusted the assurances that the water level had reached its peak, and had moved farther inland or left the city altogether.
Even in this semi-apocalyptic state, however, Manhattan was still far more imposing and important than any place Jon had ever lived or worked. And he had a nagging, recurring feeling somewhere inside of him that he wouldn’t be able to succeed here like he had back home. But he desperately wanted to impress Mayor King, so he suppressed those negative thoughts by constantly reviewing in his mind the conversation he’d had with her before he left, on a secure cell phone that Versa had given to him on her behalf.
“You’re gonna hit the ground running,” she said, after she had outlined her basic plan and purpose for hiring him. “The storm’s supposed to happen tomorrow night and Dayfall the next morning, so you’ve only got about a day to do this. We’ll fly you in to a crime scene in an office building at One Hundred Park Avenue, where you’ll meet Officer Halladay in the lobby.”
“Yes ma’am,” he answered, then wondered aloud, “Will the pilot know where to land?”
“He’ll know where the nearest helipad is.”
Jon asked that because he had spent the last three days in his hospital bed researching everything he could about the island (including transportation), and had read online that normally no one was allowed to fly helicopters close to the big buildings in the city. The police and EMTs could only do it in emergencies… so this spoke of the importance Mayor King had placed on him and his investigation.