Hauck stood up as well, opening the door for her. “I don’t mind trouble.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
There might have been a time, years back, Jack “Red” O’Toole reflected, riding the Metro-North train to Greenwich, that his soul was worth saving.
The teenage girl texting on her BlackBerry reminded him of someone from long ago. A girl he knew back in high school. Desiree Flynn. When he played linebacker at Haysville High in Kansas and the thought of stuffing the line and knocking heads for the blue and white of Kansas State was something he could reach out and touch. When maybe a job at a lathe at Great Plains Tool Company like his father had was a dream worth living for.
But that was before the sky grew dark and an F5 tornado crashed through town one May afternoon, leveling half of it, including the die plant.
Red O’Toole’s parents too.
Before he left to go into the army and developed a deft touch with an M4. Before IEDs exploded in his ears or, amped on Dianabol, he chased a fleeing insurgent into a stone hut in Hilla and emptied his mag on six “unfriendlies” sitting there-who turned out to be a family at the dinner table and their ten-year-old son, who’d been chasing after a soccer ball.
That was when the army sent him home with a full discharge, and he came back to a town of rubble and zero prospects, bad as anything he had seen over there, and he spent all of six days there, Desiree off in Utah somewhere, before signing up for two years with Global Threat Management, making five times what he did for Uncle Sam.
And got a bona fide, free license to use his skills.
They played a game when they went out on a field trip, beyond the Green Zone. They called it Tin Can. Try to knock one off the fence with their M4s. Except the “can” was more likely an old man who popped his head up watering his plants or boys playing cards on a rooftop as their armored convoy sped by.
O’Toole kept looking at the girl across from him. She kept texting, as if she didn’t even notice him.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Like shooting a tin can off a fence in a dusty field.
The train slowed, approaching his destination. “Greenwich,” the conductor announced over the loudspeaker. “Greenwich. Old Greenwich will be next.”
O’Toole stood up. He took one last look at the texting girl, who, he decided, didn’t look like Desiree at all. He stood in the line of passengers waiting to disembark.
The door opened.
O’Toole crossed onto the platform. The exiting passengers funneled down into the station. O’Toole continued along the track.
The man he was looking for was reading a magazine, hair smoothed back, wearing wire-rim glasses, waiting on a bench on the northbound side.
O’Toole took a seat next to him. He glanced at his watch. “Right on time.”
“If you can’t trust Metro-North, who can you trust?” the man replied.
“Always a good question. I ask myself that a lot.”
“Well, in your case,” the man said, “I’m afraid you have to trust me.” He closed what he was reading, the Economist, and removed an eight-by-eleven manila envelope from the pages. He slid it along the concrete bench to O’Toole.
“We have another job for you.” O’Toole opened the envelope. “I want him to become disinterested in our affairs.”
There was a series of photos inside. On top, a man he might characterize as rugged, handsome, opening the door to an office building. The next was a not-so-bad-looking chick with short, dark hair getting out of a Prius.
The third was a kid in an oversize hockey jersey. O’Toole noticed he clearly had something wrong with him.
Retard, he thought. What did they call them? Down syndrome or something.
He flipped back to the first photo. Hauck. An ex-cop. “You want him dead?”
“What I want is for him to be no longer engaged in our affairs.” His contact took off his glasses and started to clean them. “What you do is your business. I always trust the judgment of my people on the ground.”
O’Toole slipped the photos back inside the envelope. “Sounds reasonable.”
His contact stood up.
“You know, I was thinking,” O’Toole said. “See that guy over there?” A man on the other side of the platform, reading a newspaper, waiting for a train.
“The one in the suit?”
“If a twister hadn’t leveled my town when I was a kid, that might’ve been me, waiting for that train. Coming home from work. Someone waiting for me with a beer. Maybe a kid. Who knows”-O’Toole raised his shades and grinned at him-“I might’ve even been like you.”
“No.” The man in the wire-rims rolled up his magazine and tapped O’Toole’s knee. “You would never have been like me. Just make sure he’s clear of our affairs. Whatever you decide, make it something he’ll clearly understand.”
“You know, we had a saying over there…” O’Toole squinted back at him. “‘The unwanted, doing the unthinkable-for the ungrateful.’”
“Really.” The man in the glasses smiled. He dropped another envelope on his lap. This time a fat one. “I think you’ll find us grateful. As usual. Next train back’s at five thirty-two.”
He walked off, leaving O’Toole on the platform. He tapped the thick envelope against his knee and studied the man on the other side of the track.
Yeah, he thought, laughing to himself; his contact was right. That was never in the cards. He rubbed the back of his neck. Where his panther was. Shiva. The tattoo had kept him safe through five tours to the Sandbox. The tip of her long, bright claw reaching onto his neck.
If he had ever been worth saving, the statute of limitations had long run out. The pieces of his soul had scattered across the globe. Like an F5 blowing into town. Leveling most everything. Scattering the rest.
He reached back and reknotted his thick, red-brown hair.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The man in the Burberry raincoat turned up his collar against the drizzle as he stepped out of the office building onto Madison Avenue. He chatted for a second with a woman-maybe a coworker-who waved good-bye and headed north.
Thibault started walking the other way to the south.
Across the street, Hauck followed, several paces behind.
He had left the office early, telling Brooke he had some errands to attend to. He felt a little out of practice at what he was doing. He hadn’t done this kind of thing in years.
On Fifty-fourth, Thibault stopped in front of a store window, seeming to admire a tie. Then he continued, taking a call on his cell. On Fifty-third Street he made a right, heading west. Hauck crossed after him, hunching into his jacket against the rain, twenty yards behind.
Tall, swarthy, with thick, black hair that came over his collar, Thibault cut a commanding presence. It wasn’t hard to see why women might be drawn to him. Halfway down the block he veered into a recessed courtyard set between two larger buildings. It looked like a restaurant. He opened the glass doors and went inside.
The place was called Alto. Hauck had heard of it. Italian, fancy. The kind of place his boss, Foley, was always trying to drag him to. Annie would have been impressed.
He went up to the door, and through the glass, he saw Thibault remove his coat and hand it to a pretty hostess. It looked as if they were familiar with him there. He seemed to recognize someone at the bar and went straight up to him.
Hauck waited as Thibault greeted the man and took a seat, and then stepped in.
“Dining with us tonight?” The hostess, a twentysomething gal in a sexy black dress, smiled from behind a counter.
Hauck smiled back. “Just meeting a friend at the bar.”
Thibault was seated at the far end of the crowded bar. His friend, who was Mediterranean looking, wore a nicely tailored sport jacket and open white shirt.