“Abby, where’s Stu?” Evie asked. Abigail glanced back the way she came for just a moment before stretching upward into Evie’s head-scratch, her stubby tail wagging with glee. Then she shuffled off toward her empty food bowl, giving Evie sad eyes the whole way.
“Why didn’t Daddy feed you?” Evie asked, her delicate features set in a frown. But if Abby knew, she wasn’t spilling. Evie fetched Abby’s kibble from under the sink and shook some into the bowl. Abby crunched away with abandon.
“Stu?” Evie called. A clap of thunder shook the house, and the lights flickered all around her. She headed for the living room-the room from which Abigail had emerged.
As she neared the doorway, she spotted something that set her mind reeling.
Stuart’s feet, unmoving-clad in plain white gym socks, the red stripe at the toe of each pointed ceilingward.
Evie’s mouth went dry, and her heart leapt.
“Stuart?” she shrieked, her shrill tone piercing the silence of the farmhouse and echoing back at her like a mockingbird’s reply. She hit the doorway at a sprint, and then stopped short.
Stuart was lying on his back amid a sea of dowel rods and hardware beneath a half-assembled crib. When he heard her call, he jerked upright into a seated position-his forehead smacking against the wooden frame and causing the rickety structure to collapse atop him.
“Son of a-” he cried, and then caught himself. He’d been doing that a lot lately-as if the overgrown bean sprout in Evie’s uterus were absorbing every swear word within earshot, and would emerge five months from now cursing a blue streak.
“You asshole,” she said, ignoring his reproachful look. “You scared the shit out of me! Not answering when I called, leaving Abby unfed, and then…”
Stuart yanked the iPod earbuds from his ears and climbed stiffly to his feet. “Evie, I’m sorry-I didn’t hear you come in! I was trying to surprise you by getting the crib together before-” and here he noticed the rain through the French doors. He knitted his brow. “Before you got home. But these directions are ridiculous, and I guess I just lost track of time. I swear, I didn’t mean to scare you-do you forgive me?”
“Of course,” Evie replied. She was now crying and found it hard to catch her breath. She had no idea why.
“Hey,” Stu said, taking her in his arms. He knew her well enough to know she’d blame this on her mood swings. And he knew her well enough to know that wasn’t true. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. And I’m not going anywhere.”
Stuart held her close and waited for her panic to abate. Then he kissed away her tears and led her to the bedroom- both of them trying hard not to think about the fiancé she’d lost years back to a roadside bomb somewhere north of Kandahar.
The farmhouse burned bright against the dimming sky as day evened into night. Eventually, Stu and Evie came back downstairs and cooked dinner-both tired, both happy, both content. They sat awhile and watched TV with Abigail at their feet until their eyelids grew heavy. Then Evie shuffled off to bed. Stuart and Abigail followed shortly after, only delaying long enough to wander the house’s perimeter-Stuart shutting windows and checking locks.
And from the darkness of the forest, Hendricks watched unnoticed-as he’d been doing for hours, and as he’d done so many nights before. He watched until the only light that showed in any of the windows was the flicker of the TV in the master suite. He watched until even that went dark. He watched until the sky began to lighten to the east. Then he hiked back to his rental car and headed north, toward home.
4
Union Station in Utica, New York, is a structure oddly out of time and place. The city itself is a decaying industrial town nestled in the Mohawk River Valley, five hours and a world away from the bustle of Manhattan. Its streets are run-down and ill-traveled, and many of its storefronts sit empty. The factories that once provided jobs for its residents are now boarded or bricked up; the few windows left exposed are gapped by decades’ worth of vandals’ stones.
Yet Utica’s train station-which, these days, services more buses than trains-is an imposing marvel of Italianate architecture a full city block in size, with a vaulted ceiling, elaborate cornices, and an interior rife with gleaming marble. Massive columns jut upward toward skylights through which the gray light of the perpetually overcast Upstate New York sky streams through. Long, low wooden benches shiny from lacquer look out of scale for so large a space and lend the interior an oddly ecclesiastical air. In addition to a proper shoe-shine stand, the building also boasts a barbershop and restaurant, the latter an authentic lunch counter of the type that once appeared on street corners in every town in America.
The terminal was built in a fit of optimism, when rail was king, by the same architects who’d designed Manhattan’s Grand Central-but Utica’s fortunes were even then on the wane, having peaked decades before during the heyday of the nearby Erie Canal. Now the station seemed not so much preserved as forgotten, like an apparition doomed to walk the same halls again and again.
For the past fifty years, Utica hasn’t been known for much of anything-unless you count the violent struggle between four crime families that stretched the length of the seventies and eighties for control of the city.
Gazing dully out the window of his chauffeured Lincoln as it conveyed him from the private airstrip to his destination, Alexander Engelmann couldn’t for the life of him guess why organizations as powerful as the Genovese and Colombo crime families, as well as Outfits out of Buffalo and Scranton, would bother spilling blood over such a place. It seemed any money this town once possessed had been wrung out long ago. But he had to admit, their train station was really something. Perhaps it was pride that motivated their bloodshed.
Engelmann’s calfskin Ferragamos clacked against the marble floor of the terminal. Despite the summer heat, he wore a charcoal sport coat of worsted wool, a pair of pressed chinos, and a crisp white shirt, open at the throat. He carried neither bag nor weapon-his only luggage, a small carry-on, was in the Council’s hired jet, and he never traveled armed, preferring to procure any weapons in-country as needed and discard them after use. The terminal was empty but for Engelmann, two students with dreadlocks and dreadful clothes waiting for a bus, and a hulking mass of steroid-enhanced Mafia muscle shrink-wrapped into a black suit that bulged suspiciously at armpit, back, and ankle. Why this gorilla needed three firearms was beyond Engelmann, as was how anyone with that much muscle would even have the flexibility to reach an ankle holster.
Not that his assessment mattered-it was habit, nothing more. This occasion did not call for violence. Which was a pity, really; stiff and irritable as Engelmann was from his hasty trip halfway around the world, he could have used a pick-me-up.
As he approached the gorilla, the gorilla jerked his head to indicate the barbershop beyond. Engelmann strode past him without breaking stride, pushing through the glass doors and stepping into 1953.
Dime-sized hexagonal tiles, once white but now the color of old teeth, covered the floor, the grout between long since gone to black. Above waist-high marble wainscoting stretched walls that aimed for sunny yellow, but missed. Rounded mirrors hung above small vanities piled high with products Engelmann would have guessed ceased production decades ago. At each station was a pedestal sink and a barber chair of black vinyl, white trim, and ornate, tarnished bronze.
In one chair was a man, beside whom stood an aged barber. Whether the man was tall or short, fat or slim, Engelmann couldn’t tell, because he was mostly hidden beneath a black cutting cape-and his face was wrapped in steaming white towels in preparation for a shave, so that only his nose and thick black hair showed. His head was tilted back, his nose pointing skyward. His hair was slicked down such that even at the angle of his head, gravity held no sway over it.