“What are you doing?” Christine yelled.
I said, “Shouldn’t we…”
Sirens blared in the distance. My blood ran cold.
“Go!” she cried, tearing rope away from Luis’s wrists. “Get out of here!”
I stumbled back, picked up my backpack and charged into the stairwell. I took three steps at a time, pain shooting through my body with every breath.
I burst into the warm night. Nothing made sense. I broke into a full sprint, headed south down Broadway and didn’t stop until my lungs were on the verge of bursting.
I ducked into an alleyway, saw a homeless man sleeping under a cardboard box. My head throbbed. I couldn’t run anymore. I sat down, and pulled my legs up to my knees. I heard faraway sirens, and the blackness overcame me.
7
Joe Mauser couldn’t sleep. His torso was warm under the covers. His legs were naked, cold. He eyed the finger of scotch on his nightstand. He left one there every night. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. And often he found himself going for a refill.
Sitting up, Mauser squeezed the sleep from his eyes and looked at the clock-4:27 a.m. He flicked on the antique lamp that was a gift from Linda and John for his forty-fifth birthday. It was a reading lamp, they said. Only thing he read by that light was the proof number on the bottle. The only other item on the nightstand was his Glock 40.
Joe lifted the scotch and took a small sip. He felt the liquid burn under his tongue, considered turning on the television. Sometimes watching QVC put him to sleep. Maybe scan the movie channels. No, that wouldn’t work. Only things on this late were titty flicks and infomercials.
His legs were sore. Early morning runs. He’d lost twenty pounds over the last six months, working off a few years of complacency. Down to two-ten. Not terrible, but on a five-eleven frame dropping another twenty would do him good.
Early morning runs were easy when you didn’t sleep much to begin with.
He switched off the lamp and closed his eyes, hoping sleep might meet him halfway. Just as he felt darkness descending, the shrill ring of the telephone shattered any chance he had of slumber.
Cursing, Mauser turned the light back on and picked up the receiver.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Joe? I wake you?” Mauser recognized the voice of Louis Carruthers, his old friend and the NYPD Chief of Department. Carruthers held the job since ’02, the fourth Chief of Department since 1984, back when it was referred to as Chief of Police.
“No, you asshole, I just got home from the bowling alley.”
Joe and Louis had been partners for three years in the NYPD. Then Mauser left to join the Feds down in Quantico, while Louis continued up the ladder. They met for drinks once or twice a year, but those occasions were always planned out weeks in advance. Louis calling this late, Joe didn’t think it involved sitting on bar stools and shoveling snack mix down their throats.
“I’m uptown at 105th and Broadway,” Louis said. “We’ve got two assault victims on route to Columbia Presbyterian. There’s one more, and he’s…he’s not making it. Joe, you need to come up here.”
“So you got a stiff up in Harlem,” Mauser said. “And you call me at the butt crack of daylight for what?”
He heard Louis take a breath. He was struggling to get it out. “The victim, he took a. 38 in the chest. He was gone when we got here. We don’t want to move him until you have a chance to come up here, Joe.”
“Is it the Pope?” Mauser asked. “’Cause if it isn’t the Pope or the President or someone really important, I’m going back to bed.” He heard deep breathing on the other end. Muffled speaking. Louis trying to cover up the phone.
“You should come down here,” his friend said. “105th and Broadway. Follow the squad cars. It’s apartment 2C.”
“Is there a reason I should give up a good night’s sleep to check out a random vic that’s not even under my jurisdiction?” He paused a moment. His heart began to beat faster. “Lou, is this call personal or professional? Should you be calling the bureau?”
“I thought you should hear it from me before I do. Joe,” he said, his sigh audible over the phone, “we have an ID on the victim.”
“Who is it?”
“Please, Joe. I don’t want to tell you over the phone.” Mauser felt a flash of pain shoot through his stomach. It wasn’t the scotch. Something in Louis’s voice.
“Lou, you’re scaring me, buddy. What’s going on?”
“Just come down here.” Mauser swore he heard the man choke back a sob. “A lot of the guys haven’t seen you in a while. They’ll be glad to know you’re coming.” Then he hung up.
Three minutes later Joe Mauser had on his leather jacket, a pair of beaten khakis, house keys snuggled in his pocket. Gun strapped to his ankle holster.
Stepping into the warm May night, Federal Agent Joseph Mauser cinched up his coat and walked to his car. He turned on the radio. Listened to two talking heads argue over whose fault it was that the Yankees lost. He drove uptown, a gnawing feeling in his gut that the body he was about to see would mean many more sleepless nights lay ahead.
8
You wake up in a sun-dappled alley. Your ribs hurt. There’s a knot on the back of your head that throbs nonstop. You feel dizzy. A man wearing a cardboard box for a blanket blinks at you, his eyes adjusting to the sight of this stranger sharing his alley. His beard is frazzled and dirty. His hands look like he’s worked in a coal mine for twenty years. You think it has to be a dream. There’s no rational explanation. You have a bed. You live in an apartment paid for with your money. You have direct deposit. You have a MetroCard. You may or may not be in a relationship. You have a college degree. You have parents you fled three thousand miles to get away from.
You stand up. There’ll be milk in the fridge, day-old coffee in the pot. It must be a dream. Where will the day take you?
Then you remember the corpse lying at your feet. The pool of blood you avoided stepping in. The kickback as the gun fired into the man who came this close to killing you and two other people.
And then you know it wasn’t a dream.
The homeless man stared at me as I wiped the dirt from my hands on a discarded newspaper. He held a crinkled coffee cup that held a nickel and three pennies.
“You new here?” he asked. Four rotted teeth jutted out from his black gums. “If you’re new here, you gotta pay a toll. I’m the tollbooth collector. Have been for two years. Last guy died. Tragedy. You can’t live on this block unless you pay the toll.”
I absently went for my wallet, then thought better and headed toward the street. A voice behind me yelled, “Hey, you didn’t pay the toll!”
Morning had broken. The sun was hot and bright. A beautiful early summer day. I checked my watch. It was eight fifty-three. I was due at work in seven minutes.
Every breath brought pain. I stopped in front of a building with a waist-high brick outcropping. Lifting up my shirt, I saw a mild discoloration under my armpit. Nothing too bad, nothing broken. Just black and blue where I’d been savagely kicked.
As I stood there, regaining my composure, winking away the dizziness, visions of last night came to me like a swarm of locusts. A man was dead because of me. Whether I’d pulled the trigger or not-it was all so fast, but I remember his finger in the trigger guard-I was responsible for another man’s death. It hadn’t sunk in yet, merely hovering around the fringes of my subconscious.
I tried to help Luis and Christine. And now a man was dead. In my heart, I knew I wasn’t to blame. He could have killed them both. He would have killed me.
My first stop had to be the police. They’d understand the situation, know the Guzmans were in mortal danger and I acted in their defense. He had the gun. He attacked two people. If I hadn’t been there, he might have killed them. I was a hero. My picture would be in the papers, bold-faced copy that could never be erased.