Willy thought of his brother, but he couldn't see how that fit. "Not that I know of. We've been apart a long time."
Nate stared at the tabletop thoughtfully. "Sounds kind of funny," he finally admitted, looking up. "Especially if it wasn't an accident. I don't know how much I can do, though. It's not like these people keep records, you dig?"
Willy opened his mouth to say something when they both heard a loud crash at the bar's entrance. The large bouncer was being propelled backward into the room by a flying wedge of men in uniform.
Willy responded first. "Shit. Cops."
Nate recognized them more specifically. "Vice," he said, and grabbed Willy's good arm as patrons and cops began falling over each other near the front. "Head out to the bathrooms and take the second door on the right."
Willy left his seat like a sprinter out of the blocks. "You coming?" he asked over his shoulder.
Nate merely flashed a smile and said, "Too old. Good luck."
Willy slammed through the "Outhouse" door and found himself in a short, dark corridor. With the noise escalating behind him, he pulled open the second door on his right and plunged through without hesitation, stumbling over a couple of steps and sprawling into the middle of a dimly lit landing with a staircase leading upward.
Scrambling back to his feet, he took the stairs two at a time, and had climbed two floors before he heard the door he'd used crash open and the sound of voices shouting.
"Upstairs, upstairs. I hear one of 'em headin' up."
Using his right hand on the banister to help propel himself, Willy increased his speed, peering into the gloom for some alternate way to what was looking like a straight shot to the roof. But every door he saw appeared shut tight, and he didn't have time to do more than look. He was pulling ahead of his slower, more heavily laden pursuers, however, so if the door to the roof was open, there might still be some way to escape.
He wasn't optimistic, though. New York was nothing if not a haven for the security-prone. Home of the fox lock, the LoJack, pepper spray, and more miles of razor wire than it took to tame the West, this city wasn't known for having rooftop doors left open.
Except when they'd been propped that way by a strategically placed brick. As soon as Willy made this discovery, now six floors above the speakeasy, he remembered from the old days how some drug runners would leave themselves a way out, just in case they needed an emergency back door.
Silently, he thanked this particular guardian angel's prescience, stepped through the door onto the gravel-covered roof, and shut the door behind him, hearing with satisfaction the spring-loaded lock snap to.
The roof was flat, bordered by a three-foot-high wall, and pinned in place by an enormous, ancient, otherworldly water tank which stood in the center on lacy legs of steel and loomed overhead like a captured blimp. It was as symbolic of New York as that odd sound manhole covers seem to make only when taxicabs hit them at high speed, and was duplicated a thousandfold all across the five boroughs.
The light was better up here-the city's perpetual ocher glow a veritable sunshine compared to the darkness of the stairwell, and Willy took advantage of it to jog to the edge of the roof, step over it onto the neighboring building, and continue trying to distance himself from his starting point.
Just as he was beginning to think he might have pulled it off, however, he saw his luck begin to sour. Simultaneous to hearing a heavy ram repeatedly smashing into the door he'd locked behind him, Willy saw the beam of a flashlight clear the top of the distant fire escape he'd been aiming for, followed by the silhouette of a cop carrying a shotgun and rolling commando-style over the top of the low wall to vanish from view against the darkness of the roof's surface.
Willy began looking around for another way out, already knowing in his gut that he'd run out of options. He hadn't made five steps in a new direction before the door flew open and a voice from the fire escape yelled, "Police, Don't move. Get face down on the ground with your hands above your head. Do it. Now."
Willy instead ducked briefly into the shadows cast by one of the water tower's legs, quickly removed his wallet, his shield, and his weapon, and slid them all under a flap of tarpaper he found extending from the footing of the tower leg.
"Get out into the light, you son-of-a-bitch, or I'll blow you away where you are."
Willy stepped out where they could see him, his right hand up. "Okay, okay. You got me. My left arm is paralyzed. I can't move it."
One of the cops, winded, adrenalized, and angry at having given chase in what should have been a routine bar sweep, came up behind him, threw him to the ground, wrenched his left hand free of where he parked it in his pocket, and kicked him in the ribs for good measure, frisking him roughly for weapons and contraband. Grunting with the pain, Willy also had to admit he would have done the same thing had the roles been reversed.
The cop finished his search by handcuffing Willy's wrists behind his back and rolling him over to shine a light in his face.
"What the hell did you think you were doing, asshole? You think we haven't done this before?"
He didn't wait for an answer. Instead, he looked up at someone Willy couldn't see and yelled, "We got him, Sarge. Any others up here?"
"Negative," came the distant reply. "Nuthin' with two legs, anyway. You got anything on that guy?"
The answer, Willy thought, was telling: "Nah, just looks like a cripple rummy. No ID, no nuthin'. Better search the area to make sure, though."
He was yanked to his feet and escorted back down the stairs, less troubled by the jam he was in, and more frustrated by the fact that his investigation has been put on hold.
Chapter 10
The trip to the Tombs downtown, more formally known as the Manhattan Detention Complex, brought back memories to Willy of life in boot camp-lots of yelling, manhandling, shuffling together in groups, and a general sense that one's position in the human race had almost slipped from sight. That impression was driven home by his being cuffed and chained not just to a heavy belt around his waist, but to another man beside him. Fifteen of them, only a couple of whom he recognized from the bar, and certainly not Nathan Lee, were driven by guards like a small herd of clanking animals, first to a general processing center designed to handle large groups, then into a van with caged windows for transportation to the Tombs. The mechanisms involved in all this, and the clear point of it all, heightened a small tidal pool of dread Willy had been trying to ignore.
He'd hidden his badge and ID not solely from embarrassment, although that had been a factor. He'd also been keenly aware of what could happen to a cop in a prison environment. And the Tombs housed almost a thousand prisoners.
Years ago, just back from Vietnam, in an attempt to return to normalcy, Willy had gone out on a blind date with a college girl. They'd chosen a movie house in Greenwich Village, very trendy and filled with the sweet smog of marijuana, to see a black-and-white silent movie by some German pessimist. It had been about a future of brain-dead automatons, ruled by an unseen autocratic force, inhabiting a world of oversized, jagged, steel-andstone structures, all designed with an indefinable but clearly industrial styling. The humans-as-cogs-in-a-machine point of the show hadn't suffered from any subtlety, but the image-unlike the name of the girl-had never left him.
As the guard from the van pounded on the roll-down steel door of the detention center's sally port off Baxter Street, sending up a rolling, clattering echo between the dark, high walls around them, the memories of that movie set, along with everything it implied, returned with the clarity of a prophecy come true.
Like the members of a chain gang, Willy and his coprisoners were off-loaded from the van, paraded through the newly opened gap-actually a narrow alleyway between the two buildings constituting the Tombs-and told to stand still while the metal curtain rattled down behind them, cutting off the exterior world with a guillotine's finality. They were herded through a small door beyond a guard station, brought down a set of tiled concrete steps, and told to line up along a sterile, hard-surfaced, Lysol-smelling hallway whose only decorations were warnings of what they'd better not be doing, carrying, or even thinking about while they were there.