A B&E in a residential area such as this is always high risk. Neighbors know each other, strangers stand out, and residents gossip — not to mention the Block or Neighborhood Watches. Whitlock’s house has the saving graces of being set back a distance and surrounded by dense foliage. The streetlights are covered with grime, their illumination poor. Though Zeb has no intention of breaking in, force of habit makes him automatically seek out entry and exit points.
They park on the street, just to the left, still visible to anyone inside the house. Zeb makes himself conspicuous by getting out of the car, staring long and hard at the house, then walking past the place a few times, making a show of taking notes and photos as he observes the structure.
‘The house looks empty, feels empty, and the machine says it’s empty. You’re just hoping that the neighbors spot you and get the word to his mother and from her lips to Holt’s ear. All this dicking around…Zeb, I thought you were a man of action,’ grumbles Broker as he settles in the car and prepares to snooze.
Zeb spends a couple of hours on the street. In that time a neighbor comes back from shopping, the kids piling into the house with the parents following, staring curiously at Zeb. A patrol car passes him, slowly, once and then twice, but does not stop. A few other cars pass by, all with New Jersey plates.
They leave in the late afternoon, Broker driving, all the while grumbling about the waste of time.
‘Happy? Now that you’ve made yourself a target, painted yourself bright orange?’ asks Broker as they reenter New York.
‘There isn’t any other way,’ says Zeb, ‘if I want him to come to me.’
Broker throws up his hands in frustration. ‘I’ll keep plugging away at my databases, on my network, and also keep at it on Hardinger. If anything turns up, I’ll let you know. Do you want me to check into Mendes and Jones?’
Zeb shakes his head.
Broker leaves Zeb at Jackson Heights, a few blocks away from his apartment. Zeb uses the walk to run through what he has so far and to plan his next move.
He has two choices at this stage — keep hunting for Holt’s whereabouts, which might be a long, drawn-out process during which Holt could escape from the country, or draw Holt out by being provocative. Zeb being Zeb, has taken the provocative option by hanging around his mother’s house, without being directly aggressive, below the cops’ and the FBI’s radar. There is no guarantee that his actions will work nor that Broker’s digging might find Holt, but Zeb has to run with what he has, and his hunting instincts tell him that Holt will come after him.
It’s what he would have done, had he been in Holt’s position.
He goes to his apartment and takes out his carryall, which has all his weapons — a Glock 17, a Beretta 92A1, a HK416 as well as a Heckler and Koch G28, a Benchmade spring-loaded Entourage knife, some flashbangs, his cable camera — and makes a lightweight pack of his clothes. He will be living in rundown seedy hotels, where there’s no one to note his comings and goings, till this blows over. He takes out a map and works out a grid of blocks between 58th and 25th Street. Broker had hired the Civic within that grid, and it will give Holt a starting point for locating Zeb.
He walks into a hotel near 58th Street on the West Side and checks in. The porter does not look up from the football game playing on his TV as he wordlessly takes Zeb’s money and hands over a key. The room is surprisingly clean and well organized, with a small, well-maintained bathroom and a tiny window overlooking the street. He freshens up and explores the hotel thoroughly, noting the fire escape next to his window, the rear exit, the lighting along the corridors, and the single camera facing the entrance.
He walks around the block and familiarizes himself with its layout.
He then walks to that perennially populous place in New York City, Times Square, and hangs out, watching the ebb and flow of people, the pulse of the city throbbing.
The next day he hires the same Civic from the same agency, drives out to Williamstown, and repeats his observation of Holt’s mother’s home.
He notices the neighbor’s curtain twitching when he has spent an hour there, but the thermal imager is quiet.
He leaves after another hour. On returning to the city, he checks out of the hotel and finds another anonymous one a few streets south.
He walks the streets of the city the next few days, and it is on the fourth day that violence finds him.
He’s walking along East 36th Street late at night, not many pedestrians around, barring the lone cab cruising the street and the occasional insomniac dog walker. He hears a scuffle ahead and slows down further, checking out the street ahead and behind him. Nothing. Empty.
He moves cautiously to the mouth of the alley from which the sounds come.
Sniffen Court is one of the few alleys in lower Manhattan. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century for stables, which were later converted to housing. The far end of the alley is a dead end, with a brick wall punctuating it like a period. Adorning the brick wall are plaques of Greek horsemen. The alley is lined with genteel townhouses, where time moves just a little slower than the rest of the city.
Normally the alley is fenced off by a metal gate, but tonight the gate is wide open, and Zeb can see three black men holding a black man and white woman at gun and knife point.
All five of them are in the shadow of a house lower down the alley, and the houses either seem to be empty, or the inhabitants are unable to hear the scuffling. Zeb is wearing dark clothes and is a shadow amongst the many shadows on East 36th. He watches the scuffling a long time and also the alley behind them for signs of a trap. He doesn’t detect any. One of the attackers is holding the black man at knife point, the knife pricking his neck; the other two are grappling with the woman, covering her face so she can’t make any sound. A mugging seems to have turned into attempted rape.
Zeb steps inside the alley with his back to a wall and moves within visible sighting distance of the five. The woman sees him, and her eyes go wide, and her struggling draws the attention of the attackers.
‘Beat it, nigga,’ one of them mutters. ‘This is a private party.’
Zeb steps forward. Three to one, not the best odds, but usually if the ringleader is taken out, the others run. Been proven since the days of kings.
One of the black men swings away from the woman and advances towards Zeb, his gun glinting in the shadowed light. ‘Last chance, asshole, mind your own business and you get to live.’
Not the leader, a minion; still, taking the minion out would whittle them down to two.
He takes a step back, closer to the wall, to put distance between him and the rest, and the attacker follows, his finger on the trigger, slack. Zeb can see the black bore swing toward him and takes another step back toward the wall. If the gun fires, it will either hit him or the wall. Acceptable.
The black man steps forward, grinning at seeing Zeb cornered against the wall.
The hand of a good martial arts practitioner can move at about forty-six feet per second. Martial artists have to be slowed down or the movie camera speeded up to capture their action sequence for a movie and played back at twenty-four frames a second, or else all that the audience will see is a blur.
At forty-six feet per second, the martial artist delivers nearly forty-six joules of energy in an overhand strike. The energy needed to break the ribs of an average person is thirty joules. Much less is needed to break a wrist.