“The crane case?”
“No. It’s Andy Gilligan. Looks like a professional tap.”
The officer was silent. “Kind of a coincidence...”
“What is?”
“The DSE theft — documents about the city’s infrastructure. Maybe Unsub 89’s the shooter. He wanted the files for the crane attacks. Gilligan got a lead and Eighty-Nine tipped to him, took him out. What do you think?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“Run the scene.”
“Call in with what you find.”
16
“Move along there.”
An easy job.
Guard duty, basically, but even easier.
Guarding something nobody would want.
Dennis Chung, a twenty-eight-year-old patrol officer out of a neighboring precinct house, had been one of the uniforms picked to keep an eye on the wreckage at the jobsite on 89th Street.
In regulation blues and a wool jacket, the slim, fit officer was standing near the police-line tape at the north side of the site. The crane had fallen in this direction and taken out all the fencing, two bulldozers, two flatbeds and a shitload of supply pallets. Plaster and concrete dust were everywhere.
Chung’s job was easy, yes, but he still had to be on top of his game. The nobody-would-want part referred to the fact that all the valuable supplies that thieves might walk off with had been secured on the other side of the site, near the main entrance. If you were inclined to perp a sheet of plasterboard or two, you could find some here, but why risk getting collared for what you could get at Home Depot for twenty bucks?
“Move along, please.”
The real risk was one that wouldn’t have existed twenty years ago: selfies.
And apparently — he wasn’t into social media — it was popular to get them at the sites of disasters. And the closer to the wreckage you got, the better. Nobody cared about the police tape. The Do Not Cross words in stark black type apparently translated to “Come on in and take all the pix you want.”
So, he wasn’t stopping thievery; he was saving people’s hides. Most of the acid that had been used in the attack was neutralized — the FDNY had sprayed gallons of some crap on the counterweights and the rear boom of the crane. But there were unstable piles of wreckage and rubble and beams and other spilled chemicals that would guarantee a trip to the emergency room.
And yet here people were taking selfies...
Which raised something Chung had come to worry about in recent years. All the damn pictures people took.
So far, he guessed, he’d been in two or three hundred while on duty. Some people asked him to be in their pix. He declined, of course, but he often ended up in the background inadvertently. The patrolman did a lot of work for the Street Crime Unit, which took on some of the tougher crews in the city. Not all of them were morons, and he guessed they were plenty familiar with computers. Maybe they would scan people’s Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and run pictures of cops in those background shots through facial recognition programs to get their names and addresses.
Maybe far-fetched.
But with all the technology nowadays... nothing seemed impossible.
“Hey, move along.”
The two kids were leaning over the tape to get some shots of the rebar rods that the worker had landed on in his fall from the top of the crane. Two hundred feet in the air. The teens looked privileged. Westchester, maybe? Or Connecticut? And Chung hoped they might start to lecture him on the First Amendment.
At which point he would detain them for trespass.
But, too bad, they simply tucked their phones away and left.
Another scan of the grounds.
A text from his wife about her parents coming for dinner. He was to get dessert after his watch. That was fine too.
He put the phone away.
Which is when he saw motion within the yellow tape. Well within. Not far from the base of the shattered crane, which rose straight up for about thirty feet before it bent and cracked from the fall.
Chung squinted.
Yes, there was somebody moving from south to north — from the direction of the main entrance toward where workers were cutting apart the fallen crane with torches and diamond-edged power saws.
Well, damn.
It was somebody he’d seen before.
A homeless man. He’d walked right past Chung a half hour ago.
He wore a gamy hat like that of a French revolutionary or an Afghan warrior. It was brown and orange, striped. His other garments were a torn and dirty brown overcoat that looked way too warm even on a day like this. Baggy and stained pants. Mismatched shoes. His face was smudged and under his nails were black crescents, particularly troubling to Chung, who had a thing for clean hands.
How had he gotten inside?
Probably just ambled into the site, by virtue of the fact that he was invisible.
All homeless people are.
And Chung thought this fellow was particularly sad. Mid-fifties, wan skin beneath the smudges. Sick, maybe. Likely no family, or a family he was estranged from.
Still, he was trespassing. Chung wouldn’t have thought of citing him, much less bringing him in. But he needed to get the guy out of the site before he got himself killed. The holes in the building floor that the counterweights had crashed through were merely marked with orange caution tape. There was no fence around them — which Chung would have done. One wrong step there, and it’d be a thirty-foot drop to concrete.
And there was rebar down there too.
“Hey, you!”
The man was fifty or sixty feet away, and with the sound of the electric saws grinding their way through steel, the officer guessed his voice didn’t make it to the fellow’s ears.
Chung thought: Oh, hell. He ducked under the tape and, after wagging a finger at a couple of tourists perilously close to an unstable piece of the mast, he started through the wreckage toward where the homeless guy was plodding along.
He called again, and this time his shout came during a pause in the screeching cry of the saws.
The man looked his way and froze.
Chung waved toward the street, but the man just stood there, staring blankly. Drunk, maybe.
When the man stayed put, Chung started for him. He had to duck under some of the fallen crane structures. They seemed sturdy, but each one weighed tons. An unlikely collapse could squash you just as dead as a probable one.
Because the officer had needed to duck, he momentarily lost sight of the homeless man. When he emerged and rose, he scanned in the direction he’d last seen him.
Nothing.
No, wait. There he was. He hadn’t exited, but was in a portion of the site where the operator’s cab had come crashing to the ground.
Goddamn it.
If I break a leg, you’re going to detention, asshole...
The man glanced back at him and now made his way north once more.
Then Chung noticed something else about him. When he’d seen him earlier, he was holding one of those blue-and-white deli coffee cups, begging for money. He still held this in his left hand, but in his right was something shiny, metallic. That’s what he was doing here — not taking an odd shortcut, but scavenging the grounds for items of value. Had he found something that had belonged to the dead operator? Chung could add larceny to the trespass count.
Scavenging from a disaster site. Didn’t get lower than that.
The homeless man now saw Chung coming his way, and he moved more quickly, surprisingly fast. In a few minutes he was climbing through a gap in the shattered fence.
Chung continued after him, but he slowed, minding the booby traps of the wreckage, and when he finally emerged from the site, the man was not to be seen.