But Barbara was smart. She’d turned her teenage fancy into a profession and became a makeup artist. She freelanced for several modeling agencies in town. Most of the time her hours were tenA.M. to two or threeP.M. Models didn’t like to work early in the morning or late in the afternoon. They didn’t look their best then. That worked for Barbara. It left her time to work out in the afternoon, play around with her oil paints, and read.
But once in a rare while one of her clients had a great idea to shoot on top of a building and catch the sunrise. Like today. So Barbara had gotten up with Hal, who seemed way too happy to have her with him. She’d loaded her makeup kits into the baskets on the back of her ten-speed, armed herself with helmet, cellular phone, mace, and a loud battery-powered siren bracketed to the handlebars-to use against reckless drivers or would-be attackers-and headed into the morning.
She was happy that days like this happened only once every few months.
Barbara left the old building she and her husband had bought, gutted, and renovated and pedaled quickly down Riverside Drive. The morning air was smooth and the streets cooperatively deserted. She hunkered down over the bars and turned up the speed. She smiled, savoring the healthy slap of her heart and the just-short-of-painful burning in her thighs.
Suddenly there was a burning in her neck, then along her scalp, up the backs of her arms, and across her shoulders and down her spine. She saw something flash past her on the left, then come back at her. Something small and black that her mind registered as a pigeon. When it doubled back and flapped at her face and closed her left eye with its claws, she saw that it wasn’t a bird.
She tried to hold the handlebar with her left hand while she reached for the bat with her right. She screamed with shock and then pain. She had trouble seeing. The bike wobbled.
A moment later Barbara thought she’d hit a pothole. The nose of the bicycle dipped. She felt herself being thrown forward, but she didn’t fall. She continued forward. The muscles of her shoulder cramped for an instant, and then knife-sharp pain ripped across her back from the tops of her arms to the middle of her neck. Her back stiffened and her mouth fell open and she wanted to scream. But she couldn’t. The pain had slapped the air from her lungs, and all she could do was squeal.
She felt her throat tighten with sound, but she didn’t hear it. All she heard was the rush of the wind and something beating all around her. It sounded like when she was a little girl and hid in the sheets on her mother’s clothesline and wondered if that’s what it felt like to be an angel in the clouds.
Barbara was dimly aware of the bicycle falling to the ground in front of her. Or the street growing dark and her back trembling and weak, hot and then cool. She tried to reach up, but there was no strength in her arms. Then her lungs stopped. Her eyelids sagged.
For a moment before they shut, she thought she saw the comforting clouds of her youth…
Seven
Robert Gentry spent the night at the Hotel Windermere on West End Avenue and Ninety-second Street. The manager, Dale Rupert, was one of his oldest and closest friends.
Rupe used to run the Hotel Dixie on West Forty-fourth Street. When Gentry was still a beat cop, the Dixie Hotel was the “Midtown Eden” for junkies and pushers. Rupe hated the drug traffic and had Gentry boot the pushers out. The one-armed Vietnam veteran hated it even more when swaggering drug boss Stevie “Cool” Kuhl came to see him one day. Cool threatened to break Rupe’s remaining arm with a mallet if he stopped Kuhl’s people from dealing in the lobby.
That was all Rupe had to hear.
With the veteran’s full cooperation, Gentry brought in the Special Narcotics Enforcement Unit. The SNEU fitted Rupe with a wire, and thanks to his efforts they sent Stevie Cool to prison for fifteen years.
But the Dixie operation uncovered a larger New York-southern Connecticut drug chain that SNEU agents in both states wanted to break. Having completed his requisite two-year tour as a patrolman, Gentry asked then-Precinct Commander Veltre to be transferred to SNEU. He spent several weeks undergoing intense tactical training at Camp Smith in upstate New York, then came back to Midtown South and worked as a plainclothes narc running buy-and-bust operations. Later, in order to break the Mizuno ring, he went undercover. Tearing down that smuggling-and-dealing chain consumed the next five years of his life. It sent fourteen major dealers to prison and earned Gentry a Medal of Valor for bravery. He gave the medal to Rupe. He wasn’t sure why, but his partner Bernie was gone, and it seemed like the right thing to do. Gentry and Rupe remained friends. Rupe stayed at the Dixie until it was torn down in 1990.
There were no rooms available at the Windermere, but Rupe let Gentry have the couch in a psychiatrist’s office on the first floor. The leather couch was comfortable, though Gentry had trouble sleeping for more than an hour at a time. Some paranoid kept calling the answering machine and waking him. The man was complaining that his apartment building was too quiet. He was sure the neighbors were listening to him. He said he could hear them putting drinking glasses against the wall and moving them around. By fourA.M. Gentry seriously considered calling the man back, informing him he was listening from the room next door, and telling him to go the hell to sleep.
Early the next morning Gentry pulled on the beige slacks and white shirt he’d brought with him. He had coffee with Rupe at the front desk and looked at theNew York Post. A front-page article said that the “bat boy and bat man” up in Westchester were recovering, though wildlife officials still had no idea why they were attacked. Thanking Rupe and throwing his overnight bag over his shoulder, Gentry took the Number 2 subway down to Twenty-third Street. The shrink’s paranoid caller would not have liked the ride. The passengers seemed unusually quiet. As if they were waiting for something to happen.
Or maybe it was him waiting for something…or imagining that people were quiet. Either way, it was weird.
Gentry felt better as he walked crosstown through the warm, bright morning to the police academy building on Twentieth Street between Second and Third Avenues. He always felt good visiting the thirty-four-year-old academy. Whether it was to talk to plebes about the Accident Investigations Squad or his days with the SNEU, recruit new talent for the precinct or to see Chris Henry, it was exciting to watch enthusiastic young cadets move in and around the eight-story building. Just like the kids at the Fashion Institute, it renewed his spirit to see the up-and-coming generation. To see that they cared, that they weren’t afraid to put everything on the line for others.
The forty-nine-year-old Henry was the head of the crime lab-more formally known as the Scientific Research Division-specializing in ballistics, bombs, and what they called “unidentifiables” found at crime scenes. Though the FBI lab at Federal Plaza had the whiz-bang public reputation, and the NYPD Crime Scene Unit on Tenth Street got the press and big bucks, Henry ran the smartest little group of scientific sleuths in town.
The short, chunky physician was sitting at the chrome table that filled his laboratory. He was reading theDailyNews and drinking coffee when Gentry stepped into the open doorway.
“Get your big goddamn nose out of the personals,” Gentry said. “You’re married.”
Henry looked up and smiled. He slid off his stool and extended his hand. “Well, look who’s here! You know, Bobby, I was just telling my new lab assistant about you yesterday.”
“Male or female?”
“The latter. Bright, and gorgeous, and engaged, so forget it. How the hell’ve you been?”
“Not bad.”
“You look tired.”
“I am.”
“Been working late on a case?”
Gentry shook his head. “It was something else.”
“Well, pull up a stool and tell me all about it. Iam married. I need to live vicariously through my single male friends.”