Bilko leaned in, tried to soften her face, botched it. “Sharon? Sharon, dear? Can you hear me?”
Sharon mumbled something. Bilko looked over her shoulder at Emily, who shrugged.
“Sharon? Honey, can you say that again?”
“Wah-water. So thirsty.”
“They’ve got you set up with an IV drip, but I’ll see if they’ll let you drink something now you’re a little more with us.” Over her shoulder, “Officer?” Damned if she could remember this one’s name. The uniform rolled around the doorjamb. “Please ask one of the nurses if Officer Dimke can have some water.”
“Ma’am.” If he’d had a cowboy hat, he’d have tipped it before heading off.
Bilko turned back to Sharon. “Honey, can you tell us where he had you?”
“Warehouse,” she grated, “…somewhere.”
“Can you remember where?”
“Blind-folded the whole time.”
“And he just dropped you off in front of the precinct?”
“Corner.” She winced and swallowed. “Couple blocks up.”
Bilko tried to keep it off her face. The motherfucker had been a couple hundred yards away at most and they’d missed him. This was intolerable. Fine was laughing at them. He’d sent back Dimke just to throw it in their faces.
The uniform came back in with a small paper cup. “Nurse says she can have this, but slow.” He gave the cup to Bilko without looking at Sharon. Emily jerked as he left to take up his post by the door. Rage. Vengeance. Enough to punch through her shields a little. She shook it off, but seriously doubted Drummond Fine would survive if any one of New York’s Finest got him away from official eyes for even a nanosecond.
“Just take a sip, honey,” Bilko said, and put the cup to Sharon’s chapped lips. Dimke reached up to take the cup with a hand clumsy with bandages from the sutures in her finger. She wondered if losing a pinky finger was enough to mess up your aim and if she was going to have to learn to shoot lefty. Funny to be calm about it, so detached. Valium. This she could get used to. She got some water down and her stomach collapsed around it in a painful crunch. Bilko caught the grimace and moved the cup away.
After a moment she asked, “Do you remember anything that would help us to track down Fine, Sharon?”
“He’s got two other people.”
Emily looked up.
Bilko kept herself together. Charles Dunbar they knew about. “Two?”
“Males. White. Late twenties.” She closed her eyes and drifted a moment. She jerked herself back from the velvet. Sharon still had work to do. “One of them had dark hair, glasses. Fine kept calling him Harlem. No. Harlan. It was Harlan.”
Emily covered her mouth with her hand.
“And the other one. A little guy. Bald. Fine kept making nurse jokes. He knew the other one. Kept trying to talk to him, but he was barely there. Really messed up.”
“They’re friends,” Emily said. “Harlan is one of Charlie’s good friends.” She could feel a scream building in her throat. She talked around it. “What’s going on? Why’s he doing this?” But underneath the fear, the correlation came through: Fine was going after the people who knew about her power. He wanted her. The monster was baiting a hook and Charlie and Harlan were the worms.
Sharon watched the girl through a screen of eyelashes. “He’s been hurting them. Harlem—,” she swallowed and her throat clicked. “Harlan is almost dead. His eye…” The one she took. The one she’d scooped out herself. Fine had tossed her a fragment of Oxycontin for that and she’d actually caught it in her mouth, snapped it out of the air like a trained Labrador. He’d giggled wildly and for a moment she’d been proud of herself. It had gotten worse from there. “He won’t last much longer.”
Bilko stared at the floor, lost, thinking. People were dying. Right now. She knew who was doing it and when it was happening, just not where. For a long time no one said anything. Sharon’s breathing was slow, even. A few tears moistened her face. Samuels turned his head and squinted out the window into empty night. He took a startled breath and then Sharon spoke, “It sounded like Texas.”
Bilko leaned in. “What’d you say?”
“It sounded like Texas. Like an oil derrick pumping. I lived outside Galveston a little while when I was small. Derricks everywhere. Chunka-chunka-chunka. I could hear that.”
“An oil-derrick? You could hear that from the warehouse?”
“Like it was right on top of us. Loud.”
Bilko beamed. Emily turned her head away as if she were dodging a spray of water. Bilko turned around and Emily threw up her shields full force, blocking Bilko’s excitement. “You know where he is.”
“We have his ass now! There’s a place just over the river. It’s a little off one of the commuter rail lines. Jesus, I used to see it all the time when I dated this jerk who lived out that way. It’s an old well next to some outbuildings. I think there’s a warehouse out there. Holy shit. We have him. We have him.
“Sharon? I’m going to leave you with the officer outside the door. Ms. Burton and Mr. Samuels are going to keep you company. You’ll both be safe enough here while we go get Fine.” To Emily, “If she says anything else, tell the officers to radio me with the intel. Holy shit. Holy shit.” She was already reaching for her radio and half way out the door when Emily stopped her.
“Don’t underestimate him.”
Bilko stared at her. “No,” she said. “Not again.”
* * *
CHARLIE FLOATED UP into a miasma of old water damage, dusty bird shit and concrete. He sneezed and a bolt of hot iron spiked his sternum. Jesus, what had hit him? Felt like that time he’d gotten caught up in a St. Patrick’s Day Parade skirmish with the cops. He’d taken a jab from a night stick and had been sore as hell for a week. This was going to be worse. Another sneeze threatened but he held it off. His vision cleared and shapes began to resolve. Cracked flooring stretched off into the gloom, a few broken squares of glass sprayed gray light from about twenty feet off the floor. It was either getting late or very early. A flutter of wings from invisible rafters and low cooing drifted down to him.
Charlie tried to lever himself up off the floor, but his hands were bound, wrists hurting. He craned around. Handcuffed to a pipe. His mouth went dry and his stomach hardened, pulled in. A shot of adrenaline burned the rest of the cobwebs away. He tried to remember. He’d been on the couch scared and waiting, hoping that he could help the cops catch Fine. He’d been watching some science channel show about how magnetic fields could induce feelings of religious communion—something Harlan would have been into. And then? And then, silver eyes. “Oh, shit,” Charlie whispered.
“You’re the crappiest cavalry ever.”
Charlie jerked and pushed his back up against the pipe. What he had thought was a heap of rags a few paces away had just spoken to him. “Oh, shit!”
“You said that already, buddy.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it’s hard to get your shit straight in this kind of predicament.” The rag-pile said. “I said things like ‘what’ and ‘huh’ for the first few minutes, too, but then that bitch started in and, well, I kind of snapped right into reality. Wish I hadn’t.”
Charlie squinted. He knew the voice. It was like listening to a frog talking with its mouth full of broken glass and sand. Still, the inflections pinged off his memory. “You know me?”
The rag-pile rolled over. Charlie gasped, his shoulders bunched.
“I’ve looked better,” Harlan said. “I get it.”
“Harlan! Oh, God, man, what the hell is going on? What happened to you?” Charlie tried to get up with each statement, surging against his cuffed hands and falling back onto his butt.
Harlan smiled and winced as what was left of his lips split and bled. “Don’t make me smile, dude. Hurts like a sonofabitch.” He shook a mostly scraped-bald head. “Funny, I didn’t think I’d ever smile again, so I guess that’s one I owe you.”
“Jesus, Harlan.” Char
lie could only bite his lip and shake his head. His friend had been destroyed. Harlan’s scalp looked like it was at least sixty percent missing, clumps of thick black hair sprouted in random patches. His nose and mouth were ragged holes. It looked like one of his eyes was out of the socket and smeared along his cheekbone. And that was just what Charlie could see. He felt a sob run up from his guts and racked it back. If he let himself start now, he wouldn’t stop. He needed to figure out a way to help his friend.
Charlie took a breath. “What happened to you, Harlan?”
“Ah, the head nurse is taking charge now? That’s good.” A species of laugh slouched across the space. “That’s good.”
“You’re in shock, Harlan. It’s the only reason you’re still even talking. We need to figure something out for you soon.” Charlie looked around the warehouse. The light had faded a little already. At least he knew what half of the day it was. “Do you know where we are?”
Harlan didn’t answer.
“Harlan? Harl? Stay with me, man!”
“I’m here. I was just trying to think of something existential to say.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. He hated dealing with shocky people. It was like talking to a drunk with an arrow in his head. “Where are we? Do you know?”
Harlan started crying, weak, limp sniffling. “It’s my fault, Charlie. I’m really sorry.”
“What are you talking about? Shh. You’re okay, man. Just tell me—”
“No, he wants Emily. That’s what all of this is about. He wants her because he thinks he can suck on the whole city if he goes through her mind. He’s like her, man. He can feel people’s hearts, but it’s more than just emotional. He can, he can squeeze.” Harlan slurped, coughed and spat a wad of something dark. “Sorry, I’m a mess over here.”
“I know you mean Fine but I’m not getting the rest of it.”
“He needed to get to her, but didn’t know where she was. He figured out that I’d fucked with the files on his scan.” A single, screeching, “Ha!” And then, “He counted the fucking bones. Can you believe that shit? He counted the bones.”
“He came for you and then did this to you.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, man. I held out for a really long time before I gave up. You’d have been proud of me. I was like a rock for at least, shit, two minutes. You ever get a hair cut with a piece of broken glass?” Another one of those creepy laughs. “She was reluctant at first, really.”
“She?”
“Some cop he’d caught before me. She was all messed up, hurting really bad for something.”
“Hurting? She was using?”
“Not then, he wouldn’t let her, but believe you me—and you know I know what it’s like—she was in a bad, bad way. She was most of the way out of her head. Fine,” he choked on the name. “Fine paid her in a little pieces of pill to do this to me. She hurt me so bad, Charlie. I think I’m dying. I bled like…” He dissolved into quiet sobbing.
“Where is he now? Harlan? Do you know how long he’s been gone?”
Harlan spat, “Fuck do I know, Charles? It’s not like I’ve got the place wired with CC TV or something. I’ve been tied up with motherfucking baling wire for like a day and a half. You know what? I think my hands are probably already going gangrenous. I smell almonds. Ha! I’m an ice cream flavor. Almond Torture Monkey—the new one from Ben and fucking Jerry’s.”
Charlie shook his head. “We’re not having this conversation, man. This shit. This shit…”
“Doesn’t happen? Yeah, and psychic hotties from the Midwest can’t move stuff with their minds either? Right? Right?”
Harlan shrieked then. It peeled out from him, the last of his mind rolling over and over in a torrent of pain. Charlie winced back from the sound. He could hear it: his friend was ending. Even if they could save his physical life, no man comes back from a place like that. Harlan’s scream died in a choked gurgle and he lay breathing, uneven, silent. The birds in the rafters fluttered then calmed. They’d gotten used to Harlan’s shouts.
“Actually,” a voice echoed from the dark, “he gave you up after at least four minutes.”
Charlie turned his head. A slight shift in the shadows by a pillar and a flash of eyes. Drummond Fine stepped out into the low light. He’d been there the whole time.
“Of course,” he said, “space and time are relative.”
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 26
BILKO HELD ONTO the door handle as the cruiser slewed off the main road and into the dust cloud the Tactical Unit had left a second before. She could just make out the flare of tail lights from the black S.W.A.T. van a couple of lengths in front. “Shit!” her uniformed driver hissed and stomped the break. The prowl car slid to a stop on the loose gravel access road an inch from the van’s chrome bumper. The warehouse ran a short chunk of the horizon a few hundred yards up the road, a black domino on its side. Just off to the left, the oil derrick bowed its grasshopper head over and over as it had done since forever.
“Kill your lights, officer.”
Her driver smacked at the toggle on the dash. “Sorry, sorry.” He keyed off the engine. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” She patted him on the knee. Bilko was feeling downright frisky. In another minute, S.W.A.T. would creep up the road just like some badass Special Forces unit and then we’d see what we’d see. Bilko would put S.W.A.T. up against any of those Army Ranger boys any old time, thank you very much. She’d read Black Hawk Down. She knew what was what. Rangers were trained to go in and kill everything that moved. Good enough. But Special Weapons And Tactics were trained to go in and not kill. Well, not kill everything anyway. They had to be able to waste the bad guys and leave the vics without a scratch. That was some hardcore shit to be able to carry off. In the dark no less.
The uniform, a young black man in his twenties, Queens accent, was breathing hard. “What they waiting for?” he whispered.
She tried to keep the fun out of her voice. This shit was serious. “We made a lot of noise pulling off the main road. They think Fine is checking the windows, looking for us. They’re going to wait until they think it’s—”
The side door on the van slid open and seven figures, bulky with armor, flowed into the night.
“Damn,” the driver said. “Like a ninja clown-car or something.”
Bilko felt the rebuke behind her teeth, something about the severity of the situation but, hell, that had been funny.
“What do we do now, Lieutenant?”
She sat back in her seat. “Wait for the flashes, and shortly thereafter, the bangs. Boys’ll be out with the big bad wolf’s pelt presently.”
“I love watchin’ S.W.A.T. do they thing.”
“Ain’t they cool, though?”
* * *
THE WAREHOUSE WAS an empty place. No one but Fine and his victims had disturbed the space under its sagging roof for decades. Pigeons chased complete stillness from its rafters. Redwing blackbirds ringed the perimeter in the reeds: the occasional match flare as they broke gravity. Charlie could see a single curl of gray paint on the side of a steel support pillar. It cupped a tiny cashe of dust like snow caught in the bowl of a dead leaf.
Fine had just finished saying something about Einstein or relativity or something. All he knew was that his chest was sore from the inside out and the husk of his friend was expiring with the fading light. There was a reason why Charlie wasn’t yet dead, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know it. Fine stood perfectly still, only his eyes moved.
“The universe has been very kind to me in recent weeks.”
Charlie squinted. “Yeah?” He took in Fine’s baseball hat, the tendrils of greasy hair worming out the sides, the sweat stains and second-hand or stolen clothes. The cops had been on this man for two days. Charlie imagined it had been at least that long since Fine had showered or maybe even ate. “Cause you look like hell.”
Fine blinked. A squawk spiked from among the gentle cooing in the rafters and a pigeon fell stiff at his feet. A
single red claw twitched and the bird was still. Fine blinked again, and again, and again, and again. A minute later, there were at least ten birds growing cold in the dust.
Harlan rasped from the darkness, “Careful, man.” He coughed. “He can do shit. It’s like your girl, but bad.”
“Ah, yes,” Fine took a step closer. “Let’s discuss ‘your girl’.”
“What girl?”
“Don’t bother. I’ve known about her from the moment we met. We crossed, you see, at the hospital. We overlapped, I think. Something changed. Something wonderful happened. And, now, well, now I can do this.” Another bird expired in the rafters and dropped down to the floor. Fine’s head tipped to one side, remembering the Central Park encounter. “And she can do other things.”
“What do you want with her?”
The sound of car tires popped on gravel in the distance. Fine froze, head cocked. He sniffed the air, snuffling like a wolf. Charlie cringed as Fine smiled. “They’re very frightened.”
* * *
“WHAT IS IT?”
Emily’s reflection hovered in the dark window glass over Aaron Samuel’s shoulder—a guardian angel, a lurking ghost—but he didn’t hear or see her. Samuels was lost in a sparkling matrix of strings radiating from a central event. Each string a chance, a contingency leading to another central hub that in turn sprouted its own halo of possibility. The event on which he concentrated had several direct outcomes that would end in Emily’s death, some in Charlie’s, some both. All left Aaron Samuels alive except one. He couldn’t look away from that black strand of spider web. It led to his destruction and then into nothing; a solitary line of light slimming into the darkness.
He sighed. “And here I was beginning to think this would be some kind of gift.”
“Samuels?” Emily touched his shoulder. “You okay? You were kind of gone there for a minute.”
He put his kgnarled old hand over hers and gave a squeeze. Without turning around he said, “I know what you’ve got to do.” Aaron Samuels, former accountant to a private detective who’d done some good, faithful husband to a beloved and long-dead wife and New York Doorman stood up and faced the woman in the hospital bed. “You know what she has to do, too, don’t you Sharon.”