Mary Catherine didn’t hesitate a second. She pressed the back of her hand against his forehead to feel his temperature, then lightly swatted her fingers against the side of his ear.
“The ‘didn’t-study’ flu is what you’ve got, as if I didn’t know about your math test,” she said. “Get moving, you malingerer. I’ve well enough to do around this house than to deal with your messin’.”
As they left, I did something I’d written off for this morning. I smiled with genuine good humor.
Cancel the National Guard, I thought. All this situation required was one petite young Irish lass.
Chapter 9
THE TEACHER WALKED into Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, at eleven a.m.—still ahead of schedule. He’d stopped by his headquarters, a rented apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, and changed his appearance from head to toe. The Rolex was gone, replaced by a Casio sports watch. So was the Givenchy suit. Now he was wearing wraparound shades, a Jets cap, a traffic-cone-orange Mets spring training jersey, and baggy yellow basketball shorts.
No one could possibly have recognized him as the elegant businessman who’d pushed that worthless bitch in front of the train—which was precisely the point. To make the mission succeed, speed and surprise were key. He needed to strike like a cobra, get in and back out again before anyone even knew he’d been there. Melt into the crowds and use them as human shields. Exploit the multilevel, mazelike streetscape of Manhattan. Totally change his appearance—then strike again.
He found an empty folding chair in the park, removed his Palm Treo from his fanny pack, and brought up the other vital document it contained. To accompany his mission statement, the Plan was a fourteen-page blueprint for what he needed to accomplish. He scrolled to its last and most important page, a long bullet-pointed list. Almost in a trance, he read it over slowly, mentally rehearsing each and every possibility as he went along, visualizing how he would perform every act with calm, serious perfection.
He’d first learned about the power of visualization when he was a pitcher on the baseball team at Princeton. He wasn’t especially gifted—just a basic power righty, with a fastball in the low nineties. But his coach had taught him to go over the lineup of the opposing team before every game, imagining each strikeout in detail.
That coach had taught him a couple of more down-to-earth techniques, too. One was a velvety smooth delivery that made him seem faster. Another was to throw inside, which led to his well-deserved reputation as a headhunter.
And that was what had gotten him kicked off the team in his junior year. He’d plunked some blond pansy from Dartmouth so hard that the baseball cracked his helmet and gave him a concussion. The Dartmouth team assumed that he’d done it on purpose, because the asshole had gone three for three against him. The field had erupted in a bench-clearing brawl.
They were right that the Teacher had thrown the beaner deliberately, but wrong about the reason. What had pissed him off was the other guy’s hot girlfriend, sitting in the front row of the stands, who jumped up and cheered every time he was at bat. No way did that faggot deserve a girl like her. So the Teacher had decided to show her what a real man was all about.
He smiled at the memory. It had been his last game, but far and away the best of his life. He’d broken the Dartmouth third-base coach’s nose and all but spiked the ear off their catcher. If you had to go out, that was the way to do it. Too bad he’d never seen the girl again. But she’d remember him for the rest of her life.
The Teacher shook away the reverie and tucked the Treo safely back into his fanny pack. He stood, spent a moment stretching, then lowered himself to a runner’s on-your-mark stance, fingers digging into the gravel path.
He had his game face on now. It was time to get to work.
Bang! went an imaginary starting pistol in his head.
With his strong legs churning and gravel flying behind him, he bolted into a sprint.
Chapter 10
STEP ONE OF THE PLAN was to create a smoke screen. The Teacher was racing along the pavement between 41st and 40th when he spotted a perfect opportunity— a middle-aged businessman jaywalking across Sixth Avenue.
Strike like a cobra, he thought, instantly changing the course of his pounding footsteps.
He crashed into the suit like a linebacker, catching him in a headlock and dragging him to the curb.
“Hey! What the hell?” the guy gasped, struggling feebly.
“Cross on the green, not in between,” the Teacher sang, and spilled him to the pavement. “Like a human being—not a worthless animal.”
He spun away, and within seconds he was back at full speed, arms pumping, alert for his next target. He spotted it in an Asian restaurant deliveryman who was rushing south down the opposite sidewalk, jostling other pedestrians as he wove in and out of the crowd.
The Teacher made another instant turn, dashing out in front of the oncoming traffic and across the street, accompanied by a symphony of blaring horns, screeching brakes, and shouted curses.
-Take-out food bags flew into the air like startled pigeons as he clotheslined the deliveryman with a forearm across the throat.
“Where’s the fire, buddy?” the Teacher roared. “This is a sidewalk, not a racetrack. Show some fucking courtesy, you got me?”
He took off again, his flying feet barely touching the pavement. He felt incredible, invincible. He could run straight up the fronts of the glass canyon office towers and down the backs of them. He could run forever.
“WE WILL, WE WILL, ROCK YOU!” he screamed into startled faces. He’d always hated that song, but damn if it didn’t feel spot-on right now.
People stopped and stared. The street-smart ones, hot dog vendors and waiting radio car drivers and bike messengers, were wisely getting the hell out of his way.
It was hard to rouse attention on the jaded streets of Manhattan, but he was doing a bang-up job.
The light bouncing off the dark glass curtains of the monstrous buildings poured down on him like a holy baptism. His face split into a huge grin, and his eyes filled with happy tears.
He was actually doing it. After all the planning, all the obstacles, it was showtime.
He jumped out into the curb lane of the wide avenue and sprinted full bore toward the trees of Central Park.
Chapter 11
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, the Teacher emerged from Central Park on the Upper East Side. Though he’d run more than thirty blocks, he hardly noticed it. He wasn’t even winded. He raced out across tony Fifth Avenue and kept going east down 72nd.
Then he finally slowed to a halt, in front of a fabulously ornate four-story French château–-style building on the southeast corner of 72nd and Madison—the flagship Ralph Lauren store.
The first target that really counted.
The Teacher glanced at his watch to make sure he was still on schedule, then took a long look up and down both the side street and the avenue. There were no cops in sight, which wasn’t surprising. This store sat smack-dab in the middle of the city’s most populated precinct. Roughly fifty officers, probably fewer counting sick days and vacation, were supposed to protect more than two hundred thousand people. Good luck, the Teacher thought. He pulled open the store’s shining brass door and stepped inside.
He gazed around, taking in the Persian rugs, chandeliers, and oil paintings on the fifteen-foot mahogany-paneled walls. Not exactly your local Kmart. Among the antiques and flower arrangements, piles of cashmere cable knits and oxford-cloth button-downs were distributed with artful casualness. The overall impression was that you’d walked in and caught the Vanderbilts unpacking from a summer in Europe.
In other words, it was disgusting. He jogged up the wide mahogany stairs to the men’s shop.
A slick-haired man in an impeccably tailored three-piece suit stood behind an antique glass display case filled with neckties. One of his eyebrows rose just enough to signify his contempt for the slovenly buffoon he saw approaching.
“May I help
you?” he said with a condescension that bordered on vicious. The Teacher knew that if he answered “yes,” the salesman would laugh out loud.
So he just smiled.
“Are we a trifle language-challenged, sir?” the malicious bastard crooned. Then he dropped the polished pretense and spoke in much coarser, and much more natural-sounding, Brooklynese. “We’re all outta fanny packs today. Maybe you better go to Mo’s instead.”
The Teacher still didn’t speak. Instead, he unzipped the little pack and took out a pair of objects that looked like Cheez Doodles. They were actually firing-range earplugs. Without hurrying, he pressed one of them into his left ear.
The haberdasher started to look flustered, and took on his piss-elegant tone again.
“I beg your pardon, sir, I didn’t realize you needed hearing aids. Still, if you’re not here to purchase something, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
The Teacher paused, with the second earplug still between his fingers, and finally spoke.
“I’m really here to give you a lesson,” he said.
“Give me a lesson?”
“In salesmanship,” the Teacher said, mimicking the prick’s supercilious tone. “You’ll be sew much more successful if you learn to treat all your customers with respect. Watch how it should be done.”
He pushed in the second earplug, then reached into the fanny pack again and drew out an oiled pistol.
“And here,” he said, with his words muffled in his own ears, “we have the Colt M1911 semiautomatic in .45 caliber. Would you care to try it, sir? I dew believe you’ll be impressed by its performance.” He flicked off the safety and put the hammer on full cock.
The clerk’s mouth opened in an O. His lips moved as he stammered words that the Teacher could barely hear. “Oh, my God . . . terribly s-sorry . . .” One soft, manicured hand flew to the cash register and punched open the drawer. “Please, take everything . . .”
But his other hand moved, too, dropping under the counter, no doubt to reach for a hidden alarm button.
The Teacher was expecting that. His finger twitched, and the first big .45-caliber round boomed like a stick of dynamite, blowing the display case into a cymbal crash of shattering glass. The clerk screamed, staggering backward, clutching at his mangled, bloody hand.
“I’m not here to take,” the Teacher said quietly. “I’m here to give you something you’ve wanted your whole life, but were afraid to ask for.
“Redemption.” He emptied the rest of the clip point-blank into the salesman’s chest.
Watching him careen backward, limbs flopping spastically like he’d been hit by a giant sledgehammer, was the most electrically satisfying moment of the Teacher’s life.
There were going to be more of those soon.
He reloaded the Colt with smooth, practiced motions as he hurried back down the steps. As he got to the door, he noticed another suave clerk, crouched beside a cashmere upholstered club chair. This man was shivering in shock, too terrified even to scream for help.
The Teacher paused long enough to press the Colt’s barrel against his cheek. Then he spun the big gun off his finger, caught it in the air, and stuffed it back into his fanny pack.
“You are the witness to history,” the Teacher said, patting the sniveling fop on the head. “I envy you.”
He opened the door enough to scan the streets again, then stepped out of the store and blended in with the passersby on 72nd—once again, just another anonymous guy in the crowd. But he headed straight for the westbound side of the street and hailed the first cab he saw. He instructed the turbaned driver to take him to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then settled back in the seat and took out the Treo.
“Ralph Lauren Clerk” was the first item that came up on the screen. He deleted it from the list and checked his watch. The operation had taken just two minutes from start to finish, plus he’d caught a cab right off the bat—all even smoother than he could have hoped.
He wasn’t just the Teacher. He was the man.
Chapter 12
AT NINE THAT MORNING, I called my office to take a personal day. It was another no-brainer. If half a dozen sick kids wasn’t a personal crisis, what was? Then, after Mary Catherine and I made sure the troops were accounted for and tended to, I did something I hadn’t done in over a week. I pulled on my FULL-BLOODED IRISH T-shirt and a pair of sweats and went for a run.
As usual, I huffed it up to Grant’s Tomb at 122nd and Riverside to pay my respects to the general. It would have taken magic to make me resemble the lean Manhattan College Jasper center fielder I’d once been, but I managed to keep a steady, strong pace the entire way.
I studiously avoided newspaper stands that would have thrown last night’s debacle in my face, and not a single person started shooting at me. It was by far the nicest morning I’d had in recent memory.
When I got back home, I started at the top of my priority list—substituting a dollar bill for the tooth that Fiona had lost and left under her pillow. In the confusion last night, I’d forgotten all about it. The tooth fairy’s job performance ratings, like a lot of other things around this place, had gone way downhill since we’d lost Maeve.
With that taken care of, I brewed a pot of coffee and went on to less important tasks, like paying bills online. I took my time, letting my thoughts wander as I poked along. It felt great playing a little hooky for a change. Maybe I should have felt guilty about all those DD5 incident reports I needed to file, but they could write themselves as far as I was concerned. I was home with my own crew, feeling the love, and especially ecstatic to be taking care of people who weren’t trying to kill me for it.
For about the billionth time, I found myself thinking about how I’d been burning myself at both ends lately—burning myself out, really. That, in turn, led me to contemplate some of the job offers I’d gotten in the past few months, since a major hostage incident at St. Patrick’s Cathedral had made me into a sort of celebrity cop.
The best prospect was a corporate security management position at ABC. The job consisted of coordinating security at the local news studios they had over on Columbus Avenue in the Sixties. The commute was easy, the hours were human, and it paid about twice my current salary.
But I still had five years to go until my twenty-year pension, and frankly I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hand in my shield just yet. The main problem was that I loved being a cop, especially a homicide detective. It was who I was.
Then again, I also loved my family, who needed me more now than ever. A job where I could count on being home every evening and weekend would be a godsend, and so would the extra money. What to do?
As usual, no clear, easy decision came to me. When I finished with the bills and some other busywork, I rounded up my sick kids and sat everybody down in front of the TV for a game of Harry Potter: Scene It?
Then my cell phone rang. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be good news. Still, I couldn’t ignore it.
“Mike Bennett,” I said.
“Hi, Mike. This is Marissa Wyatt. Would you hold for Commissioner Daly?”
I sat up, blinking. I knew that calling in for a personal, after the chaos of last night, might cause a few grumbles. But a call from the commissioner’s office? What did he want with me? Had the Harlem fiasco turned that bad that fast?
“Mike?” Daly said.
I’d met Daly at a couple of upper-level meetings I’d been invited to. He seemed like a straight shooter, at least as straight a shooter as could be found in the puzzle palace that was One Police Plaza. I decided I might as well make my case right away.
“Hi, Commissioner,” I said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about the way things went last night?—”
He cut me off brusquely. “We’ll talk about that later. I need you on the bricks, right now. Strange things going down this fair morning. A couple of psycho assaults, including somebody pushing a young woman in front of a subway. Then an ugly shooting at the Polo store on Madison abou
t fifteen minutes ago. Since today looks like a catastrophe in the making, and you happen to be the department’s only former CRU section chief, I’m handpicking you to coordinate our team.”
Damn, I thought. Not fair. The commissioner must have been looking through my personnel file. In another life, back when I was single, I’d spent some time working for the CRU, or Catastrophic Response Unit, a federal forward-response team that helped out and investigated disasters, especially ones that seemed to have a criminal element.
But to call me a section chief was ridiculous. Because of my Irish gift o’ gab, they just put me out in front to distract everyone while the real heroes—my team of forensic anthropologists, environmental engineers, and clinical psychologists—made me look good.
“C’mon, Commissioner. That was a long time ago. I’ll admit it. I lost my head and worked for the Feds for a few years. You can’t use that against me,” I said. Besides, doesn’t the Nineteenth Precinct have detectives anymore?
“Oh, yes, I can. You’re my star, Mike, like it or not. And this one’s a big red ball. Make me look good, okay? There’s a payoff for you, too—you’re on assignment, so you don’t have to write reports about the Harlem thing, or deal with the media jackals. The office of information has just about lit on fire with requests to interview you.”
The truth, I knew perfectly well, was that Daly didn’t want anybody talking to the media about last night until all the facts were in. But he was using it to make me think he was doing me a favor. Add public relations savvy to his skill set, I thought.
“Get on your horse and go straight to Seventy-second, ASAP,” he finished. “Chief of Detectives McGinnis will fill you in.”
Get on my what? I thought, listening to the dial tone. No wonder he was commissioner. The man was a professional manipulator. Not only did he show no respect for my personal day, he hadn’t even given me a chance to tell him about my sick kids.