Zero Hour pp-7 Page 16

  A beanie-style cap pulled down over her forehead, a wool scarf wrapped around her mouth, the collar of her ski jacket zipped high to her chin, she turned up the street from the building’s entrance courtyard, glad it was only a short walk to the indoor playspace where she’d left her daughter a little over an hour before. At five hundred dollars per year, an unlimited admission pass to GoKids almost could be considered a bargain. Compared to the cost of standard daycare, it was a bargain nowadays, but who was she kidding? It had been a long time since money had been a concern for her, Pat wouldn’t have balked if the annual tab had come to five times that amount.

  In his way, he was a good family man. And in their own screwy way they’d made things work as parents.

  She hurried along the sidewalk, bowing her head to keep the wind out of her eyes. There’d been nothing like these supervised after-school centers when she was young, she thought, especially in the working-class area where she grew up. Nowhere outside her bedroom to play with her girlfriends in the depths of winter, unless it was at one of their family’s apartments, in one of their rooms… and after a while they’d all just felt confined, restless, and bored with the very same toys that had seemed as if they would be never-ending fun while still gift-wrapped under the sparkling lights and ornaments of a Christmas tree. Children didn’t lose their need or desire to be physically active when the fall came and leaves started dropping from the trees, but in New York, or anywhere close to the city, they barely had opportunities to exercise outdoors until spring came around. To stretch themselves. True, her daughter had skating, and sledding if there was snow on the ground, but first you had to get her ready, and then bring her over to a park or ice rink, these being scattered far and wide across the area. The travel and preparation involved made it a project that was strictly for weekends, when they could turn it into a full-day affair. And under the circumstances, in her current state of mind… just getting herself together and in gear sometimes seemed impossible.

  It was a blessing, GoKids. An absolute blessing. With slides of every type, a sandbox, climbing ladders, jungle gyms, and hideout tunnels, it amounted to a modern playground with a roof over it, and had made all the difference in the world to her daughter, giving her something bright she could look forward to every day, a level of companionship and attention that was otherwise absent from her life right now… and that her own mother recognized she couldn’t provide.

  Even trying her best to cope, aware she couldn’t put her responsibilities on hold no matter what else was going on around her, she’d been unable to manufacture a smile for her little girl these past several days. Not while she constantly felt like tearing her hair out of her head by the damned roots in her worry, or medicating herself into a stupor to quiet the scared and — God forgive her—furious voice in her head that told her Pat had gone too far this time around, gotten too many big ideas for his own good, taken the sort of chances that she’d repeatedly warned had been bound to lead toward serious trouble… trouble that could swallow up everyone and everything around him.

  But she didn’t want to think about it right now. What was the use? It would do her a lot more good to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.

  She walked on into the wind with her head low, hoping she didn’t crash right into somebody while rushing blindly toward the intersection. Luckily there weren’t many people around at the moment. In another half an hour it would be six o’clock and the street would fill with commuters returning from work, but this was the lull when most nine-to-fivers were still in transit, jammed together in crowded trains and buses.

  She could almost envy them, ridiculous as that sounded. Their average routines, their common complaints… right now she would have traded for them in a minute.

  It was so cold out here, so dark and cold.

  Her daughter’s playspace was about five blocks downtown, and she would need to cross the street heading toward it, walk south on the next avenue. But the parked cars along the curb were crammed so close together — bumper to bumper, almost — that it seemed impossible to find an opening between them, another of this city’s ongoing shortages being available spots. She figured it would be better to wait till she reached the intersection than catch her coat or slacks trying to squeeze between fenders.

  Those cars aside, her block rarely got too congested. Residential, lined with trees, it was a lot quieter than most, and could almost make you forget what a busy part of town this was in general. She supposed the corner park over on the other side of the block, Peter’s Field, also helped cut down on foot traffic. In fact, she herself wasn’t eager to walk past it. There were usually strong gusts kicking up all around its fences, probably something to do with how the wind sort of pooled and swirled around the park, really just a little open space with some benches where the old men and women liked to sit around feeding the pigeons, and athletic courts the basketball and tennis players claimed as their own in the summertime.

  She would hate to cross the street there, but couldn’t avoid it, and admittedly felt like a spoiled, selfish bitch even letting a minor inconvenience of that sort enter her thoughts. These days, she had heavier concerns pressing down on her shoulders, and might have given anything in the world to see them lifted. Having an indoor center for her daughter so close to home… she knew she really ought to be thankful for that and leave it alone.

  Still hunched forward against the wind, she was unaware of the guy who stepped from the front passenger side of the parked car on her left until he called her name, and even then almost crashed into his door as it swung open over the sidewalk. Startled, not recognizing his voice, she came to an abrupt halt and looked up at him, barely avoiding the door.

  His face, what she was able to see of it in the dark, was unfamiliar to her.

  “Nice to see you,” he said, smiling, repeating her name as he sidled around the door, quickly moving right up in front of her.

  She didn’t recognize his face in the shadows, couldn’t place it, didn’t have a clue who he was. But his eyes… something about his eyes, the way they were locked in on her, made her think she probably didn’t want to know him.

  She backed up on impulse, confused, anxious, suddenly realizing there was nobody on the park side of the street, nobody else on this side.

  Nobody but the two of them standing out here on the darkened sidewalk.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to whoever the hell he might be. Starting to get really frightened now, trying to ease forward around both his body and the door. “I’m in a hurry to get somewh—”

  His gloved hand came up, clapped over the lower half of her face before she could finish her sentence. Then another had came up to her neck, something held in it, what she thought looked like a fat marker pen. As she started to scream against the hand covering her mouth, a snapping sound came from the tubular object, and she felt a sting right through her scarf, and the scream died off into a muffled in-turned whimper.

  Instantly dizzy, her senses flushing away, her legs turned to soft putty, she reeled, felt herself being shoved into the car, thrown across the backseat. And then heard its doors slamming shut in what seemed some distant place behind her.

  By the time the driver got back into his vehicle and pulled from the curb, she was completely unconscious.

  * * *

  His Maglite raised above his shoulder, its lens turned downward in the pitch blackness, he walked around the pile of sod, rotten leaves, and splintered branches concealing her body. The surface of the frozen bog quivered underfoot, its icy carpet of moss and tangled weeds crackling with each step he took through his slow circle, like a thick rubber mat that had been spread over an even thicker layer of broken glass.

  The flash’s wide, high-powered beam revealed a hint of white flesh — part of her cheek, or maybe her neck — and he knelt to scoop another clump of dead foliage into his gloved hand and toss it where he’d caught his glimpse. He recalled having seen patches of snow among the nearby brush and stu
nted trees, momentarily considered flinging some onto the heap for added cover, but then decided it was better to leave the snow undisturbed. More would fall to blanket her soon enough… unless the coyotes and bobcats arrived first. They were all over these woodlands, half starved in the bareness of winter, scavenging for whatever food would sustain them. Probably they would take care of the body before any human being had a chance to discover it. Not many people wandered this far from the beaten path, and those who did — off-trail hikers, nature watchers, that type — wouldn’t get the inclination for months. Not until the wicked cold abated.

  He continued to move around the corpse, frost-hardened mud crunching beneath his weight.

  The auto-injector couldn’t have worked any better, he thought. A little pressure was all it had taken for its needle to eject from the tip and penetrate the heavy scarf she’d worn around her neck, releasing the contents of its prefilled dispenser.

  The propofol had put her out in less than a minute. He’d experimented with a wide range of sedatives, tranquilizers, and anesthetics in his solitary career, could recite a whole desk reference’s worth of names from memory, and was convinced he’d never gotten hold of anything more potent. The dosage he’d pumped into the woman, eighty milligrams into the artery that fed her brain, could have put a horse on the ground in seconds. She’d already been semicomatose when he finished her in the backseat, pinching shut her nose with one hand, clapping the other over her mouth, blocking her airways until her autonomic motor system simply gave up on trying to fill them.

  His take-outs weren’t always as clean, but he preferred it when they were. With his best ones, the ones that went the way she’d gone, it was almost as if he was the Sandman kneeling at their sides, gentling them to sleep, making them yield to him with a soft, easy touch.

  Hush, baby, he’d whispered in her ear. You hush, and I’ll see you by-and-by.

  He had kissed her goodnight — lightly, on the cheek — as she went out with hardly a shiver and a gasp.

  Now he came full circle and paused to stand in silence over the body’s outstretched legs. He could see filaments of vapor escaping his mouth and nostrils to scatter in the bright cast of his Mag, hear timber creaking and groaning around him in the wind.

  In the unlikely event anything was left of her when the thaw arrived, it would be sucked down into the bog. The acid mire sped up decomposition, turning organic remains into food for the peat and sphagnum. There was a whole education to be gotten from being piss poor and orphaned young, and that had been among the abundant lessons he learned in the cranberry bogs where he’d toiled during the October harvests, just a kid back then, part of a large troop of strapped and exploited seasonal laborers. The pickers, most of them, were minors like himself, along with hardscrabble local women and Mexican illegals who had come thousands of miles north of the border to join them in slogging through those flooded fields for less than minimum wage, raking berries loose from the vines so they would float to the water’s surface, then skimming for them with big brooms, rakes, and nets… and this while the foreman, their padrone the migrant workers had called him, sat watching with his fat ass parked high and dry in the cab of his tractor. As you tramped across the bog, it would drop down in ditches where the cranberry vines took root, and you’d wade out deeper, step by step. Start out covered in cold slime to your ankles, and later on find yourself swamped to the waist, where the dead things came stirring up from the mucky bed. Drowned chipmunks, squirrels, foxes, birds, there would be small animals and decayed pieces of animals floating all around you, leeches and wormy creatures clinging to them, feeding on their putrefied tissues.

  He remembered the cranberry bogs. Remembered the dead things. But that was long ago, and he wasn’t here to do any picking tonight.

  He’d found this patch of spongy ground a while back, used it for another of his jobs, and hadn’t had a problem locating it again. It was the ideal place to dispose of her, hidden at the end of a dirt trail among a million acres of unpopulated wilderness out here in the Jersey barrens… miles and miles of nothing, of nowhere, a quick shot from Manhattan. The drive had been under forty minutes, and he’d taken it slow to make sure the staties didn’t get interested in him. When he was finished looking over his work, he would pull his rental back onto Highway 73, head a few exits down the ’pike to the Lincoln Tunnel, and then he would be across the Hudson, out of that underwater tube, city lights greeting him, Broadway in his face, the Empire State Building thrusting into the eastside sky like a giant multicolored glowstick. But here, right here, none of it seemed to exist.

  Over the river and through the woods, amazing.

  Remaining very still over the body, he switched off his flashlight on an impulse that, while not quite unconscious, arose from a chamber of his mind buried deep down at the lowermost level of consciousness.

  And then the world went dark.

  He could have been anywhere.

  He could have been nowhere.

  Nowhere, U.S.A. Riding along some unmarked road, mile after empty mile, in a big old Mack truck that was redder and shinier than a fire engine, he thought with a smile of bitter recollection, his free hand briefly touching the right side of his neck.

  After a second he thumbed his flash back on, turned, and walked away from the evidence of his latest atrocity, bearing with him an indelible reminder of the many crimes of his past.

  FIVE

  VARIOUS LOCALES

  Avram Hoffman dashed by Jeffreys on his way to the elevators in the DDC’s ground-floor entrance hall. It was already twenty minutes past nine, late for his morning prayer session, and he couldn’t afford to run even a minute later. Mr. Katari had left the Club in a huff well before Avram returned from yesterday’s hastily arranged meeting with Lathrop, and his indignance over having been put off was understandable. In the competitive hustle of the jewelry trade, one’s time was not to be squandered. A missed appointment could lead to another, and that might result in lost opportunities. The domino effect could be rapid and serious. All the hard, quantifiable appraisals of a gemstone’s value, its cut and carat, clarity and color, scientific identification and grading—all of it — meant less than its tenuous hold on a potential buyer’s fancy. No man or woman had ever died for lack of a precious bauble. It could sparkle with the brilliance of a thousand suns, but what did that matter if it couldn’t arouse a comparable gleam in the eye of the beholder… or if its lure to the eye faded before a sale was closed? The true measure of its worth would be found in dreams, desires, and passions — and these were fleeting intangibles, enchantments of fickle power. That diamond you promised me hasn’t arrived? The broker was held up at an appointment? Well, I’m flying out of town tonight and will have to shop around.

  Avram had needed to shower Katari with apologies, guarantee him exclusives and special discounts, practically offer verbal supplication over the phone to convince him to come back here today. But Katari was a major client, and Avram wouldn’t hang himself with a noose of pride.

  He stepped into the elevator now, out of breath, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, his cheeks flushed above the line of his beard. It was the rushing. The constant scurrying to get things done. He’d been awake most of the previous night in his home laboratory examining the Kashmir with his various instruments… a binocular microscope, a polariscope, an immersion cell analyzer, all state-of-the-art equipment for which he had paid many thousands of dollars. At about eight o’clock, his youngest daughter, Rachael, had knocked on the door with a stack of books in her hand… would he read to her? Avram had sent her off to bed in a brusque, preoccupied tone for which he still felt guilty. Told her he was too busy, knowing he had broken a promise made earlier. But he’d considered it an urgent must to look for any signs of artifice before dropping the sapphire off at the GIA laboratory… a stop he had made first thing this morning, eager to get the certification process underway, hours of his own extensive tests having shown him absolutely nothing that might indicate the stone
wasn’t of natural origin. Though the lab was just down the block from the DDC building on Fifth Avenue, Avram’s need to wait for his regular man and put in a request for prioritization had put him behind schedule. If there was a trait shared by experts of every kind, he thought, it was that they seemed to enjoy stretching the patience of those who depended on their services.

  As he rose to the trading floor in the elevator, Avram remembered the hurt look on Rachael’s face over his snappish dismissal, and silently pledged to make it up to her soon. Tonight, if he had the time. He would try to be better with Rachael tonight.

  Meanwhile, he had to pull himself together and set his mind toward the long day of bargaining ahead.

  * * *

  What Anthony DeSanto usually did after walking the two blocks from his apartment to the office at Dunne Savings and Loan every morning was browse through the newspapers over a cup of spiced apple cider and a blueberry muffin, preferring the city’s two major tabloids, the Daily News and New York Post, for their extensive sports coverage. There were enough hours in the day for him to get beat over his head with the stories of war, terrorism, crime, politics, and economic turmoil that dominated their front-page headlines, and Tony figured the latest developments on all those glorious subjects could wait until he was caught up on the game scores.

  Tony guessed he was a creature of habit, and scanning the papers — back to front — was stage one of his ordinary routine at the bank, a chance to catch his breath after hustling uptown on the train, a comforting transitional phase to help ease him into the feverish rhythms of the workday. Right now, though, things weren’t routine, or ordinary, and he couldn’t pretend they were. For maybe two, three days after Pat disappeared, Tony had tried to go about his mornings as if nothing was wrong, thinking it would help stave off his creeping fears. He had picked up the papers at the newsstand outside the Union Square subway exit, bought his cider and muffin at the green market, and, once he’d plunked himself down at his desk, studied the sports section as though everything was the same as usual… although he’d been constantly and ever-more-keenly aware that it wasn’t. But it seemed worth a shot trying to focus his thoughts on the previous night’s monster jams and power plays — even a halfhearted shot — if there was any chance it could temporarily distract him from thinking about what could have happened to his best friend of twenty-five years, a guy who’d seemingly vanished into thin air.