On the Line Read online

  “What’s that, the price of admission? Yeah, I do.”

  “Okay, you’re in.” I looked around. “There’s a coffee shop on West Third by the basketball courts. I’ll meet you there.”

  In the twenty minutes before Linus blew through the diner’s door I had three cups of coffee punctuated by a trip outside for a smoke. I tried Lydia’s phone twice but it got me nothing. If anyone had come near me I’d have punched him; if I’d had any idea what to do or where to go I wouldn’t have stayed. But I was as lost as could be.

  I worked Lydia’s description over and over in my mind, and the robot voice, and the words. I couldn’t get close.

  The bag, then. I could send it and the junk in it to a private lab to test for prints, but that would take time and anything they found I’d have to get a cop somewhere to run for me. Likely there wasn’t much. Who wouldn’t know not to leave prints? Or even more likely: even if this crap was clues, none of it was his. He’d dug it out of the garbage and it had prints all over it, a dozen different strangers’ prints. That’s how I’d do it, if it were me.

  When had the bag been left? Anytime last night, this morning. I hadn’t been out since around midnight; it’s a shadowed doorway. How long had this bastard had Lydia? No way to know. Unless she could tell me.

  The diner’s door opened. Linus Wong glanced around, spotted me, slid into my booth. He was dressed skateboard-ready, baggy cargo pants and a short-sleeved tee over a long-sleeved one. His hair was buzzed short sides, long top, and he had a gold earring in his left ear. When I first met Linus, four years ago, he was a high-IQ high-schooler, always in trouble because hacking was more fun than history class, video games better than gym. After a fistful of suspensions, two expulsions, and a larceny charge—eventually dropped—for changing the entire junior class’s grades to As, he fought the school system to a draw, got a GED, and last year set up an e-security firm in his parents’ Flushing home.

  “Dude,” he greeted me.

  A thin young woman had come in behind him and now slipped in beside him. She had a few inches and maybe a few years on him, meaning in this state she was old enough to drink. She wore spiked blond hair, thick black boots and a short plaid skirt, multiple eyebrow- and earrings, plus a stud in her nose, but none of those was what I noticed first. First came her electric blue eyes. Next was the air she carried: the tight-coiled joy of a runner at the starting blocks.

  “Who’s this?” I said.

  She gave me a sharp grin. “Trella.” This was the voice that had answered the phone.

  “Friend of mine,” Linus said. “She’s good at stuff.”

  Before I could speak the waiter appeared, finally hopeful for more from this booth than the tip on a cup of coffee. Linus ordered a Coke. Trella asked for coffee and coconut cake. “With the cherries,” she said. “Not the plain one.” I’d been watching the dessert carousel go around for twenty minutes; I knew everything in it. I hadn’t seen Trella, walking past, give it so much as a glance.

  “Couldn’t find the phone,” Linus said. “That chip must be history.”

  “Shit!”

  “But my dude found the tower. Number 378V72, lower Manhattan. Fulton and Church.”

  “That means the call came from near there?”

  “Six blocks in each direction. But that was, what, an hour ago?”

  Meaning: the haystack, though still huge, had gotten smaller. But the needle might have been moved.

  “The voice, Linus. Electronically distorted. Does that mean he’s someone like you?”

  Linus looked at me blankly. “Like me, what?”

  Trella rolled her eyes. “Like you, what. No,” she said to me. “That’s a voice modulator. You can get one at Best Buy.”

  The waiter clattered cups and plates onto our table. Linus said, “What else you got?”

  “Lydia told me what he looks like.” I repeated what she’d said and what I thought it meant.

  “Yes!” Linus pumped his fist. He turned to Trella. “See? I said you’d like her.”

  Trella leaned forward, glowing eyes on me. “So what does it tell you?”

  I could only shake my head.

  “No idea at all, dude?” Linus asked. “Zero, nada, none?”

  Trella said musingly, “If you heard him talk—”

  “I told you, the voice—”

  “Not the voice. His phrases, how he strings words together. A voice modulator doesn’t change that. And you know kind of what he looks like. But you still don’t know.” As she spoke she dumped spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. She stopped at eight, sipped, and added another. “Then it’s got to be someone from a long time ago. But he’s only coming at you now.”

  “He was in jail!” Linus said. “He was locked up and he just got out! Man, that would suck, being locked up. No wonder he’s pissed at you, if you did it.” Linus, who’d spent half his childhood grounded, spoke with authority.

  “I had the same thought,” I said. “But I still—”

  “That’s why he didn’t just kill you.” Trella looked up suddenly. “Or her.”

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t just want you dead. You made him suffer over a period of time, and now he wants you to. That’s why the game. That’s why the clock.”

  “Who did you send to jail, dude? That’s your business, right, sending freaks to jail?”

  “More than one guy. Some of them I probably don’t even know about.”

  “Give me a break. How can you not know?”

  I clenched my teeth to keep from snapping at him. Why would these kids know this? “What I do, half the time you never learn the outcome. A lawyer, a relative, someone hires you to track something down. You find it, turn it over to the client, that’s it. If it helps put someone away, he might blame you, but you might never know.”

  “It may not be a professional thing, anyway,” Trella said. “And it might not be he was in jail. Maybe somebody whose wife you slept with or something. Broke his heart, took him years to plot revenge. Or someone who went into the army to get away from you.”

  Linus gulped Coke. “Into the army? Dudess—”

  “I’m just saying. Lots of possibilities. This is getting us nowhere. Let’s see what’s in the bag.”

  I’d been over the contents of the plastic bag at least a thousand times while I’d been waiting. I still harbored the suspicion it was someone’s garbage. But I didn’t have a better idea. I dumped it out on the table. “Don’t touch it,” I said. “There’s a lab I use, I’m going to messenger it over. Maybe there are prints.”

  The two of them exchanged an oh please glance. “No one’s that dumb anymore,” Trella said.

  “I have to check anyway.”

  “Whatever.”

  “That Amtrak ticket’s to Philadelphia,” Linus said. “You think you’re supposed to go to Philadelphia?”

  “And do what when I get there?”

  Trella craned her neck. “Where’s the receipt from?”

  “Fairway.”

  “Which Fairway?”

  “You mean, Broadway or Harlem? It doesn’t say.”

  “Or Red Hook.”

  “There’s a Fairway in Red Hook?” Fairway’s a legendary New York market. For half a century there was only one; then they opened another, in an old warehouse in Harlem. But Red Hook?

  “Red Hook’s cool, man,” Linus informed me. “Art galleries and shit. Cutting-edge yuppieville. About to be, you know, the place to be.”

  Trella, still focused on the table, shook her head. “Won’t happen. It was hip for a while, but the minute Manhattan got affordable again, those yuppies were outta there.” She frowned; the hardware in her eyebrows shifted. “But they do have a Fairway.” She pointed her fork at the receipt. “He bought milk and sugar.”

  “For his coffee?” Linus gestured skeptically at the crumpled cup. “At Starbucks they give you that.”

  “Coffey Street,” I said. Both kids looked at me. “There’s a Coffey Street in Red
Hook.”

  “Dude, I thought you didn’t know about Red Hook.”

  “Not about cutting-edge yuppieville. When I was a kid in Brooklyn we used to drink in Red Hook. Out there we didn’t get carded.”

  “Do people know that about you?”

  “I don’t know who knows. It’s no big deal but it’s not something I keep secret.”

  “So this guy could know.”

  I regarded Linus. My finger went to a scar beside my eye. “I got this in a fight out there. Four stupid Irish kids in a waterfront bar, trying to prove how tough we were. I almost lost the eye. I tell the story sometimes if I’m drinking with guys and they start looking for someone to punch.”

  “That bar—was it on Coffey Street?”

  “No.”

  Linus deflated.

  Trella tapped her fork against her front teeth. “I wonder what is? Look, guys. Suppose we’re right, he means Red Hook and he means Coffey Street. So what about these?” She waved the fork over the ticket and the cigarette pack.

  Linus had his iPhone out. He swiped his finger across the screen a couple of times. “Shit! No street view.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Google maps, dude.” He turned the phone to me. On its screen was a map of Red Hook. Some streets were traced in blue, but not Coffey. “Street View, we could’ve seen what’s there. But let me try something else. Maybe there’s a place on Coffey Street named Philadelphia.” A few more swipes. He shook his head. “Maybe American Spirit.” He started to poke at the iPhone again, but I stopped him.

  “No. Try one forty-three. The number, one forty-three.” The biggest print on an Amtrak ticket doesn’t give you the station, the price, or the date; it’s the train number.

  “One forty-three Coffey Street,” Linus said. “It’s a bar. A hookah bar. Fatima’s. Says here, full bar, Middle Eastern food.” He looked up. “Strong Turkish coffee.” Back to his screen: “Individual and group hookahs. Twenty-two kinds of tobacco. Whoa, dudes! Says, all pure, all premium. No additives.”

  We were out of there in seconds, me dropping bills on the table and sweeping the trash back into the bag.

  That’s the claim to fame of American Spirit cigarettes: pure, premium tobacco. No additives.

  3

  There was only one car on the block outside the diner: a decrepit Ford Fairlane in a no parking zone.

  I said to Linus, “Give me the keys.”

  “No way, dude.”

  “Especially no way, dude, because it’s my car,” said Trella.

  “If we’re right and this lunatic is there—”

  “Then you need someone to watch your back.”

  “I don’t want you kids anywhere near him.”

  “Let me put it this way.” Trella faced me, deadpan. “I’m going to Red Hook. You can come with, or not. You could take the subway, but this’ll be faster. Or you could take a cab. But I drive better.” She yanked open the driver’s side door. Linus raised his eyebrows at me and got in the shotgun seat. After a second, I climbed in the back and hadn’t shut the door before Trella rocketed away from the curb.

  “You know how to get there?”

  In the mirror Trella threw me the look you’d give to someone asking if you knew how to spell your own name.

  The streets of Manhattan, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the BQE, all about a thousand miles long. It nearly killed me to be sitting in the back, not gunning the engine, not cornering, passing, getting there. But for the same reason I hadn’t called Linus from my home phone or my cell, I wasn’t about to use my own car. It was a safe bet the guy at least knew what I drove, and for all I knew he’d bugged it. If we were right about Fatima’s, he knew I was coming. This way, though, maybe he wouldn’t know when I arrived.

  Jittery as I was, a part of me was watching how adroitly Trella drove. She took the route I’d have taken and she took it fast, weaving, jumping lights, pushing the edge but not so far we risked getting stopped. The car’s body was a wreck, the suspension was shot, but the engine purred. Trella shifted smoothly, probed the traffic ahead, sliced through gaps cleanly when she found them. Linus, belted in beside her, sat relaxed, never tensing or pulling away the way passengers sometimes do when the driver goes fast and cuts close. I guessed they rode together a lot, and I guessed she always drove.

  Linus, fiddling with his phone, said, “Dudes. This Fatima’s? Looks like it’s closed. Lots of sad posts on iDine.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “About a year ago. Must’ve been hot, people missing it a lot. Doesn’t look like anything else opened there yet.”

  After that, no one spoke. Trella stayed focused as a surgeon. Linus watched the world fly by. I sat forward, chainsmoking through the fifteen-minute eternity from lower Manhattan to Red Hook. When I lit the first one, Trella narrow-eyed me in the mirror, but instead of saying anything she hit the master button and lowered all the windows.

  Finally we were off the BQE, onto Columbia, up to Coffey. As we crossed Van Brunt I said, “Roll down the block, slowly, like you’re lost. Don’t pay attention to the place and don’t slow down when we pass it.”

  I wanted an idea, the lay of the land. The bastard was expecting me, but he might not be expecting two teenagers in an ancient Ford, probably lost on their way to Red Hook Park to buy dope. Me, I was just the shadow in the backseat.

  If a gentrification wave had broken over Red Hook, it had receded leaving no mark I could see. Single- and two-family houses, scattered four- or five-story apartment buildings, empty lots. Brick, or wood siding, or asphalt shingles hammered on when the wood began to rot. Everything I saw was what I’d seen when, younger than these kids, I used to come here looking for trouble.

  Whatever cutting-edge yuppiedom had planted its flag here must be centered on Van Brunt, the commercial avenue. Only the most optimistic would open a bar on a side street. But apparently Fatima had been a hopeful sort. One block up, two buildings from the corner, we passed it.

  Hopes can get dashed. This was a dusty and derelict place. Kept company on one side by a weed-choked lot, the three-story building nestled on the other side against its larger neighbor and dreamed of vanished glory. In the front window, ghostly through grime, an unlit neon hookah floated; in each of the upstairs windows, a smaller painted version of the same hookah flaked off the glass.

  From across the street I could see the heavy chain and padlock on Fatima’s front door. What I couldn’t see was any point in trying it. At the corner, on my direction, Trella turned right; at the next corner, right again. I said, “Stop. Let me out here. And you guys stay away.”

  Without a word, Trella pulled to the curb.

  I got out and headed down the block. Gentrification or not, in the middle of the morning Red Hook’s streets were still empty. No one was in sight when I reached my goal, a one-story building I’d spotted from around the block through the overgrowth of Fatima’s empty side lot. Set back from the line of front stoops, flanked by a pair of dark, narrow alleys separating it from the houses on either side, it looked to have started life as a garage. A spray-paint mural on the roll-down door and a giant sheet-metal rat on the roof announced it was an artist’s studio now. The artist wasn’t here, though. The psychedelic door was locked tight—I knocked, then tried the handle—but before he’d gone off the good citizen had put his recycling cans out. I recycled one into a ladder: hauled it beside the building, climbed on, grabbed the roof’s edge, and swung myself up. I crouched, inched across the tar paper, crunching scraps of tin and glops of solder. I passed under the rat’s haunch and, at the back of the building, dropped to my belly to give Fatima’s the once-over.

  The concrete apron behind the defunct bar was strewn with rusting carcasses of ductwork and kitchen equipment. Weeds like a fountain sprouted in a stack of tires. But I saw what I’d been hoping to see. Clipped to the back of the building, Fatima’s had a fire escape.

  I swing over the edge and dropped into the studio’s slim backyard, scrambled
up and over the chain-link, and dashed across the overgrown side lot. If the lunatic was watching the back he’d see me easily, but I was banking on him expecting me to come from the street.

  If we were right, and the bag on my doorknob was anything besides someone’s garbage, and he was here at all.

  The ladder from Fatima’s fire escape hung too high for me to reach. The metal wreckage in the backyard would clank and scrape if I tried to drag it over, but there were those tires. I could climb on them. The weeds bowed as I pulled the tires off and piled them under the ladder. I had to hope the top hook was good enough that when I grabbed the ladder, it would hold. Those ladders are made to drop when that hook’s released and when they drop they make a hell of a clang. But there was nothing to do except hope, breathe, and jump, so I did.

  The ladder shook but it didn’t move. My arms shook, too, as I hauled myself up the half dozen rungs it took to get a foothold. When I got to the platform I crossed fast, took the rusted steel stairs to the next platform two at a time. I was thinking to go in at the top. That way, wherever he was—and I was betting, on the ground floor, just inside the door—I’d have both surprise and height.

  At the top of the fire escape I flattened against the wall and inched to the window, peered around the jamb. Soot streaks clouded the glass but the room was a floor-through and sun slanted in the windows in the far wall. It didn’t show me much: curved lumps of abandoned furniture, exhausted drapery on a bent curtain rod. It was the desolate end of someone’s dream but it was all as still as a photograph and that’s what I wanted to know.

  This had been a bar, and the fire escape was its emergency exit. By law, when the place was functioning, these windows had to be unlocked. Had anyone cared enough, when Fatima’s dream ended, to lock them up before walking away? Gently, I tried the flaking wood window frame. The window rode up without protest, too dispirited to care.

  I eased over the sill, gun drawn. Nothing moved. No one burst out suddenly, no one dove through the weightless dust to slam me, throw me down. My own pounding heatbeat was the only sound. Motionless, I surveyed the room: floor cushions velvety with dust; beaded lamps and beat-up chairs; a low table where a hookah sat with its mouthpiece tubes curved, perky, pathetically ready. A sagging railing on the left showed me where the stair was. Beyond it, a sofa faced the front window. If someone were hiding in this room, that would be the only place. I took wary steps that way, had my gun out straight as I drew close enough to see over the sofa’s high back.