Empire State (21 page)

  Rex felt better. He was thinking clearly, and that was good. Realising what had happened, the root of the problem, that was good. That was halfway to getting it sorted.

  Rex nodded again, then jerked his head up. He blinked and found his face was still wet, and the rain was still falling, and the street was still empty. He'd managed to drop off. Good. How long, it was impossible to tell. The street stretched out like an abandoned film set before him. Rex folded his arms close, thankful at least that while the rain was very wet, it wasn't very cold.

  So where the hell was he? Born and bred a New Yorker, Rex had to admit that he hadn't been down
every
street in Manhattan. That was one of the best things about living in one of the greatest cities in the world. You could live there all your life, and still be surprised just a few blocks from your own front door. Rex'd heard the same about London. If you're tired of London... or New York, you're tired of...

  Rex knocked the back of his head against the stone doorway as he jerked back to consciousness. The damned buzzing abated when he slept, but it was that moment of wakefulness when it peaked, his head pounding like he'd been tapped with a baseball bat. A second later the sensation was gone. He needed to get home, get inside, get to his bed and sleep and take some aspirin. Sleep, and food and drink, and some pills, and he'd be ready to tackle the next item on his agenda.

  Move the body.

  He'd hidden it pretty well. This whole part of the damned city was a ghost town anyway, and Rex wondered if perhaps he could just have left her in the middle of the damned street and nobody would find her. But how long ago had it been? Last night? The night before? Last week? Time felt fuzzy. That was to be expected. Good. Another sliver of recognition. Rex felt like a private eye slotting the pieces of a case together. Tell me, Rex, where were you on the night of the fifth? He laughed. He was OK. He stood, and decided it was time to move.

  Rex looked down to tighten the belt of his trench coat, and when he looked up again if there wasn't a damn
person
walking down the street. His pace was quick, his head hunched down, hands thrust in pockets, trying to dodge the rain as he clipped along the sidewalk. The rim of the man's fedora was sagging from the water, and the bottom half of his pale trench coat was a patchwork of water and oil stains thrown from the wet streets. The man kept a straight line, then turned down a side street.

  "Huh," said Rex, to himself, as he fingered the brim of his own fedora. There was something familiar about the man in the rain. Perhaps he wasn't so far from his own apartment building, because he was sure – no, certain – that that man lived in the same building. Hell, hadn't they exchanged a polite hello each and every morning for the past... for the past forever?

  Rex pushed his hat onto his bald head and skipped down the stairs two at a time. His feet hit the sidewalk and he turned in the direction the man had been heading. Head down, hands thrust in pockets, trying to dodge the rain, Rex set off.

 

Now
he was lost.

  He'd been trailing his neighbour for a half hour, but that buzzing, that damned-to-all-hell headache peaked and troughed and perhaps he hadn't been following his neighbour at all. It was still night, and the rain had eased to drizzle, and Rex stood in the middle of another empty street and wondered where the hell he was.

  There were street signs, sure, but he'd never heard of any of them. All of the buildings were featureless granite or limestone. There were no shops, no bars, no restaurants, no clubs, no market stalls, no newspaper signs, no billboards, no advertising, no cars or buses or bicycles. No people, no litter. Just wet streets reflecting the yellow lights, and a million buildings with locked doors and black windows.

  Maybe he was somewhere in the banking area. One of those little zones where it was all stockbrokers and merchant bankers and lawyers, where you didn't need signs or plaques because everyone knew where they were going, and if you needed to know the name or number of a building or office, then you weren't supposed to be there in the first place. If he was in the financial district, maybe that explained the dead buildings. Rex sniggered.

  There was a small park on the corner, raised up from the street. Rex pulled himself up the four or five steps and found himself on a bench-lined path that orbited a square lawn. Sitting on the nearest bench, he found the hedges all around blocked out the view of the lifeless street below, and the single large tree in the centre of the park, its branches extending broadly outwards, removed his view of the grey stone buildings all around him.

  If Rex sat there, and let his eyes fall, just a little, he could pretend he was back in New York City. Because the thought occurred to him that somehow, bizarrely and impossibly, he wasn't in Manhattan. Maybe he hadn't fallen and hit his head. Maybe he hadn't been the only one down that dark alley that night. If he thought it was a good spot, perhaps other people did too. Perhaps McCabe had found him? No, if it had been that sonovabitch he'd be as dead as the girl now. Maybe, entirely without realising it, he'd walked straight into someone else's operation, and they watched him kill the girl and then removed him from the scene and dumped him in New Jersey or something.

  No. It didn't make sense. They'd've just knocked him down too and he sure as hell wouldn't have got up again.

  But somehow, he didn't feel like he was home.

  He curled his legs up onto the bench. The whole park was tiny and mostly kept dry by the huge spreading tree. The night was warm and fuzzy, and if he lay down his head seemed to settle.

  Rex fell asleep on the park bench in the warm night.

 

It wasn't until the fifth shake that Rex awoke. Both eyes snapped open quickly, his subconscious giving his conscious mind a kick, letting it know that something was going on and really he needed to start paying attention. Rex looked up and saw the leaves of the tree, glossy bottle green in the half-light, and the face of a man leaning over him and shaking him by the shoulders and speaking in a quiet, polite voice. Not a whisper, more a murmur, the low monotone employed when you need to tell something important to someone but don't want the people in the next room to hear. Rex blinked, and found his eyelids were dry. He could hear water hitting tarmac, so it was still raining, but the small park was dry thanks to the tree.

  Rex blinked again and squinted. The man standing over him didn't
have
a face. Eyes, sure, and the bump of a nose, but all covered in white cloth that hung long as the man leaned over. If only he could think straight and see straight, he'd ask the man why he was wearing a napkin over his head.

  "Friend, friend..." said the man with the napkin on his head, as he gently rocked Rex on the park bench. When he saw Rex's eyes flick open, he straightened up, and the white cloth moved like he might have smiled underneath it. Rex raised himself up onto an elbow, but when he raised his voice his head pounded.

  "Hey, back off, buddy. I ain't your friend," he said, and realised he couldn't get off the park bench. He'd lain on one leg, which was now numb and useless. Rex swore, and then heard the man in the white hood laugh.

  "Welcome, friend, welcome." At regular volume his voice was rich and deep, the accent a strong and familiar Yankee twang. "You have led us a merry dance, but you're in safe hands now."

  Rex closed his eyes again, thinking perhaps that would ease the buzzing in his head which had now returned, louder and heavier than ever, and that perhaps the weirdo in the mask would vanish in a puff of smoke. Sleeping on a park bench in New York City was exactly the right way to attract weirdos and worse.

  "Buddy, I'm not interested." Rex made it to the sitting position and hammered on his left thigh, urging the blood to flow and the feeling to return. "If you don't quit it, you'll know what's coming." Rex looked up at the man, knowing his threat didn't quite make sense. But for all the confident voice and pose, the man in the hood was smaller than Rex. Rex was tall and broad, an ex-boxer run a little to fat. On purely a weightby-weight ratio, he'd be able to floor the man without much effort if he didn't goddamn leave Rex alone.

  The man reached to help Rex stand, but Rex shrugged the hand off his arm instantly. He made another threat, a more cogent one this time, although this just made the masked man laugh more. As he watched, Rex could see the hanging front of the cloth mask puff out with each expelled breath.

  The man stood to his full height, and placed his hands in the pockets of his smart double-breasted suit.

  "Rex, I'm here to help you. You'll understand that shortly, but I think we need to get you inside and cleaned up first. Come, let me help you up."

  Rex pushed the man away for the second time, although now he managed to push himself up off the park bench to stand. He stood nearly a foot taller than the man in the mask, even as Rex swayed on his feet. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  "How do you know my name? Who are you? What's with the get-up?"

  "Allow me to introduce myself. My name will not mean anything to you, but people call me the Pastor of Lost Souls. And welcome to the Empire State. We have been expecting you for a long, long time."

 

 
 

 
 

THE MEAL WAS GOOD, but the Pastor hadn't joined Rex. He'd sat at the table – but hadn't touched his own food as Rex ate, and then stood and left as soon as Rex's plate was clean, saying only that he would be back shortly and that Rex should wait there. After a few minutes, Rex shuffled his chair over to the Pastor's spot and ate his meal too. It was cold, and under any other circumstances dreary fare, but for Rex, food had never tasted so good. He mashed the cold egg, cold half of a sausage, cold potatoes and hard bread together, the pain in his head and the buzzing behind his eyes lessening with each mouthful. When he was done he felt full and much happier. He sat back, and looked around the room.

  They were at the top of a three-level house, in an office. It was virtually empty, with bare board floor and white painted walls. The only items that offered any colour were the dark mahogany desk, and the big red title on the front of the book sitting on it, although its dust jacket was a stark black and white that seemed to match Rex's surroundings.

  Rex pushed his – the Pastor's – plate aside on the desktop, and reached for the book.
The Seduction of the Innocent
. Rex smirked, checked over his shoulder then, feeling faintly ridiculous, flipped it open at a random point.

  Huh. Some history book or something. Nothing salacious at all, despite what the title promised. Although the man in the white hood had called himself a pastor, Rex knew very well the kind of books that men like him liked to keep hidden away in the vestry. But this book was hidden in plain sight, and looked like a disappointing read.

  Rex heard voices downstairs. Hospitality of the Pastor aside, the house was a nutcase in itself. All the walls were white, and all the doors were open, and all the lights were on full. Each room was lit by round white bulbs, individually far too bright for the old building, and grouped together in wall settings of two, or chandeliers of a dozen, the effect was dazzling. White light reflected off white walls, with the open windows showing nothing but the black of the night outside. Rex could
hear
the world outside – the rain ebbing and pulsing, the wind picking up and funnelling between the tall buildings – but it was all invisible from inside the house.

  The House of Lost Souls. That's what the Pastor had called it. Rex had been impressed from the outside, with the house lit like a goddamn beacon in the dark city, and he quickly realised where he was. A commune, some sort of weird religious sect. The Pastor was a nut. Wearing that freak show hood was bad enough, but the house was full of his followers. Young, all smiling, eyes refracting the light which reduced their pupils to tiny pinpricks.

  Rex knew these kind of places existed, or rather, he had imagined they had, in New York City. But the fantasy in his head had been one of shadows and decadence and insubstantial, diaphanous clothing. Not a bunch of lefties sat crossed-legged on the floor listening to their beloved leader lecture them about moral turpitude.

  Rex stood up, the cold meal sitting heavily in his stomach as he thought of another option. He whistled low, and scuffed the floorboards with a brown shoe. Communists? Anarchists? Maybe Fascists, perhaps funded by one of those groups spreading out in Europe? Well, holy smoke, if he hadn't just found himself a gold mine. Not only had he single-handedly removed one of the primary obstacles to the growth of his business empire, which would put the mayor squarely in his pocket, he could lead the authorities to a nice little collection of crazy anarchist loons on the side. Maybe these last few days were starting to turn around.

  "Rex, I hope you are feeling better."

  Rex turned. The Pastor was standing in the doorway to the office; one hand in his jacket pocket, thumb out, the other holding another copy of the black-and-white-jacketed book.

  Rex smiled and nodded, muttering a thanks for the meal. He had to play it cool, but his head was starting to hurt again. His eyes seemed to pop when they were looking in the Pastor's direction; glancing back at the two empty plates on the desk, his eyeballs didn't burn quite so much. It must have been the weird white light, and the knock on the head. He rubbed the back of his skull absently, wondering how many days' growth of stubble he had on his scalp.

  The Pastor jerked into life, walking from doorway to desk and sitting in the chair behind it. He placed the second copy of
Seduction
on top of the first, straightened the pair, then folded his hands into a steeple in front of his covered mouth, before gesturing to the empty chair in front of the desk. Rex waved a thank-you and sat.