Mad Dog Justice (17 page)

He turns and looks back.

Bluetooth Guy is coming. Fast.

The train begins moving. Picks up speed.

Roddy whirls around. Realizing he’s at the metro-level entrance to Bloomingdale’s, he races into the store. Rotating his neck, he glances in every direction. No sign of his pursuer. Roddy’s in the men’s casual-wear department. Brushing past rows of jeans, sports jackets, slacks, belts, and gloves, he smells leather and fabric. He keeps moving, scampering past racks of clothing and displays. His breath whines in his ears.

Scanning the store, he sees a stairway. He scrambles up the stairs and comes to the store’s main floor. He looks back, no longer seeing Bluetooth Guy. But the man could have ducked behind a display or might be moving along a parallel aisle among the store’s myriad racks and shelves.

As he passes through the cosmetics department, a floral fragrance assails him. His eyes sweep the area. In the reflection of a mirrored pillar, Roddy sees a man wearing a black anorak. It’s a momentary flash—maybe half a second or less—and Roddy can’t be sure it’s Bluetooth Guy.

Another glimpse—in the periphery of his vision—as the figure moves behind a display. Roddy’s insides jolt. Looks like it was Bluetooth Guy.

Roddy strides toward the 3rd Avenue exit, passes shoppers and browsers, moves past an in-store bakery and glances back. No sign of Bluetooth Guy.

He exits the store onto 3rd Avenue. The frigid night air hits him like an arctic blast amid the rumble of busses, a northbound stream of headlights, the rush of taxis, and the hissing of a truck’s air brakes. WALK and DON’T WALK signs blink amid a maelstrom of noise and people streaming through the winter air, breath vapor rising in the lighted street.

Roddy sees an older woman opening a taxi door. She’s exiting the cab. A young, fashionably dressed woman holding two shopping bags waits for the older one to get out of the taxi. Roddy
watches. The older woman’s foot hits the pavement.

At that second, Roddy lunges ahead and cuts in front of the young woman at the curb. “Sorry,” he calls, and jumps into the taxi. He plops into the back bench seat—behind the driver—and tries to close the door. The young woman grabs the outside handle and tugs the door open. “Hey,” she shrieks. “What are you
doing
?” and uses her body weight to hold the door open. Roddy clamps his hand on the inside handle and pulls. The door slams shut.

The vinyl seat is cracked, concave, and still warm. He sinks into the depression left by countless asses. The cab is overheated and smells of the older woman’s perfume.

“Head north on 3rd,” Roddy shouts to the driver, a Middle Eastern–looking man with a closely cropped beard.

The woman pounds frantically on the taxi door. Her voice penetrates the window; her face contorts in rage. The taxi lurches ahead; her voice fades away amid the street noise as the vehicle moves uptown.

“Where to?” asks the driver.

“I’ll let you know. Just go.”

Roddy’s heart pumps like a piston. He slumps down in the seat, opens his canvas bag, and removes a black baseball cap. He pulls it low over his eyes. The taxi cruises into the thick stream of traffic. Amid honking horns, a siren pierces the night air. A moment later, traffic is at a standstill; the ambulance siren pops and then returns to its insistent whine. There must be an accident up ahead. The taxi stands in the middle lane of 3rd Avenue. It might as well have stalled.

Roddy straightens up and peers quickly out the taxi’s rear window. The avenue is a mass of movement beneath sodium vapor lights and a sea of headlights behind him.

Bluetooth Guy is right there, maybe fifty feet away. He popped out of Bloomingdale’s and stands outside the store, peering north
and south along the avenue. And he’s talking into his earpiece.

If he sees me, the guy could run up to the taxi, pull a gun, and pop me through the window
.

Roddy’s heart feels like it’s leaping into his neck. He ducks down, slips his hand inside his pocket, and grasps the revolver’s handle. He sees the driver sneak an uneasy peek at him through the rearview mirror.

Traffic begins to move, but it’s agonizingly slow. The driver jockeys for position, changes lanes, lurches ahead, stops, and starts again. Horns honk, and the street is flooded with people—shadowy, ghostlike figures in the night. They thread their way between stopped cars on the street. A bus in front of the taxi stops suddenly. The driver slams the taxi’s brakes and Roddy is hurled forward. His head nearly rams the Plexiglas barrier between the front and rear seats.

The driver changes lanes again, veers left, and lurches forward. Roddy sees the nearest street sign: East 64th Street.

“Hang a left on 65th,” he says.

The taxi inches to the west side of 3rd. At the next corner, the driver turns left onto East 65th.

“At Park, make another left.”

Park Avenue in the southbound direction is less jammed than 3rd, but it’s still slow-going. After what seems like an eternity, they pass through the divided aerial roadway of the Helmsley Building and continue south along lower Park Avenue. Traffic thins out, but people still swarm toward subway stations at the end of the workday. He’s lost Bluetooth Guy, but there could be a third man following. They’re in telephone contact. Roddy thinks back to Sergeant Dawson.

Live by your wits. Improvise. Vanquish fear and panic
.

Looking behind the taxi, Roddy sees an ocean of headlights. He smells exhaust fumes, even with the taxi windows closed.

“Go down to 14th Street,” Roddy calls to the driver and
reaches for his wallet. “I’ll get out at Union Square.”

He pulls out a twenty and hands it to the driver through the opening in the Plexiglas barrier. “Keep the change,” he says, jumping out of the taxi as it pulls up to the curb. He sprints to the subway entrance and rushes down the stairway leading to the downtown side of the station. He swipes his MetroCard, but it doesn’t register.

Too fast. Swipe the card gently
.

He swipes again; it still doesn’t work.

Slow down … slow down … get it right
.

He swipes the card once more—very slowly, holding his breath—and the mechanism activates. He pushes through the turnstile and races down the stairs to the platform. He has a choice: either the downtown local or the express. They run along each side of the platform.

He’ll take whichever comes first.

Just as he reaches the platform, the express train roars into the station. When it squeals to a stop, the doors open and passengers pour out of each car. Just in case he’s been followed, Roddy waits for a few seconds. Then he jumps into the train a moment before the doors slide shut. Amid the press of people, beneath the fluorescent lights and subway ads for hemorrhoids, moles, skin tags, and acne, he edges toward a center pole as the train hurtles downtown.

At the Bowling Green station, Roddy hears an announcement: it’s the last stop in Manhattan.

Next stop: Court Street–Borough Hall. Brooklyn.

The train rushes through the tunnel beneath the East River. Picking up speed, it shudders and roars at sixty miles an hour. Red and yellow lights flash on the tunnel walls and the train rocks left and right. It’s a thunderous sound with a rap-like rhythm as they streak beneath the riverbed.

It seems like Roddy left Bronxville an eternity ago. His army
training has helped him stay alive—escape and evasion tactics—but he has to do more. He can’t keep on running.
Gotta do more—much more
. But he can’t take the fight to the enemy unless he knows who they are. He must somehow learn who’s after him and then go on the offense.

The train shrieks to a stop at the Court Street–Borough Hall station. The crowd piles onto a grease-stained platform. Roddy ascends a flight of stairs; he presses the baseball cap down and keeps his head low. He pushes through a turnstile and climbs another flight of stairs.

He walks quickly past the Ionic columns of the Borough Hall building into the Brooklyn night. The air smells different: fresh and clean. A melancholic feeling of déjà vu floods him. It’s so powerful, he stops in his tracks. The street appears blurred, dreamlike—as though he’s in a daze. Strangely, he thinks back to his time in Brooklyn. He wonders where Jackie Kurtz is now. Is he even alive? And what’s he doing? And Tommy Hart, Johnny Rinaldi, Benny Gantz, and the others. A lump forms in his throat.

Never forget who you are or where you came from
.

He moves away from the colonnaded building, crosses the street, and makes his way through eddies of frigid Brooklyn air.

T
he Marriott is an ultramodern, twenty-five-story building near the Brooklyn waterfront. It’s in the MetroTech Center, a business and educational hub created as part of the revitalization of Downtown Brooklyn. Roddy recalls reading about it in the
Times
.

No one would ever think about looking for him here.

Approaching the hotel, Roddy peers across the expanse of windswept Adams Street. A newspaper page twists in the blustery wind, flies through the night air, and presses against a hedge on the median divide. Cars pour down the avenue in an endless procession of head-and taillights. Seeing the rear entrance of Brooklyn’s Supreme Court building, Roddy is jolted back to the day the judge sentenced him to three years of army service instead of a juvenile detention center. It’s the day Roddy’s always thought of as the first day of his new and better life.

He’s back where he started—in more ways than one.

Entering the hotel, he takes the escalator to the mezzanine, rising through a spacious, foliage-filled atrium with a skylight roof. At the reception desk, a pert, blond woman wearing a smartly tailored gray blazer greets him with a warm smile. Her name tag reads “Holly.” She’s maybe twenty-five and wears her hair pulled back in a scalp-tightening ponytail, just as Tracy does. She has porcelain-pale skin, green eyes, and Celtic features; for
a moment, Roddy thinks he could be standing before a younger version of his wife. There’s an intense feeling of déjà vu mixed with an awareness of his present plight. He feels a wrenching tug of regret as he thinks of Tracy and the kids staying in Nutley. It dawns on him with sledgehammer intensity that his marriage could be on the verge of ending.

“What can I do for you, sir?” Holly asks as she tilts her head and smiles.

“I’d like a room on a high floor.”

“Certainly, sir,” Holly says with a nod. “How long will you be staying with us?”

“Can I let you know in a few days?”

“Of course, sir,” she says. Their eyes meet. Holly’s irises are Caribbean green and look bottomless, just as Tracy’s do. Roddy feels suddenly as though he’s slipped back in time to when he and Tracy met by chance in the medical library at New York Hospital. The memory of that day usually warms him, but not tonight.

As Roddy hands Holly his credit card, he smells her skin; it’s vaguely reminiscent of Tracy, but his wife’s scent is unlike any other woman’s he’s ever known. It’s not perfume, soap, or lotion. It’s simply Tracy. Watching Holly slide his credit card into the slot, he notices her fingers are tapered with buffed nails. She wears clear nail polish and hardly any makeup—also reminiscent of Tracy. He’s so aware of missing Tracy, he wonders if he’ll be seeing her—even sensing her presence—everywhere.

T
he room is a spacious, L-shaped single; a king-sized bed is covered by a down comforter. There’s a mahogany credenza and desk and a built-in chest of drawers in the room and a fifty-two-inch flat-panel HD television mounted on the wall. And there’s the obligatory minibar stuffed with miniature bottles of top-shelf booze. A large thermal-pane window faces the Gothic towers
of the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the East River. Crossing the bridge, necklaces of red and white lights slink languorously in the distance. Lower Manhattan’s crenellated wall of glittering lights looms just beyond the bridge and reflects on the inky waters below. Gazing at the city’s looming towers of glass and concrete fills Roddy with a sense of estrangement. Tracy and the kids are apart from him; he’s back in Brooklyn—but not the Brooklyn of his youth—not Sheepshead Bay with its moored fishing boats and waterfront restaurants. He’s in a distant place, far removed from where he’s been for so many years. And so different from his long-ago past.

The sight of the red monolith known as One Police Plaza on the other side of the river reminds Roddy of looking out the window of Captain Greene’s office the day he and Danny reported Kenny missing.

And this room: comfortable in a functional sort of way. It has a decorator’s sensibility—silk flowers, a faux oil painting, and fabrics in beige, ivory, and chocolate brown, lit by the soft glow of cookie-cutter bedside lamps. The room is orderly and serviceable in a stylishly impersonal way, completely lacking the loving touches of home. The room is quiet, even tomb-like. Absent are the ordinary sounds of life to which he’s accustomed. Roddy hears only the blood rushing in his ears.

He unpacks his few items of clothing and sets his cell phone on the desk. He tucks the pistol in the bedside table drawer. The sight of it sends a quick shiver down his neck and spine. It’s emblematic of how drastically everything has changed. He takes out the disposable cell he bought when he picked one up for Danny.

His cell phone rings—not the disposable. Looking at the screen, he sees it’s from Colleen’s house in Nutley.

“Tracy?”

“You have some nerve,” she says in a quivering voice.

“Tracy, what’s wrong?”

“It’s
Sandy
,” she nearly sobs.

“What’s going on?”

“I … I told the kids that some unsavory characters were connected with the restaurant and you didn’t want them coming to our house. And Sandy … she … she began crying hysterically. She told me she was outside the house last spring when a big, fat man approached her and said he was looking for Dr. Dolan.”

The day Grange came to the house and gave Sandy his business card
.

“And he touched her and kissed her. He gave her a card and said he’d come
back
.” Tracy barely controls her sobs. “Sandy was scared to death. And she said she told you what happened and gave you this man’s card.”