The Burning Wire (Lincoln Rhyme 9)

He looked out the window of the town house into the complex geometry of buildings and beyond, where he could just see a bit of stonework from the Brooklyn Bridge. A portion of Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" came to mind.

The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious;

My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

These words were true of him as well. The facade of Fred Dellray: hip, ornery, tough, man of the street. Occasionally thinking, more than occasionally thinking, What if I'm getting it wrong?

The beginning lines of the next stanza of Whitman's poem, though, were the kicker:

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;

I am he who knew what it was to be evil . . .

"What'm I going to do?" he mused.

Justice For the Earth . . .

He ruefully recalled turning down the chance to go to a high-level conference on satellite and data intelligence gathering and analysis. The memo had read, "The Shape of the Future."

Slipping into street, Dellray had said aloud, "Here's the shape of the few-ture." And rolled the memo into a ball, launching it into a trash bin for a three-pointer.

"So, you're just . . . home?" Serena asked, wiping Preston's mouth. The baby giggled and wanted more. She obliged and tickled him too.

"I had one angle on the case. And it vanished. Well, I lost it. I trusted somebody I shouldn't've. I'm outa the loop."

"A snitch? Walked out on you?"

An inch away from mentioning the one hundred thousand. But he didn't go there.

"Gone and vanished," Dellray muttered.

"Gone and vanished? Both?" Serena's face grew theatrically grave. "Don't tell me he absconded and disappeared too?"

The agent could resist the smile no longer. "I only use snitches with extra-ordinary talents." Then the smile faded. "In two years he never missed a debriefing or call."

Of course, in those two years I never paid him till after he'd delivered.

Serena asked, "So what're you going to do?"

He answered honestly, "I don't know."

"Then you can do me a favor."

"I suppose. What?"

"You know all that stuff in the basement, that you've been meaning to organize?"

Fred Dellray's first reaction was to say, You've got to be kidding. But then he considered the leads he had in the Galt case, which were none, and, hefting the baby on his hip, rose and followed her downstairs.

Chapter 56

RON PULASKI COULD still hear the sound. The thud and then the crack.

Oh, the crack. He hated that.

Thinking back to his first time working for Lincoln and Amelia: how he'd gotten careless and had been smacked in the head with a bat or club. He knew about the incident though he couldn't remember a single thing about it. Careless. He'd turned the corner without checking on the whereabouts of the suspect and the man had clocked him good.

The injury had made him scared, made him confused, made him disoriented. He did the best he could--oh, he tried hard--though the trauma kept coming back. And even worse: It was one thing to get lazy and walk around a corner when he should've been careful, but it was something very different to make a mistake and hurt somebody else.