Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

Beside the municipal buildings were open fields that had been converted into recreational facilities, baseball and soccer fields, tennis courts, picnic areas. There was even a driving range.

Our destination, the Charles H. Gay Men’s Shelter, was at the bottom of the off-ramp, a large, wide four-story redbrick building behind a black iron fence. It almost looked like a private school until we got closer and saw the broken beer bottles and piles of vomit peppering the curb by its gate. We parked just beyond the M35 bus stop out front, where a white-bearded old Hispanic man lay splayed flat on his back on a bench, sleeping.

We told the security guard inside the door what we wanted, and he buzzed us in to see the facility’s day director, Nolan Washington, in his office just off the lobby.

“There must be some mistake,” said Washington, a well-dressed XXL black man and former air force medic. “You’re looking for a criminal? Here?”

He rolled his eyes as he sat us down on his office sofa with some coffee.

“That’s a joke, in case you were wondering,” he said, accepting the photo of Roger that Arturo handed him. “We got plenty of people with serious criminal histories here, especially sexual assaults. They commit offenses, go upstate to jail, and then when the jails dump them back out, they come back home to nothing and we get to deal with the mess.”

“This place looks pretty empty,” I said. “How does the shelter work?”

“We open at eight p.m. and close the doors at the ten p.m. curfew. Everybody has to be out by eight the next morning. They’re supposed to look for work, make some attempt to try to become self-sufficient. But they don’t. They mostly drink and drug and l

ie around all day like oversize alley cats until we open the doors back up at eight p.m. It’s pretty frustrating.”

“So have you seen Roger?” I said, redirecting his attention to the photo.

“Let me grab my glasses,” he said, lifting a pair off his desk.

He slipped on bifocals and stared at the sheet thoughtfully.

“Wait a second,” he said, his eyes suddenly brightening. “I think we just hired this guy in the kitchen. But his name isn’t Roger, it’s Simon. Simon Ritt? No, Britt. That’s it. Simon Britt.”

He blinked up at us.

“He should be here right now.”

CHAPTER 85

WASHINGTON TOOK OFF HIS bifocals as he lifted a phone.

“Hey, Sam, is that new guy, Simon, in?” he said.

He listened.

“Uh-huh. OK. Thanks.”

“He’s on his morning break,” Washington said as he hung up. “They said he just took one of the maintenance carts to go to the snack bar by the driving range.”

We rushed back outside with a trailing Washington, who hopped into the backseat. We were coming along the concrete columns of the Triborough about a quarter mile north on one of the island’s access roads when Washington pointed forward through the windshield.

“There he is! That’s him in the green cart.”

Instead of the golf cart I thought he’d be driving, Roger, wearing kitchen whites, was on a green John Deere quad-like off-road vehicle. He turned his head as we were coming alongside him. I smiled as our eyes met.

Then Roger disappeared.

I almost ran him over as he suddenly cut savagely to the left in front of the Chevy, up over a curb under the Triborough Bridge overpass.

I immediately slammed on the brakes and wheeled left, the Chevy’s tires throwing dirt and gravel as we bumped up off the road into a construction site under the bridge.

“Aw, c’mon, man,” I heard Washington say in the back as he clicked on a seat belt.

When we came back out on the other side of the overpass, we saw Roger. He was back near the shelter, tearing away on the deceptively fast little vehicle across some baseball fields toward the shore of the island, where there was a footbridge back to Manhattan.

I couldn’t let him get away. Not again. Arturo and Washington and I almost hit the roof of the Chevy twice as I sailed down and up over the access road’s two curbs. The Hispanic man sleeping at the bus stop got a rude awakening as I raced past the shelter into the baseball field at about sixty and climbing.