Worst Case (Michael Bennett 3)

But he just couldn’t help himself when he stopped for the second time, on 33rd, one block south of the Empire State Building. Putting down his case, he halted before the telephone company’s idling box truck on the corner.

“Excuse me!” he said to the oaf eating his breakfast behind the driver’s side window. He rapped sharply with his Columbia ring on the glass right beside the jerk’s face. “I said, excuse me!”

The phone guy threw open the door and leapt out onto the sidewalk. He had a shaved head and the shoulders of a defensive lineman.

“Fuck you knocking on my window for, dog?” he bellowed, spitting doughnut crumbs.

“Fuck you idling your truck for, dog?” Francis shot back. “You’re violating Section twenty-four-dash-one-sixty-three of the New York City Administrative Code: ‘No person shall cause or permit the engine of a motor vehicle, other than a legally authorized emergency motor vehicle, to idle for longer than three minutes while parking.’ You see that poison coming out of your tailpipe there? It includes chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and acetaldehyde, not to mention particulate matter that can lodge deep in your lungs. It kills people, heats up the environment, too. Now shut it—”

The gaping, wide-eyed phone company man let out a kind of snort as his huge hand suddenly reached out. He snatched Francis’s tie and swung him around in a full three-sixty before letting him go. Francis actually went off his feet as he slammed into a newspaper box on the corner. He skinned his chin and the palms of his hands as he went ass over tea kettle onto Fifth Avenue. Horns honked as Gotham Writers’ Workshop pamphlets fluttered past his face.

Turning, Francis got a good mouthful of particulate matter–laced exhaust as the fleeing phone truck left rubber. He coughed as he pulled himself back into a sitting position on the curb.

There were pebbles embedded in his bleeding palms, a streak of something black and wet across the forearm of his tailored suit jacket. He looked down at the torn knee of his Savile Row pants. For a moment, he was back in the schoolyard again, picked on and knocked down by assholes who were bigger and older. Like it did then, the misery of feeling powerless began to bubble up.

But then, the startled fury on the phone man’s face came back to him, and he was suddenly laughing. He had to stop this nonsense. He’d gotten off easy, Francis realized, considering how large the man was. He was lucky the guy hadn’t killed him.

Besides, he wasn’t powerless anymore, was he? he thought as he found his valise. He patted it lovingly before he lifted it and continued his pilgrimage north.

A snatch of grammar school Robert Frost came to him as he picked up his pace.

He recited to himself, But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Chapter 68

“DADDY, DO MY ashes look okay? I told Grandpa to do a good job,” my five-year-old, Chrissy, said as we sat by the window inside the crowded Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway.

We’d just dropped off her siblings at school after church. Chrissy, who was in kindergarten now, luckily didn’t have to go in until noon. In our big family, one-on-one time was an extremely rare commodity. Not even a nasty killing spree would make me miss our Wednesday-morning Starbucks date.

“I don’t know. Let me see,” I said, reaching across the table, holding her tiny chin in my hand as I peered at her. I couldn’t help but kiss her elflike nose. “They look great, Chrissy. Grandpa did fine. And they go really well with your hot chocolate mustache.”

As she went back to her drink, I looked at the long line by the pastry case. Waiting for their morning fix of Seattle’s main export were nannies with infants, tired-looking construction workers, and tired-looking men and women dressed in business clothes. Maybe ten percent of them, along with one of the baristas, had ashes.

I wondered with a cold chill if it was in the killer’s mind to shoot people who had ashes today. That he was going to do something was a given. Every indication was that today was the day. The only questions left were where and how.

I rubbed my eyes before I lifted my coffee and took a large gulp. My blood caffeine level had hit record highs in the past couple of sleepless days, but it couldn’t be helped

. After last night’s end-of-day task force meeting, I’d spent much of the night Googling everything I could on Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday was one of the most solemn days in the Catholic liturgical year. It was a day for contemplating one’s transgressions.

But whose transgressions was the killer trying to point out with the slayings? The dead kids’? Society’s? His own?

I caught my ash-streaked, mournful reflection in the plate glass.

Well, I was certainly stewing in my own lapses this morning, I thought, looking away. For not already putting an end to this horrible case.

As Chrissy played peekaboo with a neighboring toddler in a stroller, I checked my cell phone for the millionth time to see if I had missed any messages. I winced when only my Yankees-logo wallpaper appeared again. Emily had put an incredible rush on the print, but there was still no word.

I spun my phone on the chessboard tabletop as I looked out the window down Broadway. I could feel the moments slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do.

Where and how? I thought. Where and how?

Chapter 69

MY CASE-DISTRACTED MIND still hadn’t come a hundred percent back online as I stepped with Chrissy into my apartment ten minutes later. Otherwise, I would have checked my caller ID before I snapped open my phone.

“What’s the story?” I yelled into it.