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The cops exchanged glances. David had seen that expression on far too many faces the last few months. If there'd been any chance they were going to take him seriously, it was gone now. As far as these guys were concerned, he might as well put on a flowered housedress.

The cop with the notebook shook his head as he turned to leave. “Then you probably have a busy day of diaper changing or whatever. We've got this covered, Mr. Sparrow. You have yourself a good night, okay?”

“Yeah,” muttered the other cop. “Don't trip over your apron.”

There were both still laughing as they got in the squad car and then sped away.

*   *   *

David got the kids to school a little earlier the next morning so he could drive into the city. There was somebody he wanted to see, a person he'd known from the military. He drove to Amy's parking garage and left the Escalade. Trying to park in Charlie Finn's neighborhood wasn't a good idea.

He hopped on the subway and headed north. As he sat there listening to the click of the train along the tracks, he recalled what he knew about Charlie. A strange guy, but they liked each other.

Charlie had been David's handler his first year of solo ops. Eye in the sky, the voice in his ear through a satellite uplink. Charlie had guided David through a pretty hairy situation in Venezuela. David had taken a bullet in the side, but he'd gotten out. Barely. David had told Amy the scar was from a cycling accident.

After Venezuela, David had been sent back to the states, and when he was well enough, he tracked Charlie down and bought him a steak dinner at the best place in town. Charlie had saved David's ass. It was that simple. They'd hit it off. Charlie had been a little twitchy, which seemed standard with so many of those tech types, but he was amiable and sharp.

About a year later Charlie disappeared, and David was given a new handler. When David asked around, he heard a lot of rumors about Charlie going off the deep end with a bad drinking problem. David's perfunctory attempts to track down Charlie came up empty, and he eventually let it go. Sometimes people were hard to find because they didn't
want
to be found.

Then two years later, David got an e-mail from Charlie out of the blue. A name and address.
If you ever want to look me up, I'm here
. That sort of thing. David had moved on. Anna had just been born. So with a very mild stab of guilt, David filed away Charlie's e-mail and went on with his life.

Now David found himself on a subway headed for the Bronx, wondering if he was doing the right thing. He thought about calling ahead first, but somehow that felt like dipping a toe into a cold swimming pool. Better just to dive in and be done with it.

He got off the train at 161st Street and paused to look at Yankee Stadium. If he could get Brent more interested in sports, a day game would make for a nice afternoon. Hot dogs and cotton candy.

David headed up Gerard Street and then turned onto 164th, keeping track of the numbers on the sides of the buildings. A couple of the locals gave him the hard stare from their stoops as he passed. He wasn't worried, but he didn't let on like he noticed. The last thing he wanted was some confrontation that would delay him.

When he arrived at the building with Charlie's number, he double-checked to make sure. There was a burnt-out Toyota parked on the street in front of the building and a mountain of trash piled next to the building's entrance. David considered turning right around and going back the way he'd come. Charlie might not be in any position to grant favors. Nor in the mood for that matter. There was no reason to believe Charlie was the same man David had known six years ago.

Except you've ridden hell and gone out to the South Bronx to see him, so find your balls and ring the buzzer
.

David thumbed the buzzer for 1-B, a basement apartment. He counted to ten. Slowly. He hit the buzzer again.

A moment later a voice crackled through the speaker. “I'm not expecting nobody, and I didn't order no pizza. So lay off that buzzer.”

David grinned. A little more rust in the voice, but it was definitely Charlie Finn. David pressed the buzzer again.

“I said fuck off,” squawked the speaker.

“Charlie, it's me. David.”

“Well, pardon the shit out of me,” Charlie growled. “Fuck off,
David
.”

“It's David Sparrow, Charlie.”

A pause. “Captain?”

It was Major now, but that wasn't important. “David is fine.”

“Holy fucking shit. Hey, man, you want to come in? Shit, what a stupid question, like you just come all this way to stand on the fucking sidewalk. Hold on.”

The door buzzed, and David entered the building.

He descended a dank stairwell with a flickering fluorescent light, gang graffiti on the walls, and at the bottom Charlie was already opening his apartment door and beckoning to David.

They grinned at each other and shook hands, and a second later hugged, slapping each other hard on the back.

Charlie's skin hung loose on his middle-aged frame as if he were a man who'd gotten fat over time and then lost it all quickly. He was half black and half Puerto Rican and all Bronx. He wore a Ramones T-shirt, sweatpants that had been cut off for shorts, and a battered Syracuse Orangeman ball cap. The full black beard was new. No reason to shave every day if the military isn't making you.

“Man, been awhile, Captain.”

“David.”

“Right. David. Sorry.” He gestured him into the apartment. “Come on in, man.”

Inside the apartment, David saw exactly what he was hoping to see. Where somebody else might have set up a big-screen TV and a stereo, Charlie had installed a circular desk. Multiple keyboards and monitors and printers and scanners and a big media setup. David would have bet dollars to navy beans there was a nice little satellite array on the roof of Charlie's building. If he asked Charlie to turn on the lights in Yankee Stadium, David had no doubt that his former handler could plop down at his computer and have them shining in five minutes.

“You want some orange juice? I'm off cola.” Charlie shrugged. “And beer. Obviously. I could make some coffee.”

“I'm good. Thanks.”

“Have a seat.”

David sat on the edge of the sofa, and Charlie sat in his desk chair, swiveled around to face David. “Kids are okay? Your wife?”

“All good,” David said.

“Right. So. What are you doing here?”

David laughed. “Straight to it, huh?”

“You know I'm glad to see you,” Charlie said. “But it's sudden, you know?”

“Charlie, I'm afraid I'm here to be a jerk,” David said. “We haven't spoken in forever, and then suddenly I show up to ask you a favor. Not cool, right?”

Charlie scratched at his beard for a moment. “No, it's cool. I get it. I never had no kids, you know, but I can imagine. You had your hands full. You had your life happening.”

“I wouldn't be bothering you if it wasn't important.”

“You're not bothering me.” He grinned. “Yet. Maybe I'd better hear what this favor is.”

David told him the story. The man breaking into his house, how he nearly got his ass handed to him, the fact the intruder was poking around in Amy's desk. He even told him how the cops made fun of him for being a stay-at-home dad. He wrapped the story by reaching into his pocket and coming out with the sheet of paper with the intruder's fingerprints. He handed it to Charlie.

Charlie squinted at it. “You think there's more to this guy than the cops know?”

“I hope not,” David said. “Frankly, if you could work your magic and confirm everything is just as the police claim then that would be just fine with me. I can forget all about it.”

Charlie tugged at bits of his beard just under his bottom lip as he looked at the fingerprints again. “Okay, I think we can work with this. Sit tight and let me jam on these.”

David sat back on the couch and watched him work.

Charlie scanned in the fingerprints and then started to bring up databases, stitching them together for cross-referencing purposes. His hands flew over two different keyboards, all the monitors coming alive with data.

Charlie glanced over his shoulder at David. “Back when I was your handler, I left behind lots of backdoors into the system. They purged some of them, but I can still get in, and the other systems will all spread their legs for any other system with higher clearance. Thank you, Patriot Act.” He went back to work and then turned to David again a few seconds later. “Don't tell anybody that.”

“Don't worry,” David said.

Five minutes later, Charlie was nodding and pointing at the largest monitor. “Okay, here we go. Nolan Jakes. Got a police record here says everything you told me, robbery, burglary, petty larceny, the whole basic Whitman's Sampler of street crime.”

“So it's the real deal?” David asked.

“Oh, sure.”

David blew out a sigh of relief.

“But it's also bullshit.”

“What?”

“I mean it's a real police record in that it's really in the system and official,” Charlie said, “but I smell bullshit.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's not messy.”

“Talk me through this nice and slow,” David said. “Because I'm not following you.”

“If you've looked at police records before you know they're messy.” Charlie pulled at his beard again, trying to figure how to explain. “You ever see a planned community?”

“I know what you mean.”

“All the streets are laid out evenly,” Charlie said. “A perfect grid. Planned and predictable. Then look at some old European city. The streets and alleys were made up as they went along. The place evolved over centuries. It's messy, but it's
real
. Has a completely different feel.”

“You're saying the police report feels wrong?”

“Yeah. Because it's not messy,” Charlie said. “With this kind of rap sheet, it all gets added on a little at a time. Reports come through the system from other precincts or from out of state. I should be getting search hits from all over the place on this guy, but instead it's all just right there. Boom.”

“So…” David groped to follow what Charlie was saying. “It's like somebody wrote the whole thing at once.”

“Exactly,” Charlie said. “And look at the PDFs of the police reports. They're all typed perfectly. Not even one spelling error, nothing crossed out. Cops can't type for shit, trust me, I know. The file on this guy was put together and inserted into the system, so anyone looking him up would find
this
instead of his real record. And whoever did it wasn't figuring on somebody like me looking too closely at it.”

David let that sink in. Ordinary beat cops like the ones he had spoken to last night wouldn't even blink. They checked the record like they always did, and that was that.

He considered the flash drive the burglar had attempted to steal, thought about handing it over to Charlie to see what he could do with it. But he'd just connected again with the man and didn't want to push it so soon. Besides, David wanted to go over it himself first.

“Charlie, with those fingerprints is there any chance you can poke around and find out who this guy really is?”

A shrug. “Yeah. No guarantees, but it's worth a try. I'd have to run some really slow search programs, underneath radar encrypted type stuff. It'll take some time, but we can see what we see.”

“Look, I know this computer stuff costs money,” David said. “And you're spending time on this. You've got to let me toss you a few bucks.”

Charlie waved him away, laughing. “Naw, man, this kind of thing is fun for me. Don't sweat it.”

“Charlie, come on.”

“Hey, you think I need the money? Don't worry about old Charlie. He's doing fine.”

David glanced around the room. He hadn't bothered to notice when he'd come in but the interior of the apartment was far nicer than the exterior of Charlie's building would indicate. The furnishings and carpeting were every bit as good as what David had in his own house.

Maybe Charlie was reading his mind. “This is my neighborhood, you know? So I came back here. I could live anywhere, but I came home. These are my people. You pass that hot dog cart when you came out of the subway?”

David pictured the hot dog cart outside the station, the skinny old man standing next to it. “Yeah.”

“That's Saul. I bought that cart for him and in return, he kicks back to me each month. I clear maybe thirty to forty bucks a month on Saul.”

“Thirty to forty a month,” David said deadpan. “So you probably hang out with Bill Gates and Donald Trump all the time is what you're saying.”

“Yeah, yeah, you always were a funny guy,” Charlie said. “But multiply that times a hundred and seventy-four carts and it adds up.”

“Ah.”

“And it's tax free in cash,” added Charlie. “Don't tell anybody that.”

David made a zipper closing gesture across his mouth.

“And with my setup”—he waved a hand at the computers—“I'm able to pick up an insider stock tip once in a while. Don't tell anybody
that,
either.”

David held up his hands in surrender. “Okay. You can help me for the sheer fun of it. Hell, maybe you should lend me a few bucks.”

Charlie laughed. “Look, Captain—David—it's good to see you again. Let me see what I can find out. Maybe nothing, but who knows? But if you've got motherfuckers breaking into your house, then hell yeah, of course I'll help.”

“Thanks. It means a lot,” David said. “Let me give you my cell number. It's unlisted.”

“Don't bother.” Charlie grinned. “Unlisted just means it'll take me an extra thirty seconds to find it.”

 

CHAPTER SIX