The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (14 page)

White guy, neat suit, way out of place. He didn’t look cop but he didn’t look queer neither. Looked like some sort of missionary.

“A van in the airport parking garage. You pick it up, drive it into Manhattan, park it, and walk away.”

“A van,” said Gus.

“A van.”

“What’s in it?”

Dude just shook his head. Handed over an index card folded over five new tens. “Just a taste.”

Gus pulled out the bills, like lifting the meat out of a sandwich. “If you PD, this entrapment.”

“The pickup time is written on there. Don’t be early, and don’t be late.”

Gus thumbed the folded tens in his hand like sampling a fine fabric. Dude saw this. Dude also saw, Gus realized, the three small circles tattooed onto the webbing of Gus’s hand. Mex gang symbol for thief, but how would this dude know that? Was that why he made him back in the store? Why the dude had picked him?

“Keys and further instructions will be in the glove compartment.”

The dude started walking away.

“Yo,” said Gus after him. “I didn’t say yes yet.”

Gus pulled open the door—waited; no alarm—and climbed inside. Didn’t see no cameras—but he wouldn’t anyway, would he? Behind the front seats was a metal partition without a window. Bolted in there, aftermarket. Maybe truck full of PD he’s driving around.

Van felt still, though. He opened the glove compartment, again using the rag. Gently, as if a gag snake might jump out at him, and the little light came on. Laid out inside was the ignition key, the parking garage ticket he needed to get out, and a manila envelope.

He looked inside the envelope and the first thing he saw was his pay. Five new $100 bills, which pleased and pissed him off at the same time. Pleased him because it was more than he had expected, and pissed him off because no one would break a century from him without a hassle, especially nowhere in the hood. Even a bank would scan the hell out of those bills, coming out of the pocket of an eighteen-year-old tatted-up Mexican.

Folded around the bills was another index card listing the destination address and a garage access code,
GOOD FOR ONE USE ONLY
.

He compared the cards side by side. Same handwriting.

Anxiety faded as excitement rose.
Sucker!
Trusting him with this vehicle. Gus knew, right off the top of his head, three different spots in the South Bronx to take this baby for
reconditioning
. And to quickly satisfy his curiosity as to what sort of contraband goodness he was carrying in back.

The last item in the larger envelope was a smaller, letter-size envelope. He withdrew a few sheets of paper, unfolded them, and a warm flame rose out of the center of his back and into his shoulders and neck.

AUGUSTIN ELIZALDE
, headed the first one. It was Gus’s rap sheet, his juvenile jacket leading up to the manslaughter conviction and his being kicked free with a clean slate on his eighteenth birthday, just three short weeks ago.

The second page showed a copy of his driver’s license and, below that, his
mother’s
driver’s license with the same East 115th Street address. Then a small picture of the front door of their building at the Taft Houses.

He stared at that paper for two straight minutes. His mind raced back and forth between that missionary-looking dude and how much he knew, and his
madre
here, and what kind of bad shit Gus had gotten himself into this time.

Gus didn’t take well to threats. Especially involving his
madre
: he had already put her through enough.

The third page was printed in the same handwriting as the index cards. It read:
NO STOPS
.

G
us sat at the window of the Insurgentes, eating his fried eggs doused with Tabasco sauce, looking at the white van double-parked out on Queens Boulevard. Gus loved breakfast, and, since getting out, had eaten breakfast at nearly every meal. He ordered specific now, because he could: bacon extra crispy, burn the toast.

Fuck them,
NO STOPS
. Gus didn’t like this game, not once they included his
madre
. He watched the van, thinking over his options, waiting for something to happen. Was he being watched? If so, how close? And if they could watch him—why weren’t they just driving the van themselves? What kind of shit had he gotten himself into here?

What was inside that van?

A couple of
cabrones
came sniffing around the front of the van. They ducked their heads and scattered when Gus emerged from the diner, his top-buttoned flannel shirt flaring out behind him in the late-day breeze, tats sleeving his bare forearms in bright accents of red around jailhouse black. The Latin Sultans’ cred carried out of Spanish
Harlem north and east to the Bronx, and as far south into Queens. Their numbers were small, their shadow long. You didn’t mess with one unless you wanted war with all.

He pulled out into the boulevard, continuing west toward Manhattan, one eye out for tails. The van bounced over some roadwork and he listened closely but heard nothing shift in back. Yet something was weighing down the suspension.

He got thirsty and pulled over again outside a corner market, picking up two twenty-four-ounce cans of Tecate. He jammed one of the red-and-gold cans into the cup holder and pulled out again, the city buildings coming up across the river now, the sun falling behind them. Night was coming. He thought about his brother at home, Crispin, that shitbag addict, showing up just as Gus was trying his best to be good to his mother. Sweating out chemicals on the living room sofa, and all Gus wanted to do was slide a rusty blade between his ribs. Bringing his disease into their crib. His older brother was a ghoul, a straight-up zombie, but she wouldn’t put him out. She let him lay around and pretended he wasn’t shooting smack in her bathroom, biding time until he would vanish again, along with some of her things.

Gus needed to put some of this
dinero sucio
aside for his
madre
. Give it to her
after
Crispin was gone. Stick some more in his hat and leave it there for her. Make her happy. Do something right.

Gus pulled out his phone before the tunnel. “Felix, man. Come get me.”

“Where you at, bro?”

“I’ll be down Battery Park.”

“Battery Park? All the way down there, Gusto?”

“So roll over to Ninth and drop straight down, bitch. We’re going out. Have ourselves a party, man. That money I owe you—I made me some flash today. Bring me out a jacket or something to wear, clean shoes. Get me into a club.”

“Fuckin’—anything else?”

“Just pull your fingers out of your sister’s
concha
and come get me—
comprende
?”

He came out of the tunnel into Manhattan and drove across town before turning south. He maneuvered onto Church Street, south of Canal, and started checking street signs. The address was a loft building fronted with scaffolding, its windows plastered with building
permits, but without any construction trucks around. The street was quiet, residential. The garage worked as advertised, the access code raising a steel door under which the van just fit, rolling down a ramp beneath the building.

Gus parked and sat still a moment, listening. The garage was dingy and underlit, looking to him like a good trap, the kicked-up dust swirling in the fading light through the open doorway. His impulse was to beat a hasty retreat, but he needed to be sure he was out clean. He waited as the garage door rolled shut.

Gus folded the pages and envelope from the glove compartment and stuffed them inside his pockets, draining the last of the first beer and crushing the can to an aluminum pick, then stepping out of the van. After a moment’s deliberation, he went back in with his hand rag and wiped down the steering wheel, the radio knobs, the glove compartment, the door handles inside and out, and anything else he thought he might have touched.

He looked around the garage, the only light now coming in between the blades of an exhaust fan, dust drifting like a mist in its faint rays. Gus wiped off the ignition key, then went around to the side and back doors of the van. He tried the handles, just to see. They were locked.

He thought about it a moment, and then curiosity got the better of him. He tried the key.

The locks were different from the ignition. Part of him was relieved.

Terrorists
, he thought.
Could be I’m a fucking terrorist now. Driving a van full of explosives.

What he could do was drive the van back out of here. Park it outside the nearest police precinct, leave a note on the windshield. Have them see if it’s anything or nothing.

But these fuckers had his address. His
madre
’s address. Who were they?

He got angry, a heat flare of shame shooting up his back. He pounded the meat of his fist once against the side of the white van, demonstrating his dissatisfaction with the arrangement. A satisfying sound resounded within, breaking the silence. He gave up then, tossing the key onto the front seat and slamming the driver’s door with his elbow—another satisfying bang.

But then—instead of getting quiet quickly again—he heard something. Or thought he did: something inside. With the last of the light eking in through the fan grate, Gus got right up to the locked back doors to listen, his ear almost touching the van.

Something. Almost … like a stomach rumbling. That same kind of empty, roiling hunger. A stirring.

Ah, what the fuck,
he decided, stepping back.
The deed is done
.
So long as the bomb goes off below 110th Street, what do I care?

A dull but distinct
bang
from inside the van rocked Gus back a step. The paper bag containing the second cerveza slipped from underneath his arm, and the can burst and sprayed beer over the gritty floor.

The spraying faded to a dull foaming, and Gus bent to gather up the mess, then stopped, crouching, his hand on the soaked bag.

The van listed ever so slightly. Its undercarriage springs pinged once.

Something had moved or shifted inside.

Gus straightened, leaving the burst beer on the ground and moving backward, shoes scraping the grit. A few steps away, he reset himself, willing himself to relax. His trick was to think that someone was watching him lose his cool. He turned and walked calmly to the closed garage door.

The spring creaked again, putting a hitch in his step, but not halting him.

He reached the black panel with a red plunger switch next to the door. He hit it with the heel of his hand, and nothing happened.

He hit it two more times, first slow and easy, then hard and fast, the spring action on the plunger sticking as though from disuse.

The van creaked again, and Gus did not allow himself to look back.

The garage door was made of faceless steel, no grip handles. Nothing to pull. He kicked it once and the thing barely rattled.

Another
bang
from inside the van, almost answering his own, followed by a severe creak, and Gus rushed back to the plunger. He hit it again, rapid-fire, and then a pulley whirred and the motor clicked and the chain started running.

The door began lifting off the ground.

Gus was outside before it was halfway up, scuttling up onto the sidewalk like a crab and then quickly catching his breath. He turned
and waited, watching the door open, hold there, and then go back down again. He made certain it closed tightly and that nothing emerged.

Then he looked around, shaking off his nerves, checking his hat—and walked to the corner, guilty fast, wanting to put another block between him and the van. He crossed to Vesey Street and found himself standing before the Jersey barriers and construction fences surrounding the city block that had been the World Trade Center. It was all dug out now, the great basin a gaping hole in the crooked streets of Lower Manhattan, with cranes and construction trucks building up the site again.

Gus shook off his chill. He unfolded his phone at his ear.

“Felix, where are you, amigo?”

“On Ninth, heading downtown. Whassup?”

“Nothing. Just get here pronto. I’ve done something I need to forget about.”

Isolation Ward, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

E
PH ARRIVED AT
the Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, fuming. “What do you mean they’re gone?”

“Dr. Goodweather,” said the administrator, “there was nothing we could do to compel them to remain here.”

“I told you to post a guard to keep that Bolivar character’s slimy lawyer out.”

“We did post a guard. An actual police officer. He looked at the legal order and told us there was nothing he could do. And—it wasn’t the rock star’s lawyer. It was Mrs. Luss the lawyer. Her firm. They went right over my head, right to the hospital board.”

“Then why wasn’t I told this?”

“We tried to get in touch with you. We called your contact.”

Eph whipped around. Jim Kent was standing with Nora. He looked stricken. He pulled out his phone and thumbed back through his calls. “I don’t see …” He looked up apologetically. “Maybe it was those sunspots from the eclipse, or something. I never got the calls.”

“I got your voice mail,” said the administrator.

He checked again. “Wait … there were some calls I might have
missed.” He looked up at Eph. “With so much going on, Eph—I’m afraid I dropped the ball.”

This news hollowed out Eph’s rage. It was not at all like Jim to make any mistake whatsoever, especially at such a critical time. Eph stared at his trusted associate, his anger fizzling out into deep disappointment. “My four best shots at solving this thing just walked out that door.”

“Not four,” said the administrator, behind him. “Only three.”

Eph turned back to her. “What do you mean?”

I
nside the isolation ward, Captain Doyle Redfern sat on his bed, inside the plastic curtains. He looked haggard; his pale arms were resting on a pillow in his lap. The nurse said that he had declined all food, claiming stiffness in his throat and persistent nausea, and had rejected even tiny sips of water. The IV in his arm was keeping him hydrated.