Winter and Night (17 page)

"We crossed paths. I told you. Some of the places I went, they already had pictures. I—" We were interrupted by the ringing of her cell phone.

She answered in both languages, listened, asked where and when, took out a pen and wrote on a napkin. She thanked the caller, flipped the phone shut.

"It's someone who thinks she saw Gary," she said.

Her phone's ring had silenced all other sounds in the room, for me. "When? Where?"

"Queens, this afternoon. A volunteer for One to One. One of those charities that have outreach vans for street kids? She was parked with her van near the Queens Plaza subway stop, but she didn't see Gary's picture until she got back to One to One's headquarters just now. He was okay," she said, heading off my question. "He was hungry, she gave him a couple of sandwiches, but he wouldn't stay around. He acted nervous, she said, kept looking around as though he was looking for someone. But he seemed okay."

"This afternoon? Goddammit—" I stopped myself, tried to take control as the heat flooded my face and my shoulders tightened. "I'm sorry," I said to Lydia. "I just— let's go."

She sat for a moment longer than I did, searched my face with her dark eyes. Then she nodded and stood. I waved to Shorty, pointed to our table so he'd know to put dinner on my tab. He sent a question in his look; I shrugged, shook my head. I dropped some bills for Caitlin, hurried through the room to the chill of the night.

The drive to Queens was short, not a lot of traffic at this hour. I took the bridge and Lydia didn't say anything until we were on it, rolling a little too fast out of Manhattan, across the river.

"Bill?"

I glanced over, saw her looking at me, the skyline and the dark water behind her.

"You have to get a better grip," she said. "I know it's important. I know there's more to it than I know about. But if you lose it, you're going to make it worse."

I looked at her again, then back at the road. I nodded, said nothing. Downshifting, I pulled out to pass, pulled back in right after I'd done it. I lit a cigarette. Lydia rolled her window down and didn't speak again.

The address we were headed for, the spot where the One to One van had been parked, was a few blocks from the place at Queens Plaza where six subway lines come together, four below ground, two above. Roosting pigeons swooped and dived as trains rumbled along steel trestles or over cracked concrete structures arched like Roman aqueducts. The streets and avenues below interrupted each other, crossed at odd angles, dead-ended and jogged and bent. Old office buildings and small storefronts, apartments above, lined them, the stores pretty much closed now, papers blowing along the sidewalks, roll-down gates locked tight. Some of the businesses were still open, the take-out Chinese place, the corner bodega, and we started with them, handing the countermen Xeroxes of Gary's picture with Lydia's cell phone number at the bottom. No one said they'd seen him; they all promised to call if they did, and we had to live with that, go on to the next place, show the picture again.

The night got colder, more storefronts closed, traffic thinned and we didn't find Gary. We made a wide circle of the neighborhood, stopped to post his picture on lampposts and hand it to people out walking their dogs. I bought a pack of cigarettes and Lydia got a cup of tea from the last corner deli still open. The lights on its sign went out as soon as we left.

"Are you going to call your sister?" Lydia asked. We walked a short way, stopped on the corner, for no reason except that we had nowhere to go.

I shook my head. "To tell her what? That someone thinks she saw Gary hours ago, but we can't find him now?"

We stood on the corner, me smoking, she warming her hands around her cup.

"We need to go back," Lydia said.

I didn't answer.

"We can't do anything here," she said. "He might have left a long time ago. It might not have been him at all," she added, something I was sure we'd both thought of but neither of us had said.

"I know," I said. "I know." I made no move to go anywhere. A gust of wind knocked some trash out of the can beside me.

"You didn't sleep last night," she said. "You won't be any good to anybody if you wipe yourself out."

A train clattered overhead, eastbound from Manhattan, people headed home. I stared up as its lights flashed by. Lydia was right. I was exhausted. Gary wasn't here. Going back, getting some sleep, now while there was nothing else we could do, would make sense. After a night's sleep tomorrow's choices would be clearer, the next step more obvious.

But I didn't want logic and I didn't want planning. I wanted to find Gary, give him the help he'd asked for. Someone needed to care about the kid; someone needed to stop him from screwing up.

Lydia touched my hand. She startled me; my hand jerked, but she held me. "It isn't you," she said. I didn't know what she meant by that.

We were on the bridge headed in when a cell phone rang, mine this time. I had it out, open, barked "Smith!" into it before it rang a second time.

"Linus Kwong. How's it going?"

"Linus— oh, hey, yeah," I said, blanking, then registering. "Where are you? Did you find anything?"

Lydia turned, watched me as I spoke to her cousin.

"I'm in Chinatown. And I'm not sure, dude. I'm, ah, looking for, like, authorization."

"Authorization? To do what?"

"Well, see, it's like, that place you wanted me to go? That was a no-brainer, dude. The computer in your guy's room, there's nothing there but, like, school stuff."

For the second time that day I got the feeling stuff was the edited version, for adults.

"There's this other computer they have," Linus went on. "They just have like one online account with different passwords, and the lady, she gave them to me. So I go in there, and it's a snore. I mean, this is the heartland, right? These people, they're hitting like the NFL and Sears.com. Takes me maybe an hour, I've seen it all, dude. Your guy, he's not a game-player, he's not hooked up anywhere."

"I'm trying to follow you here, Linus. You're saying there's nothing there?"

"I'm saying, he's not hooked up. But I'm running through the back e-mails for each screen name, because, hey, you're paying me, you know?"

"I appreciate the professional thoroughness."

"Oh, hey, forget it, dude," said Linus, obviously pleased. "So your guy, he calls himself GRussell80, I don't know what that's about, but it's him. So like he has not so much e-mail, not his métier obviously, but there's this one dude, Premador."

He paused to give me a chance to catch up, but beyond a mental lift of the eyebrows at métier, it didn't help.

"Does that mean something?" I asked.

"Well, see, what I want authorization for, this Premador dude, I want to, uh, check him out."

"You're asking me to authorize you to hack into this guy's computer?"

"Oh, man, now don't say that."

"Listen, Linus," I said. "I can't authorize you to do anything illegal. I'm not a cop and I can't get a court order. And if I got you in trouble your cousin Lydia would kill me."

"I think she's my aunt."

"You'll have to straighten that out with her. But here's the point: The kid who's missing is fifteen, and I think he is in trouble."

"I get you, dude."

And Linus is fifteen, too, Smith. I pushed that thought away and asked, "What is it about this guy that interests you? Something in his e-mail to Gary?"

"No. One thing, it's all old, like a couple of months. And it's boring. But, like, his handle, dude."

"Premador, you mean?"

"Yeah. I don't guess you, like, follow Japanese books?"

"Japanese books?"

"Comic books, dude. They have them in English. The big ones, size of the newspaper?"

"No, I guess I haven't seen them."

"Well, there's this one series, CyberSpawn, you know, monsters and mutants and stuff."

"Okay."

"And this mutant Premador, he's real twisted. He was like a good mutant, but everyone messed with his head, and now he's bad. They're always trying to stop him, because he's like on a major mission."

"What's his mission?"

"To, like, blow up the world."

The conversation with Linus Kwong had taken us off the bridge and onto the FDR. While we headed south I told Lydia what her cousin had told me, or at least as much of it as I understood.

"So he thinks Gary's been exchanging e-mail with someone who wants to blow up the world?"

"Gary's e-mail handle—"

"In English we call that a screen name."

I gave her a glance. "Thanks. Gary's screen name is GRussell80. Linus doesn't know what the eighty is for, but I think I do. One of football's most famous wide receivers, Jerry Rice? That's his number."

"So you're saying, your screen name is who you want to be?"

"I'd think so. You have e-mail. What's yours?"

She looked at me for a moment, then said, "Lydia Chin."

I dropped Lydia at home in Chinatown, promising to call her if anything developed. She promised the same.

"You'll go home and sleep?" she said. "You won't run around trying to do something when there's nothing you can do?"

"Yes," I said. "No."

She gave me a long, skeptical look. "And if you do," she said, "you'll call me so I can at least come?"

"Yes," I said again, and I couldn't help smiling. She got out of the car, waved from the sidewalk, entered the building she lived in.

* * *

I put the car in the lot for the second time that night, walked the half dozen blocks to my place. Guilt grabbed for me, tried to pull me into the bar to give Shorty the explanation I'd said I'd give. The promise of a drink double-teamed me, shoving me in the same direction, but I kept on going, unlocked the entrance to the steep stairs up to my place instead. Shorty had never known my sister, but he'd known me, met my mother and my father in the bad days after she'd left. He knew what had happened there, and he, like Dave, like all those men, had never been any less than stone certain that what I did was right. But they'd always been more sure than I was. And those weren't doors I wanted to open, right now.

Inside, upstairs, I took off my jacket, threw it on the couch, felt a hard chill in the air. The window, in the back room: It still gaped, jagged glass glinting again in the glow from the streetlight as it had last night. I rummaged through the desk, found enough cardboard to tape together a barrier between the night and me that should last until morning. I poured a drink, downed half of it, took a hot, pounding shower. Coming out of the bathroom for the rest of the drink I saw Gary's Warriors jacket over the back of the chair where I'd left it, after I'd searched and it had told me nothing. At least I knew now who the Warriors were.

I took my bourbon to the stereo, put on not Brahms, not Bach, but Copland, though I wasn't sure why: American music, maybe, something more raw, less reasonable. I crossed the room again, heading for the couch, planning to sit with my feet on the coffee table and drink and listen. Just before I got there I finally noticed the fax machine. It sat patiently holding a pile of papers, maybe a dozen sheets. Most of them were reduced Xeroxes of newspaper columns, their grainy high-contrast photos nothing but blurs of black and white, but their type tiny and sharp. The top sheet was a scribbled note in a round, clear hand.

"Ancient History 101," it read. "What are we looking for? And what do I get?" It was signed, "Stacie."

I don't know, I thought, and settled down to read.

Eleven

This time the dream was about catching a train. Someone waited for me at a distant station as dusk grayed all color from a snow-dusted, hilly landscape. I was late, and the train we had agreed to take was the last of the day; there was no other that could get us to the event we were traveling for, expected at. But I couldn't find the things— the clothes, the papers— I was supposed to bring; I'd left them with the man who would be giving me a lift to the station, and he couldn't remember where he'd put them and didn't care much. I searched frantically, until seven minutes before train time; the station was ten minutes away. Then we left, empty handed, to see if we could make it, though it was probably too late.

I woke not because of the buzzer, which came a few minutes later, but because of the dream: some dreams you can't finish, and you can't leave. When the buzzer sawed through the night I was still lying on the couch, awake but not thinking, following the dream again, and the Copland Piano Sonata, which still played. My first coherent thought was that I couldn't have slept very long if the CD was still on. My second was that maybe I ought to get up and answer the door.

I stumbled to the intercom, pressed the button and asked who was there. The sharp electronic answer from two floors below slammed me awake: "Scott Russell."

I thought about asking him what he wanted; I thought about telling him to go to hell. Instead I pressed the buzzer, threw off my robe, pulled on my jeans. I picked up my cigarettes from the desk, stood in the doorway and lit one, watched Scott climb the stairs. While he did, the music finally ended.

He gave me a look that said he felt the same way about being at my place as I felt about having him here. Well, hell, Scott, you're the one who came, I thought as I held the apartment door for him, shut it behind myself.

"What do you want?" I asked.

Scott looked around as Gary had, his eyes registering not surprise but disgust, though I didn't think it was the books, the pictures on the walls, not even the piano, as much as the fact that they were mine. He turned to me, a broad-shouldered, sandy-haired guy, stubble on his ruddy face. I had four inches on him, and Gary probably had two, might pick up two or three more before he was through.

"I want you to keep the hell away from my family," he said.

I looked at him for awhile, not moving; then I turned, walked past him to the kitchen, put water on. "You want coffee?"

"Fuck that! You were in Warrenstown all fucking day, Smith, you think I don't know that?"

"I wasn't trying to hide it."

"Are you hearing me? I only came here to say one thing: Stay away."