“Me and Jarry in one place?” I say. “The reward merits the risk.”
Pete taps our blueprint.
“A lot of terrain,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, “but lucky for us we aren’t looking to keep him out.”
“We still need to see him coming,” Patsy says.
Dennis shivers.
“Jarry should charge the draft in this place rent,” he says.
Patsy leans over the map, draws circles around four second-floor rooms: north, south, east, and west.
“Our lookout points,” she says. “Between the four of us we can cover the full tree line. Whoever spots him jumps on the radio.”
“So we sit at the windows, waiting for a sniper?” Dennis says.
“We’ll have the lights off,” Patsy says. “And the shades drawn.”
I take the pencil, draw a fifth circle.
“Except for here,” I say. “In a place this big, we need to know where he’s heading. So we’ll draw him to Jarry’s bedroom. We’ll leave the lights on and the TV turned up.”
“He should buy it,” Patsy says. “Everyone knows old people don’t sleep.”
I nod.
“Jarry’s suite has double doors leading into each adjoining room. Once we’ve spotted him, that’s where we’ll set up. Two of us in the room to the east, two in the room to the west.”
“We’ll have to move like lightning,” Pete says.
“Better make sure Dennis doesn’t have far to run,” Patsy says.
“Thanks,” Dennis says. “I appreciate the consideration.”
Chapter 36
Two hours in a cubicle at the midtown library yields the location of Jarry’s home and a tour of the area via Google Earth. The mansion is secluded, surrounded by woods. The woods give way to national forest. Miles can leave his rental car on an access road, hike onto Jarry’s property.
Under normal circumstances, he would have his choice of entry points and escape routes, but he cannot count on Cheryl playing fair: it is possible she will have a small army camped in the forest. The challenge excites him.
He’d hoped to find information about the interior of Jarry’s home—a photo spread in Architectural Digest, or, better still, a blueprint in the registry of historical structures. But Jarry is not the type to open up, let others in. At least not the Jarry he imagines: a recluse who dislikes people yet feels compassion for them.
He has no doubt that Cheryl is using the old man. Jarry must be on his last mental legs if he’s agreed to hire an NYPD outcast. Still, Miles cannot fault Cheryl: the game they’re playing assumes the highest possible stakes.
He calls up a new search engine, types in “Alfred Jarry’s Castle on the Hudson,” then deletes every word but “Jarry” and “Castle.” He skims the results, his mind spinning out questions and obstacles.
Questions: How will he arm himself? How will he circumvent the alarm system, if there is one? How will he find Jarry in a house that large? Will he find Cheryl, or let her find him?
Obstacles: Cheryl knows he’s coming; he’d be a fool to believe she was alone.
Still, however many people Cheryl might have with her, there are only two targets Miles cares about. He can turn this to his advantage.
And then he finds it, buried on the fifth page of his search. Not what he was looking for, but the next best thing: Lage Coryell, the name of the architect who designed Jarry’s house.
Miles begins a fresh search, learns that a graduate student in Ithaca manages a website dedicated to Coryell’s work. An Overview tab claims that Coryell’s designs are steeped in nostalgia: though he came to prominence just after World War II, he built in the Georgian style of the early nineteenth century. Apparently, he wanted to “restore a sense of grandeur to a traumatized world.”
You mean to the rich, Miles thinks. You would have been high on my father’s list.
The website’s homepage is a photo of a Georgian-style mansion similar to Jarry’s home. The windows of the mansion function as a menu. Miles moves the cursor from window to window until the word BLUEPRINTS appears on the screen. Miles all but leaps out of his seat.
He spends hours studying every line of the twenty-four archived prints, does not leave his seat until an automated voice announces that the library is closing. By the end, he’s found the common feature that presents an opportunity. Coryell worked with a Cold War sensibility: every home he designed between 1947 and 1962, the year of his death, includes an underground concrete bunker linked to the main residence by fifty yards of tunnel.
Would Cheryl know this? Would the fading Jarry have thought to tell her?
Miles cannot be certain, but odds are against it, and every mission requires at least one leap of faith.
The trick will be finding the entrance to this bunker in a dense forest in the dead of night. Once again, Miles feels up to the challenge.
Chapter 37
We’ve got a half hour till sunset. Pete and I are decorating Jarry’s room for effect, making it up to look like his final resting place. We’ve loaded a TV tray with a dozen pill bottles and a six-pack of Ensure. We stacked magazines on the nightstand, set a chamber pot at the foot of the bed. We stuffed pillows under the comforter to make the shape of a body. The more the Sniper has to look at, the longer we have to take him unawares.
“I think we’re done,” Pete says.
“I think so,” I say.
We stand there reviewing our work, neither of us heading for the door. I sense there’s something Pete wants to say. After a long beat, he comes out with it:
“So Bryzinski picked up one of the undercovers?”
I’d been hoping for something else—something along the lines of a declaration.
“Yeah,” I say. “He did.”
“And then what happened?”
Of course I want to tell him: the story makes me look good. And this is a sleepover in a castle on a cold and windy night. We’re supposed to tell ghost stories.
If only the undercover hadn’t been Randy.
“And then we caught him,” I say.
“That’s it? No chase? No dramatic finish?”
I glance over at him. His grin says: “Come on, you know you want to.”
Okay, I tell myself. But you don’t mention Randy by name.
“Bryzinski made the undercover,” I say.
“Made him how?”
Is Pete a gossip hound, or just eager to learn from other people’s mistakes? Either way, I keep going.
“He asked questions the undercover couldn’t answer, questions anyone who’d done time at Rikers would ace. What do they serve for lunch on Mondays? What do they call the special housing unit on the third tier? By this time Bryzinski knew we were getting close. He was playing it careful.”
“Okay,” Pete says. “But it’s a cab, right? The undercover’s sitting behind the driver, and he’s strapped. Plus I’m guessing you’ve got a five-car tail and a battalion of squad cars at the ready. So why does it matter if the cop got made? There’s nowhere for Bryzinski to go, and if he tries anything, then you know you’ve got the right guy.”
“You’d think,” I say.
“But…?”
We’re sitting side by side on the bed now. Pete’s looking at me. I’m looking out the window.
“Bryzinski had the car tricked out. Bulletproof glass dividing the front and back. Locks only he could open. And…”
I hesitate. I don’t like remembering this last part. I don’t like remembering Randy the way I found him—tied spread-eagle to a table, eyes red and swollen, skin turning colors, muttering a long stream of nonsense.
“And?” Pete pushes.
“And he had the back rigged like a gas chamber. He knocked our man out cold.”
Chapter 38
It took Bryzinski five blocks to lose four-fifths of our tail—everyone but me,” I say. “He bolted a red light, ran over a pedestrian, then sped a hundred miles an hour the wrong way up a one-way street.”
Pete’s quiet now, maybe imagining himself in the back of Bryzinski’s car.
“I followed them to Jackson Heights,” I say. “Bryzinski turned so hard into an alleyway that I went skidding past him. The alley was lined with automatic garages. By the time I backed up, the car had vanished.”
“So you call for reinforcements,” Pete says. “Choppers, SWAT, the whole nine yards. Shut the block down.”
“That’s what Branford wanted,” I say. “He was screaming at me over the radio. But cavalry would’ve got the undercover killed. If Bryzinski thought he’d gotten away, he’d take his time, enjoy himself. Especially with a cop. If he heard us bearing down, that cop’d be dead in seconds. I wanted to at least give him time to fight.”
“How many houses are we talking about?” Pete asks.
“Seven or eight.”
“So how’d you narrow it down? I’m guessing the mail hadn’t been delivered at six in the morning.”
“I saw the trash was out for pickup,” I say. “A can for every garage. I figured Bryzinski might have tossed something I’d recognize. So I parked on a side street, took a blanket from the trunk, mussed up my hair, and played homeless.
“Third house in, I found dozens of empty packets of ramen noodles—like whoever lived there ate nothing else. That’s con food. They make it in their cells to avoid the canteen slop. They get addicted to the stuff.”
“Could’ve been a college kid,” Pete says.
“I only had time for one guess. It seemed like a safe bet.”
“And it was?”
“Yeah. I knew as soon as I went around to the front. The first-floor windows were blacked out with thick wool blankets. Whoever lived there didn’t want anyone seeing inside. And they didn’t want anyone showing up unannounced. There were about a dozen deadbolts on the door.”
“So how’d you get in?”
“I took out my gun, wrapped the blanket around my head, and jumped through the window.”
“Like an action figure.”
“I didn’t even think about it—there was no other way. When I looked up, I saw the undercover right there in front of me, tied to an operating table, drugged out of his mind. The entire place—floor, ceiling, walls—was wrapped in plastic. I was lucky. Bryzinski hadn’t started cutting yet. The blade had come loose on his shank, and he was wrapping duct tape around the handle. He saw me, pulled out a real knife, and lunged for the table.”
“And you shot him?” Pete says.
“I caught him in the throat. He bled out before the paramedics got there.”
“The undercover have a name?” Pete asks.
“No,” I say. “No name.”
And then I bite my lip hard thinking how Randy has been held hostage all this time by what he thinks he owes me. Because I’ve put him through enough to chase anyone else away, and he was only in danger to begin with because he was following my plan. Just like Dennis, Pete, and Patsy are following my plan now.
“All right,” Pete says. “I won’t push.”
I glance out the window.
“Almost dark,” I say.
Chapter 39
The entrance to the bunker is covered with a canvas tarp, its fabric tattered and stained from years of rain and snow. Miles holds his flashlight in his mouth, pulls the tarp back, watches the garter snakes scatter.
The round iron door looks like a rusted manhole cover. He takes a pair of bolt cutters from his backpack, removes the padlock, discovers a metal ship’s ladder descending into a deep darkness. He starts down, pulls the door shut behind him.
The large, subterranean chamber is made of poured concrete and lined with enough bunk beds to sleep as many people as might reasonably live in the mansion. From the looks of it, no one has been down here in decades—maybe since the place was built. The mattresses are disintegrating. A shelving unit collapsed under the weight of canned goods, and now hundreds of tins of peaches and tuna fish cover the floor.
Miles shines his flashlight over the walls, finds the door-shaped crack that separates bunker and tunnel. He shoves aside one of the bed frames, lowers his shoulder, and pushes.
The tunnel is made of the same poured concrete. Miles feels a crunching under his feet, looks down, discovers a tapestry of long-dead beetles.
He is afraid the passageway from the tunnel into the house might be barred by something like a bank vault door, but instead there is only another rectangular crack in the wall. He switches off his flashlight, takes his revolver from his waistband, lowers his shoulder a second time.
There is no one waiting for him on the other side—just more darkness. Cheryl is unaware of the bunker’s existence. Miles feels a slight pang of disappointment.
He switches his flashlight back on. The basement is cavernous, empty, deteriorating. Its cement floor is breaking apart. Its wooden beams are bowed and splintered. The basement, Miles thinks, of someone who acquires nothing, has no past to hold onto.
Gun drawn, he starts up the stairs to the main floor. Once again, he finds no one waiting on the other side—just a paler shade of darkness. He pockets his flashlight, gives his eyes a moment to adjust.
He is standing in a long corridor segmented by evenly spaced archways. The total silence is cut now and again by distant bursts of laughter—a television, the blue light he’d seen flashing in a second-story window. He takes off his tennis shoes, ties the laces together, dangles them over one shoulder. Heel-to-toe, he moves toward the sound.
He makes it to the second-floor landing without having encountered a soul.
Maybe, he thinks, Cheryl really is alone with Jarry. Maybe she’s come around, realized she wants what I can give her.
He continues on, arrives at a bedroom door. He pauses, listening for voices that are not televised.
I won’t leave his side until the sniper is brought to justice, Cheryl said.
Gun raised, Miles turns the knob.
Immediately, he senses something is wrong. Every object in the room points to a dying man, yet there is no smell of death. No whiff of sweat or urine, menthol or chicken broth. His eyes fall on the bed; he does not need to yank back the covers to know that there is no man lying underneath.
Slowly and silently, he backs from the room, shuts the door.
He stands in the hallway, listening, pushing down a swelling anger, running through possible scenarios. The most likely seems to be that he is alone in this house, that one or more lookouts were waiting for him to enter before they gave SWAT the signal.
But then they could not have seen him enter. The solution is simple: he will turn around, exit the way he came.
He takes a step, stops cold when he hears a faint cough coming from a nearby room. Worried his mind might be playing tricks, he waits until the cough is followed by the distinct sound of a man clearing his throat.
He inches forward, presses his ear to the door in question. Yes, there is someone on the other side. A heavy someone, shifting his or her weight on a rickety chair.
“Ready or not,” Miles whispers.
Chapter 40
I’ve been standing for hours, surveilling the western tree line through a gap in the blinds, trying hard not to blink. My eyes are dried out and my head’s pounding. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t crave one of Andy’s chocolates.
My radio lets out a small explosion of static. I snatch it up, thinking the night has begun, anxious to know who’s spotted him and where. But the next thing I hear is a gunshot. It comes muffled from some far end of the house, clear and loud through the radio.
And then I hear a long, guttural scream followed by a deep bellowing I know belongs to Dennis.
“Do I have your attention?” a voice says.
His voice.
“I’m listening,” I say, hoping Pete and Patsy will know to stay quiet, make the Sniper think it’s just me and Dennis in the house.
“Funny,” the Sniper says, “the fat man I just shot looks nothing like Alfred Jarry. I thought we were going to ha
ve an intimate evening, Cheryl. You, me, and Jarry makes three. I keep wanting to trust you, and you keep betraying me. Were you really kicked off the force, or was this all a ruse from the start?”
A sound bite comes back to me from the academy: make the hostage human—give him a name.
“How bad is Dennis hurt?” I ask.
“A flesh wound,” the Sniper says. “Lucky for him, he has a lot of flesh.”
“Dennis also has a wife and kids,” I say. “He isn’t alone in the world. He isn’t a distressed soul.”
“He isn’t dead, either,” the Sniper says. “Not yet.”
And then I hear Dennis, roaring up from the background:
“Don’t think about me. You come and kill this—”
His voice breaks off with a groan.
“Hush now,” the Sniper tells him. “You’re being rude.”
He’s enjoying himself. Part of me thinks: How did he get in the house unseen? Which one of us missed him?
“So what will it take to keep Dennis alive?” I ask.
“You mean what do I want?”
“Yes.”
“I want what you promised me,” he says. “I want you. And I want Jarry.”
“Jarry isn’t here,” I say.
“But you know where he is. The man let you occupy his house.”
“Because he wants you to stop.”
“And I want to hear that from him. I’d like a chance to explain myself. You have a habit of misrepresenting me. Take me to Jarry and your friend Dennis should recover nicely.”
I can’t think of any better way to stall, so I say:
“All right. Whatever you want.”
“Good. Now, how many of you are here in the house?”
“There’s just me and Dennis.”
“Why on earth would I believe that?” he asks.
I think: Sell it, Cheryl. Sell it hard.
“There’s something the press doesn’t know,” I say. “I was high when I shot that kid. Dennis is the only one who stood by me.”
The air goes quiet while he makes up his mind. For a minute I’m afraid I’ve lost him.