Michael Ledwidge: Alert

“Well, Mr. Joyce is the real brains,” said Mr. Beckett as he headed back to the bar. “He’s a genius in mathematics as well as materials engineering. He used to be an actual rocket scientist — well, missile scientist, if you want to get technical. And here’s some advice from personal experience.”

“What’s that?” Tony said.

“Don’t play chess against him, especially for money.”

“Not a chance,” Tony said with a laugh. “Never touch the stuff, Mr. Beckett. Why don’t you pour yourself a drink and come and sit?”

“Sorry, Tony. I don’t drink. I like to be in control at all times,” said Mr. Beckett.

“You don’t drink? What do you do for fun?” Tony said.

Before Mr. Beckett could answer, there was a faint, flicking, whistling sound from the dimness on the other side of the room near the bathroom. Then there were two sounds, all but simultaneous. The first was the click of Tony’s dropped drink landing miraculously upright on the table. The second was the loud crack of his head as it slammed back violently into the plywood back of the booth.

Mr. Joyce emerged from the hallway with the compound hunting bow after Tony stopped twitching. He stood before the booth for a moment with his dark goatee cradled in his free hand, peering at the fletching and the twenty-seven-inch carbon shaft of the broadhead arrow that protruded from Tony’s left eye socket.

“That was just terrible,” Mr. Joyce said.

“Come now, Mr. Joyce. I liked Tony, too, but we have to cover our tracks,” said Mr. Beckett as he retrieved the bag of money and returned it to the safe.

“Please: you don’t actually think I care that Tony is dead, do you?” Mr. Joyce said with a laugh. “I’m just upset about this new bow I bought. I was aiming for right between the eyes, but one of the pulleys must be overtight. I booted it down and a little to the right at the last second.”

“Now, now, Mr. Joyce,” said Mr. Beckett as he came over. “You have to admit that this light is horrendous, and besides, no one is perfect one hundred percent of the time. Your little toy is quite effective, if you ask me. What’s the expression? ‘Close enough for government work?’”

Mr. Joyce took a pair of side cutters off the bar, reached behind Tony’s ruined skull, and cut away the carbon shaft embedded in the plywood. Tony landed faceup on the filthy concrete after Mr. Joyce kicked him off the booth seat. He slid the arrow out of Tony’s eye by the fletching, then lifted the dead man’s left hand and checked the cheap digital watch on his wrist.

“Look at the time, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said. “Grab his ankles, would you? We really need to get going. You know traffic is going to be a nightmare.”

At a little after eleven o’clock, I was back on the streets of Washington Heights. Well, back under the streets of Washington Heights, to be exact.

“See? It’s over there, Mike,” said Con Ed supervisor Al Kott, a few rungs below me on the Saint Nicholas Avenue manhole ladder. He pointed his flashlight at a ruined section of fire-blackened brick in the north wall.

“That wall there isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s been jackhammered, by the looks of it. And not by my guys. I already checked the records. There’s been no maintenance in this hole for the last eighteen months.”

“You see anything that looks like an air shaft in there, Al?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said, pointing the beam of his flashlight into the gap. “I don’t know. It’s all burned and wrecked to shit, but I think I see some ripped metal about five or six feet in.”

I nodded as I thought about that. More details had been revealed at the precinct meeting by the bomb experts. Evidence was pointing to two bombs placed on the tracks just north of the 168th and 181st Street stations. Massive cratering above the blasts at two air shafts corroborated the thermobaric bomb theory. Some kind of fuel had been deliberately pumped into the tunnel.

That had to be it, I thought as I stared at the ripped-open wall and massively damaged Con Edison manhole. This spot was one of the locations where the flammable bomb fuel, or whatever the hell it was, had been pumped down.

We had our where , I thought as I climbed for the circle of daylight above me. Now we just needed to find our who .

The building was a new thirty-two-story glass high-rise on Haven Avenue overlooking the Hudson River on the west side of Washington Heights.

The man was in apartment 32J. He was a junkie, thin and middle-aged, vampire pale, with long, gray ponytailed hair and a road-worn, angular face. In a wifebeater and once-black but now faded-to-gray pair of jeans, he sat on the gleaming oak floor of the small, high-end condo’s living room, his bony knees up and his back flat against a wall.

Despite this spartan sitting position, he appeared comfortable. Like he’d long ago become used to sitting on hard, bare floors.

There was no furniture in the room. Not a stick of furniture in the whole apartment, in fact. The only other object in the apartment was a white iPad, facedown on the floor between the gaunt man’s beat-up hiking boots. He sat there, staring at it steadily. As if, any second now, it were about to perform some sort of amazing trick that he didn’t want to miss.

Every once in a while, he’d flick a glance around the empty room. The bare white walls. The rectangle of cloudless, cornflower-blue sky showing through the big, curtainless window.

He wondered who owned this place. Would they actually have bought an apartment just for this? Or maybe it was rented.

He yawned, rolled his shoulders, stretched. As if that mattered. He didn’t need to know about all that. He only had to make sure his own part worked so he could get the rest of the money.

The instructions couldn’t have been simpler. He just needed to do it, leave the apartment, get into the rental car parked in the lot on Broadway, and head straight back to Florida.

He glanced at his watch. Three minutes. Hot damn! Three! he thought. Then he went back to staring at the tablet again.

He was trying to keep his mind blank, stay serene. But as the clock ticked down, it became exceedingly difficult.

He kept thinking about the craziest, most screwed-up shit he’d ever done in his life. How he’d broken into houses when people were home sleeping. How he’d knifed that kid who tried to take his shit that time when he was living on the beach in Key West. In the back of the neck, too. He had to have killed him. He sure hadn’t stuck around to find out.

The worst was in the midnineties, when, during a Christmas visit to his little brother Kenny’s house, he up and flat-out stole his brother’s new Toyota Echo, which had his two nieces’ car seats in the back and a woman’s new winter coat in the trunk that couldn’t have been anything but Kenny’s Christmas present to his wife.

But all that put together, thought the man as he rubbed his sweating palms on the soft, threadbare thighs of his Levi’s, couldn’t hold a candle to the act of certifiable insanity he was about to commit.

Literally, no one had ever done anything like this. No one. It was going to rearrange people’s minds.

Did he really want to be part of that? He didn’t know. Half of him was afraid, of course, especially about getting caught. That would not be good. But he really didn’t think he would. The plan was pretty much foolproof .

The other half of him was excited about it. Not just about the $150K he was due but also because it was so big-time. Monumental. Wasn’t like he was winning any Nobel Prizes anytime soon, so what he was about to do would definitely leave a mark.