James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

Jack glanced out the passenger’s-side window. The real crowds wouldn’t show up until after midnight, but the sidewalks were beginning to bulge with the usual mix: the obvious tourists and a few couples, but mostly twentysomethings who had largely ditched the art of normal face-to-face conversation and preferred to hook up for sex via text messaging. Even just a year ago, it might have made Jack wonder if he’d been born twenty years too soon. Now he just felt glad to be engaged.

Good God, I really am forty.

“Let me out here,” said Jack.

“Dude, all right already. I’ll put on some jazz.”

“It’s not the music. The caller said to come alone. Just park.”

The only option was valet, and Theo steered toward the curb. Reaching into his wallet, Jack did some quick math and figured that the hourly parking rate added up to $18,000 a month. He was suddenly thinking of his old friend Scholl again-mystery solved as to how he’d built a world-class art collection and a wine-making empire.

“Wait here for two minutes,” said Jack, “then find a place on the mall to hang out where you can watch me. If the guy turns out to be some kind of nut job, I want you close by.”

“Got it, chief.”

“And wish me luck,” said Jack as he started away.

“Dude,” said Theo.

Jack stopped and looked back.

“That client of yours-Jamal what’s-his-name.”

“What about him?”

“He probably dreams about strapping on a vest and blowing up Lincoln Road Mall.”

Jack paused. For a time, the one person who had seemed to shrug off Jack’s representation of a Gitmo detainee was Theo. But when push came to shove, even the kid from Liberty City-an innocent man pulled from the electric chair-had the same reservations as everyone else.

Jack had them, too.

“That’s the buzzkill,” Jack said. “But my money still says he didn’t kill McKenna Mays.”

Jack headed up the sidewalk toward the mall, leaving Theo behind in the crowd.

From a wooden bench near the illuminated public fountain, a man wearing a stylish Italian suit and hiding behind sunglasses watched with the intensity of a trained professional. It was a cool night, but he was sweating profusely. His eyes were tiring, and forcing himself to stay so focused was giving him a headache. Jet lag, he figured. Flying from Europe to the States was easier than going the other way, but with the plane change in Paris, it was still a fourteen-hour flight from Prague.

Lincoln Road Mall is an outdoor collection of shops, cafes, and restaurants that stretch for several blocks of pedestrian traffic only. The Lincoln Theatre, home to the New World Symphony, is a historic art deco-style building at the east end of the mall. It’s a curvy restored jewel, right down to the original cinema marquee and floral relief on its coral pink facade. That night, against a dark purple sky and in the glow of soft evening light, it looked like the postcards commemorating one of the many movie premieres that defined the theater’s early years.

The mall was buzzing with activity, and the man in the dark Italian suit was well aware that his target could have chosen any number of nearby cafes to sit and wait. Designer shades were stylish even after dark, but his were no fashion statement. His eyes revealed nothing as he watched Jack Swyteck take a table beside a potted palm directly across from the theater.

Sweat gathered on his brow. His heart was racing. This wasn’t normal. He wasn’t even nervous. He removed his jacket and laid it on the bench beside him. He was still roasting. He hoped he wasn’t catching the flu.

Damn airplanes are like a germ factory.

The crowd flowed in both directions, two endless streams that checked each other out and occasionally swirled away into little eddies of conversation. Some were dressed to kill. Others were barely dressed. They were all under his surveillance, his eyes and mind working together and processing each passing image like the superfast, superpowered face-recognition software that never seemed to work for him the way it worked on television dramas. Reject after reject, his eyes darted left to right, east to west, and back again. Hundreds and hundreds of passersby without a match.

His throat tightened. His left foot was starting to tingle. More like his entire left side. The foot-no, the leg all the way up to the knee-was actually numb. This was no mere adrenaline rush.

What the hell is going on?

He wanted to rise, but his body refused. With a wobbly push he forced himself up from the bench, and it gave him a head rush. The flow of pedestrians through the mall was starting to blur. The glow of streetlights, landscape illumination, and colored neon had blended into a ghostly fog. He removed his sunglasses and strained to focus. His gaze tightened, and for a split second things came clear to him. He’d seen them before, just an hour earlier-another pair of eyes hiding behind sunglasses after dark-and his mind replayed the brief and seemingly meaningless encounter. It wasn’t so much the face he remembered as that long, white mobility cane approaching at a surprisingly fast clip. It was a needlelike missile that had emerged from the crowd, guided by the hand without sight, and no matter which way he turned, he couldn’t get out of the way. He jerked one way, the stick followed, and in the ensuing head-on collision, that mobility stick had jabbed into his ankle like a jousting stick.

I can’t feel my foot.

He glanced back at the cafe table by the potted palm across from the theater. Swyteck had no idea who he was even looking for-no reason to know what was happening to the man he was supposed to meet.

His gaze shifted back toward the white walking stick in the crowd, but it was gone. Or maybe it was still there and the image wasn’t registering.

I can’t see-can’t… breathe!

He wanted to scream. No voice. He tried to run, but he felt nothing from the chest down. His arms, too, failed him, refusing to break the fall. He felt only the wind on his face as he dropped to the sidewalk. His chin slammed against the concrete, and as darkness took over, he noticed that he couldn’t taste the blood.

Then the silence turned black.

A woman screamed, and Jack jumped to his feet.

Just a few doors down, a crowd was gathering near the illuminated fountain. Through the growing forest of onlookers, Jack saw a man lying flat on the pavers with people around him speaking in short bursts of panic and waving their arms in frantic gestures. He threw a ten-dollar bill on the table to cover his sparkling water and sprinted toward the commotion. By the time Jack got there, an older gentleman had already rolled the fallen man onto his back, ripped open his shirt, and started chest compressions. An elderly woman was shouting into her cell phone.

“My husband’s a retired physician and is trying CPR,” she said, “but the man’s not breathing, and there’s no pulse!”

Another woman came forward, opened her purse, and said, “I have an aspirin.”

“Can’t,” said the doctor, waving her off. “He’s unconscious.”

“Looks more dead than unconscious,” said one of the onlookers.

“Did anyone see him collapse?” asked the doctor.

A waiter spoke up. “I did.”

“How long ago?”

“Five minutes or so.”

“Be exact.”

The waiter checked his watch. “I’d say more like seven.”

“Tell them they’ve got sixty seconds!” the doctor shouted to his wife.

She repeated the message to the 911 operator, but Jack heard no approaching ambulances in the neighborhood. The doctor kept at his work, a hundred compressions per minute, desperately trying to revive him. He looked exhausted. Jack stepped in to relieve him.