Michael Walsh - Early Warning

But he, Francis Xavier, would have no such luck. Sure, Mary Claire had left him long ago, and Doreen as well, and with her his entrée to the downtown Manhattan society he had always despised. But then came Ingrid and that mess with his brother Tom, and once again he had had to corrupt himself, to take a perfectly good bust and turn it, not in the direction of justice but to his own advantage, to give him power over people, over Ingrid, whom he’d condemned, and over his brother, whom he’d always loathed. He’d gotten out of that one alive and well and even prospering, just as his boss, Matt White, had, so many years ago. In that incident they both remembered all too well but which they never discussed, never could discuss, because to do so would mean the end of both of them. Behind every great fortune is a great crime, Balzac said, but far worse was the policeman’s axiom that behind every great career was an even greater crime, as he understood all too well.

He could still see Rikki Marcon, holding his dead girl, Rosa, who had begged the cops to save her from her violent boyfriend, and whom he’d loved so much that he’d gone to work on her with an ice pick, and there wasn’t much left of her when Matt and Frankie came upon them and without hesitation Matt had capped Enrique twice in the head with his.38 and that was the end of that. That was the reality of the city streets in those days, of bloody love and violent death, the only way these things could end when you got right down to it, which was maybe for the best. It spared everyone the happily-ever-after bullshit, the broadening of the hips, the weakening of the libido, the screaming children, the fights, the broken crockery, the sound of gunshots breaking the semi-stillness of the night in the south Bronx or Bed-Stuy or Brownsville or East New York or…

“RIP, motherfucker,” was all Matt had said when he blew Rikki away, and as far as Byrne was concerned, that was about all the valedictory and eulogy any one of us deserved.

From that moment on, neither of them had even mentioned the incident. It was the unspoken scales of Blind Justice between them, both of them eternally complicit in what had been a righteous kill, but what had also been a crime, and the fact that one of them was now Commissioner and the other the head of the CTU was the only possible virtuous outcome in a world long ago condemned.

And now here he was, twenty years later, not as fit as he was back then but twice as smart, not as clever but twice as wise, not as amoral but twice as opportunistic, faced with an opportunity even he had never dreamed of. Not even when he and Tom were boys, sleeping in their bunk beds back in Queens, Tom the older, Tom the tougher, Tom the dominant, Tom the one he’d hated all his life. Tom who lorded it over him after the death of their father, Tom the successful one, Tom the FBI agent, the lawyer with the gun, whereas he was just Frankie the cop, the Fordham grad with the old.38, because he was too old or too dumb or too scared or simply too lazy to change.

The.38, his dad’s service revolver, was in his hand as he looked up at what had been the AMC on 42nd Street.

The entire front of the building had been blown away, leaving two flanking sides with a great gap in the middle, with only the back wall of the lower floors still standing, although for how much longer was hard to tell. It was sagging, groaning with the agony of collapsing steel, a great expiring beast on its last legs, gravity about to claim it. If there was anybody still alive in there it was a miracle.

In the distance he could hear the sirens of the fire trucks. His job lay to the east, toward the gunfire that he could still discern among all the other sounds-screaming, moaning, shattering glass, the wordless voices of destruction. The voices that had always surrounded him, even back in Woodside, back when New York had been safe, when little Irish boys could sleep soundly in their beds, back before Kitty Genovese and the first World Trade Center bombing and 9/11. Back before the greatest city in the world had nearly been brought to its knees in fear and shame and guilt by 19 men from Saudi Arabia and other parts unknown. Back before invincible New York was bloodied. Back before the spiritual rot and nihilism that had long since infected the engine of capitalism and freedom had taken hold, hollowed it out, and rendered it supine before a handful of savages armed with box cutters and faith.

Twenty years ago, he remembered sitting in an Irish bar with Sy Sheinberg, Sid’s late uncle, and musing that the exhausted Irish couldn’t even muster one of their own as a bartender; today, the entire city couldn’t even muster a single priest to give it the Last Rites, if not absolution, on its way to Hell.

A man was running toward him. The hot dog vendor. Byrne didn’t have to think about the make: he knew.

Hope knew who it was before she looked at the display. Knew by the ring, the very same ring that announced the arrival of every incoming call. Hope didn’t have the patience of her children, who somehow had managed to assign a special ring tone to each of the callers in the phone books, the better to sort them out aurally as well as visually. How long that would take, she had no idea, but it was just one of those things she was never going to get around to. When Hope was a kid, all the phones came pretty much in black and rang pretty much the same, although there were those weird pink Princess phones, but you still couldn’t buy them, you just rented them from the phone company at a premium, and thought you were getting a bargain on some level. Such was the power of marketing.

“Danny?” she cried. “Help us! Oh my God, please help us!”

She knew he couldn’t. Even if he were overhead in one of his choppers right this minute he still wouldn’t be able to help her. But help was not really what she was after at this moment, not with the building swaying the way it was, not with hope fading so fast, not with her children clinging to her as if she were some sort of goddess, able to save them with a wave of her divine wand.

Well, why not-she had, once before. She had plucked her son out of the rubble of the middle school in Edwardsville, found her daughter in that awful prison in France when all hope had been lost.

“Hope-HOPE! Where are you? What’s happening?” She could hear the fear in his voice, but more than the fear-there was something else. Something else that she herself had been feeling, but not letting herself feel. It was too soon, that’s what she’d kept telling herself. Too soon for feeling, too soon after the death of her husband, too soon after the adventure in France, too soon. But Fate had a way of trumping Time, and too soon may not after all be quite soon enough.

“We’re okay, Danny, but we’re trapped. We were in the AMC on 42nd Street, when-”

Even in the vortex of sound, she could hear him punching a computer. “I’ve got you on video feed from the police helicopters,” he said, and she didn’t even bother to wonder how that was possible. “I’ve got the building on Google Earth. Now listen to me, Hope-”

Hope screamed as the building shifted and tilted. She had a flash of being on the Titanic, just like in the movie, when the boat began to slide beneath the waves, the elevation of the stern growing ever steeper.

“Hope. HOPE. Listen to me, baby, listen to me. I’ve tapped into the city building archives, so I’ve got the plans right here in front of me. Can you see all right? Can you breathe?

“We’re on the roof, Danny. Can’t you get someone here to pick us up?”

“Not right now, baby. So stay as calm as you can and listen very carefully…”

Ben Addison, Jr., saw the cop in front of him, made him as sure as he’d ever made any cop in his life. Cops were something he knew almost from childhood, cops were the things you’d best avoided unless you were ready to take them on, cops were the white men-even if they were black, like you-the white men who made your life miserable, the white men who were the font of all your misery, and your mama’s misery and your long-gone daddy’s misery, because after all he was probably in the jug somewhere, some guy you never knew whose rash action had brought you into this shitass world, and now here you were face-to-face with the Man, and it was long since past payback time.