Glenn Cooper - Library of the Dead aka Secret of the Seventh Son

“Only other side of airport?”

“You’re a great help. Yeah, only there.” He switched off his mobile phone and tossed it in his bag, swapping it for the bulkier prepaid.

The driver wouldn’t take any money. Will got out and looked around: moment of truth. Everything looked normal, no blue lights, no pursuers. He immediately joined the short taxi rank in front of the terminal and hopped into a yellow cab. When it drove off he used his prepaid phone to call Nancy and fill her in. The two of them urgently hatched a small plan.

He figured they’d be motivated and resourced, so he had to put on a good effort, multiple transfers, zigzags. He had the first taxi drop him off on Queens Boulevard, where he stopped at a Chase Bank and withdrew a few grand in cash from his account and hailed another cab. The next stop was 125th Street in Manhattan, where he boarded a Metro North commuter to White Plains.

It was early afternoon and he was hungry. The rain had stopped and the air was fresher and more breathable than earlier. The sky was brightening and his bag wasn’t heavy so he set off on foot in search of food. He found a small Italian restaurant on Mamaroneck Avenue and holed up at a table away from the window for a languorous three-course time-killer. He stopped himself from ordering a third beer and switched to soda for his main course of lasagna. When he was done he paid in cash, let his belt out a notch and walked into the sunshine.

The public library was nearby. It was a grand municipal building, some architect’s concept of neoclassical design. He checked his bag at the front desk, but because there was no metal detector, he kept his weapon in its shoulder holster and found a quiet spot at a long table at the far end of the air-conditioned central reading room.

He suddenly felt conspicuous. Of the two dozen people in the room, he was the only one wearing a suit and the only one with a clean table space. The large room was library quiet, with an occasional cough and the scuff of a chair leg on the floor. He removed his tie, stuffed it into a jacket pocket, and set off to find a book to kill the time.

He wasn’t much of a reader and he wasn’t sure he remembered the last time he wandered the stacks of a library-probably at college, probably chasing a girl rather than a book. Despite the drama of the day, he was postprandial and drowsy and his legs were heavy. He weaved through claustrophobic rows of tall metal bookcases and inhaled the stale cardboard smell. Thousands of book titles blurred into one another and his brain started getting fuzzy. He had an overwhelming desire to curl up in a dark corner and take a nap, and was on the brink of going fully numb when he snapped back to alertness.

He was being watched.

He sensed it first, then heard footsteps, to his left in a parallel row. He turned in time to see a heel disappearing at the end of the stacks. He touched his holster through his jacket then hurried to the end of his row and made two quick rights. The row was empty. He listened, thought he heard something farther along, and crept quietly in that direction, another two rows toward the center of the room. When he wheeled round the corner, he saw a man scuttling away from him. “Hey!” he called out.

The man stopped and turned. He was obese, with an unruly speckled black beard, and was dressed as if it were winter, in hiking boots, a moth-holed sweater, and a parka. His upper cheeks were pocked and irritated and his nose was bulbous and textured like an orange peel. He had wire-rim glasses with a thrift-shop pedigree. Even though he was in his fifties, he had the petulance of a child caught doing something wrong.

Will approached him cautiously. “Were you following me?”

“No.”

“I think you were.”

“I was following you,” he admitted.

Will relaxed. The man wasn’t a threat. He pegged him as a schizophrenic, nonviolent, controlled. “Why were you following me?”

“To help you find a book.” There was no modulation. Every word had the same tone and emphasis as the last, each one delivered with complete earnestness.

“Well, friend, I can use the help. I’m not big on libraries.”

The man smiled and showed a mouthful of bad teeth. “I love the library.”

“Okay, you can help me find a book. My name is Will.”

“I’m Donny.”

“Hello, Donny. You lead, I’ll follow.”

Donny joyfully hurried through the stacks like a rat who had mastered a maze. He led Will to a corner then down two flights of stairs to a basement floor where he burrowed deeply into the new level with a sense of purpose. They passed a library assistant, an older woman pushing a cart of books, who smiled slyly, pleased that Donny had found a willing playmate.

“You must have a really good book for me, Donny,” Will called out to him.

“I got a really good book for you.”

With plenty of time on his hands, Will found the escapade diverting. The man he was chasing had all the hallmarks of chronic schizophrenia with maybe a touch of retardation thrown in, and by the look of him, was on big-time meds. Deep in a library subbasement, he was in Donny’s house playing Donny’s game, but he didn’t mind.

Finally, Donny stopped midway down an aisle and reached over his head for a large book with a worn cover. He needed both sweaty hands to wriggle it free before offering it to Will.

The Holy Bible.

“The Bible?” Will said with a fair bit of surprise. “I’ve got to tell you, Donny, I’m not much of a Bible reader. You read the Bible?”

Donny looked down at his boots and shook his head. “I don’t read it.”

“But you think I should?”

“You should read it.”

“Any other books I ought to be reading?”

“Yes. One other book.”

He scooted off again, Will following, lugging the eight-pound Bible under his arm, pushed up against his holstered gun. His mother, a meek Baptist who endured his son of a bitch father for thirty-seven years, read the Bible incessantly, and just then he cloyingly remembered an image of her at the kitchen table, reading her Bible, holding onto it for dear life, her lower lip trembling, while his old man, drunk in the living room, cursed her out at the top of his lungs. And she plumbed the Bible for personal forgiveness when she too turned to the bottle for release. He wouldn’t be reading the Bible anytime soon.

“The next book going to be as profound as this one?” Will asked.

“Yes. It’s going to be a good book for you to read.”

He couldn’t wait.

They went down another flight of stairs to the lowest level, an area that didn’t look like it saw a lot of foot traffic. Donny suddenly stopped on a dime and dropped to his knees at a shelf filled with older leather-bound books. He triumphantly pulled one out. “This is a good one for you.”

Will was keen to see it. What, in this poor soul’s view of the world, would match the Bible? He braced himself for a revelatory moment.

NY State Municipal Code-1951.

He put the Bible down to examine the new book. As advertised, it was page after page of municipal codes with a heavy emphasis on permitted uses of land. It was probably a minimum of half a century since anyone had touched the volume. “Well, this sure is profound, Donny.”

“Yep. It’s a good book.”

“You picked both these books randomly, didn’t you?”

He nodded his head vigorously. “They were random, Will.”

At five-thirty he was sound asleep in the reading room with his head comfortably perched on the Bible and the Municipal Code. He felt a tug on his sleeve, looked up and saw Nancy standing over him. “Hi.”

She was checking out his reading material. “Don’t ask,” he pleaded.

Outside, they sat in her car talking. He figured if he was going to be taken down, it would have happened already. It looked like no one had connected the dots.