Jeffery Deaver - The Bone Collector

There was silence for a full five minutes. Rhyme lacked the mechanism most people have for bleeding off tension. He’d been a manic pacer when he was mobile, drove the officers in IRD crazy. Now, his eyes energetically scanned the Randel map of the city as Sachs dug beneath her Patrol cap and scratched at her scalp. Invisible Mel Cooper cataloged evidence, calm as a surgeon.

All but one of the people in the room jumped inordinately when Sellitto’s phone brayed. He listened; his face broke into a grin.

“Got it!” One of Haumann’s squads is at Eleventh and Sixtieth. They can hear a woman’s screams coming from somewhere around there. They dunno where for sure. They’re doing a door-to-door.”

“Get your running shoes on,” Rhyme ordered Sachs.

He saw her face sag. She glanced at Rhyme’s phone, as if it might be ringing with a reprieve call from the governor at any minute. Then a look at Sellitto, who was poring over the ESU tactical map of the West Side.

“Amelia,” Rhyme said, “we lost one. That’s too bad. But we don’t have to lose any more.”

“If you saw her,” she whispered. “If you only saw what he did to her -”

“Oh, but I have, Amelia,” he said evenly, his eyes relentless and challenging. “I’ve seen what happened to T.J. I’ve seen what happens to bodies left in hot trunks for a month. I’ve seen what a pound of C4 does to arms and legs and faces. I worked the Happy Land social club fire. Over eighty people burned to death. We took Polaroids of the vics’ faces, or what was left of them, for their families to identify – because there’s no way in hell a human being could walk past those rows of bodies and stay sane. Except us. We didn’t have any choice.” He inhaled against the excruciating pain that swept through his neck. “See, if you’re going to get by in this business, Amelia… If you’re going to get by in life , you’re going to have to learn to give up the dead.”

One by one the others in the room had stopped what they were doing and were looking at the two of them.

No pleasantries now from Amelia Sachs. No polite smiles. She tried for a moment to make her gaze cryptic. But it was transparent as glass. Her fury at him – out of proportion to his comment – roiled through her; her long face folded under the dark energy. She swept aside a lock of lazy red hair and snatched the headset from the table. At the top of the stairs she paused and looked at him with a withering glance, reminding Rhyme that there was nothing colder than a beautiful woman’s cold smile.

And for some reason he found himself thinking: Welcome back, Amelia.

“Whatcha got? You got goodies, you got a story, you got pictures?”

The Scruff sat in a bar on the East Side of Manhattan, Third Avenue – which is to the city what strip malls are to the ’burbs. This was a dingy tavern, soon to be rockin’ with Yuppies on the make. But now it was the refuge of badly dressed locals, eating suppers of questionable fish and limp salads.

The lean man, skin like knotty ebony, wore a very white shirt and a very green suit. He leaned closer to the Scruff. “You got news, you got secret codes, you got letters? You got shit?”

“Man. Ha.”

“You’re not laughing when you say ha,” said Fred Dellray, really D’Ellret but that had been generations ago. He was six foot four, rarely smiled despite the Jabberwocky banter, and was a star special agent in the Manhattan office of the FBI.

“No, man. I’m not laughing.”

“So what’ve you got?” Dellray squeezed the end of a cigarette, which perched over his left ear.

“It takes time, man.” The Scruff, a short man, scratched his greasy hair.

“But you ain’t got time. Time is precious, time is fleeing, and time is one thing You. Ain’t. Got.”

Dellray put his huge hand under the table, on which sat two coffees, and squeezed the Scruff’s thigh until he whined.

Six months ago the skinny little guy had been caught trying to sell automatic M-16s to a couple of right-wing crazies, who – whether they actually were or not – also happened to be undercover BATF agents.

The feds hadn’t wanted the Scruff himself of course, the greasy little wild-eyed thing . They wanted whoever was supplying the guns. ATF swam upstream a ways but no great busts were forthcoming and so they gave him to Dellray, the Bureau’s Numero Uno snitch handler, to see if he might be some use. So far, though, he’d proved to be just an irritating, mousy little skel who didn’t, apparently, have news, secret codes or even shit for the feds.

“The only way we’re dropping down a charge, any charge, is you give us something beautiful and sticky. Are we all together on that?”

“I don’t have nothing for youse guys right now is what I’m saying. Just now .”

“Not true, not true. You gotchaself somethin’. I can see it in your face. You’re knowing something, mon.”

A bus pulled up outside, with a hiss of brake air. A crowd of Pakistanis climbed from the open door.

“Man, that fucking UN conference,” the Scruff muttered, “what the fuck they coming here for? This city’s too crowded already. All them foreigners.”

“ ‘Fucking conference.’ You little skel, you little turd,” Dellray snapped. “Whatcha got against world peace?”

“Nothin’.”

“Now, tell me something good.”

“I don’t know nothin’ good.”

“Who you talking to here?” Dellray grinning devilishly. “I’m the Chameleon. I can smile’n be happy or I can frown and play squeezie.”

“No, man, no,” the Scruff squealed. “Shit, that hurts. Cut it out.”

The bartender looked over at them and a short glance from Dellray sent him back to polishing polished glasses.

“All right, maybe I know one thing. But I need help. I need -”

“Squeezie time again.”

“Fuck you, man. Just fuck you!”

“Oh, that’s mighty smart dialogue,” Dellray shot back. “You sound like in those bad movies, you know, the bad guy and the good guy finally meet. Like Stallone and somebody. And all they can say to each other is, ‘Fuck you, man.’ ‘No, fuck you.’ ‘No, fuck you .’ Now, you’re gonna tell me something useful. Are we all together on that?”

And just stared at the Scruff until he gave up.

“Okay, here’s what it is. I’m trusting you, man. I’m -”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatcha got?”

“I was talking to Jackie, you know Jackie?”

“I know Jackie.”

“An’ he was telling me.”

“What was he telling you?”

“He was telling me he heard anything anybody got coming in or going out this week, don’t do it the airports.”

“So what was coming in or going out? More 16s?”

“I told you, man, there wasn’t nothing I had. I’m telling you what Jackie -”

“Told you.”

“Right, man. Just in general, you know?” The Scruff turned big brown eyes on Dellray. “Would I lie to you?”

“Don’t ever lose your dignity,” the agent warned solemnly, pointing a stern finger at the Scruff’s chest. “Now what’s this about airports. Which one? Kennedy, La Guardia?”

“I don’t know. All I know is word’s up that somebody was gonna be at a airport here. Somebody who was pretty bad.”

“Gimme a name.”

“Don’t got a name.”

“Where’s Jackie?”

“Dunno. South Africa, I think. Maybe Liberia.”

“What’s all this mean?” Dellray squeezed his cigarette again.

“I guess just there was a chance something was going down, you know, so nobody should be having shipments coming in then.”

“You guess.” The Scruff cringed but Dellray wasn’t thinking about tormenting the little man any longer. He was hearing alarm bells: Jackie – an arms broker both Bureaus had known about for a year – might have heard something from one of his clients, soldiers in Africa and Central Europe and militia cells in America, about some terrorist hit at the airports. Dellray normally wouldn’t’ve thought anything about this, except for that kidnapping at JFK last night. He hadn’t paid much attention to it – it was NYPD’s case. But now he was also thinking about that botched fragging at the UNESCO meeting in London the other day.