Graveland: A Novel (26 page)

Shoulda this, shoulda that, shoulda the other.

The phone rings.

She lets it go for a bit, but then leans forward. As she’s reaching up to get the phone, she notices Alex’s backpack under the table. She pulls it out, realizing that she has no idea what’s in it. It doesn’t feel heavy. It could be just a few books.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t open it. She puts it on the table.

She picks up the phone. She doesn’t say anything.

“Lizzie?”

She avoids looking at Alex, but notices that on the couch next to him—and next to the remote control—is the gun he had yesterday.

“Lizzie?
Lizzie?
You there?”

“Yeah.”

She stretches across the table, over the back of the couch, and reaches down for the gun.

The window is to her right.

She must be plainly visible.

“Lizzie, listen to me very carefully, okay?”

“Have you done it yet?”

“What … sorry?”

“Glass-Steagall. Have you reinstated it yet?” She pauses. “
You stupid motherfuckers
.”

She drops the phone on the floor. She raises her other hand, points the gun at the window, and pulls the trigger. The sound is alarmingly sharp, and in the recoil her arm and shoulder yank back really hard. Unlike the earlier and more discreet incoming shots, this one shatters the windowpane completely.

Lizzie’s shoulder is sore, and she rubs it for a moment with her free hand.

When she’s done, she picks the bag up from the table. She walks over to the door and kicks it a couple of times, grunting loudly.

Then she opens it.

Holding the bag up and pointing the gun directly in front of her, she heads out into the narrow hallway and the oncoming steel-gray blur of Kevlar vests, ballistic helmets, and M4 assault rifles.

*   *   *

In the cab on the way down, Ellen tries to plot out the next three weeks in her head. The first one—assuming this siege thing doesn’t drag on too long—will be talking to Frank Bishop and, hopefully, to Lizzie. The second week will be back up at Atherton, excavating the Coady connections and gathering local detail, and then
maybe,
if it becomes necessary, a Coady-related schlep down to Florida for the rest. The third week will be at home on an intravenous coffee drip getting the story written for the next
Parallax
deadline.

Her agreement with Frank Bishop—informal, and yet to be tested—will be key here. To make it work she’ll have to help
him
first.

Devise some kind of a strategy.

As the cab turns onto Delancey Street, her phone pings. It’s a text from Max.

You watching Hannahoe?

She composes a reply—
No
.
In a cab
.—but then decides not to send it. She doesn’t want to be distracted by calls or texts. She’ll get back to Max after she’s met with Frank.

At the barrier on the corner of Orchard she asks a uniformed officer if she can speak to a Detective Lenny Byron. The officer turns away and relays the request into his radio. After a few moments he turns back and tells her that Detective Byron will be along to see her in a few minutes.

She thanks him, and looks around.

Traffic is passing normally on Delancey, but there are a lot of extra parked vehicles—squad cars, trucks, trailers. There are a lot of people gathered on the sidewalk, too, mostly civilian onlookers, locals, the evacuated. There’s a good deal of curiosity and neck-craning and disgruntlement. She can see up Orchard Street, and there’s another, smaller group of people at the next set of barriers, just before Rivington. These are mostly cops, Bureau and Homeland personnel, journalists, tech crews.

After a couple of minutes, a guy in a crumpled suit and an invisible cigarette sticking out of his mouth wanders down.

Ellen has met a lot of NYPD detectives in her day, and they tend to fall into fairly set categories, the assholes, the plodders, and the ones you can actually have a decent conversation with. Only problem is you can never tell beforehand. Unless you have an indication. The fact that Frank Bishop apparently has this guy on his side is indication enough for Ellen.

And that’s how it turns out.

A minute or so later, they’re both strolling back in the direction of Rivington and parsing recent testimony in the Connie Carillo murder trial. The sun is nudging its way out from behind a passing cloud bank, and Ellen has already spotted Frank Bishop.

It is a moment of virtual tranquility.

And then a shot rings out.

It’s somewhat muffled, but it’s unmistakable.

Byron runs on, everyone else moving at the same time, sucked forward.

But just as quickly, all movement ceases, and there is an eerie silence.

The scene suspended, everyone left hanging.

Frank Bishop leans over the barrier, his head in his hands, Byron at his side now.

Ellen stands watching.

Then the silence is broken, this time by a sustained burst of gunfire. It comes from the same direction, from inside, and is louder, fuller, more comprehensive.

Still only a couple of seconds.

But enough to change everything.

11

W
ALKING FROM THE DOOR OF THE BUILDING OVER TOWARD
F
RANK,
Detective Lenny Byron gives a quick shake of his head. He’s pale, and his eyes look hollowed out.

He mouths, “I’m sorry.”

Frank stares at him in disbelief, barely able to breathe now, his chest like a brick, his gut twisting into knots. He holds on to the barrier with both hands, squeezing so hard it feels as if either the metal or his bones should crack.

There is a moment when his voice comes close to making a sound, to releasing something, a scream or a howl, but the moment passes. And then it’s too late. Frank knows what this is, even if he can’t control it—his systems are shutting down, his emotions seizing up, grief and despair retreating, burrowing into dark, silent recesses.

Almost immediately, too, stuff begins to happen around him, distracting stuff, like the Rivington and Stanton Street barriers being pushed aside to make way for the extra personnel that are now appearing—technical units, crime scene, bomb disposal, paramedics—a whole security apparatus whose function, it seems, is to disassemble, to debrief.

To obliterate.

Frank and an openly howling Deb soon get swept up into a separate debriefing process that involves being talked to, or talked
at,
in various locations, at various times—and, most disconcertingly, in various tones—by a parade of uniformed officers, special agents, and PTSD counselors. What the process does
not
involve, however, is any kind of response to their repeated requests for information.

For confirmation.

For a chance to see their daughter’s body.

That
—it soon becomes apparent, as they are drawn ever farther away from the scene—is simply not going to happen. And despite whatever armory of legalistic-sounding bullshit Lloyd Hackler is able to draw on, the firewall phrase “national security concerns” proves to be impenetrable.

But what strikes Frank about this—about the notion of juxtaposing that phrase with his daughter’s name—is just how preposterous it seems.

A part of him wants to laugh.

Which actually feels like something he might be able to do, in the absence of other, more appropriate responses—crying, say, howling, trembling uncontrollably, lashing out.

He doesn’t laugh, though, or do any of these things. Instead, he moves through the hours like a zombie, dealing with the authorities, with Deb and Lloyd, talking on the phone to John (after Deb calls him), accepting Deb’s invitation to stay with
them
tonight (because where else is he going to stay), and ending up in their apartment on Eighty-sixth Street, with people dropping by all the time, people he knows vaguely, people he doesn’t know at all, then watching Deb break down, watching her recover, and watching her break down again.

Unable to sleep that night, he stares at the ceiling for six hours.

At around noon the next day, he and Lloyd drive out to JFK to pick up John. This forty-minute car journey should be awkward and emotionally charged, as it’s actually the first time the two men have ever been alone together, but instead it’s nothing. It’s preceded by a testy encounter between Lloyd and some of the photographers and reporters camped out on Eighty-sixth Street, and is followed by an interminable wait in the overcrowded arrivals area.

John is understandably distraught when he appears, but after a long silent hug, Frank leaves most of the talking, and explaining, such as it is, to Lloyd.

And in this way Saturday rolls on and folds into Sunday.

The media barrage in the morning is relentless, the papers, the talk shows, but Frank ends up being shielded from a lot of it—and again, here, thanks are due to Lloyd, whose crisis management skills are operating at full tilt.

But what Frank realizes after a while is that he doesn’t want to be shielded from it, because in the absence of being able to
feel
anything, he finds that all he can do is think, and to do that he needs input, he needs information.

In the apartment, there is a lot of walking on eggshells, and whispered conversations, and tea drinking, and Frank knows he won’t be able to bear this for much longer. On Sunday evening, therefore, he has a quiet word with Deb, an even quieter one with John, and then he takes his leave. He borrows a coat and hat of Lloyd’s, so that when he exits the building he’s able to slip by the photographers unnoticed.

He’s not sure what he’s going to do, though.

He doesn’t want to go downtown to retrieve his car—doesn’t want to go anywhere near
there
, not yet. Besides, he’ll have to stick around town for a few days, to find out what’s happening. To find out about the release of the body.

So he wanders aimlessly for an hour or two, and eventually checks into a cheap hotel, the Bromley, in midtown, near Seventh Avenue. For a cheap hotel, the Bromley is still fairly expensive, but Frank doesn’t care. He has a credit card, and
some
money in the bank.

Not that any of that matters anymore.

He settles into his room, which is musty and could do with a lick of paint and a change of carpets, and turns on the TV.

He flicks around the channels looking for any reference to, or analysis of, the events of Friday. Incredibly, it seems that the story has already receded somewhat, and other stuff has come to the fore. But he does find a bit of coverage, which he watches with mute incomprehension—and as soon as it’s done, he flicks on through the channels to look for more elsewhere.

He’s also very hungry, he realizes, but he does nothing about it.

Eventually, he falls asleep on the bed, in his clothes, the remote control in his hand.

*   *   *

“Well, I wasn’t paying attention. I was actually pretty busy on Friday.”

“Yeah. Guess I called
that
one wrong.”

It’s Sunday night, and Ellen is at the bar in Flannery’s having a drink with Charlie. She raises her glass and says, “You might not have been the only one.”

Charlie nods. “Quite the spectacular fuckup, wasn’t it?”

Ellen doesn’t say anything. She can still hear the gunfire in her head, and feel the resultant knot in her stomach. She’s had the weekend to get over it, to digest what happened, but it now appears that that’s not going to be enough.

“Three dead kids?” Charlie goes on. “That’s a bad day’s work, no matter what the circumstances. Okay, this wasn’t Kent State or anything. They shot those banker guys, I get that. But still.”

Ellen doesn’t know how old Charlie is exactly, but his casual reference to Kent State as a sort of touchstone for this says a lot.

“Anyway.” She doesn’t really want to talk about Orchard Street. It’s not that she doesn’t have anything to say on the matter. She does. That’s the trouble. She wouldn’t know where to start. “So, counselor,” she says, upbeat, “what’s going on? What’s the latest?”

Charlie’s obsessive interest in the Connie Carillo murder trial is almost as amusing as the trial itself. It’s like a soap opera for him, something to watch and then ironically tear apart and analyze in the bar with his co-retirees and anyone else, like Ellen, who’ll bother to listen.

“Okay,” he says, “on Friday morning Joey Gifford finished up, so after lunch they called the next witness.” He glides a hand through the air, as though conjuring up something magical. “Enter Mrs. Sanchez, the housekeeper.” He lets that sink in for a moment, but when it doesn’t get the reaction he was obviously expecting, he hammers the point home. “It means we get our first glimpse
inside the apartment.
And even if Mrs. Sanchez is no Joey Gifford, she’s going to have a lot more to dish up on the day-to-day stuff chez Carillo.”

Dutifully, Ellen raises her glass again. “What’s not to like?”

“Exactly.”

But as Charlie goes on with his account of Friday’s proceedings in the courtroom, Ellen finds her mind wandering back to Orchard Street, and to an image she has of Frank Bishop standing alone at the barrier, stooped, motionless, waiting for Lenny Byron to reappear.

She and others were shunted away at that point.

Near the outer barrier she had a quick word with Val Brady, and then stood around on Delancey for a while before wandering off and eventually—once again—heading home.

Here there were more voice messages and e-mails inviting her to address Twittergate—or, as it should perhaps more generously be called (it being the only -gate he’s ever likely to get), Rattgate—but she ignored them. She turned on the TV, went online, grabbed her phone, and started following the Orchard Street story across as many platforms as she could handle. Unlike earlier, she accepted now that she was a civilian where this was concerned. But she was a committed one and wanted answers.

She wanted to understand.

And over the course of Saturday and Sunday she
has
come to understand quite a bit, even managing to piece together for herself a plausible-ish picture of how and why the whole thing happened. Unsurprisingly, though, certain key questions remain unanswered—questions about the different guns the Coadys used in the shootings, about whether or not there actually
were
any explosives in the apartment, and about the exact sequence of events at the very end. She knows from experience that when these issues come up for official processing they’ll either be dealt with head-on and honestly, or they’ll be fudged, spun, and subjected to such extensive redaction as to be rendered meaningless.