Nightwatcher (22 page)

That dress changed her on the outside. Quite miraculously, she no longer looked the part of a forlorn orphan. She looked like a young woman who was quite capable of taking care of herself.

And that was what she did.

It’s only a dress . . .

It’s only fashion . . .

Was it just yesterday that she’d thought it would never matter again?

Somewhere outside, she can hear sirens wailing.

There have always been sirens, there always will be. They just sound louder now because there is no other street noise.

Allison goes over to her closet, pulls out a Badgley Mischka dress with the tags still on, and hangs it on the hook on the back of the door. She’ll wear this today.

Back in the kitchen, she pours a cup of coffee, then takes it into the living room and sits down at the computer. She finds several e-mails—including one from her supervisor, sent late last night, and addressed to the entire department.

Office will be open Thursday. Please report in if possible.

Good.

She switches over to a local news Web site, wondering if there will be anything about Kristina’s murder—and, perhaps, an arrest.

But of course, there’s nothing at all. Thousands of New Yorkers were murdered on Tuesday; Kristina is lost amid the mass hysteria and grief.

Detective Manzillo gave Allison his card last night. “Call me if you think of anything else that might help,” he said. “Or if you need anything,” he added, an obvious afterthought.

She takes it out, toys with it, looks at the phone.

She doesn’t need anything, really, and she can’t think of anything else that might help.

She puts the card into her wallet, goes back to the kitchen, pours another cup of coffee, and carries it over to the door. Then she stops and looks at the locks.

Who knows what’s going on out there this morning? For all she knows, Jerry the handyman could be lurking in the hallway, waiting to pounce.

No—if he killed Kristina, he’d be as far away from here right now as he could get, wouldn’t he?

Anyway, she’s already concluded that she can’t stay barricaded in her apartment from now on. That would be letting terror win.

She sets down the coffee while she unfastens the chain and all the locks.

Again, she hesitates, remembering how vulnerable she felt last night—how uncertain she was about everything. Including Mack.

Is this a bad idea?

Maybe.

But she’s doing it anyway.

She picks up the mug, opens the door, and sticks her head out just to be sure there’s no one lurking.

The hallway looks empty; it
feels
empty.

Allison takes a deep breath to steady her nerves and carries the coffee across the hall to Mack’s door.

T
he morning sun streams in the east-facing, fortieth floor windows just off Times Square. It’s a comfortable apartment in a doorman building, with high ceilings, a terrace, and large rooms—by Manhattan standards, anyway. The kind of apartment most twenty-three-year-olds barely earning twenty thousand dollars a year would be hard-pressed to afford.

But, as Nora Fellows informs Vic, she shares the apartment with thirteen other women.

“
Thirteen?
” Vic echoes, not sure he heard her correctly.

“Yup. We’re all flight attendants, based out of JFK. It’s basically, like, a crash pad, you know?”

A pretty, blue-eyed redhead, Nora is just a few years older than Vic’s daughter Melody, and she reminds him of her. She has the same pert attractiveness and slight build, uses the same slang and speaks with the same inflections.

Yet unlike Vic’s daughter—as far as he knows, anyway, which is a chilling thought—Nora Fellows very likely had a run-in with one of the suicide bombers who brought down the World Trade Center.

Yesterday, she called the police to report an incident she’d witnessed on a flight last month. The locals passed along the information to the FBI.

Now, operating on a few hours’ sleep and at least four cups of coffee, Vic sits in a folding chair across from Nora. Beside him is Detective Al Lozen from the NYPD.

When they were introduced this morning, Vic asked Lozen if he knows Rocky.

“Name sounds familiar,” Lozen said. “Is he . . . okay?”

That was a loaded question. Ever since Vic arrived in New York yesterday, he’s heard people asking it of each other.
Is he okay? Are they okay? Is everyone okay?

Translation:
Did you lose someone on Tuesday?

“He’s okay,” Vic told Lozen. “How about you? Everyone okay?”

Lozen shook his head grimly, and Vic regretted asking.

The guy’s NYPD, lives in Brooklyn. Every New Yorker, especially every cop, knows someone who died on Tuesday. Everyone’s lost someone—for most, it was more than one. Some people have lost not just family members and friends, but dozens of colleagues and acquaintances.

Besides O’Neill, Vic’s own list includes a couple of childhood pals from the old block back in the Bronx, and several men and women with whom he’s crossed paths over the course of his career.

“You know, I have two daughters,” Lozen is telling Nora, “and they share a bedroom and bathroom, and you should hear how they fight. I can’t imagine how all of you girls don’t go crazy and kill each other.”

“We’re never all here at the same time,” Nora assures him, “so it works out. A lot of flight attendants live this way. It doesn’t make sense to have your own place when you’re hardly ever home, right?”

Lozen agrees, and Vic glances at his notes. Time to get down to business.

At the moment, Nora has the apartment entirely to herself. Her roommates have been stranded since Tuesday at airports all over the world. None, thank God, were aboard American Flights 11 or 77 but Nora knew several of the flight attendants and both pilots who were killed when they crashed.

“I would have been flying myself on Tuesday.” She plays with the hem of her sweatshirt, which is a couple of sizes too big. “Not on the planes that went down—I always fly out of JFK—but still . . .”

“Why weren’t you flying that day?” Vic asks.

“I ate at this new Thai place and got food poisoning on Monday night. I should have known not to eat there, because that place was such a hole in the wall, you know? It was so bad . . . I mean, it seems crazy to even worry about something like that
now
. After everything that’s happened to all these people . . . people I know . . . like, nothing else even seems to matter, you know?”

“It’s okay,” Lozen tells her. “So you were sick . . .”

“Yes, and I couldn’t fly. So I was here, and I’ve been watching TV, and when they started saying that the planes were hijacked by Middle Eastern men—I totally remembered that guy from last month. And I thought I should call.”

Vic nods. “Tell me exactly what happened on August twenty-fourth.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay. I was working a flight from Miami to JFK, first flight of the morning. I noticed a passenger acting suspicious. He was sitting the bulkhead, you know . . . at the front of coach, and just sort of . . . paying really close attention to what we were doing as we boarded the passengers and got ready to take off. Then I saw that he was talking into a little tape recorder. He was speaking in a foreign language. But he spoke English, too, you know—pretty well.”

She went on to describe how she’d reported his actions to the lead flight attendant, who told her to go into the cockpit and bring it to the captain’s attention. She did, and was told to keep a close eye on the passenger.

“I tried,” she tells Vic, “but, I mean, I was busy, especially after we took off, and . . . to be honest, he wasn’t really doing anything. He was just watching. And recording himself. At the time, it bothered me, but I had no idea . . . I mean, if I had known what could happen . . .”

“You did the right thing, reporting him. Tell me about the rest of the flight.”

She does. It was uneventful, the passenger disembarked, and she never saw him again.

“Would you recognize him if you did?” Vic asks as his personal cell phone vibrates in his suit coat pocket.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Excuse me for a minute, please.” Vic steps into the hall and pulls out the phone. “Vic Shattuck.”

“Vic. Jesus, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“Rocky. Yours, too.”

“Yeah? Even though I’m talking with my mouth full? I thought you said that was a bad habit.”

A faint smile crosses Vic’s face. Amazing what connecting with an old friend can do for a person, even in the midst of a crisis. “We were five when I said it,” he points out, “and it is a bad habit.”

“Yeah, well, there are worse,” he says, chewing. “Ange made me a frittata and I don’t want it to get cold.”

Vic imagines Rocky sitting at the worn oval table in the kitchen of his duplex in the Bronx, a stone’s throw from the block where they grew up—and really, just ten miles or so from here.

If only Vic could drop everything and go up to the Bronx and eat some of Ange’s home cooking and shoot the shit with Rocky, and make the world go away.

Too bad it doesn’t work like that. Not today, and not for him. Never.

“Listen,” he says hurriedly, “I’ve got to call you back, Rock. Sorry. I’m in the middle of something.”

“Aren’t we all. Call me when you can.”

“I will.” Vic quickly hangs up and for a few seconds, stands there imagining what his life would be like if he hadn’t followed this path. If he were, say, a psychiatrist, the way he’d intended to be when he’d first gone to college.

For one thing, he’d be better rested, and closer to home . . . and there sure as hell wouldn’t be a gun in his pocket.

But this is the life he chose for himself; he’s doing what he always wanted to do.

No—what he always
had
to do.

Jaw set, Vic returns to the living room and hands Nora Fellows a sheet of head shots. “Do you recognize any of these men, Nora?”

Nora looks it over, then gasps and points. “That’s him. That’s the guy on my flight.”

Vic nods with grim satisfaction, his momentary desire to flee all but forgotten.

One step closer.

S
omething pokes at Mack’s cheek, startling him awake.

He opens his eyes to see a child standing over him. What the . . . ?

He blinks and she’s still there and he has no idea who she is, or where he is and his head is pounding so badly it’s no wonder he can’t think straight.

The child opens her mouth and, without turning her head or moving her gaze away from Mack, shrieks, “
DADDY, HE WOKE UP!
”

The shrill blast splinters Mack’s skull like a sledgehammer.

He closes his eyes and swallows back a tide of nausea. When he opens them again, the little girl has been replaced with Ben. He’s holding a steaming mug in one hand, a green plastic soda bottle in the other.

“Black coffee?” he asks. “Or ginger ale?”

Mack swallows hard. “Neither.”

“If you puke on that carpet, my friend, Randi will kill me. And then I’ll kill you. So— bathroom’s that way.” Ben points over his shoulder.

“I don’t need—” Mack gulps, sits up, and finds that he’s entangled in a puffy purple quilt. He manages to extract himself, runs past Ben, and makes it to the bathroom just in time.

As he kneels miserably on the tile in front of the toilet, he tries to piece together how he wound up here, at Ben’s apartment.

He remembers calling Ben from home and asking if they could get together for a little while. The last thing he remembers, he’d found his way to the midtown pub where Ben had promised to meet him for a beer. Or was it a drink?

Judging by how wretched he feels, it was both, and many of each. He smells strongly of stale cigarette smoke, too, and he recalls buying a pack somewhere along the way to the pub.

He rinses his mouth with water and spots a tube of toothpaste that has a picture of Barbie on it. He squeezes some of the sparkly pink goo onto his finger and rubs it over his teeth. He hasn’t finger-brushed since his sleeping-around days, before he met Carrie.

Carrie
.

He spits out the disgusting toothpaste, which tastes of fruit and flowers, and it’s all he can do not to throw up in the sink. After splashing cold water over his stubbly face, he dries off with a towel.

Today’s newspaper is sitting on top of a closed wicker hamper, the sections in disarray, as if someone had been reading it and put it aside hastily. Mack finds the front page, scans the headlines, then leafs through the section, skimming the news.

Five minutes later, he folds the paper open to a page, tucks it under his arm, and makes his way back to the living room.

Ben is there, waiting. Wordlessly, he holds out the mug and the bottle.

Mack takes the bottle, but he’s not convinced he can stomach even ginger ale right now.

“Drink,” Ben tells him.

Mack opens it and takes a cautious sip. It goes down, stays down.

“Sit.” Ben gestures at the couch. The purple quilt is now neatly folded at one end, a pillow on top of it.

“Ben, I’m sorry . . .”

“Sit,” Ben says again, taking his arm and steering him over to the couch. “It’s okay.”

“Thank you.” Mack sinks onto the couch, the newspaper on his lap, and sips some more ginger ale. It’s not helping, but it’s not hurting, either.

Ben is in a chair opposite the couch, watching him warily.

Is he worried I’m going to throw up on the rug? Or worse?

What the hell happened last night?

What did I do?

Why am I here?

Mack vaguely remembers that he called Ben because he needed a shoulder and an ear.

What did I say?

“Feeling better?” Ben asks. He’s wearing a suit, Mack notices.

“A little better. Are you . . . are we . . . is the office open today?”

“It is, but no one expects you to be there. I’m just going for a little while, to get a few things squared away. You can stay here if you don’t want to go home. Randi and Lexi will be around.”