Quake (8 page)

Nick and Mendoza continued up Sixth Avenue, past Washington Square Park and New York University on their right, Sheridan Square and the Jefferson Market Courthouse on their left. Mendoza had several times suggested turning west, at Bleeker Street, at Waverly Place, and again at Greenwich Avenue. But each time Nick replied, “Let's keep going. We can cross over to the west side once we get farther north.”

Now they were approaching Fourteenth Street, the next logical place to turn left. Only Nick wasn't ready. He wasn't ready to see that the devastation had reached the west side. Wasn't ready to find a collapsed Port Authority Building, a flattened Chelsea Hotel. Continuing along Sixth Avenue, also known as the Avenue of the Americas, shielded him from such sights, and he was tempted to suggest they follow it all the way past Bryant Park and the New York Public Library, to Forty-second Street before finally hooking a left and walking through the Theater District and past Times Square to Eighth Avenue.

When they finally reached Fourteenth Street, all of Nick's deliberations didn't matter. At the intersection of Fourteenth and Sixth Avenue, they found a hulking crater that reminded Nick of the one he and Sara climbed during their honeymoon in Honolulu. Diamond Head was its name. Only Diamond Head wasn't situated in the dead center of a major metropolis. And Diamond Head had been formed some 200,000 years ago. This crater at Fourteenth and Sixth had only been here since around lunchtime today.

“Christ,” Mendoza said, crossing himself again. “How the hell do you think something like that happens? It looks like a goddamn asteroid hit the city.”

For a moment, Nick considered the possibility. But no, there were multiple tremors, which would have meant multiple asteroids striking New York City all at once. And NASA was tracking these so-called Near-Earth Objects anyway, right? What hit today was a quake. A magnitude 7.1 if the postal worker (and amateur geologist) they'd spoken to was correct. This crater had to have formed as a result of an explosion beneath the surface of the street.

Nick glanced around the intersection. The full moon was providing just enough light for him to see that whatever had caused the crater had also blown the tops off several buildings to the east and west. Whatever it was had also shredded Fourteenth Street in the direction of Seventh Avenue.

“We can't get past this,” Mendoza said. “What do we do? Backtrack?”

Nick shook his head. “I'd prefer not to, if we can avoid it. After all the walking we've done, moving south even for a street or two would probably break my spirit beyond repair.” He pointed to the right. “There. We can get around it. Turn up Fifth Avenue and cross over to the west side at the next major hub, which would be Twenty-third Street.”

Mendoza said nothing, for which Nick was grateful. They were about to go out of their way solely because Nick had refused to turn west earlier for no apparent logical or rational reason.

“Let's do it, then,” Mendoza finally said.

They walked one long city block, then turned north onto Fifth Avenue. Nick removed the tie from his forehead and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He was grateful that he'd held on to the suit jacket. Even though he was sweating from exertion, he felt a chill throughout his entire body, and his arms were experiencing the worst of it.

As they crossed the next intersection, Nick caught Mendoza staring at the street sign on the opposite corner.
East
Fifteenth Street, it read. It didn't mean anything, of course. Had they made a quick left they'd have been back on
West
Fifteenth Street. But Nick imagined that the word was having as much of a psychological impact on Mendoza as the thought of backtracking had had on Nick ten minutes earlier.

They walked silently. Past Sixteenth and Seventeenth and Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets. The farther they got uptown, the more survivors they saw. Mobs of them, in fact. Not because there was less devastation, Nick knew, but because there had simply been more people north of Houston Street than south of Houston when the tremors hit.

Nick struggled to keep up as Mendoza hurried his steps past Twentieth Street and Twenty-first Street. Nick's left leg screamed out in pain, but there was nothing he could do it for it just then. He favored his right, but it didn't seem to be doing a hell of a lot of good.

The Flatiron Building came into view. Nick instantly thought of its architect, Daniel Burnham. He and Lauren had both recently read Erik Larson's
The Devil in the White City
, a nonfiction narrative about 1893's Chicago World's Fair, of which Daniel Burnham had been the chief architect. While Burnham oversaw the design and construction and maintenance of the World's Columbian Exposition, a doctor named Henry Howard Holmes was engaged in the murder and mutilation of at least two dozen victims, many of them young women, just a few short blocks away.

When it was completed in 1902, the Flatiron Building was the tallest in the world.

Twelve years ago the Twin Towers held that honor,
Nick thought as a lump rose in his throat.
At least they did until those religious fundamentalists flew airplanes into them.

The building at 175 Fifth Avenue had earned the name Flatiron because of its odd triangular shape, but some had referred to the building as Burnham's folly, because experts predicted that the winds along Twenty-third Street would knock the unusual structure over; it was just a matter of time. A century and some later, Burnham's Flatiron Building was still standing. It even appeared to have withstood the quake.

“Do you feel that?” Mendoza said.

Nick turned. “I don't feel anything.”

Mendoza stared down at his feet. “I think the trains are running again. Which line is directly below us? The N and R or the 4, 5, and 6?”

Nick tried to picture one of the ubiquitous subway maps that could be found underground. He saw a green line and a yellow line splitting at Fourteenth Street, Union Square. The green line—the 4, 5, and 6—continued north along Lexington all the way to the Upper East Side and into the Bronx with a stop at Yankee Stadium. The yellow line—the N and R—curved west along Broadway and therefore would run under the Flatiron at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue.

Nick said, “It would be the N and—”

Before he could finish his sentence he felt the sensation that Mendoza was referring to, only it was much stronger. So much stronger that it nearly knocked him to the blacktop.

Screams suddenly filled the air all around them.

The earth began to shake and all Nick could think was:
No, please. No. No, not again.

Nick dropped back, pulling Mendoza along with him. He pointed up at the Flatiron Building as windows burst on nearly every floor. The building itself swayed like a small tree in the wind, and Nick thought it was just a matter of time before it toppled.

As he and Mendoza broke into a run, Nick searched for cover but no place looked safe. All of those drills he'd been forced to go through as a child in California were useless right now. There were no desks to duck under, no thick door-frames to stand between. All they could do was run down the middle of the street and hope to avoid the falling debris.

Mendoza stumbled and fell to the pavement. Nick stopped short, barely maintaining his balance as the street bucked beneath his feet. He ran back to Mendoza and helped him up. As he did, he watched over Mendoza's shoulder as the Flatiron Building tipped like the leaning tower of Pisa. Only this tower was tipping over in their direction and it wasn't going to stand much longer.

Nick tried to get Mendoza to run with him, but the agent pushed him and shouted, “I
can't
. I twisted my ankle. You keep going. I'll do my best to follow!”

Nick gazed up at the Flatiron Building and tried to gauge its distance from them. It was difficult to tell but he felt certain they were still in the building's shadow. So he lowered his head, grabbed Mendoza around the waist, and grunting, lifted the larger man onto his shoulder with all his strength.

Nick's knees threatened to collapse beneath him as he turned and began at a much slower pace down the street, away from the Flatiron. Behind him he could hear those horrible sounds—that shrieking of steel, the crumbling of concrete—and he knew they might not survive the next sixty seconds.

 

 

Back at the Federal Courthouse at 500 Pearl, the defense lawyer Kermit Jansing finally crawled free of the rubble he'd been digging through for hours. He had no clue as to where he was in the building, or even if the building still stood. The last thing he remembered was running into the lockup with two federal marshals, his assistant Courtney trailing just behind him. From the lockup they'd rushed down a set of concrete stairs and pushed through a door on what may have been the first floor. That was all he could recall; after that, nothing but blackness. His only comfort now was that he was no longer pinned under immense pieces of wood and steel and concrete, and gazing up, he could even see a sliver of the night sky.

I made it
, he thought.

With a great deal of pain in seemingly every part of his body, he attempted to lift himself off the ground, but cried out the moment he tried to put weight on his right leg. He looked down, gently wiped off some of the thick dust that covered him head to toe, and grimaced at the sight of his knee. The shape was grotesque; clearly his kneecap had been dislocated. With another yelp, he exhaled and prepared to fall to the ground.

But he suddenly felt a pair of strong arms around his waist, and heard a gentle voice in his ear. “It's all right, counselor,” the voice said. “I'm just going to set you down a few yards away where it's safer.”

As the man lifted him off the ground and carried him over to a spot clear of debris, Jansing tried to get a look at his face. It was far too dark, but in the sliver of starlight he could tell that the man was dressed in a bloodied white short-sleeve shirt and dark pants. Jansing could make out patches on the man's arms and knew instantly that he was a court officer.

“Thank you,” Jansing mumbled. “Thank you, thank you.”

The court officer set Jansing down. Jansing blinked several times, wiped dust from his eyes, but it only caused them to burn more.

“Here, counselor,” the court officer said, lowering Jansing's hands and placing what felt like a wet towel over the lawyer's eyes.

“What's happened?” Jansing rasped, surprised at the weakness in his own usually powerful, booming courtroom voice.

“Earthquake, we think,” the court officer said.

We?
Jansing quickly removed the towel from his eyes and blinked rapidly searching for other survivors. When his eyes finally began cooperating, he stared at a shape not far off on top of a pile of rubble.

“Courtney?” he said.

The court officer pulled a small Maglite from his pocket. He twisted the front of the flashlight and a narrow beam appeared. He shone it in the direction in which Jansing had been looking.

“Dear God.” Jansing could make out her long, flowing blond hair, her porcelain skin. He tried to move toward her but the court officer gently held him back.

“I'm sorry, counselor. We did all we could but your assistant didn't make it.”

Jansing immediately felt tears well in his eyes and a powerful pang of grief in his chest.

The poor girl
, he thought.
She was only a kid. So enthusiastic about the law, so excited to become a lawyer.

Jansing hung his head. When would this nightmare finally be over?

Just as he thought it, an intense rumbling sound emanated from below.

 

 

When the Flatiron Building finally toppled, Nick and Mendoza were clear of its shadow. As the ground shook, Nick finally collapsed in the street. With Mendoza lying next to him he braced himself as a cold wind of dust and debris washed over them like angry surf.

Nick held his breath as long as he could, but when he finally inhaled he knew no matter what happened in the next twenty-four hours, his lungs would never recover from what he breathed in during this crisis.

After a minute the ground calmed again.

We have to keep moving
, he thought. Waiting for the dust to settle, so to speak, was impossible. They would be there for weeks, maybe months or more. Against the cold wind, he lifted himself up. Leaning over, he placed Mendoza's arm around his shoulder and lifted the agent to his feet.

“Leave me here,” Mendoza wheezed.

“The hell I will.”

“Nick, you've got no choice.”

“There's always a choice.”

Nick tightened his grip on Mendoza's forearm and held it over his shoulder.

Together they trudged west toward Sixth Avenue, then past it to Seventh, where they turned right and continued true north.

After excruciatingly slow progress, navigating debris heaps and dodging potholes, on Seventh Avenue, Nick and Mendoza reached a snarl of toppled infrastructure two blocks north. A power pole, a lamppost, a telephone booth (Nick wondered if maybe this quake would be the end of phone booths in the city once and for all), and a bus stop bench were among the objects Nick recognized in the pileup. As he was plotting a way around the obstacles, he noticed a bicycle wheel, still spinning, protruding from the mess.

“Hold on.” Nick removed Mendoza's arm from around his shoulder and eased the agent away, taking care that Mendoza had his balance on his good ankle before letting him go. “Maybe we can use this.”

Nick went to the bike, which was pinned between the phone booth and the bus bench. He squatted to look deeper into the destruction and that's when he saw the body.

“Christ!” Nick recoiled, knocking his head into a toppled telephone pole still festooned with flyers for nightclubs that no longer had an audience, if they still existed at all.

The city's gone
, he thought
. This town will never be the same.

The bike's rider was still on the bike, helmet on his perfectly intact head; even his glasses were still in place. But his body was crushed beyond all hope of repair, nothing more than a bloody pressing of intestines and gore. A messenger bag lay pinned beneath the bicycle. Nick guessed that this man was—used to be—one of Manhattan's omnipresent bike messengers who couriered documents all over town.

This town will never be the same
, he thought again.

He blocked out his inner voice and walked back over to Mendoza.

“Maybe if we ride the bike it'll be easier going. I can pedal. Think you can balance on the handlebars?”

Mendoza wiped his brow before returning Nick's gaze. Then he looked back toward the crumpled Flatiron, then to his grime-caked shoes. “Just take it, Nick. Take it and go to your daughter.”

“I was kidding, Frank. You can ride and I'll push. This way you can keep your weight off that ankle.”

Mendoza shook his head. “The bike will slow us down even more. You need to keep moving, Nick. I'm not going hold you back any longer.”

“I can't just leave you here. I won't.”

Mendoza appeared to be lost in thought.

“Frank, what is it?”

Mendoza finally held Nick's stare. “I can't allow you to continue helping me like this, Nick. You're a good guy who needs to get to his little girl. I can't . . .” He sputtered to a halt, watching what must have amounted to thousands of reams of paper fluttering by on ground level and in the air. “I can't let you do this.”

Nick threw up his hands and glanced north on Seventh Avenue. “Spit it out, Frank. We're on a mission, remember?” Nick began to wonder if the stress had become too great for the agent.

Just then the ground vibrated with another temblor, smaller than the last but still strong enough to make Mendoza cry out in pain as the ground shifted beneath his turned ankle.

Once the tremors faded, Mendoza coughed once before speaking and said, “Look, Nick, there's something I've got to get off my chest. In case one or both of us doesn't make it through this.”

“Okay. Make it quick.”

Mendoza reached out and gripped Nick's shoulder. “You remember the Boneta case?”

Nick frowned and imparted a sarcastic inflection to his response. “No, it must have slipped my mind. Why don't you refresh my memory. Of course, I remember it; it turned into the biggest debacle of my career. What gives?”

Nick's memories of the case were painful enough to pierce even his sense of urgency to reach his daughter. For a few whirlwind seconds Nick forgot about the ruins of Seventh Avenue and the city full of hurt through which they'd trod in order to reach their loved ones, and he remembered....

Luis Boneta.
A Puerto Rican murder defendant Nick had prosecuted seven years earlier. Boneta was a Class-A scumbag who had been committing atrocities in four of the city's five boroughs for nearly a decade. Murders, rapes, violent robberies. Sometimes he acted alone; other times he directed a loosely organized network of mercenary-like thugs. Some of the investigators on the case claimed he had a fetish for sadism, because it seemed like he inflicted more and graver injuries than were necessary to commit his crimes. One time he'd even put on a mask and raped the wife of a small-time drug dealer who'd been late paying him, while his associates held the dealer down, filmed it, and posted the footage to a popular online video sharing service. It was viewed millions of times in the short duration it remained live before being removed.

These and other twisted exploits eventually made Boneta a high-profile target for not only the NYPD, but the FBI. Boneta was an agile chameleon, though, with many aliases, disguises, evasion techniques, and well thought-out contingency plans, and for a time it seemed he would make a mockery of any law enforcement entity that crossed his path. But his slipup came, as they often do, for the most mundane of reasons.

FBI agents were alerted to a Manhattan residential address from a grade school application for one of Boneta's daughters. Turned out his ex-wife had used the address to try to get her child into a better school district. She'd been under surveillance for a long time running and agents were privy to her attempt to enroll her daughter into a highly regarded school by providing an address within that district rather than that of her own Brooklyn duplex. A warrant was issued for the address and federal agents raided it several days later at four a.m. on a Monday to find Luis Boneta sound asleep in a four-poster bed next to a coked-up male whore. Both men were arrested; the prostitute was ultimately released in exchange for additional information on Boneta.

Nick was assigned the case for the U.S. government. His preparation and performance in the courtroom was second-to-none (except perhaps his opening statement for Alivi which he didn't get to finish), and Boneta was convicted and later handed a twenty-five year sentence.

Flash forward a year and a half and Boneta was back in court after his attorney—Kermit Jansing, in fact—had filed a motion for a new trial based on the allegation that Boneta's confession had been coerced.

Nick had put up a valiant fight and the court of public opinion remained firmly on his side, but in the end the “blatant misconduct of one or more bureau agents” noted by the Court of Appeals proved insurmountable, and Boneta was released. It disgusted Nick to no end that all of his hard work—the bleary-eyed string of one-hundred-hour work weeks he'd put into nailing that subhuman monster—had come to naught. And worst of all, to add insult to grievous injury, not even a full year had elapsed before Boneta killed again. And this time it hit home, and hit home hard. The victim was an innocent bystander, and an old friend of Nick's—a law school colleague who'd been caught in the cross-fire of one of Boneta's brazen newsstand drive-bys—wrong place, wrong time, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Mendoza's voice pulled him back to the present. “So then you remember why his conviction was overturned?”

“The Court of Appeals threw out his confession. Some asshole—apparently outside the view of the interrogating officers—worked him over for forty minutes before he gave his statement.”

Mendoza swallowed, said in a low voice, “That asshole was me, Nick. I was the agent who went into that interrogation room. I never had the balls to tell you. I . . .”

The sound of indeterminate cries for help echoed across the wreckage of the neighborhood during the silence that followed.

Finally, Nick spoke, voice tense. “
Why
are you telling me this
now
?”

Mendoza shook his head, stammered a few syllables of something unintelligible.

“
Why
, Frank?”

“I told you, I just . . . In case we don't make it . . . It's something I've always meant to tell you.”

Nick flashed on all the times he'd cursed aloud whoever the hell it was who had worked Boneta over. He'd even called in a few favors with some of the specialists he was on good terms with at the bureau to try to find out who'd been responsible, but the feds refused to give up one of their own, even informally.

Nick felt his temper rising along with the plume of black smoke that issued from what used to be the Flatiron. He reached out with both hands and grabbed Mendoza by what was left of the agent's lapels.

“For the last seven years you couldn't find the time to tell me? Just too busy, I guess?” He gently shoved his former colleague backwards and the man teetered on his bad ankle.

Mendoza held up his hands in a gesture of surrender but remained silent.

Nick shook his own head violently, as if clearing a thought he didn't wish to act on.

“We'll talk about this later, Frank. But this . . .” He waved an arm at the grim rubble scape. “This doesn't change anything tonight.”

“I know that.”

Nick appraised Mendoza's condition, lingering on his wobbly ankle. He didn't want his anger clouding his judgment in the hours that followed, and being near Mendoza would ensure that he remained furious.

“You're not far from the hospital,” Nick said. “Maybe you're right. Maybe this is where we part ways.”

Nick bent down and extracted the bike from the dead messenger. He righted it, wiped the blood from the seat with his shirttail and hopped on. He swerved at first over an uneven mound of displaced roadbed, and then settled into an uneasy rhythm north, toward Columbia, toward the only person on this earth he trusted not to lie to him, even though he had lied to her (
this city is safe
), toward Lauren.