“Yeah, Tone?”
“Okay,” he said.
“Good. I’m real busy right at the moment. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you where you can give me the cash.”
“Today.”
“Tomorrow I’ll call with a time and place. You bring the cash and I’ll give you what you need.”
I pressed the red button before he cou£€€ yold complain.
INTUITION GUIDED MY next call.
The first number I called put me directly into voice mail telling me that that particular cell phone had been turned off.
Then I dialed the oldest number I know.
“Hello?” a tremulous voice answered.
“Mardi?”
“Hi, Mr. McGill.”
“Let me speak to Twill, honey.”
“Um . . .”
“It’s important.”
“He’s not, he’s not here.”
“Not there? Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she stammered.
I didn’t need any peripheral creativity to worry about where he might be.
“Listen closely to me, Mardi,” I said. “I know about your father, what he’s done to you, and that you’re worried about your sister. I know what Twill plans to do to him. But you don’t have to worry about any of that anymore. I can take him down without you and my son going to prison. But you have to tell me where Twill is right now.”
Silence.
“Mardi,” I said. “Twill will spend the next twenty years in prison. You will, too. Who’s going to take care of your sister if that happens?”
“He’s . . .”
“Yes?”
“There’s a street fair on our block this afternoon.”
“I thought that was next week.”
“Daddy got it wrong. He has to rush down to the Village to get the photographs he’s selling. He should be back by now . . .”
I RACED DOWN to the street and caught a cab on Sixth. I gave the Pakistani driver a fifty-dollar bill and promised him another hundred if he could get me to the Bitterman block in under ten minutes.
We were maybe four minutes into the drive when I realized that I’d left my gun at the office. I considered turning around to get it but I couldn’t see any reason for going after my son armed.
Hyenas yipped in my hand as we were crossing S£€€y seventy-ninth Street.
“Where are you?” I asked Carson Kitteridge.
“Downtown,” he answered. “Why?”
“I gotta call you back.”
“Sanderson’s escaped,” he said before I could switch him off.
“How could a man with a fractured skull stand up, much less escape?”
“Desperation.”
We were nearing the Bitterman block.
“I gotta go, Carson,” I said. I don’t ever remember calling him by his first name before.
The street was blocked off, so I threw the hundred in the front seat and bolted from the cab. My foot hit the curb at an awkward angle and I went down, twisting my left ankle badly. But I got up and walked through the pain, just like Gordo taught me when I was a kid.
It was a bright sunny day and there were a thousand people milling and meandering down the center of the blocked-off street. I limped along, looking this way and that for my son.
My son.
I looked for him through racks of cheap jewelry, past the steam rising from a sausage vendor’s kiosk, and across a cell-phone seller’s cart. I bobbed up and down, moving in an erratic line past stacks of old Life magazines and piles of vintage vinyl albums.
I was bumping into people because of my awkward gait, handing out “Excuse me’s” like a politician pressing palms and saying, “Glad to meet ya.” I didn’t want to call out Twill’s name, just in case he shot the child molester before I got to him.
“Hey, watch out!” a man shouted. I think I might have stepped on his foot.
He pushed me as I was bringing weight down on my sore ankle and I fell. But that wasn’t punishment enough for whatever insult I had inflicted. He reached down to grab me by my lapels. I concentrated on him for the moment. He was a white guy, in his early forties, with various tattoos on his muscular forearms and that part of his chest that was exposed by an open dark-blue shirt. I remember seeing a skull with a serpent coming out of its eye socket.
I clamped onto his decorated forearms and pushed with my good foot. When I was standing again, and he was understanding the strength of the hands crushing his arms, I saw a slender figure in a dark-green hoodie off to my left.
“Motherfucker!” my tattooed antagonist hissed.
I swiveled my hips, throwing him to the ground as I lunged toward the overdressed figure sporting the form and grace of my son.
“Twill, stop!”
When he swiveled his head to look at me the hood fell away. He had on a fabric skullcap, which threw me for an instant. Also, I had never seen that look on Twill’s face—but I recognized it. He was a man but seconds away from a desperate and final act. I looked a little farther to the left and saw, behind a large flat folding table, the man I had heretofore only seen buggering little Mardi Bitterman on a computer monitor. Behind him was a canvas screen hung with colorful photographs of panda bears, zebras, and other creatures reminiscent of childish wonder.
Adrenaline is a miracle compound. It ramped through my system like Popeye’s spinach or Captain Marvel’s “Shazam!” This internal elixir reached my ankle, temporarily curing me and setting my feet in motion. I reached Twill in an impossibly short span, grabbing him by both arms because, among other gifts, my son is ambidextrous. He tried to pull away but one thing I had on him was strength.
“It’s over, boy,” I said.
A familiar smile twitched across Twilliam’s lips.
“Hey, Pops,” he said.
“Are you Twill McGill?” a man asked. Not just a man, but Leslie Bitterman. “Where’s my daughter? I know that she’s with you.”
I don’t know what he planned to do next but it didn’t matter because I let go of my son and slapped Leslie hard enough to knock him on his ass. He was sitting on the curb, shaking his head to clear out the stars and cobwebs.
“Hey!” the white man who had pushed me down said.
He was coming right at me.
With my slap-hand I brought together his dark-blue shirt collar and pulled his face close to mine.
“I got a gun in my pocket and nothing to keep me from shooting you dead right here, right now.”
I don’t know if it was the words or the tone of my voice that convinced the guy but he fell back and melted away into the mass of unsuspecting humanity.
Ê€„
52
I took Twill by his right wrist and dragged him away from the street fair like an angry nanny might do with a naughty five-year-old. We didn’t stop moving for six blocks.
“Dad. Dad!”
I realized that my mind had been racing ahead without me.
“What?”
“What’s wrong with your foot?”
“My what?”
iv height="1em"
“You’re limping.”
His words, it seemed, brought the pain back into my ankle.
We were standing on the western sidewalk of the Natural History Museum. Twill led me to a bench there.
Willie Sanderson was on my mind. Where was he?
Who would the monster kill next?
“Dad?”
“You don’t have to worry about Mardi’s father anymore,” I said. “I know what he did to her and I’ll take care of him. But you should have come to me, son. You should always come to me when you have a problem.”
“Mardi didn’t want anybody to know.”
“There’s no secrets between us, Twill. I would no more betray that girl than you would. Don’t you know that?”
“I guess.”
“And what kind of fool are you, planning to walk up to somebody and shoot him in broad daylight in front of a thousand people?”
“How’d you know I planned to shoot him?”
“Don’t you think I know your hiding places, boy? And I’d have to be blind not to see what was goin’ on with that girl. What I couldn’t see was how making yourself a martyr in front of a street full of people was going to help.”
“No, man,” he said to me as if I were one of his school friends. “I had this.” He pulled the fabric hat from his head. In his hand the woolen skullcap opened into a ski mask. “That way nobody could see my face and . . .”
Twill stood up and pulled the sweatshirt-hoodie up over his head. Underneath he was wearing an ugly but bright orange-red Hawaiian shirt festooned with images of pelicans and pineapples.
My irrepressible son grinned.
“I woulda walked away with the gun at my side and then pulled off the hoodie in an alley two blocks away. Then I’da made it into Central Park, where there’s a rock I’d put the gun under.”
It wasn’t a half-bad plan. You’d have to be focused to pull it off, but Twill never had an attention deficit.
“Listen, son,” I said in spite of how impressed I was. “You’re smart and fearless. But you don’t know everything. That man deserves anything he gets but not by you taking the law in your own hands. Killing is wrong and I don’t want you involved with anything like that.” Sometimes I marvel at the simplicity of communication between people who share closeness. I was raised on the Hegelian dialectic, but there is no love in that language.
“That’s why you ran out there after me?” Twill asked, but I felt that there was another question on his mind.
“I’d die to protect you,” I replied to the unspoken interrogative.
Twill sat there on the public bench, staring into my eyes. I have rarely felt closer to another human being.
After a moment he nodded.
“I’m sorry, Pops,” he said.
I held out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Grab a cab home and put the pistol in my office, in the desk.”
“All right. But put that away. I got my own money.”
It was going to be a long haul making sure that my son survived his own dark brilliance.
AFTER TWILL WAS GONE I caught a taxi of my own. I gave the Jamaican driver an address near Gracie Mansion and sat back. Now that Sanderson was free I thought I might be able to leverage some information out of BH. I closed my eyes and drifted for a minute or two. My telephone let out a loud bleep, telling me that it was nearing the end of its power.
I nodded a bit more and the hyenas began to yip.
“What?” I said into the invisible mouthpiece.
“We can’t find Sanderson,” Kitteridge said.
“What were the guards doing while he was escaping?”
“Knocked both of them out before they ever even knew he was there. Hit ’em in the head with some kind of bludgeon. I’m impressed that you laid him low when he was at full power.”
“I’m just glad he didn’t kill me.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Willie anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because once we catch him, and I promise you we will catch him, we’ve got all we need to send him to prison for life—or death.”
“What do you have?”
My phone made another bleeping sound, telling me that the juice was almost gone.
“That’s police business, LT.”
“Come on, man. Yesterday you were telling me I was going to prison over Sanderson.”
“Somebody had his lawyer call and tell us that Sanderson was trying to shake down hi«€€1ems wife. Said that Sanderson had admitted to killing Brown and Tork. He also said that he’d called in a debt to make a hit on a Theodore Nilson in prison and that he murdered a guy named Norman Fell in Albany. This guy Fell is the one who said he was Ambrose Thurman.”
Once again my heart was racing. Once again the phone bleeped.
“Was the guy who the lawyer was calling for Bryant Hull?” I asked.
Silence.
“Carson!”
“What do you know about this, LT?”
“Did you tell Sanderson about the charges?”
“Why do you care?”
That was the moment my battery chose to die. There was a clicking sound and then deadness.
I was thinking about Hannah’s mother. If Sanderson thought that his Bunny had betrayed him he’d go straight for her.
“Driver.”
“Yeah, mon?”
“I need to use your phone.”
“The driver’s phone is not for public use,” he said. He probably said the same words a dozen times a day.
“This is an emergency.”
“It always is.”
“But this is a case of life and death.”
“There’s a phone booth on the corner. I can stop if you want me to.”
There was no time for the pay phone, and if I got in a fight with the driver I would lose precious minutes. The only thing I could do was to keep on moving.
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars, and you can make the call yourself.”
“Keep your money, brothah. We’ll be where you’re goin’ in a minute.”
My father would have applauded such an upstanding working-class individual. I wonder what he would have thought of me.
THE FRONT GATE’S BUZZER was going when I got there. I found out later that when the home-emergency button is pushed, the gate stays open for the cops to come in.
My adrenaline supply was plentiful that day. I made it up the stone stairway with no difficulty. The door was connected to the security system, too.
«€€nti
Two of the maids were unconscious on the floor. A big black man in a dark cranberry suit looked like he was dead at the foot of the bouquet table. And Willie Sanderson was leaning over a woman’s body, choking her, halfway up to the second floor.
