I heard a click on the line then, followed a moment later by the sound of a coin dropping into the phone’s metal guts.
When his voice came back, he got right down to business.
“
Listen, Payton. The reason I called. I need your help to flush a tail out into the open. There’s a meeting later today and one of the people leaving the meeting, I think, is going to be followed. I need to know who is doing the following. It’s not much, just daywork, maybe into early evening. But you’ll be covered for the whole day. What’s your rate, Payton?”
I heard a sharp crack, like a distant rifle report or a wood plank slapping the ground, over the phone and out my window. I looked out, but didn’t see what made it, then heard it again, just out of view directly below my window, sounding more clearly like a flat wooden board smacking pavement.
Something about Owl’s call was bothering me, something
off
. My normal rate was $50-an-hour plus expenses, but I told him, “Hundred a day.”
“
Please, not your professional rate, Payton. What’s your regular? C’mon, I’m retired, just a private citizen now, not a private eye.”
“
Doesn’t sound like it.”
“
Oh, this? It’s a personal matter. Client is someone I owe a favor to. Old time’s sake. You live long enough, it’s actually a pleasure to still be around to repay your debts.”
Long as you don’t chalk up more along the way, I thought. But didn’t voice it.
“
I should be comping you, Owl, professional courtesy. If it gets around to the other agencies that I’m not, I’d never get another referral throughout the five boroughs.”
That was it, the not-quite-right-something bugging me. George Rowell was connected, had friends in all the top agencies in Manhattan. Hell, he was tight with Moe Fedel. He only had to ring up Fedel Associates and have a half-dozen ops at his disposal, with probably a groovy spy-van thrown in, and all on the house. Even Matt Chadinsky—perennial tightwad—would have only billed him pro rate, and then torn up his check. Before he’d been recruited into the upper echelon at Metro, Matt had learned the ropes as Owl’s apprentice.
So with all that at Owl’s fingertips, why was he calling me? I’d be the first to say it: he could do better.
“
Okay, a hundred,” he said. “But I buy you dinner later.”
I agreed. I’d never intended to comp him anyway. It was just bluff. I wouldn’t even comp my own mom these days. But I couldn’t just lap it up either. I asked him, “Why you bringing this to me, Owl? It can’t be my mad skills.”
Maybe the slang threw him, he didn’t respond right away. If not for the background noises and my looking down at him, I would’ve thought he’d hung up.
Instead, he gave me a jolt. Turned and tilted his head up and looked right at me framed in my second-floor window. Knew I’d been watching him,
sensed
it; he was a canny old bird. He smiled, a big toothy grin. Tall and bony as he was, for a second he did resemble an owl, an old white owl like on the cigar boxes. He shrugged his stooped shoulders.
“
It’s short notice. And it’s right here, just a couple blocks away. Thought about who could cover it and you came to mind.”
“
We talking hard cover? If it’s muscle you ne—”
“
Nah,” Owl said. “Soft cover. Simple. Nothing rough. It’s just legwork, but I haven’t got the legs for it anymore. You do. And the Lower East Side is your neck of the woods. You’ve got the natural coloring.”
I nodded my head, but wasn’t completely convinced.
“
And how’s this job tied in with Law Addison?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’ve turned him up?”
Owl laughed, no mirth in it though.
“
No, no…haven’t found him. But I may have stumbled—”
Another click on the line. When no more coins dropped, an automated voice interrupted saying, “Please deposit twenty-five cents for the next three minutes.”
I told Owl to save his quarter and come on over. He waved in agreement and hung up the phone. He put a slip of paper in his jacket pocket, then, squaring his shoulders, he walked to the corner. I got my first good look at him.
He was ancient and not too steady on his pins. Rickety. Yeh, he needed a legman, all right. Hell, he could’ve used a registered nurse; every day I saw geezers younger than him wheeled around the city by their vacant-eyed assistants.
What was a guy his age doing still mixing in the business? If that’s what this was. That something-not-quite-right was still niggling at me. Possibly the rumor I’d heard that Owl had died from Alzheimer’s, maybe a kernel of truth in it? Going off on tangents. Strong emotion in his voice a couple times, anger, agitation. Was I about to be enmeshed in some sad senior moment? Dementia might account for his approaching me rather than one of his old friends if they were already alert to such episodes of Owl imagining himself back in harness.
The light changed and he started across. He looked frail, but had sounded solid enough over the phone.
Well, solid enough for me because, fact or fantasy, I could use his hundred bucks, even if I only spent the rest of the day tramping after heffalumps and woozles.
Waiting for him to buzz, I tried to make myself and the office more presentable, but there wasn’t much to work with. The floor was littered with debris, spent matches, scratched lottery tickets, splayed newspapers, and balled-up socks. I definitely didn’t put on much of a front. Trouble was there wasn’t much back of it either.
Two-thirds of the year gone by and I’d only had four paying clients, all small gigs lasting no longer than a week. In some ways, satisfying jobs. But I couldn’t live on satisfaction.
It was demoralizing, doing the only thing I was ever good at and still I sucked. I wasn’t bringing in enough business to pay my rent. I’d borrowed a grand from my folks last month and all of it went to pay overdue bills that had matured into final cut-off notices. The letter with my parents’ check said for me to have a big dinner on them. I had to make up a hearty-sounding meal to describe before calling to thank them for the loan.
I was barely hanging on. The bulk of my possessions had been fenced on eBay. Most of my furniture sold off on Craigslist. Soon I’d be down to only a chair, the desk, and my gun tucked away in the floor safe. I was devolving, dissolving. I’d spent the last fifteen years forging a career for myself, and what did I have to show for it? A forgery.
Owl’s words ricocheted in my mind, “Why we do it.”
I shook my head. Some things we do are beyond our control, especially those things that take years to do, not just spur-of-the-moment lapses in judgment, but decisions we don’t make as much as they make us.
My problem was I never found a niche, instead playing jack-of-all-trades. Should’ve specialized, trained to become an expert in some particular field: computer forensics, document verification, corporate security, biological detection, identity-theft protection, cellular counter-surveillance, handwriting analysis, something specific, anything instead of this master-of-none shit.
Knew a guy, little younger than me, who used to work at Metro around the same time. A nerdy-looking guy—thick glasses, pockmarked complexion, ink-stained pocket protector, the works. Looked like a disguise, but he never was an op, just the office’s technical support, which when I started there only meant clearing the copier’s paper jams and connecting fax machines. But the position blossomed. Suddenly he was in charge of finding the best firewall for their computer network and establishing their website, etc. The others at Metro—like at most agencies, a collection of hard-ass ex-cops—treated him brusquely, balking his attempts to join in on conversations. I sort of took him under my featherless wing, taking pity on him, always thinking, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Not long after I left Metro, he followed suit and formed his own computer security and risk management company. Couple years later, he had expanded into nineteen international markets. Last year, he was featured in a
Time
magazine cover story, “Faces of the New Detective.” I still had the issue in my bathroom stack. Whenever I flipped across it now, I still thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
I tidied the office, ditching the gunked-up ashtrays, collecting empty soda cans, and hunting for shoes. Managed to find a pair, but one was black, one was brown, and both were lefts. I kept looking. I needed to make a good impression on Owl.
His call couldn’t have come at a better time. The money was sweet, but so was the opportunity to learn some secrets from an old master, maybe turn my life around. And, if things went well—at least didn’t go sour—possibly get some future work from the agencies where Owl had friends. I’d been waiting for this, for a break to fall my way. If only I didn’t blow it.
I kept up the search for footwear. Minute later, still hadn’t located a matching pair, but it was okay because the buzzer hadn’t rung yet either. But that wasn’t okay.
He couldn’t have gotten lost, only a few dozen feet from the corner. I went to the intercom and pushed the button to unlatch the downstairs door and heard the latch buzz and clack.
I opened my office door and poked my head out, calling his name, but the only sound in the stairwell was my own voice.
Just furrowing my forehead over that when the morning’s white-noise blackened to pitch with a sudden thick-sick meat-thud sound and a mangled-pig squeal of swerving tires. Brakes screeched and…then nothing. The city struck dumb.
Without even thinking about it, I was out of my office and going barefoot down the steps three at a time, not caring as my office door swung shut behind me, as if I knew in advance what it was, what I would see before I saw.
Nothing paranormal about it though, only me naturally imagining the worst that could happen. Because had it truly been a premonition, I would have at least known beforehand to grab my keys on the way, instead of locking myself out.
Chapter Two: FOOTWORK
I opened the street door and looked out. What I saw started me running to the corner of Twelfth Street and Second. I didn’t even hear the door close behind me, because ahead in the gutter was a bundle of clothes with a man inside them.
Head cracked clean open from impact with the granite curb. Pale-pink, white-haired scalp ruptured, a skull shard sticking out and an emission of brain like a pupal discharge. Bits of gravel studded his forehead, cheeks, and chin. His eyes were open, but each pointed off in another direction like clocks of different time zones, Istanbul and L.A.
I didn’t have to touch him to know he was dead.
That’s not why I had to touch him.
I took a deep breath, like right before swimming to bottom, then sank to one knee and reached out for him.
Lifeless flesh and bone which could not do me ill
.
With my right hand, I went through the motions of seeking a pulse in his throat, while with my left I went through his jacket pockets.
I was quick and graceless. The first pocket I clawed for and dug in was empty, and when I pulled my hand back out, the lining came out along with it. The next pocket yielded folded papers, and within, something hard, flat and flexible like a credit card. I palmed them and, shielding my movements with my bent-over body, shoved it all down the front of my jeans. Then started standing up again, backing up, shaking my head in pantomime of no-he-ain’t-going-to-make-it.
But I must’ve stood too fast or shook my head too solemnly, because suddenly I was a little sick at my stomach. A headrush of sparkles blotted out vision. I felt myself losing balance, losing sense of up and down. Not sure where I was, what I’d been doing or what I was going to do next. I sucked in deep breaths to keep it all together, to look normal, blend in.
I rode out the nausea, until my vision cleared again and I discovered I was still standing on my feet, but that was the only welcome news it brought me.
It was a clear, too-bright September morning, quarter to ten, at a busy Lower Manhattan intersection. I had a dead man at my feet and plenty of people—witnesses—all around.
Pedestrians, shopkeepers, deliverymen, and tourists, who’d been frozen in the shock of the sudden accident, but now were thawing out and beginning to creep closer.
I looked to see if anyone had seen what I’d done, but none of the naked looks of horror were directed at me.