Nightbird (33 page)

On Shore Boulevard the lights were even brighter. He saw his partner in the luminous haze, standing next to his nephew, both
of them looking down into the water.

Anthony Ryan knew he’d saved no one, but he felt at peace with himself. Maybe it was all about trying, he thought. The simple,
holy truth of effort. The past would always be there, even as he remembered less of it. He waited for the young men and women
of the NYPD. It was too bright to see the stars. It would have been nice to see the stars, but he was ready to be rescued.
Ready for whatever comes next.

A
nthony Ryan sat on his back deck in the magic hour of a Sunday as the sun’s last light glittered around his granddaughter,
Katie, running circles through the grass, chasing fireflies.

“I can’t believe you did this,” Anthony Ryan said.

“It was easy,” Leigh said. “I asked Joe, and he took care of everything.”

“I got her over here,” Gregory said. “Getting her back to Ireland is your problem.”

The Ryans had been eating breakfast when Gregory walked in with a case of Brooklyn Lager on his shoulder and Katie’s hand
in his. Overnight she’d flown in on the Project Children charter, sitting next to a man she knew only as the Duck, who taught
her how to play “Sweet Molly Malone” on the tin whistle with her nose.

“We’ll get her back,” Ryan said. “When we’re good and ready.”

Danny Eumont flipped the steaks on the barbecue and ranted about how was he going to know when the meat was done, in the darkness.
Gregory shoved his good hand in the ice chest and grabbed a beer. His other hand had been cut reaching through the broken
window of Pinto’s Nova. He opened the bottle and gave it to Danny, saying it would do more for his eyesight than anything
that damn New Jerseyite Edison had invented.

“I should put some lights on,” Leigh said.

“No, leave it like this,” Ryan said. “It’s perfect.”

Leigh got up and began watering the flowers. In the past week she’d transformed their backyard into a garden. Potted geraniums
and zinnias and snapdragons and impatiens in boxes hanging from the kitchen window. Hydrangeas, azealeas, and rhododendrons
lined the outside edge of the deck. She watered them precisely, always starting and stopping in the same place.

“When you coming back to work, pally?” Joe Gregory whispered.

“The surgeon says another month with my hand. And I’ve got vacation time to burn. A lot of things we want to do. Get the Duck
to fill in for me. He’ll be glad to get back downtown. And I owe him for this.”

“But you are coming back?”

Ryan just shrugged. In the quiet of his backyard he could hear the neighbors’ kids. A Puerto Rican couple, he a Yonkers fireman,
she a nurse at St. John’s, had bought the Brunton house when they flew the coop to Florida. Once again, two houses away, the
chirping laughter of infants could be heard on a street of empty nests.

“Jake Bugel claimed Victor’s body yesterday,” Gregory said. “Him and some guy named Carlson.”

Six hours after NYPD divers fished Anthony Ryan out of the Hell Gate, they found Victor Nuñez. His backpack, containing twelve
and a half pounds of artificial fortune, had snagged on a piece of metal imbedded in the bulkhead.

“I hear Evan Stone is in town,” Ryan said.

“Yeah, that’s turning out to be a nice story,” Gregory said. “Danny did it. He called them. Whatever he said had an effect,
because they hired a lawyer for Faye, and it looks like they’re getting behind her a hundred percent. She’ll probably get
probation, what with her cooperation and all. The Stones are trying to get a judge to release her into their custody in Arizona.”

Faye had cooperated with a full accounting of Victor’s description of Gillian’s murder. They’d found resin in Victor’s suitcase,
that matched the sample from Gillian’s mouth. Plus, in his backpack was a small plastic vial of liquid Lorazepam they assumed
was meant for Faye.

“Danny did good,” Gregory said. “He saved her life. She was serious about eating that gun. He jumped right in there.”

“I’m really proud of him,” Ryan said.

“Ain’t that right, Danny?” Gregory yelled. “Me and you fighting the battle of Hell Gate and your uncle decides to go for a
swim.”

Ryan watched his wife go through the numbers of her orderly watering process. Leigh Ryan had even managed to get grass growing
in their tree-shaded yard, a yard beaten down to near concrete by the feet of Rip and company in a thousand different games.
The evening air was fragrant with the honeysuckle that grew wildly in the Carey yard.

“You talk to Winters?” Ryan asked.

“Actually, he’s been pretty cooperative. He told us that Gillian said she was cleaning the closet one night and found a combination
written on the back of the door frame. She looked under the rug, and there was the safe. She read the letters and made the
mistake of telling Faye about them. Winters says he had no idea the safe was even there until she told him about it, that
night.”

“How is Darcy?” Ryan said.

“She’s sticking by him, believe it or not. I figured she’d dump his ass after what he did to her father. Paul Klass’s letter
said that after Winters confronted Marty Jacobs about the boy sex thing, it freakin’ killed him. He had a massive stroke just
days after that. Winters says the only reason he did it was that Marty Jacobs had private detectives digging up all kinds
of shit on him. He says he did it in self-defense, for love.”

“Doesn’t surprise me Darcy is being loyal. If Winters had had faith in her from the beginning, none of this would have happened.”

The glow of red coals illuminated Danny’s face as he examined the progress of a steak. Rip had been the chief Ryan barbecue
chef since he was a teen. Rip claimed the reason men who never cooked loved to barbecue was that an element of danger was
involved.

Leigh swung the last remaining drops of water out over the grass. She put the can under the deck in the same spot she’d been
putting it since they’d bought the house. She picked up a pair of shears and snipped a green plant.

“Will that grow back now?” Ryan asked.

“This? This is hosta, you can’t kill it.”

Katie came running across the yard and leaped into Ryan’s arms. She begged for another story like the one he’d told her earlier,
about the carpet for the coronation of a Russian czar. But Leigh Ryan said she might have a story of her own. She put down
the shears and took something out of her apron pocket. She handed it to Ryan.

“I found this in the back of Rip’s bottom dresser drawer,” she said, running her fingers through her husband’s hair.

It was a cassette tape. He held the tape in his hands while she touched his latest scar. They had no record of their son’s
voice. In the attic sat boxes of old photographs, but his voice was only a memory. The damp evening breeze changed, now coming
from the west. Ryan could smell mint from ground cover Leigh had planted. She must have snipped some.

“Are you ready for this?” she said, setting a tape recorder on the table.

“I don’t know,” Ryan said.

“What is it, Grandpa?” Katie said.

“We think it’s a tape that Uncle Rip made,” Leigh said.

“Ooh, play it,” she said. “Please play it.”

Ryan could feel the heat rushing to his face. Danny stood behind him. Gregory pulled his chair up close. Leigh snapped the
tape in, and sound began. At first it sounded like air
whoosh
ing or a steam radiator belching air. Ryan’s heart dropped; he hadn’t been sure if he wanted to hear his son’s voice. Now
he was desperately disappointed.

Then, “My name is Rip, so don’t give me no lip.”

The voice of their son came in a singsong fashion from the small black Sony. It didn’t sound like him. The voice was a put-on,
an imitation of a street gangster. Rip, who loved to call himself a Dixie wop-mick because of his mother’s southern heritage
and his Irish Italian father, was imitating a rap singer.

“I remember him doing this,” Danny said.

Anthony Ryan held his hands over the tiny metal speaker as if he could touch his son’s voice with his fingers. They all stared
at the machine. Then more air
whoosh
ing; they realized it was Rip making the sound with his mouth. Rip the rap artist. He was beating on something like a trash
can.

“I come from Yonkers, where all my friends are wankers,” sang Rip the rapper.

Then more
whoosh
ing. And words mumbled in a ghetto staccato.

“I have no idea what he’s saying,” Leigh said.

“Neither do I.”

“I think he said something about wankers?” she said.

“Sounded like wankers. Is it supposed to rhyme with Yonkers?”

“It doesn’t,” Leigh said.

Ryan shrugged and looked across at his wife. He heard her laugh that deep, chesty laugh as their son entertained them one
more time.

“Wankers,” she said, shaking her head, tears streaming.

Gregory sang Rip’s song, just the one line. Katie danced that stiff robot rap dance. Then she went running. Danny said he
thought the steaks were ready, but he couldn’t be positive. The moon was just a sliver above them. Anthony Ryan reached out
and held his wife’s hand. A little girl, laughing hard enough to wake the neighborhood, raced wildly in a flowery backyard
lit only by fireflies.

It was one
A.M.
when a figure in white plummeted through the incandescent Times Square sky and slammed onto the roof of a parked Ford van.
Bits of broken glass danced gracefully across the luminous pavement in one of those silent, slow-motion moments that occur
when the world stops. Stunned. As if even God were taken by surprise.

“Jumper,” Detective Joe Gregory said.

—from NIGHTBIRD

“EDWARD DEE IS THE REAL DEAL. Every page of
NIGHTBIRD
is stamped with the authentic feel of the mean streets and the cops who must walk them…. He works these precincts like a
haunted poet.”

—Michael Connelly, author of
Blood Work
and
Angels Flight

“
NIGHTBIRD
WILL MESMERIZE YOU—CLOSE YOUR EYES AND HOLD ON TIGHT. THIS IS THE REAL THING—a police novel so alive it hits you with the
power of a psycho swinging a baseball bat. Dee writes with the rhythm of the streets in his blood.”

—Paul Bishop author of
Tequila Mockingbird

“WRITTEN IN THE BEST TRADITION OF BIG-CITY STORIES. EDWARD DEE MAKES
NIGHTBIRD
SING WITH ACTION AND GLITTER WITH PEARLS OF DIALOGUE. Tough, savvy, and extraordinary are understatements for this always
interesting, unpredictable, and exciting book.”

—Dennis Smith, author of
Report from Engine Co. 82
and
A Song for Mary