Spark: A Novel (42 page)

“Who’s that?”

“Some old lady. The viewing starts at three o’clock. Mass begins at five.”

“Then what happens?”

“They take the coffin away. A few days pass, then someone else dies and they bring in another box.” Gregory searched through the key ring, found the right one, and unlocked the bottom drawer behind the altar. Nine handguns were concealed beneath a priest’s robe and he began sorting through the collection.

“I got two options for a revolver that would fit that ankle holster. For the larger gun, I’ve got a Glock thirty that’s chambered for a forty-five-caliber cartridge.”

“How large is it? Let me see.”

Still kneeling in front of the drawer, Gregory handed me the weapon. “It holds ten rounds … very light and easy to carry … but I don’t have a laser sight that fits the frame.”

I pointed my new weapon at a murky painting of an angel delivering news to a monk holding a cross. “Why did you think I was here to complain?”

“Because that was the first time I ever placed a tracking chip in a handgun. Lorcan gave me the nine-millimeter automatic I sold you a couple of weeks ago. Remember?”

“That’s right.” I removed the magazine and made sure that the firing chamber was empty. Then I squeezed the trigger and dry fired at the angel.

“I couldn’t test the chip because I don’t have that kind of equipment. So I put it inside the grip and gave it back to Lorcan.”

“You don’t need to worry, Gregory. Everything worked perfectly.”

Ten minutes later I walked out of the church carrying a new revolver in an ankle holster and the Glock in a plastic shopping bag. I got back into Sean’s car, but I didn’t start the engine.

By now Lorcan or another enforcer was inside my loft, waiting for me to return. The loft was not my home; I felt no attachment to the kitchen table or the rusty pencil machine. But at that moment I needed a quiet, open space where I could hammer a nail into the floor and revolve around it in a perfect circle.

Although Miss Holquist had lectured me about bosons and fermions, she had also made sure that she could monitor my activities. Gregory had placed tracking chips in my two handguns and I had become a little red dot moving across a GPS map. Emily was right. I was the one who led Lorcan to Thomas Slater. I was the reason why everyone was dead.

Lorcan probably thought he was a wolf surrounded by a herd of sheep, but he was just another predictable Human Unit. The moment I handed over the flash drive, he would try to kill Emily. That meant I needed to figure out a way to protect her after the exchange. Sean might offer a solution to that problem, but I had to find him first. The night we met, Emily had walked to the furniture factory. That meant that she had to live somewhere nearby. I allowed my memory to see her again, drinking hot chocolate as she joked with Millicent and Sean. And what did she say when she took off her parka?
We live in a warehouse surrounded by thousands of broken machines.

I asked Laura to search for a parts supply store within a two-mile radius of the Vickerson factory. It took only a few seconds for her to find a recycling business on Skillman Street called U-Find-It. Laura guided me across the bridge to Brooklyn and I parked outside a three-story building surrounded by a chain-link fence. There were iron rails embedded in the street, half covered with asphalt, and I wondered if the building had once been a repair shop for subway cars. I passed through the gate and followed a short driveway to a loading dock with hand trucks and cargo dollies. A sign over the open doorway read:

U-FIND-IT
EVERYTHING MECHANICAL—EXCEPT CAR PARTS
BUY AND SELL—NO DELIVERY

Two men were loading a used washing machine into a van while a growler girl with tattoos on her arms carried out three record
turntables. Directly inside the entrance was an Airstream trailer with a rounded aluminum body. The trailer had been turned into a cashier’s booth, and a sallow-faced man sat behind a Plexiglas window glaring at the customers.

“I’m looking for Sean.”

“Walk to the back. He’s in the security trailer.”

The U-Find-It building was an enormous room with a forty-foot ceiling. The interior was lit by fluorescent light fixtures and divided into a grid of shelves—each aisle marked with a street sign. I turned left and walked down an aisle marked
WESTSIDE DRIVE
that went from the entrance to the end of the building. The massive steel shelves were twenty feet high and the shelves were filled with discarded machines and plastic bins filled with parts. Movable ladders with platforms at the top were scattered around the building so that customers could reach the machinery stored above them.

The aisle labeled
FIRST STREET
had water pumps, elevator cables, and the jigs and cutters for tool and die machines. Second Street had a section for nubot parts—mostly arm and leg assemblies. But there was also a bin packed with detached heads, the mechanical eyes open and staring at the wreckage around them.

A second trailer with a flat roof had been set up at the end of the building. The windows were covered on the inside with sheets of yellowed newspaper. In the cold, shadowy building, the trailer looked like a little home. A hand-lettered sign taped to the door read,
THIS IS NOT A PUBLIC TOILET! PEOPLE LIVE HERE! USE THE PORTABLES OUTSIDE!
I touched the doorknob and twisted it slightly. It wasn’t locked—so I walked in.

Sean stood beside a table cooking a grilled-cheese sandwich in a frying pan placed on a hot plate. An unmade bed with a cartoon quilt was at one end of the room. At the other end was a desk holding three computer monitors that showed surveillance camera images of U-Find-It.

When Sean saw me, he dropped his spatula and picked up a bread knife. “Where’s Emily?”

“Thomas Slater is dead. He and the rest of his team were murdered last night. The killers set fire to the bodies.”

“What about Emily?”

“She was captured by a man named Lorcan. But I can trade her life for the information on the flash drive.”

“I’m going to call the police.”

“Don’t. Emily will be killed the moment you go public with this.”

Sean waved the bread knife. “I don’t believe you.”

I sat on the office chair and glanced at the surveillance monitors. In exchange for a rent-free home, Sean kept people from stealing machine parts. Each screen was divided into a grid so that you could see four camera images at the same time.

“Put down the knife and listen. It’s your decision if you want to help me.”

“Why would they kill Thomas Slater? Is some rich guy’s tax fraud really that important?”

I swiveled the chair toward him. “There was a secret in the stolen files, and it had nothing to do with taxes. Alexander Serby, the head of BDG, met Danny Marchand and sent him money that was laundered through Indian banks. One of the coded files is a video of the two of them together. It looks like Serby financed the Day of Rage.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You and your growler friends have spent your lives coming up with conspiracy theories. Most of them are just fictions that make the craziness of the world seem logical. But what I just told you isn’t a story … it’s a fact that can cause Emily’s death.”

The energy that had pushed Sean through the world seemed to dribble out of him. He sighed and placed the knife on the table. “So what do we do?”

“Make the trade.”

“And how do we do that?”

“When does this place close?”

“Six o’clock.”

“Is there a security guard?”

“No. Just me and the cameras.”

I stared at the images on the screen. An old man wearing a black
overcoat was buying a mechanical clown that could blow up party balloons.

“I’ll call Lorcan and tell him to bring Emily here tonight.”

“And then what?”

“Once Lorcan gets the flash drive, he’ll try to kill everyone in the building.”

Around nine o’clock in the evening, Sean and I climbed onto the tar-paper roof of the U-Find-It building. On one side of the roof someone had dumped a pile of copper pipes and plumbing fixtures that had been ripped out of abandoned buildings. It looked like a giant puzzle that only angels could untangle.

“We can watch the entrance from here.” Sean led me over to a low wall and we looked down at the loading dock. “So why didn’t you give them an address?”

“Because Lorcan would have spent the last six hours gathering information about this building. If you have the money, you can rent surveillance drones from a company on Long Island.”

“How do you know this guy? Have you worked with him?”

“After I was hired by Miss Holquist I was sent to a training school down in North Carolina. It wasn’t a real school … just a few old buildings that used to be a hunting camp. I stayed there for three months with Lorcan and the instructors.”

“What did you do at this school?”

“An Englishman who used to work for the British intelligence service was in charge of the program. Every two weeks he would bring in a new instructor who had a particular specialty. We learned how to fire different kinds of guns and disassemble them, how to conceal our actions from the EYE programs, and how to find people who were living off the grid. Toward the end of our time there, Lorcan and I had a confrontation.”

“Do you think Emily is safe with him?”

“No.”

“Maybe he’s already killed her.”

“Lorcan will obey Miss Holquist. But he’ll also try to follow his own plan.”

“What does he want to do?”

“If he has the time, he’ll torture Emily with a knife or a razor.”

Sean looked as if someone had just slapped him. “We should have called the police.”

“I know these people, Sean. This is the only way to save Emily. Stay up here on the roof and you’ll be safe. Do you have the flares?”

“Yeah. I’m ready.” Sean reached into his canvas shoulder bag and pulled out three road flares and a cigarette lighter.

“Good. If we’re on the phone and I put you on hold, it’s because I’m talking to Lorcan.”

I left the edge of the roof and walked over to the open hatchway. “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Sean said. “Why are you doing this?”

“I’m protecting Emily.”

“You don’t even know her.”

“Sometimes I hammer a nail into the floor of my loft and then I attach a cord to the nail and walk around it in a circle. Emily is a nail and a cord for me. Thinking about her makes me feel like I’m not going to fly away and dissolve into random particles.”

“You’re as crazy as Lorcan.”

“Just follow the plan, and don’t get in my way.”

I stepped through the hatchway and climbed down a metal staircase to the ground floor. All the lights were on in the building and the harsh energy from the fluorescent bulbs was reflected off the surface of the broken machinery. At the sixth aisle from the entrance, I turned and walked between the shelves. The right side of this aisle was dedicated to washing-machine parts. The left side displayed golf carts and motorized wheelchairs.

Someone had attached a toy hula girl to the dashboard of a blue golf cart. I pushed her head with my finger and her body swayed back and forth. Opening up a glove compartment, I tossed out some
trash and deposited the flash drive that contained the three coded files. That would be the payment for Emily’s life.