The Ninth Step (17 page)

The Seven-oh detective squared one of the piles of paperwork on his desk, a lost cause. “I still think that fed is an asshole. But you know what? Even if he’s a total clown, that’s all the more reason why you and I need to be on our best game. We both lived through Nine-eleven here. And we know these terrorist bastards are out there.”

Jack nodded somberly. He straightened up and pulled his chair closer to his partner’s desk. “Anything new on the ATM front?”

As they would with any fugitive, the detectives had tracked down Nadim Hasni’s bank accounts and asked to be informed about any automatic-teller transactions. (They wouldn’t get the info in time to catch him at any particular branch, but at least a recent withdrawal could tell them that their suspect was still in town—and several might indicate that he was hiding out in a particular neighborhood.)

Richie shook his head. “
Nada
. The guy worked in a cash business and I bet he had some dough squirreled away.”

Jack sighed. These days, only the dumbest perps didn’t watch enough cop shows on TV to know that they shouldn’t use their debit or credit cards when on the lam.

Richie laced his hands behind his head. “So what do you want to do next?”

Jack frowned. “I wanna put the bastard’s picture on the front page of the
Daily News
and the
Post
. I wanna go interview every one of his car-service buddies. And I wanna give every cop in the city his goddamn photo.”

Richie snorted. “Our buddy Charlson would love that.”

Jack glanced at the clock on the squad room wall: their shift had ended half an hour ago. He shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna just go home and watch TV. How about we drive back over to Jackson Heights and take another crack at Hasni’s wife? I mean, at least
I’ll
go—I know you’ve got a wife of your own to get home to …”

Richie stood up and grabbed his car keys. “We’re trying to protect the city from a radiation bomb. I don’t think my wife is gonna complain.”

AND SO THEY SET
off to re-interview Nadim Hasni’s ex. Or, at least, they made it to Queens …

“
I’ll
drive,” Richie said, pointedly referring to Jack’s spacey command of the steering wheel during their last trip to the neighboring borough.

Jack was happy to give in. He found a toothpick in the pocket of his sports jacket and chewed all the mint out of it as his partner steered toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Over the Kosciuszko Bridge they went, past the backdrop of little gravestones and big skyscrapers, Jack absorbed in thinking about Hasni and Charlson. And about an old man sitting in a wheelchair on a hill in Bay Ridge.

Despite the expressway’s notorious problems (frequent mysterious traffic jams; potholes the size of meteor craters), they reached Queens in excellent time and got off the highway just a few blocks from Ghizala Mamund’s apartment. As always, Jack was impressed by the foreignness of the neighborhood. New York City had a number of these little compact transplants from other worlds: Little Korea on Thirty-second Street in Manhattan, Little Brazil in the Forties … Somewhere, undoubtedly, there must be a Little Burkina Faso and a Little Iceland. Despite the vastness of the city, people liked to clump together with their own, often spending most of their lives within a familiar quarter-mile. Jack gazed at the scenery as they cruised down Thirty-seventh Avenue; the passing faces growing browner, the clothing more colorful …

“Stop the car!” Jack blurted. “Be subtle!”

“What the hell?” Richie was puzzled, but he managed to pull over without too much fuss.

“Back there,” Jack said, looking into the side mirror. “In front of the bakery with the green-and-white awning. You’re not gonna believe this!”

Richie stared up at the rearview mirror. “You think it’s possible?”

They had spent a lot of time studying the driver’s license photo. And now Nadim Hasni, or a young brown-skinned guy who looked one hell of a lot like him, was standing outside the shop, wearing bleached jeans and a navy blue tracksuit jacket. He held a paper bag in one hand and peered up and down the street like an anxious bird. In fact, after Jack’s decades of police work on city streets, those nervous head motions had drawn his attention before he even registered the man’s face.

Hasni walked away from them, disappeared from view behind a newsstand, then reappeared. He paused for a moment on the next corner, looked right, then turned left, out of sight.

Jack was already out of the car. “Drive around!” he urged his partner through the open window. “Come down the block and close him off!”

He was in pursuit before Richie had time to hit the gas.

NADIM PAUSED AS HE
came out of the bakery with his brown paper bag. A serving of
rasmalai
—he could already taste the sweet cheese balls floating in their soothing cream.

That childhood favorite seemed particularly appealing at this stressful time, but it was actually the need for cigarettes that had driven him out of hiding. For the past day he had been holed up in Malik’s little fourth-floor walk-up two blocks away. Last night, the young stud had gone out to a nightclub. “Come with me,” Malik had urged, but Nadim said that his stomach didn’t feel well. And it didn’t: he had spent a good part of the afternoon in the bathroom retching, and then he had tried to sleep, but he was still trembling too hard. Thank God he managed to calm down a bit before his friend came home—Malik still didn’t know anything about the incident in the deli or the subsequent attempt on Nadim’s own life. As Malik dressed for his date, Nadim anxiously watched the TV news, but there was nothing about the man in the deli or about any kind of manhunt for his killer. Very puzzling. At least no one had trailed him here to Jackson Heights. Not yet, anyhow … He had not taken any chances today, though, and stayed inside. But he had smoked his last cigarette while watching the news. All day long, the need for a smoke had gripped him, like a big fist, squeezing. He knew Malik didn’t smoke, but he hoped that one of the other two roommates did. He had ransacked their tiny bedrooms, had scrounged under the piles of magazines and random detritus in the messy little common room … No cigarettes, anywhere. Nadim held out for as long as he could. What had he read somewhere? Nicotine was more addictive than heroin.

I’ll just step out for a second,
he finally told himself.
I’ll be very careful.
He peered out the front window for a full fifteen minutes, scanning the street below. Nothing suspicious. No vans in sight. Wary, he edged out the front door, ready to duck back at the first sign of anything suspicious. Quiet. He allowed himself to exhale. And he had set off down the block, without incident. Turned onto Thirty-seventh Avenue: no problem. Stopped at a deli and bought his smokes. He turned to go back to Malik’s, then realized that he was starving. Malik’s bachelor refrigerator was empty.

With his stomach so upset, Nadim figured that there was only one thing he might be able to keep down: a helping of
rasmalai
. And Kabir’s Bakery was just a half block down … After the harrowing past few days he could really use a bit of a treat.

Now he stepped out onto the sidewalk, feeling like a successful secret agent. He had completed his stealth mission: cigarettes in his breast pocket, his dinner in his hand. Enough tempting fate, though: it was time to hurry back to Malik’s, to his safe hiding place.

He set off, savoring the fresh air outside and the gorgeous spring afternoon. The new-leafed trees along the avenue provided some shade from the bright sun; their dappled shadows danced on the sidewalk. Nadim reached the corner of Seventy-fourth Street, glanced right, and panicked. Just what he needed today: his wife—his ex-wife—was standing right there on the opposite corner! She was looking down, thankfully—digging for something in her ever-bulging leather purse, a cheap Gucci knockoff she had bought one time for ten dollars on Canal Street, stupidly convinced that she had scored a miraculous bargain. Yes, it was definitely Ghizala, under those dowdy clothes: her doe eyes, those plush lips that had once driven him wild. Amazing to think how she had once made his heart swell with love.

It certainly wasn’t love that swelled his heart right now—it was anger, a raw surge of grievance and resentment, and maybe even another rash impulse toward homicide. He felt it wash over him, a scalding red wave, but all of his common sense was not carried away. That was the last thing he needed right now: another killing. The plan would be ruined for sure.

He turned quickly, in the opposite direction, down Seventy-fourth Street, into the heart of Little India.

JACK WAS THIRTY YARDS
behind, running.

He forced himself to slow down as he rounded the corner onto busy Seventy-fourth Street. The sidewalks were thronged with shoppers, which was good, providing him with cover, but he wished this was a street in midtown Manhattan, where a white man in a sports jacket and tie could blend in. He was blitzed by distractions as he moved down the packed shopping street: a heap of battery-powered, arm-waving baby dolls on a card table outside a gift shop, a couple of women in dazzling orange and purple saris strolling hand in hand down the middle of the crowded sidewalk. He kept his eyes fixed on the back of Nadim Hasni’s blue jacket.

He glanced up ahead, hoping to see Richie Powker maneuvering toward him through the crowds. Should they grab Hasni now, bring him in for the Brasciak murder? Or should he call Brent Charlson first? He had promised to do so, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off his quarry long enough to find Charlson’s number. His heart was racing—it was one thing to be chasing a murder suspect, but now he was after someone who was also plotting another vicious, depraved terrorist attack on the citizens of New York.

Down the block, Hasni stumbled against something and then regained his balance.

Two men carrying a big cardboard box suddenly emerged from a store and stepped in front of Jack. Cursing under his breath, he veered around them.

SEEING HIS EX-WIFE AGAIN
stirred up so many powerful emotions at once that they threatened to overwhelm Nadim. He needed to escape, immediately. Random faces, garish colors, dazzling glints of light—they streamed past him in a blur as he plunged off through the Little India crowds.

He could forgive Ghizala, he thought, for so many things. He could forgive the way she had represented herself when they had first met, when she was on her trip back to see relatives in Pakistan and she had seemed to him, a poor student in Karachi, like such a glamorous woman, come from America, where—she said—her father owned a prosperous business. He could forgive the way she had looked back then, so beautiful, like the ripe, curvy star of some Bollywood movie. He could forgive the way she had captured his heart, had drawn him to this foreign country with tales about her ambitions to become a fashion designer, about the job her father would give him, about the rich life they would build together in her fancy New York home. He could forgive the discovery, once he arrived here, that she lived in a small, dumpy apartment, that the old man was something of a charlatan, with only a part-interest in a tiny newsstand, that Nadim would have to work like a dog to support them, that Ghizala’s ambitions were just pipe dreams, that she really just wanted to sit on the couch all day watching soap operas, growing plumper by the month. She had never bothered to go to fashion school, even though he offered to pay; worst of all, she had never troubled herself to learn any English, the language of her adopted country. And though he could, perhaps, forgive all the rest, because she had given him the greatest gift in his life, his beautiful Enny, he could never forgive her that. Because when Enny had fallen ill that fateful night, and he had been away, Ghizala had not been able to place a simple phone call for help. (If she had just known enough to call 911, even if she couldn’t speak, they might at least have sent someone to check!) And he could never forgive her smug old father, who must have sat there at the kitchen table, stupid hand cupped around his stupid cigarette, unable to do anything while, in the next room, Enny lay wheezing for breath. Just
pneumonia
! It would have been so simple to save her! And he could never, never, never forgive Ghizala because she had waited three weeks before she dared to come see him and tell him that his daughter was gone.

Now he threaded blindly through the crowds, not seeing anything but his daughter’s anguished face. He knocked into an old woman’s shopping cart, almost fell over it, and snapped to. Was Ghizala still behind him? Had she crossed the street? He couldn’t bear to look at her—instead, he veered to the right.

UP AHEAD, NADIM HASNI
had vanished. Completely, as if a giant hand had reached down from the sky and snatched him up. Desperate, Jack scanned the sidewalk, the street, the opposite sidewalk. He looked ahead and saw Richie Powker striding toward him through the crowds. The Seven-oh detective gave a quizzical look and Jack raised his hands, utterly mystified.

The two cops met in the middle of the block.

“Damnit!” Jack muttered. “I was right on him. Somebody blocked my view for a second, and then … I don’t know.” He walked forward a few yards to where he had last seen their suspect, and his heart sank. On the right, its entrance partially blocked by a Dumpster, a little alley led in toward the center of the block. He turned to his partner: “Go around! Meet me on the other side!” He ran into the alley, reaching into his sports jacket for his gun. He had no idea if his suspect might be armed. So far, the man had only used a can of beans—but he had proved that he was ready to kill.

Breathless, Jack reached the end of the alley. He slowed, then stepped out into a cross lane. He glanced left: a dead end maybe thirty yards down. He glanced right: another dead end a few yards the other way. This wasn’t a throughway, just a place for a few shopkeepers to park their cars. And there was no sight of Hasni.

Hypervigilant, he walked along the cross lane on both sides, holding up his gun with one hand while he tried the back doors of the buildings. All locked. There was no other possible exit—except for one spot, where a walled section of rough plywood marked some kind of construction site. The walls were maybe ten feet tall, too high for a man to jump. The wood was roughly joined; Jack glanced through a gap into a muddy vacant lot, where a building on the other side of the block might have been demolished to make way for new construction. But the gap was only two or three inches wide, too small for a man to squeeze through.