The Ninth Step (28 page)

Sighing in frustration, Jack turned at one point and caught someone looking at him. A deeply tanned thirtyish guy with a lean, athletic air; he seemed familiar, but Jack couldn’t place him.

“Hey, partner?”

Richie was calling him; when he glanced back, the stranger had disappeared into the river of people cruising the boardwalk.

“You wanna try Brighton Beach?”

Jack shook his head. That neighborhood was just a few minutes down the boardwalk, but it was a very white (Russian) world.

The detectives moved deeper into the Coney amusement area. A few yards down the boardwalk, they could hear the resort’s most unusual and nutty attraction before it came into view. An incredibly raspy amplified voice stopped passing tourists in their tracks. “Step right up, folks, and shoot a live human target! You shoot him; he can’t shoot back!”

Between two low brick buildings that housed a bar and a concession stand stretched a banner that read
SHOOT THE FREAK
. Below it, the public could stare down off the boardwalk into a vacant lot that held an odd array of abandoned refrigerators, trash barrels, and mannequin heads. This jumbled landscape was home to the Freak, who was actually just a teenager wearing a visored helmet and an armor of dirty football pads. He dodged back and forth, taunting the spectators, which might not have seemed like such a good idea, given that the amusement’s operator, a bald mountain of a man wearing a headset microphone, was renting some of them high-powered rifles. Luckily for the Freak, the only ammo was paintballs, which
thwocked
against his armor and coated the whole attraction with a wild palette of Day-Glo splatters.

The kid took advantage of a short cease-fire between customers to lift his visor and wipe his sweaty face. He looked about seventeen. His pay probably wasn’t great, but at least he wasn’t stuck behind some fast-food counter. Talk about weird jobs: the kid was a scapegoat, the daily target of hundreds of people’s life frustrations.
You shoot him; he can’t shoot back!

As a homicide cop, Jack was hardly thrilled with the idea of anyone offering training in how to shoot unarmed people, but as a lifelong New Yorker he knew that a contained dose of unruliness and “danger” was essential to Coney’s character. New York’s working class spent dull days as bus drivers or supermarket cashiers; on nights and weekends, they needed to bust loose a little.

But the two detectives were far from busting loose; in fact, they were seriously flagging. They were about to leave when Jack spotted a couple of local patrol cops cruising along in an NYPD beach buggy. The driver was a stout, muscular young black woman; her partner, a white guy, also looked like a serious weightlifter. (Maybe they worked out together.) Jack waved them down and flashed his badge. “How you doin? We’re working a homicide and we’re on the lookout for a suspect.” He held up the photo.

Confronted by two senior detectives, including a member of the elite Homicide squad, the two cops in the buggy straightened up from their relaxed slouch. The uniform riding shotgun lifted up his wraparound blue shades, then nodded, excited. “I think I rousted this guy from a bench along here a few days ago. I was workin’ a double—it would’a been right around sunrise. He was conked out and I told him to move along.”

“You sure it was him?”

The uniform nodded. “Pretty sure. He seemed kind of disoriented when I woke him up, but he wasn’t making any trouble, so I left.”

“Did you see where he went?”

The uniform shook his head.

Jack scratched the back of his neck, glanced up and down the boardwalk, and turned to his partner. “Our guy can’t go home. He might have been staying in Jackson Heights, but after we chased him, he wouldn’t feel safe there.” His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he’s crashing out here.”

Richie frowned. “If I was on the lam, with hardly any money, where would hide?” That was a big part of the job: trying to think like a perp.

Jack considered the matter. It would seem, in such a big city, that it would be easy to find a place to sleep, but if you were forced onto the streets, the options were actually few. If you were just homeless, there were church steps and a few other possibilities, but if you needed to hide, there were eight million potential spotters walking around. Coney Island had more than its share of skels and dopers, but at night they probably ended up in city shelters or low-rent SROs.

He turned back to the uniforms. “You guys know the area better than us, so why don’t we split up? You two”—he pointed to Richie and the male uniform—“can look through Astroland, and we’ll check around the Wonder Wheel.” His colleagues started to move, but Jack held up a hand. “There’s just one thing.” Gingerly, he explained to the two young cops about the possible radiation risk. “You up for this?”

The uniforms gave each other a look, then nodded gravely. Jack felt for them: they probably spent most of their time dealing with pickpockets or drunk-and-disorderlies, but suddenly they had been dropped into the middle of a bizarre and potentially life-threatening terrorism case.

“He’ll probably be carrying a knapsack,” Jack concluded. “If you spot him, don’t approach. We’d better call for backup before we go in for the arrest.”

T
HE FIRST PAY PHONE
had no dial tone. The second didn’t even have a receiver, just a couple of wires sprouting from the end of the connecting coil, as if someone had ripped it off in the midst of a frustrating conversation. Nadim groaned. Everyone used cell phones now. Surf Avenue was crowded today; he considered asking one of the passing tourists if he could borrow one, but they would surely turn him down.

Finally he found a working phone and called Malik. He got his friend’s voice mail and left an excuse for his recent disappearance. “Please tell the others,” he said, “I’m still in on the plan. I will definitely do my part.”

As he hung up, an amplified voice boomed out behind him. “Bump it! Bump it! Bump it! Come inside!
Everybody
rides!” Nadim stepped to the inner edge of the sidewalk and peered in through a grille at a big dark hall full of careening bumper cars.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder and he spun around.

“Yo buddy, you got a light?”

It was a wiry man wearing grubby cargo shorts and no shirt; he held up a half-smoked cigarette he’d probably just found on the sidewalk.

Nadim shook his head and edged away. The people around here, the regulars, they frightened him. They looked pugnacious, jittery, undernourished yet strong enough to win a street fight. They seemed to be always pushing some scam, ever on the lookout for potential victims.

He turned into an alley, back into one of the amusement parks, eager to get back to his hiding place.

AS JACK AND THE
young policewoman walked into Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, they entered a blizzard of sights and sounds. This oceanside end of the park was filled with kiddie rides: little trains and fire trucks, grinning plastic clowns and dinosaurs, brightly colored, all spinning. In fact, the entire visual field was in motion: the hordes of families cruising through, the Tilt-a-Whirl tilting and whirling, the giant Ferris wheel revolving overhead. Bells clanged; pennants snapped in the breeze; tinny music blared from crappy speakers. The two cops waded into this maelstrom, searching for one particular brown face.

Above the frenetic scene on the ground, several perennial landmarks loomed. Aside from the Wonder Wheel, Jack could see the Astroland tower, a tall white rod encircled by a rising, donut-shaped observation deck; farther east, he caught glimpses of the Cyclone, its cars full of screaming riders bucking and plunging as they whipped around its snakelike coils. Jack thought of Nadim Hasni’s knapsack. He could only pray that the bag would not soon provide a different cause for terror and screaming.

His new partner wore her hair in tight cornrows. Her arms and thighs were big and muscular; some of the old-time NYPD cops had been less than thrilled with the advent of women on patrol, arguing that they wouldn’t be able to subdue a fleeing or belligerent suspect, but this one looked like she could more than hold up her end. They moved north, toward the Surf Avenue end of the park. It seemed like a lost cause, but Jack knew that they had several advantages. Though the two amusement parks were densely packed, they were small; they took up only three or four blocks. And the best part was that they were bounded by high chain-link fences, so there were only a few ways in and out.

The two cops moved down a concrete ramp in the middle of the park, which led to the base of the Wonder Wheel, where attendants sorted the riders into its little cars. An alley there passed beyond the ticket booth, then veered into a lane full of game booths, where grizzled carnies surrounded by crappy plush toys separated the park’s visitors from the contents of their wallets.

Halfway down that lane, another alley split off to the left. Jack’s partner reached it first. She glanced down it, then waved frantically for him. He hurried over, threading his way through gaggles of little kids.

“Down there!” she said.

Straining to see over the crowds, Jack spotted a brown-skinned male forty yards ahead, carrying a knapsack, wearing a blue jacket, headed toward the west side of the park—and an exit onto West Twelfth Street.

“Radio the others!” Jack shouted to his partner, and they set off in pursuit.

They made it through the crowds and then, breathless, burst out onto West Twelfth, which featured much less foot traffic. Jack had lost sight of their suspect; he scanned right, toward Surf Avenue, then left.
There!
About halfway up the block he saw the man, still moving at a casual pace, pointed toward the boardwalk. But then, farther ahead, out of the mouth of the Wonder Wheel lane emerged two men. One of them was the tanned stranger Jack had noticed on the boardwalk. The other he recognized immediately: it was the crew-cut fed who had approached him outside of Nadim Hasni’s apartment. Charlson’s man.

Jack’s head spun. The tanned agent must have been tracking him earlier. But how could they have known he was here? Had Charlson’s team tailed him and Richie? No—if the fed and his men had them under surveillance, they wouldn’t have rushed off to Jackson Heights. A possible answer came to Jack: he had been talking to Ray Hillhouse all the way out here. Recent technology made it possible to triangulate the source of a cell phone call within about a fifty-meter radius. A phone company ping of the GPS chip in newer phones could be even more precise, but real-time tracking required a court order. Had Charlson misused his Homeland Security powers to follow an NYPD detective?

There wasn’t time for further speculation: both feds stopped in their tracks as they spotted Hasni walking toward them. They drew their guns. Jack’s heart rate kicked up. He remembered the bullet traces in Hasni’s home driveway, and it occurred to him that these men were all too likely to shoot first and ask questions later.

He ran forward, past a swirling ride blasting incredibly loud hip-hop music. Up ahead, it seemed that Hasni had also noticed the feds. He stopped and looked to his right: a high fence edged the entire lot on the opposite side of the street. He spun around and saw Jack and his partner running toward him. He turned to his left and veered off the sidewalk.

The feds ran forward, but Jack got there first.

As he skidded to a stop, he saw that their suspect had disappeared into the entrance to the Ghost Hole, a haunted-house ride. The façade featured paintings of leering demons, above papier-mâché statues of a bloody alien monster and a devil stirring a cauldron. A little train of what looked like bumper cars was rolling inside through a couple of swinging doors. Jack dashed in behind it.

BEYOND THE SWINGING DOORS,
Nadim had found himself in near-total darkness. He ran forward, smack into some kind of heavy rubbery curtain. He found a wall to his left, so he turned right and scrambled up a long, narrow ramp. He had run about forty feet when he heard the swinging doors bang open behind him, letting in enough daylight for him to see a little train full of people rattling upward. He pressed back against another curtain; as the train shuttled past, a loud cackling came out of the ceiling and a bright light flashed on overhead. Right next to him, Nadim beheld a near-naked man strapped to a chair. The chair buzzed, electrified, and the man screamed.

Nadim almost fainted with fear. Down the ramp, the doors swung open a second time—one of his pursuers ran through. Nadim scrambled on through the hollow darkness, barely able to make out the rear of the train swerving around a corner ahead. As he followed it, demons in rags loomed out at him, reaching for him with jerky motions, and something brushed against his face. He reeled around another corner, and a bloody, naked body dropped down from overhead, suspended by its ankles.

Nadim gasped. If he didn’t get out of this horrible place right away, his heart was going to explode.

JACK CURSED AS HE
tentatively made his way up the dark ramp, following the little train. Up near the top, an animatronic dummy was shrieking in an electric chair. The detective looked back and saw the swinging doors burst open below. One of the feds ran in, holding up his gun. Jack ran on, smack into a heavy rubbery curtain. He felt his way around the corner, nearly tripping over the train track at his feet. He felt his way around another curtain, past a couple more animatronic ghouls, and came around another corner, where a vomiting specter rose up out of a trash barrel. He stumbled past it, almost into the back of the stalled little train, which was filled with confused, grumbling customers—evidently the operator had finally stopped the ride. Jack turned, disoriented, and under a flashing strobe light he saw Nadim Hasni disappear behind one of the rubbery curtains.

NADIM CLOMPED DOWN A
little wooden staircase he discovered behind the curtain. It left him in a little hallway lit by only one dim bulb. That in turn led to a door, and he ran forward, slammed it open, and hurtled out into daylight, into a grubby concrete backyard, right toward a mangy gray pit bull, which cowered, startled, in front of a ramshackle trailer, under a big fernlike ailanthus tree. Nadim looked around, blinking in the sudden light, and realized that he was in the middle of the amusement park, in some kind of hidden employee area.