I never saw his hand shoot out, but next thing I knew the Asian guy had me by the scruff of my neck. He hurled me effortlessly at Tyrese. I was actually airborne, my legs kicking out as though that might slow me down. Tyrese saw me coming, but he couldn’t duck out of the way. I landed on him. I tried to roll off quickly, but by the time we righted ourselves, the Asian had gotten out via the van’s side door.
He was gone.
“Fucking Bruce Lee on steroids,” Tyrese said.
I nodded.
The driver was stirring again. Brutus prepared a fist, but Tyrese shook him off. “These two won’t know dick,” he said to me.
“I know.”
“We can kill them or let them go.” Like it was no big deal either way, a coin toss.
“Let them go,” I said.
Brutus found a quiet block, probably someplace in the Bronx, I can’t be sure. The still-breathing white guy got out on his own. Brutus heaved the driver and the dead guy out like yesterday’s refuse. We started driving again. For a few minutes, nobody spoke.
Tyrese laced his hands behind his neck and settled back. “Good thing we hung around, huh, Doc?”
I nodded at what I thought might be the understatement of the millennium.
32
The old autopsy files were kept in a U-Store-’Em in Layton, New Jersey, not far from the Pennsylvania border. Special Agent Nick Carlson arrived on his own. He didn’t like storage facilities much. They gave him the black-cat creeps. Open twenty-four hours a day, no guard, a token security camera at the entrance … God only knows what lay padlocked in these houses of cement. Carlson knew that many were loaded with drugs, money, and contraband of all sorts. That didn’t bother him much. But he remembered a few years back when an oil executive had been kidnapped and crate-stored in one. The executive had suffocated to death. Carlson had been there when they found him. Ever since, he imagined living people in here too, right now, the inexplicably missing, just yards from where he stood, chained in the dark, straining against mouth gags.
People often note that it’s a sick world. They had no idea.
Timothy Harper, the county medical examiner, came out of a garagelike facility, holding a large manila envelope closed with a wrap-around string. He handed Carlson an autopsy file with Elizabeth Beck’s name on it.
“You have to sign for it,” Harper said.
Carlson signed the form.
“Beck never told you why he wanted to see it?” Carlson asked.
“He talked about being a grieving husband and something about closure, but outside of that …” Harper shrugged.
“Did he ask you anything else about the case?”
“Nothing that sticks out.”
“How about something that doesn’t stick out?”
Harper thought about it a moment. “He asked if I remembered who identified the body.”
“Did you?”
“Not at first, no.”
“Who did identify her?”
“Her father. Then he asked me how long it took.”
“How long what took?”
“The identification.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I, quite frankly. He wanted to know if her father had made the ID immediately or if it took a few minutes.”
“Why would he want to know that?”
“I have no idea.”
Carlson tried to find an angle on that one, but nothing came to him. “How did you answer him?”
“With the truth actually. I don’t remember. I assume he did it in a timely fashion or I’d remember it better.”
“Anything else?”
“Not really, no,” he said. “Look, if we’re done here, I got two kids who smashed a Civic into a telephone pole waiting for me.”
Carlson gripped the file in his hand. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re done. But if I need to reach you?”
“I’ll be at the office.”
PETER FLANNERY, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW was stenciled in faded gold into the door’s pebbled glass. There was a hole in the glass the size of a fist. Someone had patched it up with gray duct tape. The tape looked old.
I kept the brim of my cap low. My insides ached from my ordeal with the big Asian guy. We had heard my name on the radio station that promises the world in exchange for twenty-two minutes. I was officially a wanted man.
Hard to wrap ye olde brain around that one. I was in huge trouble and yet that all seemed strangely remote, as though that were happening to someone with whom I was vaguely acquainted. I, me, the guy right here, didn’t care much. I had a single focus: finding Elizabeth. The rest felt like scenery.
Tyrese was with me. Half a dozen people were scattered about the waiting room. Two wore elaborate neck braces. One had a bird in a cage. I had no idea why. No one bothered to glance up at us, as though they’d weighed the effort of sliding their eyes in our direction against the possible benefits and decided, hey, it isn’t worth it.
The receptionist wore a hideous wig and looked at us as though we’d just plopped out of a dog’s behind.
I asked to see Peter Flannery.
“He’s with a client.” She wasn’t clacking gum, but it was close.
Tyrese took over then. Like a magician with a great sleight of hand, he flourished a roll of cash thicker than my wrist. “Tell him we be offering a retainer.” Then, grinning, he added, “One for you too, we get in to see him right away.”
Two minutes later, we were ushered into Mr. Flannery’s inner sanctum. The office smelled of cigar smoke and Lemon Pledge. Snap-together furniture, the kind you might find at Kmart or Bradlees, had been stained dark, feigning rich oak and mahogany and working about as well as a Las Vegas toupee. There were no school diplomas on the wall, just that phony nonsense people put up to impress the easily impressed. One commemorated Flannery’s membership in the “International Wine-tasting Association.” Another ornately noted that he attended a “Long Island Legal Conference” in 1996. Big wow. There were sun-faded photos of a younger Flannery with what I guessed were either celebrities or local politicians, but nobody I recognized. The office staple of a golf foursome photo mounted wood-plaque-like adorned a prize spot behind the desk.
“Please,” Flannery said with a big wave of his hand. “Have a seat, gentlemen.”
I sat. Tyrese stayed standing, crossed his arms, and leaned against the back wall.
“So,” Flannery said, stretching the word out like a wad of chaw, “what can I do for you?”