“Angry? Is that what I am? It made the evening news, the morning paper. My name! I lost my job. My neighbors dumped their trash at my door.” He stepped back, arms dangling limply at his side. “Angry?”
She tracked his right hand as it moved slowly into the pocket of the trench coat. Then, movement to her right. Boldt, oblivious to traffic, his weapon drawn. A car braked, narrowly avoiding hitting him.
Movement shifted into an eerie slow motion, an awkward street ballet choreographed for a mugging gone south. She knew well enough that no matter how fast one reacts, the blade or the bullet always reaches the victim unexpectedly fast. She also knew that 99 percent of mugging victims reacted defensively and afraid.
Matthews said, “You don’t want to do this!” Then she lowered her right shoulder and charged into him, struggling to get her purse open at the same time.
Boldt shouted something about “Hands over your head,”
though it existed only ephemerally for her-a drone in the buzz behind her. The purse slipped off her shoulder, falling to the sidewalk, its contents lost. From all around her, a convergence of special assignment officers. She felt them running toward her.
Heard the chaos over the handheld radios.
She leaned her weight into the center of Hollie’s chest, just below his sternum, and drove into the unforgiving stone edifice of Public Safety, knocking the wind out of him. She would not be a victim. She would not succumb to the fear. She screamed with the move, part aggression, part reaction, backed off the pressure, and then slammed into his chest a second time. A bone cracked beneath her effort. Hollie groaned as he gasped and sank to the sidewalk.
She lifted her knee into his crotch as he went down-sharply, like a move in step aerobics. Boldt pulled her away and tackled her, covering her, just as two undercover officers arrived. He lay on top of her, his face filled with rage.
She witnessed Boldt’s thought process as he realized she was all right and took appraisal of Hollie. He rolled off her and came to his knees.
Hollie’s hand was yanked out of his coat pocket on its way to a handcuff. A piece of paper rose like a bird, fluttered, and returned to earth.
Not a gun, after all, but his eviction notice. The weapon she had feared was nothing but a piece of paper.
Boldt was walking her around to the front of the building when her cell phone rang from within her purse. He’d offered to have her join him at the lab for Lofgrin’s report on the Underground, but she didn’t feel up to it. She wanted her office. A cup of tea.
Her phone’s caller-ID displayed: PAY PHONE #122.
“Hello?” she answered, pressing the phone to her ear.
“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. You know that, don’t you?” Her throat constricted. The voice was too breathy to identify. Purposefully difficult to identify, she thought.
She stopped abruptly and Boldt clearly sensed the dread that washed through her.
“P-a-y p-h-o-n-e … WALKER?” she mouthed, looking in all directions at once. She mouthed the word “pay phone” again and held up her fingers: one, two, two.
Boldt grabbed for his own phone, speed-dialed a number, and turned away from Matthews so he wouldn’t be overheard.
“Boldt. I need the location of pay phone one twenty-two, one-two-two. I’ll hold.”
The breathless voice continued in her ear, “Tell your friend they don’t need to worry about you. You’re in good hands.”
“Who is this?” she asked calmly.
“I won’t let anything happen to you.” The phone went dead.
She spotted a pair of pay phones down on Third.
But Boldt pointed in the opposite direction, up to the corner of Fourth Avenue. “There!” he said, still waiting for identification from dispatch.
Matthews followed his outstretched arm to where a man hung up a pay phone receiver and stepped away from the open booth.
“Oh my God,” Boldt gasped, as the man’s face could be seen.
It was Lanny Neal. He turned his back on them and disappeared at a leisurely pace around Fourth Avenue.
Boldt took a step in that direction, but Matthews snagged him by the arm. “What, Lou?”
“It’s Neal!”
She agreed: It had looked like him.
“He had my cell phone number? Do we really think so? Are we sure? Where’s the foul?” she added, slipping into LaMoia’s vernacular. Little pieces of him rubbing off on her-she’d have to watch that.
Boldt broke loose of her grip.
“There’s no crime, Lou! It’s a phone call is all. Besides, that guy-if it was Neal-hung up too late. My guy had already disconnected.”
“We don’t know that,” Boldt argued. He stopped, two paces into the street, his ear pressed to the phone. His head spun around sharply, and she thought he was looking at her, but more likely he was receiving confusing directions. He then turned back and crossed the hill toward that empty pay phone at a near run. “Which corner?” she heard him say into the phone. “Give me the compass point! North … south … what?”
“I think it was Walker,” she said, blurting it out, keeping up as they crossed through traffic. “Psychologically, it fits perfectly for Walker.” Was he even listening to her? she wondered.
He called over his shoulder. “You’re telling me that Neal being at a pay phone is coincidence?” The word, so distasteful to him, barely came off his lips. He kept the phone pressed to his ear.
“It was Walker,” she repeated, this time more convincingly.
“The protective role fits him perfectly. It’s the last logical step, Lou, before-” but she cut herself off, slipped through two parked cars, and joined him on the opposite sidewalk. She didn’t want him hearing what she was thinking.
“Before what?” Boldt climbed the hill, leaning toward the far street corner like Blue straining at his leash.
She didn’t answer. He glared at her.
Traffic noise and a ferry’s horn filled the resulting silence.
“What?” Boldt barked angrily into the phone. He caught Matthews’s attention and shook a pointed finger at the street corner diagonally across from them. Based on the Neal look-alike-or had it been Lanny Neal? she wondered-they’d crossed to the wrong set of phones.
Boldt snagged the com-radio and rattled off the coordinates of the pay phone: “Suspect spotted on southeast corner of Fourth and Columbia! Pursue and detain!” With the streetlight green and the resulting traffic, which included a tall delivery truck, they hadn’t spotted Walker, but that was Boldt, she thought-he trusted the system more than any other cop.
A pair of patrol cars and three plainclothed officers converged on the street corner, seemingly out of thin air. Over the rooftops of vehicles, Ferrell Walker was seen running three steps before throwing his hands over his head and leaning up to the chain-link fence of a construction site. Pedestrians collected like bluebottle flies on a corpse.
“Abduction,” Boldt said, supplying the word Matthews had avoided.
They met eyes. Matthews found it impossible to speak.
Boxed In
“She betrayed me,” Walker said to LaMoia across the interrogation table in the Box.
“Where have you been?” LaMoia asked flippantly. “She’s a woman, Walker. Get used to it.”
The edge of the table carried the regimented brown larvae of cigarette burns despite the NO SMOKING sign on the wall. A cassette machine ran two tapes recording simultaneously. Two yellow pads. Two pencils.
