Zack nodded, answering immediately. “She would hide me.”
“She would take you away. Remove you from the threat, get you to a safe place.” Eph listened to what he was saying. “Just pick you up and… run. I’m right, aren’t I?”
“You’re right,” said Zack.
“Okay, so — being the overprotective mom? That’s my job now.”
Eric Jackson photographed the window burn from three different angles. He always carried a small Canon digital camera when he was on duty, along with his gun and his badge.
Acid etching was the thing now. Craft-store etching product usually mixed with shoe polish, marking on glass or Plexiglas. It didn’t show up immediately, burning into the glass in the space of hours. The longer the acid-etched tag remained, the more permanent it became.
He stood back to size up the shape. Six black appendages radiating from a red center mass. He clicked back through his camera memory. Another one, taken yesterday in Bay Ridge, only not as well-defined. And another, in Canarsie, looking more like an oversized asterisk but evincing the same tight lines.
Jackson knew Phade’s work anywhere. True, this wasn’t like his usual throw-ups — this was amateur work compared to that — but the fine arcs and perfect free-hand proportion were unmistakable.
Dude was going all-city, sometimes in one night. How was that possible?
Eric Jackson was a member of the New York Police Department’s Citywide Vandals Taskforce, his job to track and prevent vandalism. He believed in the gospel of the NYPD as it pertained to graffiti. Even the most beautifully colored and detailed graffiti throw-up represented an affront to public order. An invitation to others to consider the urban environment theirs to do with as they pleased. Freedom of expression was always the miscreant’s way out, but littering was an act of expression also, and you still got nicked for it. Order was a fragile thing, with chaos always just a few steps away.
The city was seeing that now, firsthand.
Riots had claimed whole blocks in the South Bronx. Nighttime was the worst. Jackson kept waiting for a call from a captain that would put him back in the old uniform and out on the street. But no word yet. Not a lot of radio chatter at all, whenever he switched it on inside his car. So he kept on doing what he was paid to do.
The governor had resisted calls for the National Guard, but he was just a guy in Albany, weighing his political future. Supposedly, with so many units still in Iraq and Afghanistan, the guard was undermanned and underequipped — but, looking at the black smoke in the distant sky, Jackson would have welcomed any help.
Jackson dealt with vandals in all five boroughs, but nobody bombed as much of the city’s fa$clade as Phade. Dude was everywhere. Must have slept all day, tagged all night. He was fifteen or sixteen now, had been getting up since he was twelve. That was the age most taggers start, toying up at schools, on newspaper boxes, etc. In surveillance photos, Phade’s face was always obscured, usually by a Yankees cap tucked underneath a sweatshirt hood, sometimes even an aerosol mask. He wore typical tagger get-up: cargo pants with many pockets, a backpack for his Krylons, hi-top kicks.
Most vandals work in tagging crews, but not Phade. He was a young legend, moving with apparent impunity throughout diverse neighborhoods. He was said to carry a stolen set of transit keys, including a skeleton that unlocked subway cars. His tags earned respect. The typical profile of a young tagger is low self-esteem, a desire for peer recognition, a distorted view of fame. Phade fit none of these traits. His signature wasn’t a tag — usually a nickname or a repetitive motif — but his style itself. His pieces jumped off walls. Jackson’s own suspicion — long since moved from a hunch to a foregone certainty — was that Phade was likely obsessive-compulsive, perhaps showing symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome or even full-spectrum autism.
Jackson understood this, in part, because he was an obsessive himself. He carried a full book on Phade, quite similar in appearance to the “piece books” taggers carried, featuring their graffiti outlines in a black-cover Cachet sketchbook. As one of five officers assigned to the GHOST unit within the Vandals Taskforce — the Graffiti Habitual Offender Suppression Team — he was responsible for maintaining a graffiti offender databank cross-referencing tags and throw-ups with addresses. People who consider graffiti a kind of “street art” think of brightly colored, Wild Style bubble bombs on building murals and subway cars. They don’t think of tagging crews etching storefronts, competing for high-profile — and often dangerous—“gets.” Or, more often, marking gang territory, establishing name recognition and intimidation.
The other four GHOST cops had stopped showing up for shifts. Some radio reports had NYPD officers deserting the city like the New Orleans cops after Hurricane Katrina, but Jackson couldn’t believe that. Something else was happening — something beyond this sickness spreading throughout the boroughs. You’re sick, you bang in. You get your shift covered so you don’t leave a brother to pick up your slack. These claims of abandonment and cowardice offended him like some incompetent tagger’s clumsy-ass signature over a freshly painted wall. Jackson would believe this crazy vampire shit people were talking before he’d accept that his guys had turned tail and skedaddled to Jersey.
He got inside his unmarked car and drove down the quiet street to Coney Island. He did this three days a week, at least. It was his favorite spot growing up, but his parents didn’t take him there nearly as much as he’d have liked. While he’d abandoned his pledge to go every day when he was a grown-up, he went often enough for lunch to make it okay.
The boardwalk was empty, as he had expected. The autumn day was certainly warm enough, but with the mad flu, amusement was the last thing on people’s minds. He hit Nathan’s Famous and found the place deserted but not locked up. Abandoned. He had worked at this very hot-dog stand after high school, so he went back behind the counter and into the kitchen. He shooed away two rats, then wiped down the cooking surface. The fridge was still cold inside, so he pulled out two beef dogs. He found the buns and a cellophane-covered tin of red onions. He liked onions, especially the way the vandals winced when he got up in their face after lunch.
The dogs cooked fast, and he stepped outside to eat. The Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel were still and quiet, seagulls perched on the uppermost railings. Another seagull flew close, then darted away from the top of the wheel at the last moment. Jackson looked closer and realized that the critters sitting atop the structure weren’t birds at all.
They were rats. Lots of rats, dotting the top edges of the structure. Trying to grab birds. What in the hell?
He continued down the boardwalk, passing Shoot the Freak, one of Coney Island’s landmark attractions. From a railed promontory, he looked down into the alley-like shooting gallery cluttered with fencing, spattered barrels, and assorted mannequin heads and bowling pins set upon rusted racks for target practice. Along the railing were six paintball guns chained to a table. The sign listed the prices, promising a LIVE HUMAN TARGET.
The brick side walls were decorated with graffiti, creating more character. But among the fake white Krylon tags and weak bubble throw-ups, Jackson noticed another of Phade’s designs. Another six-limbed figure, this one in black and orange. And, near it, in the same colors, a design of lines and dots similar to the code he had been seeing all over town.
Then he saw the freak. The freak was dressed in heavy black armor, like riot gear, covering his entire body. A helmet and mask with protective goggles hid his face. The orange-painted shield he normally carried in order to deflect paintball projectiles stood against a low section of chain-link fence.
The freak stood at the far corner of the shooting alley, a can of spray paint in its gloved hand, marking up the wall.
“Hey!” Jackson called down to him.
The freak didn’t acknowledge him. It kept right on tagging.
“Hey!” called Jackson, louder now. “NYPD! I wanna talk to you!”
Still no response or reaction.
Jackson picked up each of the carbine-like paintball guns, hoping for a free shot. He found one with a handful of orange balls still inside its opaque plastic feeder. He shouldered the weapon and fired low, the carbine kicking and the paintball exploding in the dirt at the freak’s boot.
The freak didn’t flinch. It finished its tag and then dropped the empty can and started toward the underside of the railing where Jackson stood.
“Hey, asshole, I said I wanna talk to you.”
The freak did not stop. Jackson unloaded three blasts at its chest, exploding red. Then the freak passed
