What the hell was nagging her about this stretch of Ditmars?
She held her ID high, limped across the street. Thankfully, traffic slowed. Some people actually came to a full stop.
Powell walked into the nail salon. A girl behind the counter looked up from a magazine.
“Help you?”
The girl was about twenty, with blunt-cut, multicolored hair, a set of dazzlingly bright spangled nails. There were no customers in the shop.
“Have you got Internet access?” Powell asked.
Nothing. Powell tapped the ID on her chest. The girl looked from the ID to Powell’s eyes. Powell asked again, this time speaking a little more slowly, enunciating every word.
“Have… you… got… Internet access?”
Now the girl looked at her as if she were from another planet. Maybe the Alien Workshop. “Of course.” She turned the LCD monitor on the counter to face Powell, then slid the keyboard and mouse forward.
“Have you got a stool, something I can sit on?”
Another pause. Powell was beginning to wonder if there was some sort of drug-induced time delay in here, one caused by a long-term exposure to nail-salon chemicals. The girl caught on, slid off her stool, picked it up, and walked it around the counter.
“Thank you,” Powell said. She eased onto the stool, opened a web browser. She searched again for the New York article on Michael Roman. Her eyes blazed down the page. She found the paragraph she had been looking for, and finally located the itch. She got on her two-way, raising Fontova. A few minutes later he walked into the nail shop. By that time, Powell had navigated to an overhead map of the surrounding ten-block area.
Powell briefed her partner. Fontova looked at the map.
“Okay,” Powell began. “We have the initial crime scene here.” She put a virtual pushpin in the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office. “We have the Ford Contour last seen in Roman’s possession here, which is also where our cutter attacked two police officers. And lastly we find the H2 in which our alleged psycho made his temporary escape abandoned here.”
Powell leaned back, looked at the locations. “Now, I love this part of the city. Don’t get me wrong. But what the fuck is so special about Astoria, and especially this here little slice of heaven around Ditmars?”
She slipped a dollar into Fontova’s hand. He took it without comment.
“I don’t know.”
“I think I do.”
Powell maximized the other browser window, the one displaying the New York article. She pointed to the screen, at the paragraph that mentioned Michael Roman’s childhood, about how his parents were murdered in their place of business, a place called the Pikk Street Bakery, a place that Michael Roman and his wife had purchased a few years earlier.
A place located at 64 Ditmars Boulevard.
FIFTY-ONE
The old feelings rushed over him in a dizzying flourish. It wasn’t just a remembrance of his time spent here, a recollection of carefree childhood, a home movie unspooling in his mind, but rather a feeling that he was once again nine years old, still running down this hallway to help his father accept deliveries of flour and sugar, large boxes of bottled molasses, dried fruits and fresh-roasted nuts. The aroma of just-baked bread still lived in the air.
Since the Pikk Street Bakery had closed only a few retail tenants had tried to make a go of the space. Michael knew that, for a short while, a company offering orthotic and prosthetic services rented the first floor. After that, a natural foods store. Neither enterprise flourished.
The back hallway was just as Michael remembered it, its hardwood flooring worn in the center, a pair of Sixties-era light fixtures overhead. He proceeded down the hallway by feel, hugging the wall. A nail protruding from the plaster caught his sweatshirt, tearing the fabric, scratching his skin.
When he reached the doorway before the front room he stopped. He tried to calm himself, quiet his breathing. He slowly peered around the corner, into the room that once held the bakery’s office. As a child he had been forbidden to play in this room, only entering when his mother was doing the books, the mysterious paperwork that seemed to hold adults in its dark thrall once a month. He recalled once being punished for leaving a lemon ice to melt on the desk. Now the room was musty, abandoned. In the dim light he could make out shapes. A pair of dun-colored file cabinets, an old metal desk on its side, a pair of packing crates.
He continued a few feet down the hallway into the front room. When they purchased the building, Abby visited with the realtor, and told Michael that the previous tenants had removed most of their furniture, had even made a half-hearted attempt at cleaning. Michael looked across the room. The front windows were soaped, making the translucent light otherworldly. Dust motes hazed the room.
Michael eased his way up the steps, each tread echoing that horrible day, the dry wood protesting his presence, the sounds and smells vaulting him back in time. He could all but hear the noise of firecrackers going off in the street outside, some of them, he learned, the sounds of the gunfire that had shattered his family.
He reached the top of the stairs, looked down the hallway. The door to the bathroom had been removed. Scant light came in through the barred window. He turned to his parents’ bedroom. He recalled the day his father and Solomon painted the room, a hot summer day in July, the sound of a Mets game in the background, fading in and out on old transistor radio. Solomon had gotten drunk that Sunday afternoon, and rolled paint over half the window before Peeter had been able to stop him. The glazing was still flecked with blue.
Sweat slid down Michael’s back, his skin pimpled with gooseflesh. The air was close and damp and silent. He crossed the hallway to the space that was once his bedroom. He pushed open the door, the old hinge giving a squeal of complaint. He could not believe how small the room was, how it had, at one time, in the fictional world of his child’s mind, been his tundra, his castle, his western plains, his fathomless ocean. There was no bed, no dresser, no chair. Against one wall were a pair of cardboard boxes, coated with years of filth.
He closed his eyes, recalled the moment – seven o’clock exactly, the time the bakery closed. He had had nightmares about the scenario for years, had even felt a pang of terror at the times when he happened to glance at a clock at exactly seven. In his dreams he saw shadows on the walls, heard footsteps. It all coalesced at this moment. The horror in his closet, the two men who had killed his mother and father, the man who now had his wife and daughter.
Michael stopped, opened his eyes, and suddenly realized it was not a dream. The footsteps were real. He felt the slight buckle of the floorboards, the change in the air, and knew that someone was right behind him. Before he could take the gun from his pocket, a shadow filled the room.
Mischa, he heard his mother say. Ta tuleb.
Then there was fire inside his head, a supernova of orange and scarlet pain.
Then, nothing.
FIFTY-TWO
It took a while to realize where he was, when he was. Reality sifted back, laced with the thudding agony in his head.
When his eyes adjusted to the light, he took in the scene. He was in the front room of the bakery, sitting in a chair, next to Abby. In front of them was one of the small wooden cafe tables that used to be near the window of the bakery. Michael could see some of the names still carved into the surface.
On the table was a gun.
Emily sat on the other side of the room, the side on which the three counters of the bakery once were. The glass cases were long gone, but the two large ovens still stood against the back wall. Next to them were dismantled tables, chairs, bookshelves. There was no electricity, no overhead fixtures, but in the thin light slicing
