his anger slip away. None of it mattered, as long as Mia was safe to get home to their girls, to hold and protect them forever.
But when Jack opened his eyes, he saw a tear on Ryan’s cheek, Ryan, the one who was not known for emotion, the one whose wife had called heartless on more than one occasion.
“Jack, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Mia’s dead.”
CHAPTER 34
Frank had spent the last hour chasing down every friend, contact, and enemy he had in the New York City Police Department to find where Jack had been taken. He had lost Jack once he exited his car with the Suburban in pursuit. They had both disappeared up 48th Street.
Frank thought of taking up the chase on foot, but Jack was long gone, and he knew he would have no chance of finding him. He quickly set to work changing his front left tire, which the men in the Suburban had shot out, finishing in pit-stop time of two minutes. He was thankful for his intense workouts and large forearms as he muscled through the process but admitted that he felt his age as he climbed back into the car with an ache in his back and a sore shoulder. He had quickly started up the car and headed up 48th Street, where Jack had disappeared. He imagined that he sought refuge within the sea of tourists who prowled Broadway on a Friday night, a far better place to hide than in some isolated hole in the wall.
He raced west toward Seventh Avenue and couldn’t believe his eyes as he saw Jack carried out of on office building by three cops. Unconscious, his weight taxing the young police officers, he was stuffed into the back of a police cruiser and sped out of there. Frank took up pursuit and was quickly foiled by the slow-moving traffic out of Times Square, but the cop car managed to bob, weave, and vanish to who knows where. He flipped on his scanner, but there was no mention of the goings-on on West 48th Street. Frank knew that Jack was under VIP care, radio silence on whatever had happened, allowing the officers and the department to sort through what to do with the arrest of the city’s DA.
Frank had called in favors, had called in chits, had called upon captains and rookies, but no one had heard even a rumor about Jack being arrested. There was fractional chatter about an occurrence at the Tombs, but that was being handled by the FBI, where Frank knew he wouldn’t be afforded even a pleasantry. He had called out to Riker’s Island but knew that they would never take Jack there, into the heart of the enemy, whose population would flay the skin from Jack’s body before he was even placed in a cell. He called the central jail at the Tombs, but no one had been brought in during the last hour even anonymously. Frank headed downtown and circled back to the entrance to the Tombs, where he found the FBI poring over the lobby, dusting for prints, noting and cataloguing the bullet slugs and the scars they’d left in the marble walls and floors. Frank couldn’t believe what he saw and was amazed that Jack had made it out of there alive. He had searched for Larry Knoll but was told Larry was being debriefed by the FBI at a different location. The wall of silence on the matter was impenetrable.
He had been so furious with Jack for leaving him, for slipping into the Tombs. He had no idea what prompted Jack’s singular drive to get downstairs without him or any real idea of what had happened. He had only glimpsed the mythical box that Jack had spoken of, as he clung tightly to it while they raced up the FDR. And he did not get even a glimpse of its contents, let alone a mention of what was inside.
Frank was loved and respected by the NYPD, both top brass and lowly rookies, but he wasn’t about to get any information from his former colleagues; no one knew a thing. He had been a cop for twenty-five years. Even though he’d retired, he still considered himself one and would until they day he died. He thought back on his career and similar situations-the arrests of movies stars, the senator from Arkansas found unconscious at the Four Seasons with his battered wife next to him, and the incident twenty years ago involving the former mayor’s son, the underage girl, needles, and guns. He thought about each situation and the embarrassment it created, not just for the individual but for law enforcement, the country, and the city administration, all of whom sought legal, PR, and practical advice before informing the media and the world of a respected and loved VIP going off the rails. And the pieces fell into place…
Frank knew where Jack was.
Jack lay on the riverbank, his body broken and wet, the sound of the rushing river heavy in his ear, his body and mind enveloped by the darkness of night. Moonlight danced off the muddy shore, the wet leaves of the surrounding woods. And there was a presence beside him. The man who had emerged from the woods, cloaked in the shadows of night, knelt behind his head, just beyond the periphery of his vision.
An incredible pain coursed through Jack’s body, his head pounded, his face was dotted with multiple stings, his chest throbbed on the left side, and his torso felt as if a vise was closing around it.
And a voice rose, a quiet chanting, a prayer uttered in the soft whispers of a foreign tongue. But somehow, despite the fact that he spoke no language beyond English, Jack understood the words that poured from the man’s mouth.
“In between life and death, between the deepest dark of night and the first rays of dawn, in that moment where we begin to drift up from sleep to wakefulness, is where anything is possible, Jack.”
The man reached over and drew Jack’s naked arm to him. Under the rays of moonlight, the man withdrew a quill from his pocket, a bottle of ink from the other. He dipped the quill in the dark brown ink and began to write. His hand was that of an artist, his focus and demeanor those that of a wise man.
“You can still save her, Jack,” the man whispered as he wrote, “but time is slipping away and will soon fall through your fingers, where all will be forever lost.”
Jack’s eyes flashed open, and he desperately tried to recapture the fading thread of the dream, trying to hold on to the answers that floated up from his memory while he slept. He lay in the hospital bed, the strap around his chest reaffixed, his arms tethered back down. He was filled with such agony, such grief, such confusion.
Everything he held as reality had slipped away. Mia was everything, his better half, his lover, his best friend, and she was dead.
He reviewed the last fifteen hours in his mind, every conversation, every action he took. It had all seemed so real. Talking to Jimmy Griffin… he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t have been an imposter. He had not set Jack up. He was her friend. He didn’t lead him down some rabbit hole. He merely said that her salvation lay with the fate of the evidence case.
And Cristos, he was not some illusion, some spirit come back to haunt him. He was flesh and blood. The bullets were real, not dreamed. Jack would not go off randomly shooting his way into the Tombs. He wouldn’t have killed Charlie or shot some innocents. He had seen death at his own hand in the past. It was what had brought him to law and away from guns. He wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.
But above all, it was Mia’s voice that rang in his ear. He had spoken to her from Cristos’s car. It wasn’t imagined. It was not the wishful thinking of a grieving man. He heard her desperation, her surprise at his being alive.
He had known Ryan for too many years to count; he had always been a good friend, someone he could always count on. He couldn’t imagine him lying to him, making up some elaborate story. But was he, too, being manipulated? Was he drawing conclusions off facts that he couldn’t possibly verify himself in such short order? Had he fallen into the trap of being fed information that could only lead to one conclusion? Jack couldn’t imagine his friend toying with him. He had seen Ryan’s pain when Ryan told him of his cancer diagnosis; he had seen his agony at seeing Jack tied to the bed. And above all, Ryan was not one to fake tears or grief at the loss of a friend’s wife at the behest of the FBI. Ryan believed everything he told Jack… and Ryan believed he was crazy.
He and Emily had left the room to consult further on Jack’s “condition” and “illusions,” leaving him alone for the last ten minutes, which felt more like ten hours.
They never explained how Mia died, simply implying that she died in the car accident, but he had seen her kidnapped, driven away. Or had he? Everything was so murky. Had his mind played tricks on him? Had he blocked out what he had seen, suppressed the tragedy of her death? Had she been lying there next to him on the riverbank, or was she drowned in the car only to be washed downstream? Had her death been the impetus for his insanity, for some desperate act within a reality of his own making? Did a crazy man ever know he was crazy, or did he simply
