Foerster dove off the railing. Someone in the crowd – a man or a woman, Jonah couldn’t tell – screamed as Foerster’s skinny body carved a graceless, tumbling arc through the air, then splashed into the water below. Jonah rushed to the railing and saw Foerster disappear beneath the surging foam.
Jonah closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
He looked again.
Foerster’s body appeared, bobbing off to the right and already well behind the boat. Jonah watched it closely, looking for signs of life. An arm moved. Then the other arm moved. A moment later Foerster was swimming, pulling hard, growing smaller and smaller in the distance. Soon he was a speck, then maybe he was there and maybe he wasn’t – a tiny spark on the water, a ray of sunlight reflecting off a discarded beer can.
The S.I. Newhouse motored along, passing the Statue of Liberty.
Up ahead, the tall buildings of lower Manhattan drew nearer. They seemed to launch themselves heavenward, like bamboo shoots springing up out of the ground.
‘Shit,’ Jonah said. ‘That’s twice now.’
He turned and faced the guy who knew what a microphone looked like. Five feet away, the guy stared at him blandly.
‘Was that any of your goddamn business?’ Jonah said.
The guy shrugged. The beard looked like it came from a costume store and was just glued right on there. ‘I made it my business. You have a problem with that?’
Jonah stepped into the punch, landing it solidly across the guy’s chin. The guy’s head swiveled to the right and he took two stumble-steps backward before falling on his ass. His head bounced off the ironwork of the floor. He was down and his eyes said he would stay down. A woman from the crowd kneeled by him and glared up at Jonah, not saying anything. All around them, people murmured.
Jonah could feel it already – the dull ache in his hand and in his wrist that by tonight would travel the length of his arm up to his shoulder. Instant karma – you paid a price for hitting people in this world. Still, punching that loudmouth felt good. It felt right. It felt like something Gordo would do.
‘I don’t know how it happened,’ Foerster’s mother said between heavy gasps for air. She had sobbed for a time and had only stopped a few minutes before.
‘I don’t know how Davey got so bad. I can’t tell you how smart he was as a boy. He was the smartest boy in his whole school. Everybody said so. He won big prizes for science and math.’ She shook her head. ‘And now this. In and out of jail. Beat up by the police. Always on the run.’ A long, world-weary sigh escaped her. ‘You know, his poor father must be rolling over in his grave.’
Gordo put his big hands on top of hers and let them rest there a moment. They sat at her kitchen table. Jonah had come in a few minutes before and shook his head – missed him again. Now he hovered around, not saying anything, and in general making Gordo nervous. Gordo was working here.
He glanced around the kitchen, really noticing it for the first time. The wallpaper was peeling away in several places. The ancient cabinets were half-falling out of the wall. There was almost no counter space. The linoleum on the floor was scuffed and ripped. The plastic tablecloth was sticky with age. Through a doorway he could see into the living room. The furniture was old – old, and not in a good way – and covered in plastic. Hell, back here in the kitchen the refrigerator was five feet tall. Gordo hadn’t seen one of those in ages. If he opened the icebox, he knew what he would find. Caked ice, five inches thick on every side, with a few frozen dinners stuffed into the dim tunnel remaining.
In the aftermath of the raid, he had managed to charm her. Even after bursting into her home, even after accidentally knocking her over – thankfully, she was a sturdy woman and hadn’t broken a hip or some vertebrae when she went down – he had managed to win her over to his way of thinking. With a maniac like Foerster for a son, she must have been halfway there already.
He had helped her up, brought her here to the kitchen table, and told her that he worked for the courts. He deliberately kept it vague, allowing her to believe whatever she wanted to believe about that. It seemed she had come to the conclusion that he was a court officer of some kind, maybe a special detective who reported directly to the judges. That was a fine thing to believe. He had also told her that he was trying to help her son, not hurt him. He had told her that if the police got to Davey first, her son might not get off as easily. You could tell by the bruises and the stitches in his head that the police had very little compunction about the use of force, even deadly force. The court system was a great deal more humane than the police.
He had won her over so thoroughly that she had agreed not to call anyone right away. She had also agreed to let Gordo look around in Davey’s room for a few minutes. There wasn’t much to see. A twin bed that might cramp the style of a ten-year-old. Posters of obscure heavy metal bands still on the walls. An aluminum fire ladder attached to the window sill and hanging down to the alley – quite the escape artist was our little Davey. And one thing that might actually mean something, though at this moment Gordo couldn’t imagine what: the business card of a security consulting firm located in Charleston, South Carolina. Gordo found it on the bedside table, which suggested to him that Foerster had it out for a reason. It was a very curious thing, that card.
‘Well, it happens,’ Gordo said now. ‘People go bad. It’s no reflection on how you raised him.’
Mrs. Foerster looked up, and in her eyes Gordo detected the light of hope. ‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Of course I do. Jonah here can vouch for what I’m saying.’
Jonah nodded his head solemnly. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course I can.’ But it sounded empty, like the absent- minded blather of a man who wasn’t listening and had no idea what he was agreeing to.
Gordo soldiered on with the lie. Jonah had already tuned the whole thing out, and Gordo himself was even growing a little bored with it. He wanted to keep Foerster’s mom on the hook by projecting compassion, and he even wanted to feel compassion for her. But in reality some plenty warped shit must have gone on in this house during Foerster’s upbringing, and no amount of hand-wringing was going to unmake that fact. In Gordo’s experience, a career whacko like Foerster didn’t get that way entirely on his own. He had help, and the help started early.
‘In our line of work,’ Gordo said, ‘Jonah and I deal with some very bad men. Some of them – not Davey, mind you, but some others – are the worst men in our society. And we find over and over that many of them were raised in good homes. Maybe they have some kind of defect, a chemical imbalance in their brains, or maybe they get led down the wrong path by people they meet on the street. I don’t know what it is.’
‘I don’t, either,’ she said.
‘Whatever the reason in this case, it’s very important that Davey be taken off the street for a while. It’s important that he get help from professionals. And it’s important that other people… well…’
‘That he doesn’t hurt anyone else,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’
She nodded, as if finally coming to a difficult decision. ‘I should have called someone as soon as he showed up here. But I wanted to protect him. I love my son, Mr. Lamb.’
Gordo nodded. ‘I know you do.’ His hand moved to her shoulder. ‘We can make things right for Davey. Will you help us do that?’
She began to cry again, silently this time. Her body shook all over. ‘I’ll do anything you want.’
Gordo held up the business card. ‘Do you know anything about this? I found it upstairs. It could be a clue.’
She took the card in one hand. ‘He told me he has a job lined up in South Carolina. I don’t know if it’s true or not. He’s lied so much that I have no idea whether I’m coming or going sometimes. He wanted me to give him money so he could go down there, but I didn’t believe that’s what he wanted it for.’
‘Did you give him any money?’
‘I gave him forty dollars. He said it wasn’t enough. I was actually afraid of him, what my son might do, to get more money from me.’ She started crying some more at the thought of it, but not as forcefully as before. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks.
‘Do you have any idea what kind of work he might do with a security firm?’
She shrugged. ‘Something with computers, maybe. Like I said, he’s very smart.’
‘Can you do this for me? Can you call the phone company, right now, and find out if by any chance Davey
