Wallid.
Trembling, the driver flailed at the gearshift arm. He clipped it with his wrist, snapping it into drive. With the accelerator already flush against the floor, the cab lurched forward like a dragster, laying half-block-long stripes of rubber. Another bullet sparked the top of a parking meter behind them.
Wallid ratcheted the wheel, turning the taxi at almost a right angle onto a clear Carroll Street block. Centrifugal force hurled Drummond into Charlie’s spine. While explosive, the pain was a minor consideration because they were safely away.
Climbing back onto his seat, Charlie asked-shock had thrown off his governor so that it came out as a scream-“Who the hell were they?”
Drummond brushed bits of glass and foam from his hair. “Who?”
“The guys who tried to murder us a minute ago!”
“Oh, right, right, right.” Some of the light returned to Drummond’s eyes. “Tell me something? What’s today’s date?”
“The twenty-sixth.”
“Of?”
“December.”
“The last time I recall checking the calendar, the leaves had just begun to fall.”
“So about two, three months.” Charlie hoped this was leading somewhere.
Drummond waved at the shattered rear window. “This probably has to do with work.” As if drained by the thinking, he sagged into a reclining position.
Charlie needed more. “I never thought of the appliance business as quite so deadly.”
Drummond nodded vaguely.
“How about the way you knew how to handle yourself back there?” Charlie asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t pick that up at the repair and maintenance refreshers?”
With a shrug, Drummond leaned against his window, content to use it as a pillow despite the cold and the rattling of the glass. His eyelids appeared to grow heavy.
“At least tell me how you knew that the first guy had a gun?” Charlie said.
Drummond sat up an inch or two. “Yes, the key was…” He stopped. He’d fumbled the thought. He recovered it: “The fellow lured you down the block with the thing they knew would most entice you, a monitor scheme.”
“You mean a monetary scheme?”
“As I recall, the Monitor was a ship.”
“I know. What does it have to do with anything?”
“The Monitor battled the Merrimac.”
“Civil War, I know, I know. Was there a particular scheme the Monitor used?”
“The Merrimack is a hundred-ten-mile-long river that begins at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers.”
“You’re losing me.” Charlie suspected Drummond himself was lost.
“Franklin, New Hampshire,” Drummond said, as if that settled it.
13
The precinct house was quiet. “It’s so cold out there tonight, the pickpockets are keeping their hands in their own pockets,” explained the duty officer as he led Charlie and Drummond down an empty, characterless corridor of mostly dark offices. The place had the same coarse, sour smell as all the municipal buildings Charlie had been to. He wondered whether the odor of all the humanity massed into these places was too strong for any cleaning compound, or whether all the places simply used the same inadequate cleaning compound. Either way, all things considered, he felt as if he and Drummond had reached an oasis.
They came to the squad room, a big, open space painted a drab beige with few of the wanted posters or softball trophies Charlie had expected and none of the chaos. Three detectives doing paperwork was it for action.
The duty officer directed Charlie and Drummond to Detective Howard Beckman, a man well into his fifties who looked to have been a bruiser back in his day. His thatchy gray hair was now parted ruler straight. Like his sport coat, his oxford shirt was crisp. His silk tie, knotted with precision, was of the quality usually seen on a cop only if he were commissioner. Charlie took Beckman for a warrior forced to the sidelines by age restrictions, striving to soften his edges with couture-though couture probably wouldn’t be his term for it.
“So Murph says you fellas’ve got a good one for me,” Beckman said with a smile as he gestured Charlie and Drummond into the chairs before him. Charlie liked the old cop right out of the gate.
Battling his own incredulity, Charlie delivered what felt like a thorough rendition of events. Drummond sat quietly, occasionally nodding in corroboration, mostly gazing at his slippers.
Afterward, Beckman cupped his solid jaw in a hand, evoking a general pondering a battlefield map. “Quite a day,” he said. His tone was pure sympathy. Unfortunately his eyes divulged skepticism. He disappeared behind a giant computer terminal. “Let’s start with the fire,” he said, picking up the pace. “I see Chief Morris of Company two oh four ordered plywood over your windows and doorways to keep out looters, which is standard. He requested stepped-up police patrol-same reason, also standard. But there’s no request for a look-see by a fire marshal, nothing like that. If he’d thought anything was fishy…”
“At that time the gas man and the boiler blowing up seemed like coincidence,” Charlie said. “The two guys trying to shoot us made for a pattern.”
The detective slurped hot coffee from a tall Styrofoam cup. “I’ve also got the report from the patrol car that the duty officer sent by.” He dipped behind the terminal again and read aloud, “‘Resident officer saw and heard nothing out of ordinary. Officer observed no signs of gunplay, no casings, nothing out of ordinary.’”
Charlie had the same creeping, itchy sensation he did when a horse he’d bet began to let the lead slip away. “These guys, though, they clearly weren’t amateurs.”
“Then they would’ve tidied up, yeah. Understand this wasn’t a full forensics team Murph sent over.”
“What about the bullets in the Plexiglas divider in the cab?”
Beckman brightened. “That could be something, yeah.” A burst of right and left index finger pecks at his keyboard and he relayed, with disappointment, “No new incident reports from Transit on the system.”
“How long does it take for them to show up?”
“Not this long. It’s the cab companies’ first priority, if only so they can put in for insurance.”
“Wallid said he was going straight to his garage, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he stopped to get a drink first. My luck, the cab was stolen while he was in the bar.”
“A lot of times, especially late night, the guy’s an illegal with a borrowed hack license. Shelling out for the body work himself beats dealing with Immigration, you know?”
“Great,” Charlie said. So the cab getting stolen would actually be better luck.
“We can still get to him,” Beckman said. “I show three licensed cabbies named Ibrahim Wallid in the metro directory, plus a Wallid Ibrahim. We’ll call ’em tomorrow, find out if one of their vehicles is out of service.” He returned his attention to his coffee.
Charlie’s anxiety escalated into a feeling like that of a cold coming on. “So I guess, from a procedural standpoint, this doesn’t rate any more immediate action than a purse snatching?”
Beckman smoothed his tie. “The thing you gotta understand is, even on a slow night like this, we’re gonna have half a dozen complaints where somebody’s actually been shot. What the department would need to sink its teeth into yours is the why. Why would a sixty-four-year-old appliance salesman, even one who’s surprisingly good with his fists, have professional hit men after him?”
All Charlie could come up with was, “That’s the question of the night.”
With an outstretched palm, Beckman put it to Drummond.
Drummond raised his shoulders.
Beckman massaged the bags under his eyes. “The best thing’d be if you fellas come back tomorrow when the flip-chart lady’s here so she can sketch composites of your guys. They match anything in the system, we’re off to
