she would even
There was a mild surge in traffic. It started in the left lane, where one of the flanking trucks hissed and rumbled forward as its driver released its air brakes. Then the Jeep began to move and Gordian toed the accelerator.
He figured he’d gained about a car length of blacktop before the taillights of the Jeep flickered on and he had to brake behind it.
“I don’t think I’d better be home when you get here,” Ashley said.
“Honey…”
“No, Roger,” she said. “Don’t. Not now.”
Gordian’s stomach dropped some more. He knew from the flatness of her tone that there wouldn’t be any further discussion. She had closed up tight.
“I need some room,” she said. “It can only make things worse if we see each other tonight.”
“Where are you going to be?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later and let you know,” she said.
And hung up.
Click.
Gordian held the phone to his ear for almost a full minute after the line went dead, then finally slipped it back into his pocket.
He leaned back against the seat rest and rubbed his forehead, expelling a tired, resigned sigh.
In front of him, the little dog with its face in the window had started barking and wagging its tail. Or looked like it was barking, anyway, since he couldn’t actually hear it through two panes of glass and the drone of several hundred idling motors.
Gordian held his hand up and waved and the dog swished its tail back and forth more rapidly.
“Happy New Year,” he said to the interior of his car.
FIFTEEN
On an upper story of a sleek steel-and-glass office tower at Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, a group of German executives from the international magazine empire Fuchs Inc. had gathered behind floor-to-ceiling windows to watch the proceedings below. Well in advance of their holiday visit, office space used by their American editorial staff had been converted into an observatory /banquet area that included plush lounge chairs, high-magnification telescopes, a wet bar, and gourmet hors d’oeuvres served by a white-glove waiter staff. Also prior to their arrival, a memo instructing employees to leave the building early on New Year’s Eve had circulated down through the corporate hierarchy. It was their express wish that the observation deck be inaccessible to Americans, regardless of their positions in the company. The spectacle taking place in Times Square, so oddly crass and colorful, was one the foreign management wanted to view — and comment upon — in secure, uninterrupted privacy.
While the hectic New Year’s Eve gathering might be an American tradition, the German businessmen, who had poured millions of dollars into glossing up the district, felt it was theirs alone to enjoy from on high.
A large outdoor parade stand had been erected on the concrete island occupying the middle of the square from Forty-second Street to roughly Forty-third Street, the military recruiting office and benches that normally stood in that area having been uprooted prior to the festivities by the mayor’s New Year’s 2000 Organizing Committee. It was here that the mayor and other public officials stood with their families, friends, political patrons, and a smattering of entertainers, making speeches, waving to the crowd, leading cheers of “I love New York!” smiling to camera lenses, and urging people to have a good time while please, please,
Seated beside his wife and daughter on the platform — where a famous, born-on-the-lower-east-side comedian had just begun snapping off one-liners at the mike — Police Commissioner Bill Harrison felt like a cold piece of meat on a makeshift smorgasbord. Any minute now somebody was going to flip the damn thing over on its side, and the starving rabble would feast.
He looked around skeptically, wishing he could be more confident of the precautions that had been taken for the safety of the big shots on exhibit, not to mention the safety of his wife and daughter, who had cheerfully (and against his protestations) insisted on accompanying him to this fiasco. Half the City Hall establishment, and enough stars to fill a week’s worth of
As his eyes continued making their circuit of the immediate area, they fell briefly on the Emergency Services Unit’s One-Truck, parked in close proximity to the VIP stand on Forty-second Street. Besides being chock full of rescue and tactical equipment, the big, bulky vehicle was loaded with firepower ranging from Ruger Mini-14s to 12- gauge Ithaca shotguns to belt-fed Squad Automatic Weapons to M16s equipped with grenade tubes and multipurpose ammunition. Behind it on standby were two smaller Radio Emergency Patrol trucks, a surveillance van, a temporary headquarters vehicle, and a bomb truck.
Harrison took more than a little comfort in knowing that the elite ESU personnel were trained to respond to virtually any crisis; if something bad went down, they would be able to meet the challenge of coping with it head- on. But response wasn’t the same as prevention, and Oklahoma City loomed darkly over his thoughts tonight, reminding him that it only took a second for hundreds of innocent lives to be lost.
“Is that Dick Clark?” Rosetta said, pointing toward a sudden swirl of activity near the stand. “By those TV cameras over there?”
He sat forward, craning his head.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “That guy looks too old.”
“You never know, Bill. He’d have to be around seventy by now.”
“Dick Clark stopped aging at thirty,” he said. “Unlike your poor bedraggled husband, whose energies are on the wane as we speak, and who will be sleeping like a rock the moment his head hits the pillow tonight.”
“Is that so?”
“My days as a late-night party animal are behind me, sweetheart,” he said.
She put her hand on his thigh and let it rest there, a slanted little smile on her lips, her eyes glinting in the way that never failed to make his throat tighten and his heart skip a beat.
Tonight was no exception.
He looked at her with surprise, catching his breath.
“Like I said, old man, you never know,” she said.
“Yo, cuz, you got jelly donuts?”
The bearded vender lifted his eyes from his wristwatch and shook his head.
“How ’bout custard?”
“No more.”
Des Sanford looked over at his friend, Jamal. Jamal looked back at him and shrugged. Both teenagers were
