Gone Tomorrow

Two rooms away the second telephone stopped ringing.

And a third started.

I heaved upward.

I got the side of the cell about a foot off the ground. The tread plate floor shrieked and bent like paper. But the welds held. The third telephone stopped ringing. I looked up at Lee and mouthed, ‘Jump.’ She got the message. She was a smart woman. She jumped high off the toilet and smashed her bare feet down together right where two welds were under pressure. I felt nothing through my hands. No impact. No shock. Because the welds broke immediately and the floor bent down into a radical V-shaped chute. Like a mouth. The opening was about a foot wide and a foot deep. Good, but not good enough. A kid might have gotten through it, but Lee wasn’t going to.

But at least we had proved the principle. Score one for the nineteenth-century city fathers.

Two rooms away all three phones started to ring simultaneously. Competing tones, fast and urgent.

I caught my breath again and after that it was just a question of repeating the triple procedures over and over again, two welds at a time. The pry bar, the weightlifting, the jump. Lee wasn’t a big woman, but even so we needed to tear free a line of welds nearly six feet long before the floor would bend down enough to let her out. It was a question of simple arithmetic. The straight edge of the floor became part of a curved circumference, in a ratio of one to three against us. It took us a long time to get the job done. Close to eight minutes. But we got it done eventually. Lee came out on her back, feet first, like a limbo dancer. Her shirt got caught and rode up to reveal a smooth tan stomach. Then she wriggled free and crabbed clear and stood up and hugged me hard. And longer than she needed to. Then she broke away and I rested for a minute and wiped my hands on my pants.

Then I repeated the whole procedure all over again, for Jacob Mark.

Two rooms away phones rang and stopped, rang and stopped.

FORTY-SEVEN

WE GOT OUT FAST. THERESA LEE TOOK THE LEAD AGENT’S shoes. They were big on her, but not by much. Jacob Mark took the medical technician’s whole outfit. He figured that an incomplete out-of-town cop’s uniform would be conspicuous on the street, and he was probably right. The change was worth the delay. He looked much better in the chinos and the T-shirt and the basketball sneakers. They fit close to perfectly. There was a nickel-sized bloodstain on the back of the pants, but that was the only disadvantage. We left the medical guy sleeping in his underwear.

Then we headed out. Up the stairs, across the littered floor, through the alley, to the 3rd Street sidewalk. It was crowded. It was still hot. We turned left. No real reason. Just a random choice. But a lucky one. We got about five steps away and I heard the blare of a horn behind us and the yelp of tyres and I glanced back and saw a black car jamming to a stop ten feet the other side of the firehouse. A Crown Vic, new and shiny. Two guys spilled out. I had seen them before. And I knew for sure that Theresa Lee had seen them before. Blue suits, blue ties. The FBI. They had talked to Lee in the precinct house, and they had talked to me on 35th Street. They had asked me questions about Canadian phone numbers. Now twenty feet behind us they ran for the alley and ducked in. They didn’t see us at all. But if we had turned right we would have collided head-on with them as they got out of their car. So we had been lucky. We celebrated by hustling hard, straight for Sixth Avenue. Jacob Mark got there first. He was the only one of us with decent shoes.

We crossed Sixth Avenue and followed Bleecker for a spell and then found refuge on Cornelia Street, which was narrow and dark and relatively quiet, except for diners at sidewalk café tables. We stayed well away from them and they paid no attention to us. They were more interested in their food. I didn’t blame them. It smelled good. I was still very hungry, even after the salami and cheese. We headed up to the quiet end of the street and took inventory there. Lee and Jake had nothing. All their stuff was locked away in the firehouse basement. I had what I had reclaimed from the table in the second room, the important components of which were my cash, my ATM card, my Metrocard, and Leonid’s cell phone. The cash amounted to forty-three dollars and change. The Metrocard had four rides left on it. Leonid’s cell was almost out of battery. We agreed it was beyond certain that my ATM number and Leonid’s phone number were already flagged up in various computer systems. If we used either one, someone would know within seconds. But I wasn’t too worried. Information has to be useful to be damaging. If we escaped from West 3rd and days later withdrew cash in Oklahoma City or New Orleans or San Francisco, then that data would be significant. If we withdrew cash immediately a couple of blocks from the firehouse, then that data was useless. It told them nothing they didn’t already know. And there are so many cell ante

So we moved on and found an ATM in a bright blue bank lobby and I withdrew all the cash I could, which was three hundred bucks. Apparently I had a daily limit. And the machine was slow. Probably on purpose. Banks cooperate with law enforcement. They sound the alarm and then slow down the transaction. The idea is to give the cops time to show up. Maybe possible, in some places. Not very likely, with city traffic to deal with. The machine waited and waited and waited and then it coughed up the bills. I took them and smiled at the machine. Most of them have surveillance cameras built in, co

We moved on again and Lee spent ten of my new dollars in a deli. She bought an emergency cell phone charger. It operated off a penlight battery. She plugged it into Leonid’s phone and called Docherty, her partner. It was ten after ten, and he would be getting ready for work. He didn’t pick up the call. Lee left a message and then switched off the phone. She said cell phones had GPS chips in them. I didn’t know that. She said the chips bleeped away every fifteen seconds and could be pi

So we moved on again. We were all aware of cop cars on the streets. We saw plenty of them. The NYPD is a big operation. The largest police department in America. Maybe the largest in the world. We found a noisy bistro in the heart of NYU territory after skirting north of Washington Square Park and then heading east. The place was dark and packed with undergraduate students. Some of the food it sold was recognizable. I was hungry and still dehydrated. I guessed my systems had been working overtime to flush out the double dose of barbiturate. I drank whole glasses of tap water and ordered a kind of shake made of yoghurt and fruit. Plus a burger, and coffee. Jake and Lee ordered nothing. They said they were too shaken to eat. Then Lee turned to me and said, ‘You better tell us what exactly is going on.’

I said, ‘I thought you didn’t want to know.’

‘We just crossed that line.’

‘They didn’t show ID. You were entitled to assume the detention was illegal. In which case busting out wasn’t a crime. In fact it was probably your duty.’

She shook her head. ‘I knew who they were, ID or no ID. And it’s not the busting out that I’m worried about. It’s the shoes. That’s what’s going to screw me. I stood over the guy and stole his footwear. I was looking right at him. That’s premeditation. They’ll say I had time to reflect and react appropriately.’