Ground Zero

Hank didn’t look convinced. “Yeah? How?”

He gave a sideward nod toward Darryl. “It’s too complicated to go into now.”

“Hey,” Darryl said, scratching his arm, “I can tell when I’m not wanted.”

Finally Drexler looked at him. “Can you now?”

“Yeah. I’ll leave and let you get ‘complicated.’ ”

“That would be—” Drexler stopped and stared. “What is that on your arm?”

Darryl tugged his sleeve down. “Nothing.”

Drexler stepped closer. “Show me.”

“It’s nothing. I—”

“Show me.”

Didn’t look as if the guy was going to give up, so Darryl yanked up his sleeve and exposed the purplish rash. Drexler stared a few seconds, leaned in for a closer look.

“Do you have more of these?”

“Yeah.”

“How many?”

“Half a dozen, I guess. You know what it is?”

“How long have you had them?”

Darryl was getting worried now. “A couple months. What is it?”

“I’m not a doctor, but you need that looked at. Have you been having night sweats?”

“N-no.”

Not true. He’d been sweating a lot at night, and it was getting worse. Just last night he woke up with his undershirt so wet he could have wrung it out. He’d had to get up and change.

But he didn’t know why he’d denied it. Maybe it was the way Drexler was looking at him . . . like he suddenly found him interesting. But not a caring interest. More like a guy who’d found a strange-looking bug.

Maybe he was afraid Drexler would find him “entertaining.”

“Be that as it may,” he said, pulling out a cell phone, “I’m going to call a doctor I know and get you an appointment immediately. You need a full work-up.”

Now Darryl was really scared. “What do you think it is?”

But Drexler wasn’t listening. He was frowning at his cell phone.

“Forgot: no signal down here. We must go upstairs.”

“Hold on a second there,” Hank said. “That can wait. I want to know how this thing’s go

“I’m afraid this ca

Darryl didn’t know what frightened him more now: what might be wrong, or Drexler’s concern.

7

“She calls me every day at six P.M. sharp,” Ed was saying.

They’d found a hotel with a bar—the first place they’d tried, the Excelsior, had been shockingly deficient in that amenity—and snagged a booth away from the windows. Jack didn’t sit in windows.

“And I do mean sharp,” he added. “In years I don’t think she’s ever been more than five minutes late.”

“Why the call?”

“To let me know she was all right—for her sake rather than mine. After Steve’s death, she became concerned about living alone. Something could happen to her and no one would know. She could fall and lie there for days, dying of dehydration or starvation, with no one having a clue that anything was wrong. Or someone could come in and attack her and leave her there with the same result.”

“So when yesterday’s call didn’t come . . . ?”

“I called her. When I got no answer, I went over to her place and found it empty with no sign of a break-in.”

“Just where is her place?”

“Queens—Jackson Heights.”

“So we assume that sometime between six o’clock Sunday night and six o’clock last night she went out—”

“Sometime between dawn and six yesterday. She doesn’t go out at night.”

The black-jacketed waiter arrived with their drinks. Jack had ordered a Heineken, Eddie a Ketel martini with three olives.

Eddie . . . a martini drinker. Strange.

“Why don’t we start off assuming no foul play,” he said as Ed took a hefty sip.

“Why assume that? Her note—”

“Because of Occam’s razor: It requires the fewest assumptions.”

“Well, if there’s been no foul play, where would a recluse like her be, besides home?”

“How about a hospital?”

“First thing I tried. I called emergency services and they had no record of ferrying a Louise Myers to a hospital. I even had them check her maiden name, but no hits.”

“Then we’ll have to try all the hospitals themselves. I mean, she could have felt ill and cabbed to an emergency room.”

Ed frowned. “Never thought of that. How many hospitals are we talking about?”

“Lots. But if she lives in Queens we should probably start there and work toward the city.”

“ ‘We’? Does that mean you’re going to help?”

“Hell, yes. This is Weez we’re talking about.”

Ed was staring at him over the rim of his martini. “Just who are you, Jack?”

“I’m the guy who used to whip your ass in Pole Position.”

He gave a tight smile. “You’re also the guy I used to kill in Missile Command, but that doesn’t tell me why Weezy sent me to you instead of the cops. ‘Jack can find me’ when the cops can’t? What’s that all about?”

How to answer that? He’d grown up with Eddie Co

“I honestly don’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t have much contact with her after high school. Hardly any. I don’t know how she got my number or even knew I was in the city.”

“So what are you? Some sort of detective or black ops guy or spook?”

Jack had to laugh. “Not likely. Why would you even think that?”

“Because of the way you disappeared. I got home from college and you were gone. I came looking for you and your father told me you’d walked out of the house and never come back, never called, never wrote. He and Kate were crazy with worry.”

Jack took a long slow sip of his beer to buy some time.

Yeah, that had been a rotten thing to do, but he hadn’t seen it that way at the time. He’d hit reset. He’d severed all ties with his old self, with his old life, with everyone he’d ever known and everything he’d pla

Maybe he should have.

“I assure you I am not now, nor have I ever been, associated with any government—city, state, federal, foreign or domestic or intergalactic.”

“Then why—?”

“I don’t know. We’ll ask her when we find her.”

He smiled. “I like the way you think. But what do you do?”

“I run a repairs business.”

“Appliances?”

Jack blew right past that. “What about you?”

“I’m an actuary.”

“An insurance guy?”

He looked a little put off. “I freelance to pension consultants and HMOs and, yes, insurance companies.”

“So you crunch numbers all day? Makes sense. You were always good in math.”

“It’s rated overall the second best job you can have.”

“No kidding? What’s first?”

“Biologist. Good work environment, good pay, little or no stress.”

“Sounds great.”

But Jack was thinking, Shoot me first. In the brainstem. With a .454 Casull hollowpoint, please, to guarantee no chance of survival.

“You live in the city?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah.” He took a gulp of his beer and hoped Eddie wouldn’t ask his address.

“You know the city hospitals?”

“A bit.”

Knew more than he wished about some of them.

“Good. I work here, but I commute from Jersey, so it’s not my stomping grounds.”

“Well, Queens isn’t mine. We need to get to a computer and Google hospitals over there—”

“This can do all that,” Eddie said as he pulled a BlackBerry or one of its clones from a pocket.

Over the next few minutes he came up with a bunch of hospitals—the ones in Queens seemed mostly animal hospitals—and Jack wrote down the numbers. Then they divided the list and began calling.

“Don’t forget to ask about any Jane Doe admitted yesterday too.”

Ed slapped the table. “Shit.”