Cemetery Dance

The cameras and mikes were all back on him. The questions came slowly, desultorily. Disappointment seemed to hang in the air. The protesters remained in their corner, waving their signs and chanting, but their voices were now subdued and mostly drowned by the rush of traffic on Chambers Street.

The questions were predictable and he answered them all. Yes, they were bringing action against the Ville. No, it would not be tomorrow; the legal process would determine the schedule. Yes, he was aware of the allegations of homicide against the group; no, there was no proof, the investigation was proceeding, no one had been charged with a crime. Yes, it did appear that the Ville had no valid deed to the site; in fact, it was the opinion of city attorneys that they had not established a right of adverse possession.

The questions began to die, and he checked his watch: quarter to one. He nodded to his aides, raised his tufted head to the press one last time. "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this press conference."

This was greeted with a few more catcalls from the protesters:

All talk, no action! All talk, no action!

Feeling pleased with himself, Wartek slipped the paper back into his suit pocket and walked up the steps. It had gone just as he'd hoped. He could almost see the evening news: a few sound bites from his speech, a question or two answered, a few moments devoted to the protesters, and that would be it. He had covered all the bases, thrown a bone to every constituency, and displayed the sober, dull face of New York City officialdom. As New York protesters went, this had been a pretty anemic group. Clearly this was a sideshow to whatever else the main group was pla

He reached the top of the stairs and headed toward the revolving glass doors, two aides at his side. It was lunch hour, and streams of municipal office workers were leaving the large building and pouring down the stairs. It was like swimming against the tide.

As he and the aides worked their way upstream against the flow, Wartek felt a passerby strike him hard with his shoulder.

"Excuse me! " Wartek began to turn in irritation, when he felt the most surprising sensation in his side. He jerked back, instinctively clutching his midriff, and was even more astonished to feel — and observe — a very long knife being extracted from his body, right through his clutched hands. There was a sudden feeling of heat and ice at once; ice inside him, in the depths of his guts; heat rushing outside and down. He looked up and had a brief glimpse of a swollen, scabrous face; foul sticky hair; cracked lips drawing back over rotten teeth.

And then the figure was gone. Speechless, Wartek clutched his side, staggered forward. The crowd streaming past seemed to hesitate, bunch up, collide into one another.

A woman screamed in his ear.

Wartek, still unable to comprehend, his mind a blank, took a second staggering step. "Ouch," he said quietly, to no one in particular.

Another scream, and then a chorus of noise, a roar like Niagara Falls, filled the air. His legs began to buckle and he heard incoherent shouting, saw a rush of blue uniforms: policemen madly fighting their way through the crowd. There was another sudden explosion of chaos around him: people going this way and that, back and forth.

With a supreme effort he took another step and then folded; he was caught and eased to the ground by many hands. More confused shouting, with a few persistent words penetrating the hubbub: Ambulance! Doctor! Stabbed! Bleeding!

He wondered what all the confusion was about as he lay down to sleep. Marty Wartek was so very, very tired, and New York was such a noisy city.

Chapter 50

Slowly she drifted in and out of dark dreams. She slept, half woke, slept again. At last, full consciousness returned. It was pitch — black and smelled of mold and wet stone. She lay there for a moment, confused. Then it all came back to her and she groaned in terror. Her hands groped damp straw over a cold concrete floor. When she tried to sit up, her head protested fiercely and she lay back down with a wave of nausea.

She struggled with an impulse to scream, to cry out, and mastered it. Once again, after a few moments, she made the effort to sit up — more slowly — and this time she succeeded. God, she felt weak. There was no light, nothing, just darkness. Her arm was sore where the IV had been, and there was no bandage covering the injection site.

The realization settled in that she'd been kidnapped from the hospital room. By whom? The man in the orderly's uniform had been a stranger. What had happened to the cop guarding her room?

She rose unsteadily to her feet. Holding her arms out, shuffling cautiously, she made her way forward until her hands touched something — a wet, clammy wall. She felt around it. It was constructed of rough, mortared stones, powdery with efflorescence. She must be in some kind of cellar.

She began feeling along the wall, shuffling her feet. The floor was bare and free of obstructions except for patches of straw. She reached a corner, continued on, counting the distance in foot — lengths. Ten feet more and she came to a niche, which she followed — hitting a door frame, and then a door. Wood. She felt up, then down. Wood, with iron bands and rivets.

The faintest gleam of light shined through a crack in the door. She plastered her eye to the crack, but the tongue — and — groove construction defied her attempts to see through it.

She raised her fist; hesitated; then brought it down hard on the door: once, twice. The door boomed and echoed. There was a long silence, and then the sound of footsteps approaching. She leaned her ear against the door to listen.

Quite suddenly, there was a scraping noise above her head. As she looked up, a sudden blinding light burst over her. Instinctively she covered her face and stepped back. She turned away, narrowing her eyes to slits. After a long moment she began to adjust to the dazzling light. She glanced back.

"Help me," she managed to croak.

There was no reply.

She swallowed. "What do you want?"

Still no reply. But there was a sound: a low, regular whir. She peered into the brilliance. Now she could make out a small rectangular slit, set high into the door. The light was coming from there. And there was something else: the lens of a video camera, fat and bulky, thrust through the slit and aimed directly at her.

"Who… are you?" she asked.

Abruptly, the lens was withdrawn. The whirring noise stopped. And a voice, low and silky, replied. "You won't live long enough for my name to make any difference."

And with that the light was extinguished, the slit closed heavily, and she was once more in darkness.

Chapter 51

Ke

"Next year," said Martinelli, accepting the joint and nodding at the field beyond the dark baseball diamond, "we'll harvest the pot growing down there."

"Yeah," said Roybal, with a sharp exhale. "It's premium grade, too."

"Fuck, yeah."

"Word, homeboy."

"Word."