Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(17)

“Yeah . . . but that’s how I’m wired. I’m used to it. Like Zevon says, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, right?”

“Zevon?”

“Warren. Warren Zevon.”

She shrugs.

“Are you too young to know that song?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Yeah . . . too young.” He grins and shakes his head.

“How old are you?”

“I told you—look it up. But here’s a hint: I’m old enough to have listened to Zevon’s first album as a kid. He was a friend of my dad’s. Anyway, it’s a good song. ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ And that’s my motto.”

She smiles, though for some reason, what he’s saying doesn’t sit well with her.

Ten minutes later, as she crawls into her own bed and closes her eyes, those words are still echoing in her head.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead . . .





PART II

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest





Chapter Three

September 12, 2001

New York City

3:07 A.M.

The police officer, wearing his NYPD uniform and a bright orange reflective vest, materializes in front of Jerry the moment he rounds the corner onto West Broadway.

“Sorry, buddy. You can’t go down there.”

“Look! Look what they did!” Jerry points with a trembling hand to where flames still burn in the night, down at the far end of a dust-coated thoroughfare lined with shattered storefronts and burned-out cars, the ground littered with paper and debris. “Look at that.”

The cop says nothing, just stands there, a sentry at the fiery gates of Hades.

“I was already down there,” Jerry tells him, “earlier today. There were a lot of firemen. But I’m not a fireman.”

“Oh, no?”

“No. I always wanted to be one, but a lot of firemen died so I’m glad I’m not one, because I don’t want to die.”

“No one does, kid.”

The cop’s eyes look red and swollen, Jerry notices.

Maybe it’s the smoke in the air, or maybe he’s been crying.

On television, they said that it wasn’t just the firemen who died when the towers fell. A lot of policemen did, too. And all those people on the planes, and the people who worked in the World Trade Center . . .

“Listen, kid, you can’t go down there, so—”

“But why not?”

“Restricted zone. Go on, turn around.”

Jerry turns around and walks away. A few yards from the cop, he turns to take one last look at the massive destruction down the street, and rage builds within him.

Look what they did.

Look what they did.

Lying in bed five blocks north of the smoldering tomb, Kristina can hear the usual wee-hour sirens . . . but not the usual intermittent sirens. These are constant.

Conspicuously absent tonight is the occasional drone of planes that have just taken off from LaGuardia or JFK or Newark. Every airport in the metropolitan area—every airport in the entire country—is closed.

But every so often—just often enough to keep Kristina’s nerves on high alert—comes the shattering roar of an aircraft flying low enough to rattle the tall loft windows.

Fighter jets.

Fighter jets over New York City.

Surreal.

Please make it stop. Please make it all go away.

She lies flat on her back with the quilt pulled taut beneath her wide-open eyes, as if to protect her from anything that might drop out of the sky. Planes . . . bombs . . . debris . . .

People.

She saw them this morning—scores of human torches falling or jumping from the burning towers; grotesque, limb-flailing freefalls branded into her brain.

Like so many of them, Kristina greeted the day with an early alarm clock, coffee, the New York Post, a crowded subway ride, a short, sunny stroll to her job in an iconic Manhattan skyscraper. The city, scrubbed clean in last night’s rain, was spectacular. Now, part of it lies buried beneath a heap of debris and toxic dust.

What if the Chrysler building had been hit instead of the World Trade Center?

But it wasn’t. You’re alive.

When the second plane hit the second tower, she fled her office on the fifty-fourth floor of the Chrysler Building, not waiting for evacuation orders.

“Hey, where are you going?” one of the secretaries asked as Kristina raced past on her way to the elevators.

“Home.”

“You can’t just leave!”

She didn’t bother to respond. As far as she was concerned, she was running for her life.

She took the subway downtown and emerged to find her neighborhood blanketed in smoke. She doesn’t really remember making a conscious decision to walk all those blocks south to see what was going on; she simply fell in with other gawkers swimming against the sea of frightened tower refugees.

But after a few minutes of watching it unfold in front of her—a few minutes of seeing those desperate jumpers, hearing bystanders’ screams as they came down and the staccato death explosions when they hit the ground—Kristina was overcome. She turned abruptly and ran home, arriving right before the first tower fell, most likely engulfing the very spot where she’d stood watching.