Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(51)

“You come back anytime,” he always says in his thick Middle Eastern accent. “I am here twenty-four-seven, all the time, weekends, holidays . . . all the time.”

He means it literally. Unless he has an identical twin, Mo himself is perpetually at the cash register, ringing up cigarettes, newspapers, and lottery tickets; soda cans, coffee, toilet paper . . . like all good New York bodegas, Mo sells a little of everything.

“Don’t you ever go home to sleep?” Jamie sometimes wants to ask Mo, but never does.

Tonight, Mo utters the usual “Hello, hello,” but he glances up only briefly from the open New York Post on the counter in front of him.

The two small aisles of grocery are picked over—the canned goods and bottled water shelves completely bare. People must be stockpiling supplies, fearing the end of the world.

Funny—everyone thought that would happen last year, when the millennium dawned. There was a collective sigh of relief when it passed uneventfully. No one ever imagined the Armageddon that lay ahead.

Jamie plucks an Entenmann’s box from the shelf, taking it as a good omen that there’s one kind of cake left—and it happens to be Jerry’s favorite—chocolate, with chocolate frosting.

Back at the counter, Mo’s newspaper is open to a bold headline stretching across the top of both pages: BIN LADEN’S SICK BOAST NOW REALITY.

“That is it?” Mo asks, glancing down at the Entenmann’s cake.

“That’s it.”

Mo rings it up, takes the bills, hands back coins, puts the cake box into a slippery white plastic bag, and hands it over. “Thank you.” Tonight, that’s all Mo says before he goes back to reading his paper, his round black eyes fretful behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

Out on the street, Jamie backtracks to the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Funny how some parts of the city are teeming with security, and others are completely deserted. Even where there is security, the soldiers and cops don’t always bother to ask for ID. If you don’t look like their idea of a Muslim terrorist, you can pretty much skirt the barricades.

Don’t they know you should never judge a book by a cover?

Stupid. They’re so stupid. They think they know everything, and they don’t know anything at all.

Jamie walks past Ladder 21, the neighborhood firehouse, with its growing shrine of flickering candles and flowers in memory of its many missing men. Jamie used to see them, laughing and joking around beyond the wide open doors, or clinging to the sides of the big red trucks as they raced off to fight a fire somewhere. A fire that could be conquered, unlike the still raging inferno that swallowed the men of Ladder 21 and hundreds of others who were sent to battle it.

Sirens wail in the night even now, and a military jet roars through the sky, tracing a path along the Hudson River just a few blocks west of here.

Jamie doesn’t like it. Any of it. This day—this night—hasn’t unfolded the way it was supposed to.

Allison Taylor was supposed to be taken care of, before she could go blabbing to the police about seeing Jerry in the hall the night Kristina was murdered.

But it’s too late. Before Jamie could get to Allison, she found Kristina. There’s a certain pleasure in imagining Allison’s reaction to the meticulous, bloody handiwork left behind in Kristina’s apartment. But that pleasure doesn’t come without a price.

With a sinking heart, Jamie watched from the shadows as the police took a pale, shaken Allison away for questioning. Of course she was going to tell them she’d seen Jerry at the scene of the crime.

By now, they must know.

By now, they’ll be looking for him.

He shouldn’t be easy to find, but still . . .

“You have to stay home for a while, Jerry,” Jamie told him earlier. “You can’t go anywhere without asking me first.”

“But I have to go to work.”

“No, you don’t. Mr. Reiss called and told you not to come in for a few days, remember?”

Jerry shook his head.

“Sure, he did. He called, and you talked to him.”

“I don’t remember,” Jerry protested.

“Think about it. He told you not to come to work for a while, and then I told you I’d get you some chocolate cake. Remember?”

Jerry thought hard, then shrugged and nodded. “I guess so. Sometimes I forget things.”

“We all do, Jerry. It’s okay.”

Sometimes, it’s frightfully easy to plant “memories” in Jerry’s poor, damaged brain.

But it’s for his own good. It always is.

Poor Jerry.

Apparently, he met a woman today, made a move, and the woman turned him down. “All I did was ask her to have cake,” Jerry blubbered, “and she said no.”

Surprise, surprise.

But it’s Jamie’s job to take care of Jerry now.

You never should have left him alone ten years ago.

Why did you go? What were you thinking?

I thought it was all over for Jerry. How could I know he’d survived?

And as soon as I found my way back to him, I did what I could to make it right.

Jerry has suffered enough in his life. And now he’s hurting again.

I have to make this right, too.

“Maybe this girl is married,” Jamie told Jerry, “or—”