Underground Airlines(50)

The real world was a trap, though, and I couldn’t escape it. I knew this, and because I knew this I knew where Jackdaw was. I had worked it out. Not on purpose, but that’s how it happens a lot of times—my mind does the work while I’m busy with something else.

I’d always known I would crack it, because I always do, and I had.

“Jimmy?”

I don’t know where the nickname came from. Lionel’s face had appeared at the driver’s-side window, and he was looking right in at me, concerned, peering at my face as if through aquarium glass. “Are you okay?”

I guess maybe I had been moaning or something. I don’t know what all I was doing, but I was doing something. But he said it, like, three more times, instead of good-bye, suddenly racked with anxiety: “Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?”





21.



The rain had started. Fat dark drops, relentless out of a dark sky. I watched it come down from the balcony of the room.

It would have been nice to be able to say Sorry, boss, no idea. I can’t crack it. Move me on, I guess, or make good on your threat and send a van to pack me up and haul my ass back home to Bell’s.

But I knew. Goddamn me, I did.

The photograph was locked away with the rest of the file, but I could see it clear as looking at it: the delicate face, bemused expression, grief-stricken, scared. Oh, Jackdaw; oh, son; oh, poor lonely boy.

The rain was rushing down outside. Making up for all its timidity and teasing over the last few days. Coming down in sheets, in crashing torrents, pounding down onto the parking lot outside. Thunder rippled in a distant corner of the sky.

I took out my cell phone and took off Jim Dirkson’s glasses and folded them arm over arm and put them away, then I settled on the edge of the bed, holding my phone between my hands. One phone call.

The rain was a wall of gray.

This case had been building up in me, pushing against the barricades like rushing water, not only the case but the town, the girl, the memories, all these red-and-black memories, crashing in and pushing in on me since I got here, too. And why were these visions returning now, my old story flashing back to life, coming down out of the gray Indiana sky? Why now? Why—

I told myself I didn’t know, but I did; I had some inkling. I had some idea.

And now all of it would be over. One call to Maryland. Just make the f*cking call.

I stood up. The phone was a hard flat square in my hand, a dislocated thing, an alien artifact. It was heavy as a ship’s anchor; it was a barb sunk into the meat of my palm. I imagined what it would feel like to open one of those balcony doors and hurl the thin object out into the rain-flooded parking lot. I imagined it borne away on a rivulet, taken down to the White River, and ending up in the depths of some sewer, some sea. I imagined myself lying on my back, my arms and legs splayed out, carried by the furious current from the blacktop parking lot to the ugliness of 86th Street, making no resistance, until some fierce roll of water turned me over, took me under, swallowed me whole.

What happened when I called would all be according to procedure, specific steps dictated by statute. I would give my considered opinion as to the whereabouts of the missing man, based on the evidence I had accumulated, and then I in the field and Bridge at his desk would collaborate on a plan of capture. Bridge’s office would file notice with his superiors down the hall in Gaithersburg, and when I was directed to do so I would take a field position, and Bridge would initiate the plan we’d agreed upon.

The swarm of white vans, the whoop of sirens, the truncheon and the Taser; then a fugitive court, a commissioner, a court-appointed attorney, a comparison of the runner’s features with the features enumerated by the complainant, the fingerprints run against the fingerprints on file.

I found that I had pressed the button. The phone was ringing. I was making the call I had made already a thousand times in my career.

(And see what I do? A thousand times in my career, as if the actual number is lost in the blur of memory. I had made the call, before that day, 209 times. Some of those times I had sent a text message. But my conscience was stained with 209 positive identifications.)

The phone rang in my ear while it rang in Gaithersburg.

I was ready for it to be over, and it was over. I knew where the man was, and f*ck Barton and f*ck Cook and f*ck Dr. Venezia-Karbach: I was ready. The words were poised on my tongue, ready to be said: It is all done. It is all set.

“Marshals Service. This is Bridge’s office.”

It was a woman’s voice, bright and cheerful. It was Janice. Bridge’s assistant. When she answered it meant he was out in the field. In the field or in a meeting.

Opportunity. It was Castle. Castle whispering in the dark. Opportunity.

Janice, patient, cheerful: “Hello?”

“Yes,” I said. “Hello.” There was no voice I could have done better. Cold as steel, flat as dirt ground, a smoky whisper of a southern accent. “It’s me.”

The rain lashed against the flimsy balcony doors, and they rattled in their grooves. My number would have come up blank—a field number—but so, too, I suspected, would Mr. Bridge’s own cell-phone number, blank, masked, agent-to-base communication, the same as mine. From Janice’s POV, a blank is a blank. It was a wild risk to try out such an assumption in these circumstances. This was just one of many risks I was taking, about to take.