The Red Hunter(61)

Josh Beckham tried to help me. He was a kid like me that night. It was Didion, Rhett Beckham, and the fourth man that I needed. One down, two to go. Closure.

I reached into my pocket and felt for the key. It was smooth and cold beneath my fingertips.

“What about the fourth man?” I asked. “Any progress?”

Something—quicksilver—flashed across his face. Sadness. Fear.

“What is it?” I asked. He moved from the stool and sat across from me at the table. He folded up the file, Mariah’s bespectacled visage disappearing from view.

Seth had long claimed that there was someone waiting in the car that night. He saw the shadow of a figure. I never saw him. Boz wondered if maybe in his state of shock, Seth had been mistaken. But Seth was certain, and I believed him. We’d spent a lot of time talking about him, the fourth man. Who waits in the car? The boss? Maybe Whitey Malone himself, not wanting to get his hands dirty but not trusting his thugs not to run off with the money.

The police questioned Seth vigorously. Had he lured me from the house on purpose? Had someone asked him to do it? Paid him to do it? No, he swore. There was no evidence to the contrary. What did the fourth man look like? He was big. A bulky shadow, wider than the seat he was in. And he smoked. Seth saw the plumes drift up from the open window, the glowing orange tip. But that was it.

Seth and I always stayed in touch. I wouldn’t say we were friends, like Boz and I weren’t friends. We just shared the same obsession. It bonded us. It has only been the last few months that we’ve actively been working together, though.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “Something I’ve been working on. Kind of a fluke, really.”

He got up and spun around one of the case boards. He flipped on a lamp sitting atop one of the desks and shined it like a spotlight on the clutter that hung there. There were maybe half a dozen photographs pinned, ordered by date, starting about a year earlier, each captioned with a note in Seth’s tight, tidy handwriting, addresses, some news articles.

October 3, 2016, Riverside and Ninety-Sixth Street. A slim hooded figure stopped mugging in progress, injuring the perpetrator with a low kick that fractured his shin.

Hanging above these notes, a grainy image showed a man on the ground, gripping his leg, his face a mask of pain, a woman standing stunned, cell phone in hand. In the background, said slim, hooded figure strode away.

There were others.

East Village, November 12, 2016. A little boy pulled from the subway tracks where he’d fallen, apparently pushed by his mother’s boyfriend.

The hooded figure is caught mid-leap from the platform, the light from on the oncoming train a moon in the distance.

Harlem, December 1, 2016. A homeless man is saved from a group of marauding teens. Hooded figure delivers a blow to the bridge of the biggest boy’s nose with the heel of her hand. Boy tells cops: It was a girl!

Eyes everywhere. Sloppy. On those endless romps I take through the city, every now and then I come across a situation that demands involvement. There were other incidents, too; they just happened not to be caught on film.

“What’s all this?” I asked, leaning in closer to pretend to take a closer look.

Seth flipped over our case board, the one we’d been working on, compiling all the events related to my parents’ murder, beginning with the drug dealer robbery, our list of suspects, speculations about the fourth man—Whitey himself? Hired man? Dirty cop?—to the whereabouts of each of them. Seth had added a new element, a new story about Didion’s death. And that grainy image captured by the camera across the street.

“The vigilante thing—if you want to call it that,” said Seth. “It’s been kind of a pet project for me. I first noticed it last year—a Daily News crime beat reporter did a small piece about that thwarted mugging. Then things starting turning up on Twitter. It’s just interesting, you know? Some hooded girl, fighting crime in the city.”

I don’t feel fear. Not anymore. My heart doesn’t race at much. It takes quite a bit to get my adrenaline pumping. Seth, on the other hand, when he turned to face me, was sweating. He dug his hands deep into his pockets.

“It’s odd, you know. This girl, she stops bad things from happening. Which is cool. But here”—he tapped at the case board—“if this is her, and I think it is. She killed John Didion in cold blood. Or so it seems.”

“So?”

“It’s not like her,” he said. He sounded worried, disappointed, like a kid who wanted to believe in Santa Claus.

“You know her?” I asked. “What’s she like? Who is she really, inside?”

“I thought I did.”

I felt the color come up on my cheeks, turned away from his sad gaze. He rubbed a hand over his sizeable belly, then took off his glasses to squeeze at the bridge of his nose.

“Seth,” I said. “Have you made any progress on the fourth man?”

There was that look again. He held my eyes for a moment, like he was expecting me to say something. But I didn’t.

“Maybe,” he said finally. He turned the board around again. “But you’re not going to like it.”

My dad stood stone-faced in the corner, he nodded at me to look down. When I did, my hands were slick with blood.

I didn’t need Seth—or Mike, or anyone—to tell me that I’d crossed a line. It wasn’t an accident. Why was everyone so surprised? What did they think I was going to do after I finally caught up with the men who murdered my parents? Bring my case again to the police, beg them to reexamine evidence that wasn’t new? Even if they did finally see what Boz, Seth, and I believed to be true, would we seek justice via the courts and prison system? No. No. That’s never what I wanted. What is the difference between justice and revenge? Justice is a concept, one agreed upon by a civilized society. Revenge is wild and raw, it’s a balancing of the scales of the universe.