Loyalty in Death (In Death #9)(98)

And below the streets, she thought, in the transpo station, it would be worse. Unimaginably worse.

For money, she thought as the heat rose in her like a geyser. For money, she was sure of it, and for the memory of a fanatic without a clear cause.

Someone, she swore it, would pay.

It was an hour before she got back to Roarke. He stood, his coat rippling in the wind, as he helped MTs load wounded into transports.

“The kid okay?” Eve asked him.

“He will be. We found his father. The man was terrified.” Roarke reached out, wiped a smear off her cheek. “The talk is casualties are light. Most were killed in the panic to get out. Most got out, Eve. What could have been a death toll in the thousands is, at this point, less than four hundred.”

“I can’t count lives that way.”

“Sometimes it’s all you can do.”

“I lost a friend tonight.”

“I know that.” His hands lifted to frame her face. “I’m sorry for that.”

“She had a husband and two children.” She looked away, into the night. “She was pregnant.”

“Ah, God.” When he would have drawn her to him, she shook her head and stepped back.

“I can’t. I’ll fall apart, and I can’t. I have to go tell her family.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, it’s a cop thing.” She lifted her hands, pressed them to her eyes, and just held them there a moment. “Feeney and I will do it. I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

“I’ll be here awhile yet. They can use extra hands.”

She nodded, started to turn.

“Eve?”

“Yeah.”

“Come home. You’ll need it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I will.” She walked off to find Feeney and prepared to deliver news that crushed lives.

Roarke worked another two hours with the wounded and the weeping. He sent for oceans of coffee and soup — one of the comforts money could buy. As bodies were transferred to the already overburdened morgue, he thought of Eve and how she faced the demands of the dead every day.

The blood. The waste. The stink of both seemed to crawl over his skin and under it. This is what she lived with.

He looked at the building, the scars and the ruin. This could be mended. It was stone, steel, glass, and such things could be rebuilt with time, with money, with sweat.

He was driven to own buildings like this. Symbols and structures. For profit, certainly, he thought, reaching down to pick up a chunk of concrete. For business, for pleasure. But it didn’t take a session with Mira to understand why a man who’d spent his childhood in dirty little rooms with leaking roofs and broken windows was compelled to own, to possess. To preserve and to build.

A human weakness to compensate, he supposed, that had become power.

He had the power to see that this was rebuilt, that it was put back as it had been. He could put his money and his energies into that and see it as a kind of justice.

And Eve would look to the dead.

He walked away, and went home to wait for his wife.

She drove home in the damp, frigid chill of predawn. Billboards flashed and jittered around her as she headed uptown. Buy this and be happy. See that and be thrilled. Come here and be amazed. New York wasn’t about to stop its dance.

Steam spilled out of glida grills, belched out of street vents, pumped out of the maxibus that creaked to a halt to pick up a scatter of drones who’d worked the graveyard shift.

A few obviously desperate street LCs strutted their stuff and called out to the drones.

“I’ll give you a ride, buddy. Twenty, cash or credit’ll buy you a hell of a ride.”

The drones shuffled on the bus, too tired for cheap sex.

Eve watched a drunk stumble along the sidewalk, swinging his bottle of brew like a baton. And a huddle of teenagers pooling money for soy dogs. The lower the temperatures fell, the higher the price.

Free enterprise.

Abruptly, she pulled over to the curb, leaned over the wheel. She was well beyond exhausted and into the tightly strung stage of brittle energy and racing thoughts.

She’d gone to a tidy little home in Westchester and had spoken the words that ripped a family to pieces. She’d told a man his wife was dead, listened to children cry for a mother who was never coming back.

Then she’d gone to her office and written the reports, filed them. Because it needed to be done, she’d cleaned out Anne’s locker herself.

And after all that, she thought, she could drive through the city, see the lights, the people, the deals, and the dregs, and feel… alive, she realized.

This was her place, with its dirt and its drama, its brilliance and its streak of nasty. Whores and hustlers, the weary and the wealthy. Every jittery heartbeat pumped in her blood.

This was hers.

“Lady.” A grimy fist rapped on her window. “Hey, lady, wanna buy a flower?”

She looked at the face peering through the glass. It was ancient and stupid and if the dirt in its folds were any indication, it hadn’t seen a bar of soap in this decade.

She put the window down. “Do I look like I want to buy a flower?”

“It’s the last one.” He grinned toothlessly and held up a pitiful, ragged bloom she supposed was trying to be a rose. “Give ya a good deal. Five bucks for it.”