Though I had snagged an invite, I hadn’t been asked to speak at the meeting for some strange reason. Actually, I knew the reason all too well. My boss, Miriam, had called at dawn and told me that I’d been taken off as lead in the case and would now be taking orders from and reporting to Lieutenant Bryce Miller.
I arrived early enough to score a precious visitor parking spot at One Police Plaza, which was no small feat, considering how many people worked in the neighborhood’s courthouses and government buildings. On the crowded eighth floor of the brown brick monolith, I spotted Chief Fabretti in the hallway. Instead of giving me his usual hail-fellow-well-met routine, he blew past me with his iPhone glued to his ear and an evil look glued to his face, like I was empty air.
I actually didn’t really care or really even blame him. The situation and the stress level everyone was under had reached the impossible zone. I knew we all wanted the same thing—for the killing to stop and for this horror to be over.
I had a little time before the meeting, so I hit the break room, where I managed to score the last three survivors in a box of cinnamon Munchkins. There was no more coffee, so I had to settle for green tea that I made semitolerable once I poured in a lot of half-and-half and sugar.
I took my grub over to a corner window overlooking the Foley Square courthouses to the northwest and gave Emily a call.
“Hey, Agent. There you are,” I said when she answered. “I tried to call you earlier, but you must have been in the shower or something. I’m down here at One PP at the latest big emergency meeting. Are you heading over or what?”
“Not this time,” Emily said. “Like dogs and people without shirts, feds aren’t allowed, apparently. The press is asking questions about what they’re calling ‘shortsighted and brutal’ tactics at the Queens raid yesterday, and now everybody involved is working overtime to throw anyone they can grab under the bus. So much for our happy task force. Looks like the feds and the department are so pissed at one another this morning they’re no longer talking.”
I laughed grimly.
“Great. Dissension and infighting are just what we need while the city is being dismantled brick by brick. So what are you doing?”
“I’m at our VIP emergency meeting, of course. Just a couple of blocks from you at Twenty-Six Fed.”
“So close and yet so far,” I said, looking at the federal building two blocks away, above the courthouses. “Hey, after our respective ass-covering sessions, how about Chinese for lunch? Wo Hop. My treat.”
“Wo Hop?” Emily said. “How could I turn that down?”
CHAPTER 56
So … how’s your morning going?
Gary Friedman smiled as he dropped his mop in the corner of the stairwell landing. He sat down, light-headed, as he looked at the text that had just come in on his phone from Gina.
He couldn’t stop smiling. Or reading the text.
“Thank you, Lord,” he said, kissing his Galaxy.
He really wasn’t one for screwing off and getting lost in his phone like a lot of the other guys on the maintenance crew. Especially after his rat bastard of a boss, Freddie, busted him playing Angry Birds two weeks back and chewed him out in front of everybody. Just because they worked in a law enforcement building, Freddie thought he was in law enforcement, the stupid jackwad.
But after last night, after the best night of his life, Gary didn’t care, he thought as he reread Gina’s text. Things were changing in the life of Gary Irving Friedman—for the better, finally.
Like a lot of his classmates at Brandeis, he’d moved to Brooklyn from Boston straight after graduation. With his cinematography degree and his award-winning short film under his belt, he’d thought it’d be just a matter of hooking up with other young artists in the borough’s vibrant arts scene, then it would be Hollywood, here I come.
But he soon woke up and smelled the fair trade coffee, because practically everybody he knew in Williamsburg had a cinematography degree and a short-film award or was in a band or had a writing MFA. What none of them had were connections. Or jobs in their respective winner-take-all fields.
Six months in, when his summer job money ran out and the janitor job came up through a friend of a friend, he was dumbfounded. A fucking janitor? It was a government job, with job security and benefits and all that, and it actually paid pretty well, but his father was an eye doctor, for the love of Pete, and he was going to be scrubbing urinals?!
But in the end, he took it. Swallowed his pride. Because it was either start mopping or go home to Dr. Friedman’s musty beige basement in Brockton. He’d decided to stick it out and mop it up.