DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) (9 page)

In summer Laurel Grove was as pretty as a picture, Staryles thought. White limestone radiated calm and cool. As
lazy June summer days came to an end, nothing was more languorous than the atmosphere on the retirement home campus. He could just sense it as he drove into the parking lot in his dark blue Oldsmobile Cutlass.

As he popped the trunk of the car, his feelings were confirmed when a nurse — or orderly, or personal care giver, whatever they were called — came rolling an old-timer out at a snail’s pace. Staryles exited the vehicle, went around to the trunk and pulled out a small duffel bag. He headed to the front entrance.

The nurse smiled and the old timer — a white man with even whiter hair, and veins and liver spots showing through his parchment skin — waved a knobby hand as Staryles approached. Staryles waved back. There was no hurly-burly here, no urgency. The dusty summer air, the stillness of the maple trees by the river, the ease of the low Hudson itself, Pepsi-colored water purling unhurriedly down towards the city.

Staryles passed the nurse and the old timer (
bet that corn husk saw the beaches of the Pacific or Normandy so close and personal he could count the grains of sand
) and reached the entrance. The automatic doors swung inward, inviting him in.

He stepped into a vestibule with a bank of locked brass mailboxes, and then to a second set of doors. Lettering on the glass declared that
These Doors Are Locked 7 PM to 7 AM.

But they swung open now, friendly and welcoming. Laurel Grove was not some squat concrete building with a few fake plants in the lobby in some rundown district of town. Laurel Grove was top-notch and pricey.

But their security sucked.

Staryles maintained his leisurely pace, admiring the plants — not fake — which decorated the front lobby, the low benches that were sort of Art Deco with cushions, the mosaic stone walls with their shining specks of mica.

The front-desk nurse smiled at him and he smiled back. He noticed how her eyes dropped to his clothes. No suit today, but a pair of M3 Safari designer jeans, a vintage-fit white t-shirt from Hugo Boss, and a pair of sandals Christ himself would envy.

For just a second he felt a pinch in his gut at the blasphemy, and almost lost his smile. But then he watched how the nurse’s eyes lingered on him — it was only a second, barely a second, but that was all it took — and he regained his full presence.

“Hello,” he said in a voice which he’d carefully cultivated, even practiced during morning sit-ups. He set down his bag.

“Hello,” she said back, failing utterly to hide the fact that she was single and found him intriguing, if a little intimidating. The usual.

“Here to see Philomena Argon,” he said.

“Oh wonderful,” she chirped, and then something in her changed. Her smile faded and her eyes grew suspicious. It was happening again, this metamorphosis which occurred in people whenever he got close.

As she gathered up the log book, he turned away. He decided it was less pleasant in here than he had first thought. It was more like some smug Ivy League library, or some fancy home where the uppity rich wife never lets the kids touch anything. It was stuffy in here.

“Here you go, just sign in right here and I’ll page the home worker to bring you in.”

Mmpf.
Staryles thought.
A home worker
. The term was nonsensical.

But he didn’t share this insight. Instead he gave the nurse behind the desk another full-veneer smile and bent forward over the log book.

The front-desk lady turned away, giving Staryles a chance to fan the pages of the logbook. He already knew Healy had been here. Seven months previously, late November, Healy had stood right here, right at this desk. But he just wanted to see. When he had flipped to the appropriate date he scanned the page. Sure enough, there was Healy’s scrawl. Staryles felt a small thrill and sense of self-satisfaction. He would have made a good detective himself, if he weren’t in such high demand for a different vocation.

He quickly returned to today’s page, signed and turned the book around to face the nurse who stood up and took it without so much as a glance at it. She put it back beneath the countertop, gave him one more fake smile and then turned her shoulder to him as she went back to whatever she was doing on the computer. Probably Facebook, or Pinterest.

These women. The same thing kept happening. They didn’t recognize him. Didn’t seem him for who he truly was, what he really could do.

He looked through the glass doors. The nurse pushing the old-timer in the wheelchair had only just made it to the end of the front walk, heading towards some elm trees where there was a picnic table.

The picnic table sparked a memory of a family picnic, the only one they had ever had as far as he could remember. His father had lectured the young boys about how the nation was founded on the family structure, with the father meting out proper discipline and punishment.
It’s the mother’s job to bear children and nurse them
, he’d said,
the father’s job to straighten the spine.

Their mother had not been happy with the conversation. Staryles remembered how she had looked as if she’d rather be anywhere other than sitting with her husband and these three boys she had somehow rented a womb to for nine months a piece, only to lose them to the father the moment they’d dropped off the nipple. His mother’s face haunted the expressions of the women he encountered.

“Sir?”

Staryles snapped to attention, his spine rigid, his hands ready. Within the span of a breath, however, he caught hold of himself and turned on a smile.

“All set for you, sir,” said the home worker who’d come to escort him.

“Great,” he said, slipping the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulder.

They walked down the hallway together.

* * *

Philomena Argon was in her room. Everything was exactly the way it had been the last time Staryles had seen it. The quaint furniture, the framed picture of her parents in their Scottish getups. The roll-top desk, not so unlike the roll-top desk Olivia Jane had kept in her house. Stupid Olivia Jane. Unable to keep her mouth shut in the end.

Mena sat quietly at the edge of her bed, watching Staryles as he softly closed the door behind him.

He walked across the room and squatted in front of her, relishing the way his thigh muscles felt taut and ropy, the way his spine was straight as a board.

“Hi, Mena. I thought we’d talk a little bit. I was wondering if you knew the story of King Midas.” He looked at her, perhaps the way his father had looked at his mother that day. His mother hadn’t been around for long after that picnic. “It’s a good story. The god Apollo calls King Midas an ass and touches him and gives Midas the ears of a donkey.”

He searched her foggy eyes. It was hard to say, but he felt like she was emanating a little hatred towards him.

“Midas is embarrassed — I can only imagine — and covers up the ears with a huge hat. But guess who knows about the ears? His barber. Those town barbers have all the juicy secrets. Midas warns the barber never to speak of it or he’ll be beheaded. But the barber is just exploding with this intel, he’s just bursting.”

Staryles looked around the room, out the window, and then back at Philomena. He opened his bag and took out a pair of black gloves.

“So you know what he does? He runs out and digs a hole in the bank of the Pactolus River, checks to make sure no one is around, and then whispers the secret about Midas’ ass-ears into the hole. Boom, done, got it out of his system. So he fills up the hole and leaves. But, Mena, the next spring, the reeds sprout. One grows up from the hole, and it whispers to the other reeds. The reeds tell the insects, and the insects tell the birds, and a bird lands on Midas’ window. Guess what? The bird declares that Midas has the ears of a donkey hidden beneath his Phrygian cap. And so you can imagine what happened then.”

Staryles reached into the bag and took out a small vial of white powder. He cocked his head to the side and licked his lips, just a quick dart of the tongue.

“You’re kind of a blabbermouth, Mena. Let’s face it. Kind of a barber-type. It’s people like you that make regs what they are — who make security have to be as tight as it is.”

Staryles brought his gloved hand an inch from her skin and feathered his fingertips down the side of her sagging face. His eyebrows knitted together in mock compassion.

“See? Your admonishment was poetic justice, I’ll give them that. You can’t talk because of your stroke. But I’m the next generation. I don’t have that sense of mercy, Mena. No stroke for you this time.”

He looked out the window again, his face a carefully built expression of serious contemplation. He practiced this face in reflective surfaces; he wished he could see himself now, but the room was gloomy and the day bright outside. No reflection.

He took the vial of thallus sulfate and tapped it against his thigh, cutting his gaze back over to her. Her eyes, milky with glaucoma but still intelligent, dropped to glance at the vial, then met his stare.

They remained like that for a few moments, Staryles squatting and looking directly into her eyes, Philomena looking right back.

Then he spoke, “Where is it, Mena? Is it in your room here somewhere?”

She mumbled something unintelligible. He got up and sat down on the bed beside her. It was a soft mattress, way too soft for his tastes. He cupped his free hand around his ear. “What’s that, Mena?” He pulled the hand away and then tilted his head to the side. “Did you give it to your brother? Is that what you did? You’ve been sitting on that IMF data, like a hen on an egg, for a long time.” He clucked his tongue, and shook his head with parental disappointment.

She said something again. It sounded like there was some suction in her mouth, like she was at a dentist with that tube hanging from her lips. Was she playing dumb? Surely she could speak better. Her muscle memory had to have come back somewhat after all these years.

“Because I wonder,” Staryles said, lifting the vial to his face. He tapped the tip of it against his jutting chin and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I wonder if Lawrence Taber, that old son of a gun, if when he sent Brendan Healy down here last year to look for something . . . I wonder if he was hoping Seamus Argon had taken all your hard work, and stashed it somewhere.” His eyes found her again. “You think?”

This time she made no effort to speak. Staryles pursed his lips and puffed his cheeks out like a chipmunk, then blew through his lips. He sucked air in through his teeth and then stood upright. He turned his head to look back out the window. “Yeah. That’s what I think, too.” He considered things for a moment, striking a thoughtful pose, gazing into the rolling green yard outside. Sun dazzled the chrome and plastic of the vehicles in the parking lot. The nurse pushing the old man in the wheelchair was off to the left, turning back this way.

It was so quiet here. So peaceful and still. You could lose all sense of time, really. There wasn’t even a television in Philomena’s room, or a computer, nothing. How did she stay in touch? He looked at her. This woman who had once been plugged right into the very heart of it. Secrets swarming around her like a vortex.

Secrets necessary to keep people safe? Staryles wasn’t so naïve. Midas should’ve just come out with his ears instead of burying his secret beneath that ridiculous cap. Because soon the reeds would know, and the insects would know, and the birds would know.

Philomena was like the barber. Lawrence Taber was one of the birds. You could hardly blame the bird, really. But you could — and you should — behead the barber.

He sat shoulder to shoulder with her and carefully unscrewed the vial. It would be an hour or so before anyone even checked on her and he would be long gone. With her failing health, Mena wouldn’t last as long as the others. A few hours of necrosis, maybe one night, and her heart would give out.

“Philomena,” he said in his best stern-but-warm voice, “if you have it here, tell me. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I know where it is, anyway.”

A nerve fired beneath his eye. He felt it, and it triggered a flare of anger. He brought the vial up to her lips. He expected her to start babbling, to cry for help, but she was motionless and silent. She actually turned her head away. He followed her gaze and together they looked out the window.

She remained silent, and he pressed his fingers against her cheeks and forced open her mouth. Her skin felt as thin as tissue paper, her lips parted easily, as if she didn’t care. He felt her slump against him, the two of them watching that still, unmolested world through the glass.

By the time Louis Tremont finished his time at Rikers Island, he had dropped twenty-six pounds. Brendan could imagine the man he once was. He saw Tremont sitting in a boxy old Crown Vic outside of a Manhattan bank, casing the joint for access points and timing the rotation of the security staff. A younger Tremont, fit, top of his game, the world as his piggy bank. He’d smoked cigars in those days, he said, so Brendan pictured the younger Tremont puffing on a Rocky Patel as he watched the bank like a predator.

It was a Sunday, a quiet day in the West Facility, when Tremont offered the final piece of information Brendan needed. It had nothing to do with the channeling of drugs through the jail system. He was folding his spare set of sheets; Tremont often folded and refolded his bedding when he was thinking about something, or when he was nervous, a habit developed from all the time he spent in the laundry. And he was getting out in less than forty-eight hours. Brendan thought Tremont was worried he would slip back into crime and wind up in Rikers again.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Tremont said. He made a careful, ruler-straight crease in the sheets and folded them over. “But I gotta tell you, I heard something.”

Brendan was rereading
The Great Divorce
and tonguing the cavity where his molar had been knocked out not long before.
Heaven will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory
. He looked up. “I don’t want to talk about what? Your weight loss? I think we’ve covered it. You look great, boss. The ladies will be lining up.”

Tremont laughed, but there was little humor in it. “You’re kind of like a celebrity,” he said.

“Oh yeah?”

“When you came in here, there was a buzz about you. High-profile beef. You know?”

“I guess.”

“Well, big shit, there have been some other celebrity-types through here,” he said. “You’re not so special.”

“I’m dying to know.”

Tremont set down a perfect square of a folded top sheet, laying it gently on his top bunk. “Lil’ Wayne, was here. You know? That rapper. ‘Motherfucker’ this and that. Tupac, too. Then Plaxico Burress, NFL receiver, he took a short nap here. And back in the day, Sid Vicious. Can you believe that?”

“I’m not sure I fall in the same category.”

“No. Maybe not. But you fall in with who’s here now.”

Brendan was keeping it light, but he sensed the shift in Tremont’s tone. They did a bit of goofing around to pass the time. This wasn’t part of that.

“Alright. Who?”

“Someone who really takes the cake.”

“Enough of the suspense, Lou. Let’s have it.”

“Okay. So, just the head of the IMF.”

“Alright, now you’re fucking with me again.” Brendan put his nose back in his book. He felt the hairs on his neck standing up. “This more about the pigeon population dropping just before the cafeteria serves chicken cacciatore?”

“Didier Lazard. Here for an alleged sexual assault of a housekeeping employee at the Waldorf-Astoria. Awaiting trial, just like you. Though I imagine his will get moved to the head of the docket, no offense. Guy’s loaded.”

Brendan looked up from his book. “He’s been in protective custody?”

“Yep. For two weeks.”

“Okay. So what? And this guy is in the same category with me, how?”

Tremont stepped away from the bunk and sat down on the toilet. He’d lost weight, but he was a still a big man, getting on in years, and the flesh seemed to hang on his bones. He turned his dark face to Brendan, who sat on the bottom bunk, tucked into the shadows. “Word I heard was that Lazard was here to meet with the head of the CSS. Guy named Wick. That’s why he was in town. But, seems he got touchy-feely with the maid and is taking a ride for it.”

Brendan felt his skin crawl. It wasn’t exactly fear or distaste, it was the sense of something coming together, like an electric charge turned up in the room.

“How do I get to him?”

“You don’t. He’s in the protection wing.”

* * *

“What is it, Healy? You’ve got something for me?” Grimm looked desperate. The pouches beneath his eyes could hold pennies. The heat in his office was stifling. Outside, the late March afternoon was gray and cold. It looked like it was about to snow.

“I need to see Didier Lazard.”

Grimm blinked, straight-faced. “That’s funny, Healy. I didn’t know you were so funny. The fuck do you think you need to see him for? Get an autograph?”

“Because of the smuggling going on in here.”

Grimm pursed his lips and exhaled through his nostrils. “Healy, goddammit. Three months I get nothing from you. You want to fuck around with me? Fine. Let’s see how you fair out there in gen. pop. with Laruso after you.”

“Just hear me out, sir.”

Baker appeared in the doorway. Brendan turned to look at CO Baker’s mouth curled into a sly smile, as if he’d been waiting for Healy to screw up and to get the opportunity to punish him for it. He entered the room and Brendan turned quickly back to Grimm.

“It’s not because Lazard is involved directly,” Brendan said quickly. “It’s the facility. The protective custody cells in West Facility are your major gateway.”

Grimm’s expression shifted from rage to interest. He held up his hand, and Brendan sensed Baker come to a stop just behind him, looming there, ready to pounce.

Brendan hurried on. “Think about it, sir. The rest of your facility is overpopulated. Men everywhere — guards and inmates. West Facility is far less populated. You’ve got special ingresses and egresses for inmates in custody — places where the security is isolated.”

“Then how is it being distributed?”

“Through the laundry,” Brendan lied. “You’ve got all those cots set up to handle the overflow. The machines there are running practically around the clock, so you’ve got laundry service making trips over here to wash that extra bedding and fatigues. Then the washed stuff goes back to the other facilities, and contains a little something besides clean sheets.”

Grimm leaned back in his chair, which squeaked beneath his considerable weight. He skewered Brendan with his glare. “And how do you know this?”

Brendan took a breath. “Sir, I’ve been quietly interviewing dozens of inmates. I’ve been taking all this time to build a case that gives you everything you need. But if I give you information now and you, in turn, do a little in-house cleaning, stave off this tactical search probe — which you and I both know is going to hit the jackpot with all the bug juice running through this place . . . You’ve got, what? Two years until social security and full pension, you said? You really want the Corrections Commissioner pulling you two years before retirement, the whole thing splashed all over the media? Because that’s what will happen.”

Grimm was as silent as a tomb, unmoving, watching Healy with dead mackerel eyes. For a moment Brendan thought his life might be over. Grimm would just do away with him. Change his mind on the whole thing and have Baker drag him down into the laundry where the rest of the guards would beat him to death. Or stick him in segregation and let them pay him visits over a period of weeks, maybe months. He’d already threatened as much.

“Who was talking?”

Brendan felt his heart thumping. “I would like to protect my sources if I could, sir.”

“What are you, a fucking journalist for the
Times
? Protect your sources? What do you care about what happens to some other scumbag in here? I put you together with Tremont for a reason . . .”

“I don’t, sir. I care about myself.” He paused and swallowed down the bile rising in his throat. If he involved his cellmate in the scam, Tremont’s nerves would prove accurate, his obsessively folded sheets auguries — Grimm wouldn’t let him go anywhere. He would trump something up to keep Tremont inside until things were resolved. “If I disclose my sources,” Brendan said, “I’m as good as dead. But you let me do this, let me go to the protective wing, it circumvents the source. We can say you put me there, for whatever reason you want to come up with, and I found things out on my own.”

Grimm took all of this in. He even brought his hands up and tented the fingers together, as if he were the Godfather. After a full, ostentatious, thirty seconds of this, he nodded. Brendan could feel Baker breathing down his neck. The man’s desire to throttle Brendan was palpable, as if it were the source of the heat in the room rather than the clanking radiator.

“Alright,” Grimm said at last. “So we send you into the protective wing to talk to Lazard. First of all, what’s your cover? And second of all, if we already know the contraband is being distributed via the laundry, what are you going to find?”

“Glad you asked, sir. Good questions. My cover is that you’re moving me into protective custody.”

Grimm changed his posture to sit up straighter and was waving his hands in the air. “I don’t like that. Too much paperwork. It will look suspicious if we get a probe audit, which we’re bound to, because if they’re waiting to pounce on the raid, and I’ve got to tell you, I can feel the cocksuckers ready to pounce, and when they do and they find nothing, they’re going to know I beat them to the punch and then they’re going to get their paper-pushers in here and look through every one of my files . . .”

“You won’t do the paper work on me, sir.”

“Excuse me?”

“Inmates bounce in and out of the protective wing all the time. No one is going to notice I’m gone for two days. Three, tops. Then I’m right back to my Cadillac.”

“Your celly will notice.”

“Tremont will go along with whatever story you feed him, sir. He wants to do right by you, wants to do his time and be out of here tomorrow.”

Grimm laughed. It was a wicked, humorless laugh. “Everyone wants to get out of here.” He grew straight faced again. “So if this happens and if you get in, what indisputable evidence are you going to get for me so I can move on this?”

“I’m going to get you contraband.”

Grimm blinked. “How?”

“Lazard. He has the one occupied cell in your private wing. And that’s where they’re storing it right after it comes in, before it gets moved down to the laundry with his sheets. Storing it in the other cells would be recorded — every time one of these cells opens or closes, you have an account of that. So it’s the one cell that’s occupied. The one you usually reserve for these celebrity-types. No one bats an eyelid when their cell is opened. And they’re not complaining that they’ve got the freshest bedding in town; they expect it, they’re used to being treated like royalty. That’s probably why Lazard figured he’d pinch a little tail and get away with it.”

Another chuckle from Grimm, a sinister sound. Brendan felt a surge of nervous excitement. It might work.

But Grimm frowned. “And how are you going to get the contraband from Lazard’s cell? If I put you in there, then I’ve got to move him, and we’re back to the whole paper trail problem, Healy.”

“I’m going to talk him into giving it to me.”

Grimm’s eyes remained glassy and serious. “You are?”

“Yes.”

“And just how are you going to do that?” Now Grimm’s face contorted into a violent mask. “You’re telling me your plan is to have the director of the IMF turn over the illegal contraband in his cell to you? What if when he gets out of here in two months, he decides to tell the whole goddamned world that drugs were being stored in his fucking cell at Rikers-fucking-Island?” Grimm was shouting.

“He won’t. Or, even if he thinks he can, he’s the
former
head of the IMF. No one is going to give a shit about what he has to say about his time in jail for sexual harassment, especially not the global organization he used to represent.”

Grimm sat back again, slowly, never taking his eyes off Brendan. Outside, the first flakes of snow started to drift down.

“Okay,” Grimm said. He looked at Baker. “Let’s make it happen.”