The Long Fall

“I need to talk to the man himself,” Tony said. “The feds will want to interrogate me and I need to get up to speed. It’s been a long time.”

I didn’t believe a word of it but I couldn’t call him a liar straight out.

“So?” Tony asked.

“I got a full plate right now, Tone. There’s lotsa other PIs you could call.”

“I know you.”

“I’m busy.”

“Don’t make this a problem, LT. Find the guy for me. I swear to you it’s legit.”

Not for the first time did I think of my going straight like getting caught in an ant lion’s sand trap. I could get past Tony, maybe, but the more people I got mad the more likely I was to be taken down somewhere along the line. Every step I took upward, it seemed, brought me two rungs down.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“I could send Lucas and Pitts,” The Suit suggested again.

“I’ll think about that, too.”

“You want me to give you what I know?”

“I said I’ll think about it, Tony. Don’t press me.”

We were at an impasse. I wasn’t saying no but I wouldn’t say yes until I had a little time to consider my options. Tony saw all this.

“I’ll be calling,” he said.

Without another word he stood up and walked out of my office. I let a few minutes pass and then checked to make sure that he was gone. After that I got the .38 out of the old jeweler’s safe and made sure that it was clean and loaded.

Ê€„

11

One thing I’ve learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there’s a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us—each and every day of our lives. There’s drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there’s banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck.

I once knew a woman named Gert Longman. She had a place down in SoHo. I used to stay there sometimes. One morning, when she had alre ^ knady left for work, I was drinking coffee on her fire escape when a car came careening down the street. A mother and her young son were crossing and the car slammed into them. For a moment it seemed that the car was going to stop to help but then he, or she, stepped on the gas, ran over the bodies, and was gone. I climbed down the fire-escape ladder, but when I got to them I could see that they were dead, very much so. I called 911 and the ambulance came crying. The police arrived a few minutes later and I told them everything I could.

That was a tough day for me. I was so upset that I went home. Katrina had taken the kids to visit her parents in their Miami retirement condo, so I brooded alone in the apartment, worried about Death behind the wheel of a red car, rushing up on you out of nowhere and then hurrying away like a coward. I got in the bathtub with a book but forgot my drink on the sink. I got one foot on the floor and slipped, did a James Brown split, flew up in the air, and landed hard. My skull grazed the edge of the iron tub. And even though the pain in my head and hip was excruciating, I lay there laughing at myself. I had forgotten that Death was watching from all sides; that it comes at you from the place you least expect.

And so even though a gangster had me in his crosshairs, I still had a life to live just like every other doomed soul walking this earth, wondering if he could make it across the street.

I TOOK A bus downtown and got off three blocks from Tiny Bateman’s Charles Street address.

Charles was a narrow street of mostly four- to six-story apartment buildings built of brick and thickly coated with decades of city grime. Most had concrete stoops and little barred gates that led down to the basements. Tiny worked in an underground apartment half a block from Hudson Street. I descended the seven granite stairs and gave that week’s secret code. I felt like a fool with a magic decoder ring but Tiny would never answer unless I tattooed the right sequence on his buzzer.

After three minutes there was a loud click and I pushed open the reinforced steel door that was painted a fanciful shamrock green.

It was more of a compartment than an apartment. Each room, even the toilet, had worktables along the walls. These tables were crowded with wires and chip boards, computers without casings and cameras that looked like ceramic dolls, single-cigar humidors, a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, and other, less recognizable items. There were clusters of cell phones on the tables; some were wired to computers, others wired together. Tiny could do things with modern technology that even the inventors had not yet imagined. He supplied people like me with surveillance tools, hacked information, and general advice. Most of his work was done over the Internet but he allowed a select few into his dark and dusty domain.