The Steel Kiss

For some reason the IOU idea had jumped into his head. Not bad. He’d scrawled out a fake marker. When Alpho gave him the Oden info he’d slipped it into the same pocket as the note. It wouldn’t pass forensics—no friction ridges other than his own…  and forget about handwriting analysis. But he guessed that the DSS cops back there weren’t much concerned about him. They just wanted to get back to their pizza and the Dominican banger stakeout.

He now extracted and looked over the note Alpho had given him, memorizing the address and the other information on it. He closed his eyes and recited it a dozen times.

The hour was getting late. Lincoln and Amelia had to be wondering where he was. And he himself was curious if there’d been anything on Williams’s computer that might lead to Unsub 40. But, checking his phone, neither had called. He texted Amelia that he was heading home—the Gutiérrez case had taken up more time than he’d believed it would—but if she needed anything, give him a call.

Was she mad? Probably. But nothing he could do about it.

He was going to flag down a cab but was painfully aware of how much of his own money he’d just handed over to Alpho so it was subway time. He walked back to Broadway Junction to begin the complicated journey to his wife and children. Feeling dirty, tainted. And sure that even seeing their soft, smiling faces would do little to bring him comfort.

* * *

Amelia Sachs pulled her Torino up to the curb and shut the engine off. Sat for a moment, reading texts. She slipped the phone away but still didn’t get out of the car.

After leaving Rhyme’s she’d gone on two missions. The first was to meet with a reporter for one of the big local papers and give him a follow-up to the People’s Guardian story. As part of the article he would print the list of products that contained smart controllers—though in the online edition, since the number of such items was so lengthy. She’d also explained what Chaudhary had said, that manufacturers were reluctant or too lazy to install the patches to improve security. The CEO was going to contact them again but she’d decided that a news story about that reticence would create some public relations pressure for them to install the security updates.

The reporter had thanked her for the tip and left to further research and write up the story.

Sachs had then stopped by One PP briefly and was now here on her second mission—in Little Italy, little indeed, having been taken over by hipsters from the north and Chinese restaurants and gift stores from the south. She climbed out of the car, snagged her briefcase and walked south. Slowing her pace to a stop, she noted the man’s silhouette in a window of the coffeehouse before her.

This place had been here for years, a classic espresso-and-pastry shop right out of a 1940s film. The name was Antonios (there had been only one owner by that name; the family, or the sign-painter, had never bothered with an apostrophe). Sachs preferred it to the three or four other surviving bistros here in south-central Greenwich Village, all of them resiliently resisting the chain-store approach to caffeine.

Sachs pushed inside, a bell mounted to the door jingling cheerfully, and she was assaulted by the smells of rich coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, yeast.

Eyes still on Nick Carelli, who was scrolling through an iPad.

After a brief pause she walked up to him and said, “Hi.”

“Hey.” He stood up, looked into her eyes and kept his gaze there. No embrace.

She sat and set the briefcase on her lap. Defensive, the way suspects being grilled sometimes crossed their arms.

“What would you like?” Nick asked.

He was drinking black coffee, and she had a memory of a cold Sunday morning, both Nick and she off duty, she in a pajama top, he in the matching bottoms, as she made two cups of coffee, pouring boiling water through a cone filter, the sound like crinkling cellophane. She would sip hers immediately while he would set his cup in the fridge for a few minutes; he liked tepid drinks, never hot.

“Nothing. I can’t stay.”

Did he seem disappointed? She believed so.

“Newfangled.” He pointed to the iPad with a smile.

“A lot’s changed.”

“I think I’m at a disadvantage. Don’t you need to be about thirteen to master something like this?”

“That’s the upper limit,” Sachs said. She couldn’t help but note once more that Nick looked good. Even better than when she’d seen him last. Less gaunt than then. More upright, the slouch gone. He’d had a haircut too. His appearance seemed better now than in his younger days when he’d been, she thought, too skinny. The sprinkles of gray among the black strands helped. And the years—and prison—didn’t seem to have dimmed his sparkly-eyed boyishness. A bit of the frat boy was forever inside. Sachs had believed back then that he hadn’t so much ruthlessly planned and executed the hijackings, as fallen in with the wrong crowd and, for the hell of it, thought he’d try something daring, without considering the consequences.