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She sends a shooting star emoji.
Jordan tucks the phone back into his pocket before someone yells at him for looking at it. Now he’s got a date with a funny andsane girl from North Carolina who’s studying how physicists can program particles to assemble themselves, or to have certain physical properties, or something like that—he was a little drunk when she was trying to explain it to him.
Now that he knows Ellie, she doesn’t remind him of Hannah so much. But he tells himself that’s a good thing.
CHAPTER 86
Jordan spies Officer Brian Dunthorpe coming out of a coffee shop on 49th Street early on Wednesday morning. He’s a short, burly man with a splash of freckles across his nose and the cauliflower ears of a former fighter. “Miranda warned me you’d show up,” Dunthorpe says.
He starts walking down the street, and Jordan hurries to catch up with him. “And she told me where to find you,” Jordan says. “Thanks for talking with me.”
“I’m getting paid for it.” Dunthorpe throws his head back, drains the rest of his coffee, and pitches the cup into an overflowing trash can. “So what’s up, kid?”
Kid.Jordan smiles. Officer Dunthorpe’s not that much older than he is. But Dunthorpe has a uniform, a gun, and a bit of a bowlegged swagger.He walks like his balls are too big for him, Jordan thinks.
“I was wondering if you could tell me anything about a girl you came across a few weeks ago.” He decides not to mention how she’d ripped off her clothes and was screaming about her sister. “She was, uh, having a mental health crisis.”
Dunthorpe snorts. “Who isn’t these days? We got people robbing stores in broad daylight. Kicking old ladies. Shoving eachother in front of trains.” He gives an exaggerated shrug of his big shoulders. “Everyone’s gone freakin’ crazy.”
We don’t use that word, Jordan thinks for the hundredth time. So, at the risk of sounding like a know-it-all prick, he points out that most people with mental illness are only a danger to themselves. They don’t go around pushing people in front of subway trains.
“Oh, you don’t gotta lecture me,” Dunthorpe says amiably. “I know how it goes. There’s a reason I called the ambulance on your friend. There’s a reason I didn’t let my buddy press charges.”
“Press charges?” This is news to Jordan.
“She kicked Haines in the sternum so hard he took two days off from duty. Couldn’t play basketball for a month. We got a league, you know.” His hand goes up to his cheek. “She punched me good, too. Sharp little knuckles.” He gave a half laugh. “Someone oughta teach her to box. Girl’s got fight in her.”
“Had you seen her before that day?” Jordan asks.
“I never knew her name, but she hung around outside that used bookstore over on Ninth sometimes. I bought her a sandwich once. Egg salad.”
“Do you know where she lived?”
Dunthorpe jaywalks across 45th; Jordan follows. “On the street,” Dunthorpe says matter-of-factly.
Hannah is homeless?The thought of her sleeping under a tarp or in a cardboard box on the street makes his heart clench up.
“So—like—him?” He points to the sleeping body of a man, curled in a doorway.
“I know that guy, too,” Dunthorpe says. “Clay. He’s all right when he’s not full of meth.” His radio crackles, then goes silentagain. “I think your friend slept in that tent city south of Javits. You know what I’m talking about? Near Twelfth Avenue?”
“I don’t know that one,” Jordan says. No wonder Hannah doesn’t talk about leaving Belman the way the other patients do. She has nowhere else to go.
“Well, it’s gone now. It got swept last week,” Dunthorpe says. “But it’ll pop up again. We clean the same places over and over and it doesn’t matter. Everyone’ll be back in a week, with all their trash and their dogs and their drugs.”
“Hannah didn’t do drugs.”
But Dunthorpe isn’t listening. “This is New York City! The greatest city in the world! You can’t have people shitting on the sidewalks and shooting up in public and passing out in people’s doorways. They think some damn Business District Recovery Initiative foot patrol is gonna fix this? We need—”
“Twelfth and what?” Jordan asks.
“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Thirty-third, kid.”
“Thanks for your time, officer.”
CHAPTER 87
Where the encampment used to be, Jordan finds a lone guy in a filthy Carhartt jacket sitting on the sidewalk next to a bag of cans and bottles. He’s twentysomething, Jordan guesses, with blond locs and a pair of old-school headphones hooked around his neck. The wires dangle down, unconnected to anything.
