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One thing was key: the suspect would probably pay a visit to one of the legendary outdoor timepieces of the city.
He’d actually said that, Sellitto had said. “Legendary timepieces.” Most of them in the watch room struggled not to snicker.
There were five of these Rhyme had picked and the PD had undercover teams on them all.
Brunet sat forward, scanned a passerby. Blond checked too. The pedestrian wasn’t him.
Blond kept coming back to the end of the briefing Sellitto’d done, when he asked what the teams should do if he was spotted. He’d replied, “Call it in, follow. Keep watching. He makes you, or he moves on somebody, you take him.” Sellitto had then hesitated and grumbled, “Standard procedures apply, but …”
The qualifier he ended his sentence with was a tough one.
He was talking about deadly force, while not really talking about it.
Officers can kill a suspect only when their lives or someone else’s is in direct danger.
But …
With that one word, Sellitto was suggesting that Hale fell into a different category.
Meaning, without saying: take him out at theleastpresentation of threat.
But it wouldn’t come to that.
Blond had decided that Sellitto was wrong. No way would Hale, if he really was that smart, risk getting collared or shot just to see a fucking clock, legendary or otherwise.
Especially the one they were parked across from. The time-piece that jutted out over the coffee shop in the Baker and Williams Building up here in Harlem was, the detective concluded, really just so-so.
26.
CHARLES HALE WASmoving through the crowded streets, just another man in Harlem, on his way to eat, to an ad presentation, to see a cousin who’d moved here recently, to meet his mistress for a fast lunchtime, to meet his wife for a real lunch.
Not jaunty, not cautious.
Walking in New York City mode.
Purposeful yet distracted.
Eyes ahead of him on the Baker and Williams clock.
“Excuse me.”
He turned to see a woman in her thirties, blond hair pulled back, taut. She was tanned from the out-of-doors, not a machine. (Having tinted himself for various jobs, he knew the difference.) She wore a skirted suit of navy blue, a white blouse, pearls. She held a shopping bag from an upscale 58th Street boutique.
She displayed her phone. “I’m trying to find this mural.” On the screen was a picture of the street painting depicting the poet Langston Hughes, a native son of Harlem.
He looked down at it. Then he drew his phone and called up a map. She looked athisscreen.
Green dots appeared in the upper right-hand corner of both phones as the retinal scans did their duty. This form of proving ID had the lowest false acceptance and false rejection rate of all biometric security measures.
“There,” he said, and they turned away from the huge clock and walked into the shop behind them, sat in the window. He ordered black coffee. It was chamomile tea for her.
“Did you get out to the Hamptons I didn’t even bother the train the cab I wasn’t sure if she’d get fired but sure enough and not a minute too soon the bottom line was a disaster …”
The rambling conversation, unrehearsed, ceased when the drinks arrived and they’d each assessed those sitting nearby were no threat.
Turning her deep blue eyes his way, she said, “Brad told me you’ve subbed out work to him before.”
Brad was the leader of the crew she worked for much of the time. They were, in effect, mercenaries, though the half dozen operated far more subtly than the camo-wearing, inked and bearded grunts one thought of when hearing that job description. When Hale had contacted Brad Garland with his needs, the man had instantly recommended the woman who sat in front of him now.
