Page 10 of No Safe Place

“Too many,” I said quietly.

“Oh, right,” Colleen said, suddenly not smiling anymore either as she, too, remembered where we’d seen each other last.

At the funeral of her brother, Connor, a firefighter in the FDNY, two weeks after 9/11.

Like the badass, wild Irish maniac he’d always been, my best friend, Connor, had been running up the stairs of the burning North Tower to save people when the scumbags knocked several hundreds of thousands of tons of steel girders down on top of him.

What really made it so much worse was that their dad, Mr. Doherty, was an ironworker who had worked putting up the Towers back in the seventies.

Like everyone in the NYPD back then, I did my time in the pit of Ground Zero. I had actually met Mr. Doherty down there and worked with him. The whole time in that burnt-metal-stinking landfill mess, I prayed to God that I would find some sign of Connor for his family.

That it didn’t happen was disappointing though not surprising.

Like a lot of New Yorkers, God was pretty busy that fall.

“I was going to get a coffee,” Colleen said after a beat. “I can come back out if you’re staying.”

“No, you’re not getting a coffee,” I said, pulling out a chair for her. “I am. Stay right there, Colleen. Don’t move another muscle. What are you having? My treat.”

“Please, Mike. Don’t be silly,” Colleen said, laughing now.

“Colleen, I insist. You must understand,” I said, smiling as I pulled open the door. “Fate doesn’t play games like this more than once. This may be my last and only chance.”

“Only chance for what?” she said.

“Are you kidding me?” I said with a wink. “A date with Colleen Doherty has only been on my bucket list my whole life.”

11

“Hey, how’s your dad? Still living in the old neighborhood?” I said as I came back out with her Venti Americano.

“Of course,” she said. “I begged him to head for Florida, but he has this old lady, Mrs. Paulmann, for a tenant upstairs who he shovels the snow for, so he’s not leaving. He liked you a lot, Mike. He never could understand why you joined the navy SEALs when he offered to get you into the steelworkers union.”

“Go up on the high steel with your crazy old man?” I said as I sat. “I chose the SEALs because it was safer!”

I watched her laugh. It was something to watch.

What a day to be alive, I thought again.

“So, what brings you all the way up here from the Boogie Down Bronx, Colleen?” I said. “Let me guess. You ran out of Pepperidge Farm cookies?”

“Bite your tongue,” Colleen said with a laugh. “I’m an Irish Catholic West Bronx girl to the bone, Mike. You actually think I’d ever step out on Stella d’Oro?”

I laughed myself at that. The Stella d’Oro Italian cookie factory was located next to the Major Deegan Expressway, a stone’s throw from our Bronx block. Playing outside, you could always smell when the cookie ovens were firing. Even all these years later, the scent of Swiss fudge and anisette gave me Gen X childhood flashbacks.

“I’m up here in Connecticut for work actually,” Colleen said, blowing on her coffee. “I’m an investigator now.”

“No! You’re a cop?” I said. “I thought you were a nurse and your husband—what was his name? Bill? I thought he was the cop, a transit cop, wasn’t it?”

“My ex-husband’s name is Ryan,” Colleen said, laughing again, “and yes, he was a transit cop and maybe still is. I wouldn’t know because I don’t talk to him anymore. After the divorce, I got sick of being a nurse and so I went back to school and now I work as an investigator for a law firm in Manhattan. It’s been seven years now.”

“Is that right?” I said. “A law firm investigator. But if it’s a law firm in Manhattan, what are you working on way up here?”

“Wait, you’re not still a cop, are you, Mike?” she said, sipping her coffee.

“Nope. Happily retired, thank goodness,” I lied.

I was retired. But happily? Not even a little. That was another story. One that Colleen, or anyone really, didn’t need to know about.

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