Page 19 of No Safe Place

On the ground thirty feet to his right lay two uprooted young white birches about fifteen feet in length. They’d probably been knocked over in a nor’easter the year before. They looked kind of like a couple, he thought. A sad tragic one, star-crossed lovers fallen in a suicide pact.

The gun Shaw took out from under his hoodie was a beautiful stainless-steel Springfield Garrison .45 with thin line, checkered walnut grips. There was a silencer on it, a matte black steel one from a company called Federal Nitro Firearms that he wanted to field test. The silencer was almost the same length as the gun barrel.

Back and forth went the oiled slide over the forged frame, snicking a .45 into the chamber with perfect precision.

He raised and fired. Twice in quick succession. So quick it almost sounded like one sound. With the excellent silencer and the subsonic rounds, there had been no telltale firecracker bang. No echo.

You couldn’t help the barrel noise from where the casings were ejected but other than that, the two shots had just been short discreet metallic snaps no louder than a car door being unlocked with an electronic key fob.

Not bad at all, he thought, nodding to himself as he checked the empty chamber and tucked the gun away and scooped his brass. He never scrimped on silencers, and the ones being made today were amazing. He’d add it to his toolbox.

He took a Leatherman from his pocket as he walked forward and knelt at the stump. He snapped its knife open and dug first one then the other spent .45 slugs free from the soft white wood.

What was the Boy Scout expression? he thought, pocketing the smashed lead. Take only snapshots, leave only footprints? Sounded good to him.

When he arrived back at the parking lot, he saw his was the only car remaining now. He’d left his phone in a faraday pouch in the CT5’s glove box and when he sat and took it out and checked it, he saw there was a job for him.

He read the details. It was a red ball job. A job in the city that needed doing right this very minute. He smiled. Red ball jobs paid the most.

In every large city in the world, there was a man just like Shaw. A man on call there at all times ready to be summoned to action by those in the know. For the last two years, he had been the top go-to in the Northeast for the jobs that needed doing pronto.

The message said they were powering on a chopper out at the airport as he sat there. As usual, the details of who, what, where on the target in Manhattan would be waiting for him.

That wasn’t surprising. He’d done several rush jobs in Manhattan before.

His last one three months before had been on the subway. His first push job. It was on some middle-aged lady who hadn’t had the time to utter a single word as Shaw had hip bumped her off the Canal Street platform under the wheels of an arriving Q train.

Easiest six figures he had ever scored.

He smiled at the red ball deets on his phone screen.

Now here came another.

This would help the beach house fund, Shaw thought with a glance out at the water.

Then he started the Cadillac with a 6.2 liter fuel injected grumble and spun back and out of the Camp Hero Beach’s gravel lot with a V8 roar.

18

As usual, Olivia’s father, Emilio Ramos, left the Bronx Hunts Point Terminal food market facility where he worked at four on the dot.

And just as usual, across Food Center Drive, he saw that the bus stop was already crowded with a dozen of his fellow day shift truck loaders waiting on the BX #6.

Yeah, he was one of the dirty dozen all right, he thought, as he trotted across the 18-wheeler-lined industrial street. Or to be more specific, make that one of the dirty frozen dozen as they all actually worked in a windowless refrigerated warehouse humping sixty-pound boxes of frozen chicken parts by hand and hand truck and forklift for eight hours straight.

“Como se cuelgan?” said his buddy Victor, who was one of the forklift mechanics.

Victor offered him a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros he took out of his pocket.

“Nah, man. I quit,” Emilio said as he accepted one with a wink and a smile.

Finding a window seat in the far back of the bus that uncharacteristically arrived two minutes later, Emilio cursed under his breath for forgetting to bring his headphones again.

Because the diesel engine roar would have been bad enough, he thought from where he hunkered down in one of the bus’s plastic rear seats, but it was actually nothing compared to the loose window in the back.

The clattering rattle of the window as they blasted over the south Bronx’s countless potholes sounded, not just a little but almost exactly, like an M240 belt-fed machine gun laying down suppressing fire.

He knew this from personal experience. Oh, yeah, knew all about that sound. He had made it himself often enough from atop the LAV-25 armored reconnaissance vehicle he’d rode in Iraq II with the marines.

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