Nostrand was a still life, save the yellow cab idling in a parking spot halfway down the block. Drummond ripped open the rear driver’s side door and dove in with Charlie in hand like a suitcase. A plump Middle Eastern man of perhaps forty-five sat behind the wheel, munching a kabob to “Jingle Bells” on the radio. “Where to?” he asked, as if their means of arrival were nothing out of the ordinary, which, Charlie thought, probably was the case in late-night Brooklyn.
Charlie turned to Drummond with the expectation that he would announce a destination. Indeed, Drummond pointed straight ahead and opened his mouth. But nothing came out. It seemed the words had stumbled along the way or gotten lost. And the glow in his eyes was fading, as if his power cord had been yanked.
“How about the police?” Charlie said.
Drummond appeared to think about it. Or he just sat there and said nothing. Charlie wasn’t sure which.
Charlie’s eyes flew to the movement in the rearview mirror. He whirled around to find MacKenzie in a crouch at the corner of Prospect and Nostrand, a hundred feet behind them, using the top of a Daily News vending machine to steady his gun.
A chunk of the rear window burst apart. Bits of glass sprayed inward, stinging Charlie’s neck, ears, and scalp. A slug imbedded itself behind the driver’s head in the inch-thick sheet of Plexiglas dividing the cab.
Drummond ducked beneath the window line. If PlayStation games represented reality with any accuracy, Charlie knew the car’s chassis offered little protection against a full-metal-jacketed round traveling at near the speed of sound, and the seat essentially provided no additional defense. Nevertheless he dropped all the way to the floor and lay there, petrified.
“Just go anywhere,” he managed to call to the driver.
Ibrahim Wallid was the driver’s name, according to the ID rubber banded to his sun visor. He tried to reply, but no sound would come. He gripped the wheel and stomped on the accelerator, bringing the engine to a throaty roar.
But the taxi was still in park.
Drummond’s headrest burst into particles of foam. Again a bullet bashed into the Plexiglas behind Wallid.
Trembling, the driver flailed at the gearshift arm. He clipped it with his wrist, snapping it into drive. With the accelerator already flush against the floor, the cab lurched forward like a dragster, laying half-block-long stripes of rubber. Another bullet sparked the top of a parking meter behind them.
Wallid ratcheted the wheel, turning the taxi at almost a right angle onto a clear Carroll Street block. Centrifugal force hurled Drummond into Charlie’s spine. While explosive, the pain was a minor consideration because they were safely away.
Climbing back onto his seat, Charlie asked-shock had thrown off his governor so that it came out as a scream-“Who the hell were they?”
Drummond brushed bits of glass and foam from his hair. “Who?”
“The guys who tried to murder us a minute ago!”
“Oh, right, right, right.” Some of the light returned to Drummond’s eyes. “Tell me something? What’s today’s date?”
“The twenty-sixth.”
“Of?”
“December.”
“The last time I recall checking the calendar, the leaves had just begun to fall.”
“So about two, three months.” Charlie hoped this was leading somewhere.
Drummond waved at the shattered rear window. “This probably has to do with work.” As if drained by the thinking, he sagged into a reclining position.
Charlie needed more. “I never thought of the appliance business as quite so deadly.”
Drummond nodded vaguely.
“How about the way you knew how to handle yourself back there?” Charlie asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t pick that up at the repair and maintenance refreshers?”
With a shrug, Drummond leaned against his window, content to use it as a pillow despite the cold and the rattling of the glass. His eyelids appeared to grow heavy.
“At least tell me how you knew that the first guy had a gun?” Charlie said.
Drummond sat up an inch or two. “Yes, the key was…” He stopped. He’d fumbled the thought. He recovered it: “The fellow lured you down the block with the thing they knew would most entice you, a monitor scheme.”
“You mean a monetary scheme?”
“As I recall, the Monitor was a ship.”
“I know. What does it have to do with anything?”
“The Monitor battled the Merrimac.”
“Civil War, I know, I know. Was there a particular scheme the Monitor used?”
“The Merrimack is a hundred-ten-mile-long river that begins at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers.”
“You’re losing me.” Charlie suspected Drummond himself was lost.
“Franklin, New Hampshire,” Drummond said, as if that settled it.