I found myself rubbing my hairline again. I pulled my hand away forcibly and stood up to walk over to the window. Outside, bathed in a ghostly green light, I saw Michael talking to the soapbox preacher. I shouldered the window open a crack as quietly as the old building would let me. Neither of them looked up.
"Stay away from that Jezebel." The preacher waved his arms in the direction of my window. Great, I grimaced, no wonder business dropped off so sharply. "Jezebel" was hardly the image I wanted to impart to my clients.
"She is unclean," the preacher continued to rave, "... unholy."
Michael's body stiffened, as if the insult were directed at himself and not me.
"No one is beyond redemption. That's the gift you give her. If it wasn't for the solace that brings, I'd ..." His fists clenched at his sides and, for a moment, I thought he was going to punch the preacher right in the mouth. Then, with a snort, Michael turned away. Over his shoulder he added, "Try being the Christian you profess to be, and remember the phrase: 'Let him who is without sin ... cast the first stone.' "
The preacher and I watched in stunned silence as Michael stomped down the alley toward the street. These days everyone used the Bible as a weapon, but usually to bludgeon, not to cut to the heart of the matter. Michael impressed me. Either New York's Finest had raised their admission standards, or this guy wasn't from around here. That's when I decided to follow him.
Grabbing my keys from the hook by the door, I dashed down the back stairwell. The preacher's eyes were still watching Michael moving down the street, so he didn't notice me slip across the street to the parking ramp.
My old beater was the only car at this level in the lot. The lights in the parking ramp flickered meekly, reminding me that I needed to pay my electric bill in order to keep the tube connection active. The car had a battery for short-distance driving off the rail, of course, but gravity would be against me if I needed to go up a level to get juice.
Since all cars were electric, all the major metropolitan areas were covered in a gerbil cage-like maze of tubing. Traffic Control, a huge hub of computers and sensors, made sure that none of the millions of cars in the tubes went barreling into each other. Control managed our speeds and otherwise oversaw the difficult task of keeping up with city traffic. Needless to say, things did not always run as smoothly as planned. Especially here in New York.
I jumped in the car and, on battery power, maneuvered the car over to the tube-rail. With a spark, rail connected to the car, and I lurched forward with sudden power. The traffic tubes on this level were recycled plastic, and murky, but I was able to see Michael
moving on the street below me.
This far down, the shadows of the city were long, and the light was hazy and greenish, as it was filtered through more and more of the knotwork of traffic tubes and skyways above. To my left, I could see three thin stabs of pure light that had not been diluted by tubing. But, mostly my world was cast in a perpetual greenish haze.
The car shook as I moved along. The tubing of lower levels badly needed repair. The landfill-mined plastic had worn thin in places, and I sped up, hoping to have enough momentum to save me should one collapse under the weight of my Chevy. At this level, there was no other traffic. The electric engine hummed quietly.
It was not difficult to follow the dark dot that was Michael's lone form on the cracked and ancient sidewalks below. Walking the streets of New York in the era of skyports and skyways was virtually unheard of and certainly not something for the faint of heart. If I learned anything about him, it was that Michael was braver than the average New York City cop. Not even a badge protected people on the streets these days. My grandfather remembered "beat cops," but these days that was an imperative sentence, not a noun.
Still watching Michael's leather jacket grow smaller as he marched into the distance, I punched the numbers for the Tenth Precinct into my mobile wristwatch-phone. "Yeah," I told the dispatcher that answered. "Get me Captain Morgan."
The image in the digital time readout window flickered, then morphed into a detailed three-dimensional image of an empty desk. Hard-copy files, photos, and data chips were spattered across the surface in seeming abandon. "All that's missing are the donuts, Chief."
"I thought that was the phone." I heard shuffling and continued muffled curses. He walked into view, and I saw the back of his head. Gray had completely overtaken the raven hair that impressed me so much as a rookie. Though, I was glad to see, he still seemed to have a full head of it. Taking in the rest of his trim form, it seemed he was still keeping in shape. A sweat-darkened leather strap of a shoulder holster contrasted with the starched white of his shirt. Even though his job confined him mostly to the desk and the rabbi-mayor's office, he wore jeans. Still as irreverent as ever. I smiled, but he didn't see me. He was still searching for the phone.