Название: The Dark Tide
Автор: Andrew Gross
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007280285
isbn:
Just be okay, Charlie, wherever you are. Just be okay.
A car door slammed outside. Karen heard the doorbell ring. Someone called out her name and came running into the house.
It was Paula. She fixed on Karen huddled on the floor, in a way she had never seen her before. Paula sank down next to her, and they just hugged each other, tears glistening on each other’s cheeks.
“It’s gonna be okay, honey.” Paula stroked Karen’s hair. “I know it will. There could be hundreds of people down there. Maybe the phones aren’t working. Maybe he needed some medical attention. Charlie’s a survivor. If anyone’s gonna get out, it’s him. You’ll see, baby. It’s gonna be okay.”
And Karen kept nodding back and repeating, “I know, I know,” wiping the tears with her sleeve.
They called over and over. What else was there to do? Charlie’s cell phone. His office. Maybe thirty, forty times.
At some point Karen even sniffled back a smile. “You know how mad Charlie gets when I bug him at the office?”
By nine forty-five they had settled onto the couch in the family room. That’s when they heard the car pull up and more doors slamming. Alex and Samantha burst in through the kitchen with a shout. “School’s closed!”
They stuck their heads into the TV room. “You heard what happened?” Alex said.
Karen could barely answer. The sight of them struck terror in her heart. She told them to sit down. They could see that her face was raw and worried. That something was terribly wrong was written all over it.
Samantha sat down across from her. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Daddy took the car in this morning,” Karen said, “for service.”
“So?”
Karen swallowed back a lump, or she was sure she would start to cry. “Afterward,” she paused, “I think he went into the city by train.”
Both kids’ eyes went wide and followed hers, as if drawn, to the wide screen.
“He’s there?” her son asked. “At Grand Central?”
“I don’t know, baby. We haven’t heard from him. That’s what’s so worrisome. He called and said he was on the train. That was eight thirty-four. This happened at eight forty-one. I don’t know….”
Karen was trying so hard to appear positive and strong, trying with all her heart not to alarm them, because she knew with that same unflinching certainty that any moment Charlie would call, tell them he had made it out, that he was okay. So she didn’t even feel the trail of tears carving its way down her cheeks and onto her lap, and Samantha staring at her, jaw parted, about to cry herself. And Alex—her poor, macho Alex, white as parchment—eyes glued to the horrifying plume of smoke elevating into the Manhattan sky.
For a while no one said a word. They just stared, all in their own world between denial and hope. Sam, arms hung loosely around her brother’s neck, her chin resting nervously on his shoulder. Alex, grasping Karen’s hand for the first time in years, watching, waiting for their father’s face to emerge. Paula, elbows on knees, poised to shout and point, Look, there he is! Jump up in glee. Waiting with all the certainty in the world to hear the phone she was sure was about to ring.
Alex turned to Karen. “Dad’s gonna make it out of there? Isn’t he, Mom?”
“Of course he is, baby.” Karen squeezed his hand. “You know your father. If anyone will, it’s him. He’ll make it out.”
That was when they heard a rumble. On the screen the camera shook from another muffled explosion. Onlookers gasped and screamed as a fresh cloud of dense black smoke emerged from the station.
Samantha wailed, “Oh, God …”
Karen felt her stomach fall. She cupped Alex’s fist tightly and squeezed. “Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie …”
“Secondary explosions …” muttered a fire chief coming out of the station, his head shaking with a kind of finality. “There are many, many bodies down there. We can’t even get our people close.”
Around noon
When the call came in, Hauck was on the phone with the NYPD’s Emergency Management Office in the city.
Possible 634. Leaving the scene of an accident. West Street and the Post Road.
All morning long he’d kept a close tab on the mess going on in the city. Panicked people had been calling in all day, unable to reach their loved ones, not knowing what else to do. When the Trade Towers were hit, he’d been working for the department’s Office of Information, and it had been his job for weeks afterward to track down the fates of people unaccounted for—through the hospitals, the wreckage, the network of first responders. Hauck still had friends down there. He stared at the list of Greenwich names he’d taken down: Pomeroy. Bashtar. Grace. O’Connor.
The first time around, out of the hundreds unaccounted for, they had found only two.
“Possible 634, Ty!” the day sergeant buzzed in a second time. Hit and Run. Down on the Post Road, by West Street, near the fast-food outlets and car dealerships.
“Can’t,” Hauck said back to her. “Get Muñoz on it. I’m on something.”
“Muñoz is already on the scene, Lieutenant. It’s a homicide. It seems you got a body down there.”
It took only minutes for Hauck to grab his Grand Corona out of the lot outside, shoot straight up Mason, his top hat flashing, to the top of the avenue by the Greenwich Office Park, then down the Post Road to West Street, across from the Acura dealership.
As he was the head of Violent Crimes in town, this was his call. Mostly his department broke up spats at the high school, the occasional report of a break-in, marital rows. Dead bodies were rare up here in Greenwich.
Stock fraud was a lot more common.
At the bottom of the avenue, four local blue-and-whites had blocked off the busy commercial thoroughfare, their lights ablaze. Traffic was being routed into one lane. Hauck slowed, nodding to a couple of patrolmen he recognized. Freddy Muñoz, one of the detectives on his staff, came over as Hauck got out.
“You gotta be kidding, Freddy.” Hauck shook his head in disbelief. “Today of all days …”
The detective made a grim motion toward a covered mound in the middle of West Street, which intersected the Post Road and cut up to Railroad Avenue and I-95.
“It look like we’re kidding, LT?”
The patrol cars had parked in a way that formed sort of a protective circle СКАЧАТЬ