The Whites: A Novel Read Free Page A

now, I have to get up in three hours.”
    “How about you take a half?”
    “I can’t.”
    “All right, just, you know, you’ve been here before, worse comes to worse, you’ll have a tough day tomorrow but it won’t kill you.”
    “When are you coming home?”
    “I’ll try and duck out early.”
    “I hate this, Billy.”
    “I know you do.” His cell began to vibrate again; Rollie Towers on line two. “Hang on a sec.”
    “I really hate it.”
    “Just hang on . . .” Then, switching over: “Hey, what’s up.”
    “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”
    “Fuck you, what do you got.”
    “Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” said the Wheel.
    By the time Billy and most of his squad made it to Penn Station and then to the long, greasy, lower-level arcade that connected the Long Island–bound commuter trains to the subway platforms at the opposite end, the cops who were on the scene first, both Transit and LIRR undercovers, had taken control of the situation better than he would have expected. Not sure what to preserve of the one-hundred-yard blood trail, they had cordoned it all off with tape and garbage cans like a slalom run. They had also miraculously managed to round up most of the sodden homebound revelers who had been standing under the track information board when the assault occurred, corralling them into a harshly lit three-sided waiting room off the main concourse. Taking a quick peek into the room, Billy saw the majority of his potential witnesses sitting on hard wooden benches gape-mouthed and snoring, chins tilted to the ceiling like hungry baby birds.
    “Looks like the guy got slashed under the board here, took off running, and ran out of gas by the subway,” Gene Feeley announced, his tie unknotted and dangling like Sinatra at last call.
    Billy was surprised to see Feeley there at all, let alone first detective on the scene. But then again, this was Feeley’s thing, the old-timer usually disdaining any run unless there were at least three dead or a shot cop, front-page stuff.
    “Where’s the body?” Billy thinking he’d be lucky to see his kids by dinnertime.
    “Just follow the yellow brick road,” Feeley said, pointing to the red-brown sneaker prints that marked the way like bloody dance-step instructions. “It’s one for the scrapbooks, I’ll tell you that.”
    They arrived at the subway turnstiles just as a southbound express pulled into the station, more pie-eyed revelers disembarking onto the platform, ho-shitting, laughing, stumbling, blowing vuvuzelas , everyone assuming the wide-eyed stiff was just drunk except for the two middle-aged detectives from the Crime Scene Unit who had opted to take the subway to work, their forensics kits making them look like down-at-the-heels salesmen.
    Billy snagged a wandering Transit detective. “Listen, we can’t have trains stopping here right now. Can you call your boss?”
    “Sarge, it’s Penn Station.”
    “I know where we are, but I don’t want a fresh herd of drunks stomping all over my scene every five minutes.”
    The victim lay on his side, neck and torso compressed into a hunch, his left arm and leg thrust straight out before him as if he were trying to kick his own fingertips. It looked to Billy as if the guy had been trying to jump the turnstile, bled out mid-vault, then froze like that, dying in midair before dropping like a rock.
    “Looks like a high hurdler just fell off the front of a Wheaties box,” Feeley said, then wandered off.
    As a CSU tech began teasing the wallet out of the victim’s formerly sky-blue jeans, Billy stopped marveling at his live-action lava cast and took his first good look at his face. Mid-twenties, with wide open, startled blue eyes, arched pencil-thin eyebrows, milk-white skin, and jet-colored hair, femininely handsome to the point of perversity.
    Billy stared and stared, thinking, Can’t be. “Is his name Bannion?”
    “Hold the phone,” the tech said, pulling out the