The Tracker Read online

  “Jill hasn’t been home for a week.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ve been taking care of her things. Just forgot the key.”

  “I’m home all the time. I haven’t heard a single footstep up there. I’m calling the cops.”

  This was a tough nut to crack. I sensed not to push.

  “No need. I’m out. Have a good night.”

  I walked down the steps, and disappeared around the building and out of sight. So that was two swings and two misses. Moving on to Plan C, I looked up at the building. I now at least had a frame of reference of where Jill’s apartment was located. She lived directly above the lady with a corner unit. I had to get inside. I had not come all this way to New York City to lose this lead. Unfortunately, it was going to take something more creative to get into her apartment.

  I spotted a white repair van parked on the curb. I looked back to the building, toward the alley, where I noted the metal emergency stairs winding all the way up to the top of the building. Okay, I was getting somewhere now. I walked quickly up the street, next to the repair van. Peered in the passenger window. Bingo. A toolbox was sitting on the floorboard of the van. After confirming there was no one on the sidewalk either direction, I pulled the twisted paper clips out of my pocket and stuck them in the lock. Worked a jiggle motion, like I had over a hundred times in my life, and lifted the handle to pull the door open. I grabbed a socket wrench and some duct tape from the toolbox. After shutting the door, I circled to the front of the van and popped the hood. I had the caps off within seconds, wires pulled, and was working the socket wrench until I’d freed up a spark plug.

  I shut the hood gently, wrapped the spark plug in a shirt from my backpack. Then I laid the shirt and spark plug on the concrete and smashed the white ceramic component into sharp little pieces with the socket wrench.

  I found the dark alley behind Jill’s building again.

  The corner units had windows to the front street and more windows to the side alley. The metal emergency stairs were attached to the building, but they did not extend all the way to the ground unless the stairs were released from above. I would have to find a way to get to the first set of stairs.

  I climbed up onto a filthy metal dumpster and almost passed out from the smell inside. Among random trash bags and boxes, it looked like a bag of dirty diapers had burst wide open. I balanced on the edge of the dumpster, peered up. I would have to make a flying leap to catch the bottom of the emergency stairs and pull my way up. Which also meant I’d have to chance missing and dropping twelve feet to the hard pavement.

  I had to move fast, before the smell made me pass out.

  One. Two. Three. Leap.

  My right hand caught the metal railing, my left hand missed. I dangled by one arm for just a moment, then swung my body to get my other hand up and onto the stairs. With both hands secure, I quickly tugged my body weight up to the first landing. I was right outside the crazy lady’s apartment window. The curtains were slightly parted. I was very careful to not make a sound. I could see the flicker of the TV set in a dark room. I kept moving. Quiet with every soft step, up the stairwell to the third level, where I squatted right outside a dark window to what I suspected was Jill’s apartment unit. There was a light on inside, near the front door.

  I quickly pulled my backpack off my shoulders. I used the flashlight on my phone and searched every corner of the window pane. I spotted no tiny security boxes or wires anywhere. If the unit had an alarm, it was not on the window. I began peeling off strips of duct tape. First, I made a big X on the window with strips, then placed a big plus sign on top of the X, followed by a thick duct tape border around the outside. I had one shot at this. I couldn’t break the window glass with multiple loud blows, like with a hammer, and chance having large shards of broken glass fall everywhere. I needed a quick explosion.

  I unwrapped the small pieces of white ceramic from the broken spark plug. Ninja Rocks was what we call them on the streets. A tiny handful of these bad boys could break a car window in a split second, shatter it into a million pieces with a simple toss. We used them to do snatch-and-grab jobs with purses, laptops, cash, anything that was left on the front seats of cars in the parking lot at the mall. We could be in and out within three seconds. The ceramic material was a harder material than the glass. If you got caught with Ninja Rocks in your pocket by the cops, they knew exactly what you were doing.

  I took a step back, found the right angle and threw the Ninja Rocks at the window. Bam. Like magic. The window shattered. A billion tiny pebbles of glass. But because of the duct tape, it held mostly together, so there was no loud noise, no shattering. I simply had to peel off the tape and the shattered glass together, carefully, which I was doing now. All the way to the edges until the glass was fully removed. I climbed inside.

  The apartment was small but neat and well decorated. A tiny kitchen, tiny living room, tiny bedroom. By flipping through the mail on the kitchen counter, I confirmed that it was indeed Jill Becker’s place.

  It did not look like anyone had been inside the apartment. Nothing seemed out of place. I assumed it was exactly as Jill had left it when she caught a plane to Texas earlier in the week. I found pictures on the shelves of Jill with girlfriends. One with folks that looked like her parents. I made my way to the bedroom, as lightly as possible, as I knew crazy lady was right below. I turned on the light to her tidy bedroom and found a queen-sized bed neatly made. I searched her dresser and nightstand drawers, finding nothing unusual. Then I made my way over to a small roll-top desk shoved into the corner by the window and pulled open to the top. Jill was neat and organized. There was mail, magazines, books, notepads and cards. The things you’d expect to find on a desk in a bedroom. I sifted through everything, but found nothing suspicious until I spotted a yellow notepad by the base of the white desk lamp. It was the name and phone number at the bottom right corner of the page that caught my attention.

  Devin Nicks.

  Our suspicions were correct. Congressman Mitchell’s chief of staff had hired Jill. I plucked the page from the notepad, examined it more closely. It was hard to believe. Congressman Mitchell’s team had thrown a wild, last second Hail Mary to try to win the election.

  I folded the paper, put it in my pocket, and turned out all the lights. Then I carefully exited the apartment along the same outside metal stairwell.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Monday, 1:36 a.m.

  New York City

  21 hours, 24 minutes to Election Day

  My head was reeling when I stepped onto the cold sidewalk outside the apartment building. That’s when I spotted him, dressed in a dark trench coat. The gray-bearded man was standing across the street, in the reflection of a café light, but in the shadows. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what to do. Walk straight up and introduce myself? Run from him? But then I reminded myself that he’d likely taken my mom, so the decision suddenly became very easy.

  We needed to talk. Right now.

  I stepped off the curb, into the street, walking toward him with purpose.

  He quickly turned the corner, slipped behind the building, and was gone.

  So I took off sprinting, bounded up the sidewalk, turned that same corner at full speed.

  I stopped and quickly scanned every direction. No sign of him. I ran forward, peered into building shop windows, car windshields, listening for engines starting up, the sound of footsteps on concrete. Nothing. I spun around in a slow circle, staring up at the windows of all of the commercial and residential buildings on the block around me. He’d just vanished. Impossible. Or did he? Had I really seen him? Or was I now seeing visions? Sleep deprivation was known to make the mind do crazy things. But this seemed so real.

  I screamed in frustration. Just let it loose at the top of my lungs.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  My yell echoed in the streets. I got a quick “shut-the-hell-up” in reply from a friendly Brooklyn neighbor with an open window nearby.

  But no an
swer from the gray-bearded man.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Monday, 2:11 a.m.

  New York City

  21 hours, 49 minutes to Election Day

  I spent the night inside the historic Trinity Church on Wall Street near Broadway. I only had five hours to kill before I needed to be somewhere close by, so I didn’t even want to bother with a hotel or motel. Why risk possibly being identified by a front desk clerk when I wouldn’t be sleeping anyway? Of course, Trinity Church was not opened to the public at two in the morning, but it wasn’t on lockdown, either. I managed to find my way inside through a side door and now sat on a third row wooden pew inside the enormous sanctuary. It was dark but there was enough peripheral light to marvel at the massive stained-glass windows that stretched nearly to the sky. People had been worshipping in this building for hundreds of years. I figured with my mom’s fate in the hands of a mysterious stranger, deadly assassins on the prowl, and the FBI intent on hunting me down, there was probably no better place for me to spend a few hours right now than on my knees inside a church.

  It was dead quiet. Almost too quiet, after two straight days with so much noise in my head.

  I pulled out my collection of photos from my backpack, began flipping through them. Some were when she was just a kid, holding me as a baby. A baby having a baby. There were many others, much more recent, including a photo of the two of us sitting on a red checkered blanket at a 4th of July festival this past summer. My mom looked so frail in the photo, but still happy. My mom said she had no reason to frown. The cancer could have her. God had already answered her prayers. We were together again.

  My eyes grew moist. I wondered where she was right now, at this very moment. Was she okay? Had they threatened her? Hurt her?

  My breathing grew heavy.

  I swallowed. But I couldn’t stop it.

  Before I knew it, the tears started trickling down.

  She was the only family I had. I could not lose her.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Monday, 6:55 a.m.

  New York City

  17 hours, 5 minutes to Election Day

  I waited in Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan, with a view of the Statue of Liberty. It was five minutes to seven on Monday morning, the eve of Election Day. The sun was just up and the city was rolling out of bed, yawning, stretching and getting its day started. A few folks were out, taking early morning walks, some with dogs, others with coffee and newspapers. I avoided those with newspapers. The tours of Lady Liberty nearby wouldn’t begin for another hour. I was busy working the crick out of my neck from a night on a hard wooden pew. I’d managed to slip out unnoticed before dawn, before the clergy arrived.

  Ten minutes ago, I’d texted Josh, my old roommate at CU, the friend who had recruited me onto this disastrous tracker assignment in the first place. I saw on Josh’s Twitter feed that he was in New York City with his team today, working a big political function for a New York senatorial candidate. He was staying downtown at the W Hotel just a few blocks away. I’d called the hotel first thing, but they could not or would not tell me which individual room belonged to Josh. Since I couldn’t just sit around in the hotel lobby all day hoping for a chance encounter with my old roommate, I decided to take the risk and text Josh.

  Need to see you. ASAP. Battery Park, Bosque Fountain. - Clyde Josh wouldn’t recognize my phone number, but he would know the text was from me. Clyde was a nickname we’d called each other regularly back in our campus days. It came from the name of the funny orangutan in the old Clint Eastwood comedy Every Which Way But Loose and the famous Eastwood line, “Right turn, Clyde.” We must have watched that movie two dozen times our freshman year while playing poker and drinking too much cheap beer.

  Thankfully, Josh replied almost immediately. Showing he knew it was me.

  I’ll be there in ten minutes.

  I sat nervously on a cool bench in the park. It was a very crisp 45 degrees. I had my black Yankees cap on, bill pulled down tight, headphones on, head bopping slowly up and down, even though I didn’t currently have any music playing. Just an act. I spotted Josh walking up the sidewalk. I’d recognize that awkward lanky gait anywhere. He was tall, about six-five, and always walked with his shoulders slumped forward. He wore a black Colorado Rockies sweatshirt. Josh loved baseball but was one of the most uncoordinated human beings that I’d ever been around. He practically pulled a muscle every time he did routine tasks like unloading the dishwasher. He was my age, but looked ten years older because he was already prematurely balding on top.

  He slowed near the fountain, began looking around.

  I was sitting on a park bench twenty feet in front of him. Right under his nose. He did not recognize me. If one of my best friends couldn’t spot me right out in the open, hopefully neither could anyone else.

  I slipped the headphones down.

  “Josh,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the water fountain.

  His head whipped back around. He looked over at me for a second, puzzled, then seemed to put it together. He stepped over, I stood. We exchanged an awkward hug.

  “I can’t believe it,” Josh said quietly, shaking his head. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.”

  “Well, here I am,” I said, with an edge. I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad to see me. I didn’t really trust Josh right now. I needed answers.

  “Sam, what happened out there?”

  “You tell me.”

  His forehead wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

  “Josh, don’t play dumb with me. You got me mixed up in this!”

  For a second, he looked defiant. But then he swallowed, his face drooping. “I didn’t mean to, I swear. I had no idea any of this would happen. I promise you that.”

  “I don’t care about your promises. Tell me why. Why did you call me for this job?”

  He shifted his weight. “Ted called me up, said he had a new client. That he needed someone new for a special assignment. Said it could mean a lot of money, that he’d share if I could help him find the right guy. This client was not okay with who Ted currently had tracking on the campaign trail. He wanted someone brand new. Someone he could vet and hand pick. Someone who wasn’t so interconnected with the rest of the team. Someone who was really resourceful. A risk taker, a loner. He had all these specific requirements. Ted said it would pay really well. I thought of you. I knew you needed the money, Sam. For school, for your mom. So I turned in a file I’d put together on you, your background, your skill set, my recommendation. A few weeks later, Ted called me back and said the client wanted you. That I should set it up, whatever it took.”

  “And you didn’t think this was information I needed to know?”

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t say anything. It was part of the deal.”

  “So you just took the money and put me out there in the war zone?”

  “I didn’t know there was more to it. I swear, Sam. I would have never done it had I known.”

  “Who was the client, Josh?”

  “I don't know. Ted said I couldn’t know.”

  “Come on, man. You have to have some idea. Was it someone from Congressman Mitchell’s team?”

  “I swear, I don’t know. When all of this hit the fan, I panicked and called Ted. But I never talked to him to get any answers. And the next thing I know, he’s…well, he’s dead.”

  I could see the leery look in his eye. “And you think I actually killed him?”

  He paused, unsure. I was flabbergasted. He actually thought I’d killed him. I didn’t even know this guy anymore. The Josh I knew was long gone. DC had already changed him.

  “Come on, Josh! Get serious. I didn’t kill anyone. But I’ve got plenty of people out there right now trying to kill me. I’ve got the Feds on CNN telling the whole world that I’m a killer. Someone has even kidnapped my mom. I’m living a nightmare right now because of you.”

  Josh seemed shocked. “You really didn’t have anything to do with Rick or Ted
?”

  “Hell no! I mean, I was with them. But someone else put the bullets in them. And then they tried to kill me.”

  “Who has your mom?”

  I wanted to punch him. “I don’t know! Are you listening to me? I need your help.”

  Josh’s eyes suddenly widened. He took a peek to his right. He turned back to me, lowered his voice even more. “You’ve got to get out of here, Sam. Right now.”

  I felt a flash of panic. “Why?”

  Josh’s face went pale. “The FBI will be here any minute.”

  I cursed. “How do you know?”

  His face dropped even further. “I called them. Right after you texted. I’m sorry. They met with me one-on-one yesterday. They have a pretty clear case against you, Sam. Security photos. Prints. The works. I didn’t want to believe it, but they had even me convinced. I’m sorry. I realize now, I was wrong. You’ve got to go. Now. They asked me to stall you as long as possible.”

  I peered over his shoulder, spotted the first two agents. They were already here, only thirty yards away. They were walking quickly up the sidewalk, wearing trench coats and sunglasses. It wasn’t bright enough yet for sunglasses. They had already honed in on us standing near the water fountain.

  Josh followed my glare. “I’m sorry, man. I really am.”

  I ignored him, even though I wanted to take a swing at him. I glanced to my left. Two more agents. Twenty yards. Circling in from behind. Were more coming? I wasn’t going to wait around to count them. I turned, leapt over a curb and sprinted through moist grass toward the water. Racing away from both sets of agents, I did not spot any agents directly in front of me. I hit the sidewalk next to the water, raced past a female jogger. I took my first peek back. I spotted all four agents at a dead sprint in pursuit. I hit the edge of Battery Park, cut through a parking lot, near the Staten Island Ferry dock. A NYPD police car suddenly appeared right in front of me, screeching to a halt, its lights flashing.