Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [4]
Done.
He took a deep breath that seemed to grab into the very pit of his stomach. He shivered uncontrollably. Christ, he’d done it. He’d actually goddamn done it!
He’d delivered Green Band’s message and he felt terrific. He wanted to scream out inside the drugstore. More than that, he wished he could leap two feet in the air and punch the sky.
No formal demands had been made.
Not a single clue had been offered as to why Green Band was happening.
Harry Stemkowsky’s heart was still beating loudly as he numbly maneuvered his wheelchair along an aisle lined with colorful deodorants and toiletries, up toward the gleaming soda fountain counter.
The short order cook, Wally Lipsky, a cheerfully mountainous three-hundred-and-ten-pound man, turned from scraping the grill as Stemkowsky and his wheelchair approached. Lipsky’s pink-cheeked face immediately brightened. The semblance of a third or fourth chin appeared out of rolling mounds of neck fat.
“Well, look what Sylvester the Cat musta dragged in offa the street! It’s my man Pennsylvania. Whereyabeen keepin’ yourself, champ? Long time no see.”
Henry Stemkowsky had to smile at the irresistible fat cook, who had a well-deserved reputation as the Green-point neighborhood clown. Hell, he was in the mood to smile at almost anything this morning.
“Oh he-he-here and there, Wally.” Harry Stemkowsky burst into a nervous stutter. “Muh-Manhattan the mo-most part. I been wuh-working up in Manhattan a lot these days.”
Stemkowsky tapped his index finger against the tattered cloth tag sewn into the shoulder of his jacket. The patch said VETS CABS AND MESSENGERS. Harry Stemkowsky was one of seven licensed wheelchair cabbies in New York; three of them worked for Vets in Manhattan.
“Gah-gotta good job. Real job now, Wah-Wally.… Why don’t you make us some breakfast?”
“You got it, Pennsylvania. Cabdriver special comin’ up. You got it my man, anything you want.”
Chapter 3
AS EARLY AS 6:15 that morning, an endless stream of sullen-looking men and women carrying bulging, black briefcases had begun to rise out of the steam-blooming subway station at Broadway and Wall Street.
These were the appointed drones of New York’s financial district; the straight salary employees who understood abstract accounting principles and fine legal points, but perceived little else about the Street and its black magic.
By 7:30, gum-popping secretaries were slouching off the Red and Tan Line buses arriving from Staten Island and Brooklyn. Aside from their habitual gum-chewing, several of the secretaries looked impressively chic, almost elegant that Friday morning.
As the ornate, golden arms on the Trinity Church clock solemnly reached for eight o’clock, every main and side street of the financial district was choked with thick, hypertense pedestrian traffic as well as with buses and honking cabs.
Over nine hundred and fifty thousand people were being melted into less than half a square mile of outrageously expensive real estate; seven solid stone blocks where billions were bought and sold every workday: still the unsurpassed financial capital of the world.
The New York police hadn’t known whether or not to try and stop the morning’s regular migration. Then it was simply too late—the slim possibility had disintegrated in a frantic series of telephone calls between the Commissioner’s office and various powerful precinct chiefs. It had petered out into a nightmare of impossible logistics and mounting panic.
At that moment, a wraithlike black man, Abdul Calvin Mohammud, was very calmly entering the bobbing parade of heads and winter hats on Broad Street, just south of Wall.
As he walked within the spirited crowd, Calvin Mohammud found himself noticing corporate flags waving colorfully from the massive stone buildings.
The flags signaled BBH and Company, the National Bank of North America, Manufacturers Hanover, the Seaman’s Bank. The flags were like crisp sails driven by strong East River winds.
Calvin Mohammud continued up the steep