The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [93]
Late that night, he wandered around his old neighborhood in Harlem. Starting at 119th Street, he headed west across Morningside Park, which was alive with crack and other secretive drug deals. Teenage dealers were now using electronic pagers to signal one another. A dozen crack houses lined a single block.
He continued down Broadway toward Ninety-sixth, into the so-called gentrified neighborhoods, what the young whites were beginning to call Sohar, which stood for “southern Harlem.”
Occasionally, people waved to Parker as he passed. He was known to be a cop, but he and his brother, Marcus, had been part of the neighborhood for so long, even that didn’t matter.
Isiah Parker smiled at some of the familiar neighborhood faces. For others, he was cool and expressionless. He knew how to play the hometown crowds. He and Marcus had always known how to play the Harlem street audience.
He had a flat, cold feeling inside, brought on by the realization that he couldn’t hide like this for much longer. A numbness edged into his body. He would have welcomed the rage that had driven him for the last several months but the knifing anger wouldn’t come. He had to get it back—one more time at least.
All the best plans—the constant surveillance cars, the other forms of harassment—were just more police games to Alexandre St.-Germain. St.-Germain had seen the eye of combat before. He had survived gang wars in Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, and Macao. He was always protected; a step, several steps ahead of everyone else, including the police.
Isiah Parker ducked inside a neighborhood coffee shop on 106th Street, across a wide stretch of Broadway from the Olympia Theatre. He sat at the counter with a brimming cup of bitter black coffee, and a stale sugar doughnut. He watched the street, but saw nothing to alarm him.
The coffee shops are all going to the Orientals lately, he thought. New York considered the Chinese and Koreans “good little workers,” but they made shit coffee. There wasn’t much left for black people.
Neither of the two young Korean counter boys said boo to him. They probably looked down on black people, too. Parker left them a tip anyway, and he went back out on the street.
Something was bound to happen soon. Something was definitely going down. It had begun with the kidnapping of Sarah McGinniss’s son. Also, the late-night phone call to Stefanovitch. Thinking about the incidents, he had an image of somebody walking up and shooting him in the back. It almost seemed inevitable now.
He didn’t want to take any chances that someone might be following. He played subway games from 103rd Street down to West Seventy-second and Broadway.
He was the last one on a crowded, buzzing subway car. Then he would suddenly jump off at a stop. He’d get back on just before the electric doors closed.
He was finally pretty sure he wasn’t being followed. At the corner of Seventy-second Street and Broadway, he took a Checker cab crosstown, to the East Side.
He made the cab stop inside Central Park. He got out and walked the rest of the way.
Nobody was following. Or they were so brilliant, so good at this, that it didn’t much matter.
At eleven-thirty, he rang a tarnished gold doorbell inside the dreary, semidarkened foyer of an East Side brownstone. Parker rang the bell a second time. There was no working intercom in the grim foyer, just the rusted shell of one.
By midnight, Parker was in bed with a model named Tanya Richardson.
Tanya was a girl he’d been seeing on and off for the past few months. He felt safe in the East Side apartment. Almost no one knew about him and Tanya. The few who did, Parker knew he could trust…
90
AT ONE-THIRTY in the morning, Parker lay awake in bed thinking about everything that still had to be done to get at St.-Germain. He was feeling paranoid and jumpy in spite of the late hour. Finally, he decided to take a walk. One last check around. Then maybe he could sleep.
As quietly as he could, he rose from the bed. It was a Byzantine, frilly affair with pipes and sideboards painted