lot of time chewing the end of an unlit Cuban, as if daring himself to light it. This morning, he had obviously needed a smoke.
“Chicago,” Sully said, his gruff voice even raspier than usual. “How fast can you get to New York?”
Nate paused with the sticky cinnamon bun halfway to his mouth.
“What’s in New York?”
He could hear Sully blow out another lungful of cigar smoke before answering.
“Murder.”
Just after three-thirty in the afternoon, Drake sat in the back of a New York City taxicab, breathing in smoke from the incense the cabbie had been burning and watching the green street signs go by on the way to Grand Central Station. He could have taken a shuttle bus directly from JFK International Airport in Queens to Grand Central in the heart of Manhattan, but Sully’s urgency had been clear, and for once Drake was flush with cash.
He wished only that Sully had been more forthcoming over the phone. Drake had spent his whole life learning how to roll with the punches, and a big part of that had been Sully’s tendency to spring things on him at the last minute. But he didn’t think Sully’s reluctance to go into detail had anything to do with the aging treasure hunter’s usual games. Just before Sully had rushed off the phone, Drake had heard a woman crying in the background. If his old friend and mentor didn’t want to talk about murder, he figured it was because someone else in the room was grieving. Sully would never be accused of being the sensitive type, but neither was he heartless.
A grieving friend also would explain why Sully hadn’t come to the airport to meet him when his plane landed. If he needed Drake for backup for some reason, normally Sully would have wanted to brief him as soon as possible. Instead, he had just asked Drake to meet him under the clock on the main concourse of Grand Central Station.
The cab dropped him off in front of a restaurant called Pershing Square that was practically hidden beneath the elevated Park Avenue Viaduct. Drake paid the cabbie but barely looked at the man, his thoughts running ahead of him. He’d been lucky enough to catch a flight from Chicago within half an hour of talking to Sully on the phone, and throughout the nearly two and a half hours in the air and the duration of the cab ride, he had mostly been able to let his mind drift or focus on other things. But now that he had arrived, he couldn’t help being worried.
Victor Sullivan had practically raised him from his early teens and taught him everything—or nearly everything—he knew about staying alive in the “hard-to-find-acquisitions” business. They’d been all over the world hunting for treasure and antiquities for pretty much anyone who could afford to pay the tab. And in all that time he had never heard Sully sound as grim and weary as he had on the phone.
A taxi driver laid on the horn as Drake hustled across the street. A chilly October wind blasted him, and he shivered, wishing he had a coat. He had left his bags in a locker at JFK, figuring he would be headed back to the airport on his way out of the city, but nothing in there would have helped. Ecuador had been warm and humid. Drake had spent too much time in hot and sticky locales in his life, so he didn’t mind the chilly autumn wind, but it was a rapid shift, like stepping through a door to the other end of the world.
Wouldn’t that make my life easy? he thought. But of course that kind of stuff happened only in science fiction and fantasy stories, where the heroes were all noble and dead wasn’t always forever. Real life had less convenient rules.
Drake hauled open the heavy glass-and-brass door and walked up the pebbled incline between the outer and inner doors. A man with a long, filthy, matted beard and sunken eyes stood to one side wearing a sign announcing the arrival of the End Times, but there was no way to tell if he was celebrating or regretting the moment.
When he stepped into the main concourse—the enormous, ornate chamber that came immediately to mind when he thought of Grand Central Terminal—he made a beeline for the huge clock. He spotted Sully standing beneath it, but the older man was turned away, watching the stairs across the terminal, probably thinking about the baby carriage