The Vanished Man

cop, a med tech, an ESU officer, a reporter, a soft-clothed detective, a passerby or homeless man—and they simply didn’t know it.
    •   •   •
    Through the yellowing window in the interview room Andrew Constable could see the grim face of a large black guard peer in and look at him. The face disappeared as the man stepped away from the door.
    Constable rose from the metal table and walked past his lawyer to the window. He looked outside and saw two guards in the hall, speaking gravely to each other.
    All right then.
    “What’s that?” Joseph Roth asked his client.
    “Nothing,” Constable responded. “I didn’t say anything.”
    “Oh, I thought you did.”
    “No.”
    Though he wondered if he had. Made some comment, uttered a prayer.
    He returned to the table, where the lawyer looked up from a pad of yellow foolscap that contained a half-dozen names and phone numbers, which Constable’s associates in Canton Falls had just provided in responseto their questions about what Weir might have planned, where he might be.
    Roth looked uneasy. They’d just learned that a man with a rifle had made an attempt on Grady’s life in front of the building a few minutes ago. But it hadn’t been Weir, who was still unaccounted for. The lawyer said, “I’m worried that Grady’ll be too spooked to deal with us. I think we should call him at home and tell him what we’ve found.” Tapping the sheets. “Or at least give this stuff to that detective. What was his name? Bell, right?”
    “That’s it,” Constable said.
    Moving his pudgy finger over the sheet of names and numbers, Roth said, “You think anybody here’ll know something specific about Weir? That’s what they’ll want, something specific.”
    Constable leaned forward and looked at the list. Then at his lawyer’s watch. He shook his head slowly. “I doubt it,” he said.
    “You . . . You doubt it?”
    “Yeah. See this first number?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s the dry cleaner on Harrison Street in Canton Falls. And the one below it’s the IGA. The next one’s the Baptist church. And those names?” the prisoner continued. “Ed Davis, Brett Samuels, Joe James Watkins?”
    “Right,” Roth said. “Jeddy Barnes’ associates.”
    Constable gave a chuckle. “Gosh no. They’re all made up.”
    “What?” Roth frowned.
    Leaning close to his lawyer, the prisoner stared intothe man’s confused eyes. “I’m saying that those names and numbers’re fake.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    Constable whispered, “Of course you don’t, you pathetic fucking Jew,” and slammed his fists into the side of the shocked lawyer’s face before Roth could raise his arms to protect himself.

Chapter Forty-one
    Andrew Constable was a strong man, strong from hiking to remote hunting and fishing grounds, from dressing deer and sawing bones, from chopping wood.
    Paunchy Joe Roth was no match for him. The lawyer tried to rise and call for help but Constable struck him hard in the throat. The man’s shout became a gurgling sound.
    The prisoner pulled him to the floor and began pummeling the bleeding man with his cuffed fists. In a moment Roth was unconscious, his face swollen like a melon. Constable dragged him back to the table and propped him up on it, his back to the door. If one of the guards happened to glance in again it would look as if he were reading the papers, head down. Constable bent down, pulled off one of the lawyer’s shoes and socks and wiped the blood off the table as best he could and covered the rest with documents and pads of paper. He’d kill the lawyer later. For now, for a few minutes at least, he needed this innocent-looking tableau.
    A few minutes—until he was free.
    Freedom . . .
    Which was the whole point of Erick Weir’s plan.
    Constable’s best friend, Jeddy Barnes, the second in command of the Patriot Assembly, had hired Weir not to kill Grady but to break the prisoner out of the notoriously secure Manhattan Detention Center, transport him to freedom over the Bridge of Sighs and ultimately into the New England wilderness, where the Assembly could resume its mission to wage war against the impure, the unclean, the ignorant. To rid the land of blacks, gays, Jews, Hispanics, foreigners—the “Them” that Constable railed against in his weekly lectures at the Patriot Assembly and in the secret websites subscribed to by the thousands of right-thinking citizens around the country.
    Constable now rose, walked to the