The Vanished Man

twenty-three. The C?”
    “No, the full size.”
    “That a good gun. I got myself a Smittie.” He lifted his throwaway sweatshirt and, with a mix of defiance and pride, showed her the brushed silver handle of a Smith & Wesson automatic. “But I’ma get me a Glock like yo’s.”
    So, she reflected, an armed teenager. How would a sergeant handle this situation?
    The car bounced down off the trash can, rear wheels ready to roll.
    Whatever a proper sergeant would say or do, she decided, didn’t matter under the present circumstances. The way she handled it was to give him a solemn nod. “Thanks, homes.” Then the woman with wire added ominously, “Don’t shoot anybody and make me come lookin’ for you. You got that?”
    A wide gold grin.
    Then, snap, into first gear and the gutsy tires burned wormholes into the asphalt. In a few seconds Amelia Sachs was doing sixty.
    “Go, go, go,” she muttered to herself, focused on the faint blur of tan in the distance. The Chevy wobbled like crazy but it drove more or less straight. Sachs struggled to get the Motorola headset on. She called Central to report the pursuit and redirect the backup along this route.
    Accelerating fast, braking hard . . . the streets of crowded Harlem aren’t made for high-speed pursuits. Still, the Conjurer was in the same traffic as she was—and he wasn’t half the driver. Slowly she closed the gap. Then he turned toward a school yard, in which kids were playing half-court basketball and whacking softballs into fake outfields. The playground wasn’t crowded; the gate was padlocked shut and anybody wishing to play here either had to squeeze through the gap like a contortionist or be willing to scale a twenty-foot chain-link fence.
    The Conjurer, however, simply gunned the engine and went though the gate. The kids scattered and he narrowly missed some of them as he sped up again to take out a second gate on the far side.
    Sachs hesitated but decided not to follow—not in an unstable car with youngsters around. She sped around the block, praying she’d pick him up on the other side, then skidded around the corner and stopped.
    No sign of him.
    She didn’t see how he’d gotten away. He’d been out of sight for only ten seconds or so as she made thesweep around the playground and the school. And the only other escape route was a short dead-end street, terminating in a wall of bushes and small saplings. Beyond that, she could see the elevated Harlem River Drive, beyond which was just a scuzzy mud bank leading down to the river.
    So, he got away. . . . And all I’ve got to show for the pursuit is five thousand bucks of bodywork. Man. . . .
    Then a voice crackled. “All units in the vicinity of Frederick Douglass and One-five-three Street, be advised of a ten-five-four.”
    Car accident with probable injuries.
    “Vehicle has gone into the Harlem River. Repeat, we have a vehicle in the water.”
    Could it be him? she wondered. “Crime Scene Five Eight Eight Five. Further to that ten-five-four. You have the make of the vehicle? K.”
    “Mazda or Toyota. Late model. Beige.”
    “Okay, Central, believe that’s the subject vehicle of the Central Park pursuit. I’m ten-eight-four at the scene. Out.”
    “Roger, Five Eight Eight Five. Out.”
    Sachs sped her Camaro to the end of the cul-desac and parked on the sidewalk. She climbed out as an ambulance and Emergency Services Unit truck arrived and rocked slowly through the brush, which had been crushed by the speeding Mazda. She followed, walking carefully over the rubble. As they broke from the vegetation she saw a cluster of decrepit shanties and lean-tos. Dozens of homeless, mostly men. The place was muddy and filled with brush and garbage, dumped appliances, stripped, rusting cars.
    Apparently the Conjurer, expecting to find a road on the other side of the bushes, had gone through the brush fast. She saw the panicked skid marks as he slid uncontrollably through the slick muck, careened off a shack, knocking it apart, then went off a rotting pier into the river.
    Two ESU officers helped the residents of the shack out of the wreckage—they were unhurt—while others scanned the river for any sign of the driver. She radioed Rhyme and Sellitto and told them what had happened and asked the detective to call in a priority request for a crime scene rapid response bus.
    “They get him, Amelia?” Sellitto asked. “Tell me they got him.”
    Looking at the slick of oil and gasoline