Several hours later, Emily and the team and I were just east of East 78th Street and Cherokee Place, alongside John Jay Park.
I’d never been to the park before or even heard of it. The buildings that formed a kind of horseshoe around it were nice ones, I saw. The park and playground were empty, but I could easily see it on the weekends being packed with kids and nannies. It was an upscale leafy enclave that reminded me a little of the famous Gramercy Park.
What wasn’t looking very upscale was the silver Volvo SUV that had jumped the curb on 78th and plowed into a fire hydrant and utility box and the wrought-iron fence surrounding the park.
The Volvo was now just a crumpled mass of metal and broken glass. The air bags had all deployed, but the hydrant and a huge dislocated section of the fence had gone through the car all the way to the backseat. Everybody in the car had died in an unimaginably horrible way.
Three more dead, I thought, sickened and angry and getting angrier. I’d heard that an old woman being transported out of Sloan Kettering had gone into cardiac arrest, which made the body count at least four. I thought of all the stores we had passed in our search for the EMP devices. Block after block of owners standing there mute and devastated in front of the darkened doorways of their nail salons and dry cleaners and restaurants and grocery stores, their lives and livelihoods in tatters.
All these poor people. I suddenly felt incredibly tired. And what was more frustrating was that we couldn’t help them. We were supposed to prevent these things, protect people, save them. And we weren’t doing it. We weren’t doing a damn thing.
The search for the NNEMPs had come down to the most basic footwork—i.e., walking to every building in the devastated area and asking supers and staff if they had received any strange deliveries. We’d been doing it all day to the tune of nada progress. The needle was still hiding in the haystack. If there even was a needle.
Emily came over as I sat on the curb by the park’s entrance and cracked open a bottle of water.
“How many injured, you figure?” I said up at her after a long sip. “How many dead?”
I suddenly chucked the half-filled water bottle in my hand as hard as I could into the middle of the street.
“And why the hell is this happening?!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
I was losing it a little, I knew. Maybe more than a little. I was beyond frustrated, beyond worried. I’d been hitting it hard for the last couple of days. Watching the mayor get shot was alone enough to give anyone a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
This whole situation was just so freaking insane!
“I know you’re angry, Mike,” Emily said calmly, after a beat. “We all are, but unfortunately, anger will get us nowhere.”
“Yeah, well, neither is calm, cool, and collected, Emily, if you haven’t noticed,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to try raging pissed-off for a bit. Feel free to join me at any time.”
That’s when Doyle ran at me from across the street, hollering into his radio.
“That was from a uniform who knows the area,” Doyle cried. “He said some super said some kind of device was installed recently on the roof of his building on East Eighty-First, just two blocks from here. He said it’s a metal box that looks burned. That’s what we’re looking for, right?”
Emily and I exchanged a glance.
“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” she said as she offered me a hand.