“Which one?”
“The black one, five rows up.”
I pointed up into the sky. “That one?”
It was getting dark and snowing harder, nearing blizzard conditions again. We’d braved nearly thirty blocks to get to Chuck’s parking garage in the Meatpacking District. The city was mostly deserted at street level, except for the fancy Gansevoort Hotel we’d passed on Ninth. It was still lit up like a Christmas tree, and there was a huge crowd of people outside trying to get in. Several large doormen were shaking their heads. Everyone was yelling. We passed by and tried to ignore it.
“No, the one next to that one,” said Chuck.
I squinted. “Ah, wow, now that is one nice truck. Too bad it’s fifty feet off the ground.”
We were in front of a vertical parking garage, right at the corner of Gansevoort and Tenth, at the entrance to the West Side Highway. The perfect location for making a quick getaway from New York, assuming your getaway car wasn’t suspended in space five stories up.
Chuck growled and swore again. “I told those guys to bring my truck down to the first level.”
The parking structure was a set of open platforms—each platform just big enough to hold a car—suspended between vertical metal beams that closely stacked the cars against the wall of the building behind it. Each set of vertical metal beams had hydraulically operated lifts that could raise and lower the platforms to let operators get the cars off, but of course the lift controls needed power to operate.
“Nobody’s going to come now. Couldn’t we hot-wire a different truck? Something on the road?”
The snow had completely covered all the cars at ground level.
“No way. We need my truck. Nothing else is going to get us out of here, not with all this snow and ice.” He looked longingly up into the falling snow at his baby. “Land Rover Wolf ’94 XD 110, under-armor, snorkel, heavy-duty winch, thirty-six-inch IROK Radial snow tires—”
“It is pretty,” I agreed. “Pretty damn high up. Even if we got it down, do you think it could climb that snowbank?” I pointed toward the eight-foot-high pile of snow and ice lining Tenth Avenue. It was the only obstacle to getting onto the West Side Highway from the garage lot, but it was a formidable one.
He studied the pile. “One way or the other. But we can’t just crash it down from up there. Not even the Wolf could survive a drop like that.”
“We better get going.” The temperature had dropped, and I was shivering hard. “Let’s think about it. At least it hasn’t been stolen.”
Chuck took one last look at his truck and then turned around. We scrambled out of the parking lot and started back up Ninth. The crowd outside the Gansevoort had mostly dispersed in the coming darkness. As we passed, several of the people still outside watched us closely, clearly interested in the backpacks we were carrying. Chuck put his hand in the pocket of his parka, gripping his .38, and stared back at them, but nothing happened. Breathing a sigh of relief as we left them behind, we passed the Apple Store. All the windows were broken, and snow had swept inside.
“A funny time to decide you need a new iPad,” I laughed. Then I noticed something else. “This snow’s getting deep.”
We were walking right up the middle of Ninth Avenue. All day we’d been walking up and down the big avenues, and the plows had been rumbling back and forth. The snow hadn’t gotten more than ankle deep on the plowed streets. We were now up to our calves.
I squinted into the gathering darkness but couldn’t see any headlights coming our way.
“If they’ve stopped plowing, city services must be totally screwed,” observed Chuck. “This is going to get ugly.”
“Maybe it’s just a slowdown?”
“Maybe,” replied Chuck without conviction.
We decided we better grab what we could from Chuck’s restaurants before somebody else did, so we wound our way back uptown, stopping at the one nearest our place and packing our bags with as much high-calorie canned and preserved food as we could find.
When we got back outside, it was nearly pitch black. Slogging the rest of the way back up to Twenty-Fourth, I had visions of the keys not working, of being trapped outside. The cold was unbelievable. We could die out here. My steps quickened.
By the time we arrived at the back door of our building, I was frozen. As Chuck fumbled the key into the lock, the door opened from the inside, and Tony’s face appeared, smiling at us goofily. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys!”
“Not as glad as we are to see you!”
Chuck and I had our headlamps on, but Tony had been sitting in the dark. We asked him why. So he wouldn’t attract attention, he said, and we left it at that.
Tony stayed behind to lock up and clean the floor, telling us to get upstairs and that everyone was worried sick. In a jolly mood we began climbing the stairs, pulling open our layers of clothing and taking off our hats and gloves, enjoying the comparative warmth and the thought of a hot meal and coffee and a warm bed.
Reaching the sixth floor, we stopped, and taking a deep breath, I opened the door. I expected to hear Luke come running, and I jumped out to surprise him.
Instead, I was met by a mob of scared, unknown faces. A large homeless man was spread out on the couch outside my apartment door, and a mother and two young children cowered on the Borodins’ couch. At least a dozen more people I didn’t know were crowded into the hallway. A young man wrapped in one of Richard’s expensive duvets got up and extended his hand toward me, but Chuck burst through the door and pointed his .38 right in the kid’s face.
“What have you done with Susie and Lauren?”
The kid held his hands up and gestured at Chuck’s apartment. “Everything’s fine. They’re in there.”
Behind us, Tony came charging up the stairs. “Wait, wait, I forgot!”
Chuck was still pointing his gun at the kid’s face as Tony appeared in the doorway behind us, huffing and puffing. He put a hand on Chuck’s gun, lowering it. “I let these guys in.”
“You did what?” yelled Chuck. “Tony, that is not your decision to make—”
“No, it was my decision,” said Susie, coming out of their apartment. She bear-hugged Chuck.
Lauren appeared in the doorway, with Luke at her feet. She ran to embrace me. “I thought something had happened to you,” she whispered in my ear between happy sobs.
“I’m fine, baby, I’m fine.”
With a deep breath, she released me, and I leaned down to kiss Luke, who was hugging one of my legs.
“We okay?” asked the kid, his hands still in the air. He looked like he’d had a rough time of it.
“I guess so,” Chuck replied, putting his gun away. “What’s your name?”
“Damon,” said the kid, reaching out to shake my hand. “Damon Indigo.”