Charges Read Online Free Page B

blue umbrella had cracked against a black Cadillac Escalade, scratching a deep gouge in its lustrous paint. Vincenzo slipped in the morass of watery hot dogs and fought to keep his footing. A few feet ahead, a portly man went down, dragging two women with him. They floundered on the cement sidewalk, splattering themselves with a colorful mixture of mustard, ketchup, and relish. Vincenzo almost laughed at the sight, but he was still in the middle of the splash zone, and he didn’t want to take a header into the gruesome goo as he stepped past the thrashing people.
    He noticed his shoes were covered with mustard, chili, and rapidly congealing melted cheese. It’s a great day to be back in New York.
     
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    Back in his condo on the seventy-second floor of Metropolitan Tower, Vincenzo felt trapped and anxious. Several hundred feet above the street, he didn’t feel the twin currents of dread and desperation that sluiced through the city like a hot knife neatly bisecting a stick of warm butter, but he could see the signs of it clearly enough. Helicopters orbited the vast crowds that had formed in Central Park, only a block north of him. More choppers flitted back and forth across midtown, to the south. A fire had started in the towering One57 skyscraper right across the street, and West Fifty-Seventh Street was filling up with fire trucks, which had doubtless had a difficult time making it in. Beyond the park, in Harlem and the Bronx, and even from the tony neighborhoods of the Upper East Side, columns of smoke rose into the blue sky. Vincenzo was amazed at the vista. Even during 9/11 he hadn’t seen the city suffering so horribly and in so many places at once.
    He tried Jessie and Grant and his parents from his home phone but got either the same recorded message or just a fast busy signal. The satellite TV was out, so there was no news about what was going on in the rest of the world. Vincenzo ground his teeth in frustration and no small amount of fear. Even if the coronal mass discharge speeding toward Earth turned out to be harmless, he didn’t doubt that mankind would do himself in before morning.
    And the sun was still surrounded by that queer nimbus that seemed to slowly roil as if the great orb were being viewed through a cloud of rising steam. He had never seen such a thing in his life. Then, he thought he had—in the series he had produced called Starfield , when one of the effects shots showed a rotating sun called a pulsar trapped inside a nebula. It was eerie to think that what had been conjured up by some geeky computer graphics illustrators could be so closely mirrored by a real-life event.
    Vincenzo found his mind had given birth to a perplexing thought, one that still seemed faintly ridiculous, given that he was standing on one of the top floors of one of Manhattan’s most famed residential towers, his skin cooling in the air-conditioned air. What if the doomsday callers are right? What if this is going to be a catastrophic event?
    If all electrical power failed and would be gone for many weeks or months or even years—God, he had a hard time getting his head wrapped around that—then the effect on the United States alone would be almost imaginable. Without power, there would be no climate control, so buildings like the Metropolitan would be uninhabitable so close to full-on summer. There would be no pumps to drive water, making that resource a sacred commodity, the new gold of the next era. Automobiles, airplanes, and boats built after 1980 or so would be inoperative, their electronic ignitions destroyed. Refineries, water purification, and food-processing plants would be shut down. The nation’s state-of-the-art communications systems would be useless, and a reborn Pony Express would be the only way to correspond with others not in the immediate area.
    And New York City would descend into utter chaos.
    He walked to the master bedroom and threw open the doors to the walk-in closet. In the far corner