The Ninth Step Read Online Free Page B

middle of the night, stroke her forehead, tell her old folk tales to calm her down. The Farmer, the Crocodile, and the Jackal . The Seven Wise Men of Buneyr . And her favorite: Heer and Ranjha .
    He pictured his daughter’s face, plump and round, listening to that last one, that grand, doomed love story, her thick, round eyeglasses glinting in the low light of her bedside lamp. (Without them, she could barely even see her parents’ faces.) She listened as they told her of the peasant musician Ranjha, and how he was prevented from marrying Heer, his upper-caste love. Heer’s family married her off to someone else, but the young lovers still managed to elope one night. When her kinsmen recaptured her and took her back to their town of Rangpur, Heer cried out, “Oh, Lord, destroy this town and these cruel people so that justice may be done!” And then a fierce fire broke out and began to devastate the town.
    At this point, Enny would always interrupt to ask, wide-eyed, why all this suffering was necessary.
    It was her mother who answered, more often than not: “Because it was the will of Allah.”
    Nadim knew that others—Enny’s fourth-grade classmates especially—had found her plain and bookish, had made fun of the hijab that covered her pigtails. Without mercy they had teased his daughter, who had proclaimed her wish to become a scientist— a marine biologist, no less—a girl whose ancestors came from a landlocked desert state! She had loved this place, this aquarium, had never grown tired of it. Had loved coming here with her father.
    And now he had become a killer. What would she have thought of him? He would have explained to her, if he could. He had done it for her. For justice . Like the Christian Bible said. An eye for an eye.
    He stood up and moved to the next dark room. He thought again of the plan. Was it too late? Perhaps not. He doubted that the deli clerk had gotten a good look at him. He had run wildly out of the store, but he’d had the good sense to slow down outside, and he couldn’t recall anyone watching him go.
    He stopped in front of another huge window, watching a seal rocket down toward the bottom of the tank, trailing bubbles, then spin around and corkscrew up toward the surface.
    As if it were free.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “M AYBE WE SHOULD JUST let them have it,” said Detective Sergeant Stephen Tanney two hours later.
    The man was Jack’s direct boss. They were crammed into his little office, along with Frank Cardulli, the head of Brooklyn South Homicide. Richie Powker, new to the headquarters, was gazing at the walls, checking out the clusters of red pins, one for each murder of the year, covering a map of the borough, and the clipboards for each of the seventeen precincts in their region.
    “I mean,” Tanney continued, “if the feds want the case so bad, why not let it be their problem?” The young sergeant always reminded Jack of a Hollywood actor wearing a fake mustache and trying to play a tough guy; he was the kind of boss who couldn’t appreciate the competence of his crew without considering it a challenge to his own tenuous control.
    Lieutenant Cardulli listened patiently. He was a squat fireplug of a man, also mustached. Unlike Tanney, though, he had the squad’s full loyalty and respect. The L.T. tugged at his earlobe. “Well, I guess Homeland Security does have the ultimate authority here, according to the bullshit Washington has handed down …”
    “What about this radiation business?” Richie said. “I sure didn’t like the sound of that.”
    Cardulli shrugged. “Let’s not get all worked up until we know more. The feds are already on this, and we need to keep focused on our own mission.” They were homicide cops, not specialists in counterterrorism. “Anyhow, this is probably just the latest false alarm.”
    The other detectives nodded. Ever since 9/11 and the anthrax thing, the whole country had been so nervous—color-coded threat levels going up and down,