“We’re obviously getting some promising results in the Pavel-seems-to-be-a-player hypothesis,” I said. “Who do you think tuned him up?”
“All three of the Pep Boys, by the looks of him,” said Paul, pointing at the console’s screen, which showed a bruised Pavel covered in cords, sleeping.
“The Russians? The Kremlin?” I said.
“You’d think, right?” said Paul. “But why leave him alive?”
“What does the house look like?” I said.
“Clean. Too clean. He’s got dogs. Plus there’s no sign of entry. Someone picked the locks, it seems. There was water all over the kitchen floor. Either Pavel decided to do some bobbing for apples after he kneecapped himself, or he was waterboarded.”
“You think it was the president’s shooter? Pavel was a middleman, and something got screwed up and the shooter needed to find out some information the hard way?”
“That’s a good theory,” Paul said. “We should use it.”
“You want me to go say hi?” I said.
“Can’t,” said Paul. “He’s got some internal bleeding. Doctors said we need to wait until the morning.”
“Maybe this works to our advantage,” I said. “If he spilled the borscht about something during his little inquisition, he might be in big trouble, right? We could offer him some sanctuary.”
Paul Ernenwein looked at the screen.
“Good night, Pavel. Sleep well. We’ll more than likely flip you in the morning,” he said.
Chapter 35
At eleven fifteen that evening, Sophie, wearing a large camping backpack, walked east down East 20th Street, past the Gramercy Park neighborhood’s charming Italianate and Greek Revival town houses.
She sighed as she passed the awning of the famous Players club, which had been founded by Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes. Astors had lived in the famous neighborhood. Steinbeck, Thomas Edison, even Julia Roberts.
Though she lived in SoHo, she sometimes fantasized about moving onto the famously attractive historic block, with its exclusive, mysterious private park.
Too bad she wasn’t here to house hunt. Her pick was already out as she got to the Irving Place entrance to the park. A moment later, its famous cast-iron gate briefly shrieked, and she was in.
She walked alongside snow-covered benches and hedges to the statue of Edwin Booth in the two-acre park’s center. Walking past it, she panned her eyes left and right along the small park’s straight and winding paths. But it was too cold and too late for anyone else to be there.
Good.
She cast a quick glance at the Gramercy Park Hotel, straight in front of her. Then she walked back to the statue and casually dropped the massive backpack she was carrying at its feet. She quickly zipped open the bag, making sure the flap was pulled all the way back. She scanned it. Everything looked good. Wired tight.
A moment later, sans backpack, she exited through the Irving Place gate and continued east down 20th, picking up her pace.
“It’s in place. Are you?” she said into her Bluetooth.
Chapter 36
“Just a sec,” said Matthew up in the windy darkness above her, looking down at the park and the city lights.
The building he was on top of was a block behind her, on 19th, just in off Park Avenue South. It was a twelve-story prewar office building, uninhabited, with a sidewalk shed and black mesh wrapped around its edifice due to a major rehab.
His setup was pretty sweet. There was a brick structure atop the roof that housed the elevator equipment, and he was on top of that, belly down on the tar paper behind a tent made up of several sheets of the black construction cladding.
The rifle he lay beside was one of his favorites, a precision XM24 SWS with a long suppressor and five .300 Winchester mags in its detachable box magazine. Up on its bipod, it was pointed across the park on his target at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Suite 809, to be exact.
It had taken Matthew a long, busy, and messy two hours to persuade Pavel to tell him where he could locate the man he was looking for. No one knew the assassin’s real name. Not even Pavel. The assassin was a hard old bastard who’d been around forever and whom they called the Brit. A true mercenary, he worked for the highest bidder.
And tonight, his long career was going to come to its inevitable end, Matthew thought, leaning into his rifle’s fixed cheek piece.
Matthew blinked as he looked through the S & B nightscope. It was already dialed in on 809’s floor-to-ceiling window, in off the corner of 21st and Lex. Beyond the curtain of the big window, the end of a low, dark leather couch and the edge of a huge, modern splatter painting on the wall were visible.
It was a joke of a shot, really. A little over two hundred yards on a slight left-to-right, four-story downward angle. He could have almost hit it with a pistol at that range, but it was windy. A steady ten-mile-an-hour wind was blowing out of the northwest; he needed the pop of the XM24 to compensate.
The setup was straightforward. Get him to come to the window with a distraction, then blow out the first visible, vital part of him with a .300 Winchester’s supersonic boat tail.
Matthew wasn’t the biggest fan of distractions. They worked far less often than people thought, and were just as likely to make your quarry alert as to trick them. But then again, everybody let their guard down sometimes.
“Okay, talk to me. On your call,” said Sophie in his ear.
Matthew took some breaths, then closed his eyes, just listening, trying to still himself. After thirty seconds, he felt himself become one with the building beneath him. He felt the rush of the cold wind on his cheek, listened to the high shriek of a bus somewhere in the darkness below, a car horn.
He opened his right eye and dead-centered the reticle on the window.
“Ready. Hit it now,” he said.
Chapter 37
The Brit came awake to a pulsing flash of light on the wall of his hotel bedroom. There was a low boom, then light was shaking the room as a rattle of firecrackers went off close by.
“What in the world? Fireworks? Is it some Yank holiday?” his wife said, already sitting up and looking toward the pulsing window. “Maybe it’s the anniversary of that horrid little park. It’s coming from that direction. Look.”
The assassin checked his Rolex on the bedside table.
“Maybe,” he said as another skyrocket popped softly outside the window, shivering the walls of the suite’s living room with a pale-green light.
“Oh, it’s pretty,” said his wife, who was still quite tipsy from all the wine they’d had that evening at the Four Seasons. “Let’s see if we can get a better look from the living room. Maybe the hotel is doing it. Call down and see what it is.”
“Just go back to sleep,” the Brit said. “You know the amount of work we have to do.”
“You and your work. Please, for once, would you let us have a little fun?”
“Fine.”
The Brit got up and walked out the bedroom door. Two more rockets burst in the air as he crossed to the kitchenette’s dark quartz island, where he’d left his phone.
Then two more exploded right at eye level, a yellow one and then another green. He smiled. He loved fireworks. Who didn’t? It would be lovely to hug his wife and watch them. Enjoy one of those rare happenstances that entirely make a trip.
He found the concierge’s number on his phone and thumbed it as he walked toward the window, the dark room glowing strangely in the billowing colored smoke and streaks of light.
Chapter 38
In the cold air rush, Matthew lay breathing evenly, watching the window through the nightscope.
There were other people now at the hotel windows, some of them taking pictures as Sophie’s pack of skyrockets continued to streak at a slow and regular interval straight up from beside the park’s central statue.
He could feel his heartbeat thump as he watched 809’s floor-to-ceiling window kill zone. The curtain. The end of the couch. The painting.
&
nbsp; “C’mon,” he whispered. “Come to Papa.”
“That’s the last one. Any sign?” said Sophie as a big rocket burst into a yellow-and-red flower.
In its afterglow, Matthew watched, waiting, finger on the trigger.
No, damn it. Nothing, he thought. It wasn’t going to happen.
“Tell me you have something,” said Sophie.
“Negative.”
“Maybe he’s dead asleep or something,” she said. “What do we do?”
“We go back to the drawing board,” he said, packing up.
Matthew was about to turn to go down the ladder when the round hit him. It caught him about four inches below his brain stem, just above the center of his shoulder blades. Its impact knocked him flat, facedown, as if somebody had yanked out his ankles from underneath him.
He came to a skidding stop halfway off the elevator housing, and he just let himself topple the rest of the way into space, just in time to get missed by the next suppressed shot that blasted brick bits and tar paper between his boots.
He smashed hard into the roof, bashing the shit out of his elbows and the top of his head and his ribs as he landed on the XM24 in the clunky kit bag. Knowing he was safe, he pulled his backplate out.
The indent in it! He shook his shirt and caught the big and still-hot mushroomed bullet that had been meant for his heart and just stared at it.
The bastard must have run up to the hotel’s roof, which was level with Matthew’s perch.
“Hey, I’m in the car. Are you coming?”
Fear hit him almost as hard as the bullet. He imagined himself running down the twelve flights of stairs just in time to see the prick lighting up Sophie.
But he calmed himself and calculated quickly. What would he do if he knew he was being ambushed? Attack or hold position? Hold position, definitely. The Brit might have spotted him, the sly bastard, but he didn’t know what kind of operation he was up against. No way would he run from cover.
“Matthew, are you okay?”
“Fine,” he said after a few labored breaths.
He looked at the plate again and shivered.
“Fine, baby. Be there in a shake.”
Chapter 39
The telescoping stock of the rifle gave off a satisfying job-well-done snap as the Brit, crouching in the dark on the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel, collapsed it with the callused heel of his palm.
He hid the new matte-black Belgian FN FAL with its suppressor and state-of-the-art night-vision scope under his fluffy white hotel robe. Then, still in a crouch, he slipped silently off the darkened hotel roof, back through the stairwell door.
Padding quietly down the hotel’s back stairs in his bare feet, he thought he very well might have hit the prankster on the roof of the building on the other side of Gramercy Park.
And with a hefty 7.62 x 51mm NATO round, he’d more than likely gotten his attention.
Who had it been? he wondered. Not the coppers. Company, then? Someone else? Definitely someone in the business, by the looks of the hardware they had. Whoever they were, they were a little sloppy. Fireworks?
Then he thought about it. Maybe not so sloppy. He had, after all, almost gone to the window.
Plus the fireworks were pretty. It was almost elegant, in a way. Like a birthday party. Only the opposite. A little light show before they cut his cake once and for all, the bastards.
When he got back to his room, he put the gun away in its case and called Pavel, who had hired him. It kicked into voice mail. Had Pavel turned on him for some reason? He pondered the implications of that.
Should he leave now? he thought as he went into the bedroom.
No. If it were company or anybody else in the game, they’d want him out on the street at night to keep it discreet. He took an OJ out of the minifridge beside the bed and cracked it and took a long sip. He nodded to himself. To heck with it. He’d check out in the morning, like a regular human being.
“Well?” said his wife when he got back into the bed. “What was it?”
The Brit thought about who would want to kill him. Then he laughed. He’d be up all night.
“I don’t know,” he said as he snuggled in next to his wife. He kissed her above her camisole, right where he’d just shot whoever it was who thought he could pull a fast one on him.
“Aren’t we so tender all of a sudden? What was that for?”
“Love, darling,” he said as he pinched her bottom. “All we need is love, right?”
“And rockets,” she said after a moment, and they both began to crack up.
Chapter 40
“Now, finish up the rest and don’t screw it up,” Flicka said, stabbing one of his long fingers in Marvin’s face. “I know what a gram looks like in my dreams, so you think about skimming, you think again. I’ll go down and get the car. You be in the lobby waiting when I come around. Don’t make me text your ass.”
Marvin waited for Flicka to leave before he let out a tense breath and looked around at the spare room.
The table. The electronic scale. The massive mound of rank marijuana.
“What the hell are you doing?” he whispered to himself.
The apartment was in Flushing, Queens, near LaGuardia Airport, with planes screaming overhead every five minutes. Flicka had taken him here three hours before and set him to work, busting down a couple of pounds of weed.
This whole thing was all over his stupid cousin. He just had to get into weed dealing with Flicka. But he messed up, stealing money or losing product, and got shot dead by Flicka. And now Marvin had to do Flicka’s bidding to pay off his cousin’s debt, like some sort of slave, or else his poor uncle down in North Carolina was going to get it, too, from the other guys in Flicka’s crew.
Marvin had been trying to think of how to get out of the situation, but so far, he was coming up empty. What the hell could he do?
Maybe he could ask the family living here in the weed apartment for advice, he thought, shaking his head at the insanity of it all. The apartment belonged to some Asian people, apparently. A grandma, it looked like, and a three-year-old and a baby.
As he sat busting up the last of the weed, he watched as the grandma walked obliviously past the open bedroom door and headed into the hall bathroom.
Did Flicka have a deal with them or something? Marvin thought. Was the mama-san some sort of crook? He had no clue.
Marvin finished bagging the last gram and stuffed everything into the knapsack, along with the scale. When he came out into the hallway, he almost stepped on the three-year-old who was sitting there in a diaper, eating one of those long ices in a plastic sleeve. Which would have been way weirder than it already was had the apartment not been stiflingly hot. The ice was a blue one, and the stuff was stuck to the little guy’s face and neck and chest. He was just covered in it.
Marvin winced as he stepped over him and headed out the door.
“What you waiting for? I should get out and hold the door open for you?” Flicka said as Marvin hit the sidewalk. “Get in.”
Flicka was in his Escalade now. What he called his company car. The inside of it smelled more like weed than a lawn mower smells like cut grass. Marvin got in and put on his seat belt and looked around for cops.
About ten silent minutes of driving through the maze of Queens later, they pulled into the parking lot of a Stop & Shop supermarket and parked.
“Go out and get me one of them carts,” Flicka said with a jut of his chin.
“What?” Marvin said, staring at him.
“You deaf? Go get me one of those carts.”
“One of the shopping carts?”
“What other kind of carts you see, boy?” Flicka said. “Get one and put it in the back. And flip it when you put it back there, too. I don’t need it rollin’ around, rippin’ up my upholstery.”
What the hell now? Marvin thought.
After twenty more minutes of driving around, they pulled into a storage locker joint beside a U-Haul rental place. Flicka
parked and ordered Marvin to take the shopping cart out of the back.
Marvin followed as Flicka rolled it inside the storage facility. They took an elevator up to the second floor and continued down a seemingly endless hallway lined with corrugated steel lockers.
“Two one six two. Here it is,” Flicka said, undoing the lock on one of the steel shutters and rattling it up.
Inside, it was jam-packed with moving boxes and kids’ furniture and bicycles and clothes. Box after box after box.
“We gotta get all this out to my sister’s new place in Camden,” Flicka said, handing Marvin the lock. “Fill up the ride with as much as it can hold, and then come get me. I’ll be in the diner across the street.”
Marvin stood there, staring at the boxes.
It’s official. I’m a slave, he thought. There’s no way out of this.
“Aw, don’t look so sad, little Marvin. This here’s what’s called a character-building exercise,” Flicka said, grinning. “If you get tired, don’t worry. Just think of your uncle’s smiling face, and everything will work out fine.”
Chapter 41
It was a little after nine o’clock at night, and Manhattan College’s Draddy Gym was hot and bright and packed to the rafters.
The gym was an old seventies-era airplane-hangar-looking building that was sometimes criticized by visiting sports reporters. But when the Jaspers were playing their closest rival, Iona College, the fans’ electricity in the joint could have outdone what you’d find at a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
Over the squeaks and squeals of sneakers on hardwood blasted the arena standard “Get Ready for This,” as Manhattan’s band and cheerleaders and dancers and student fan section Sixth Borough went batty.
They weren’t the only ones. Myself and the rest of the Bennett bunch were at the top of the bleachers at half-court going berserk as we watched my son Trent compete in the halftime high jinks.