All Maggie saw was danger. In the right hands, the bat could be more deadly than her revolver. Likewise the broken spindles on the chairs. The glass holding the tea could be turned into a weapon. God only knew what was hidden inside the holes in the furniture or tucked away in the boxes.
Maggie checked outside the window. The abandoned storage facility was across the street. She hadn’t seen a gloved hand before. The brick had been chipped away around the window opening so that the granite header could be salvaged. What she’d seen from the street was a piece of black tar paper flapping in the wind.
She turned back to the room. The real danger was standing fifteen feet away.
Anthony grunted as he leaned against the doorjamb. His eyes followed Gail’s every move. His jaw was tight. His hands were fisted. Maggie got the feeling he wasn’t the type to let things go. The colored girls had warned her that the big guy was crazy, but Maggie had seen up close what crazy looked like courtesy of her father and she always assumed that other people wouldn’t know crazy if it bit them in the ass.
In her expert opinion, Anthony looked just like the kind of crazy who could bite their asses clean off.
“All right, ladies.” Chic sat on the couch. He smoothed down the legs of his trousers. “You gonna stand there and gawp or you gonna tell me why you’re here?”
“What the hell.” Gail sat in one of the chairs across from him. She left her purse in her lap, zipper open.
Maggie let Kate take the other chair so she had a reason to stand. She leaned her back into the corner. The window was to her right. Chic was front and center. Gail and Kate were at an angle to where he sat on the couch. Anthony stayed in the doorway. Maggie didn’t look at him. She could feel him. He radiated hostility.
Quietly, Maggie unsnapped the safety strap around her revolver. She knew Gail could pull her gun from her purse in under a second, but it would take more than that to bring Anthony down.
“So.” Gail wasn’t one for lengthy preamble. “Whitehall. You’re running girls there.”
“Am I?” Chic paused a moment before saying, “I don’t think anybody’s running anything. Your storm troopers have jailed just about every working girl in the city.”
“A cop was murdered,” Gail reminded him. “You can do something about it.”
Chic quipped, “You think I give a shit about a dead pig?”
Gail braced her hands on her knees. “Looky here, Sambo. I ain’t got time to chase my tail around no tree.”
Kate straightened like a stick had been shoved up her ass.
Chic zeroed in on her. “Whatchu lookin’ at, slit?” He had an accent now, and it was pure street. “You gonna answer me?”
For a change, Kate had nothing to say.
Chic couldn’t push Gail, so he was going to screw with Kate. “Come up into my house staring at me like I’m some kind of bug under a piece of glass. Who the fuck are you, bitch? Staring at me like that?”
Gail didn’t move. Neither did Maggie. If Kate was going to keep digging herself into these holes, she’d have to learn how to get herself out of them.
“Well?” Chic demanded. “Whatchu gotta say, bitch? You want me to make you talk?”
Anthony stirred in the doorway. The floor creaked under his weight.
Kate blurted, “Your scarf.”
Chic was as surprised as the rest of them. He put his hand to the scarf. “What about it?”
“I just wondered …” Kate’s voice shook. “I wondered if it was Chanel.”
Chic stared at her for a beat. After what seemed like a good, long while, he smiled. “Of course it is.”
Kate swallowed audibly. Her voice still shook, but only a little. “It’s very stylish. I looked at it for myself.”
He studied her for a moment. “With your coloring, you should stay away from reds. You’re a Winter, right?”
“Autumn, but I’ve always felt I fall somewhere in between.”
Maggie wanted to bang her head against the wall. If somebody had told her last week that she’d be standing in the ghetto listening to a Yankee pimp discuss the Caygill Color Method, she would’ve laughed in their faces.
“Christ,” Gail muttered. “Can we get back to business here?”
Chic raised an eyebrow. “What business is that?”
“I’m betting one of your girls saw something the night that cop was killed.”
Chic leaned back on the couch. “Oh, I know at least one of them saw something.”
Gail sat back, too—at least as much as the chair would allow. She was pretending it didn’t matter, but they all knew it mattered. “What’d she see?”
Again, he didn’t respond immediately. He smoothed his trousers. He touched the knot in his scarf. Chic had the upper hand now and he was going to enjoy it for as long as he could.
Gail looked at her watch. She looked back at Maggie. She looked at her watch again.
Finally, Chic said, “It seems to me that a man with such valuable information should get some sort of recompense.”
“All right.” Gail sounded annoyed, but Maggie knew crafting the deal was her favorite part. “What do you want?”
Chic turned his attention back to Kate. He was flirting with her again. “What should I ask for, Autumn?”
Kate had worked the streets less than two full days, but she’d obviously been paying attention. “We can let you work north of Edgewood.”
Gail made a show of being outraged. “Why don’t you give him the keys to the goddamn city while you’re at it?”
Chic played right into her hands. “That sounds good. North of Edgewood.” He looked at Anthony. “You like that, brother?”
“I like it good.” Anthony nodded his head up and down.
“You’ll have to get some better girls,” Gail warned, like she gave a flip what they did. “Them toothless old whores of yours won’t pull in the traffic.”
“I can get some.”
“Two,” Gail told him. “Stick ’em near the park, not inside. You go anywhere else, you’ll end up with your belly gutted, and it might be a cop what does it.” She leaned forward again. “Now, no more bullshit, Chic. You better give us some goddamn good information. I mean the kind we can verify.”
Chic tapped his fingers to his knee. He was obviously thinking again. And then he decided. He reached his hand into a hole in the back of the couch.
Both Maggie and Gail drew their guns.
Chic said, “Good Lord, bitches, give me some credit.” He waited for them to lower their weapons. He saw that they weren’t going to. He moved slowly, his hand inching out like a stop-motion cartoon.
At first, Maggie didn’t recognize what he was holding. It was like reading a clue in a crossword puzzle and seeing the thing in your mind but being completely incapable of translating that image into a word that filled in all the blocks.
But then she knew: Jimmy’s radio transmitter.
Chic lofted up the plastic brick like a trophy. “This verification enough?”
Maggie slid her gun back into her holster. She leaned heavily against the wall.
“All right.” Gail didn’t take the transmitter. She lowered her revolver, but she kept the gun in her lap instead of returning it to her purse. “Tell me where you got that.”
“One of my girls found it in the alley where that cop was killed. Whitehall, C&S Bank.”
“It was just sitting there in the alley?” Gail didn’t believe him. “Where’s the girl?”
“I got her hid somewhere. She saw something scared the shit out of her.” Chic looked at Kate, then Maggie, then Gail again. “Oughta scare the shit outta you, too.”
Gail asked, “What’d she see?”
“It ain’t a what, it’s a who. And the dude my gal saw sure as shit ain’t nothing like the brother you guys put out on the news.” Chic grinned. “You know, this is some really good shit I’m giving you. I think we need to revisit our deal.”
Gail jammed her gun into the pimp’s face. “Where is s
he?”
“You gonna Edward Spivey me? Plant some bogus shit in my room and try to put me on trial?”
“I might.”
Chic stared down the muzzle of the gun. “You listen careful to me, bitch. Either you take that gun out of my face or your dried-out old pussy goes out that window.”
Anthony took a step forward.
Maggie did, too.
He took another step.
She pulled her revolver again. The grip was warm in her hand.
And then two things happened, one immediately after the other.
Kate collapsed to the floor.
The side of Chic’s head vaporized.
At least that was how it looked to Maggie. The right side of Chic’s face was there one second—eye, cheekbone, jaw—and then the next second, it disappeared in a spray of blood.
Somebody screamed. The window exploded. Or maybe Maggie was just now hearing it, the same as the distant crack of a rifle that reverberated in her ears.
One shot. Head shot.
The Shooter.
Maggie hit the floor. Kate was already there. Her eyes were closed. She wasn’t moving. A trickle of blood ran from her ear down her cheek. Broken glass was everywhere. Maggie’s hand was empty.
Her revolver was gone.
Gail’s chair shattered to pieces. The sound was like another gunshot. Anthony had jumped on top of her. He’d assumed the bullet had come from Gail’s gun. He straddled her, pinning her down. The switchblade was in his hand. Gail grabbed his wrist with both hands. Her arms shook as the knife got closer. The blade was inches from her eye.
“No!” Maggie scrambled to get Kate’s gun. The revolver was twisted inside her holster. The snap was bent on the safety strap.
Gail gave a bloodcurdling scream. Maggie watched helplessly as the long, sharp blade was driven straight into Gail’s eyeball.
The snap finally gave. The strap ripped open.
Anthony sat back on his knees.
That was the last thing he ever did.
Maggie pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger.
Her senses went haywire. She felt her finger pulling the trigger but she didn’t hear the gun fire. She didn’t see Anthony fall onto his back, but she could tell from the way the floor shook that he was down. Smoke trailed up from the muzzle, but she couldn’t smell the cordite.
She heard clicking.
Click-click-click.
Like a set of wind-up teeth.
The gun was empty, but Maggie was still pulling the trigger. She dropped the revolver on the floor. The thud was muffled by the time it reached her ears. Sound came back to her like an approaching siren—first it was so far away she could barely hear it, then suddenly it was loud and heart-stopping.
“Jesus … oh, Jesus …,” Gail panted. Her chest heaved as she tried to force air into her lungs. The knife was still jammed into her eye. The handle wavered back and forth like a tent pole.
“Gail?” Maggie crawled over to her. “Gail?”
“Wha …” Gail reached up to her eye.
“Don’t!” Maggie grabbed Gail’s hand. This wasn’t real. It was a drill. None of this was really happening. Maggie didn’t really just kill somebody. She wasn’t really looking at a knife sticking out of Gail Patterson’s eye.
What next? What next?
Maggie grabbed her mic with her free hand. “Dispatch, this is unit five. Sixty-three times two, my location. Repeat, sixty-three times two—urgent—my ten-twenty.”
Dispatch came back quickly. “Ten-four, unit five. Help is on the way.”
Maggie dropped her mic. She looked around the room. The carnage was unreal. So much blood. Pieces of bone and cartilage sprayed the couch. Shards of Chic’s teeth bit into the wall.
None of this had really happened. These people weren’t really dead. Gail was fine. Kate was fine. Maggie had not killed a man. She had not pointed her gun at a man’s head and emptied her entire load into his skull.
“Maggie,” Gail whispered. “Is it bad?”
“No.”
“Is it?”
Maggie forced herself to look at the switchblade sticking out of Gail’s face. She was covered in Anthony’s blood. A clear liquid seeped from her eye, dragging a line that cut to the pasty white skin of her cheek.
This had happened. All of it had happened.
“It’s not so bad,” Maggie lied. The blade was six inches, at least. A third of it went through Gail’s eye, another third sunk into her brain.
“Oma?” Kate mumbled. She was coming to. Her hand went to her head. The top of her ear was bloody where the bullet had nicked her skin.
“Kate.” Maggie forced an authority into her tone that she did not feel. “Kate, get up. Now.”
She sat up quickly, panicked. She looked at Sir Chic. She looked at Anthony. She looked at Gail. Her mouth opened, but only a squeak came out.
Maggie said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Kate couldn’t take her eyes off the knife. She knew it was bad. That she didn’t say so was a minor miracle.
“Fuck me,” Gail whispered. The panic was taking over. The muscles in her neck stood out like rope as she fought to keep her head from moving. “It’s bad. I know it’s bad.”
“You’re gonna be—” Maggie’s voice caught. She wasn’t going to be all right. None of this was all right.
“Don’t.” Gail’s voice was shallow. “Don’t you goddamn cry, Lawson.”
“I’m not,” Maggie lied. “I won’t.”
“Both of you. I’ll take out this knife and stab you myself. You hear me?”
“All right.” Kate had no idea what she was agreeing to. Her pupils were so blown open that she looked stoned.
Maggie tightened her grip on Gail’s hand. She willed her tears to stop. She had to keep her promise. The ambulance crew, the responding officers, whoever was on their way—she couldn’t let them see her cry. They had to be tough gals. They had to be stronger than everybody else.
Maggie looked up at the ceiling. She took a deep breath and slowly let it go. Her eyes could not find a spot to rest on. She didn’t want to see Gail or Kate. She didn’t want to see the two dead men whose bodies were already giving off the metallic odor of congealing blood.
She looked out the broken window at the abandoned storage building across the street.
The flapping piece of tar paper was gone.
20
Fox passed the pimped-out Mercury as he walked away from the scene. He plucked Kate’s hat from the back seat, leaving Jimmy Lawson’s for the rest of her shift.
Flowers.
He knew that Kate’s hair would smell like flowers. Not like perfume, but the real thing that grew out of the ground.
Fox let himself consider what it would be like to feel her skin. To bite her with his teeth. To screw her into the ground. To one by one pluck away her petals. To cut himself on her thorns.
He always felt this way after a kill—not satisfied, but craving more. He owed Kate Murphy. She had led him here. Not that Fox didn’t keep his ear to the ground. The police scanner had been filled with chatter since Don Wesley had been taken out. Nobody gave a shit when Fox was killing drug dealers and street scum. Put down a couple of cops, and that got their attention, even if they were the kind of cops who deserved to die.
Still, Fox was getting tired of surprises.
And he was getting tired of correcting his own past mistakes.
Fox had been halfway home when he’d decided he needed to walk the alley where Jimmy and Don Wesley had been going at it. Leaving a kill scene like that was lazy, and Fox was not lazy.
Lesson eight: Always follow the plan.
This was how it happened: You stuck your gun in their face. You made them call dispatch and clock out. You unplugged their radios so they couldn’t call for help. You put them on their knees. You made them lace their fingers together and put them on the top of their heads. You pulled the trigger.
Pop.
P
op.
Two men. Two bodies. Two more names off the list.
And then you always checked the scene to make sure you hadn’t left anything for the good guys to find.
By the time Fox got back to the alley, the spunk and blood were already drying on the ground. Grid search, just like they used to do for land mines. Fox had paced back and forth and found nothing but the shit you could find on every street in the city.
He now accepted that someone had been there before him. The pimp, obviously. He had a police transmitter in his hand. Jimmy Lawson’s transmitter. No whore would’ve given up that kind of bargaining chip. All any slit ever cared about was sucking cock and stealing some poor guy’s money.
The pimp wasn’t a nuisance. He was a witness.
Lucky thing Fox had his rifle.
The bullet had clipped Kate’s ear because Fox had told it to. He could taste the blood in his mouth when it happened.
Kate’s blood.
Fox licked his lips. The cold wind dried them quickly. He didn’t need wind; he needed lightning. The plan wasn’t coming together like he wanted. The thing in the back of his head wasn’t talking to the front. And the thing between his legs was yelling that it was tired of waiting. Fox was patient, but he wasn’t a saint. Tomorrow, all of this had to come together or something really bad was going to happen.
He heard a police siren blaring up the street. They were coming faster than Fox had anticipated. No choice but to duck into an alley. Fox wasn’t worried about witnesses in this neighborhood. He was a white man with a cop’s hat in his hand and a sniper’s rifle slung over his shoulder.
Nawsir-Officer-sir, I didn’t see a thing.
The police cruiser zoomed past the alley. Fox’s car was parked behind the next row of houses. He knew a back way out. Fox always knew a back way out.
He allowed himself a smile. The ground shook beneath his feet. The trains were rumbling through the Howell Wye.
Trains.
The lightning finally struck Fox’s skull. The plan jolted from the back to the front. He saw it now, a living, breathing plan that he could hold in his hand and study from all angles. It was complicated, but brilliant.