“Maybe,” he said. “Howard, get his gun.”
Howard reached under Morris’s coat and removed the weapon and handed it to Lewis, who tucked it into the waistband of his pants.
Howard said, “I know this has all been a terrible shock, a hell of a lot to take in. I get that. But you need to think before you do anything rash. The thing is, Morris, while all of this was done to help you, things are kind of turned around now. You have to help us continue to help you, or there won’t be a you anymore.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t cut you loose years ago.”
“You didn’t because I’ve always done my job so well. You know it and I know it. But understand what happens if you don’t play ball. Lewis here will put a bullet through your brain. And then you know what he’s going to have to do?”
Howard tilted his head in the direction of the street. It took Morris a moment to figure out what Howard was getting at.
Then he knew.
“Dear God, for Christ’s sake, no.”
Howard nodded. “Tell him, Lewis.”
“We kill you, then we have to kill Heather,” Lewis said. “Because sooner or later, she’s going to come in here looking for you.”
Howard said, “I’ve been where you are now, Morris. When this all started, when I gave Lewis the okay to take drastic action where Allison Fitch was concerned, I couldn’t believe I was doing it. I’d never taken that kind of step before. Never, believe me. All the things I may have done for you in the past, they’ve never included murder. And then…then it went horribly wrong, and I felt even sicker. But you know what? You reach a point where you realize there’s no going back. You’ve made your decisions and you have to live with them. That’s what you’re going to have to do, Morris. You’re going to have to make a decision and live with it.”
Morris placed an arm against the door, leaned his head into it. “I need a minute.”
“Of course you do.”
“Tell me about that woman,” he said to Lewis, who had taken the barrel away from his temple. “The one you killed.”
“A killer for hire,” Lewis said. “She had it coming. She’s done a lot of bad things, and the worst of all was screwing up, killing Bridget. You have to know, I was never going to let her get away with that.”
Morris felt as though he might collapse. He threw a hand onto Howard’s shoulder for support. The three men stood there that way for a while, Lewis and Howard apparently willing to wait for Morris to come around.
What choice did he have, really?
“I don’t want you to hurt Heather,” he said.
“I can’t believe you haven’t been putting it to her,” Lewis said, trying to break the mood.
“She has two kids,” Morris said. “Two little girls.”
“Yeah, well.”
Howard said some consoling words to Morris, made some of the arguments he’d already made all over again.
Finally, Lewis glanced back toward the curtain and said, “I’ll go check on them.”
Howard said, “This Vachon business, I want to know more about that. Do what you have to do to find out if Ray’s feeding us a line of shit.”
“Vachon?” Morris said.
“Long story,” Howard said. Then, to Lewis, “Once we’re sure we have nothing to worry about there, then, well, I want them dealt with as mercifully as we can.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry.”
Lewis headed for the back room.
“Howard,” Morris said, “for the love of God, you can’t just—”
“Shit!” It was Lewis. He’d pulled back the curtain, then called to Howard, “We got a problem.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
NICOLE is doing her dismounts from the uneven bars. A double salto backward tucked with full twist. A double salto backward piked. An underswing with a half turn to salto backward, tucked with a full turn.
She can’t get them right.
She keeps landing on her head.
Time after time. Her head plunges like a missile. Pounds into the mat. She feels her will snap. The pain’s tremendous. Her skull throbs.
It gets worse. An ice pick is sticking up through the mat. After her head hits the mat, her body topples over and the pick plunges into her chest.
It keeps happening over and over again. Letting go of the bar, spinning through the air, twisting and turning, but nothing is going as it should. She tells her body to spin one way and it does the opposite.
This is not happening, she tells herself. This cannot be happening.
Nicole was right. It was not happening. Although it was true that her head was injured, that she had taken a blow to the chest.
Realization was slowly returning to her. Before she had opened her eyes, things began to make sense.
Lewis had shot her.
Yeah.
Just like that. Wanting to make an impression on Morris. She’d figured it was coming, that Lewis would try this sooner or later. She just hadn’t expected it at that moment.
But she’d also known that could happen. That you could be on your guard, and still slip up.
The bullet hit her, hit her hard. Lying there, before she opened her eyes, she wondered whether it had pierced the Kevlar, made it all the way through the formfitting vest, but she did not think so. It felt more like she had been kicked than shot.
It wasn’t the bullet that knocked her out. It was being thrown back, hitting her head on the edge of that goddamn shelf. She was seeing stars before she hit the floor.
But now she was waking up. And she was listening.
Probably best to just stay put for a while.
SIXTY-EIGHT
“WHERE is he?” Lewis barked at me. “Where the hell is he?”
“Gone,” I said.
Howard showed up, fixed his eyes on the empty chair littered with duct tape scraps. What little color there was in his face seemed to drain away instantly. “Dear God.” Then he glared at Lewis. “You let him get away.”
Lewis tore out of the room using the side door, no doubt hoping Thomas had only just left, that he could catch up with him and drag him back. Thomas had only been gone a few seconds, half a minute tops, but if he was running flat out, it would give him enough time to get a healthy head start.
I just hoped that, having gotten away, Thomas would have the sense to go to the police, even if that wasn’t exactly what I’d asked. I’d only told him to get help. I’d assumed he’d know what that meant, but he was no sooner out the door than I wished I’d been more specific.
At the moment, he was my only hope.
“How did—how the hell did he get free?” Howard asked.
“I told you he was talented,” I said, perhaps with just a touch of smugness. “Maybe he’s gone for Vachon. Maybe his people were out there waiting for him. I wonder what they’ll do when he tells them what you—”
Howard snapped. He swung his arm back and hit me across the face with the back of his hand. He put more into it than I would have thought possible for the short little fucker.
“Enough bullshit!” he said.
My cheek burned, my brains rattled.
The curtain opened and it was Morris. “What the hell’s happened now?”
“One of them got away,” Howard said. “The one with the atlas in his head.”
“Atlas?” Morris had a long way to go to get up to speed.
“Lewis has gone looking for him. God help us, he better find him.”
“You can’t keep this up,” Morris said. “You can’t. It’s unraveling. You’re unraveling. You have been for months.” He took out his phone and held it up. “You took my gun but you didn’t take this. I told Heather to take the rest of the night off. In fact, I told her to take the next couple days off. To get out of town. I didn’t want to take any chances. She’s gone. I think that was the last straw for me, Howard. Threatening Heather. A total innocent. You’re a man with no lines left to cross.”
Howard looked at him, no doubt assessing
the implications.
“What else did you tell her?”
“I told her you were going to give me a lift home. You and Lewis.”
“So if anything happens to you, she’ll know.”
Morris nodded. His voice was strangely calm. “Let this man go. And you and Lewis would be smart to turn yourselves in. Either that, or you better be on a jet to Bolivia by noon with a couple of new identities. You know the best lawyers in the city, Howard. Pick one out for yourself and one for Lewis. Then the clock’ll start ticking, see who can cut the best deal by ratting out the other. No one knows better than us how the game is played. I guess that’s basically what I’m going to do, too. Howard, let this man go.”
I was already working on it. I’d been straining at the tape around my wrists since the moment Thomas had left. I’d been picking at the edges with my fingernails, trying to create even a tiny bit of slack.
Howard said, “I wish it were that simple, Morris.”
Lewis reappeared, winded. “No sign of him,” he said.
“Morris says we should get lawyers,” Howard said.
“What?”
“He’s not going to play.”
Lewis sneered. “Morris, I thought we had an understanding. What about—”
“Heather’s gone,” he said. “And I’m leaving, too. Don’t worry. I’ll get a cab.”
Morris swept the curtain aside and headed for the front door. Lewis, gun in hand, followed him. “Morris,” he called out.
I heard the same swift sound I’d heard when Lewis shot Nicole. Then a body hitting the floor.
Howard didn’t even look. Didn’t pull back the curtain. He knew what had to have happened. When Lewis reappeared, he walked straight past Howard and came up on my right side.
“Where would your brother go?” he asked me. “Has he got the sense to go to the cops or will he just run and hide somewhere?”
I had to admit the latter was a possibility. “I don’t know,” I said. “If I were you, I’d assume the worst.”
Lewis evidently felt a need to let off some steam just as Howard had, so he hit me, too. Not a slap across the face, but a gun to the side of head. A pistol whip. My right ear exploded in pain, and my left nearly touched my shoulder. I shouted out and watched the room spin around for several seconds.
It was during that period of disorientation I thought I saw Nicole’s arm move, bump ever so slightly into a Dinky Toy tow truck that had fallen from the shelf and landed on its wheels, making it roll forward a quarter of an inch. But then, pretty much everything had seemed to be moving in the seconds after that blow to the head, so I figured I’d imagined it.
“We have to assume we don’t have much time,” Lewis said.
“Great,” Howard said. “Just great. The police may be coming and now we’ve got three bodies to get rid of.”
I wasn’t dead yet, but I figured that time was coming. I continued twisting my wrists back and forth.
“There’s no time for that,” Lewis said. “We just have to get out of here.”
“Where the hell are we going to go?” Howard asked.
“I know people,” Lewis said. “I know people who can hide us until we get the paperwork we need.”
“God, you fucked this whole thing up from the very beginning,” Howard said. “From the moment you decided to kill Fitch, to hiring her”—he pointed to Nicole—“to letting that freak get away.”
“I can go alone,” Lewis said, walking around me, standing between Nicole’s body and me. “If that’s what you’d prefer.”
“Christ,” Howard said, shaking his head in defeat. “Let’s finish this and get the hell out of here.”
I kept twisting and twisting, thinking, if I could manage to get my wrists free, I could propel myself, with the chair attached, at Lewis, somehow grab him by the throat. Anything. Because the gun was in his hand, and I knew his intention was to use it on me in the next few seconds.
But I just wasn’t there yet.
“Okay,” Lewis said, bending his elbow so that the gun was pointing at my head.
And then he screamed. A horrific, gut-wrenching scream.
When he cast his eyes down at the source of his pain, I did as well.
There was an ice pick right through his calf.
SIXTY-NINE
“WHERE’S Ray?” Julie asked Thomas. “Think, okay? Think.”
They were sitting in her car, the engine running, out front of her sister’s cupcake shop. Candace stood on the sidewalk, watching the two of them, obviously wondering what the hell was going on.
“It was dark, and I was running,” Thomas said. His body was trembling, and his clothes were soaked with sweat. “I was running so fast I wasn’t paying attention, not until I got to St. Marks and First Avenue.” He looked at Julie. “It was just like on Whirl360, but you could touch things and smell them.”
“Focus,” Julie said. “You say you ran out into the alley and out to the sidewalk. Which way did you go then?”
“Right.”
“So you didn’t run across the front of the shop where you were being held?”
“No, the other way.”
“What were the first things you passed?”
Thomas thought. “There was a tailor’s, and a bike shop, and…”
“What?”
“I think it was called Mike’s Bikes,” he said.
“Okay.” Julie grabbed her phone from the top of the dashboard. “I’ll see if I can find it.”
“Wait,” Thomas said. Now he had his eyes closed. “Mike’s Bikes. It’s next to the tailor shop.” He jerked his head slightly to one side, paused, jerked again, paused.
“What are you doing?” Julie asked.
“I’m working my way up the street,” Thomas said. He was clicking his mouse, in his head. Advancing through the Whirl360 images.
“What street?”
“East Fourth,” he said. “It’s on East Fourth.”
Julie already had the car in drive and, without even a wave good-bye to her sister, slammed on the accelerator and tore up the street, pitching Thomas’s head back against the headrest. He opened his eyes.
“I can tell you how to get to Fourth,” he said.
“I can figure out that part. Just tell me where on Fourth.”
Thomas closed his eyes again. His head kept jerking. “I’m at an antiques store,” he said. “Ferber’s Antiques. It looks like it has toys in the window.”
“What’s the address?”
He gave her a number. “I think that’s the place. That’s where Ray is.”
Julie ran a light, turned at a cross street, floored it.
“Do you have a gun?” Thomas asked, eyes open again.
“What?”
“Do you have a gun? The man had a gun, and the woman had an ice pick.”
“I don’t have a fucking gun,” she said. Julie knew she couldn’t go storming into this place on her own.
She needed the NYPD and the FDNY. What she didn’t have was time to explain. Julie pointed to the cell phone. “Hit 911, then give it to me.”
Thomas picked up the phone. “Do you hit the talk button first and then the number?”
She grabbed it from his hand, glanced from the phone to the windshield and back again a couple of times, then put the phone to her ear.
When the 911 operator came on, Julie adopted a panicked tone and said, “There’s a fire! It looks like it’s started in the back of Ferber’s! The antiques store on East Fourth! And I think I heard shots, too!” She provided a street number, then ended the call before the operator could ask her anything else, and tossed the phone into Thomas’s lap.
Worked when she was back in school and didn’t want to take her exams.
SEVENTY
THE ice pick had entered the side of Lewis’s right leg about five inches below the knee. Nicole had driven it straight in, through his jeans, and the tip had come out the other side, poking through his pants, the tip crimson.
It
had the effect of pulling that leg out from under him, because he dropped right there, to both knees, crushing one of the board game boxes, screaming the whole time. He let go of his gun and twisted around so he could get hold of the handle of the ice pick to pull it back out.
That wasn’t something I wanted to see, but I was transfixed, as was Howard. What we both ended up seeing was even worse. Nicole sat up and got her hand on the pick before Lewis could, and instead of pulling it out and using it on him again in a new spot, or shoving it in even farther, she yanked on it sideways. The steel within his leg made new paths through his flesh, causing him to cry out again. He jerked his leg furiously, the heel of his boot catching Nicole, who was up on one arm and on her side, square in the chest.
It knocked her onto her back, but she was up in a second.
Lewis was scrambling, looking for his gun. It was on the floor in a rapidly growing puddle of his blood. He went to grab it, but Nicole had her hands on it first.
She wrapped her hand around the wet, bloodied grip and pointed it at Lewis’s head. He had rolled onto his back, had raised himself half up with his arms, and was scrambling backward, crablike, dragging the wounded leg after him.
Nicole was on her knees now, both hands on the gun, her arms out straight and steady. “I hate guns,” she said. Her blouse was torn open, revealing something else, dark and padded.
A vest.
“Nicole,” Lewis said. “Listen, listen to—”
She pulled the trigger and blew a corner of his head off. His body went flat, the floor a mass of blood and skull and brain matter.
Howard threw his hand to his mouth, like he was going to vomit. He turned, flung back the curtain, and started to run. Nicole scrambled after him.
In the distance, I heard sirens.
I pulled my left hand free of the tape, which now hung loose from my right hand and started tearing into the tape around my stomach that held me to the chair.
The sirens grew louder.
But even closer, the sounds of a car screeching to a stop in the alley. Someone shouting. A woman.