Sometimes you just have a feeling you’re about to catch a break. This wasn’t one of those times.
Which was all the more reason why I wasn’t expecting the door to my apartment to be wide open, or kicked down, or hanging off its hinges like some giant calling card. And sure enough, it wasn’t.
The door was closed. Locked, too. Easing my back against the wall and out of the line of fire, I reached over for the knob. It barely budged. Maybe the whiz kid, Owen, was wrong. They never came. They weren’t inside.
Maybe.
I took out my key—everything was one key or another now—and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. It was a losing battle. There was simply no preventing the audible snap of the dead bolt retreating. In the silence of the hallway, the way the sound echoed, it might as well have been a giant gong announcing my arrival.
I waited for a moment, trying to listen again into my apartment while staying clear of the door. I could hear every beat of my heart, every swallow, every breath I was taking—but nothing more. Each second passing was all the more reason to believe no one was waiting for me on the other side.
Still, that didn’t stop me from putting the duffel down on the floor and pulling out the Glock to go with my SIG Sauer. I was like the title of a badass wannabe country song. “Double-Fisted with Pistols.”
I peeled my back off the wall, my shirt damp with sweat and sticking to my body. Damn, it’s hot.
Whether I was steeling my nerve or just stalling, I suddenly found myself counting back from ten. That, and thinking of Dante once again and the final line of the inscription he encountered on the Gates of Hell.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
CHAPTER 41
I STEPPED back, raised my right foot, and let it fly, my heel hitting the door dead center with a deafening bam! The door flew open and my duffel bag quickly followed as I kicked it into the foyer to draw their fire. But the only noise I heard was the bag sliding across my hardwood floors.
My turn.
Crouched low with both guns drawn, I angled around the door frame, my eyes darting left, right, and everywhere. Nothing moved. No one was there.
Correction. No one was still there.
Creepy isn’t bursting into your apartment to see it ransacked. It’s bursting into your apartment to see everything as you left it … and still knowing someone’s been there.
Owen wasn’t wrong; I’d had company. The vibe was immediate. The proof came soon after.
I’d already done a quick sweep of every room to ensure I was truly alone when I circled back to my foyer and tried to think how they would think. Owen had summed it up. They’d want to know as much about me—and what I knew—as they could.
I started in my library and the easiest egg in the hunt, my laptop on my desk. Gone.
Next was the fruit bowl in my kitchen, where my mail piled up instead of fruit. All the mail was there, but at the bottom of the bowl was where I kept a spare key to the apartment, as well as one for my car and my office at Columbia.
All three keys? Gone.
By then, the old yew-wood chest in my bedroom was a foregone conclusion. I pulled open the top drawer on the right, which held my passport along with the lone weapon I kept in the apartment for protection, a 9mm Parabellum.
Gone and gone.
They had my hard drive. They had access to my home, my office, my car. They had one of my guns and the only way I could leave the country. Maybe they’d taken a few other things, but by that point I’d stopped looking.
Then I just stopped.
I froze in the middle of my bedroom, trying to listen. I’d heard something. The sound was faint but definitely there, or at least somewhere. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
There it was again.
I took a few wrong steps toward the door out to the living room, only to turn around when I heard it yet again. The sound was coming from my bathroom. I was positive I’d already looked in there. It wouldn’t hurt to check again, would it?
I sure as hell hope not.
Guns up and elbows locked, I put one foot in front of the other and moved toward the bathroom. After a few steps, I had the sound pegged. It was water. Not running, but dripping.
There was no need to channel Chuck Norris again. The door to my bathroom was wide open. The only kick I needed was one to my pants.
After a few deep breaths, I slowly peered around the hinges … and saw everything I’d seen the first time. My sink. My toilet. My shower. Nothing and no one else.
Ker-plop.
Immediately, my eyes went to the shower. The sliding doors were two-thirds closed. I could see enough through the frosted glass to know the boogeyman wasn’t standing behind them. I simply hadn’t turned off the water all the way after showering that morning.
I should’ve known, though. The déjà vu alone was enough of a tip-off. Those motherfuckers …
After a few steps forward to reach for the knob, I took one giant jump back. I wasn’t surprised about anything they’d taken from my apartment, not at all.
It was what they’d left behind.
CHAPTER 42
“DETECTIVE LAMONT, please,” I said, although the “please” was hardly polite. It sounded more like Right away, dammit! I couldn’t help it.
Not that it changed the officer’s answer on the other end of the phone. “He’s off duty, do you want his voice mail?”
No, I want his actual voice. I stared down again at the business card Lamont had given me, even flipping it over twice, as if somehow that would make his cell phone number magically appear. It wasn’t printed on the card.
“Is there a way you can reach him for me?” I asked. “It’s important.”
“Oh, wait a minute,” said the officer, his voice trailing off as if he were reaching for something. “There’s a note here. Are you Trevor Mann?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on a second.”
It was more like thirty seconds, but I hardly cared so long as the next voice I heard was Lamont’s. On second thought …
“What the hell were you thinking?” he immediately barked, skipping right past any pleasantries. The way he said “hell,” it pretty much rhymed with “truck.” He was pissed.
I knew he was referring to Bethesda Terrace. There were a few ways he could’ve found out already, but I wasn’t interested in asking. I had my own line of questioning, beginning with “Where are you?”
“At home,” he answered. “They patched the call from the precinct. Where are you?”
“At home as well.”
“I tried calling.”
“I just got here,” I said. “More importantly, how fast can you get here?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not going to believe this.”
“You might be surprised,” he said.
“Not as much as I was. Claire’s killer is in my bathtub.”
I was expecting any number of responses from Lamont, all of them falling under the heading of disbelief. Instead, I got sarcasm.
“Is the guy still dead or is he doing the backstroke now?” he asked.
“You think this is funny?”
“Do you hear me laughing?”
No, I didn’t. This was about more than Bethesda Terrace. I was missing something.
“They must have put him there,” I said. “They’re trying to frame me.”
“They, as in the two federal agents who just left my apartment twenty minutes ago?” he asked. “The ones you shot at in Central Park?”
“They were there to kill me. Christ, what the hell did they tell you?”
“I think you’re going to need a lawyer, Mr. Mann.”
“I am a lawyer, Detective Lamont.”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “We’re going to need a formal statement from you regarding Claire Parker’s murder.”
“Are you saying I’m a suspect?”
“More like a person of interest,” he said. “And I??
?m hopeful you’ll cooperate with us.”
“This is crazy.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Mann, I’m not the one with a dead guy in my bathtub.”
“But I can prove—”
He shut me down so fast I was actually startled. “You’ll have your chance, I assure you,” he said.
I was back to my original question. “Fine. Then when can I expect you here?”
“You can’t,” he said. “It’s not my shift. Detectives Charrington and Goldstein will be there soon. We’ve got to do things by the book, Mr. Mann.” He paused. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I answered. I finally did understand. Or, at least, I was pretty sure I did. A lot of years had passed since I’d read the book he was referring to. It was the one we had in common.
Lamont wasn’t ticked off. He was tipping me off. The faster I got off that phone …
The better my chances of staying alive.
CHAPTER 43
“STUPID, STUPID, stupid …” I muttered, berating myself as I quickly hung up the phone.
In the heat of the moment, at the shock of seeing Claire’s killer in my own bathtub, I’d gotten sloppy. Leave it to Lamont to catch my mistake.
He was now the official study guide—the human SparkNotes—for 1984. The two detectives he told me were coming to my apartment instead of him had the names of two other characters from the novel. Had he said one without the other, I probably never would’ve made the connection. But the two together? Charrington and Goldstein?
By the time he tacked on, “We’ve got to do things by the book,” I knew what Lamont was trying to tell me, the clever to my stupid. Big Brother was most likely listening in. My phone line was tapped.
So now they knew where I was. Where are they?
I dashed from the phone to my living room window, which faced the street below, pressing my nose against the glass. There was a windowless white van double-parked directly in front of the building. They hadn’t exactly spray-painted BAD GUYS on the hood, but I just had a feeling. This wasn’t the dry cleaners or a florist making a delivery. Nor was it the cable guy.
Time to pare down.
I kicked off my shoes, threw them in the duffel along with one of the guns—the Glock—and bolted from my apartment. Once in the stairwell, I silently stepped along the concrete in my socks for a peek over the railing, five flights down. One of the two guys from Bethesda Terrace was turning the corner to the second floor. It was only a glimpse, but that was all I needed.
Where’s the other one?
I ducked back into the hallway, eyeing the elevator. The floor light moved from 2 to 3, and it wasn’t stopping. There was my answer.
The options were shrinking fast as I ruled out the roof. The closest I’d ever gotten to jumping from one building to another was watching a Nike parkour commercial. With the alleyways on both sides of me measuring at least ten feet wide, this was no time for a crash course, emphasis on crash.
The only remaining option seemed to be standing my ground and letting the bullets fly. It was two against one—not the best odds—but probably my best chance.
Unless.
I made my way over to the middle of the hallway. There were only two apartments on the sixth floor, but there were three doors. As fast as you can say Monty Hall, I was opening door number three.
Like a moment straight out of This Is Your Life, I was flashing back to one of my earliest cases as a prosecutor with the Manhattan DA’s office. A sicko had killed his wife in their Upper East Side apartment and almost got away with it, thanks to the way he disposed of her body. He literally threw her away like yesterday’s trash.
Of course, he denied it, so one of the things I had to prove during the trial was that a 5-foot-7-inch woman weighing 145 pounds could indeed make it all the way down a garbage chute. I came up with the idea to film a crash test dummy with the same dimensions and show it to the jury. Worked like a charm.
But what about a 6-foot-1-inch man weighing 190 pounds?
I pulled open the chute with my free hand, looking into a black rectangle that might as well have been a black hole.
There was only one way to find out.
CHAPTER 44
ZIP-ZIP.
I quickly put the SIG back in the duffel with the Glock. Tossing the bag ahead of me, I listened for the sound it made on impact. A hollow, echoing, bone-crushing BANG! would spell certain doom.
Instead, what came back to my ears was more of a muffled thud, and with it the decent chance that there was enough trash in the Dumpster below to break my fall. Call it only possible doom.
I jumped up, grabbing the exposed pipe running parallel to the wall, and swung my legs into the chute. Cirque du Soleil wouldn’t be calling me anytime soon, but it got the job done. I was in.
Gravity took over as I began to free-fall, as did the panic of not being able to slow myself down. My hands kept slipping against the metal lining of the chute, which felt like it had been coated with grease or whatever god-awful slime had built up after years and years of funneling garbage. If the fall didn’t kill me, maybe the stench would. But so far, the smart money was on the fall.
I was dropping too fast—my hands were useless. So were my feet, the soles of my sneakers sliding like ice skates. Shit, this is going to hurt….
Plunging into the Dumpster, I felt my right knee buckle, followed by a sharp, stabbing pain in my left thigh. There was plenty of garbage to break my fall, all right, but none of my neighbors were throwing out their old pillows.
For a few seconds, I simply lay there sprawled like a frozen snow angel, catching my breath while taking a quick inventory of all my moving parts. Nothing seemed broken, but I could already feel the bruises forming. I wanted to scream out in pain. Instead, I settled for a slight moan. I had to stay quiet and listen. Did they hear me?
With any luck, the two guys were back in my apartment searching for me top to bottom in every room. I’d now have plenty of time to slip out the basement door near the storage lockers.
So much for luck, though.
I heard the sound the second I turned to look for the duffel amid the other bags of garbage. It was the creaking of hinges, one of the doors to the chute somewhere high above me. Damn.
There was nothing to see but darkness as I looked up into the chute. Still, I could picture one of them peering down, trying to tell if indeed I’d been crazy enough to jump.
I wanted to move out of the way, hug the side of the Dumpster, but even more than that, I wanted to stay absolutely, positively quiet. I didn’t move.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Everything around me … everything above me … was silent. I kept waiting for the sound of those hinges again, the door closing as one of them maybe convinced the other. Nah, there’s no way he jumped. He’s not that crazy….
If only.
Finally, it came. The sound I wanted. Unfortunately, it was preceded by the sound I’d never imagined.
Crazy? We’ll show you crazy….
CHAPTER 45
LIKE A missile, he shot into the Dumpster headfirst, his hands outstretched. Had I been standing a few inches to the left, he would’ve crushed me for sure. I suppose I should’ve felt lucky about that, but I was too busy falling back on my ass from the force of his impact to give it much thought.
Get up! Those were the only two words I was telling myself. If I didn’t, I was a dead man. Get up! Get up! Get up!
I pushed off whatever I could, trying to stand. He was doing the same, although I could tell he was feeling the pain of his landing. He was hobbled, favoring his right leg. But his right arm was working just fine as he dug his hand into his jacket. He wasn’t reaching for his business card.
Besides, we’d already met back at Bethesda Terrace. He’d been a split second away from killing me until Owen intervened. But Owen wasn’t here to tackle him. It was up to me.
I lunged for him. It was like trying to dive in one of those birthday bouncy houses, my feet all but giving
out underneath me. The best I could do was wrap up his legs and send him toppling over, but his hand was still on his holster.
My guns were in my duffel somewhere. His gun was at his fingertips.
Blindly, I reached for the nearest trash bag, swinging it across my body into his as hard as I could. The gun went flying as he fell back into the pile of garbage, his head banging against the steel wall of the Dumpster with a horrific crack! He should’ve been knocked out cold.
Instead, he was just getting warmed up.
Screw the gun, said his grin. He’d find it later after he beat me to death with his bare hands.
I didn’t even see the first punch, a lightning-fast roundhouse. He hit me high up on the jaw, a bull’s-eye to the molars. The only thing that kept me upright was the second punch, a roundhouse to the other side of my head. That one split my lip, the blood spraying everywhere like an exploding packet of ketchup.
His smile grew wider as I fell to my knees. I was practically teed up for him, about to be lights-out. We both knew it. The only thing delaying the inevitable was the one thing he wanted to know. He dangled the question as if it were my salvation, the only way he’d spare me.
“Where is he?” he asked. “Where’s the kid?”
I was dizzy, nauseous. My vision was quickly narrowing, blurred and fuzzy around the perimeter. That was why I didn’t see it at first, even though it was only a few feet to the left. My duffel.
The chain of the zipper was catching just enough light from the naked bulb overhead. The pull tab was on the near side, within arm’s reach. How fast do I need to be? Can I distract him?
The answer came suddenly with the piercing hiss of hydraulic pistons as the trash began to rumble all around us. It wasn’t exactly divine intervention, but I wasn’t complaining. This wasn’t your ordinary Dumpster. It was also a compactor—clearly triggered by weight—and it was about to do its job.
For one second, he took his eyes off me. It was like a reflex hammer to the knee. He couldn’t help it. He had to see what the hell was happening … that yes, the wall was closing in behind him.