14th Deadly Sin

TRUTH OR DIE

Coming June 2015

“WHERE EXACTLY DID it happen?” I asked.

“West End Avenue at Seventy-Third. The taxi was stopped at a red light,” said Lamont. “The assailant smashed the driver’s side window, pistol-whipped the driver until he was knocked out cold, and grabbed his money bag. He then robbed Ms. Parker at gunpoint.”

“Claire,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Please call her Claire.”

I knew it was a weird thing for me to say, but weirder still was hearing Lamont refer to Claire as Ms. Parker, not that I blamed him. Victims are always Mr., Mrs., or Ms. for a detective. He was supposed to call her that. I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

“I apologize,” I said. “It’s just that—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said with a raised palm. He understood. He got it.

“So what happened next?” I asked. “What went wrong?”

“We’re not sure, exactly. Best we can tell, she fully cooperated, didn’t put up a fight.”

That made sense. Claire might have been your prototypical “tough” New Yorker, but she was also no fool. She didn’t own anything she’d risk her life to keep. Does anyone?

No, she definitely knew the drill. Never be a statistic. If your taxi gets jacked, you do exactly as told.

“And you said the driver was knocked out, right? He didn’t hear anything?” I asked.

“Not even the gunshots,” said Lamont. “In fact, he didn’t actually regain consciousness until after the first two officers arrived at the scene.”

“Who called it in?”

“An older couple walking nearby.”

“What did they see?”

“The shooter running back to his car, which was behind the taxi. They were thirty or forty yards away; they didn’t get a good look.”

“Any other witnesses?”

“You’d think, but no. Then again, residential block … after midnight,” he said. “We’ll obviously follow up in the area tomorrow. Talk to the driver, too. He was taken to St. Luke’s before we arrived.”

I leaned back in my chair, a metal hinge somewhere below the seat creaking its age. I must have had a dozen more questions for Lamont, each one trying to get me that much closer to being in the taxi with Claire, to knowing what had really happened.

To knowing whether or not it truly was … fuckin’ random.

But I wasn’t fooling anyone. Not Lamont, and especially not myself. All I was doing was procrastinating, trying hopelessly to avoid asking the one question whose answer I was truly dreading.

I couldn’t avoid it any longer.