3rd Degree

Chapter 25

MY CELL PHONE was beeping.

It was the middle of the night. I shot up and blinked at the clock. Shit, 4 A.M.

Groggily, I fumbled for the phone, trying to read the num-ber on the screen. It was Paul Chin's. “Hey, Paul, what's going on?” I mumbled.

“Sorry, LT, I'm at the Clift Hotel. I'm thinking you better come on down.”

“You find something?” A four-in-the-morning question? Four-in-the-morning calls meant only one thing.

“Yeah. I think the Lightower bombing just got a bit more complicated.”

Eight minutes later - jeans and a tank thrown on, and a few purposeful brushes through my hair - I was in the Explorer, bounding down Vermont on the way to Seventh, top hat flashing through the quiet night.

Three black-and-whites along with a morgue van were crowded around the hotel's bright new entrance. The Clift was one of the city's great old hotels and had just undergone a fancy renovation. I badged my way past the cops at the front, gawking at the lavish ostrich-hide couch and bulls' horns on the wall, a few stunned hotel employees standing around, wondering what to do. I took the elevator up to the top floor, where Chin was waiting.

“The vic's name is George Bengosian. Health-care bigwig,” Paul Chin explained as he led me into the penthouse suite. “Prepare yourself. I'm not kidding.”

I looked at the body, propped upright against the leg of a conference table in the lavishly appointed room.

The color of Bengosian's skin had turned a hypoxic green-yellow, the consistency of jelly. His eyes were wrenched open like mangled gear sockets. Mucus, or some sort of viscous orange fluid, ran out of his nose and had caked grotesquely on his chin.

“What the hell did he do,” I muttered to the med tech leaning over him, “get into a life-sucking contest with an alien?”

The tech looked totally mystified. “I don't have the slight-est idea.”

“You're sure this is a homicide?” I turned to Chin.

“Front desk got a call, two forty-five A.M.,” he said with a shrug, “from outside the hotel. Said there was some garbage that needed to be picked up in the penthouse.”

“Works for me.” I sniffled.

“That, and this,” Chin said, producing a balled-up piece of paper that he picked up with latex gloves. “Found it in his mouth.”

It looked like some kind of crumpled business form.

A white embossed logo: Hopewell Health Care.

It was a statement of benefits. Some text filled in. As I started to read, my blood ran cold.

We have declared war on the agents of greed and corruption in our society. No longer can we sit back and tolerate the powered class, whose only birthright is arrogance, as they enrich themselves on the oppressed, the weak, and the poor. The era of economic apartheid is over. We will find you, no matter how large your house or powerful your lawyers. We are inside your homes, your workplaces. We announce to you, your war is not beyond, but here. It is with us.

Oh fuck. I looked at Chin. This wasn't a homicide. It was an execution. A declaration of war. And he was right, the Lightower bombing did just get a lot more complicated.

The note was signed, August Spies.