Speak of the Devil

8

I MUST HAVE RESEMBLED A KID BUILDING A PLAY FORT. WITH MY ONE arm that worked, I dragged two upended tables together in front of Rebecca Gilpin and created a little wall. Then I pulled my gun from my shoulder holster and, on my knees, rose up and peered over the wall.

Bang-bang.

Our waitress was on her hands and knees looking like someone trying to find a contact lens. Her blouse had been blown half off, and her exposed right arm was riddled with thick red dots. The restaurant had been only moderately full. Most of the patrons I spotted were moving, though some more slowly than others. There were groans and soft cries rising into the hazy air. I spotted a hand on the floor near where the waitress was crawling. When I realized that it was no longer attached to its arm, I bit clean through my lower lip. The sprinkler system had ceased. There were no fires. The floor was a thick milky puddle, with swirls of pinkish blood mixed in.

People were already coming in off the street to help or just to witness the chaos. I braced myself. This is what the more insidious bombers want, a fresh new crowd for explosion number two. Moths to the flame. I eyeballed each person who came high-stepping into the rubble. The other possibility would be that one of these people was picking his or her way through the mess to see if the target had been hit. I had no way to be certain, but I would have given better than even odds that the target was currently on the floor on her back, behind my little homemade fort.

The safety was off. My finger was on the trigger.

My heart was banging against its cage, trying to get out.

Rebecca let out a groan. “I can’t move.”

“Don’t try.”

She groaned again. I checked over the edge of my tables to be sure no one was marching toward us, then I turned and gave Rebecca a quick once-over. I didn’t like what I found below her waist. Specifically, the left leg. A nasty chard of polished wood was lodged in her thigh, just above the knee, which itself looked like a bruised apple. Blood was pumping in small steady pulses from the thigh.

I set down my gun and scrambled around for a pair of cloth napkins. I knotted them together, then took hold of the two ends and spiraled the cloth into a narrow coil. I grabbed a small column of wood that looked like it might have come from a chair leg.

“Excuse me.” Pulling Rebecca’s torn skirt up to her waist, I held the piece of wood in place on the bottom of her thigh with the doubled napkins, then brought the two ends up around the thigh, crossed the ends of the napkins and bore down with all my strength, tying them off in a secure knot.

Rebecca asked, “What are you doing?”

“Hold on.”

I located two more napkins, knotted them as I had the others, spiraled them and wrapped them around her thigh below the rig I’d just secured. I tied this one off even tighter than the first. Only then did I work the ugly sliver of wood from her leg.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

The blood was still oozing from the wound, but as I watched, the pulsing seemed to lessen. I picked up my gun and raised myself to look over the upturned tables.

A blue and red light was flashing on the faces of the people gathered outside the restaurant. The cavalry had arrived. I flipped the safety back on and holstered my gun. There was a small crowd of people standing near the remains of the coat-check closet. As I stood up, two of the people moved away, and I saw what they’d been staring at. It was the Asian coat-check woman. I recognized her red beret. It was still on her head, which was still on her shoulders, which were still part of her torso. But that was where she stopped.

My kicking the nearest upturned table proved enough-I discovered later-to run a hairline fracture on my little toe. I turned not a few heads from the grisly sight as I unceremoniously lost it.

“Goddammit!”

CAPTAIN REMY SANCHEZ OF MIDTOWN NORTH’S HOMICIDE DIVISION did some kicking of his own, but he had wisely picked a safer target: a harmless piece of plaster exploded into dust against the toe of his shoe.

“Copycat, my ass. What kind of a fool do you take me for, Malone?”

The fact is, I didn’t take Remy Sanchez for anything remotely close to a fool. Sanchez was a thirty-odd-year veteran of the force who, through patience, solid work and, some would say, an uncanny ability to learn little tidbits about his superiors that those superiors would as soon no one know, had climbed steadily up the thin blue ladder from his days as a beat cop in Fort Apache in the Bronx to the point where he could now look out over a vast array of uniformed men and women and tell them what the hell they were supposed to do. He was a gentle-looking man. The eyes of a poet. Tight black curls showing inroads of gray. Married with children. I had met his wife on several occasions. She was quiet, nice. One got the feeling that if anyone ever harmed a hair on her head, calm and steady homicide captain Remy Sanchez would quietly see to it that it was the last hair on the last head that the person ever had the opportunity to harm.

He obviously wasn’t buying the copycat story. I hadn’t thought he would, but it was my job to stick with it.

“Okay, Malone. Look me in the eye and tell it to me again. Roberto Diaz takes a shot at Miss Gilpin as he’s spraying bullets all over the Thanksgiving Day parade, and not fifteen hours later, some fry brain who has also gotten the bright idea to go after the mayor’s special friend is up and running with a fripping bomb that he manages to place in the coat-check room of a joint where Miss Gilpin is sipping merlot with a private eye?”

“Chardonnay,” I said. Sanchez showed me the fire in his poet’s eyes.

Crime-scene tape had been set up outside the damaged restaurant to keep the onlookers at a distance. Half a dozen ambulances were parked in front, along with two fire trucks and I couldn’t say how many cop cars. The news media had also arrived in force, and minicam lights were floating and bobbing on the sidewalk as if a band of coal miners were outside the restaurant doing calisthenics. I spotted Kelly Cole, as well as some reporters from the Times, whose offices were just up the street.

“Malone!” Kelly started toward me, but Sanchez directed one of his cops to head her off.

“You’re welcome,” he said to me.

The injured were being taken out on stretchers. Remy Sanchez and I stood next to the EMS crew stabilizing Rebecca for her trip to the ambulance. She had gone into shock soon after I’d tied off the tourniquets. A little crying, a little laughing, a fixation with the flowers in her dressing room that she wanted delivered to area hospitals.

“I’m going with her,” I said to Sanchez as the EMS crew kicked the collapsible gurney up to its rolling position.

“The mayor is on his way here,” Sanchez said.

“Of course he is. And if I were you, I’d make sure that not a single one of your men or women make a peep to the media about her.”

“I don’t like this,” Sanchez said. “I don’t care if Diaz was killed, you can’t tell me this isn’t related. There’s a connection, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

“Hey, when you find out, let me know.”

The EMS crew was clearing the way to take Rebecca out. I looked around and grabbed a damp tablecloth off the floor. I asked Sanchez, “You got a handkerchief?” He pulled one from his pocket. I stepped over to the gurney. “Miss Gilpin?”

Her head had been secured. Only her eyes could move. I was surprised to see how much venom they held.

“Rebecca. It’s fucking Rebecca.”

“Rebecca, I’m sorry about this. But I think an incognito exit would be favorable.” I unfolded the handkerchief and set it over her nose and mouth and eyes, then lowered the damp tablecloth on top of her.

“Looks like she’s dead,” Sanchez muttered.

The gurney started forward. I turned to Sanchez.

“Hold that thought.”

MY LEFT SHOULDER WAS DISLOCATED. I’VE HAD THIS HAPPEN TO ME once before. That time it had resulted from a plunge off the top of a building. A man with a gun had encouraged me to take the leap. Four flights down into an industrial garbage bin, just like you see them do in the movies. I’d landed on eggshells and coffee grounds, but those aren’t what separated my shoulder. It was the thing underneath the eggshells and coffee grounds. An accordion. A nice-looking one, too. Red mother-of-pearl. Shiny white keys. The thing gave out a discordant yelp when I hit it. I’m sure I did, too.

The EMS crew popped my shoulder back into its socket at Barrymore’s. The doctor at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt outfitted me with a sling and a handful of painkillers and moved on to the more seriously injured. Rebecca was in surgery, having her leg worked on. I’d been able to get Margo on the phone before she heard about the explosion on the news, a phone call that had featured yet another long silence from her end of the line. “You do know,” she had said finally in a quiet voice, “a very nice, stable dentist did ask me to marry him once.”

I was still waiting for Rebecca to emerge from surgery when Martin Leavitt arrived. He was flanked by his deputy mayor. Leavitt came on like a hurricane. “Where is she?”

He spotted me sitting on one of the molded plastic chairs in the waiting area and veered in my direction. “What the hell happened? What were you two doing in a public place? I thought you were supposed to protect her. Do you call that protecting? Goddammit, what happened?”

His face was the color of my chair. Philip Byron pulled up behind him and watched with a look of bland amusement. I couldn’t tell if he was amused at my being dressed down or at his boss’s outburst. Maybe both.

“I’m waiting,” Leavitt fumed, planting his hands on his hips. All heads in the waiting area were turned in our direction.

I rose slowly from my chair. My God, I was aching. “What say we go somewhere private?”

Leavitt took a beat, then looked around at the gawkers and understood what I meant. He snapped, “Philip.” Byron lost the amusement and quickly escorted the two of us through the swinging doors into the ER hallway. “We need a room,” he said to the first person he saw. A fellow in green scrubs led us into a small, dimly lit room with a solid metal table in the middle and a hulking X-ray machine hanging from the ceiling. No chairs. As I leaned against the table, Leavitt opened his mouth to speak, but I beat him to it.

“She’s going to be fine,” I said. “So am I, thank you. There’s a woman who was handling the coat check at Barrymore’s who is not fine. I’d say she was in her mid-twenties. Attractive Asian girl. She’s dead, Mr. Mayor. I’m guessing the bomb went off very near her waist, because she was blown apart. Add her to the tally from the parade this morning, and I think we can all agree that it’s been a bad day.” This last part I emphasized with a simple barking of the words “bad” and “day.” The mayor blanched.

I continued, “If you want to try tagging me with the blame for Miss Gilpin’s injuries and cutting me loose, go right ahead. I’ll even give you my services gratis for the day. It’s your call. I’m in or I’m out. Executive-decision time. I’m sure you’re up to it.”

“Look,” the mayor began. “What I-”

I wasn’t finished. “Whatever the hell this is all about, this shooting, this goddamn explosion… something is not being handled right.”

Philip Byron spoke up. “You can’t talk to the mayor like that.”

I ignored him. An image of Margo having joined Rebecca Gilpin and me for drinks after the show flashed through my head. I held up a finger and placed it directly in front of the mayor’s nose. Solid as a tree. No trembling.

“I’ve known Tommy Carroll a long time. He worked with my father. Any obedience you’ve gotten from me so far, and my putting up with this need-to-know bullshit, that’s because of Tommy. But I just want you to know before you say another word that, Tommy or no Tommy, we’re finished with all that. You can bounce me or not bounce me, I don’t really care. But I am now officially curious. I want to know exactly what the hell is going on. Need-to-know basis? I damn well need to know, and I damn well intend to. This is my city, too, Mr. Mayor, and this is my body. And I am not sticking it between your girlfriend and the next who-knows-what until I get some answers and know some things. Call me nosy, but I either get those answers from you or from Tommy Carroll or from whoever else happens to know them, or I start kicking over trash cans and knocking down doors. That’s what I’m trained to do. Ask Tommy, if you want to. I’m good at it.”

My finger was no longer without a wobble, so I withdrew it. In any case, Leavitt no longer looked like he was ready to bite it off. Philip Byron did, though. He looked like he wanted to eviscerate me for speaking this way to his boss. As for the boss himself, he was considering me with a placid gaze.

“Tomorrow,” Leavitt said. “Gracie Mansion. Can you make it for breakfast?”