The Long Fall

44

I crawled back into my son’s bed at dawn and fell into a deep sleep with no fires or hidden assassins dogging my dreams. When I finally awoke it was a little after nine and the house was empty. I walked through the prewar rooms but no one was there. The kids were in summer school and Katrina was at the gym.

I went to work.

In a little cubbyhole that Twill had cut along the baseboard at the back of his closet I found a .22 pistol in a slightly battered cherry-wood box. The gun was unloaded, but there was a box of ammunition next to it. I considered confiscating the piece but thought better of it. Twill was too cunning for that to stop him for long, and, anyway, I had more than a week before he planned to commit his capital crime.

I MET HUSH in the gentrified meatpacking district just south of Fourteenth Street at 10:45. He usually drove the company Rolls but that day he was behind the wheel of a standard black Lincoln sedan. No need to call attenti怅on to ourselves when there might be mischief afoot.

I climbed in the backseat and he glanced up in the rearview mirror and into my eyes. I don’t know what he was looking for but he seemed satisfied.

“What’s the plan?” he asked.

“Moore says that the blackmailer wants him to bring the money to room C on the third floor at ten tonight. I want to bug the place and see what there is to be seen before that time.”

The killer gave a short nod and turned the key in the ignition.

“I’m just the insurance,” he said as we pulled away from the curb.

I saw no reason to corroborate a fact and so remained silent.

THE CONDEMNED APARTMENT house was a couple of buildings east of the West Side Highway, on the north side of the street. We parked at the far end of the block. I was told that there was a key behind a loose brick just above the mailbox, but Hush and I went around the back and broke in through the cellar door.

He was armed and so was I. The guns were in our hands. I used a penlight to guide us. The door to the studio apartment was open. A few errant beams of sunlight shot through the cracks in a boarded-up window. We glided in, scanned the room, and then I nailed a small block of wood on the sill of a window that looked out into darkness.

“Good place to kill somebody,” Hush commented.

Those words sent a chill through my shoulders.

The dented and dirty block of unpainted wood had a transmitter embedded in it with a tiny fiber-optic lens peeking out like the tip of a nail. It was the kind of little addition that you’d never notice unless you were in the room every day.

WE MADE IT back to Hush’s car and turned on the laptop that received the transmissions from Tiny’s very special bug. The image of the dark room appeared and all we had to do was wait. If any motion was detected, a red light would start flickering at the bottom of the screen.

I sat in the backseat with the computer beside me. Hush stayed up front, as silent as dust.

There were little red flashes now and then, triggered by passing rats, but that was all.

At a little after one I started getting bored.

“How’s it going, Hush?” I asked to cut the monotony.

He only turned his profile to me, but I could see the mild astonishment on his face. Nobody who knew Hush made small talk with him. After a moment he turned far enough to face me. At firsë€ce me. At his brows were knitted, but then he gave me a weak smile.

“I joined a monastery,” he said.

While I was trying to figure out if this was an attempt at humor, he added, “I remembered when you told me about that meditation stuff and connected with a bunch of Zen Buddhists off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Black guys mostly.”

Hush had once commented on my cool demeanor in rough situations. I told him about Zazen sitting.

“Does it help?” I didn’t feel afraid but my pulse had quickened.

“Keeps me straight,” he said. “Keeps me focused. They teach you how to sit for hours with your mind in another place. It takes some of the edge off.”

I could only imagine what edge he was talking about.

Five minutes must have passed. He was still sitting with his back to the driver’s-side door.

“I got my girl and son down on an island off the Carolina coast,” he said, continuing our conversation. “Everything you need to know about them is in an envelope that I gave that lawyer of yours—that Breland Lewis. Don’t worry, though, he won’t know you know me until he opens the letter.”

I hadn’t given him Breland’s name, never told him that I had a lawyer.

“I want you to look in on them from time to time if I’m incapacitated or dead,” he added. “You’ll have access to the funds they’ll need. Tamara has to cosign, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, just to make it a conversation.

I suppose that was Hush’s way of saying that he considered me a friend. It felt like having a king cobra slither up on the barstool next to you: you didn’t necessarily like the company, but then again, you had second thoughts about any sudden motions, much less getting up and walking away.

At 2:18 my cell phone made the sound of yipping hyenas.

“Hello?”

“Sanderson’s awake,” Carson Kitteridge said in my ear.

HUSH TOOK THE laptop in the front seat and I walked over to Tenth Avenue, where I hailed a cab.

The hospital they had Sanderson in was up in the Sixties on the East Side.

The man who should have been dead was on the fifth floor, with two strapping police guards on the door.

As I approached they got to their feet, forming a very effective blockade. I might have been nervous if I hadn’t alreë€ I hadn’ady fought and won against the monster that they were guarding.

“Off limits,” the cop closest to me said. He had copper hair and skin so white it seemed to be turning green.

He put a hand on my shoulder.

“Get yer fuckin’ hand off me, son,” I said. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it was all the tension from being in such close quarters with a commercial serial killer for the better part of four hours.

“What?” the bright penny said in warning.

“It’s okay, Landis,” Carson Kitteridge said. He was coming out from the hospital room. “LT here has a thin skin. Breathe on him hard and he feels it.”

Landis was six feet tall, so he had to look down to peer into my eyes. He didn’t like me. Maybe I should have given him a number and asked him to stand on line.

“Shall we?” Kitteridge said, indicating the room behind with a twist of his head.

“I wanna talk to him alone,” I said.

This time he shook his head.

“Nice talkin’ to you, then.” When I moved my shoulder in preparation to leave, Landis spoke again.

“Stay right where you are.”

“Say what?”

“You heard me.”

“Tell me something, boy,” I said slowly and clearly. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that children should be seen and not heard?”

The green undershade of the cop’s complexion was turning pink.

“Stand down, Landis,” Carson said. And then to me, “Okay, LT. But I wanna know what you get.”

THERE WERE LIFE-SUPPORT machines in the private hospital room but they weren’t hooked up or turned on. Sanderson had two IVs dripping medicine and sustenance into his veins and two strawlike oxygen tubes that he’d pulled away from his nose. He was sitting up against a few pillows, staring at me. His left hand was shackled to the metal bed frame. I remember wondering if that short span of chain was enough to hold the monster.

The gash on his forehead was already closing up. It was the first time that I got a good look at what I like to call the face of the man’s personality.

It was the bloated visage of a petulant boy but I wasn’t fooled; I had felt that boy’s strength and murderous intent.

Rather than slaughter, there was now ë€there wawariness in Willie’s eyes. He was looking for the thirty-odd-pound chair upside his head. I could see that, just in our fight, I had only one chance with him.

“They got you on the Roger Brown killing,” I said before sitting in the chair next to his mechanical bed. I noted that Kitteridge had placed the seat out of the killer’s reach. “They also know about Norman Fell.”

Only the quick darting of his eyes told me that he was surprised at the mention of the Albany detective.

“I went up to see Bunny at the sanitarium,” I added.

“He put her back in there?” he said.

I must have reacted in some way, shown an eagerness or something, because he clamped down after uttering those few words and nothing I could do would open him up again.

I told him that turning against the people that hired him would lessen his sentence by half a lifetime and that the law would otherwise likely go heavy on him because he’d already committed one murder and gotten away with it. I made a dozen threats and suggestions but he remained mute.

You don’t have to be smart to be tough-minded. As a matter of fact, the combination of stupidity and silence might be the greatest weapon in the history of our species.

“WHAT’D HE SAY?” Kitteridge asked when I exited Sanderson’s hospital room twenty minutes later.

“Not a damn thing.”

“How do you read it, LT?”

“It has to have something to do with the two men getting killed,” I said. “Thurman is the key, that’s for sure.”

I let those last words hang in the air because it occurred to me that the cop should have identified the illiterate PI by then. And if Kitteridge knew who he was, then he also knew he was dead.

“Yeah,” the detective said. “You got any more on him?”

“He hasn’t called me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Anything else you remember about him?”

“No.”

“No,” Kitteridge said, echoing me ominously.

“I guess I better be going,” I said.

“Where to?”

“A case.”

“Connected?”

“I sure hope not.”

“Okay, then,” Kitteridge said. “I’ll be seeing you soon.”

I wasn’t looking forward to that, either.

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