Urge to Kill

63

They’d begun to gather in the park before dawn, and now there were hundreds of them.

At eight o’clock, New York One estimated the crowd at a thousand. It sure looked like a thousand massed on a TV screen. Traffic on Central Park West had to be diverted when their numbers spilled out onto the street.

They carried identical neatly produced FREE BERTY signs, and some wore T-shirts bearing the same demand in large black letters.

The event was large enough to disrupt traffic patterns throughout Midtown Manhattan, and made Quinn late on his way to Alfred Beeker’s Park Avenue office. He wanted to get there by nine, before Beeker’s first patients began to arrive.

He wanted to be in a room alone with Beeker.

Quinn sat as patiently as he could, draping his right wrist over the Lincoln’s steering wheel, watching the brown UPS van ahead of him advance along the street ten feet at a time. His right foot moved automatically between accelerator and brake pedal, advancing the Lincoln along with the van. The car’s air conditioner was sucking in some of the van’s exhaust, so Quinn dropped the driver’s side window about six inches. Heat rolled in, along with more exhaust fumes. The metallic chattering emitted by the air conditioner was louder with the window down. Too loud.

The window was gliding back up when Quinn’s cell phone chirped. He leaned to the side and worked it out of his pocket, flipped it open, and pressed the button to answer.

“That you, Quinn?”

Renz’s voice.

“It’s my phone,” Quinn said.

“That might not mean shit. You mighta just lost it, and I’m talking to some clown pretending to be you.”

“I’m me, and not pretending.”

“What about the clown part?”

“It’s what I don’t want to waste time on now, Harley.”

“I tried to get in touch with you yesterday afternoon to tell you this movement to sympathize with Berty Wrenner is picking up steam, and you know what goes with steam.”

“Pressure,” Quinn said, trying not to yawn. The hot sun beating through the windshield was making him sleepy.

“Where were you yesterday, Quinn?”

“Pearl and I drove upstate to investigate a lead. Guy named Dwayne Avis. Nothing came of it, but I’ll get a report to you so it’s in the mix.”

“Seen TV news this morning?”

“I managed to avoid it.”

“Berty’s due to be arraigned today, so his supporters are having a big demonstration in the park. Signs, songs, the whole shebang.”

“You don’t hear that word very often anymore,” Quinn said. “Shebang.”

“Parse it,” Renz said, “and you got sexism.” He seemed to mean it. There were times when nothing seemed too trivial for Renz to worry over.

“I won’t mention you said it,” Quinn assured him.

“Thanks. The news says the shebang is growing larger.”

“That must be what’s causing the traffic mess I’m stuck in. So what does Berty’s army want?”

“Freedom for Berty.”

“Despite the murder charge with evidence and a confession to back it up?”

“All that doesn’t seem important to them. You know how it goes, Quinn. The little guy’s perfect to play the poor schmuck who’s a victim of the machine.”

“We the machine?”

“We’re part of it.”

“So you wanna turn Berty free?”

“Not me. But if certain politicians could think of an excuse, they’d be out there marching with Berty’s army.”

“You’re about the most opportunistic politician I know,” Quinn said, “and you’re not out there marching.”

“I’m also first and foremost a cop, or I wouldn’t associate with you and your fouled-up crew.”

“You including Vitali and Mishkin?”

“Mishkin’s Barney Fife with a brush mustache and Vitali’s turning into Columbo.”

“Television again,” Quinn said.

“Between the Slicer, and the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer, and this dueling bullshit, this friggin’ city’s gone nuts.”

“Always has been. That’s why we love it.”

“So you on your way to the Seventy-ninth Street office?”

“I’ve gotta make a stop first; then I’m going there.”

“Keep me better informed, Quinn. Give me some raw meat now and then to throw to the people who want to turn me into raw meat. You know how the game is played. That’s the reason why I hire you when we run into this kind of shit storm.”

“Would you throw them Vitali and Mishkin?”

“I can promise you they’ll go before you do.”

“You’re an honest evil man, Harley. That’s so rare in this world.”

“I’m working on the honest part.”

“And making progress. I’ll fax you that report.”

“You do that, the whole shebang. Whenever you find time in your frenetic schedule.”

That sounded like an exit line to Quinn. He broke the connection and stuck the phone back in his pocket.

The NYPD must have been getting the “Free Berty” demonstration under control. Traffic was creeping ahead steadily now, without the nerve-racking stop and go.

The city had caught its breath and was moving on.

Lavern removed the sheet from over her face and found a lance of sunlight aimed at her head, illuminating her pillow and igniting the pain in her ear where Hobbs had struck her last night. She moaned and glanced at the clock near the bed. Almost nine o’clock.

She recalled last night and shrank within herself. The apartment was quiet. Hobbs had left for work over an hour ago. At least there was that. She had some peace for a while. Some freedom from fear and fists.

And knives. Something new from Hobbs.

As she sat up in bed the pain in her ribs flared, and she drew a sharp breath. Her injured ear began to ring. She got both bare feet on the floor and stood up, dizzy at first so that she had to stoop slightly and touch the edge of the mattress to keep her balance. Then she worked her sleep shirt over her head and removed her panties. Every move hurt. It was as if she’d been in a terrible auto accident the day before and the pain and stiffness had caught up with her overnight. Knowing she was stooped like an old woman, she made her way toward the bathroom.

In the full-length mirror on the bathroom door she was shocked by how relatively unmarked her body was. Though her ear and the side of her head ached, there was only a slight discoloration at her temple and around the corner of her eye. Her sides were red and turning purplish and would be colorfully bruised, but not for a while. The bruising would be vivid but limited, and not visible when she was dressed. But if she looked as bad as she felt, someone would rush her to a hospital.

She was still proud of her body and thought that, considering what she’d been through, she looked all right, even sexy, though it was obvious something had happened to her ribs. As long as they were covered, she could pass for one of the world’s uninjured. Hobbs had it down to an art.

Lavern sometimes wondered how many other bruised but seemingly uninjured women she passed every day on the street, concealing their pain, holding it inside.

As she turned on the shower, she heard the rasp of the intercom. After hesitating a few seconds, she swiveled the white porcelain faucet handles to off. She dried her hands on a towel and put on a robe. Her hair looked like a birds’ nest from sleeping on it, but it would have to do.

Yanking the robe’s sash tight about her waist, she hurried from the bathroom and answered another, longer intercom buzz.

A metallic male voice from the lobby said there was a delivery for Lavern Neeson in 5C. She told the deliveryman she was the recipient and buzzed him in.

A few minutes later he was at the door, a young, acne-cursed man wearing dirt-crusted jeans and a gray T-shirt. The shirt had FLORA DORA lettered on it. Lavern knew it was the name of a small florist shop in the next block.

She accepted the narrow white box from the man, told him to wait a minute, and then dug a few dollars from her purse to tip him.

When he was gone, she carried the box to the coffee table and sat down before it on the sofa. Her ear began to ring louder, and her headache was pulsing. When she was finished here she’d take two Aleves with a glass of water, see if that helped.

She leaned forward in the quiet apartment and opened the box.

It was full of pink and red roses. There was a small white card affixed with a delicate pink ribbon to one of the stems. Lavern opened the card so she could read the blue-ink scrawling inside it and recognized the handwriting.

The roses were from Hobbs. The writing on the card proclaimed that he loved her.

The sad part about it, Lavern thought, was that he really did.

Martin Hawk sat back, sipped his espresso, and idly watched the pigeons scratching out their brief existence on the sidewalk outside the restaurant where he’d just enjoyed a delicious breakfast. He mused on how his life had changed for the better. Had it been luck? Fate? He preferred to credit it to design, but he was a realist.

At sixteen his intelligence had been obvious, especially in his knowledge of the outdoors and in the scores he accumulated on various tests meant to measure scholarly potential. Yet he’d been a hopeless student. His father had become concerned, and when Alma’s widowed and childless sister, Adriella, offered to take the boy into her home in Little Rock and see that he was enrolled in a better school and tutored, Carl thanked her for her generosity and told Marty it was time for him to become a scholar. Education was important, and he’d be a neglectful father if he didn’t see that Marty obtained some.

Marty didn’t like leaving Black Lake, but to disobey his father was unthinkable. So he lived with Adriella and struggled along in Little Rock, not exactly a top scholar, but getting by.

Three weeks before his high school graduation, fate intervened. Adriella, who was much more attractive and personable than her late sister, met and married Lloyd Barkweather.

Barkweather was a large, bluff man with shrewd gray eyes. He was moderately wealthy. And he was British. He’d been spending a month in Little Rock to consider Arkansas as a contending state in a search for the site of a new Rolls-Royce jet engine plant. Barkweather had said no to Arkansas, and a love-struck Adriella had said yes to Barkweather.

An ardent big game hunter, Barkweather had soon taken a shine to Marty. When he and Adriella moved, Marty went with them to London, where he continued his education, doing only marginally better as a scholar.

But he did marvelously well as an outdoorsman, going with Barkweather on hunting expeditions in faraway countries whose names Marty could barely pronounce.

When Barkweather and Adriella were killed in a motorcar pileup on the M23, Marty was surprised to find himself the sole heir to a modest investment portfolio.

Still without his degree, Marty left school at the age of twenty-one. He placed the portfolio in the stewardship of the investment department of Barclays Bank and traveled to Africa, where he went to work as a guide for a British company offering safaris. Mostly they were photography safaris, but Marty did hunt on his own with a rifle that had been a gift from Barkweather.

His reputation as a hunter grew, as did his reputation with women. The first had been the lonely wife of a Canadian client. Then local wives and daughters of civil servants fell one after another as victims of his charm.

Marty found courting and bedding women much like stalking and bagging game.

But not quite. There was some trouble about an unwanted pregnancy that became a miscarriage, then a suicide, and he left Africa to hunt in India.

He thought less and less about the disconsolate African woman who’d leaped to her death from a bridge out of love and remorse.

When a tiger in the Sunderbans became a man-eater, it was Marty who was hired to track and kill it. Within the week the tiger was dead, and Martin Hawk was something of a hero.

After that kill, he returned to Africa.

A month later he was sitting in a camp chair outside his tent when he noticed a slow whirl of vultures circling a distant creature almost dead. Martin Hawk raised his binoculars and saw that the doomed animal was a male lion that had perhaps been fatally injured in a fight for dominance of the pride.

He leaned back in his chair, still with the binoculars pressed to his eyes, and became fascinated not by the lion, but by the huge birds gliding and soaring on the warm air currents off the veldt, patiently waiting for the lion to die.

It was then, for a reason he didn’t understand or try to analyze, that he felt the need to return to his home country and his father.

The time Martin Hawk had chosen to return was fortunate. His modest portfolio in euros had, due to the rate of exchange, become considerably more valuable in dollars.

After his plane landed at Kennedy in New York, he canceled his connecting flight and took a cab into the city.

New York City. He wanted to see it.

It might be the perfect place for a unique and profitable business he’d long considered while enjoying the hunt.

So far it had been exactly that.

Martin Hawk had never gotten beyond New York.

He raised his hand to get the waiter’s attention and ordered another espresso.