Win

Chapter 19

I like to walk.

Most days, I walk to and from work. The route from my office to my apartment — from the Lock-Horne Building to the Dakota — is approximately two miles and takes slightly more than half an hour at a brisk pace. My routine is to head north on Fifth Avenue until I hit Central Park in front of the Plaza Hotel on Fifty-Ninth Street. I stay to the left of the Central Park Zoo, diagonally traipsing north and west until I hit Strawberry Fields and then my home in the Dakota. During my morning walk, I often stop for coffee at Le Pain Quotidien, which is located in the middle of the park. The dogs run free in this area, and I enjoy watching that. I don’t know why. I’ve never owned a dog. Perhaps I should remedy that.

It’s dark now, the park so hushed I can hear the echo of my footsteps on the pavement. Times may be better, but most people still don’t stroll through Central Park at night. I recall my rather violent youth when I would “night tour” the most dangerous areas of the city. As I mentioned earlier, I no longer trawl for trouble in the so-called mean streets, craving to right some vague wrong whilst satisfying certain of my own cravings. I’m more careful with where I wreak havoc now — albeit, as I now see with Teddy “Big T” Lyons, my targeting skills are far from perfect.

I confess I’m not good about considering long-term repercussions.

I cross the Imagine mosaic, and up ahead I can start making out the gables of the Dakota. I am thinking about too many things at once — the Jane Street Six, the Vermeer, the Hut of Horrors, Patricia, Jessica — when my phone buzzes.

It’s PT again.

I answer with “Articulate.”

“I got what I could on Strauss’s shell company. First off, it’s called Armitage LLC.”

Good name, I think. Tells you nothing. That’s Rule Number One in setting up an anonymous shell — have a name that has nothing to do with you.

“What else?”

“It was filed in Delaware.”

Again no surprise. If you want anonymity, there are three states you use — Nevada, Wyoming, or Delaware. Since Philadelphia is very close to Delaware, the Lockwoods have always gone that route.

“It’s also not a single shell,” PT says.

Yet again no surprise.

“Seems to be part of a network. You probably understand this better than I do, but LLC X owns LLC Y which owns LLC Z which owns Armitage LLC. So it’s very difficult to trace back. The checks come out of someplace called Community Star Bank.”

When I hear the name of the bank, I slow my pace. My grip on the phone tightens.

“Who set up the Armitage LLC?”

“It has no name. You know that.”

“I mean, what attorney?”

“Hold on.” I can hear him shuffle papers. “No specific lawyer, just a firm. Duncan and Associates.”

I freeze.

“Win?”

Duncan and Associates, I know, is just one man.

Nigel Duncan. Butler, trusted friend, bar-admitted attorney with but one client.

In short, the shell company paying Ry Strauss’s bill was set up by one of my family members.

I am about to ask PT exactly when the shell company was formed when something hard, like a tire iron, crashes into the side of my skull.

The rest happens in two or maybe three seconds.

I stagger, woozy from the blow, but I stay upright.

I hear PT’s tinny voice from my phone say, “Win?”

The tire iron lands with a loud splat on the other side of my skull.

The blow jars my brain. My phone drops to the pavement. The side of my scalp splits open. Blood trickles down my ear.

I do not see stars — I see angry bolts of light.

A thick arm snakes around my neck. I am ready to make the automatic move — head butt to the nose of the man behind me — but a second man, this one with a ski mask, points a gun in my face.

“Don’t fucking move.”

He stands just far enough away so that even if I had all my faculties, a move to disarm him would be precarious. Still, I would have gone for it had it not been for the blows to the skull. There are two strategies when a gun is pointed at you. One — the more obvious strategy — is surrender. Give them what they want. Don’t resist in any way. This is an excellent strategy if the purpose of the gun is, for example, to rob you. To take your wallet or your watch and abscond into the night. Option Two, the one I normally prefer, is to strike fast. Train yourself to skip over the part where you are shocked into paralysis and attack immediately. It is unexpected. The gun bearer often expects you to obey and act cautiously when you first see the gun — ergo, by moving without hesitation, you can catch them unawares.

Option Two obviously has its risks, but if you suspect the gun bearer means you great harm, as I do here, it’s my preferred choice out of a host of bad solutions.

But for Option Two to be effective, you need to be in full command of your skillset. I am not. My equilibrium is off. My feet are unsteady. Something dark is closing in on me — if I don’t fight it, I may black out entirely.

Instead I choose not to move. To use another sports metaphor, I take the standing eight count and hope that my head will clear.

The man with his arm around my neck is big. He pulls me tight against his chest as I hear a vehicle screeching to a halt. I am lifted in the air. I still don’t resist and within seconds I am tossed in the back of what I assume is a van. I land hard. My two abductors, both wearing ski masks, jump in behind me. I hear the tires screech. The van is moving before the side door is fully slammed shut.

One chance.

Before my abductors can react, I summon whatever I have in reserve and roll toward the partially-open-and-closing-fast sliding door. My faint hope now is to fall out of the gathering-speed van. No, this isn’t a great option, but it is the best one currently available. I will protect my skull with my arms and let the rest of my body take the brunt. If I’m lucky, I will end up with a broken bone or three.

Small price to pay.

My head and shoulders are out of the van now. I can feel the wind whipping at my eyes, making them water. I close them and tuck my chin and brace for the impact of my body on New York City street asphalt.

But that doesn’t happen.

A strong hand grabs me by my collar and flings me. My body goes airborne like a rag doll. I hear the van door slide shut at the exact moment my back slams against the far side of the van. The whiplash effect drives my skull into the metal side.

Another blow to the head.

I crumble to the cold floor of the van, facedown.

Someone leaps on top of me, straddling my back. I consider a move — quick spin, elbow strike — but I’m not sure I can pull it off.

Another factor: The gun is back in my face.

“Resist and I’ll kill you.”

Through my murky haze, I can make out the back of the driver’s head. The two abductors — one straddling my back, the other pointing a gun at me — still wear their ski masks. I cling to this as a good sign. If they meant to kill me, there would be no reason to disguise their identity.

The man on top of me starts a body search. I don’t move, hoping to use the time to get my bearings. The pain I can handle. The dizziness — I am undoubtedly concussed — is another matter.

He finds my Wilson Combat 1911 in the holster, pulls it out, empties it so that even if I could somehow get it back, it would be useless.

The other man, the one with the gun, says, “Check his lower legs.”

He does so. It takes some time, but he finds my small gun, the Sig P365, in an ankle holster. He pulls it into my blurry view and again empties out the ammunition. Still on top of me, he leans down near my face, the wool of his mask against my cheek, and whispers harshly, “Anything else?”

A move I could make if my head was clear: Bite him. He is that close. I could bite him through that flimsy mask, rip off a part of his cheek, turn my body, throw him toward the gunman so as to block what might be an incoming bullet.

“Don’t think about it,” the gunman says.

He says this matter-of-factly, shifting toward the side in order to prevent the sort of attack that has crossed my mind.

Conclusion: The gunman, the one doing the talking, is good. Trained. Paramilitary perhaps. He stays far enough back, so that even if I was a hundred percent — right now I would guesstimate that I’m at best forty to fifty percent — I wouldn’t have a chance.

The man on top of me is larger — bulkier, more muscled — but the bigger threat, I realize, is the trained man with the gun.

I stay still. I try to clear some of the cobwebs, but it really isn’t happening. I feel lost, adrift.

Then the big man on top of me surprises me with a kidney punch.

The blow lands like an explosion, a bomb going off, shards of hot razors slicing through my internal organs. The pain paralyzes me for a moment. Every part of me hurts, wants to cover up and find relief.

The big man hops off me and lets me writhe in pain. I roll up against the divider between the front seats and the back. I look back toward my two abductors.

When they both take off their ski masks, two thoughts — both bad — hit me at once.

First, if they are letting me see their faces, they don’t plan on letting me live.

Second — no doubt because I can see the resemblance — these are the brothers of Teddy “Big T” Lyons.

I try to stay put because every move is agony. I try not to breathe because, well, the same. I close my eyes and hope they think I’ve passed out. There is nothing to be done right now. What I need most is time. I need time without suffering further injury so as to recover enough to counter.

What that counter might be, I have no idea.

“End this,” the larger brother, the one who’d straddled my back, tells his well-trained sibling with the gun.

The smaller brother nods and aims his gun at my head.

“Wait,” I say.

“No.”

I flash back to another time, when Myron was in the back of a van, similar to this, when he too asked someone assaulting him to wait. That man had also said no. I, however, was following them in a car and listening in via Myron’s phone. When I heard that, when I heard the perpetrator say no and thus realized that Myron would not be able to talk his way out of it, I hit the accelerator and smashed my car into the back of the van.

Odd what memories come to you under duress.

“A million dollars for both of you,” I blurt out.

That makes them pause.

The larger brother says in a semi-whine, “You hurt our brother.”

“And he hurt my sister,” I reply.

They share a quick glance. I am lying, of course, unless you are one of those Kumbaya types who believe that in a larger sense, we humans are all brothers and sisters. But my lie, like my million-dollars offer, makes them hesitate. That’s all I want right now. To buy time.

It’s the only option.

The larger brother says, “Sharyn’s your sister?”

“No, Bobby,” the gunman says with a sigh.

“She’s in the hospital,” I say. “Your brother has hurt a lot of women.”

“Bullshit. They’re just lying bitches.”

Gun Brother says, “Bobby...”

“No, man, before he dies, he should know. It’s bullshit. All these bitches, they come on to Teddy. He’s a good-looking guy. They want to close the deal with him, you know what I’m saying? Lock him down, get married. But Teddy, he is — or he was before you blindsided him like a chickenshit — he’s a player with the ladies. He doesn’t want to settle down. When the bitches don’t get the ring, suddenly they’re all complaining about him. How come they don’t complain right up front? How come they go out with him voluntarily?”

“I didn’t blindside him,” I say.

“What?”

“You said that I — and I quote — ‘blindsided him like a chickenshit.’ I didn’t. We went man-to-man. And he lost.”

Big Bobby makes a scoffing sound. “Yeah, right. Look at you.”

“We could settle it that way,” I say.

“What?”

“We stop this van somewhere private. You know I’m unarmed. You and I go at it, Bobby. If I win, I go free. If you win, well, I die.”

Muscled Bobby turns to Gun Brother. “Trey?”

“No.”

“Aw, come on, Trey. Let me rip his head off and shit down his neck.”

Trey’s eyes stay on mine. He isn’t fooled. He knows what I am. “No.”

“Then how about that million dollars?” Bobby asks.

My vision is still blurry. I am dizzy and hurting. I am no better off than I was a few seconds ago.

“He’s lying to us, Bobby. The million dollars isn’t real.”

“But—”

“He can’t let us live,” Trey says, “just as we can’t let him live. Once he’s free, he will hunt us down. Forget the police — we would have to spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulder for him. He’ll come after us, with all his resources.”

“We can still try to get the money, can’t we? Let him wire or some shit. Then we shoot him in the head?”

When Trey shakes his head, I realize that I am out of time and options.

“This was all decided the moment we grabbed him, Bobby. It’s us or him.”

Trey is, of course, correct. There is no way we can let the other side live. It is too much of an unknown. I will never trust that they won’t come back for me. The same, Trey has realized, is true for them.

Someone has to die here.

We cross the George Washington Bridge and are now picking up speed where Route 80 meets up with Route 95.

I truly wish I had a better plan, something less guttural and primitive and ugly. The odds of this working are, I admit, slim, but I am seconds from death.

It’s now or never.

I slump my shoulders as though defeated.

“Then let me just confess this to you,” I say.

They relax just the slightest bit. I don’t know whether that will help. But at this stage I have but one option.

If I go for Bobby, Trey will shoot me.

If I go for Trey, Trey will shoot me.

If I surprise them and go for the driver, I just may have a chance.

Out of nowhere, I let loose a bloodcurdling scream. It sends hot jolts of agony all through my skull.

I don’t care.

They both, as I anticipated, startle back, expecting me to jump toward them.

But I don’t.

I spin toward the driver.

My plan is crude and base and not very good. I am going to get hurt badly no matter what. I could bring out the broken-eggs-omelet metaphor again, but really, is there a point?

Trey still has the gun. It hasn’t magically vanished. He’s startled, yes, but he recovers fast. He pulls the trigger.

My hope is that the suddenness of my move will throw off his aim.

It does. But not enough.

The bullet hits me in the upper back below the shoulder.

I don’t stop my spin. My momentum carries me through. I keep a thin razor blade in the cuff of my right sleeve. Bobby didn’t notice it as he searched me. Almost no one does. It shoots out now at the wrist and into my palm. I have the razor blade in my right hand, and while the driver is going at seventy-one miles per hour — yes, I see the numbers lit up large on the dashboard — I slice his throat to the point of near decapitation.

The van lurches hard to the side. Blood sprays from his artery, coating the inside of the windshield. I feel the warm contents of his neck — tissue, cartilage, more blood — empty out onto my hand. My left arm snakes through his seat belt harness so I can be somewhat braced for the upcoming collision.

I hear the gun go off again.

This bullet only grazes my shoulder before shattering the windshield. I grab the steering wheel and spin it. The van jerks off the road and teeters onto two wheels.

I close my eyes and hold on as the van flips, then flips again, then crashes hard into a pole.

And then, for me, there is only darkness.