Gone by Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

  She walked a few paces on the last flat landing between steps and continued upward, only a dozen more steps. It was quiet now, no one else climbing on the vertical street.

  Almost to the top, Fort Washington Avenue became visible to her as her head came to sidewalk level. She smiled with the accomplishment, her thighs burning. She felt a breeze that traveled the two blocks from the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. Just a few more steps upward.

  Above, a lanky, curly-haired teenage boy ran past on the sidewalk. A red flying object drew her eyes, a Frisbee whizzing by in his direction. His hand flew up and he caught it.

  A man paused at the top of the stairs. Sallow. Baseball cap. His eyes met hers momentarily.

  Her eyes followed the sound of a group of teenage boys laughing above, behind the man. The teenagers were running on the sidewalk, following the first boy. A tall kid with an auburn Afro jumped to catch the returning Frisbee, reaching back in the air to grab the high pass.

  He bumped into the man with the baseball cap.

  “Sorry, sorry.” The tall boy’s words were drowned out by a loud pop.

  A burning sensation seared Kathleen’s head and snapped it sideways. Stars exploded. She grunted and fell, halfway onto the sidewalk, at the top of the stairs. Her elbow and shoulder cracked against the rough cement. A burst of pain. Wetness flowed down her face, into her eyes. Blood.

  She heard a woman gasp, “Oh my god!”

  She realized it was her.

  Blackness.

  CHAPTER

  58

  EMILY’S PHONE RANG inside her pocketbook. She’d missed the call by the time she pulled it out. Kathleen. She tried to call back, but it rang a couple of times and went to voice mail. Probably a pocket call.

  Thea sat at her desk, working on an assignment Max had given her. Emily looked over at Max surfing the web. Emily could see the local news station’s logo on his screen. Martha and Roger were in a huddle at her desk. Martha was waving around a poster that had mysteriously gone up on lampposts all over Tribeca. It featured what looked like a mug shot of the mayor and said, WANTED: Mayor Derick Sullivan. Last seen running for president, not running the city.

  “The mayor’s livid,” Martha said. “What an effing day!”

  Roger shrugged. “It’s just the way things are in New York. It’s a tough town for mayors.”

  “Hey, Emily.” Max turned to her, excited. “Aren’t you staying in Washington Heights?”

  Emily pulled her attention from her eavesdropping. “Yeah.” At least Max had called her by her proper name. Maybe she’d given him enough annoyed looks for him to get the message.

  “There was a gangland hit in broad daylight.” Max’s lips parted into a smile. He was enjoying telling her a juicy piece of news. He lived for crap like that.

  She would have preferred to ignore him, to get the message across that she wasn’t impressed. But she was curious. She rolled her chair a couple of inches toward him. On his PC, Emily recognized the scene where the reporter stood, at 187th Street and Fort Washington Avenue. Behind the reporter, Emily could make out the sidewalk cafés of the Monkey Bar and Refried Beans, a Mexican restaurant.

  “Just a short time ago, a woman was shot here in this quiet section of Upper Manhattan,” the reporter said. “The police have released surveillance video of the shooting. We warn you that the video may be disturbing.”

  Emily had a bad feeling. Her jaw clenched. In the video, a man stood at the top of the 187th Street steps wearing a baseball cap that shadowed his face. A group of teenage boys were running by on the street above the stairs. One of them bumped him. The man was pointing a gun down at a small woman, her face blurred out. She was below him on the steps, and—

  Emily gasped and stood, her chair rolling backward. “Kathleen!”

  The others turned to look, and Martha moved toward her. Emily glanced back, hearing Roger take in a breath as he watched the auto-replay of the film snippet.

  Emily watched the auto-replay loop. The shooter was pointing a handgun. The kid bumped into him. Kathleen’s head jerked. Even with her face blurred, Emily knew it was her. Kathleen fell sideways and the shooter trotted down the stairs.

  The reporter appeared again. “The woman was shot in the head. Her condition is as yet unknown.”

  Holding back tears, Emily grabbed her pocketbook from a desk drawer. “I’ve gotta go.”

  She felt a hand on her arm and turned to Martha. “What’s the matter?” Martha asked.

  Emily spoke softly. “That’s my grandmother.”

  PART IV

  CHAPTER

  59

  LAUREN MET UP with Emily in the surgical waiting room in New York Presbyterian Hospital on West 165th Street. They say in vinyl chairs with unforgiving chrome armrests. Rain careened down the waiting room windows. Fox News played on a television high on a wall in a corner of the large room. Lauren rubbed her temples.

  A family group had gathered at the far side of the waiting room near windows that overlooked hospital buildings across Fort Washington Avenue, a view nearly obscured by the sheet of water outside the window. There were at least a dozen people in the family, children and adults of multiple generations. The adults appeared worried, but the children were happy to be with their siblings or cousins.

  “She had you on all her forms,” Emily said, drawing Lauren’s attention back to her. “Health proxy. Power of attorney. HIPAA.”

  “You said she had a lot of friends.”

  Emily looked thoughtful. “She seemed to. But I guess she wanted you.”

  “I’m not sure I appreciate it. Who said I wanted responsibility for her?”

  “Mom. We don’t even know if she’s okay.”

  Lauren fought back tears. The fact that she cared about her mother burned like bile. She’d built a great life for herself, one in which her mother had never existed. She’d been able to forget about her, the same way she’d nearly forgotten about her own drug problem after decades of not being around drugs. She’d thought she’d let go of her hatred for her mother years ago. She’d never actually forgiven her, but she’d settled into a neutral attitude, somewhere between hatred and not giving a damn. Indifference. And forgetting. That was where she’d ended up. But maybe indifference was just resentment waiting to be triggered. And that was exactly what had happened—she was so angry.

  She’d also been stunned to learn that her mother’s story was not what she’d perceived as a teenager, a perception she’d carried forward for decades. She’d never even considered that her memory of the things that had happened to her between the ages of ten and fifteen might not be the whole story. She hadn’t entirely bought into the story Kathleen had told her and Emily, but there was enough truth in it that it called into question Lauren’s entire idea of her own life history.

  Lauren murmured to Emily, although she was still gazing across the room, “She’s only been back in my life for a week, and look what a mess it’s been.”

  “Not everything is her fault, Mom.”

  Lauren pondered that.

  “What did Carl say when you told him?” Emily asked.

  “He knows she was shot. I didn’t tell him the theories about Client 13 or the attorney dying.”

  Emily’s eyebrows raised. “Really?”

  Lauren could see the treadmill picking up speed inside her daughter’s brain. She locked eyes with Emily, wanting to convey her seriousness. “The last thing Carl needs is to be associated with some sort of criminal conspiracy involving my family. Getting off desk duty and putting his career back on track is his key motivator right now. I. Won’t. Let. Anything. Complicate. That. Are we clear?”

  Emily put up her hands. “I get it.”

  Lauren softened her tone. “Stress is terrible for MS. The trial drug is working. We can’t let anything screw that up. You and I have to be on the same page about that.”

  “Okay.” Emily took Lauren’s hand. “I won’t say anything either. We’ll find out what’s going on
ourselves.”

  Before Lauren could tell Emily that this was not what she meant, Emily took out her phone. “Look at this.” She opened her photo app and showed Lauren a picture of a list of code names and phone numbers.

  “That from Kathleen’s book.”

  “I stopped off at her safe-deposit box. The numbers are definitely encoded. I did reverse lookups of a bunch of the numbers already and didn’t come up with anyone likely to be connected to Kathleen. But I doubt it’s a sophisticated code, or she would have needed a computer to create it. Her using a physical phone book makes me think the entries were made before that kind of encoding app was publicly available. She probably shifted digits up or down in each phone number. I’m sure Tabu can break the code if I can’t do it.”

  Lauren felt her blood speeding up, worried about Emily getting more involved. She knew how stubborn her daughter could be. “Jesus, Em. I doubt she’d be happy about you invading her privacy. And what are you planning to do? Call every man on the list and ask whether he killed Sharon or, better yet, tried to kill your grandmother?”

  “Cute, Mom. No. It’s just a backup plan. We may not need any of it … if she’s okay.”

  Emily looked up toward the entrance to the waiting room. A tall doctor—at least six foot ten—approached them in blue surgical garb. His shoulders stooped as if he’d spent his entire life trying not to make people feel small.

  “Ms. Davis?”

  “Yes.” Lauren rose.

  “How is she?” Emily asked, also standing.

  “She came through the surgery well. The bullet only grazed her scalp. It caused a concussion and required stitches. Scalp wounds bleed quite a bit, so I’m glad to say the injury looked far worse on the news video than it actually was. She did break her arm in the fall and tore her rotator cuff. The break required us to put in pins. We repaired her rotator cuff while we were in there. She has a fractured rib too, so she’ll be sore for a while from that as well.”

  “Can we see her?” Emily asked.

  “She’s in recovery. It will be a couple of hours.”

  CHAPTER

  60

  HE REVELED IN the dark web’s deepest places. Secret power. He thought about it as he walked through the wine cellar to the windowless room where he stored his collected weaponry in display cases and had an explosives workshop. Explosives were yet another interest he and Jackson shared. He rarely had a chance to use any of it, but on those occasions when he literally needed to blow off steam, he arranged foreign travel. His team picked up women who wouldn’t be missed and cleaned up the mess behind him.

  But the family had rules. New York City was off limits, except in extraordinary circumstances. So he’d gone a bit rogue. That would never be a complete surprise to his family. Going rogue was in his genes. And he had plenty of his own money to permit it.

  He was furious that Kathleen Harris was still alive. She’d made it through surgery. She was a hardy bitch, as the ex-cop had called her. His mood had become increasingly black.

  The job had been to kill her. If you wanted something done right, you had to do it yourself. The hitman had incredibly poor judgment; a poor excuse for a professional. You couldn’t let the excitement of the kill make you take a bad shot. You had to know when to wait for a clean shot, even if it meant waiting an hour or another day. Foiled by a teenage Frisbee game. Un-fucking-believable. The hitman wouldn’t receive his second payment, but at least he was already safely out of the country, back to his homeland, posing no risk of apprehension for either of them.

  Still, the man mulled over the failed hit, his belly scorching. He blamed his family for the outcome. The killer was nearly an amateur, not one of the normal mercenaries the family kept on retainer. The normal for-hires weren’t available, or he wouldn’t have had to turn to the dark web at all. The family had put a foot out to trip him. Had put a foot on his neck, more like it. He’d been told he was on his own if he continued down this path. He’d raged about it. But he didn’t need them. Money could buy anything.

  For now, Kathleen Harris was out of commission, which was a good thing. He had other fish to fry. Or, more aptly, bitch to fry. Then he’d get back to the whoremonger, if she ever became compos mentis again. Who knew with old people? Sometimes the simplest surgery could mean the end of their life as they’d known it, the shock and morphine taking their last marbles. Of course, she wasn’t that old; he’d probably have to circle back to Kathleen later.

  There was an upside, though. The dark-web booking of the old lady’s hit had gone off without a hitch, a thrilling new tool in his arsenal. An enjoyable middle finger to the family. Even if the result hadn’t been perfect, he’d found the whole process amusing: He placed the job anonymously on a dark-web site. The bidders named their price. It wasn’t so different from a government RFP, the contract awarded to the lowest-bidding of the qualified contractors. Of course, it wasn’t easy to determine who was qualified. Even with all the anonymity of the dark web, the bidders couldn’t confess to their past successes to prove how qualified they were or provide references. No one was that stupid.

  The customer made his deposit in the website’s Bitcoin wallet with each transaction. It was as easy as paying on Venmo or PayPal.

  But there were apparently limits, because there seemed to be a problem with his bid for the next hit. No one wanted the job. He thought he knew why. No one bid on jobs without doing some research first. They probably performed a quick background check on the victim. Kill an ex-madam/ex-con, okay. Criminals killed criminals all the time. But it wasn’t easy getting away with killing a pretty, young, white City Hall staffer who didn’t do drugs. Her death would be newsworthy. And it wouldn’t be just one snarky tabloid headline.

  Bottom line, the family wouldn’t let him use their toy soldiers, and now he couldn’t even find an independent contractor. Perhaps this should have been a sign for him to give up, but he enjoyed a challenge too much.

  And Emily had to go. She was a loose end that needed to be cauterized. She was the only witness to Sharon’s takedown. Emily and the old woman had been thick as running mates since then. If Kathleen Harris had told anyone her secrets, it was Emily Silverman. And now the man’s hackers said Emily had new photographs on her phone. Lists of telephone numbers. It would be only a matter of time before she began reaching Kathleen’s former customers, mucking up silt, narrowing things down. Although the story of Sharon’s death was unlikely to unravel that way, Emily was tenacious. He could never go on with his life knowing there was anyone out there who could pull that thread. He’d mulled it over for a while and had now made up his mind: two people needed to be removed from the family’s risk factors.

  He exited the polished mahogany doors that fronted his townhouse, walking toward Central Park. The breeze carried jasmine. Fifth Avenue was wet and clean, guarded by pretentiously uniformed doormen with gold-braided hats. He didn’t buy their disguise. He wore his own mild-mannered public persona as he strode down Fifth. He had the Clark Kent thing down to a fine art, his true self safely hidden after years of daily practice.

  No one who saw him would ever guess that he was headed to the Street, to the darkest web, so dark there were no internet connections. A place where word of mouth was still the primary mode of communication. Even burner phones were barely trusted. He knew a guy, someone with connections. He got a charge at the thought. With all the world’s technological advances, nothing surpassed the excitement of human contact of the darkest variety. So much so he wished he could risk doing the killing himself. But second best—death, fast and remote—would have to do.

  CHAPTER

  61

  KATHLEEN WAS ANTSY to get out of the hospital. She’d asked the nurses twice since she’d woken up to their prodding and thermometers at dawn. Her shoulder throbbed from deep inside, and her head ached dully below the buffer of “happy pills” the nurse had given her. With her free hand, she felt the large bandage on her head. Her other arm was casted nearly to her underarm. Her s
houlder was heavily bandaged too. She had no fever, and the doctor who’d made rounds had hinted that, although she’d have a bald spot for a while from where they’d needed to stitch up her scalp and she’d have lots of bruising, she’d be home recuperating in short order. It was hard to fathom how quickly hospitals released you nowadays, but she wasn’t complaining. She only wished she were going home to her old apartment. She longed for it.

  Thankfully, the cops had gone along with the doctor’s demand that the ankle bracelet be removed. It was out of juice now, but no probation officer had arrived at her bedside to arrest her. Kathleen guessed they could read the newspapers and knew where she was. An orderly had brought a paper for her to see. She suspected his supervisors wouldn’t have approved.

  He grinned at her when he handed it to her as if he imagined everyone was happy for fifteen minutes of fame. The headline blared, Grandmob: Gangland Hit on Elderly Woman.

  Sitting up in her partially raised bed, she shook her head. Grandmob. Someone was paid to think up shit like that. The idea of a mob connection had come out of thin air. She didn’t appreciate the “elderly” remark either.

  At the bottom it said, Sixty-Eight-Year-Old Woman Expected to Survive.

  She was glad for that, at least. She was glad, too, for the paper’s grainy screenshot of her attacker and a group picture of the teenagers who accidentally foiled the attack but no photo of her face. There were advantages to using a fake Facebook profile: at least the media had to work to find a photo of her. It wouldn’t take long, though, given her recent mug shot. And then the press would really start digging. The next headline would probably call her “Grandmob Aronist.”

  She had asked the orderly and he’d told her there was no police presence outside her hospital room, so it didn’t look like they were worried there would be another hit. Or maybe they didn’t care. In the middle of that thought, the door opened. She lurched backward, her adrenaline skyrocketing, pain exploding in her shoulder at her sudden movement. “Oooh.”