by Harlan Coben
“It’s not.” Then: “You realize, of course, I haven’t even seen Jessica in years.”
Peter put a finger in the air. “Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.”
“Damn.”
“What?”
“You’ve been reading fortune cookies again, haven’t you?”
“There is much wisdom there.”
“Tell you what. Read Sunday’s New York Times instead. Styles section.”
“I already did.”
“And?”
Again Peter raised his finger. “You can’t ride two horses with one behind.”
“Hey, I told you that one. It’s Yiddish.”
“I know.”
“And it doesn’t apply.”
“Just sit down.” Peter dismissed him with a wave. “And order for yourself. I’m not helping you.”
When Cingle stood to greet him, necks didn’t so much turn in her direction as snap. They exchanged hellos and sat down.
“So you’re Win’s friend,” Cingle said.
“I am.”
She studied him for a moment. “You don’t look psychotic.”
“I like to think of myself as the counterbalance.”
There were no papers in front of her.
“Do you have the police file?” he asked.
“There is none. There isn’t even an official investigation yet.”
“So what have you got?”
“Katie Rochester started taking money out at ATMs. Then she ran away. There is no evidence, other than parental protestations, to suggest anything other than that.”
“The investigator who grabbed me at the airport—” Myron began.
“Loren Muse. She’s good, by the way.”
“Right, Muse. She asked me a lot about Katie Rochester. I think they have something solid linking me to her.”
“Yes and no. They have something solid linking Katie to Aimee. I’m not sure it links directly to you.”
“That being?”
“Their last ATM charges.”
“What about them?”
“Both girls used the exact same Citibank in Manhattan.”
Myron stopped, tried to absorb that one.
The waiter came over. New guy. Myron didn’t know him. Usually Peter had the waiter bring over a few free appetizers. Not today.
“I’m used to men staring at me,” Cingle said. “But the owner keeps glaring at me like I urinated on the floor.”
“He misses my old girlfriend.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Adorable.”
Cingle met Peter’s eye, wiggled her fingers to show a wedding band, and yelled in Peter’s direction, “He’s safe. I’m already married.”
Peter turned away.
Cingle shrugged, explained about the ATM charge, about Aimee’s face being clear in the security camera. Myron tried to figure it through. Nothing came to him.
“There’s one more thing you might want to know about.”
Myron waited.
“There’s a woman named Edna Skylar. She’s a doctor over at St. Barnabas. The cops are keeping this under heavy wraps because Rochester’s father is a nutjob, but apparently, Dr. Skylar spotted Katie Rochester on the street in Chelsea.”
She told him the story, about how Edna Skylar had followed the girl into the subway, that she was with a man, what Katie said about not telling anyone.
“Did the police look into it?”
“Look into what?”
“Did they try to figure out where Katie was, who the guy was, anything?”
“Why? Katie Rochester is eighteen years old. She gathered money before she ran. She’s got a connected father who was probably abusive in some fashion. The police have other things to worry about. Real crimes. Muse is handling a double homicide in East Orange. Manpower is short. And what Edna Skylar saw confirmed what they already knew.”
“That Katie Rochester ran away.”
“Right.”
Myron sat back. “And the fact that they both used the same ATM?”
“Either a startling coincidence…”
Myron shook his head. “No way.”
“I agree. No way. So either that or they both planned to run away. There was a reason they both chose that ATM. I don’t know what. But maybe they planned this together. Katie and Aimee went to the same high school, right?”
“Right, but I haven’t found any other connection between them.”
“Both eighteen, both graduating high school, both from the same town.” Cingle shrugged. “There has to be something.”
She was right. He’d need to speak to the Rochesters, see what they knew. He’d have to be careful. He didn’t want to open that side of things up. He also wanted to talk to the doctor, Edna Skylar, get a good description of the man Katie Rochester was with, see exactly where she was, what subway she was riding, what direction she was heading in.
“Thing is,” Cingle said, “if Katie and Aimee are runaways, there might be a reason they ran.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Myron said.
“They might not want to be found.”
“True.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Find them anyway.”
“And if they want to stay hidden?”
Myron thought about Aimee Biel. He thought about Erik and he thought about Claire. Good people. Reliable, solid. He wondered what could possibly make Aimee run away from them, what could have been so bad that she’d pull something like this.
“Guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” he said.
Win sat by himself in the corner of the dimly lit strip club. No one bothered him. They knew better. If he wanted someone near him, he’d let them know.
The song on the jukebox was one of the most putrid songs from the eighties, Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings.” Myron claimed that it was the worst song of the decade. Win countered that “We Built This City on Rock-n-Roll” by Starship was worse. The argument lasted an hour without resolution. So, as they often did in situations like this, they went to Esperanza to end the tie-breaker, but she sided with “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo.
Win liked to sit in this corner booth and look out and think.
There was a major-league baseball team in town. Several of the players had come to the “gentlemen’s club,” a truly inspired euphemism for strip joint, to unwind. The working girls went crazy. Win watched a stripper of questionably legal age hit on one of the team’s top pitchers.
“How old did you say you were?” the stripper asked.
“Twenty-nine,” the pitcher said.
“Wow.” She shook her head. “You don’t look that old.”
A wistful smile played on Win’s lips. Youth.
Windsor Horne Lockwood III was born to great wealth. He did not pretend otherwise. He did not like multibillionaires who bragged about their business acumen when they’d started out with Daddy’s billions. Genius is almost irrelevant in the pursuit of enormous riches anyway. In fact, it can be a hindrance. If you are smart enough to see the risks, you might try to avoid them. That type of thinking — safe thinking — never led to great wealth.
Win started life in the lush Main Line of Philadelphia. His family had been on the board of the stock exchange since its inception. He had a direct descendant who’d been this country’s first secretary of the treasury. Win was born with not only a silver spoon in his mouth, but an entire silver place setting at his feet.
And he looked the part.
That had been his problem. From his earliest years, with his towhead blond hair and ruddy complexion and delicate features, with his face naturally set in an expression that looked smug, people detested Win on sight. You looked at Windsor Horne Lockwood III and you saw elitism, undeserved wealth, someone who would always look down his porcelain-sculpted nose at you. All your own failures rose up in a wave of resentment and envy — just by gazing upon this seemingly soft, coddled, privileged boy.
At the age of ten Win had gotten separated from his mother at the Philadelphia Zoo. A group of students from an inner-city school had found him in his little blue blazer with the crest on the pocket and beaten the hell out of him. He’d been hospitalized and nearly lost a kidney. The physical pain was bad. The shame of being a scared little boy was far worse.
Win never wanted to experience that again.
People, Win knew, made snap judgments based on appearances. No great insight there. And yes, there were the obvious prejudices against African-Americans or Jews or what-have-you. But Win was more concerned with the more garden-variety prejudices. If, for example, you see an overweight woman eating a doughnut, you are repulsed. You make snap judgments — she is undisciplined, lazy, sloppy, probably stupid, definitely lacking in self-esteem.
In a strange way, the same thing happened when people saw Win.
He had a choice. Stay behind the hedges, safe in the cocoon of privilege, live a protected albeit fearful life. Or do something about it.
He chose the latter.
Money makes everything easier. Oddly enough, Win always considered Myron to be a real-life Batman, but the Caped Crusader had started off as Win’s childhood role model. Bruce Wayne’s only superpower was tremendous wealth. He used it to train himself to be a crime fighter. Win did something similar with his money. He hired former squad leaders from both Delta Force and the Green Berets to train him as if he were one of their most elite. Win also found the world’s top instructors on firearms, on knives, on hand-to-hand combat. He secured the services of martial artists from a wide variety of countries and either flew them to the family estate in Bryn Mawr or traveled overseas. He spent a full year with a reclusive martial-arts master in Korea, high in the hills in the southern part of the country. He learned about pain, how to inflict it without leaving marks. He learned about intimidation tactics. He learned about electronics, about locks, about the underworld, about security procedures.
It all came together. Win was a sponge when it came to picking up new techniques. He worked hard, ridiculously hard, training at least five hours every day. He had naturally fast hands, the hunger, the desire, the work ethic, the coldness — all the ingredients.
The fear went away.
Once he was sufficiently trained, Win started hanging out in the most drug-infested, crime-ridden corners of the city. He would go there wearing blue blazers with crests or pink polos or loafers without socks. The bad people would see him and lick their lips. There would be hate in their eyes. They would attack. And Win would answer.
There may be better fighters out there, Win assumed, especially now that he was growing older.
But not many.
His cell phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Articulate.”
“We got a wiretap on a guy named Dominick Rochester.”
The call was from an old colleague Win hadn’t heard from in three years. No matter. This was how it worked in their world. The wiretap did not surprise him. Rochester was supposedly connected. “Go on.”
“Someone leaked to him your friend Bolitar’s connection to his daughter.”
Win waited.
“Rochester has a more secure phone. We’re not sure. But we think he called the Twins.”
There was silence.
“Do you know them?”
“Just by reputation,” Win said.
“Take what you heard and put it on steroids. One of them has some kind of weird condition. He doesn’t feel pain, but man, does he like to inflict it. The other one, his name is Jeb — and yeah, I know how this is going to sound — he likes to bite.”
“Do tell,” Win said.
“We once found some guy the Twins worked over with just Jeb’s teeth. The body… I mean, it was a red puddle. He bit out the guy’s eyes, Win. I still don’t sleep when I think about it.”
“Maybe you should buy a night-light.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. They scare me,” the voice on the phone said, “like you scare me.”
Win knew that in this man’s world, that was about as big a compliment as he could pay the Twins. “And you believe that Rochester called them right after he heard about Myron Bolitar?”
“Within minutes, yeah.”
“Thank you for the information.
“Win, listen to what I’m saying. They’re absolutely nuts. We know about this one guy, a big old mafia don from Kansas City. He hired them. Anyway, it didn’t work out. The mafia don pisses them off, I don’t know how. So the don, no fool, he tries to buy them off, make peace. Nothing doing. The Twins get a hold of his four-year-old grandson. Four years old, Win. They send him back in chewed-up pieces. Then — get this—after they’re done, then they accept the don’s money. The same amount of money he’d already offered. They didn’t ask for a penny more. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Win hung up. There was no need to reply. He understood perfectly.
CHAPTER 22
Myron had his cell phone in hand, preparing to call Ali for a much-needed hello, when he noticed a car parked in front of his house. Myron pocketed the cell and pulled into his driveway.
A husky man sat on the curb in front of Myron’s yard. He stood when Myron approached. “Myron Bolitar?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
Myron nodded. “Why don’t we go inside?”
“You know who I am?”
“I know who you are.”
It was Dominick Rochester. Myron recognized him from the news reports on TV. He had a ferocious face with pores big enough to get your foot caught in. The smell of cheap musk came off him in squiggly line waves. Myron held his breath. He wondered how Rochester had learned about Myron’s connection to the case, but no matter. This would work well, Myron figured. He had wanted to talk to Rochester anyway.
Myron was not sure when the feeling came upon him. It could have been when the other car made the turn. It could have been something in Dominick Rochester’s walk. Myron could see right away that Rochester was the real deal — a bad guy you did not want to mess with, as opposed to that poser, Big Jake Wolf.
But again it was a bit like basketball. There were moments when Myron was so in the game, where he would be rising on his jump shot, his fingers finding the exact grooves on the ball, his hand cocked in front of his forehead, his eyes locked on the rim, only the rim, when time would slow down, as if he could stop in midair and readjust and see the rest of the court.
Something was wrong here.
Myron stopped at the door, keys in hand. He turned and looked back at Rochester. Rochester had those black eyes, the kind that view everything with an equal lack of emotion — a human being, a dog, a file cabinet, a mountain range. They never changed no matter what they saw, no matter what horror or delight played out in front of them.
“Why don’t we talk out here?” Myron said.
Rochester shrugged. “If you want.”
The car, a Buick Skylark, slowed.
Myron felt his cell phone vibrate. He looked down at it. Win’s SWEET CHEEKS was displayed. He put the phone to his ear.
Win said, “There are two very bad hombres—”
That was when Myron was jarred by the blow.
Rochester had thrown a punch.
The fist skimmed across the top of Myron’s head. The instincts were rusty, but Myron still had his peripheral vision. He’d seen Rochester launch the fist at the last second. He ducked in time to take away the brunt. The blow ended up glancing across the top of Myron’s skull. There was pain, but Rochester’s knuckles probably felt worse.
The phone fell to the ground.
Myron was down on one knee. He grabbed Rochester’s extended arm by the wrist. He curled the fingers of his free hand. Most people hit with fists. That was necessary at times, but in reality you should avoid doing it. You hit something hard with a fist, you’ll break your hand.
The pal
m strike, especially to vulnerable areas, was usually more effective. With a punch, you need to flick or jab. You can’t power straight through, because the small bones in the hand can’t handle the stress. But if the palm strike is delivered correctly, fingers curled and protected, the wrist tilted back, the blow landing on the meaty bottom of the palm, you put the pressure on the radius, the ulna, the humerus — in short, the larger arm bones.
That was what Myron did. The obvious place to aim right now was the groin, but Myron figured that Rochester had been in plenty of scrapes before. He’d be looking for that.
And he was. Rochester raised a knee for protection.
Myron went for the diaphragm instead. When the shot landed just below the sternum, the air burst out of the big man. Myron pulled on Rochester’s arm and threw him in what looked like an awkward judo throw. Truth was, in real fights, all throws look pretty awkward.
The zone. He was in it now. Everything slowed down.
Rochester was still in the air when Myron saw the car stop. Two men came out. Rochester landed like a sack of rocks. Myron stood. The two men were moving toward him now.
They were both smiling.
Rochester rolled through the throw. He’d be up in no time. Then there would be three of them. The two men in the car did not approach slowly. They did not look wary or worried. They charged toward Myron with the abandon of children playing a game.
Two very bad hombres…
Another second passed.
The man who’d been on the passenger side wore his hair in a ponytail and looked liked that hip, middle-school art teacher who always smelled like a bong. Myron ran through his options. He did this in tenths of a second. That was how it worked. When you’re in danger, time either slows down or the mind races. Hard to say which.
Myron thought about Rochester lying on the ground, about the two men charging, about Win’s warning, about what Rochester might be after here, about why he might attack unprovoked, about what Cingle had said about Rochester being a nutjob.
The answer was obvious: Dominick Rochester thought that Myron had something to do with his daughter’s disappearance.
Rochester probably knew that Myron had been questioned by the police, and that nothing had come of it. A guy like Rochester wouldn’t accept that. So he’d do his best, his damned best, to see if he could shake something loose.