They all froze. Then, Thomas saw the man on the left lean slow into a lunge. Thomas jerked upright, and a heavy object slithered down his chest onto his belly—the gun! He seized it with both hands—jerked the trigger twice. Two casings soared out of sight, and the smell of cordite filled his nose. The brute’s face fell open in shock. He plummeted past Thomas and collapsed as a heap against the baseboard. The back of his head was a chewed up mess.
“Oh Christ!” Thomas’s first attacker collapsed onto his side in slow motion and rolled up into a sitting position, legs out in front of him. He had both arms cinched up tight across his stomach. Blood pooled up across his arms and dripped down onto the floor. Clutching the gun, Thomas crawled over to the guy and stuck the pistol up in his face.
“Who the hell are you?”
The guy’s eyes were unfocused, glazed. “I know you. You’re that financial prick who’s been bugging LeFarge.”
Very bad. These must be two LeFarge men. Thomas leaned into the bastard and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Why are you here? Listen to me, I said! Why are you here?” He spaced out the last four words and screwed the muzzle of the gun up into the man’s chin.
“What are you going to do, kill me? Christ, you already done that.”
“Then tell me why you’re here, before you die.”
Saliva dribbled out of the corner of the man’s mouth. “God! I wish I could rip your throat out. You held out on us, didn’t you? You knew all the time Zlata’s whore lived here.”
“Why are you here?” Thomas’s voice sounded tinny in his own ears.
“We busted in to search the place, to take him alive or kill him—and to take her if we couldn’t grab him. And now look; you screwed us over good, Jack.” The guy groaned. “I just shit myself. It won’t be long now.”
Thomas rocked back onto his heels. He had interrupted a planned murder or two. Now there would be two different corpses. The wrong corpses from O’Brien’s view.
He crawled towards the door—nausea washed up over him. On his knees in the hallway he revisited his mu xu pork. He struggled up to his feet, lurched into the wall and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Moving to the head of the stairs, he stared down at his own hand. He still held the semi-auto. He jerked out his shirttail and stuffed the gun into his pants. He stared down at his new clothes and picked out dark flecks and damp spots everywhere. His legs felt weak; he trembled like a nervous Chihuahua. He stumbled down the stairs and out into the street. A block down Canal, he collapsed onto a bench. What the hell was he doing? What had happened?
He muttered, “Why are you running? It was self-defense. Call the police—and tell them what? Tell them it was an accident, but the conspiracy was on purpose?” He paused. Afraid. Of whom? What?
Canal Street hid, cloaked behind its roll-down shutters, not answering, somnolent under its streetlights, waiting for dawn. He made out a wad of newspaper with a fish smell at his feet—his stomach lurched, tried to escape. He hunched over, wrapped both arms around himself. Tell the police that he left a man to bleed to death. Tell the police he’s an accessory to Carl Dupont’s kidnapping. But it’s all justified because Dupont’s a thief. Tell them Dupont is dead or soon will be. Tell them LeFarge is a murderer, and therefore, O’Brien is too. Turn state’s evidence. Right. He didn’t have much to incriminate anyone but himself.
Thomas gazed goggle-eyed at an early riser walking a pug dog. The pet lover stared askance at the disheveled man on the bench and scurried his fat little beast past. Nobody except O’Brien would ever make him a CEO, not with blood on his hands. Was it too late to get out? Or did he even want to?
He still wanted that step up, still wanted the Bishop’s ring. He wanted to pretend he had never crossed the line… that things were like yesterday—competitive, clean, on-the-edge-of-legal, narcissistic. Was he running from the police? No. He was making sure O’Brien wouldn’t find out. O’Brien had been Thomas’s shot at the future, but now he could be the end of it. Run from the police, sure, but lie to LeFarge and hide his treason from O’Brien. He lurched up off the bench, spattered in blood and wondered what he would do next. Like a boat loose in the flood, he bumped his way down the sidewalk, caught in the eddy, spinning around as he made his way downstream.
Chapter Eight: Weep Over Luck’s Change
Thomas Cabot Steward might as well have had the words “Murderer” cut across his forehead for all to see. The shooting had transformed him into a forensic stockpile of self-incrimination. He couldn’t go home and contaminate his own house. He wandered around until he remembered the gym. He caught a cab to his racquetball club. There in his locker, he had a sports bag and a spare set of office clothes.
Outside the club he dropped the gun in a storm drain. He couldn’t avoid the check-in at the desk, but once in, he had access to his big locker and the showers. First, he stripped off everything and dumped it into a trashcan. He scrubbed his hands hard in the sink, paced back naked through the room and opened his locker. He got his kitbag and padded into the showers. Back in the marble booth under the shining spray, he showered with the hottest water he could tolerate and shaved standing up. To remove the stink of cordite, he snorted soapy water up his nose from his palm. He sneezed it out… couldn’t think of anything else.
After tugging on clothes, he opened the trashcan that held last night’s debacle and tied the trash bag shut. He dragged it along with him. He stopped in the coffee bar to bury the clothes beneath yesterday’s barista grounds and garbage. He knew that was no guarantee. He had littered New York with the crime’s traces.
***
Down in Chinatown, Robko rambled out for breakfast and strolled back in with steamed eggs and rice noodle rolls. They ate in the narrow bed off of plastic plates, Sibyl propped up against the footboard and he against the headboard, with the diminutive cartons nestled into the heap of bedding.
Sibyl wasn’t a fan. “See, if I had chosen the apartment, we would have had kolaches and coffee, or empanadas with fruit filling.”
“Hey, when I cook, we eat what I want. When you cook, we eat what you want.”
“Take-out isn’t cooking.” She poked at an unravelling noodle roll like it would leap up and bite. “What are these little square things?”
“That’s tofu. The green things are scallions.”
“No wonder I left you.”
“Um, I left you.” He poured an entire steamed egg out of the carton into his waiting mouth.
“Well, this time it’s my turn to leave. I want to go home for a few hours, accomplish some things before I go to work.” She rose up from the bed, stretched, and began to wander around the room, searching out her clothes. “You don’t mind washing up, even though you did the cooking?”
He watched her disappear from view. She folded herself into her underwear, slipped on a cotton shirt and black jeans, and an oversized black sleeveless tee. She thrust both hands up into her hair and shook it out. He told her, “You should wear that outfit to work. I like it a lot. I’d love to see you take it off.”
“And spend the day here, I bet.” She hesitated at the door. “It is tempting, but I have a life… unlike you.”
“I need to teach you the meaning of the words stop-and-smell-the-roses.”
“I need to teach you the meaning of the words lazy-ass. Lock up behind me.”
***
Sibyl never made it to her condo.
In the street below, a friend caught her arm. “Sib, are you all right? Come in here, in the diner. Come on, come on.” Anxious and frowning, he hid them away in a café. Down an aisle past tables and patrons, he hustled her into a booth.
With tea and coffee ordered, she said, “Okay, Arnie. What’s this about?
“You don’t know? There was a shooting in your condo last night. By the time the cops got there, the killers were gone.”
“Killers? In my place?” Her vision sharpened down to only his face, puffy and yellow colored.
“Well, maybe one killer. Maybe more. Yeah,
you had two dead dudes in your place.”
“Dead?”
“A black and a white. All the commotion woke me up, so I popped down the stairs—just before five. They interviewed me, so I got to see them tagging and bagging the guys. There’s blood all over your entry and I guess spattered across your living room.”
They shut up as the tea and coffee arrived. As the waitress bustled away, Sibyl leaned towards him and hissed, “A shooting in my place? Why? Who?”
“The police want to know that too. They’re looking for you. They want to talk to you.”
“Did, um, did you say anything about what I do for a living?”
“I only said you worked nights and probably hadn’t been home.”
“That’s okay then.” She shot a glance down the café towards the front and then back at Arnie. “I’m all shook up—it hasn’t sunk in yet. No lie, two dead men in my apartment?”
A tiny smile teased the edge of his mouth. “Oh yeah.”
It wasn’t his place, the bastard. “It has to have something to do with—with Tim. You remember him, my ex.”
“He was before my time, before me.” Arnie touched her hand, tried to cup it in his.
“Christ Arnie, I told you it was just mercy sex. Besides that was two years ago. I can’t be bothered with that crap right now.”
“I know.” He drew his hand back and hung his head all sheepish.
“So my ex has landed me in it.”
“Maybe. Better find out before the police talk to you.”
“Okay, you’re right. I need to bug out of here. You should stay as far away from me as possible.”
“I’ll go with you, Sibyl. They’re on the lookout for a single woman, not a couple.”
“No, no.” She dropped five bucks on the table. “I’ll call him on the way. Get as far away as I can. I’ll go out the back. I can’t stroll up Canal, not today.”
“Hire a lawyer, Sib.”
She nodded.
***
Thomas left straight from the gym for work, thinking hard and dragging with exhaustion. He knew he couldn’t bounce back to full form. He was drained by a major shock, a serious drunk, and no sleep. Coffee helped though, even as it amped up his jitters and soured his stomach. Angie arrived; he donned his blandest face.
“Mr. Steward, good morning. Another early day?”
“Angie, you could at least call me Thomas.”
“Hmm. Office etiquette and all. We’ll see.”
“We’ve known each other less than ten days. An intense ten days, though. We’ve gotten involved in a criminal conspiracy together, even if we’re tangential to it all.”
Leaning on the door jamb, she cocked her head. “Where’s this going?”
“I want to ask you to take sides… my side, in this case.”
“All right.”
“Just like that? You say all right?”
“Sure.”
“Think it through. I’m in big trouble.”
She considered. With a nod, she said, “Let me lock my purse in my desk and snag us some coffee besides that perked dreck you’ve got. I’ll decide if I want to hear this by the time I get back.”
When she returned with her coffee and his latté, he watched her. She leaned forward and placed his latté in front of him. Her mouth was straight, her eyes still, reticent.
His hands jittered on the tabletop. “What did you decide?”
“To trust you for a while, to hear you out.” She slid into a chair, not opposite him, but closer, at the corner.
Thomas cleared his throat. “Last night I was in the right place at the wrong time. Egan LeFarge had two men in Sibyl Boxwood’s apartment, and I ran into them. During a struggle, I accidentally killed one of them. He was choking me while we fought over a gun. I killed the other one on purpose when he attacked me. Both times it was self-defense.”
She met his gaze head-on. “I’ll say one thing. You know how to start the workday with a bang. Better tell me about it—all of it, every single detail.”
“Indeed. The one thing I figured out is that O’Brien or Garland leaked the word on our thief’s identity to LeFarge.” He narrated all the twists and turns of the night and included the clean-up.
“Are you going to the police?”
He shook his head hard. “Definitely not. How could I explain why I was there without implicating O’Brien and the rest of you?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Great of you to think about us. You let a man bleed to death and didn’t call 911. And besides, you were breaking into the place and you used a firearm, even if they acquit you of murder. New York gun laws—big jail time—but you could turn state’s evidence.”
“True. Only I have nothing for evidence. Zero documentation.”
She drummed her fingers on the table. “Not quite. You’ve got LeFarge’s reports on the apartment invasions. Will you go to the cops and ask for a deal?”
“I like my life too much to turn state’s evidence. Why should I let the death of a couple of flunkies ruin it? I ride this one out, O’Brien gives me one of his small companies to run, and I become one of the good citizens, a friend to law and order.”
“Cynical.” Her voice crackled with dryness.
He spread his hands out on the table. “Yes, and self-centered. I just don’t care enough about LeFarge’s two strongmen to feel responsible or remorseful. Also, what are LeFarge and O’Brien like when they’re crossed?”
“Scary.”
He nodded. “My thought exactly.”
“Okay, at least you’re not doing this out of panic but out of calculation.”
“So, now what?”
“You’ve gotten rid of the gun, the gunshot residue, and your bloody clothes. No problem there unless you’re unlucky. What about fingerprints?”
He slumped back in his chair and stared down at the table. “No good. I left prints on the door, the floor, the wall, the taxi—you name it, I may have touched it.”
“Have you ever been fingerprinted for anything?”
“No.” He breathed out in a whoosh. She had found the key point. “So there’s nothing to match against.”
“How about DNA evidence? Did you leave any blood?”
“I hadn’t thought so, but about an hour ago, I noticed I had been cut. See?” He showed her the web of his left hand. Two gouges, now scabbed over. “I held the gun wrong. The top slider thing cut me.”
“So they might have your blood as evidence.”
He felt his eyebrows crawl clear up to his scalp. “There was an awful lot of blood in the room. Maybe they won’t find mine among all the rest.”
She said, “I assume you’re not in a DNA data bank anywhere?” He shook his head. “So you’re off the hook for now. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a future problem. You need to avoid ever giving up your fingerprints or DNA.”
“A ticking bomb.” He thought about it, a permanent threat, a dark secret.
She waited, quiet, like a promise that it was all fixed.
He tried to shake it off. “So, are we good?”
Angie glanced at him. “Yeah, for a while. You’re more the victim here, even if you are taking the selfish-bastard route. If you play it smart, you might even get away with it.”
“God, wouldn’t that be nice.” He needed luck as well as smarts. “Thanks for standing by me.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see how it works out. I’m going to run down to Security to get those stale, day-old reports they’re giving us.” She sprung up, charged to the door, and jerked it shut behind her with a clunk.
Maybe she wasn’t a hundred percent on board. Yet.
***
Angie was gone about an hour, but he didn’t worry. Much. She was probably pumping friends down there for info. She swept back into the room, her pad in her hand. “Nothing downstairs. Nothing happened yesterday or the day before for them. They haven’t glommed onto the shootings yet.”
She lit the screen of her desk tablet. “Speaking of victim
s, I did what you asked about Dupont’s family. Here’s the data and a photo.” She handed over her desktab.
“Hmph. Wife long gone and now in Hawaii. A daughter gone missing. Isobel Dupont. Traveled down to the US with him, I see. Early twenties, pretty in a black-lipstick-and-fingernails way.”
“Yeah,” she said, “some men like that death-and-anorexia look.”
He peeked over at her. “I prefer Mediterranean.”
One corner of her mouth twitched up. “Would this daughter have the memflashes? Where do you think she is?”
“Ah.” He stared up at the ceiling. “Three possibilities. She’s running silent and deep, or she’s with Zlata, or LeFarge has her. In the first case, her dad sold the memflashes or she has them.” He paused there.
“What does the second case mean… if she’s with Zlata?”
“Dunno. We still look for him, not her. In the last case, she’s given them up to LeFarge if she had them. If she gave them to LeFarge, then he’s selling out O’Brien because he hasn’t delivered.”
She frowned. “LeFarge is the outsider here.”
“Meaning we should be most suspicious of him?”
She nodded.
He tipped his head. “He’s a ruthless man, hand-picked by O’Brien to do those things none of the rest of us will. He could be arrested for two home invasions, one or two kidnappings, and maybe one or two deaths. I’ll bet he sleeps fine at night.”
“What will LeFarge think about his men’s deaths?”
“I’ve tried to puzzle that one out. I hope he assumes Robko Zlata killed them.”
“Our workup on Zlata didn’t show a propensity for violence.”
“LeFarge’s men intended to take or kill Zlata. LeFarge will believe Zlata would react violently if cornered, because LeFarge would.”
She got up and paced back and forth. As she marched and counter-marched, she crossed her arms and settled her chin in her hand. “But from here on, you have to consider LeFarge your biggest threat.”
The Big Wheel Page 8