by JoAnna Carl
I gathered the papers together, but I could see one more bit of white, a picture which had slid under the couch. I dropped my head down, leaving my fanny waving in the air, and reached for it. The position nearly killed my ribs. But I got hold of the corner of the photograph, and I pulled it out.
No reporter can look at words written in the English language and not read them. Even as upset as I was, as bad as my ribs hurt, I read the cutline pasted on the back of that picture.
“NEW A.P.B. OFFICES,” the kicker read. Then the cutline went on. “Guy Unitas, steward of the Amalgamated Police Brotherhood, and Merri Blakely, office manager, pose in the new A.P.B. offices at 4415 Grant Street. The A.P.B. will hold an open house at the new offices from two P.M. until six P.M Sunday.” It was the handout photo the A.P.B. had given us when their new offices opened.
And Merri Blakely was in it. I’d turned up a picture of Coy’s ex-wife. Talk about doing the least tactful thing at the least tactful time. With Coy already so mad he was spitting nails, the last thing I wanted to do was flash a picture of his ex-wife. Or current wife? I didn’t know what the legal situation was.
I quickly stuffed the photo into the back of the file folder and began to climb up from the floor. I was to my knees when I saw something white fluttering down. I realized I’d missed the folder when I quickly stuffed the photograph in. It was back on the floor.
Groaning, I reached for it. But this time the photograph had landed face up. I had a clear view of Guy Unitas, standing with his arms folded. And beside him, wearing a low-cut, ruffled dress that displayed her curves, was a pretty young woman, her head covered with bleached-blond corkscrew curls.
The clothes and the hair were all wrong. But the face—I quickly made a circle of my finger and thumb and covered the hair.
Lee’s flat gray eyes looked out at me, the pupils rimmed with black. My innards turned to mush, and I flipped the picture over to double-check the label on the back. It was the same caption I’d read a few minutes before.
The woman I’d known as “Lee” was identified in this picture as “Merri Blakely.”
“Lee” equaled “Merri Blakely.” And “Merri Blakely” equaled Coy’s wife.
Lee was the woman who had left Coy so bitter he hated women. The one who had taken off, the one he couldn’t even find to divorce.
And Coy was the husband Lee had described. The beast who had gotten her involved in an illegal plot.
He was the person she believed had killed Irish Svenson.
Surprise made me suck in a lot of air, and pain shot through my body. I grabbed my ribs and closed my eyes until it subsided. But when I opened my eyes, ready to reach for the photograph again, a mental pain replaced the physical agony. Because the photograph was still lying on the floor, but the toe of Coy’s shoe was on top of it.
I slowly moved my gaze up Coy’s pant leg, past his jacket, to his stony face. I was afraid to move, afraid to speak for a long moment. But I had to do something.
Could I convince him I hadn’t identified Lee? “Coy, I took these files out of the Gazette building by mistake.” I tried to keep my voice level and calm. “I have to return them. Just let me gather them up, and I’ll go.”
He shook his head. “No, Nell. You’re a smart gal. You know I can’t do that.”
“We can talk when we’re both calmer.”
He tapped his foot on the photograph. “No, Nell. This changes everything. Now that you know who Jane Doe is.”
“But—”
And right then someone knocked on the door.
Coy and I froze. Then he reacted. He whirled to face the door, grabbed my jaw, and held my head against his leg with his left hand clamped over my mouth. And with his right hand he pulled a pistol from behind his back.
He didn’t say anything, but his meaning was really clear. If I said anything, if I moved, somebody was going to get shot. And there was a real good chance it would be me.
I did not move.
The raps at the door came again. And someone spoke. “Nell? Nell!”
It was Bill Martin. He’d come looking for me. God! I’d have given anything if I’d waited in Hammond’s office the way I’d told him I would.
I crouched against Coy’s leg, hardly conscious of the pain in my side, afraid to breathe, afraid to move, and afraid not to. If I rolled my eyes upward, I could see the gun in Coy’s hand. If I looked at the door, I could see Bill silhouetted outside the smoked-glass panel. His outline moved sideways and back and forth as he shifted from foot to foot. He called my name again, questioningly. “Nell?” He obviously wasn’t sure I was in there.
I was shooting messages at him by ESP. Go away, Bill! After the way I’d wandered off earlier, I knew Bill wasn’t expecting me to be held at gunpoint. He thought I’d merely roamed away again. Despite his promise to Mike, he wasn’t expecting real trouble.
Go away, Bill! We might both be in more danger if Bill persisted in trying to find me in Coy’s office.
I could see movement through the smoked glass. “Nell?” Bill said again. And the door handle began to turn.
I rolled my eyes upward, and I saw Coy’s hand tighten on his pistol. He was getting ready to shoot. I couldn’t let him shoot Bill.
I threw my head forward, then back. My skull cracked against Coy’s pelvis.
He screamed. The gun went off. The glass in the door shattered. Bill Martin yelled and disappeared.
Coy let go of my jaw, and I dropped and rolled over. I don’t know if it hurt my ribs or not. I clawed my way through the heaps of clippings, now strewn all over the floor at the end of the couch, away from Coy, away from the pistol.
Except for my ragged breath, there was no sound. Coy had screamed only once, the glass had stopped falling and Bill Martin might be dead.
Then I heard a small gasp. For a second I thought it was me, and I put a hand over my mouth. But the sound continued. It grew stronger. It developed into a loud wail.
It was a baby’s cry.
A baby?
I peeked my head over the arm of the couch. The blue bundle Coy had carried over his shoulder was moving. It raised up, and eyes looked out from under what I now saw was a blue baby blanket. The eyes were a distinctively smooth light gray. The pupils were rimmed in black. For a minute Lee was looking at me.
Then a little boy, a toddler, sat up on his knees. He wore blue overalls, and his face was all scrunched up as he cried.
The blanket fell back, and I got a good look at him.
His hair was red. Brilliantly red. And curly. It was a brighter, child’s version of Mike Svenson’s hair.
Behind him, Coy was clutching his crotch with his left hand.
His right held his pistol, aimed at the baby’s back.
Chapter 24
“Pick him up,” Coy ordered. “Make him stop crying.”
When I didn’t react quickly, he moved the pistol closer to the baby’s head. “Now! Do it now! We’ve got to get out of here!”
I got to my feet and picked up the little boy. He pulled away from me and screamed louder.
“He doesn’t know me!” I said. “The shot scared him. I don’t know how to make him stop crying!”
“You’d better figure it out! Or you’re both dead.”
I bounced the baby up and down and patted his back. “Hey, hey, fellow. It’s all right. Shhh. Shhh.”
I could hear excited voices in the hall. Coy grabbed my arm and pushed me toward the door. “Okay, whether the brat’s crying or not, we’ve got to leave. You two are going as far as the car with me. If you behave, if everybody else behaves, I’ll let you go when we get there.” He jabbed my sore ribs with the pistol. “Savvy?”
I groaned out loud. But I nodded. Coy pushed me ahead of him, out the door of the office, into the hall. I could see secretaries and bookkeepers popping out of doors, looking toward us
timidly. They were smart enough not to approach the scene of a shooting without checking it out first.
None of them seemed to be armed, and there wasn’t a uniform in sight. Here we were in the Grantham Central Police Station, and where were the cops when you need them?
Coy waved the pistol beside my head, and one of the office workers screamed.
“Everybody stand still and stay back!” Coy yelled in my ear. He pushed me ahead. That’s when I gave a little scream of my own.
I had almost stumbled over Bill Martin’s feet. He was lying next to the wall, beside the door. Coy didn’t even look down at him. Bill wasn’t moving, but I could see a pool of blood spreading. Did that mean he was still alive?
I pressed the baby’s face into my shoulder and walked on.
More secretaries and clerks and a few cops were running out of offices and coming down the stairs, drawn by the sound of the shot.
“Get back!” Coy yelled. “Everybody stay back or Nell and the kid get it!”
Their faces loomed up, frozen in attitudes of horror, disbelief, and dread. Coy pushed me toward the hall we’d come down, the hall that led to the detective office and, beyond, to the door to the employees’ parking lot. But when we turned the corner and could see down that hall, Jim Hammond and Mike Svenson were running toward us.
“Shit!” Coy swung me around and pushed me back into the foyer, back toward his office. But three uniformed officers had materialized there. I guess they’d come from the desk in the reception area. One already had his pistol drawn.
“Stay back!” Coy’s voice was hoarse. He turned to the stairs that led up into the rotunda. He muttered as we crossed the open space, “Move along, bitch. Women are all bitches. If it weren’t for that bitch I married I wouldn’t have gotten into this mess. If you two bitches hadn’t put your fucking heads together, we still would have gotten away with the money.”
“Gotten away with what money?”
“Shut up! It was my big chance to get even with Irish. To show the world his Mr. Righteous act was just that. An act.” He pushed me up the stairs. “He was no better than the rest of us! When he got a chance to screw a good-looking woman, he took it! Then I had him. He wouldn’t dare investigate. Or he’d lose his precious, lily-white reputation.”
He shoved me up the curving stairs, around the first turn, then he pulled me to a stop. He shoved me against the railing, and I stood there, overlooking the foyer. He put his left arm around my neck and held me tight against him. The little redheaded boy was still crying, but his wails had turned to snivels. He rubbed his face against my shoulder, wiping snot all over my jacket. I could feel the pistol in my ribs.
Mike ran into the foyer. When he saw the little tableau on the stairway, he skidded to a stop. Jim Hammond was right behind him, but he couldn’t stop as fast. The two of them banged together like cartoon characters, but there was nothing funny about the slapstick.
Coy didn’t say anything. What did he need to say? He had me with a pistol against my side. I had the kid, but the position Coy held me in forced me to hold the kid over the edge of the stairway. If he shot me, I’d drop the kid. I’d drop him about twenty feet onto a terrazzo floor.
“Better get back,” Coy said. His voice was cold, but he didn’t shout.
“You’d better come down.” Mike’s voice was equally cool. They could have been having a business discussion.
“No.” I could feel Coy’s head shake.
“Coy, let’s talk—”
“No! No talk!” Coy snarled out the words, but he still wasn’t yelling. “I’m not one of your stupid, loser hostage takers. Your goddamn talk isn’t going to do any good. You’re just going to tell everybody to stay out of my way while I get out the back door, get in my car, and drive away!”
“Leave Nell—”
“No, she’ll have to go with me. You can see why. If we get to the car smoothly, we’ll leave the kid. But I ought to kill him. He caused all the trouble!”
Hammond and Mike looked at each other. Neither spoke, but I could see them communicate. Hammond was older, more experienced, and much higher in rank than Mike. But with a toss of his head and a shrug of his shoulders, he handed the situation over.
“Better do what he says,” Mike said. “Clear the hall. Clear the building.”
“And the parking lot,” Coy said.
Hammond nodded and moved out of the foyer, out of my view. Then I heard him bellowing. “Everybody out! Clear the building. Carry this man out of here!” Did he mean Bill Martin? I hoped Bill was still alive.
“Give us five minutes to clear the building,” Mike said. He leaned against the newel post at the bottom of the stairway. He looked casual, completely relaxed. For a minute I resented his easy attitude. Then I remembered that this was his speciality: hostage negotiator. He’d done this sort of thing lots of times. I clung to that idea.
Coy swung me into a different position, and I gasped in pain. And Mike came close to losing his negotiator’s cool. His fists clinched, his face screwed up, and he took one step up the stairway.
“Don’t move,” Coy said. “If the girlfriend gets hurt, it’ll be entirely your fault.”
Mike visibly controlled himself. His fist relaxed into a hand, and his face smoothed out. “I guess when Bo caved, your whole scheme caved with him,” he said. He was back in the conversational mode, his speciality, the secret of his success as a law officer. Keep ’em talking—the key to hostage negotiations. “You know we found out about the offshore account.”
“I’ve got another stash—enough to get me started,” Coy said. “I’ve got a new ID. All I had to do was dump the little bastard.”
“The kid? Where did he come from?” Mike said.
“Doesn’t the hair tell you where he came from?” Coy laughed curtly. “Merri wanted a baby the whole time we were married. Of course, I’d had a vasectomy when I was married the first time, but I didn’t tell her about that. The bitch was too stupid to realize she wasn’t never going to get pregnant. Kept going to doctors.
“So that’s one thing I have to hand your old man. She spent only one weekend with him—one little fling at a convention—and God! I practically had to threaten to kill her to get her to do it—and she turns up pregnant.”
Mike’s face tightened, but he didn’t lose his cool.
The little boy looked up with his light gray eyes, eyes amazingly like Lee’s.
“Andy,” I said, “he must be Andy.”
At the sound of the name, the little boy wiggled in my arms. “Andy!” he said. “Want down! I walk!”
Coy’s arm tightened around my neck again. I choked, but I gripped the struggling child.
“Let Nell breathe!” Mike said. “If she passes out, she’ll drop the kid.”
“It’d serve him right! He should never have been born. If I’d known Merri was pregnant, he wouldn’t have been. But the bitch figured that out—she was that smart at least. So she ran away.”
His arm tightened, and his next words were yelled out. “And she took my money!”
“Your money? Wasn’t it your fellow officers’ money?”
“The hell with ’em! It’s my money!”
“You were a good cop, Coy. The best undercover cop the Grantham PD ever had. My dad told me.”
Coy laughed again. “Yeah, I learned a lot working undercover. Disguise. How not to look like a cop. How to keep a temporary tattoo from coming off in the Salvation Army’s lousy cold shower. And where to borrow a vehicle that doesn’t look like a cop would drive it. That came in real handy—just this week. I hadn’t driven the Scamovan in years, but I knew where to find it.
“And Irish knew I was good. But that didn’t matter to him. One slip and he sank my career. I should have been division commander, could have moved into the chief’s slot. But no! he stuck me in the PIO office. Where he could breathe o
ver my shoulder all day every day, make sure I didn’t slip up again.
“Everybody thought I was Irish’s pet! I was his whipping boy. He was just waiting, waiting to trip me up.”
Mike was still calm. “He didn’t trip you up, though. You kept the job, made yourself important to the department. You always knew everything that was going on.” He smiled grimly. “It almost seems as if you could hear what was going on in the chief’s office!”
Coy laughed, a laugh as grim as Mike’s smile had been. “The great Irish Svenson! Honest Irish Svenson. He was no better than anybody else. I’d seen him eying Merri at the A.P.B. banquet. And she was always a sucker for an older guy who bossed her around. Oh, you’d have been proud of him, Mike! When he got a chance for a screw, he didn’t waste it.
“Oh, the little cunt tried to tell me she didn’t want to go to bed with Irish, but I knew she could go after anybody. And get ’em. Some women have that smell about them. Every man who sees them wants to yank his pants off.”
Mike shrugged. “I guess he got the last laugh though. She left you for him.”
“No! She didn’t! Don’t you get it? She didn’t care anything about Irish. She left me for the kid! Sure, Irish helped her hide out. But the kid was the reason she left. After she found out about the kid, she took off. She traded the tapes to Irish, made him help her.”
“The tapes?” Mike’s voice was tight. “What tapes?”
“The videos of the two of them screwing! If I hadn’t had those, I wouldn’t have had anything on Irish!”
“And Merrilee took them?”
“Took everything. Took the tapes. Took the money. Took off.”
He poked the gun in my ribs again. I groaned in agony. Andy kicked and wiggled. “Down! I walk!” he screamed.
Coy didn’t even seem to hear my groan or Andy’s scream. “The bitch! And now, Officer Michael the brave and honorable Svenson, I believe your five minutes are up. This building better be cleared, because Nell and the kid and I are getting out of here. And you’re the first person we have to get by. So you lie flat on the floor.”