Saw Davenport coming closer, screaming at him; saw himself rocking back and forth on his heels. Felt the pistol in the bottom hand on his chest, concealed. Saw Davenport reaching out to him, ordering him to turn; Davenport unaware, unknowing, unthinking. Saw himself reach out with the derringer, press it to Davenport's heart, and the explosion and Davenport's face…
The sergeant looked at Lucas, raised an eyebrow. Ready? Lucas nodded. The sergeant took a breath, raised the hammer overhead, paused, then brought it crashing down. The door flew inward, and the sergeant hit the ground. There was no immediate fire from the dark room, and he scrambled back past Fell to the stairs, groping for his gun.
"Too fuckin' old for this shit," he said.
Lucas, focused on the room, said, "Flashlights."
"What?"
"Get some flashlights…"
With quick peeks around the corner, they established that the interior of the basement wasn't quite dark. A light was on somewhere, but seemed to be partially blocked, as though the thin illumination were seeping through a crack in the door, or coming from a child's night-light. Lucas and Fell, looking over the sights of their weapons, could see the blocky shapes of furniture, a rectangle that might be a bookcase.
"Got 'em," the sergeant said.
"Poke them around the corner, hit the interior, about head high. Keep your hand back if you can. Tell me when you're going, I'll shoot at a muzzle flash," Lucas said. He looked at Fell, saw that she was sweating, and grinned at her. "Life in the big city."
The cop nodded. "Ready?"
"Anytime."
"Now."
The cop thrust the light around the corner, and Lucas, four feet below, followed with the muzzle of his gun, and his arm, and one eye. No movement. The sergeant leaned a bit into the hallway, played the light around the interior.
"I'm going," said Lucas.
"Go," said Fell.
Lucas scrambled across the floor to the apartment door, then, flat on the floor, eased his head and shoulders through the door, reached up, flicked a light switch. A single bulb came on. Nothing moving. He crouched, and Fell eased down the hall.
"What's that?" she whispered.
Lucas listened.
Jesus loves me…
Not a child's voice. But not an adult's, either-nothing human, he thought. Something from a movie, a special effect, weird, chilling.
For the Bible tells me so…
"Bekker," Lucas whispered. "Over there, I think…"
He was inside the apartment, duckwalking, the.45 in a double-handed grip, following his eye-track around the apartment. Fell, behind him, said, "Covered to the right."
"I got the right, you watch that dark door…" The sergeant's voice. Lucas glanced back, quickly, saw the older man easing inside with his piece-of-shit.38.
"Got it," Fell agreed.
"He's in the corner," Lucas said. He half stood, looking at a velour couch. The couch was pushed away from the wall, and the unearthly voice was coming from behind it.
"Bekker," he called.
Jesus loves me…
"Stand up, Bekker…"
This I know…
Lucas focused on the couch, crept up on it, the gun fully extended. Up close, he could see the top of Bekker's head, shaven, smooth, bobbing up and down with the simple rhythms of the song.
"Up, motherfucker," he yelled. And to Fell and the cop: "He's here, got him…"
"Watch a gun, watch a gun…"
Lucas, pointing his weapon at the top of Bekker's head, slid around the side of the couch and looked down at him. Bekker looked up, then stood, hands across his chest, rocking, humming…
"Turn around," Lucas shouted.
Fell moved up beside him…
"Nuttier 'n shit," she whispered.
"Watch him, watch him…"
She stepped around to get a better angle, then batted at her face and batted again, then waved her hand overhead.
Lucas, glancing sideways: "What?"
"I'm tangled…"
Bekker's head turned, like a ball bearing rotating in a socket. "Spiders…" he said.
The sergeant, near the kitchen door, coming up slowly, punched a light switch, and Fell groaned, weakly, thrashing at the objects that hung around her head.
"Get away," she choked. "Get away from me…"
They hung on individual black threads from a bundle of crossed wire coat hangers, floating in their separate orbits around Fell's head, wrinkled now, drying, the varicolored lashes as sleek as the day the eyelids were cut from their owners…
Fell staggered away from them, appalled, her mouth open.
"Get him," Lucas said, his pistol three feet from Bekker's vacant eyes. The sergeant took a step forward. Behind Fell, a thin shaft of light cut through a crack in a door. The light was hard, sharp, blue, professional. As the sergeant stepped forward, Fell pushed the door open.
Bekker took a step toward Lucas, his hands crossed on his chest. "Spi…"
An old woman lay there, bound and wired silent, her eyes permanently open now, staring, white eyeballs, the skin removed from her chest…
Alive…
"Aw, fuck," Fell screamed. She pivoted, the gun coming up, her mouth open, working, her hands clutching.
Lucas had time to say, "No."
Bekker said, "… ders." And one hand dropped and the other swung up, a glint of steel. He thrust the derringer at Lucas' chest… … and Fell fired a single.357 round through the bridge of Michael Bekker's nose and blew out the back of Michael Bekker's sleek, shaven head.
CHAPTER
30
The walls of Lily's office seemed to melt, and Petty was there, the adult face superimposed on the child's face, both of them together.
And then Kennett's face.
Kennett's face in the dark, in Lily's bedroom. Must've been in winter: she'd bought a Christmas tree, shipped into a lot on Sixth Avenue from somewhere in Maine, and she could remember the scent of pine needles in the apartment as they talked.
No sex, just sleeping together. Kennett laughing about it, but unhappy, too. His heart attack not that far past…
"Hanging out with a geek," he said. "I can't believe it. I'm not enough, she's got a geek on the side."
"Not a geek," she said.
"All right. A dork. A nerd. Revenge of the Nerds, visited on Richard X. Kennett personally. A nerd may be dorking my woman. Or wait, maybe it's a dork is nerding my woman. Or wait…"
"Shut up," she said, mock-severely. "Or I will fondle your delicate parts and then leave you hanging-in good health, of course."
"Lily…" A change of tone. Sex on the mind.
"No. I'm sorry I said it. Kennett…"
"All right. Back to the dork…"
"He's not a dork. He's really a nice guy, and if he cracks this thing, he could go somewhere…"
She'd talked, Lily had, about the Robin Hood case. She'd talked in bed. She'd talked about the intelligence guys who'd stumbled over it, she'd talked about Petty being assigned to it, she'd talked about computers.
Not all at once. Not formally. But bits and pieces. Pillow talk. But Kennett got most of it. With what Copland overheard, and what Kennett got in bed, they must've known it all.
Petty's image floated in her mind's eye, his hair slicked down, his red ears sticking out, running down the Brooklyn sidewalk with the paper overhead, so happy to see her…
"I killed you," she said to his image, speaking aloud. Her voice was stark as a winter crow. "I killed you, Walt."
CHAPTER
31
The river was black as ink, but thick, oily, roiled, as it pushed the last few miles toward the sea. A full moon had come up in the east, red, huge, shrouded by smog over the city. Lily waited until the elderly night guard and his dog were at the far end of the marina, then used her key at the member's gate.
The docks were cluttered, as always, badly lit by widely spaced yellow bug lights. Out in the water, anchor lights shone off the masts of a half-doze
n anchored boats. Here and there, lights showed at portholes, and a light breeze banged halyards against aluminum masts, a pleasant whipping tinkle like wind chimes. The smell of marijuana hovered around a small Capri daysailer and a man was giggling inside the tiny cabin. She walked out of the marijuana stink into the river smell, compounded of mud and decaying fish.
"Lily." Kennett's voice came out of the dark as she approached the Lestrade. He was sitting behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. "I was wondering if you'd come."
"You know about Bekker?"
"Yeah. And that I've been cut out of the loop."
Lily stepped into the cockpit, sat down, staring at him. His face was flat, solemn; he was looking steadily back. "You're Robin Hood," she said.
"Robin Hood, bullshit," he said wearily. He flicked the cigarette into the water.
"I'm not wearing a wire," she said.
"Stand up, turn around." She stood up and Kennett ran his hands down her, between her legs. "Gimme the purse."
He opened the purse, clicked on an electric light that hung from the backstay, looked inside. After poking inside, he took the.45 out of its holder, dropped the magazine and shucked the shells out into the water. Then he jacked the slide, to eject the shell in the chamber. The chamber was empty, and he shook his head. "You oughta carry one under the hammer."
"I'm not here to talk about guns," she said. "I'm here to talk about you being Robin Hood. About using me as a dummy to spy on O'Dell. About killing Walt Petty."
"I didn't use you as a dummy," he said flatly. "I got with you because I liked you and I'm falling in love with you. You're beautiful and you're smart and you're a cop, and there aren't many women around I can talk to."
"I don't doubt that you like me," she said, squaring off with him. "But that didn't keep you from running me. On the way up here, I was remembering when we'd lie down below there, in the berth, and you running those goddamn fantasies about what O'Dell did for sex. Do you remember that? You must've scripted those things, to get me talking about O'Dell. And before that, talking about Walt. When I think of the things I told you, because I felt secure. Because you were a lover and a brother cop. Jesus Christ, every time we got into bed, you were pumping me for information."
"Christ, Lily… Lily, if you told me anything about O'Dell or Petty… it was by-product. I wasn't sleeping with you to get information. Jesus, Lily…"
"Shut up," Lily said. She reached overhead and pulled the chain on the backstay light and they were plunged into the dark again. "I want to know some shit. We've got Jeese and Clemson, Davenport got them, and we know about Copland…"
"I knew Davenport was dangerous," Kennett said quietly. "I really didn't underestimate him. I knew he was a really dangerous sonofabitch when he looked up Gauguin, about the necktie. And I couldn't help liking him."
"Is that why your guys tried to beat him up, instead of just whacking him?"
Kennett grinned: she could see his teeth. Not a happy smile, a rueful one. "Another mistake," he said. "You start feeling that everything in New York is more. That a small-town guy could never hold off a couple of real New York pros. So we were just gonna break a few ribs, maybe. Something that'd take him off the street for a month. They said he was quick as a pro fighter. They were pissed, said that if they'd been a half-inch slower, he'd of blown them up, he'd of had his.45 out…"
"They were lucky," Lily said. "Why didn't you try again?"
Kennett shrugged. "At that point, we figured it was either kill him or forget him. He didn't seem… close enough… to kill. And I don't know if the guys would've done it anyway. Petty was already hard to stomach. Davenport's message to O'Dell, the one Copland picked up. That was fake?"
"Not completely. It was Davenport who found Bekker, all right. He was feeding the message to O'Dell to see if any hitters showed up. They did, but I was with O'Dell the whole time. He didn't make any calls. So I started thinking about it."
"God damn it. I thought about skipping Bekker."
"You should have."
"Couldn't. Didn't know what he'd say about…" He stopped, remembering.
"About the guys he saw hit Walt. Jeese and Clemson. Thick and Thin."
"No," Kennett said evenly. "It wasn't them."
"Bullshit," she flared. "They fit."
"No. It wasn't."
"Who, then?"
"I won't tell you, but Jeese and Clemson, no." He pulled at his lip. "Old Copland. A good guy. What happens to him?"
"O'Dell will think of something… How many of you are there? And how many people have you done?"
Kennett shook his head. "There are… several. Some singles, some two-man teams. None of them knows the others, and I won't tell you who they are."
"We can put Jeese and Clemson in Attica if we want-assault on a police officer with a firearm. And if O'Dell wants to fix it, I'm sure we can find a problem with Copland's pension. He'll spend his last twenty years sitting on a park bench. Or rolled in an army blanket on a sidewalk."
"Don't fuckin' do that," Kennett whispered.
"That's what happens when you lose," Lily said, her voice like ice.
"We were doing right," Kennett said. "I'll call it off. Walk away, and I'll call it off. I'll quit the force, if you want."
"What, so you can write for the Times? You'd be a bigger danger there than where you are now," Lily said.
"So what do you want from me?"
"I want the goddamned names."
Kennett shook his head. "No. Never happen. If I gave you the names, only two things could happen: a lot of good guys would get ripped off, or O'Dell would set up his own little force of stormtroopers. I'm not going to let any fat, puling, alcoholic fixer do that, I won't…" His voice grew cold as he said it. He bared his teeth and added, "I really like you. But the worst thing you do is, the worst thing about you, is that you associate with that… that… cunt O'Dell."
"I'm the cunt," Lily said. "I'm the one you rolled for information."
"Fuck you, then," Kennett said, and turned away. "You want to make something out of it, make it in court. I'll tear you up. Now take your ass off my boat."
"I've got another question before I go."
"What?"
"Why Walt?"
Kennett stared at her a moment, then dug in his shirt, found a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, lit it with a match. Tossed the match overboard: they heard it hit, the hiss hanging in the damp air.
"Had to," he said. "Him and his fucking computers. When I started this, nobody really knew about computers and what they could do. They were like electric filing cabinets. Looking in a computer was like snooping through papers on somebody's desk. We didn't know that every time we went into a file, we left tracks. Petty nailed us down. We had to have time to get into the machines, to fix things. We did that. The information's gone now." He looked downriver, at the Manhattan glittering along the river, the arcs of the bridges. "Listen, Lily. If you could take five hundred or a thousand people out of Manhattan, you could make it eighty percent safer. You could make it a paradise."
"Not a thousand," she said. "Maybe ten thousand."
"No. No, not really. A thousand would do it. We couldn't take down a thousand people, probably, but we could make a difference. Arvin Davies. You look at him? Was he one of the people…"
"Yes."
"We think… intelligence estimates… that he committed up to a hundred crimes, all sorts: assaults, burglaries, rapes, murder. He could have done a hundred more. Now he won't."
"You can't make that decision."
"Sure I can. And somebody has to," Kennett said, looking at her. "Your average junkie does fifty or a hundred burglaries for every time he gets caught, and for small burglaries, chances are he'll be right back out on the street. Plea-bargains out, or he'll do thirty days or six months or something. Not enough. If we let all the onetime passion killers out of prison and put all the junkies inside, Manhattan would be a garden spot. Even the ones we took off… Christ, we knocked down a thousand
violent crimes a year, just the ones we took down."
"How many were there?"
He shook his head. "You don't need to know. But that's why."
"That's why you shot Petty? So we'd have a garden spot?"
Kennett turned away. "We didn't like doing that. But we had no choice… O'Dell is trying to frame me, by the way. Supposedly had a witness who saw me when Waites was gunned down."
"I know."
His eyebrows went up. "You know?"
"Davenport found the kid who supposedly saw you. Found him in Charleston and broke him down. He knows it was phony."
Kennett smiled. "When he went to Minneapolis, he went to Charleston the next day. I thought it was weird that he took the day off-weird for a guy like Davenport."
"How about the others? Waites was a loudmouth, but…"
"They nurtured it, the festering. My God, look over there, look at that city, think what it could be…"
She looked across the water at the twinkling lights, like the lights of the Milky Way, seen large. "And you sold it out. And used me like a fucking Kleenex."
"Bullshit," he said. His face was getting red.
"When Walt was killed, I came over here and cried on your shoulder, and you took care of all the arrangements and patted me on the head and took me down below and made love to me, comforting me. I can't believe I did it."
"Yeah, well…"
"Well, what?"
"That's life." His teeth were clenched. "Now, go on, Lily, get the hell out of here."
Lily stood, took a step toward the dock. Then another step, toward Kennett.
"What…" Kennett began.
She hit him, open-handed, hard: a slap that almost knocked him down. He took a step toward her, hand on his face, and caught her arm. "Lily, dammit!"
"Let go of me," she said. She tried to pull away, but he held on, and for a moment, they struggled together, his face getting redder; then suddenly, he pinched his shoulders and let his hand drop away.
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