by John Lutz
“Only until she went hoarse.”
Meg gave her a level look. “You really understand what’s at stake here?”
“Yes, but I’m also skeptical of the notion that with all this obvious protection, the Night Sniper would dare come anywhere near here.”
“You don’t understand him,” Meg said. “It’s the difficulty that would attract him. The challenge. He’s a risk taker.”
“You sound as if you admire him. I’ve picked up the same thing sometimes in my dad’s voice. And in Birdy’s.”
“If we admire him,” Meg said, “it’s only as an adversary, not as a human being.”
“Whatever he is, I feel safe enough from him.” Amelia curled her legs beneath her in the chair and yawned. Her long braided hair was arranged now on the back of the chair and on one shoulder. What Meg wouldn’t do for hair like that.
“Not been sleeping well?” Meg asked.
“All right. I think your friend Birdy is nervous enough for both of us.”
Both women jumped when the doorbell rang.
“Almost nervous enough,” Amelia added.
“Bedroom,” Meg said.
Amelia immediately rose from the wing chair and disappeared down the hall.
Meg went to the door, stood to the side, and knocked three times on the inside.
There was an answering knock. “It’s Knickerbocker,” came the voice from the other side of the door. “Mr. Chicken.”
Meg squinted through the peephole and recognized the uniform outside. Ben Knickerbocker, with the fried chicken dinners from the corner deli.
Knickerbocker knew she was looking through the peephole. He made a loud clucking sound.
She unlocked the dead bolt and chain and opened the door. Cooler air wafted into the apartment, emphasizing how stuffy it had become. Knickerbocker clucked hello.
Meg accepted the two white takeout boxes from him. He was a young guy, handsome, with too much mouth on him. “Do I get a tip?” he asked through a wide grin. Guy must have fifty, sixty teeth.
“You would have,” Meg said, “but you put me in a fowl humor. They have everything the targ—Amelia requested?”
“Roger that. I made sure you’d both be happy.”
“How is it out there?”
“Normal enough,” Knickerbocker said. “Not dark yet, so the streets are still fairly crowded. Sniper’ll stand out more if he stays with his after-eight-thirty MO.”
“I wouldn’t count on anything with this guy.”
“We aren’t,” Knickerbocker said. “You on the inside can count on us on the outside. The kid holding up okay?”
“Amelia? Sure. I don’t think she fully recognizes the danger. Thinks she does, but she doesn’t.”
“Just so she follows the rules,” Knickerbocker said. He touched the bill of his cap in an oddly old-fashioned mannerism. “Enjoy dinner.”
Meg called Amelia back in from the rear of the apartment.
“Who was it?” Amelia asked.
“Mr. Chicken.”
They went into the kitchen to eat at the table. Amelia unscewed the cap on a bottle of cheap red wine while Meg spread out the chicken, slaw, potatoes, and rolls, placing them on china plates from one of the cabinets.
Amelia poured the wine and they sat down to eat.
“Not so bad,” Amelia said, raising her glass. “To safety and freedom from fear.”
And to an admirable show of bravado, Meg thought, deciding to go easy on the wine.
She clinked her glass against Amelia’s in a toast, thinking the mayor might have raised a glass after similar words at dinner the evening he was shot.
53
The next day, Bobby sat on a bench in a pocket park on East Fifty-third Street, where office workers from nearby buildings went to eat lunch or simply rest in the shade provided by small trees or the buildings bordering the park. There was a flat-surface waterfall at the far end of the park that supplied relaxing burbling and lapping sounds. A very restful atmosphere in the beating concrete heart of the city, and one where people tended to lower their guard.
Lunchtime seemed to be when these people in suits, blazers, and ties wanted to make personal calls on their cell or satellite phones. Bobby slumped on a bench as if half asleep, watching two women in particular through half-closed eyes.
The nearest was a lean, high-powered executive type with a pale complexion, startlingly blue eyes, and black hair short and parted on one side. She wore matching blue slacks and blazer and navy high-heeled pumps. All business, at least during working hours.
She was the first to end her conversation. Flipping the phone’s lid-earphone closed, she replaced the unit in her purse.
The second woman, young and with her light blond hair combed straight across her forehead and over one eye in a way that made her look like Martha Stewart, wore slacks, a gray blazer, and white jogging shoes. She completed her conversation and absently laid her phone alongside her purse on the bench where she sat. The bench was near the edge of the park, and Bobby thought it would be easy to create some kind of diversion, or simply walk past and scoop up the phone while her attention was elsewhere. If he did happen to be noticed, he’d simply hand the phone over to the woman with a smile and pretend she’d knocked it on the ground and he was retrieving it for her. Even if she didn’t believe him, she probably wouldn’t raise much of a fuss. Something about her made him think she wasn’t the type. And it was almost as if she wanted to have the phone stolen. She even made it easier for him by pulling an envelope from her purse, opening it, and becoming engrossed in a letter.
Bobby nonchalantly rose to his feet and shuffled at an oblique angle toward the bench. None of the park’s other occupants seemed to be paying much attention to him. He wasn’t the sort whose gaze anyone wanted to meet.
Within a few seconds he was only about ten feet from the bench. The woman continued to sit hunched over her letter, gnawing on a sandwich now, the black and purple cell phone resting near her right hip like a bright piece of fruit ready to be plucked.
The trouble was, Bobby wasn’t a thief.
He walked slowly past the bench, unable to act.
He couldn’t reach for the phone. He thought he’d reasoned it out and decided the end justified the means. But there was still a part of him that he held sacred and protected, that the city in its cruelty and hardships hadn’t claimed, and wasn’t up for compromise.
He hadn’t backslid that far. He hadn’t gone over to the other side. Not Bobby Mays.
Try as he might, he goddamn well wasn’t a thief!
Bobby kept walking, past the unsuspecting woman on the bench, out of the small, narrow park, and into the throngs of people passing on the sunny sidewalk.
Half a block down, he stood off to the side and with his fingertips counted the change in his pocket. A couple of dollars. If he set up with his sign and cup on a busy corner, like the one across the street, he could raise more.
Maybe enough for what he had in mind.
Within a few hours he had a total of fourteen dollars and thirty-five cents. It would have to be enough. After a subway pay-for-ride MetroCard bought from a machine, he was down to slightly over ten dollars. But he was soon uptown, in the 140s near Broadway.
There was a guy Bobby had come to see, a black man going by the name of Meander. Sometimes, when Bobby couldn’t afford his prescription medicine, Meander sold him pain pills. Only last week Bobby had bought some Darvocet from him, a few weeks before that some cherry cough medicine heavy with codeine that had not only relieved pain but given Bobby a bit of a buzz. Once he’d simply purchased Tylenol that Meander had probably stolen that morning from some retailer’s shelf.
Meander didn’t only specialize in medicinal aid to the hapless and homeless; he also dealt in stolen cell phones. These phones had a shelf life before they were noticed missing and the provider was alerted. They depreciated accordingly. Some of the phones had been bought cheap by Meander from desperate thieves laying them off fo
r a few dollars for food, booze, or drug money. Others Meander, an accomplished pickpocket, stole himself. Pure profit, those.
Meander had an assortment of chargers and kept the phones’ batteries up. Usually the buyer could count on a few days of use, sometimes longer. Longer was always riskier. It didn’t take much time to run up astoundingly high phone bills, never to be paid by the illicit user.
Bobby wandered the neighborhood for about half an hour, then spotted Meander at one of his usual places of business, the doorway of a blackened brick building that had been damaged by fire a few years ago and remained unrepaired. The building had housed a small auto supply shop that had been a front for drug dealers. The oil and other petroleum products had made for quite a fire.
Meander was a short, thin man with heavy-lidded, lazy eyes and a goatee that lent his narrow face a bored yet satanic expression. He was about forty, wearing jeans so baggy they were almost like the gangsta pants worn by the younger thieves and thugs of the neighborhood. He also had on a black T-shirt three sizes too large, and a gray baseball cap worn sideways on his head so that the bill was cocked low over his right ear. The cap wasn’t precisely a baseball cap; it bore the words Shit Kicker instead of a team logo. Bobby couldn’t imagine the mentally active but physically lazy Meander kicking anyone who might kick back, or playing any game that required exertion, unless it was Run From the Cops. A few feet behind him, in the shadow of the deep doorway, was a tattered cardboard box Meander would disavow any connection to if he happened to be rousted by the law. In this box were his wares—phones on one side of a cardboard divider, medicinals on the other.
Standing slouched against the building near the doorway as if he were glued to it, Meander watched Bobby approach. His heavy-lidded eyes didn’t blink.
“You hurtin’ agin, my man?” he asked, when Bobby was about twenty feet away and obviously had come to see him.
“Came for something else,” Bobby said.
“I axed was you hurtin’?”
“So you did. I’m always hurting.”
“Not if you take the medicine I sell you.”
“That’s some bullshit,” Bobby said.
Meander grinned. “Tha’s to say, if the expiration dates on the bottles ain’t more’n ten years old.”
“Which they are sometimes.”
“Which they are,” Meander agreed. “What you need, Bobby, you po homeless fucker?”
“I need what you sell. A phone.”
Meander looked surprised—for him. His eyelids raised to the three-quarter-open position, then dropped back to half. “Who the fuck you be callin’ on the phone, walkin’ bundle of rags like you?”
“My broker?”
“You broke, all right. You can’t afford no phone.”
“I got ten dollars.”
“That be different, but it still ain’t enough.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
Meander remained slouched, but he crossed his arms over his bony chest. “It still ain’t enough.”
“Look in your box and I bet you’ll find something in my price range. Do it as a favor.”
“Mean you gonna owe me a favor?”
“That’s the idea,” Bobby said. “How the world is greased.”
“You ain’t a cop or nothin’, so what the fuck good’s a favor you owe? You jus’ a po fool like I used to be ’fore I became a businessman.”
“I used to be a cop.”
“Like I used to be police commissioner. ’Sides, you a cop once, you always a cop.”
“Whatever. Let’s trade favors. I’ll owe you one in return for a ten-dollar phone.”
“Ain’t no such thing as a ten-dollar phone, Bobby. Ain’t you kept pace with technology?”
“I’m trying to gain ground. That’s why I wanna trade favors. Your favor’d be a discount on the phone, and mine’d be something you need in the future.”
“Trade favors, my ass. Cops don’t do that kinda deal.”
“Sure they do. Anyway, like you said, once a cop . . .” Bobby glanced meaningfully at the incriminating box full of stolen wares.
Meander straightened up from the wall, somehow still slouching. “You fuckin’ threatenin’ me?”
“Just pointing out about how favors work between friends.” Bobby was threatening him and both men knew it. Bobby twisting an arm, working the street again. Bobby back on the Job. It felt good, throwing a scare into a booster like Meander. It felt right.
“Now, that the kinda deal a cop makes,” Meander said. “Do the favor or fuckin’ else. That what you’re sayin’, Bobby, my man? That what I’m hearin’?”
Bobby merely stared at him. Fixed him with the dead-eyed look that might mean anything, including explosive danger.
“Maybe I got a spare phone at that,” Meander said, squinting slightly as if for the first time bringing Bobby into focus. “Be an Amickson clamshell, ob-tained yesterday.”
“Never heard of an Amickson.”
“It be a good brand, made in North or South some country or other.”
“Does it work?”
Meander appeared internally injured. “Do it work? Fuckin’-A right it work! Ain’t no Mo-torola or No-kia. Tha’s why it’s cheap, why we can do the deal. That an’ I got no way to charge up the motha.”
“Huh? You wanna sell me a dead phone with no way to charge the battery?”
“Dead? Ain’t dead, man. I say dead? Got some power left. Got a rabbit.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Battery indicator uses little rabbit icons. Five rabbits be fully charged. You got a whole rabbit left. Might last a few minutes, maybe an hour. Hell, you might be buyin’ half a dozen phone calls. Cheap at the price. Couldn’t sell it at such a discount, ‘cept it was dropped. I acquired it myself, an’ no sooner it hit the pavement, I put it right back together.”
“You mean you dropped it when you were running away from whoever you stole it from.”
Meander scratched his head. “That what I mean?”
“Anything else I should know about this phone?”
“Nothin’. Oh yeah, the six don’t work. Button don’t press no more.”
Bobby summoned up the phone number he might have to call. “That’ll be okay. Just the six not working?”
“Got my fuckin’ word. You a good customer, Bobby, so why’m I gonna piss you off?”
“Amusement?”
Meander chuckled. “Fuckin’ ’musement!” He turned and rummaged around in the box, then held up the phone for Bobby to see. Small, black, with blue buttons. It looked okay, though it wasn’t the clamshell flip type as Meander had said. Lying could become an addiction.
Bobby leaned closer and peered. The 6 looked like all the other buttons. The phone appeared not to have been dropped hard enough to damage the case or cause much interior damage. There were small red letters across the top. “Amickson,” Bobby read aloud. The script looked Gothic. The screen glowed and a small rabbit appeared in the upper left-hand corner. One of its ears appeared to be missing.
Meander did a tight little dance. “You want it or not? Gotta get off the stool, man. No more negotiation. I’m doin’ business here an’ the shit I sell’s of the highest quality. Tell the truth, you ain’t shoppin’ Cadillac, ’cause you one po motha. You want a phone be an off-brand, got no spare battery that’ll fit it, got no charger an’ jus’ a little charge, no number six button—price be ten dollars. An’ it’s guaranteed. It don’t work, you can bring it back.” Meander grinned. “Ain’t about to git your money back, though.”
Bobby fished the ten dollars—three crumpled bills and the rest in change—from his pocket and handed it over. “You’re all heart, Meander.”
“All head’s what I be. All business. Anyways, what difference it make? What party a loser like you gonna call? What you up to, Bobby? You talkin’ to Mars? Or maybe Ur-anus?”
“Maybe Mars,” Bobby said.
“Well, here’s your space phone.” He stuffed the money from Bo
bby in his pocket before handing over the phone. “Be the special of the day, price you paid. Now git on. I don’t want no homeless motha hangin’ round, be bad for business. I’m done with charity for today.”
“Charity? I thought you didn’t have a heart.”
“Huh? I say that?”
Bobby slipped the phone into the pocket that had carried the money to buy it, then nodded to Meander and moved away down the street.
Considering what the ten dollars might have bought, the phone could be a bargain.
If it worked when it was needed. If the rabbit didn’t die.
Lora was perched on the window seat, her back to Bank Street. Her shoulders were hunched, helping to add ten years to her age in the failing light, and her gaze was solemn.
She said, “This is driving me goddamned crazy, Vin.”
“Both of us,” Repetto said, pacing.
“Why don’t we go grab her by both arms and force her out of that apartment? That death trap?”
“That’d be against the law.”
“Then we break the fucking law!”
Repetto stopped pacing to face his wife squarely. “She’d go back. She can do that. She would do that.”
Lora lowered her gaze to the floor. “This is your decision, not mine.”
“It’s Amelia’s decision,” Repetto said. “If it was mine, it’d be the same as yours.”
After a long pause, Lora said, “You’re right.” She began shaking her head from side to side. “It’s just so damned hard to swallow.”
Repetto began pacing again, wondering if she really had swallowed it. Beyond her hunched form framed by the window, he watched night begin to fall.
Just from reading the papers it hadn’t been hard for Bobby to figure out the identity of the Sniper’s next intended victim. And to know from reading between the lines that Amelia Repetto might still be in town, refusing to be run off by fear.
If true, she was one gutsy young lady. Not stupid, from everything Bobby had read about her, so it must be courage.
Bobby had figured out her address easily from what they said about her neighborhood in the paper, and from the A. Repetto listed in the phone directory. Easy for him, easy for the Sniper. Bobby knew how the police would think, how they’d lay out their protection. He was walking the neighborhood of Amelia’s apartment, not getting too close, prowling the perimeter and gradually working his way inward. The lowering evening was cool enough to be comfortable, moonlit and without much of a breeze. A shooter’s night.