by Michael Kerr
Lennox had no time to come up with a lame-ass excuse. The line was now dead.
Logan left the room, got in the car and drove a few blocks to a twenty-four hour pizza joint that they had passed on the way in. He ordered a family-size pie and watched the breaking news on the wall-mounted TV. Same old, same old: shit going down in the Middle-East, and next up was details of a guy who’d gone berserk in Copley Place, a Boston shopping mall, and stabbed eight shoppers, killing three of them. It was believed that he had been released from a psychiatric hospital two days previously, but obviously still had mental issues, or had, up to the second that a patrol officer shot him dead in front of the waterfall on level one.
As the teenager placed the boxed pie on the counter, a local talking head appeared on screen behind him and gave brief details of a double homicide at a house in a residential district of Melrose. Patrol cars with flashing red and blue LED light bars were parked in the street, and the guy with the mike said that the shooting of a middle-aged couple had come as a terrible shock to neighbors. There were a lot of words but no further details. Logan knew that the victims had been Margie’s brother and his wife, and that the guy he had spoken to on the phone had been responsible. He paid for the pie and drove back to the motel, deep in thought. Fallon’s crew needed a lead. They had no way of finding Margie, Benny or him, but would keep looking. What would their next move be?
Della! He pulled into the motel lot, switched off the engine, got out of the Taurus and went back to open the trunk. Took a pay-as-you-go phone from a pocket of the rucksack and walk across to the room, to knock and wait. He saw a drape twitch at the window, and a couple of seconds later Benny opened the door.
“Here,” Logan said, handing the pizza to Benny, before going through to Margie’s room, after first tapping on the door and waiting for her to tell him to come in.
“Give me Della’s phone number,” he said, switching the cell on and punching it in as Margie said it.
Della went over to the counter in the kitchen and picked up her beeping cell. No caller ID, again. Curiosity killed the cat, she thought as, against her better judgment, she accepted the call.
“Della?”
A pause: “Joe?”
“Yeah. Are you okay?”
“Not really. I got a call from some guy trying to pass himself off as a cop. He was trying to locate Margie. He knew my name. I said I’d call him back and he disconnected. I rang the police and they said that they would try and trace the call, and send a car by. I goofed, Joe. I told whoever it was that I was Margie’s next-door neighbor. What should I do now?”
“Try to stay calm,” Logan said. “Make sure that the house is locked up as tight as a drum, get hold of a flashlight, switch off all the lights, and then turn off the breaker panel and go down to the basement.”
“It’s in the basement.”
“Fine. Stay down there and arm yourself with something you feel comfortable with. If anyone comes down the steps, hit them as hard as you can. I’ll be there in a couple of hours’, max. Take your cell with you. I’ll call when I arrive to let you know that it’s me breaking in. Just hold on, Della.”
Logan ended the call, told Margie what had happened, and also relayed what had been reported on the TV. There was no easy way to say it. When he had been a cop he had knocked at doors on many occasions to break the news to people that someone that they loved would not be coming home. It had always been the worst part of the job.
Benny wasn’t hungry. He would rather have had a joint, but made do with a cigarette. Margie felt sick to the stomach. The confirmation that Tony and Ellen were dead was almost too much to incorporate. Logan picked up a large slice of the pie, to quickly gobble it down. The body needed fuel to operate at optimum level: An army marches on its stomach, he thought, and agreed with the old quote that was usually attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
He finished eating, wiped his mouth and turned to Margie. “You’re safe here,” he said. “Just stay in the room. No one but Benny and I know where you are.”
“What do you plan on doing?” Margie asked.
“To go and get Della. And to hopefully come face-to-face with whomever else might pay her a visit.”
As Logan and Benny traveled north over the Bayonne Bridge in the direction of Jersey City, Lennox and Frankie stopped for a bite to eat in Queens. They felt under no pressure to rush. It was going to be a straight-forward snatch in the wee small hours. The woman in Tuckahoe either knew where the cop’s wife was lying low, or didn’t. Whichever, she would be taken and could prove useful as a hostage to barter with.
Keeping to the posted speed limits, Logan headed north. The traffic was light at this hour and he made good time, crossing the I-95 at George Washington Bridge, then over the Harlem River to head south to Melrose, which was only a few minutes’ drive away.
Dusty phoned Max Dalton on a secure line and briefly summarized what had happened.
“I thought that you had a select team to deploy on jobs like this.”
“They’re on it,” Dusty said. “I expect results soon.”
“They fucked up. We are not Murder Incorporated, for Christ’s sake,” Max said. “The guys you sent to do the job sound like trigger-happy morons. Killing an unarmed couple in their home out in the boonies is not acceptable. What Mr. F wants is the incriminating evidence against him back with as little collateral damage as possible. He is a high-profile businessman and mayoral candidate. The position of Governor of this great state is on the horizon.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” Dusty replied. “Fallon has had a lot of people taken out. He acts like a fucking Mafia don.”
“Enough,” Max said. “Just make sure that they don’t whack the woman in Melrose, we need her alive. Got it?”
“Yeah, we’re on the same page,” Dusty said. “I’ll call you when the broad is lifted.”
Della followed Logan’s instructions. The house was secure and in darkness. After putting on a thick sweater and jeans, she also donned a padded parka with a quilted lining, and armed with a flashlight, and with her cell phone, a small bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes and her lighter in the pockets, she opened the door to the basement, switched on the light and locked the door behind her. At the bottom of the steps she walked over to where the breaker panel was fixed to the cinderblock wall at chest height, to open the hinged metal door, seek out the main switch and click it to off.
The darkness was profound. She gasped, almost panicked, and felt as if the gloom was sucking the air from her lungs. Surely no blind person could experience a more intense blackness. It was totally disconcerting. She thumbed on the flashlight and shone it around. There was an old wicker chair over by the boiler. She would sit and wait, and hope that it wouldn’t be for too long. But first she needed a weapon of some kind. There were no tools, just a few mildew-stained cardboard boxes full of memories that she could not face looking at; that at some point in time she would have to sort through. All she could find was a sweeping broom with a long beech wood handle; not exactly lethal, but maybe it could be modified. Placing the flashlight on the chair, Della picked up the broom and held it in what she imagined to be a decent baseball bat grip. Her strike was not at a ball, though. She lashed out at the corner of the boiler, and with a loud, splintering crack the head of the broom flew off to hit the far wall and drop to the cement floor in a shadow-filled corner. Inspecting her work, she smiled. The end of the handle had split and now looked like a pointed stake. She had a homemade weapon of sorts, which she could utilize as a long club or a spear.
Time crawled by. Her cell was on vibrate but remained as still as a rock. She was cold, tired, had smoked at least five cigarettes, and was losing her belief that Joe Logan would come to her aid. The mind could play tricks when almost all stimuli were removed. Of course Joe would come, and soon now.
The noise was faint, but she knew that it was footsteps above her. A floorboard creaked and she gripped the broom handle tightly and stood up. Someone wa
s in the house, and if it had been Joe, he would have phoned.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dr. Perry Gifford took the chart from the holder hooked over the end rail of the bed and studied it. He had been about to end Arnie Newman’s life hours previously, but a nurse had entered the room and asked him to attend another of his patients in the main unit, who had survived a major abdominal surgical procedure but was now hemorrhaging copiously from his anus and had suffered a seizure. The patient subsequently expired on the operating table and, after a break to grab a shower and a coffee, Perry was once more at the side of Arnie’s bed, all set to inject him with nothing more subtle than a large syringe full of air, to occlude the coronary arteries and cause a massive cardiac infarction, that in his present critical state the patient would not survive.
Perry did not want to do it, but had no choice.
The two men had knocked at his apartment door in Yorkville earlier in the day, just minutes after he had returned home following a round of golf at Randalls Island Golf Center.
On answering the door, Perry was pushed back into the entrance hall, and one of the men pressed the muzzle of a handgun against his forehead. The other man stepped around him, went through to the lounge and trained his pistol on Perry’s wife and daughter.
“Here’s the deal,” the man threatening Perry said. “We need for you to do something for us when you go to the hospital later.”
The deal had been simple. They, whoever they were, knew that he was the surgeon that had saved Newman’s life.
“We want the cop dead,” the man said to Perry. “Your wife and kid are going to be taken and held till it’s done. If Newman is still breathing in the morning, you’ll get them back in pieces, delivered by FedEx. You’ll be followed and monitored. The ball’s in your court, pal. How you play it is up to you. Give me your cell phone number, and keep it switched on.”
As Perry now reached into the pocket of his coat for the syringe, his cell rang. He backed away from the bed and took the call.
“Is it done?” Max said to the doctor, having poured a large measure of Jack Daniel’s over ice as he considered the current situation.
“I…I was just about to do it,” Perry said.
“You just got a lucky break, Doc,” Max said, having decided that whether the cop in the coma lived or died was now irrelevant. It was some guy by the name of Logan that had information which could prove harmful to Patrick Fallon’s political future. “Things have changed. Do nothing. Your wife and daughter will be returned to you unharmed. Just forget that any of this ever happened, because you really wouldn’t want to meet my associates again.”
Perry left the room almost on the run and only just made it to the bathroom, where he threw up in the pan. He would obviously never tell a living soul that he had been on the brink of murdering a patient to protect his family.
Lennox picked the lock of the kitchen door at the rear of the house, but there was a bolt on at the top. At least that showed that someone was at home. He used a cutter to remove a circle of glass from one of the small upper panes in the top half of the door, put his hand through, felt for the bolt and drew it back smoothly and slowly.
Frankie followed him in, his gun drawn, just in case. While New York had one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, it didn’t harm to be prepared. Some folk took home security very seriously, and did have firearms.
They searched the house. “The bitch isn’t here,” Frankie said. “What do we do now?”
Lennox wanted to look for signs of recent habitation, or for something that could give them a clue as to where she might have gone. He switched on a light, but the darkness was not illuminated. He went through to the kitchen and tried another with the same result.
“The power’s off,” he said to Frankie. “She must have gone on a trip.”
“Seems a little timely,” Frankie said. “What if she got scared when you phoned her and pretended to be a cop? She could have checked.”
“So what’re you sayin’?”
“That she could still be here, hiding.”
“I don’t buy that, but let’s check the loft.”
“And the basement.”
She wasn’t in the loft. They went back downstairs and found the door to the basement. It was locked. Foregoing any attempt at finesse, Lennox kicked it open. The darkness was deeper. He hesitated. The meager light from a street lamp shone through a window and weakly penetrated the gloom.
Frankie fitted the silencer to his gun, although he would have bet the farm on there being no one in the basement. If the woman had for some reason felt in danger, then surely she would have fled the house.
“Remember, we need her alive,” Lennox whispered as he began to descend the flight of wooden stairs.
As he reached the third step from the bottom, a portion of the darkness seemed to detach itself from the rear of the underground room, and he made out the outline of a human shape rushing toward him. He had no time to react, and was totally surprised at the sudden impact. The pain hit him a couple of seconds later; deep, jagged and excruciating. He fell back and felt a tearing sensation in his stomach as whatever he had been stabbed with was twisted and withdrawn.
Frankie was knocked off his feet, to wind up sitting on a step with the back of Lennox’s head sandwiched between his legs. “What the fuck,” he said, having seen nothing and believing that Lennox had slipped and fallen. “Are you okay?”
Lennox didn’t answer. His mouth had filled up with blood and he couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. He began to shudder violently and lashed out at thin air with his arms and legs, as if attempting to fight and win against the unbeatable opponent that was death.
As Lennox’s frantic, jerky movements ceased and he became still, Frankie realized that something was seriously wrong. He remained sitting, but raised his gun and pointed it into the murky depths of the basement. “That was a stupid thing to do, Della,” he said, now believing that the woman was hidden down here and had just attacked Lennox. “I want you to come out where I can see you. If you don’t I’ll start shooting. You’ve got five seconds.”
Della had acted out of fear for her life, without any conscious thought to run the man through with the sharp end of the broom handle. It had been a spontaneous result of the fight or flight response, activated by adrenaline and launching the mechanism in the body that enables both humans and animals to mobilize energy rapidly in order to cope with life-threatening situations. Attack was her only option, due to being trapped with nowhere to run. Now what? For some reason she had thought that if someone did come to the house, he would be alone. But there had obviously been two of them, and maybe more. The sense of hope that Joe would turn up and rescue her from any harm had now evaporated. She would most likely die in this damp, dark underground room, but she would not go meekly, like a lamb to slaughter. The stygian darkness was in her favor. From where she had retreated to at the side of the boiler, she could make out the barely visible shape of a man as he stood up and became an inky silhouette against the charcoal gray from the open door behind him. He wouldn’t shoot blindly, or so she hoped. It struck her that if he did, then the muzzle flash from his gun would illuminate the basement for the fraction of a second he would need to see her.
When he had spoken, Della stealthily used the sound of his voice to mask her movement. She was now crouched behind the wicker chair. If he approached her she would do her best to spear him like a fish in a barrel.
Frankie stepped over Lennox and paused to feel for a pulse, but his partner was as dead and gone as yesterday. He picked up the gun from where it had fallen from Lennox’s hand onto a step and tucked it in his belt. He had no intention of taking the bitch alive now, as per his orders. He was going to make her suffer, kill her, and then call Dusty and tell him that Lennox had whacked her.
Della’s knees were aching, and a cramp tightened her left calf muscle, causing her to gasp
Frankie heard the sudden inhalation of breath. It was from his
left at the back of the basement. He slipped his leather loafers off and kept his back to the wall as he silently moved in for the kill.
Logan put the Taurus in park after driving the length of the street looking for anyone suspicious sitting in a vehicle. Knew that it was a pointless exercise, but stuck to old tried and tested procedures. If they had come for Della they would now be gone, with or without her. “Stay in the car,” he said to Benny. “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, leave.”
“And do what?” Benny said.
“Go back for Margie and get the hell out of New York.”
Benny said nothing. He knew that the woman Logan had come for would be alive, or dead, or gone, and he didn’t particularly care which.
Making his way around to the rear of the house, Logan approached the back door. It was closed, but he saw the large, circular hole in the glass. He was immediately disheartened. A part of his mind told him that he was too late. He drew the Glock from the right-hand pocket of his fleece and entered the house slow and easy. For a man so big he was light on his feet, and took one careful step at a time as if he was walking on rice paper, to reach the open door to the basement and stop at the side of the jamb to listen for any sound.
Frankie caught his shoulder on the metal box that encased the circuit breaker. He opened the small hinged door with his left hand and felt for the main switch. Found it and thumbed it on.
The house lit up like Coney Island on a Saturday night.
Della narrowed her eyes against the sudden glare, pushed up into a crouch, rounded the chair and lunged forward with the pointed broom handle gripped in both white-knuckled fists. The thick beech rod was coated in blood, as were her hands.
Maybe if she had been nearer to the man it would have been possible to skewer him in the same way she had dealt with the other, but there was ten feet between them, and he was pointing a gun at her.