The bar was on the other side of Seventh and not easily missed, as it was right on the crossroads. Steel had turned on to East Seventh Street and followed it until he reached the building. The street was narrow with a mix of red and grey brick buildings with fire escapes clinging to their sides. Tall thin trees lined the sidewalks.
Edward Gibbs’s apartment was at the end of the street and this mysterious woman’s one was in the middle—which was probably why GPS had picked him up near the area.
Steel stood in front of a red-brick building and checked the address on the piece of paper Cruise had written the details on. This was the address.
John walked up to check the names on the call buttons, and there near the bottom was Kirsty Tennant. He reached down with a gloved hand and pressed the buzzer. Nothing came over the intercom so he tried again. Still nothing.
The detective looked around and, putting his finger at the top of the row of buttons, he ran it down, so that he buzzed everyone in the building. There was a click as the door was released and he shot inside, just as the yelling from the intercom started, with people asking who it was at the door.
John made his way up to the fourth floor and the apartment of Cruise’s alibi lady.
Cruise hadn’t been able to remember the apartment number, only that it was the last one on the left. Cautiously, Steel made his way down the hallway, following his directions.
He stopped in front of the door and knocked. Nothing. He tried again. This time he could hear the faint sounds of movement emanating from within.
John Steel put his ear onto the wooden door to hear better. There were the sounds of something being dragged slowly across a floor.
Steel reached under his three-quarter length jacket to the small of his back and the Glock 33 that was holstered there.
“Hello, ma’am, it’s the police,” he called out. “Are you okay in there?”
The sounds became louder as they came nearer. Steel moved close to the wall so that he could move quickly into cover if something happened.
There was the metallic sound of door locks being unfastened that echoed through the hallway, then slowly the door opened to reveal a small lady in her late seventies. Steel blew out a quiet breath of relief and laughed at the situation.
“Hi there, madam, I am with the NYPD,” he began. “Do you know a Kirsty Tennant?”
The woman grabbed the ID badge that Steel was still holding and drew it closer so that she could see it better.
“NYPD? But you’re British?” she announced, somewhat confused.
The Englishman didn’t have time to explain, on the other hand he was in no rush to release Cruise.
“Yes, ma’am, it’s a long story. But going back to my question, do you know Kirsty Tennant?”
The woman looked at Steel, from top to bottom and smiled. “Yes I do. Would you like to come in and discuss it?”
Steel could see her wicked smile and stepped back nervously. “No thanks, I am good right here.”
Her face crumpled with disappointment. “Well I am Kirsty Tennant, why, what’s wrong?”
The detective looked beyond her through the open door into the apartment to see if anyone else was there. “Do you live alone, madam?”
The grin came back to the woman’s face. “Why yes I do, Detective, why do you ask?”
Steel took another step back, almost in fear of this lonely woman, who seemed like a man-eater.
“It is just that someone said they were here last Thursday night. Do you have a niece or a neighbour that has red hair?”
The woman shook her head, a confused look on her face. “Last Thursday, you said? I was in Boston visiting my son.” The woman looked round the apartment from where she stood.“Well nothing has been moved or taken, why were they here?”
Steel didn’t want to tell her that some scumbag of an editor was lured here and drugged. He smiled and shook his head. “I’m sorry to waste your time, ma’am, it was obviously a mistake in the information I was given, have a good evening.”And with that Steel quickly walked away and headed for the stairs.
The apartment was a bust. Whoever the woman was, she had done a good job in framing Cruise, she didn’t need to put the blame on him alone, her mission had just been to make the police waste their time.
John Steel walked out into the street. He looked around to see if there were any cameras anywhere close by so that he could get some footage. However the street was empty of ‘watching eyes’.
Then he looked back at the way he had come in at the crossroads of Seventh and Second and smiled: this was a major junction, so there was bound to be some CCTV footage.
But then another question came to Steel as he made his way to the junction to see if he was right. Someone must have known the old lady. And if they didn’t know her, why would they pick her specifically? Or was she chosen at random? Somebody knew she was going to be out of town.
Steel had found enough to release Cruise. Someone had framed him, but then, why had they done so? Why him?
He stopped at the junction and looked around at the cameras as he pulled out his cell phone to call Traffic Division.
Whoever had planned this had done it to the last detail—it required the same sort of planning as the bus escape had. It was too much of a coincidence that all this was happening: the bus crash, the murders and now the framing of Cruise.
It was obvious to Steel that all these things were linked. All he had to do was find out how and why.
Suddenly he received a text from one of his sources:
Found her for you, she is in a disused tenement in Hell’s Kitchen.
The detective nodded as he read the text, then dialled Traffic Division for his request for the CCTV footage.
He had found the girl Megan again, but he now had a bad feeling: if he could find her, so could they—whoever they were.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Megan Armstrong had followed the judge for most of the day but now she was hungry and tired. She had made sure that she had not been pursued by the two goons that had tried to kidnap her the other day by blending in with the crowds and ducking into alleyways.
The men had tried to take her for a reason and she was wondering who had sent them. Not the judge, she was oblivious to the fact that she was being followed. So it meant someone else was after her. But why?
Megan quickly turned into a quiet alley that ran between two abandoned previously tenanted buildings. She stopped and looked around before shimmying up a drainpipe that ran next to a rusty fire escape with broken steps. She stopped part of the way up and then leapt for the first platform of the metal fire escape.
The loud clatter of flesh hitting metal could not be helped but she hoped nobody had heard it. Especially the people who were after her. Megan made her way up the fire escape to the top of the building, then managed to open a bedroom window, before quickly disappearing inside. She closed the window behind her and locked it.
The whole place had been abandoned around five years ago, after a project manager bought the building and paid the tenants to move. Unfortunately his permission to tear down the building had not been granted, so it remained empty, complete with the furnishings that the previous occupants had left—either they couldn’t take their belongings with them, or they were happy to abandon them.
Inside, the building was dimly lit by the streaks of light that had made it through the dirty partly-covered windows. Speckles of dust hung in the air which were illuminated as they floated past the sun streaks, making them stand out like plankton in the ocean.
Megan moved through the apartment and headed down the corridor to another room, one she had a key for. She slipped the key into the lock and turned it until she heard the familiar click.
She had gotten the apartment a while back. It was safe, clean and fully furnished.
The windows had been blacked out so that no light could be seen from the outside and electricity was supplied courtesy of a cable attached to a lamp post near the building.<
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The only other person who knew about this place was her uncle—after all he was the one who had found it for her and had arranged for the electric power to be re-routed.
Megan had figured that it had once been a safe house for some associates of her uncle, but she never asked. For now, it was her home.
She took off her backpack and removed the small amount of groceries she had gotten on the way: milk, cereal and some bread and eggs.
The young woman looked at her watch. She would have a couple of hours before she had to be at work, so she made herself a bowl of cereal and settled down on the old couch after igniting a couple of candles for light.
*
Megan had fallen into a deep but troubled sleep. One she was suddenly woken from, as she heard the sound of someone creeping up the hallway.
She opened one eye and listened: it was the sound of someone moving slowly, a person anxious not to be heard.
It could have been another squatter looking for a place to crash but the footsteps told her otherwise. If it was a squatter, why would they move so stealthily?
Megan looked at the front door to make sure the chain was firmly fastened and that the dining chair was still rammed into place under the handle.
The sound of crunching—like someone walking on eggshells—echoed thorough the building. This noise filled her with fear: she had sprinkled broken Christmas-tree decorative balls onto the floor as a warning system to tell her how close an intruder would be, and the crunching meant that they were close—too close.
Megan shot up from her position on the couch, grabbed her jacket and the small backpack, and headed off to a back bedroom.
She quickly shut the door and placed a dining chair under the door handle so it acted as a wedge, before moving to a window. A knotted rope lay neatly on the floor, one end of which had been secured to the radiator. Megan opened the window and tossed out the escape rope.
The young woman turned as she heard voices yelling, followed by the sound of running footsteps. She had no intention of finding out who it was or what they wanted.
Megan climbed out of the window and grasped the rope. She looked down at the drop, which probably looked further than it was, but she knew it was a good thirty feet to the bottom of the alleyway. As quickly as she could Megan made her way down, gripping and then releasing the rope a few feet at a time. She looked through one hallway window as she passed it to make sure nobody had seen her unconventional exit. All she could see were badly wallpapered walls and some cardboard boxes filled with junk.
A loud crash above her made Megan stop and look up. A sudden look of fear came over her face as she knew that they were in her apartment. She began to move quicker in hope that she would reach the bottom before they found her escape route.
The cold of the evening began to bite at her fingers, making her grip on the rope that much more difficult, but she had to ignore the freezing sensation in her hands. Another crash emanated from above and with horror she realised that they were in her bedroom.
“She’s here!” a loud voice shouted, just as she felt the tug on the rope from above.
Megan looked up to see the grimacing smile of one of the knifemen who had tried to kidnap her. He leaned out of the window, the rope firmly in his hands, as he began to pull her up.
His movements were slow, as though he was enjoying watching the fear on her face. She looked down at the grey concrete below and weighed up her options: drop and probably die, or else be dragged up to face God knows what.
Megan closed her eyes and prepared to let go. She breathed slowly, taking in the sounds of the world which seemed to be suddenly crystal clear, yet somehow slowed down, out of sync with reality.
From up above there was a massive sound of breaking glass and a scream. Megan opened her eyes in time to see a man fall past her and land awkwardly on the dirty concrete below her.
Mystified by what had happened, she looked up to see the face of the man in sunglasses, at a window above her.
“If you drop he should break your fall,” Steel yelled down to her. Above him she heard the knifeman yell commands to the other people who were in her apartment, then he said, “There’s some hero below us. Get him before he gets the girl.”
Steel didn’t move. He just looked down at the scared girl clinging for her life to the rope and smiled, to reassure her that everything would be alright.
Megan looked down. The drop looked further than before. She began to climb down again, but the killer was now in a hurry and was pulling her up faster than she could climb down.
She stopped her descent and looked up to the window where Steel had been, but he had gone.
Her gaze fell upon the man as he pulling at the rope. His body halfway out of the window to gain leverage. As she came into line with the broken window Megan looked in, and her eyes widened as she saw a man dressed all in black running at full pace towards her.
The young woman’s mouth fell open in shock as he dived out of the window straight at her. Steel grabbed her body and twisted around, so that his back was to the glass. With both the girl and the rope firmly in his grasp, he made them hurtle towards and through the window of an apartment in the adjacent building.
The sounds of her screams were dulled by the sudden noise of a shattering windowpane.
And the knifeman could only watch as the pair disappeared through the window of a room in the adjacent building.
The man bared his teeth in anger, but suddenly his expression changed to one of horror, as he realised the rope had tightened in his grasp and before he realised it he was being pulled out of the window.
First of all, the man’s head impacted against the wall as he was wrenched out of the building. His skull met brick and it cracked like an egg, leaving a scar of deep red across the brown weathered wall.
As he fell towards the alleyway’s floor, his body ricocheted off both buildings as if it was a pinball, and at each separate impact he left a little something of himself, before joining his colleague on the ground in a bloody mess of skin and broken bones.
Megan slowly looked down at the body of the man in black, remembering that as he grabbed her he had deliberately spun around, so that he would take the brunt of the impact of the glass and the fall.
She stood up quickly and backed off him, wondering if he had given his life to save her. If he had, why? She didn’t even know him.
Megan leant down slowly and prodded Steel’s still body to see if he was dead.
“Are you... are you dead?” she repeated the question to herself, as if to tell herself off for asking such a dumbass question!
“Well if I am you would probably be shitting yourself about now,” Steel said, sitting up carefully, glass shards falling off his thick leather jacket. She slapped him playfully for scaring her.
“Who are you?” Megan asked, knowing he wasn’t one of the men who were out to get her. Steel said nothing at first, he just smiled before turning his attention to the loud cries from the other building.
“You’re the one who saved me from the men the other day, aren’t you?” she asked, her eyes squinting as she looked at him, as if to try and pick up a reaction.
“I suggest we leave this party before they find us,” her rescuer said. Megan nodded and helped Steel to his feet.
The Englishman knew that they didn’t have much time. What he had to do was get her downstairs or as close to the ground as possible, so she could escape.
As they headed down they began to hear voices from below: the men were here. Steel put a finger to his lips to tell her to keep silent. Megan nodded.
They moved down the stairwell, sticking close to the wall as they went. At the second floor the voices became louder, followed by the sound of heavy stomping of boots, as the men began to move quicker. Steel opened a door to an apartment and pushed her inside.
“Lock the door,” he told her. “If you can get out do so, go to this address, you’ll be safe there, just show them this card.” Steel shoved
his business card into her hand. She turned it over to see a handwritten address, then she looked up at the face of the man who had saved her so many times. Megan saw raw power there, plus the cold stony face of someone totally focused on the job at hand.
“Will I see you again?” she asked, almost terrified at the thought of losing her guardian angel. She began to speak again, but a bullet hitting a lamp on the wall signalled trouble: their enemies had found them.
Steel extended his right arm and used his pistol to put two rounds into the gunman before pushing the girl into the room and slamming the door. Steel stood back and kicked the door handle off, so that it would delay their entry.
Inside the room, Megan grabbed what she could to barricade the door, while outside gunfire rang out, making her flinch with every explosion. She stopped suddenly as she heard screams of pain followed by more gunfire. She looked at the door and a lonely tear ran down her cheek as she wondered what would become of her ‘Angel in Black’.
She looked down at the card he’d given her and read the address and smiled. A safe place to go. Was that possible? Megan headed for the windows and looked down below, to where the bodies of the two men lay in a crumpled bloody heap. The drop from here was around twelve feet but, like her angel had said, “The bodies should break your fall.”
Megan leapt out of the window and disappeared into the dusk.
TWENTY-NINE
The morning brought a slight frost that lay a silver blanket on the garden outside her window. Judge Mathews sat in the study in her grand home, using the time to catch up on things before the rest of her family rose from their slumber.
Sitting at her desk she sipped her first coffee of the day while the news blared from the large wall-mounted flat-screen TV. The office was large and modern, with plenty of windows for natural light.
False Witness (John Steel series Book 3) Page 17