by Lisa Amowitz
But she turned to me and flashed a heart-stopping, klieg-light smile in my direction. Yeah, I looked behind me to see who she was smiling at, but there was no one. It seemed preposterous, but the babe was actually smiling at me.
“Live in the neighborhood?” she asked.
“Um, er, uh—yes,” I said, thinking as quickly as my vodka-infused mind could process language. “Yes. One Twenty-Third and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.”
“Well,” she said, “how ’bout that? I’m right around the block. Columbia?”
“Columbia? Ah—yes. Pre-law.” I had to come up with a plausible lie.
“What a coincidence! I’m at the law school myself.” She stared at me, her smile blazing and intense.
I shifted in my seat. The pain in my stump had receded, and I thought, if I could keep my balance, I might actually be able to walk out of there without falling over.
“Seems we have a lot in common,” the woman said.
“We do? Oh yeah. I guess.”
‘What’s your name?”
“Jeremy,” I said. “Jeremy Glass.”
She laughed. “Half-empty or half-full?”
“Pardon?”
“How’s your glass—empty or full?”
“Oh, ha! Good one. Yeah—I used to get a lot of that. It’s kind of empty right now, I guess.”
“I can fix that if you want.”
“N-no. I-I think I’ve actually had enough. I should get going.” Something told me not to let this go any further. Even though my brain was turning to cooked mush, I knew there was no good reason why a gorgeous law student would chat up a young dork like me.
I paid my tab, slid off the stool, and managed to stand for about five seconds before I tripped and went sprawling forward, narrowly missing the lap of a very large Indian woman whose much smaller husband looked poised to tear me limb from limb.
The hot law student helped me to my feet. In the process, the leg of my jeans had ridden up, revealing a short swath of Veronica’s sleek titanium. Her gaze caught on it and her eyes went wide. Her voice dripped with sympathy. “Oh, poor you,” she said. “Lucky I’m here to help. This way I can make sure you get home safe.”
I wanted to crawl under a table. The two drinks hadn’t been worth the momentary escape they’d provided. Now I was more than halfway buzzed and in pain, which was not a great combo when you only had one working leg. So I left myself with no choice but to rely on the kindness of a beautiful stranger.
Out in the street, I realized the woman towered over me. The arm that steadied me was powerfully muscled, like she was a bodybuilder or something. I was able to mostly hop and keep the weight off of Veronica. We fell into a kind of steady rhythm as we crossed Broadway, then really picked up momentum as we headed down Amsterdam to 123rd. Mostly, the woman asked me a lot of questions, so I made up bullshit and sprinkled it with random bits of history trivia, my special ingredient for truth avoidance.
She talked a lot, too, about studying law and her how her family disapproved and wanted her to be some kind of a prize cow for some rich man to wear on his arm. I thought we were really getting to be friends until we came to the dark deserted stretch of Morningside Park and she pushed me down onto my ass.
It was then I realized that I hadn’t ever asked her for her name.
29
Bobby
Sunday: 1:45 AM
“We’ve got to go see Brendan Wavestone. I’m certain his ring is the key. Maybe someone broke into his house and stole it. You do have his number, right?”
“You want to visit the King of New York at 2 AM.” Gabe said, incredulous. “That’ll go over well with Mother.”
I began to pace. “I guess it can wait for morning…but I—” I didn’t want to tell her I couldn’t really afford to wait. Or that if we did, there was a chance the killer would strike again. But there really was no other alternative.
“Bobby’s right. We can’t wait.” Marisa said, eyes flicking over our surroundings, unable to swallow down the quaver in her voice.
“We should go back to the apartment,” I said.
“No!” Marisa blurted. “You could call Wavestone, Gabe. Tell him you’re a family friend and in some kind of trouble. Lie if you have to. Say anything.”
Gabe looked from me to Marisa. “I could come up with something, I guess. He and Mom were close once. I could— Oh boy. This would be a beaut. I’m going to be in the doghouse for years for this one.”
“Screw it, Gabe. Lives are at stake!” Marisa said.
Gabe sighed. “I could say Mother’s been hurt and I have no money to fly out to see her.”
“That’s no good,” Marisa said. “He’ll call someone close to your mother to confirm. Or he’ll just wire you money. We need to see him.”
“So what then?” Gabe asked.
“Tell him you’re in town for the weekend, have gotten in some trouble, and need his help. That you can’t talk to your mother about it and it can’t wait. All of which, technically,” Marisa said, “is true.”
The muscles in my neck tensed. Confronting Wavestone just felt wrong, for reasons I couldn’t explain. The ring itself hadn’t provided any evidence he was involved, nor had the crime scenes.
“Okay,” I said. The clock was rapidly running down and I couldn’t come up with a better alternative. “Call Wavestone.”
Five minutes later, Brendan Wavestone had arranged to meet Gabe in the lobby of his private club.
Gabe had agreed that there was no point going to meet him alone. Marisa’s quick thinking skills were sorely needed, and it was the perfect opportunity for me to scan him for clues.
◆
The entrance to the Regent Club was tucked away between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue beneath a simple awning. With its uniformed doorman and bright lighting, it could pass for any typical rich person’s apartment building in the area. But inside the sparkling marble-floored lobby, the pounding bass beat reverberating in my teeth told me otherwise.
There wasn’t much other evidence of the club’s existence other than the occasional couple staggering out into waiting limos, usually a young girl in a sequined mini-dress on the arm of a much older man. Marisa frowned and pursed her lips. I kept my gaze fixed on the ground. There were no clues of any kind to capture my attention.
After keeping us waiting for twenty minutes, Brendan Wavestone finally appeared in the lobby, not a single slicked-back hair out of place. If anything, he looked more airbrushed in person than on his bus ads. But the ice-blue eyes that stared out from the tanned angles of his face crinkled into a warm smile when they landed on Gabe. Brendan Wavestone embraced Gabe like his long-lost niece.
“It’s so good to see you, Gabriella! It’s been too long. Why didn’t you tell me you were in town? We could have done dinner.”
“I’m just here for the weekend. But I’ll be at Columbia in the fall, so we can—”
“Yes, yes,” Wavestone cut her off. “Come. This cold lobby is no place for us to talk.”
His smile faded when his gaze found Marisa and me. When it stalled on me a beat too long, I felt inexplicably small and cold. Then Gabe introduced us and the brilliant smile broke out like sun on the mountains.
Wavestone led us through a hidden door in the marble walls to a small library lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves. “Ah, this is a much better place.”
A pair of wingback chairs and a couch were arranged around a crackling fire. Wavestone sat in one of the chairs and gestured to the other for Gabe. He ignored Marisa and me, so we hovered stiffly near the wall. It was hot in the room, but I shivered just the same.
All the muscles in my scalp had pulled tight in response to his cold stare, yet nothing about Brendan Wavestone triggered any alarms. He was a blank. A total blank. I sagged with disappointment. There was no smoking gun to link him to the crimes. No sudden intuition to lead me to the next clue.
After they’d run out of social pleasantries, Gabe took the ring out of her pocket and h
eld it out for him. “Actually, we, uh, found something we think belongs to you. I recognized it from…”
Marisa stepped toward them. “It’s on all your bus ads and billboards. At least this ring looks like it. We weren’t sure, but since Gabriella is a friend of yours, we thought we’d ask. You see, there was a…” Marisa’s voice cracked and faltered, then gave way. I took her by the arm to steady her and could feel her small body trembling.
“She—she was attacked, Mr. Wavestone,” Gabriella said. “And we found this ring nearby. We thought—we just didn’t know where to turn.”
“How very observant you are,” he said, his piercing gaze pinned to Marisa. She folded herself into me, all traces of her bravado gone.
Wavestone rubbed his chin, his brow furrowing. He spoke softly, his voice deep and strangely soothing. “Did you go to the police?”
“No,” Gabe said. “Marisa… Well, it’s complicated.”
“Oh? May I see the ring?” He extended his hand. “I thought I’d misplaced it. It’s a family heirloom and I’d be relieved to have it back.”
I watched, wary, as Gabe placed the ring on his palm. The complete absence of a vibration or even an echo of the hold the ring had on me set me on edge.
“This is it,” Wavestone said, turning it over in his hand. “I can’t understand how—”
He looked at me for a beat, then closed his fist around the ring and stared into the fire. I felt no disturbance, no evidence of any similar ability, yet I couldn’t shake the notion that he was putting on a show just for me.
“Most likely, Ella stole it,” he pronounced after a long pause. “She’s always pilfering little things from me. Ash trays. Tie clips. Once she took a thousand-dollar pen I’d been given as a gift.”
He paused again to stare into the fire, his gaze gone soft. “As if I don’t provide well enough for her and her brother. I’ve done my best to keep it out of the papers, but the twins have always been nothing but trouble. The apples do not fall far from the tree, you know, which in this case is my ex-wife Doreen.”
The heat in the room was wilting me. One more minute in Wavestone’s hothouse and I was going to faint. I pushed through the door, sucking in the cool air of the lobby, and leaned against the polished marble wall. A moment later, the girls joined me.
“You left in a huff,” Gabe said. “Wavestone’s not accustomed to slights. I had to smooth some ruffled peacock feathers.”
“Meeting him was pointless,” I snapped. “Now he’s got his ring back and we’ve got nothing.”
“I know,” she said.
The three of us walked through the deserted streets in silence. With the deadline approaching, the hours were running through my fingers like sand, with nothing to show for it.
And I was almost too tired to care.
30
Jeremy
Sunday: 2:35 AM
“So tell me,” the woman said, her voice gone cold, “Why have you and your little friends been snooping around Riverside Church? What exactly are you all up to?”
“What?” I asked. I tried to stand, and when that didn’t work so well, I tried shimmying backward on my butt.
“You heard what I said.”
That’s when the other guy came from out of the park. Tanned and dressed in an expensive suit, he had a nasty gouge that stretched from under his eye, across his nose, to his cheekbone. Other than that, he looked like a male replica of his sister.
“Good evening, sister dear,” he said. “Who is your new friend?”
“This is Jeremy,” she said pleasantly. “Jeremy Glass.”
The man reached down and pulled me to my feet as if I were no heavier than a body pillow and flung me against the fence. “Hello, Jeremy. So nice to meet you. And why exactly have you and your friends been poking around Riverside Church and Sakura Park? Did you find something?”
“I don’t have—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I glanced around for something to use as a weapon, because running was totally out of the question.
“Of course you don’t,” the woman said. “Innocent little Jeremy Glass and his one leg.”
Then, as if the man knew precisely where flesh met metal and exactly what it would do to me, he pushed me against the wrought-iron fence of the park, gripped my stump, and squeezed like the devil.
I screamed, but there was a hand over my mouth. Stars whirled above me like pinwheels and I knew I was about to pass out from the pain. But I needed to fight these lunatics.
The pain bore down on me like a quick dip in hot lava, but I held on. Think, Jeremy. Just fucking think. What possible weapons could you find on a deserted Harlem street that weren’t a gun or a knife?
Opening my pants, I massaged the painful area where the stump sat inside, detached Veronica, and swung her around like a bolero.
Veronica made a pretty good weapon.
With my back against the fence for balance, I was able to stand on one leg and whack the woman in the face. I could hear her teeth crack as metal hit her expensive cap job. And then she was down.
Brother Dear laughed and feinted like a boxer. “Ooo, I’m so scared. Pogo boy is going to beat me with his leg! I should YouTube this. I’ll be famous.”
“Yeah, real famous, you sick fuck.” I held Veronica out in front of me like a shield. And then I had an idea. I started banging Veronica against the fence, making as much of a racket as I possibly could. “Will someone fucking help me? I’m getting mugged! Help!”
“Shut up, you asshole,” he said, lunging for my throat.
“Or you’ll what? Help! Help!”
People started shouting out windows for me to shut up. I only needed a split second. When the man whipped around to look up at the catcalling neighbors, I took my opportunity and swung harder and better than I’d ever done in Little League.
Veronica hit the side of his head with a hard thwack. His eyes crossed and then he fell forward, nearly knocking me down from my tenuous perch against the fence. He slid to the pavement at my feet, either unconscious or dead, like an offering to an avenging god.
The woman was just then rising up on her haunches, blood in her mouth and murder in her eyes. She pounced on me like a mother jaguar defending her young. I think she even growled.
I didn’t need to stay standing to pull off my next maneuver. When she came at me, instead of swinging, I used Veronica to pull her into a chokehold. We both fell to the sidewalk with me struggling to get on top of her.
“Get a room!” someone yelled out the window.
This woman was an Amazon. She tossed Veronica into the street, so that the next passing car was bound to crush her, and climbed on top of me, her knees on my chest and her surprisingly strong fingers around my neck.
Absently, I wondered if she was the one who’d offed Brittany Byers. And then, as if I’d summoned her, a vague outline rounded the corner of Amsterdam, followed by three charging figures.
As I gasped for breath, my eyes practically popping out of my head, I saw a mirage. An avenging angel with raven-black wings picked up a leg off of the street and, with a piercing battle cry, swung it like Thor’s hammer.
The woman’s head exploded in a spray of red before she fell backward like a felled tree. When the spots of color finally cleared from my vision, I saw Marisa holding a bloodstained Veronica like an actual body part, flanked on either side by Bobby and Gabe.
In a matter of seconds the street was a riot of red and blue flashing lights, blocked off from end to end by police cars.
When the officers got out of their cars and bounded towards us, I was relieved. Until they ordered Marisa to put her hands behind her head, and informed her that she was under arrest for the assault of Ella Wavestone and her brother Ellis.
31
Bobby
Sunday: 2:32 AM
Ambulances had arrived and the two severely injured people were loaded into them.
Two detectives had already handcuffed Marisa and ushered her into the back of a pol
ice cruiser. A squat detective holding a clipboard, and her equally squat partner, strolled toward us.
“Hey!” Jeremy yelled to the officers as Gabe and I pulled him up from the ground. He was propped up between us, his curly brown hair wild and his eyes even wilder. “You can’t arrest my girlfriend! She saved me! Don’t you get it? I was attacked and she saved me!”
“So,” the officer said to him, “the perp is your girlfriend?” She looked at Jeremy’s empty pant leg and back at the prosthetic that was currently being dusted for prints by a forensics team. “And I take it,” she added, “that’s your leg she used for a weapon?”
“Yes, that’s right. They attacked me.”
The officer scribbled in her pad. Her chubby-faced partner had an underbite and jowls that gave him the look of a bulldog. He continued to glare at us. “It was reported you left the restaurant with the victim on your arm?”
“Well, uh, yeah,” Jeremy said, “but she was holding me up. I was having trouble walking.”
The officer’s mouth twisted into a sideways smirk. “So you paid your Good Samaritan back by detaching your leg and then beating her to a pulp with it?”
Gabe and I exchanged looks. I’d had my own problems with the law in the past. I was starting to understand why Marisa had been reluctant to report her attack in the first place.
“Are you kidding me?” Jeremy shouted, leaning forward so far he was in danger of falling over. “You think we ambushed these people and beat them with my prosthetic leg?”
The officer stared at Jeremy, pen poised over her clipboard. She had an unnerving way of ending every sentence in a question. “Maybe you’ve heard of Brendan Wavestone? He’s one of the biggest contributors to the Police Benevolent Fund and a major supporter of every university and cultural institution in the city? Do you think anyone is going to believe his two oldest children attacked you?”