by John Lutz
It was a noisy, messy, darkened world, under a steady light rain. Thunder boomed and roared through the echoing canyons. Cabs swished past without slowing or stopping, all of them with passengers.
The killer raised his umbrella, carrying it low and tilted slightly forward so it would partially block or shadow his face. He strode in the direction of Carlie’s apartment and soon saw her up ahead.
Barely visible, half a block ahead of her, Fedderman strode without looking back. He also had a black umbrella. Across the street, almost level with Fedderman, was rasp-voiced Sal.
Fedderman cut away, down a side street. A block over he jogged in the direction Carlie was going, getting out well ahead of her. He gained a lot of ground before stopping, breathing hard from his effort. He’d sloshed through a puddle and his socks were soaked; he could feel it. If they were one of the pair bought by Penny it would be okay. Fedderman’s older dark socks turned his feet black when they got wet.
He walked another block south and then used his cell to phone in his position to Quinn.
The rain suddenly became a deluge lit by lightning. Thunder crashed. The leading edge of the storm had arrived. Everything was light and noise.
On the street running parallel with the one Fedderman was on, the detective Sal was facing into the wind, his face set against the driving raindrops. He was trying to open his umbrella without it being turned inside out.
Lightning flashed over and over, like urgent code from a darkened exile.
The killer recognized that Fate was present.
65
As so often happens after a long period of heat and drought, the leading edge of the storm assaulted the city like an invading army. With the suddenness of an artillery barrage, thunder rolled and echoed down the stone canyons. The darkened sky hurled large raindrops earthward, first a few, then thousands. Here was the storm, torrent and thunder.
And momentary distraction.
Fate instructed the killer. He let the short one, Sal, who was tailing Carlie close behind, get slightly more ahead of him on the opposite side of the street. Dred didn’t want to be seen in the man’s peripheral vision as he closed the space between them.
Rain continued to roar downward, sometimes propelled almost sideways by blasts of wind. Lightning flashed and acted on the city like God’s strobe lights.
Holding his umbrella lower now, and partly folded, the killer crossed the street at a sharp angle so that he was almost directly behind Sal. He drew a large folding knife from his pocket and thumbed out the blade, then opened the knife completely and pressed it flat against the side of his leg.
This was happening directly behind Sal, and fast. He saw and heard nothing but lightning and thunder, and didn’t so much as glance behind him.
There was no one else on the storm-assaulted street. And if anyone happened to be looking out a window, he or she would see something fragmented by shadow and lightning, so fast it might not have actually occurred.
And if they did realize what had happened, if they did choose to get involved, if they did call nine-eleven, it would be too late to make a difference. Fate would have moved on.
Careful to stay on an approach almost directly behind Sal, slightly to the left because of the way Sal carried his head, the killer rapidly closed the space between them.
Faster.
Squinting against the rain, he shook his head to clear his vision, held the knife low and in close to his body, pointed forward.
He ran into Sal almost hard enough to knock him down, driving the knife into Sal’s unprotected side and deep in along the bottom of his rib cage. The blade made a scraping sound on bone.
It took the breath out of Sal and crippled him with pain. He dropped straight down without a sound, aware of a dark form striding over him, continuing the way Sal had been walking—toward Carlie.
Sal struggled to reach his cell phone, but merely moving his arm brought pain like an electric current down his right side.
Lightning speared the city again.
Thunder cracked. Sal barely heard it.
Time to move fast, before the detective’s partner, Harold, would reach the intersection and look east toward where Carlie would be crossing the street. She was only two blocks from her apartment.
Silently, he caught up with Carlie, who was wearing a light, hip-length raincoat. This wasn’t the time or place for hesitation. Fate was in charge.
He slipped the knife up under Carlie’s coat, under her blouse, and held the cold blade flat against the small of her back. Felt but didn’t hear her inhale as she gasped when thunder clapped.
“This way,” he said, guiding her with the knife. “Cross the street. We’re going back the way we came.”
“Who—?”
“Quiet for now,” the killer said. “Or you’ll be quiet forever.”
They walked hurriedly back the way they’d come, then cut down a side street. Shoved along ahead of the killer, Carlie tried to think, to plan, but she couldn’t concentrate her thoughts. She kept trying to turn her head so she could see his face.
“Look straight ahead and walk,” he said. She’d dropped her umbrella when he’d grabbed her on the sidewalk. He let the wind snap his umbrella all the way open and held it so it kept both of them partially dry. A man and a woman, fond of each other, hurrying to get out of the weather.
“I wouldn’t drop anything else,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
Sure you don’t. “You might have a pocketful of bread crumbs.”
“It’s this way,” she said, attempting to turn.
He propelled her straight ahead with the fist that held the knife.
“We’re not going to your place,” he said. “We’re going to take a little walk instead. To my place.”
She thought about the Smith and Wesson .38 revolver she had in her purse. The one that Jody had urged her to carry for protection.
If only she could reach it.
But she knew that any attempt to get into her purse, even if she pretended she was reaching for a tissue or some other harmless item, wouldn’t be believed as innocent. She might lose the gun, and her only chance to survive.
She needed to choose her time carefully.
After another turn, and another, they were walking south again. Carlie thought so, anyway. They’d done so much maneuvering she was disoriented. She strained to catch an address so she could see which way the numbers ran. Finally she was able to do so. She was right. South.
The killer watched as her head turned this way and that. He knew what she was doing. She was searching for her guardian angels. Like real angels, they weren’t there when they were needed.
“There’s no one to help you,” the killer said. “You’re mine.”
66
Quinn, sitting in the Lincoln to keep dry, didn’t hear his cell phone chime over the noise of the storm. The phone was also vibrating. It slid over the seat cushion and he felt it like something alive on the side of his leg. He snatched it up and saw that the caller was Harold.
Quinn opened the line. “Whaddya got?”
“Sal’s down and he’s hurt!” Harold said. There was an urgency and pain in his voice that Quinn had never heard. He gave Quinn his precise location, said “Looks like he’s been stabbed in the side. That bastard stabbed Sal.”
“I’ll call nine-eleven,” Quinn said.
“I already called.” There was a pause. “Quinn, I can’t leave Sal. He goes in and out, and he needs somebody with him to stop the bleeding.”
“Does the killer have Carlie?”
“Must have her. I cut through to where I was supposed to take over the tail, and the street was empty. Nothing but buckets of goddamn rain! The streets are like rivers. Not even the cabs are moving.”
“Stay with Sal till EMS gets there,” Quinn said. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Carlie and the killer,” Harold said. “If he does have her and they’re still slogging south, they’ll be a block awa
y from where Fedderman was supposed to pick up the tail. Not heading toward him, though. A block east. If the rain lets up, or lightning strikes at the right time, Feds might spot them crossing the intersection.”
That was possible but a faint hope, in this weather, and with Dred Gant not knowing if there were more where Sal came from.
Fedderman was the last in the chain of angels that included Pearl and was supposed to see Carlie safely inside her apartment.
So where are they going now?
Quinn turned the Lincoln’s wipers on at their fastest speed and drove south on Broadway. The storm sewers weren’t up to the task, and water sat on the streets. The Lincoln left a wide V wake, like a boat.
Fedderman was wearing the light tan raincoat Penny had bought him. He stood beneath the flapping maroon awning that shielded the door of a closed corner bagel shop. The rain, being from time to time horizontal, had soaked the coat and, gradually, him.
Fedderman wasn’t surprised by this violent outburst of nature. That was how these long spells of extreme weather usually ended, with a meteorological attack. As if the Gods of storms used lulls in the weather to build up their arsenals and became anxious to use them.
A sudden gust of wind that built and built fluttered the awning and made it balloon out. Fedderman wondered if it would hold. Wondered if he was standing in a hurricane.
On an evening like this, he thought, Carlie Clark might have hailed a cab.
But there were no cabs. None that Fedderman could see, anyway. Only occasionally did a car or truck pass. The storm had also created premature darkness, and what few vehicles there were had their headlights glowing.
With one long burst of wind that came spiraling and bouncing down the avenue, half the awning flipped. Fedderman reopened his umbrella and it did what he expected—immediately turned inside out.
He angled it directly into the wind and it reversed itself and looked like an umbrella again. Keeping it tilted that way, he gladly accepted what little good it did.
I’ll be dry again someday.
Shadowy movement down the block caught his attention. A man and woman, huddled close together and hurrying to get out of the rain. The man had his arm around the woman’s waist, or maybe he was gripping the back of her belt, holding her tight. So she wouldn’t blow away. They were both leaning into the wind as they crossed the intersection and passed out of sight.
Something seemed not quite right about them, but Fedderman couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe it was because they weren’t moving in unconscious synchronization, the way lovers did when walking together. And the woman was slightly in front, braving the brunt of the storm.
Fedderman’s iPhone buzzed and vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and, seeing that the caller was Quinn, ran his thumb across the screen sideways to take the call. He pressed the phone to the side of his head and turned his body so that ear was out of the wind.
Quinn didn’t wait for him to say hello.
“Feds?”
“Yeah.”
“Listen close.”
Harold was out of the game, riding in an ambulance with the injured Sal.
Quinn contacted the trailing angel, Pearl, made a slight detour, and picked her up on the way to get Fedderman. She shook herself, almost like a dog, glad to be in the Lincoln and out of the rain.
“Sal gonna be okay?” she asked, when Quinn had filled her in.
“Don’t know for sure,” Quinn said. “Harold will make certain he gets good treatment.”
“What’d he say, knife wound?”
Quinn nodded as he steered through water six inches deep. “Stab wound in the side.” Water from a puddle like a lake sloshed over the windshield.
“Bastard!” Pearl said.
Quinn glanced over at her. “Were you about to break for home?”
“No. Not yet. I had a hunch about tonight.”
“The storm?”
“Maybe. Or something else.”
Quinn knew what she meant. Hunters had a feeling when the prey was running out of options and might turn on them. He’d read somewhere that tigers would sometimes double back and lie in wait for who or whatever was stalking them.
As soon as the Lincoln turned the corner where Fedderman was waiting, he saw it and rushed toward it. He opened the right back door and threw himself into the car. Shook himself much the way Pearl had.
“Wet,” he said, unnecessarily.
Pearl looked over her shoulder at him. “You think?”
“They were walking south,” Fedderman said. “Make a left here, and we should be able to catch up with them.”
“Unless they went inside someplace,” Pearl said.
“You think?”
Quinn braked slightly and pulled the Lincoln to the curb.
“There, up ahead,” he said. “Looks like two people walking close together.”
Pearl and Fedderman strained to see through the rain-distorted windshield.
“Could be,” Fedderman said.
Pearl got close enough to the windshield to lick it and squinted her eyes to narrow her focus. Her nerves were dancing.
“Is,” she said.
Quinn switched off the car’s lights and drove slowly forward.
67
Running without lights, they followed from a distance in the Lincoln. Pearl continued leaning forward, peering out the windshield during rapid sweeps of the long wiper blades.
“You sure it’s them?” Fedderman asked from the backseat, still sounding relieved to be in out of the rain. He was steaming and fogging up the windows.
“Not sure all the way,” Quinn said.
“Maybe we should drive up there hard, pile out, and see what we got,” Fedderman said.
“If it is Dred Gant and Carlie, that might get her killed,” Pearl said.
“They’re walking like they’ve got someplace in mind,” Fedderman said.
“Not her apartment,” Pearl said. “Too far south for that, and they’re walking even farther south.”
Fedderman looked at her. “His apartment?”
Quinn thought about it. “Maybe. He knows we don’t know where it is.”
“We sure of that?” Pearl asked.
“We’d have had him a long time ago if we’d known his address,” Fedderman said.
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Feds.” Pearl was the one who’d scoured the Internet social networks and phone directories to see if there was a Dred Gant listed anywhere.
There was one. He was eighty-seven years old and African American.
“If he’s got a place to go with her, he must have planned this out,” Fedderman said.
“He couldn’t have known a storm like this would hit.”
“But there was a storm in the forecast.”
“This is not the kind of guy who builds a plan around the weather forecast,” Pearl said.
No one spoke for a while.
“Let me out so I can tail them on foot,” Pearl said.
Quinn didn’t answer, thinking.
“I can raise the hood on my raincoat,” she said. “They’ll never recognize me, never suspect I’d be walking up behind them. I can get close enough to make a positive identification.”
“Without them identifying you?” Fedderman asked.
“Yes.” She put a hand on Quinn’s shoulder and squeezed. “We owe it to this girl, Quinn.”
His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
“That could be Jody,” Pearl said.
Quinn didn’t brake. He didn’t want the red aura of brake lights to be seen. He let the Lincoln coast gradually to the curb, then switched off the interior lights so they wouldn’t be noticed when Pearl exited the car.
“Don’t lose your cell phone,” he said.
Pearl nodded. “My lifeline.”
He wished she had put it some other way as he watched her climb out of the car, into the storm. She opened her umbrella, which seemed pathetically inadequate.
They sat and watche
d her almost disappear into the darkness and swirling rain.
Her cell phone really is her lifeline.
“Whaddya think?” Fedderman asked.
“Gotta be his apartment,” Quinn said, and steered the car slowly away from the curb.
It took him a minute or two to find the ideal speed not to gain ground, but to keep in sight what was unfolding in front of them.
Gant continued pushing Carlie along so they maintained a steady pace, even though from time to time she stumbled and almost fell. He had his right hand up the back of her jacket and must be holding a weapon—possibly a knife, since Sal had been stabbed—at the base of her spine. The barely discernible hooded figure behind them, keeping to shadows and building fronts, was only gradually moving closer. Then Pearl was lost to the mist.
The hurrying couple turned a corner. They walked along an avenue lined with four- or six-floor walkup apartments. Some of them had been rehabbed and converted to condos or co-ops. Quinn knew that if Gant was taking Carlie to one of the buildings on the west side of the street, it would back to a block of deserted warehouses and the river. There wouldn’t be much escape territory in that direction, unless Gant owned a boat.
Gant and Carlie did turn left, took four stone steps up, and entered a rehabbed six-story building with distressed brick facing. Air conditioners jutted from some of the windows. Flanking the ornate wood door were identical concrete urns with geraniums in them. Lush vines grew up the side of the building the detectives could see. There were lights on in about half the windows.
Quinn steered the Lincoln to the curb and stared at the building, waiting.
A window became illuminated on the second floor, front. Another on the side of the building with the vines. Corner unit.
He backed the Lincoln to where it was less likely to be seen and draw suspicion, and switched off the engine so no exhaust would be visible.
Pearl, who’d been waiting for the car to park, piled into the passenger seat.