by Lee Child
“We know you got a scrapbook, Eddy, of all your little bullshit scams.”
Collins is an asshole.
I fish in my pocket for Eddy’s pack of cigarettes, from when we took his belongings earlier. I toss the menthols on the table in front of Eddy. His callous fingers pick out a cigarette, and put it in his dry mouth. I light it for him with his lighter. His hands shackled, he raises the pack to me. I take one, and light it myself, then pace over to the mirror.
Eddy breaks his silence.
“I feel like The Unit, you know? When that cocksucker hit that goddamn pitch. Over his head, Ron. Pitch was over his goddamn head.”
I nod, without the heart to tell him my real name, and turn to the mirror. There are the three of us. Eddy looks betrayed, as he always does. I look a bit like me again, Eddy Schalaci. Eddie Schalaci. Undercover works like that. Looking in a mirror. You never know when someone’s behind it, looking back at you.
*
THEO GANGI is the author of Bang Bang (Kensington Publishing), a hard-boiled New York City–based crime thriller. His stories have appeared in The Greensboro Review and the Columbia University Spectator. His articles and reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Inked magazine, and Mystery Scene magazine. His second novel, Twist the Trees (Kensington), will be released in early 2010. Visit him at www.theogangi.com.
JEFFERY DEAVER
When J. B. Prescott, the hugely popular crime novelist, died, millions of readers around the world were stunned and saddened.
But only one fan thought that there was something more to his death than what was revealed in the press reports.
Rumpled, round, middle-aged Jimmy Malloy was an NYPD detective sergeant. He had three passions other than police work: his family, his boat, and reading. Malloy read anything, but preferred crime novels. He liked the clever plots and the fast-moving stories. That’s what books should be, he felt. He’d been at a party once and people were talking about how long they should give a book before they put it down. Some people had said they’d endure fifty pages, some said a hundred.
Malloy had laughed. “No, no, no. It’s not dental work, like you’re waiting for the anesthetic to kick in. You should enjoy the book from page one.”
Prescott’s books were that way. They entertained you from the git-go. They took you away from your job, they took you away from the problems with your wife or daughter, your mortgage company.
They took you away from everything. And in this life, Malloy reflected, there was a lot to be taken away from.
“What’re you moping around about?” his partner, Ralph DeLeon, asked, walking into the shabby office they shared in the Midtown South Precinct, after half a weekend off. “I’m the only one round here got reason to be upset. Thanks to the Mets yesterday. Oh, wait. You don’t even know who the Mets are, son, do you?”
“Sure, I love basketball,” Malloy joked. But it was a distracted joke.
“So?” DeLeon asked. He was tall, slim, muscular, black—the opposite of Malloy, detail for detail.
“Got one of those feelings.”
“Shit. Last one of those feelings earned us a sit-down with the Dep Com.”
Plate glass and Corvettes are extremely expensive. Especially when owned by people with lawyers.
But Malloy wasn’t paying much attention to their past collars. Or to DeLeon. He once more read the obit that had appeared in the Times a month ago.
J.B. Prescott, 68, author of thirty-two best-selling crime novels, died yesterday while on a hike in a remote section of Vermont, where he had a summer home.
The cause of death was a heart attack.
“We’re terribly saddened by the death of one of our most prolific and important writers,” said Dolores Kemper, CEO of Hutton-Fielding, Inc., which had been his publisher for many years. “In these days of lower book sales and fewer people reading, J.B.’s books still flew off the shelves. It’s a terrible loss for everyone.
Prescott’s best known creation was Jacob Sharpe, a down-and-dirty counterintelligence agent, who traveled the world, fighting terrorists and criminals. Sharpe was frequently compared to James Bond and Jason Bourne.
Prescott was not a critical darling. Reviewers called his books, “airport time-passers,” “beach reads,” and “junk food for the mind—superior junk food, but empty calories nonetheless.”
Still, he was immensely popular with his fans. Each of his books sold millions of copies.
His success brought him fame and fortune, but Prescott shunned the public life, rarely going on book tour or giving interviews. Though a multimillionaire, he had no interest in the celebrity lifestyle. He and his second wife, the former Jane Spenser, 38, owned an apartment in Manhattan, where she is a part-time photo editor for Styles, the popular fashion magazine. Prescott himself, however, spent most of his time in Vermont or in the countryside of Spain, where he could write in peace.
Born in Kansas, John Balin Prescott studied English literature at the University of Iowa and was an advertising copywriter and teacher for some years while trying to publish literary fiction and poetry. He had little success and ultimately switched to writing thrillers. His first, The Trinity Connection, became a runaway hit in 1991. The book was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than one hundred weeks.
Demand for his books became so great that ten years ago he took on a co-writer, Aaron Reilly, 39, with whom he wrote sixteen bestsellers. This increased his output to two novels a year, sometimes more.
“We’re just devastated,” said Reilly, who described himself as a friend as well as a colleague. “John hadn’t been feeling well lately. But we couldn’t get him back to the city to see his doctor, he was so intent on finishing our latest manuscript. That’s the way he was. Type A in the extreme.”
Last week, Prescott traveled to Vermont alone to work on his next novel. Taking a break from the writing, he went for a hike, as he often did, in a deserted area near the Green Mountains. It was there that he suffered the coronary.
“John’s personal physician described the heart attack as massive,” co-author Reilly added. “Even if he hadn’t been alone, the odds of saving him were slim to nonexistent.”
Mr. Prescott is survived by his wife and two children from a prior marriage.
“So what’s this feeling you’re talking about?” DeLeon asked, reading over his partner’s shoulder.
“I’m not sure. Something.”
“Now, there is some evidence to get straight to the crime lab. ‘Something.’ Come on, there’s some real cases on our plate, son. Put your mopey hat away. We gotta meet our snitch.”
“Mopey hat? Did you actually say mopey hat?”
A half hour later, Malloy and DeLeon were sitting in a disgusting dive of a coffee shop near the Hudson River docks, talking to a scummy little guy of indeterminate race and age.
Lucius was eating chili in a sloppy way and saying, “So what happened was Bark, remember I was telling you about Bark.”
“Who’s Bark?” Malloy asked.
“I told you.”
DeLeon said, “He told us.”
“What Bark did was he was going to mark the bag, only he’s a Nimrod, so he forgot which one it was. I figured it out and got it marked. That worked out okay. It’s marked, it’s on the truck. Nobody saw me. They had, I’d be capped.” A big mouthful of chili. And a grin. “So.”
“Good job,” DeLeon said. And kicked Malloy under the table. Meaning: Tell him he did a good job, because if you don’t the man’ll start to feel bad and, yeah, he’s a little shit Nimrod, what ever that is, but we need him.
But Malloy was remembering something. He rose abruptly. “I gotta go.”
“I dint do a good job?” Lucius called, hurt.
But he was speaking to Jimmy Malloy’s back.
Jane Prescott opened the door of the town house in Greenwich Village. Close to five-eleven, she could look directly into Malloy’s eyes.
The widow wore a black dress, closely fitte
d, and her eyes were red like she’d been crying. Her hair was swept back and faint gray roots showed, though Malloy recalled that she was only in her late thirties. Three de cades younger than her late husband, he also recalled.
“Detective.” Hesitant, of course, looking over his ID. A policeman. She was thinking this was odd—not necessarily reason to panic but odd.
“I recognize you,” Malloy said.
She blinked. “Have we met?”
“In Sharpe Edge. You were Monica.”
She gave a hollow laugh. “People say that, because an older man falls in love with a younger woman in the book. But I’m not a spy and I can’t rappel off cliffs.”
They were both beautiful, however, if Malloy remembered the Prescott novel correctly. But he said nothing about this, she being a new widow. What he said was, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. Oh, please come inside.”
The apartment was small, typical of the Village, but luxurious as diamonds. Rich antiques, original art. Even statues. Nobody Malloy knew owned statues. A peek into the kitchen revealed intimidating brushed-metal appliances with names Malloy couldn’t pronounce.
They sat and she looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes. An uneasy moment later he asked, “You’re wondering what a cop’s doing here.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Other than just being a fan, wishing to pay condolences.”
“You could’ve written a letter.”
“The fact is, this is sort of personal. I didn’t want to come sooner, out of respect. But there’s something I’d like to ask. Some of us in the department were thinking ’bout putting together a memorial evening in honor of your husband. He wrote about New York a lot and he didn’t make us cops out to be flunkies. One of them, I can’t remember which one, he had this great plotline here in the city. Some NYPD rookie helps out Jacob Sharpe. It was about terrorists going after the train stations.”
“Hallowed Ground.”
“That’s right. That was a good book.”
More silence.
Malloy glanced at a photograph on the desk. It showed a half dozen people, in somber clothing, standing around a gravesite. Jane was in the foreground.
She saw him looking at it. “The funeral.”
“Who’re the other people there?”
“His daughters from his first marriage. That’s Aaron, his co- writer.” She indicated a man standing next to her. Then, in the background another, older man in an ill-fitting suit. She said, “Frank Lester, John’s former agent.”
She said nothing more. Malloy continued, “Well, some folks in the department know I’m one of your husband’s biggest fans, so I got elected to come talk to you, ask if you’d come to the memorial. An appreciation night, you could call it. Maybe say a few words. Wait. ‘Elected’ makes it sound like I didn’t want to come. But I did. I loved his books.”
“I sense you did,” she said, looking at the detective with piercing gray eyes.
“So?”
“I appreciate the offer. I’ll just have to see.”
“Sure. What ever you’d feel comfortable with.”
“You made him feel bad. He nearly got capped on that assignment.”
Malloy said to his partner, “I’ll send him a balloon basket. ‘Sorry I was rude to my favorite snitch.’ But right now I’m on to something.”
“Give me particulars.”
“Okay. Well, she’s hot, Prescott’s wife.”
“That’s not a helpful particular.”
“I think it is. Hot . . . and thirty years younger than her husband.”
“So she took her bra off and gave him a heart attack. Murder- by-boob isn’t in the penal code.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You mean she wanted somebody younger. So do I. So does everybody. Well, not you, ’cause nobody younger would give you the time of day.”
“And there was this feeling I got at the house. She wasn’t really in mourning. She was in a black dress, yeah, but it was tighter than anything I’d ever let my daughter wear, and her red eyes? It was like she’d been rubbing them. I didn’t buy the grieving widow thing.”
“You ain’t marshalling Boston Legal evidence here, son.”
“There’s more.” Malloy pulled the limp copy of Prescott’s obit out of his pocket. He tapped a portion. “I realized where my feeling came from. See this part about the personal physician?”
“Yeah. So?”
“You read books, DeLeon?”
“Yeah, I can read. I can tie my shoes. I can fieldstrip a Glock in one minute sixteen seconds. Oh, and put it back together, too, without any missing parts. What’s your point?”
“You know how if you read a book and you like it and it’s a good book, it stays with you? Parts of it do? Well, I read a book a few years ago. In it this guy has to kill a terrorist, but if the terrorist is murdered there’d be an international incident, so it has to look like a natural death.”
“How’d they set it up?”
“It was really smart. They shot him in the head three times with a Bushmaster.”
“That’s fairly unnatural.”
“It’s natural because that’s how the victim’s ‘personal physician’ ”—Malloy did the quote things with his fingers “—signed the death certificate: cerebral hemorrhage following a stroke. Your doctor does that, the death doesn’t have to go to the coroner. The police weren’t involved. The body was cremated. The whole thing went away.”
“Hmm. Not bad. All you need is a gun, a shitload of money, and a crooked doctor. I’m starting to like these particular particulars.”
“And what’s particularly interesting is that it was one of Prescott’s books that Aaron Reilly co-wrote. And the wife remembered it. That was why I went to see her.”
“Check out the doctor.”
“I tried. He’s Spanish.”
“So’s half the city, in case you didn’t know. We got translators, hijo.”
“Not Latino. Spanish. From Spain. He’s back home and I can’t track him down.”
The department secretary stuck her head in the doorway. “Jimmy, you got a call from a Frank Lester.”
“Who’d be? . . .”
“A book agent. Worked with that guy Prescott you were talking about.”
The former agent. “How’d he get my number?”
“I don’t know. He said he heard you were planning some memorial service and he wanted to get together with you to talk about it.”
DeLeon frowned. “Memorial?”
“I had to make up something to get to see the wife.” Malloy took the number, a Manhattan c ell-phone area code, he noticed. Called. It went to voice mail. He didn’t leave a message.
Malloy turned back to his partner. “There’s more. An hour ago I talked with some deputies up in Vermont. They told me that it was a private ambulance took the body away. Not one of the local outfits. The sheriff bought into the heart-attack thing but he still sent a few people to the place where Prescott was hiking just to take some statements. After the ambulance left, one of the deputies saw somebody leaving the area. Male, he thinks. No description other than that, except he was carrying what looked like a briefcase or small suitcase.”
“Breakdown rifle?”
“What I was thinking. And when this guy saw the cop car, he vanished fast.”
“A pro?”
“Maybe. I was thinking that co-author might’ve come across some connected guys in doing his research. Maybe it was this Aaron Reilly.”
“You got any ideas on how to find out?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
Standing in the dim frosted-glass corridor of a luxurious SoHo condo, Jimmy Malloy made sure his gun was unobstructed and rang the buzzer.
The large door swung open.
“Aaron Reilly?” Even though he recognized the co-author from the picture at Prescott’s funeral.
“Yes, that’s right.” The man gave a cautious grin.
&n
bsp; Which remained in place, though it grew a wrinkle of surprise when the shield appeared. Malloy tried to figure out if the man had been expecting him—because Jane Prescott had called ahead of time—but couldn’t tell.
“Come on inside, detective.”
Reilly, in his late thirties, Malloy remembered, was the opposite of Jane Prescott. He was in faded jeans and a work shirt, sleeves rolled up. A Japanese product, not a Swiss, told him the time and there was no gold dangling on him anywhere. His shoes were scuffed. He was good-looking, with thick longish hair and no wedding ring.
The condo—in chic SoHo—had every right to be opulent, but, though large, it was modest and lived-in.
Not an original piece of art in the place.
Zero sculpture.
And unlike the Widow Prescott’s abode, Reilly’s was chock- a-block with books.
He gestured the cop to sit. Malloy picked a leather chair that lowered him six inches toward the ground as it wheezed contentedly. On the wall nearby was a shelf of the books. Malloy noted one: The Paris Deception. “J.B. Prescott with Aaron Reilly” was on the spine.
Malloy was struck by the word, “with.” He wondered if Reilly felt bad, defensive maybe, that his contribution to the literary world was embodied in that preposition.
And if so, did he feel bad enough to kill the man who’d bestowed it and relegated him to second-class status?
“That’s one of my favorites.”
“So you’re a fan, too.”
“Yep. That’s why I volunteered to come talk to you. First, I have to say I really admire your work.”
“Thank you.”
Malloy kept scanning the bookshelves. And found what he’d been looking for: two entire shelves were filled with books about guns and shooting. There had to be something in one of them about rifles that could be broken down and hidden in small suitcases. They were, Malloy knew, easy to find.