The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  He’d saved a geeky kid named Andras, from Hungary—they’d called him Andy at school—from a beating at the hands of some of the high school football team. He’d known it wouldn’t be long before they came for him. He had wanted them to find him alone in the playground. Vulnerable, an easy target. He didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder as he walked home from school. He’d had no martial arts training at fourteen, except for some karate classes he’d taken. They had taught him some much needed discipline, but he’d bailed out of the training sessions after three months. He hadn’t liked the class work. He had wanted to learn how to defend himself one-on-one, but his Sensei had said he wasn’t ready. Wouldn’t be ready for another couple of years. So he had to rely on his instincts.

  But he hadn’t sensed the jock behind him before the blow to his head. It had taken him by surprise. He turned, using a move his Sensei had taught him—an elbow to the face. At the temple. It jarred the bully, who staggered. The young McCall had grabbed the jock under his arm, heaved up, at the same moment falling down onto one knee. The jock’s momentum had sent him flying over the young McCall’s shoulder. He’d hit the cement hard. McCall should have left him alone. He hadn’t been much of a credible threat. But, in a sudden rage at being hit from behind without warning, the young McCall had kicked the kid in the side of the head. It had rendered him unconscious and given him a mild concussion. In the days after the fight, the jock, whose name he couldn’t even remember, had difficulty remembering recent events, was dizzy and off-balance at times, and had a persistent ringing in his ears. It was not until two weeks later that he had been diagnosed with an epidural hematoma. The doctor had explained to the young McCall at the hospital that the condition meant there was a buildup of blood between the tough outer membrane of the central nervous system and the skull. It put pressure in the intracranial space and could be compressing brain tissue. McCall could remember desperately not wanting the big kid—Billy Jackson, that was his name—to die. He hadn’t. But he was never quite the same again.

  The second attacker had been the quarterback, Jerry Stiles. He’d come at McCall from his left side and got in a punch to McCall’s solar plexus that had sent him to his knees. The rain had been torrential. Rain like tonight. Fierce and unrelenting and steady. He remembered blood mixing with the water as another of the jocks kicked him in the face. The blood had seeped hot out of his nose, but by some miracle it hadn’t broken.

  He’d been lucky that night.

  They had come to put him in the hospital.

  McCall tackled the jock who’d bloodied his nose, a linebacker, sending him to the ground. He was big and slow and the driving rain blinded him. McCall jabbed an elbow into his soft neck and that had kept him on the ground, moaning.

  Hands dragged McCall to his feet, punches being thrown at him on either side, but the attack was uncoordinated. They were just hitting him anywhere they could, kicking at him, thinking their superior numbers would do the trick. McCall kicked one of them in the balls and he folded and whimpered and drew his legs up for protection. A fourth jock tried to grab McCall’s face, his thumbs going for his eyes, but the move was clumsy. McCall kicked the kid’s legs out from under him. It was so slippery that any fighting technique except slamming McCall up against the grafitti-laden brick wall and wailing on him was doomed to failure. The jock tried to get up. McCall slammed the heel of his Nike into the jock’s forehead. He went down again.

  Jerry now had his arm around McCall’s throat, crushing his windpipe. He was strong and McCall felt his senses rushing from him. At the same time an icy coldness swept through his veins, colder than the rain. He felt like vomiting and his head began to cloud. All he could think of to do, in the moments before he would certainly have passed out, was to rush backward, taking the quarterback with him. He remembered, while he was hurtling backward with Jerry, thinking how stupid this fight was. He didn’t even like Andras that much. But he didn’t like to see him being tormented by these guys. Not that it was any of his business. In fact, most of the students steered clear of McCall.

  He had loner stamped on his forehead.

  Jerry and McCall crashed back into a steel spar holding up one of the basketball hoops. The force of it loosened the crushing arm around McCall’s throat. He half turned, grabbed Jerry’s arm, braced it between his hands, brought it up and down, and broke it.

  That had ended the fight. McCall had pushed away from the basketball spar, gasping for breath, and slipped to his knees himself in the pouring rain. He remembered looking up and seeing the pain and incredulity in Jerry’s eyes. A broken arm finished his football career that year. Probably forever. And the Mavericks had been in first place. They didn’t win the division championship without Jerry, McCall remembered. He thought that had upset the school faculty more than the fight.

  They’d taken off then, leaving the young Robert McCall on his knees in the playground with the rain sweeping over him.

  McCall had slowly got to his feet. He had expected to feel some exhilaration. But he had felt no elation at all. He had just felt sick. Nothing had changed. The other kids in the school would still stay as far the hell away from Robert McCall as they could. Some geeks would still get picked on, but it might give the other bullies a moment’s pause when they saw their star quarterback’s arm in a sling and their division championship chances gone.

  But it did have one far-reaching result.

  It had got McCall expelled from the school.

  “You’re the last person I ever expected to see standing in the rain in this playground,” she said quietly.

  McCall turned and immediately smiled. He must’ve looked like a drowned rat to her. Somehow, even in a downpour, she looked elegant and calm and even a little ironic.

  But then, his ex-wife always looked very good to him.

  CHAPTER 8

  They sat in a corner of the 21 Club front lounge in two of the big red leather chairs beside the fireplace. A fire roared in it. The lounge was packed with people waiting for tables. From where McCall sat he could see a small diagonal section of the Bar Room restaurant with its myriad novelties hanging from the ceiling: the Good Year blimp, a jetliner, a football, a racing car with the number 24 on it, a construction worker’s hat, and an old 45 vinyl record encased in plastic. His favorite toy was a model of PT-109, given to the 21 Club as a gift by President John F. Kennedy.

  McCall liked this restaurant. When he’d spent more time in New York, when he’d first been married to Cassie, he had come here a lot. He remembered one of the maître d’s, Harry, a good guy. He’d long since retired. But there were still familiar faces greeting patrons and McCall knew the bartender in the Bar Room would still be the same guy, serving drinks faster and with more accuracy than he could ever hope to have. McCall somehow found that comforting. Some things shouldn’t change. He remembered once being taken down to the wine cellar, where there was still the speakeasy steel door used during Prohibition. It was the most elaborately disguised vault in New York, and no feds had ever found the room behind it. To open the door you had to use an eighteen-inch meat skewer in one of the main cracks in the basement wall. Harry had shown it to McCall one night. He wondered if they still gave special customers the grand speakeasy tour.

  McCall looked at the windows to his left, lashed with rain, seeing yellow cabs pull up, disgorging folks who still dressed up to go out to dinner. All of the beautifully painted jockeys stood on top of the wrought-iron first-floor railing and descended the stairs to greet the patrons at the entrance with its old-fashioned lamps. There weren’t many restaurants with this kind of history left in New York.

  The ambiance in the lounge was noisy, as more people came in from the storm. But none of it touched their quiet oasis at the table in front of the fire. McCall was nursing a Glenfiddich, straight. Cassandra was drinking a vodka gimlet. She was in her late forties, but could pass for late thirties any day of the week. McCall remembered she used to work out at a gym five days a week before it was fa
shionable. Her body was lithe, the curve of her breasts tantalizing in her pale blue silk shirt, long tanned legs below the short dark blue skirt. Gray shoes, low heels. You walked miles in New York even if you weren’t really going anywhere. Her hair was blond and cut short. No gray yet. She was as beautiful in person as she always was in his mind. Her eyes were hazel and insouciant. Chips of green ice that could chill your blood when she interrogated you. She had been an assistant district attorney in New York City for ten years. Nobody intimidated her. She was forthright to a fault and had made a lot of enemies.

  She was also sexy as hell.

  “I need a cigarette,” Cassie said, and smiled. “Too bad you can’t smoke anywhere now. If Mayor Bloomberg had had his way, you’d have been busted for lighting up walking down Fifth Avenue. Are you still the ‘Keeper of the flame’?”

  “The flame went out. I quit.”

  “I wish I could.”

  McCall remembered that she used to smoke a lot. Especially when she was nervous.

  “What were you doing at Scott’s school so late?” he asked her.

  “I had to pick up a math book he’d forgotten to bring home. It’s not something he can access on the Internet. He’s got a test tomorrow. They left it for him in the admin office.”

  “How are things in the DA’s office?”

  “Criminals, rapists, murderers, the usual suspects.”

  “Still working for Jack McCoy?”

  She smiled. “Sometimes the DA does remind me of him, except he’s got jet black hair and less of a sense of humor.”

  “Hard to imagine.”

  “He’s tough, but he’s very fair. He never liked you.”

  “I only met him once.”

  “First impression. He said you were like a stick of nitroglycerine. Colorless, but could explode at any moment.”

  “But you never told him who I worked for.”

  “Of course not. How long have you been back in New York?”

  “Nine months.”

  “And you’ve been stalking Scott that whole time?”

  “I’ve watched him on occasion. From the Starbucks across the street from the school. He’s never seen me there and I’ve never approached him. I promised you I’d stay away and I have.”

  “That was an easy promise for you to make. You were never home. Why are you here now? Terrorist in our backyard?”

  “I’m not here to find any. I resigned from The Company.”

  There was a flicker of surprise in her eyes. “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that. Why did Control let you walk away?”

  “I didn’t give him a choice.”

  “But he knows where you are?”

  “Until forty-eight hours ago I would have said no.”

  “Now you’re not sure?”

  “I made a mistake. I stepped into a situation I shouldn’t have. It might have come back to haunt me.”

  She took a sip of her vodka gimlet. “So nine months ago you just disappeared off the radar? That’s hard to do.”

  “Not really. Take an intelligence agent and drop him somewhere no one knows him and no one needs his skills and he becomes anonymous.”

  “So what are you going to do with your life now?”

  McCall didn’t have an answer to that. He said nothing.

  “Does sitting here at the 21 Club with your ex-wife put you in danger?”

  “It’s not me I worry about.”

  “No. People around you have a habit of dying.”

  The words were said matter-of-factly, but they stung.

  McCall said nothing.

  She kept her voice casual. “Will The Company issue an order to kill you?”

  “Control would have a say in that.”

  “And he’s your friend. Probably the only one you’ve ever had. Do you trust him?”

  “No.”

  “But you think he’s got your back.”

  “I think terminating me may not be the way he wants to go. He could have a different agenda.”

  “He’d have to take it before a committee.”

  “Yes. They might like the idea of terminating me.”

  “You were never good with committees,” she said dryly. “They were wary of you. You weren’t predictable.”

  “That’s how I stayed alive.”

  “But you were never a Company man. You sometimes had your own agenda. I lived with you long enough to know that. You probably scared them. But as long as you were useful to the government, to your country, they tolerated you. Now you’ve defied them.”

  “I just walked away,” McCall said. “What I do now and how I live my life is none of their business.”

  “It becomes my business if you’re standing in the pouring rain in my son’s school yard. You know I remarried?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a criminal attorney. Tom Blake. But I’m sure you know that, too.”

  “Only the name. Not the man.”

  “He’s charming and compassionate and he laughs a lot. I never laughed much with you. I felt warm and happy. Sometimes. But there was always … I don’t know how to put it. A shadow over us. The Company, I guess. It darkened every night out and every birthday party at the carousel in Central Park with Scott and every intimate moment between us. It was like you were a coiled spring just walking into a room, or sitting on the porch at our Maine beach house while we sipped white wine and looked out at the ocean. I’m sure your colleagues were all laid-back, playing golf and going to barbecues, treating their dangerous lives as routine. But not you.”

  “Tom doesn’t bring his work home?”

  “Of course he does. But it’s not intrusive. He’s been a real father to Scott in the last eight years and I don’t want that relationship threatened.”

  “I won’t threaten it.”

  She nodded slowly. Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, but they just peeked out, like strangers in a place they weren’t supposed to be.

  “That’s why you left,” she said. “To protect us. But that should have been our decision. Not yours.”

  “Judgment call.”

  “And now you wonder if it was the wrong one? Now that you’re a free man again?”

  McCall didn’t answer.

  “I know you loved me. And Scott. Something happened. Something that made you abandon us. What was it? And don’t give me that ‘it’s classified’ or ‘need to know’ crap.”

  “Nothing specific. Just a lot of small things. They added up.”

  She finished her Vodka Gimlet and stood up.

  “I could take out a restraining order against you.”

  Again, that matter-of-factness, as if she was suggesting a lunch date.

  “You’d have to know the name I’m using. You don’t. You’d need to know where I live. You don’t. And you’re not going to. When we walk out of the 21 Club, you’ll go right back to where you were before you saw me in the rain in that school yard.”

  “And where will you go?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll stay away.”

  “That’s a promise you obviously haven’t been able to keep. Now it may be harder.”

  “Because we’ve seen each other and talked?”

  “Yes. Is it harder now?”

  “Yes,” McCall said.

  She put on her raincoat. “Stay out of our lives, Robert. Don’t come to the school again. Don’t sit at Starbucks and watch your son. It’s creepy. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the same man who left us for the same reason. You’re too dangerous to be with.” Then, quieter: “But it was very good to see you again.”

  She picked up her purse and walked out of the restaurant.

  McCall drank the rest of his scotch. He left money on the table, picked up his coat, and shook some hands at the front desk as he walked out.

  The figure on the last stool at the other end of the Bar Room restaurant watched McCall leave, quickly paid his bill, and followed. He was pretty confident he hadn’t been spotted.

 
* * *

  McCall had spotted him as soon as he sat down in the 21 Club lounge with Cassie. He walked up Fifty-second Street, pulling up his collar against the biting rain. He figured the tail was probably a hundred or so yards back.

  McCall mingled with the crowd outside the Winter Garden Theater in the Mamma Mia! intermission. He walked inside, through the lobby, into the theater, down the left-hand aisle, and through a door beside the stage. He was backstage in the chaos of the actors and out the stage door entrance before the old stage doorkeeper could even look up.

  McCall jogged to the end of the alleyway behind the theater and only then turned around. No one came out of the stage door after him.

  Misdirection.

  Magicians did it all the time. They had you look in one place because the magic was happening somewhere else. I’m shuffling these cards in my right hand, so you don’t see me palming your card with my left.

  McCall had been intent on losing the tail he’d picked up, on foot, from the 21 Club. He hadn’t noticed the ’65 Pontiac LeMans hardtop pull out of a parking space across the street from the 21 Club. He hadn’t seen it cruising down Broadway behind him. When he disappeared into the crowd of theatergoers smoking outside the Winter Garden, the men in the Pontiac had been closer to McCall than the shadower. They’d seen him duck into the auditorium. The driver figured he wouldn’t be coming out that way. He had thought, incorrectly, that McCall had spotted the Pontiac. He doubted whether McCall was actually going to sit down and watch the second act of the show, although he’d seen it a year ago and thought it was a blast. Folks enjoying themselves in some tropical place, not a care in the world while out on the street life was brutal, but the music was catchy and you couldn’t help humming those goddamned songs when you walked out of the theater.

  No, he figured McCall was going to another exit, probably at the back of the theater. He’d swung the Pontiac over to a spot beside a fire hydrant. Had to keep a lookout for cops. He didn’t want to get a ticket or, worse, be hauled to a precinct because the beat cop recognized him. He had a healthy rap sheet and a rep, but not in this neighborhood.