“You’ll last longer,” said Cigarette Man. “Not such a bad way to go. Up to you, kid.”
—
RIKER RODE IN THE BACKSEAT. Despite the racket, the freeway traffic ahead was slow to divide and yield them a free lane.
Janos, behind the wheel, shouted reassurances to be heard over the sirens of their six-car convoy. “She can’t beat us there! Not with a seventy-mile handicap!”
But Mallory would be driving most of that distance on open road—no red lights or city gridlock. They had already lost so much time along their escape route out of Manhattan.
Washington, who rode shotgun, turned around in his seat, offering Riker more comfort in a louder scream. “I saw Mallory when she left for Jersey! She’s driving her VW! A damn bug!”
A bug. Yeah, right. No worries there—a Porsche disguised as a Volkswagen Beetle.
She liked her little jokes.
If Mallory had only taken a Crown Victoria to Jersey, the rest of the squad would stand a fair chance in this race. But her incognito engine was revved up way beyond factory settings. She was melting away her handicap.
—
IGGY STRUNG SHEER WHITE CURTAINS on one of the bedroom windows. These had come from his arson kit. With no flame-retardant qualities, they were better than tinder. He wondered that sunlight did not set them on fire.
The second window was left bare. He opened it by a crack. Fire loved oxygen.
The second set of curtains were wadded up, and he tossed them on the mattress with their metal rod—as if this chore had been left undone, work forsaken to take a nap. He set an ashtray next to the pile of flimsy material.
A lit cigarette was dropped. The flash was quick. The meat locker was as good as torched.
The door closed—like someone had come in behind him. A trick of drafts? This house had lots of pranks to play: a bang of pipes, a creak of beams and mouse crumbles inside the walls. But he had to spin around. He had to look.
No one there. And no one on the other side of the door. Flames crackling behind him, he walked down the hall—and stopped—dead still now.
What the hell was that?
He stared at the square door in the ceiling, the attic access. A footstep? Up there? Oh, Christ, were the police already here?
No. Idiot! Cops in the attic? Gimme a break!
But rodents lacked the weight to account for that sound. Iggy took the revolver from his waistband. Then he pulled a hooked pole from the linen closet and held it high to snag the latch for the overhead door. Before the ladder could slide out of that square hole in the ceiling and into his outstretched hand, his mouth opened wide, but he did not scream.
He shut the attic door.
Dropped the pole.
And ran.
—
CIGARETTE MAN had left him the music of a boxy plug-in radio. Jonah rested one hand on top of it, and his palm tingled with the vibrations of golden oldies. He hugged himself and rocked his body, but the motion could not calm him anymore. His fear had a drumbeat and the wicked-fast riff of a guitar. He rocked fast now.
Faster.
Smoke!
The smell was the distant size of a whiff, but it was coming for him. Soon it would be seeping, creeping under the bolted door—to get him.
Jonah found the radio’s volume dial and turned up the music because he had lost his faith. He was done waiting for jingle bells on the stairs out there. His rocking stopped. It was time to choose between the fire and the water. He lifted the bottle to his nose. Death had no smell, but a tentative sip told him it was sugary. He drank one big gulp. And another. How long would it take? The dog had lasted for minutes.
His eyelids were heavy. Closing. The bottle dropped from his hand to slosh and roll away. Jonah knew he was going into the blink of Cigarette Man’s eye, the one closed eye where the nothingness was—no air, no life. Not even ghosts could live there.
27
Jonah curled into a ball. Shrinking. Soon he would disappear into—
He was flying! Zooming! Air rushed past him. An object flew alongside him, brushing against his hand. Cold. Metallic. He wrapped his fingers round it, the better to see it, and he made out the shape. The hood ornament! The car! And then it was gone, diving down out of his grasp. And he was falling, too, air whooshing all around him as he dropped through empty space—and fell into the front seat and, beneath his bare feet, was the sensation of rolling down smooth pavement.
Aunt Angie was driving. He saw her in the scent of perfume, a hand caressing his face. The car radio came alive in a stream of quick musical notes, a piano riff. It must be late. She always said that jazz belonged to night, and she liked a boogie rhythm to work with the blinking taillights of after-dark traffic. Now they shifted into daytime, and the sun was warm on his skin. Their new road song was a blast of rock ’n’ roll. The car picked up speed.
“I love you,” he said. “I love—”
Aunt Angie roughly pulled the hair at the back of his head, and she jammed her fingers into his mouth, all the way to the back of his tongue, and pressed down till he gagged. Vomit poured out of him in a thick smelly river. Far off, he heard a soft rush of words in a silken thread. “Sick it up,” she said. And he puked more slime in waves of nausea. Oh, so sick. He gulped stinking air as his limp body rose off the mattress, lifted in her arms.
She carried him up the stairs. Through the thick acid smog of the house. The terrible heat of an oven. Crackle and roar. Into the cool wind of the out-of-doors, a war of stink and perfume, smoke and roses.
Her footsteps slowed.
Stopped.
He was falling, slowly sliding out of her arms, down and down, to feel the grass with his spread hands. He had no more breath, not a sip of air. And he could not fight for it. And he did not want to. It was irresistible, this sinking sensation. Letting go. Spent, he lay quiet and still. Soft hair curled across his neck as her head pressed to his chest. Then she pounded his ribs. Again. Again. Louder now, silk threads snapped, she commanded him to “Breathe!” Patience lost, she breathed for him, velvet lips covering his mouth.
First kiss—and then the stench of bile exploded through his teeth.
Burning his throat.
He coughed and spewed vomit as his body was dragged across the grass. The air smelled sweeter here. She laid him down.
Before she fell.
Sirens! So loud! So many! Tires spit pebbles and rocks to knock on the underbelly of a car in its rush up the driveway. More were coming. They were here! The high-pitched wailing shut down. Shut off. And now the sounds of many car doors opening—and left open. Feet on the run.
Jonah reached out for the one who lay beside him. But he could not rouse her. She had carried him out of the fire on last legs, and now—
Nearby, a man’s anguished voice screamed, “Mallory!”
—
THE NEW JERSEY HOSPITAL was small, more the size of a clinic, and the walls were thin. The detectives of Special Crimes could hear a baby being born down the corridor from this exam room, where they waited for Mallory to be discharged.
She sat tailor-fashion on a gurney and sucked air from an oxygen mask. The stink of vomit had been thrown away with her cast-off linen blazer, but the smell of smoke hung all around her. How much of it had she taken into her lungs during her search of the house? Riker reached out to touch a strand of her hair singed by flames and frizzed like blond steel wool. “Nice.”
“Just one more question, okay?” Janos had offered to write up her report, and he wanted to meet her insane standard for detail. “The ER doc says the tox screen backed you up, but how’d you know the kid was poisoned?”
Mallory lowered the clear plastic mask. “The water in the dog’s bowl was colored—doctored. Hardly any smoke in the basement, but the dog was dead. And the kid was out cold.”
Colored water in a dog’s bowl? Of all the
detectives in this room, only Mallory would stop to look at that one odd thing—in a burning house. Before the report hit Jack Coffey’s desk, Riker planned to edit out those lines.
“Good enough.” Janos closed his notebook and said to her, “What you did—that was awesome.”
“Yet stupid,” said Riker. “The house was on fire!”
Testy, prickly, she said, “The fire was in a back room. The way to the basement was clear!”
“Oh, sure. That makes sense. The basement would’ve been the last place you checked.”
“I followed the music.”
That got everybody’s attention. There had been only sirens and shouts, the roar of fire and the breaking of glass from a blown-out window—hardly music. Riker fingered the oxygen mask that hung loose around her neck. “Does this stuff get you high?”
In the next moment, he wished that he could take back every caustic word, though the hero halo was not a good fit for his partner. Jonah Quill owed his life to a defect in her, the lack of a healthy sense of fear. That was Mallory’s weakness, even back in her puppy days, and one day it would get her killed. From the time she had entered the Police Academy, Lou Markowitz had known that his kid would surely die young. While sitting side by side on bar stools late one night, the old man had said to Riker, “When it happens, don’t hold it against her. It won’t be her fault.”
Detective Gonzales crossed the room to join the rest of the squad. “I talked to the fire marshal. He doesn’t see it as arson. His guys found a corpse in the back bedroom. Adult male. Totally cooked. He figures the guy was smoking in bed and—”
“I don’t think we could be that lucky,” said Mallory.
“Me, either,” said Gonzales. “There was only one car in the garage—a Jag smashed to shit. The Jersey cops found the oil slick from a second vehicle, but they still like the fire marshal’s theory. They don’t plan to waste any time looking for Conroy. And I’m guessing whoever died in that bed, he’s not gonna be missed.”
Mallory nodded. “Any idea when they plan to release the other body?”
“It’s a done deal,” said Riker. “The Phelps kid—”
“He’s been returned to his grave.” Rabbi Kaplan stepped inside the circle of detectives. “And the stolen heart was buried with him.” When Mallory showed surprise to see him standing there, he shrugged. “I was in the neighborhood,” a neighborhood that extended for seventy miles.
Now Riker learned that the rabbi had ridden here with Dr. Slope and not the detectives sent to fetch him.
“Edward brought the heart from the city so the boy could be made whole before—”
“That heart was evidence!” Mallory punctuated this with a raised fist. “Where does Slope get off—”
Undaunted by her anger, the rabbi said, “I told Edward he could kiss his poker nights goodbye if that little boy was reburied without his heart.” David Kaplan wore a winner’s smile. Like every player in the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game, this man gambled for penny-ante stakes that were still tailored to a child’s allowance money. And that child, a twelve-year-old Kathy Mallory, had described it as an old-ladies-night-out kind of game. So the rabbi had to grab his big wins elsewhere.
Riker was certainly impressed. Dr. Slope had never caved in so fast for—
“Kathy,” said Rabbi Kaplan, one of the few to use her given name with no fear of reprisal. “I told Mrs. Phelps her boy’s heart was restored. She was grateful. . . . When I told her you found Jonah alive, she was overjoyed.”
Son of a bitch! All these detectives and not one of them had thought to take the rabbi’s cell phone away from him?
Gonzales gave Riker a nod to say that he had received the unspoken son of a bitch loud and clear. He held up his own phone as he backed through the door, pulling the rabbi along with him to plug that leak with a call to Mrs. Phelps.
Heads turned when Dr. Slope walked in to announce that Jonah had just been dispatched by helicopter to a facility across the river. “This hospital isn’t up to the standards of a New York trauma center. If he isn’t properly treated for the wound on his leg, he could lose—” And now the doctor must have seen something that might be concern in Mallory’s eyes. Or maybe not. It was a crapshoot. And he said, “The boy’s wound is septic, but the prognosis is excellent.”
And she said, “That heart was evidence!” But that was not her only complaint.
—
OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL, the medical examiner sat on a stone bench, answering questions for the detective whose chore of damage control was nearly done.
Riker’s cigarette had gone dark and smokeless. He crushed it in his hand, neatly palming this only sign of anger. The first mistake of the day had been to invite Rabbi Kaplan here so he would not be stranded on this side of the bridge—with too much dangerous information. And now the grieving Mrs. Phelps knew that Jonah was alive. But it was Dr. Slope who had blown security all to hell.
Thanks for that, you bastard!
Less than an hour ago, the squad had nailed down containment. The Jersey firefighters never knew that a child had been taken from the burning house. And here at the hospital, the emergency-room staff had not recognized the unconscious boy with the sooty, swollen face. A gang of men with badges aplenty had supplied them with the story of just another ordinary kid doing party drugs and poison while playing with matches and a mad dog.
“So, Doc, what name did you give the—”
“John Doe! Did you really think I’d tell the pilot he was transporting Jonah Quill?”
Oh, no. Perish the thought. The chief medical examiner could be trusted to keep case details to himself—even if he could not be trusted to keep a goddamn heart under lock and key, even though Slope had taken it upon himself to whisk a little boy away from a squad of police protection—hanging the kid out in the line of fire!
However, mopping up damage took precedence over revenge, and so Riker had robbed his partner of the chance to debrief this man. Though he wished it was Mallory sitting here with a loaded gun.
Dr. Slope had yet to finish ragging on her, and this did not sit well with Riker.
The detective stood up, an invitation for the doctor to join him in a stroll to the far side of the parking lot. At the end of an aisle of cars, David Kaplan sat in the passenger seat of Slope’s black sedan, waiting for his ride home. This had been a long brutal day for that very gentle man, though the rabbi did seem at peace with the outcome.
Not so for Dr. Slope, who railed against Mallory as he walked. “I’ll tell you the real crime here. David’s already forgiven her. Do you have any idea what she put him through today? And the damage she did to the Phelps boy’s parents, those poor people. No remorse. A total lack of empathy—a complete disconnect from their grief, their pain. It’s . . . cold.”
“Yeah, I hear you, Doc. You’re absolutely right. Grieving family—that’s somethin’ Mallory can’t handle worth shit. . . . I guess we all remember the comical look on her face when her old man died.”
The doctor broke stride with a stumble.
Riker gallantly opened the car door, and a more subdued Edward Slope got in behind the wheel.
Small satisfaction.
The detective moseyed back across the parking lot, his mind on damages to come. How long would the kid’s John Doe alias hold up? Minutes? Hours? How much time did they have before a hit man went roaming the corridors of New York City hospitals, hunting down a little boy?
Two more questions occurred to him before he reached the other side of the lot: How many cops would it take to protect one kid from a professional killer? And how many presidents had the Secret Service lost to amateurs?
—
ALL THE PREP work was done. In the back of the van, Iggy buttoned up the coverall that he had packed in the duffel bag. Around the corner of this block, an NYPD cop was still wearing the uniform that Iggy cov
eted for his next change of clothing.
Using the duffel as a pillow, he laid himself down to catch a nap before dark, but he could not shut down his brain. What had he done to himself? For the first time in his life, he was homeless, and he grieved for his house, though he would not miss that thing in the attic.
—
THE DOOR to the Connecticut home was opened by Gail Rawly’s widow, a high-maintenance type with four different shades of salon highlights in her light brown hair. If this woman had not loved her husband, she would have filed down the jagged edge of that one broken fingernail in an otherwise perfect manicure. And she appeared not to notice that one of the detectives on her doorstep smelled of smoke.
Mallory held up her cell phone so Mary Rawly could see the small-screen image from a high-school yearbook. This was the only existing photograph of Ignatius Conroy, son of Moira Conroy. “He’s nineteen years older now.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never seen him before.” After inviting them in, she sent her child out to play in the backyard. The widow raised her hands, and then let them fall limp at her sides. This gesture conceded that, yes, her little girl should be in pajamas by now, but her husband was dead, and all the mom rules were suspended today.
The sun was still shining in a low orbit, but inside the house it was dark. The air was stale. The detectives followed her into the kitchen, the only room with an unshuttered window and natural light. Mrs. Rawly sat down at the table with Riker, who said, “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am.”
The window had a view of the backyard. Close by was another house, a little one built to the scale of Mrs. Rawly’s daughter. There were expensive toys scattered here and there, but Mallory liked the swing best. It was an old rubber tire suspended from a tree limb by a rope. Finest kind. And there was Patty Rawly, riding high on the tire, toes pointing up to the sun—happy in this moment. “She doesn’t know?”
Mrs. Rawly covered her face with both hands. “Patty saw an ambulance in the driveway. I pulled her inside before it left . . . before the others came for his body. She thinks Gail’s in the hospital—and he’s only sick. I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t know what to tell her.”
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