A Rush to Violence (A Spellman Thriller)

by Christopher Smith

  “I think you’ve made the right choice.”

  He didn’t answer, because he wasn’t sure that he had and he didn’t want to insult her. “We need to find out where the Miller siblings live and who they are. Then I’ll give you a web address that has a photograph of Camille and Emma. Send that address to your contacts. Tell them that Camille is likely blonde now and either living in Brooklyn or Jersey. Tell them that she’s close enough to the water to see the tip of Manhattan. If she’s living anywhere, it’s in those areas. Your other contacts can keep their eyes on Manhattan itself, with specific attention paid to where Camille’s brothers and sisters live. I’ll do the same with my contacts. Let’s hope it shakes out.”

  “How do you know Camille’s blonde? That she can see the tip of the city?”

  “Roberta,” he said. “Now, let’s do this.”

  When she left the room, he picked up the phone to call Mike Hines. “Do you have anything on Carr?” he asked.

  “Nothing links that name to anyone in the Miller family.”

  “I figured his name was bullshit. But we’ll call him Carr for the sake of having nothing else to call him.” He thought for a moment. “He said he’d known the Millers for years. He said they sought him out for his help. He could be a friend of the family. If he is, there might be photos of him with the Millers. Maybe there’s something online with him and any one of them at a public event.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  Marty described him in detail.

  “Let me see what I can find. How are Gloria and the kids holding up?”

  “That’s also where I need your help.” He told Hines everything he knew and what he needed now.

  When Hines spoke, his voice failed to hide the urgency of the situation.

  “Any idea when they were abducted?”

  “Two hours ago. I need to keep this as quiet as possible, Mike.”

  “Hang in there,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  While Camille Miller showered, Emma Miller searched.

  Her mother left the bathroom door open on purpose, likely so she could keep tabs on her daughter, listening to her while she washed the bleach out of her hair.

  But Emma was brighter than that. She went to her bedroom, turned on her boom box, and left the door open when she stepped out. Now, with her mother hearing nothing but the dance beat of Euro pop, Emma hurried, knowing that her mother wouldn’t be long and that time was running out.

  She wanted to find the bag with the guns, rifles, and ammunition.

  The apartment wasn’t large, so there were only a few places it could be. She went into her mother’s bedroom and searched the small closet. Nothing. She went to the bureau across the room and looked through the drawers. Zip. She got on her knees and looked under the bed.

  Bingo.

  She grabbed the bag and dragged it across the hardwood floor into the center of the room. Then she slipped into the living room, listened for the sound of running water and could just hear it over the music. She went back into the bedroom and opened the bag.

  Inside was a shock.

  Emma never had been around guns, but there was a pile of them here. There were four rifles, each different from the other, some so sophisticated, they looked as if they came out of a video game or a movie and couldn’t be part of the real world.

  Beneath them were three hard plastic cases lined in a row with a logo on the front that said “Glock.” She opened one of the cases and found inside a black gun nestled within wavy gray foam. There was a white wire brush below the gun and what looked like the sort of ammunition clips she’d seen on television and in the movies.

  Tucked into a black leather sleeve to the far right of the bag was a knife about six inches long. To the far left were dozens of boxes of ammunition, some of which looked like those she found in the Glock case. The boxes said they were short barrel hollow points. She didn’t know what that meant, but she’d find out.

  She paused for a moment and realized that inside the bag was her mother’s past and her present. This is how she once lived and this is how she was about to live again. But looking at it all made no sense to Emma. How could this be? It still seamed unreal to her that her mother had been an assassin. The mother she knew had nothing to do with the contents of this bag. She was kind and loving. She was her friend, not some random killer.

  But she was—or at least she had been. Talking about it earlier shook Emma, but seeing this, the sheer steely madness of it all, brought it to a new level she wasn’t sure she was prepared to deal with.

  This was her mother’s youth staring her in the face. Her mother was a murderer. Did it matter that she killed serial rapists or brutal leaders of third world countries? Emma didn’t know. She wanted to say it mattered, that what her mother did was wrong, but everything was different now. Her grandfather was dead. He was taken away from her by greed. Her mother kept saying they needed to be certain it was one or all of her brothers and sisters who were responsible for it. But Emma already knew. Everything added up. She knew them too well. Killing her grandfather was exactly something they’d do.

  Which is why Emma was going to kill them.

  She already was dressed for the night. She wore black pants, a black, long-sleeved hoodie, and the darkest pair of sneakers she could find. She had prepared a note as well as a bag. She removed one of the Glock cases, set it down beside her and took several boxes of ammunition that mirrored the kind that were inside the case.

  She zipped up the bag, shoved it under her mother’s bed and hurried into her bedroom, where the music was playing and a thin, nylon bag was sitting on her bed. She put the case and the ammunition beneath the few clothes and the laptop she was bringing with her. She tucked her hair beneath a baseball cap, left her bedroom, heard her mother turn off the water and quickly moved down the hallway toward the door. There, she dropped the note on the floor, wondered for a moment if she was doing the right thing, but when she thought of her grandfather, she knew she was. She couldn’t wait for her mother to decide to act. They needed to pay now, so she’d kill them herself.

  She opened the door and moved briskly along the hallway to the stairs. She fled down them and snaked out into the night. She had three credit cards in her name. She could withdraw enough money from them to sustain herself for a while, but she needed to do it fast, before her mother had the chance to shut them down.

  With the bag slung over her shoulder, she walked with purpose. Two blocks ahead of her was a bank with a row of ATM machines inside. She’d use it, go into Manhattan, use her fake ID to get a room and then she’d go on the Internet and learn how to use the gun. There had to be something on YouTube. If not, there always was Google.

  The more distance she put between herself, her mother and the apartment, the more frightened, charged and alive she felt. The tip of the city gleamed ahead of her. Helicopters circled above it. Boats shined low lights into the dark water. Not far from her was the subway terminal, but that would be too risky to use considering what she was carrying with her. She’d need to take a cab into the city. And once she was there, in her hotel and ready to act, she’d go after them. She knew where they lived. They’d be surprised to see her—and then they’d be really surprised when they realized why she was there.

  If her mother could seek revenge for her grandfather’s death, so could she.

  * * *

  When she arrived in the city, she asked the driver to take her to the Renaissance in Times Square. If she was going to lay low, crowds of people are what she needed now. Here, amid all the flashing lights of the JumboTron, the sidewalks crushed with people, the cars racing by on Seventh and the general chaos the area courts throughout the night, she could minimize the possibility of being seen.

  In Brooklyn, after she stopped at the bank and retrieved her daily limit of six thousand dollars in cash, she called ahead and had a room reserved for her. A few were available. She took the least expensive option. I
f she needed it, her fake ID claimed that she was eighteen.

  But Emma didn’t fear being carded for the room. She was sixteen, but she looked older and more sophisticated than her peers, which likely came from being the product of such a strong-willed mother, being educated by some of the best schools in Paris and just by living in Paris in general.

  For someone so young, she had traveled throughout Europe, stayed at some of the best hotels and understood the world from a perspective her American counterparts didn’t. Like her mother, she was fluent in English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. She had a broader scope and a deeper understanding of how to behave in certain situations. She owed much of that to her mother and to her grandfather. They always had addressed her as an adult. They never spoke down to her, but to her.

  She was thinking of her grandfather as she stepped out of the cab and approached the hotel. The doorman held the door open for her, the check-in area was to her left and she paid for a week’s stay in cash, thus leaving her untraceable. It was a solid yet simple plan.

  Or so she thought.

  “We’ll need a five-hundred-dollar deposit on the room,” the clerk said. “Would you like to put that on your credit card?”

  Absolutely not. “I don’t use credit cards,” Camille said. “Je ne peux pas les supporter.”

  The man shook his head at her. “Sorry?”

  “I can’t stand them. Would a cash deposit suffice?”

  “We take credit cards for deposits.”

  “Depuis mon identité a ete volée, je n’utilise pas de cartes de crédit.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Ever since my identity was stolen, I don’t use them. If you demand a deposit, it’ll need to be in cash.”

  “I’ll need to check.” He picked up a telephone and asked the question. She watched him impatiently. Finally, he hung up.

  “Cash is fine.”

  “I would hope so. It is, after all, cash.”

  She gave him the money, took the card for her room, told the bellboy that she was fine carrying her own bag and went to what had to be the slowest elevator on the planet. It only rose to the next floor, which was the main lobby, but it seemed to take forever to get there. When the copper doors opened, she entered a lively area that had a bar and a lounge to her right and a restaurant to her left, which was closed.

  Breakfast, she thought.

  She crossed the hallway to another set of elevators, which were faster. Her room was on the twenty-fourth floor. When she left the elevator, she took a left and found it at the end of the hall on the right. She swiped her card and entered a room that appeared clean and serviceable. King-sized bed. A view of the city. A coffee maker for the morning. A desk and a chair. A chaise by the window. A bathroom that wasn’t too cramped.

  The room was tight, but it would do.

  She hoisted her bag on the bed, pulled out her laptop and the case for the Glock. When she was ready to set up wireless, she saw that she couldn’t get online without a credit card.

  Merde.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. Him again, but this time he was more accommodating. No calls to make. In a few moments, the problem was rectified. The cost of the wireless would come out of her deposit.

  “Merci,” she said.

  Before she hung up, she half expected him to say, “Sorry?”

  * * *

  On YouTube, she found a feast of knowledge.

  There were videos on how to dismantle the gun. How to load the gun. How to clean the gun. How to handle the gun. How to use the locks. How not to use the locks. Which bullets to use and how to load them with the autoloader.

  There was a device attached just beneath the gun’s barrel that looked like a scope of some sort. She didn’t know what it was, but she eventually learned that it was a Crimson Trace Laser that was an add-on. Her mother must have requested it. To use it, all Emma had to do was pull the trigger ever so slightly and a red beam would appear. The guy in the video said the laser was “ridiculously accurate.” Since she had never used a gun before, she could only imagine how critical “ridiculously accurate” would be to her.

  For the next hour, she watched videos and learned from them. She read articles and learned from them, as well. When she watched the videos, she acted out each situation in her hotel room by copying what the instructor did. She dropped on her back, poised the gun in front of her and “shot.” She swung around a corner and took aim. She rolled on the floor and leaned into position.

  By the time she was finished, she was adept at loading each of the magazines that came with the Glock, swiftly dispensing with the magazines when they were empty, and just as fast at slapping a new magazine inside the chamber when she needed to.

  She learned defense positions, how to develop site pictures if things should go to hell around her, and tools on how to keep her focus in case that happened. By the end of it, she still felt uneasy carrying a gun, but at least she felt she had some idea about what she was doing.

  But did she? In the heat of action, would she? Or would she draw a blank? There was only one way to find out.

  She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and started tucking her hair within the hoodie so all you could see was her face. It made her think of her mother because when Emma left the apartment, her mother was coloring her hair.

  What was she thinking now, having read the note? Emma had said she needed to go out. She said that she needed time to process her mother’s past and wanted to do so alone. She said she was going to get a hotel room for a couple of days. She told her mother not to worry and that she’d be in touch. She just wanted to sort it out on her own.

  Would it work? Emma doubted it. The moment it occurred to her mother to check the bag containing the guns, she’d know better. And that’s why Emma needed to act swiftly and keep one step ahead of her, which given her mother’s past, would prove a challenge.

  She was in a rush to violence. There was no room for her to fail.

  Before she went through with this, she needed to see him again. She went to her computer and double clicked on a thumbnail image of her grandfather that she always kept on her desktop. His face filled the screen and she was struck again by how much she missed him, how grateful she was for the time they had together—and how dearly they were going to pay for taking him from her.

  In the photo, he was sitting in a chair with Blue at his side. The dog’s head rested in his lap, his large eyes lifted and turned to the camera. Her grandfather’s hand was on the back of Blue’s neck. He looked happy. Blue looked content.

  Emma looked at the dog.

  When her grandfather was found dead by his staff when they returned to work the following morning, her mother received a call from one of her sisters and they got on a plane. By the time they arrived in New York, Blue already had been put down by her uncle Scott. “Dad tripped over him,” she remembered him telling her mother, who was furious at his decision. “Mistake or not, he took our father. It was my choice to put him down. If you’ve got a problem with that, I’d be surprised since you’ve lived your life making those very choices.”

  When he said it, Emma knew what he meant because of what her grandmother told her, and she hated him for it. She had never liked him. He was a cold bastard who had joined the rest of them in bilking her grandmother when she was alive. Harvard grad. Never married. Dabbled in nothing. Got fat because of it. Owned a swank, fifteen-room townhouse on Fifth and Sixty-Eight Streets thanks to his mother, who bought it for him outright.

  Emma wouldn’t be surprised if he had led the effort to kill her grandfather, not knowing that he’d left everything to Camille. It was either him or Sophia, a royal bitch if there ever was one. Michael and Laura were possibilities if only because their lifestyles were the most extravagant. They’d need the money they thought was coming to them. She wasn’t sure about Grace and Tyler. She felt sure all were a part of it, but she didn’t see the latter two leading it. Grace and Tyler were the family artists—th
e former a painter, the latter a writer. They were well educated, but had no common sense. Emma wasn’t sure if they could find their way out of a burning building even if it had flashing arrows pointing to a safe escape.

  That’s why she’d take her uncle Scott first.

  She pushed the gun between her pants and her back, pulled her shirt down low to conceal it and left the room to grab a cab for the Upper East Side, where she planned to pay her uncle a visit.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Camille Miller read the note a third time before putting it next to her on the sofa and running a hand through her freshly cut blonde hair. She looked out the window, down the street and gazed at the tip of Manhattan, which gleamed tall above the water that separated her from it. What she once considered a beautiful view scared the hell out of her now.

  Where are you? she thought.

  The note said she was going to a hotel. But where? Here in Brooklyn? Camille knew her daughter better than that. Emma would go to the city. She didn’t know Brooklyn and she didn’t particularly like the borough when Camille decided to rent here. In fact, she had resisted the idea.

  So, that’s one down. You’re in the city. But where?

  She literally could be in hundreds of different locations. The moment Camille found the note, she ran a check on her daughter’s credit cards, which told her everything she needed to know. Emma was bright—she always had been. She knew enough to use cash so as not to leave a paper trail. By why six thousand dollars? Why so much?

  Her daughter didn’t have elaborate tastes. She wouldn’t choose a high-end hotel. Did she think her mother would cut off her cards and leave her with no means if she somehow ran out of money and got into trouble? Maybe that’s what she thought because she was angry, but Camille never would leave her daughter so vulnerable.