“Exactly. Can you work out transferring her to a precinct that’s handling one of these biker investigations? I was thinking Midtown South?”
He hedged. “I’m not sure.” Then: “Why do you want her on this?”
“I’ve been watching her for a while. I think she has potential. Plus, her case files on the Woodbine bust were...immaculate. Thorough. I wish all my police reporting looked like that.” Maggie leaned forward, fixing him with that earnest stare that often got her what she wanted with him. “There isn’t some reason why you don’t want her working this case, is there?”
He paused. “No.”
“Excellent! So I can have this one?”
He seemed to consider her for a minute. He was clearly making some kind of calculus about whether denying her was worth the trouble that this move could cause him, but he didn’t seem disposed toward telling her what that trouble might be. “I’ll make a couple calls.”
She smiled brightly. “Thanks, Corey. I’ll have my office check in with you on Monday. Oh! And do me a favor and don’t drop my name, if you can help it.” She stood up. “I’ll take you up on that scotch next time, I promise.”
“Take care, Maggie.”
She glanced at her watch as she glided out the door. It was ten-thirty a.m.
3
Empress Makes a Pick
“When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.”
–Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
She saw the redhead before the others did. Somehow she knew that the bike parked out front—a beat-to-shit metallic-black Ducati Monster 696—belonged to her. It wasn’t a bad bike, if you were a beginner, or just broke. She’d have to be upgraded at some point, but right now, it was the girl that mattered, not the bike. Empress was looking for a particular kind of flash in the eye, and the girl had it.
She was, without question, a real specimen. She was drunk, and she was Scottish, which meant if you were listening to her talk, you could only understand the word “fuck” and its variations—but since roughly every fifth word was “fuck,” you were sure to understand at least twenty percent of what she was saying. Empress wasn’t listening for that, though; she was listening for a particular fire in the girl’s belly, and she heard it from across the room. She reminded Empress a little of herself at that age, though she hadn’t been half as crazy as this one. Not back then.
This bar was a dump, perched in what polite Manhattanites would call the Upper Middle of Nowhere, and that was how Empress and her girls preferred it. It was Manhattan in only the most technical sense, as you’d never find any sharp-tongued socialites anywhere even thirty blocks south of here. The tops of the tables were more water stain than wood, the bartender was permanently in a state of angry despair, and the walls were still stained yellow from when you were allowed to smoke in bars in the city, which was a good decade ago at this point. Neon signs for cheap beers hovered in the blacked-out windows, and the occasional howl of sirens would come and go in the background. The jukebox was from before the dawn of time and contained a weird selection: half salsa, half hair metal, and for some reason, if you scrolled all the way down to one end, Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”
The sparse crowd on this particular damp spring evening was favoring the hair metal, and unfortunately for everyone concerned, a drunk guy in a denim jacket and bandana was getting up to play the same Mötley Crüe song for the twelfth time in the last hour. The redhead in the corner saw him getting up and immediately started shouting at him. It was clear that she was not in the mood to hear “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” yet again.
“Her,” Empress said calmly, watching with unbroken interest.
Ainsley, sitting at her right and working on a Heineken, looked incredulous. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. Watch.”
On Empress’s left, Vea sat quietly, observing with an interest that was probably coming from more than just curiosity as to Empress’s prediction. Her dark eyes were fixed on the redhead, and Empress knew she was already taking the girl’s clothes off in her head.
“We’re not picking out your next girlfriend, Vea,” Empress said evenly, without even looking at her. “Stay in the game, please.”
“I’m always in the game, stoosh,” Vea replied, with her musical Jamaican accent and perpetual cocky smirk.
That was mostly true. Vea was almost always in the game. Equally ready for brawling or boning at a moment’s notice.
“Stoosh yourself,” Empress rejoined calmly. “I know how to make a pick.”
“Ay, fucker!” the redhead was yelling to the guy, who was fishing through the pockets of his threadbare jacket, looking for more money to put in the jukebox. She lurched over to him, surprisingly light on her feet for how drunk she clearly was.
He, clearly about as drunk as she was and looking like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, lolled his head to the side to look at her.
“I said,” she repeated emphatically, “if you put that fuckin’ Mötley Crüe shite on the fuckin’ jukebox one more time, you’ll be [something Scottish] out your fuckin’ [something Scottish], okay?” The words were hard to pick out. But she grabbed hold of his collar with her free hand, to emphasize them anyway. The other hand was still holding a mostly-finished mug of beer.
His face turned from passive mean to active mean. “Bitch, I got no problem hittin’ a broad, all right? Take your fuckin’ hand off me, and let me put my goddamn song on, or I’ll lay your ass out.”
She seemed to take this as a challenge. “Oh, really? I’ll bet you [something Scottish] fuckin’ [something Scottish], but I’m a bit tougher than that fuckin’ eight-year-old you beat up for his milk money this morning.”
He shoved her off of him and raised his fists, blearily trying to stare past them at her face, which was lit with a kind of amused rage.
She knocked back the contents of the mug and then smashed it against the edge of the table next to her. At this point, the song stopped, and there wasn’t another one queued up, so it fell quiet. The bartender grumbled loudly and started to reach under the bar. Empress and the girls knew what was under there.
It was escalating quickly.
Empress got up and waved them along with her. Vea grabbed the redhead’s arms and pinned them behind her. Ainsley shoved the guy back against a table. Empress stepped between the guy and the redhead. She wasn’t that tall, and she wasn’t as young and fit as the girls, but she had a kind of authority. Even this drunk idiot could see it.
“I think everyone needs to settle down a little, don’t you?” she asked calmly.
“Hey, fuck you! She started it. Mind your fuckin’ business!” he protested. But he was looking back and forth between the women in front of him and trying to fathom his situation. There was a lot of black leather in this room.
“You started it with that shite song you keep playing!” the redhead shouted back, struggling against Vea’s grip.
“Take it easy, girlfriend,” Vea said in her ear, in a kind of croon. “We’re your friends out here, me and dem, okay?”
She stilled for a minute and glanced over her shoulder at Vea. She looked quizzical, but suddenly seemed to be enjoying her situation more. “Oh, hello,” she said casually, as if it were an everyday thing that people introduced themselves by running up to her during a bar fight and pinning her arms behind her back.
Vea grinned at her, all white teeth and sly eyes.
Empress smiled mirthlessly and told the guy, “I can see, in that slow, drunken brain of yours, you’re trying to do the math to see if you can take the four of us. Let me explain your situation to you.” She gestured to Ainsley. “She…wins kickboxing tournaments on the regular. She,” she went on, gesturing to Vea, “is armed. And she,” she finished, pointing to the redhead, “is insane, apparently.”
He looked for a moment, processing it.
Finally, he looked at her. “What about you? What do you do?”
“I make picks.”
He seemingly didn’t understand.
“You have a choice. You can get up, and you can leave, and nobody goes home with anything broken. Or, I go to the jukebox, and I pick. And if I get to pick, that means that you get your ass kicked with Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ as the soundtrack. So, you pick, or else…I pick.”
The place was quiet. The bartender was holding still, waiting to see if he was going to need to take his twelve-gauge out from under the bar. The guy turned to him with an entreating look, but it wasn’t clear what he was even expecting him to do.
“I think you better go, Ace,” the bartender finally said.
Ace got up and stumbled out the door, cursing under his breath.
Vea finally let go of the girl’s wrists, but by that point, it was already clear that maybe she didn’t mind being restrained so much if it was Vea doing the restraining. She rubbed her palms on her jeans and turned around to get a good look, first at Vea, and then the rest of the party. “I coulda taken him fine, you know,” she began.
“Yes, I think you could have. But you didn’t have to,” Empress said. “What’s your name?”
“Eilidh,” she answered, tossing her hair back over her shoulders.
“Empress likes you,” Ainsley said.
“I like you,” Vea interjected.
“Empress!” Eilidh hooted, looking her up and down. “What happened, lass, was Queen taken and you didn’t care much for Admiral?”
Empress smiled a little. “Something like that.” She glanced over at the bar, where the bartender had gone back to listlessly running his dirty rag over its surface with a look of total futility and meaninglessness on his face. “Let’s go for a ride, Eilidh. I’d like to invite you to our little party. I think you belong there.”
“It’s not like some type o’ weird sexual shite, is it?” It was hard to tell if she was joking, or if it would have been a bad thing if it had been. Eilidh’s eyes were scanning the three of them with a growing curiosity.
“Not unless you want it to be,” Vea answered.
Eilidh didn’t exactly seem put off by Vea’s flirting.
Ainsley snorted and rolled her eyes.
“That’s your Monster out front, isn’t it?” Empress asked.
Eilidh nodded.
“You’re too drunk to ride,” Empress decided. “Ride with Vea. You can come back for the bike later…if you still want it.”
They headed out into the warm, wet spring evening. Hard to believe, Empress thought, that they had only begun this venture a month ago.
4
Crippled Gadabouts
“I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.”
–Steppenwolf
Quin drank a lot of coffee. A lot of coffee. Some people think they drink a lot of coffee, but they’d be mistaken. Quin showed up to long meetings like this with three venti lattes from Starbucks lined up in front of him, each spiked with two extra shots of espresso.
It was the only way he could stay awake.
“Mr. Sparr,” one of the younger board members was saying, “I think that your story continues to be our best lead when we go in to talk to these donors.”
Quin demurred: “It’s media-friendly, but this organization’s mission was originally to provide athletics for injured veterans, and I don’t really feel like it’s respecting that to lead with me all the time.” He knew from a lifetime of privilege that charities loved to have the names of influential families on their boards, but he always felt weird being addressed as Mr. Sparr. He still thought of himself as too young. It made him miss his father too much.
His eyes scanned around the heavy oak table, over the bean-counters, a few earnest non-profit types with modest haircuts and inexpensive suits, and then Erik Schulze. Erik was the only other guy in the room who was like him.
Erik lifted his prosthetic hand and gestured to Quin. “But I know you had a few other thoughts, Quin, with regard to the fall schedule and media coverage, and I think we really want to hear more on that.”
Quin shot him a grateful look.
After Quin got to talk about the programs he wanted to introduce, he had to sit and look at a series of pie charts on a whiteboard. Hence, the coffee.
As chart after chart flipped by, they made eye contact across the table, and Quin could see by the way Erik subtly widened his eyes, as if trying to prop them open, that he wasn’t any more revved up about this part of things than Quin was. Quin tried not to smile, but his mouth quirked a bit.
By the end of the meeting, all three of Quin’s coffees were finished.
As Erik was walking out, Quin in his wheelchair caught up with him. “Erik, wait a minute!” he called.
Erik stopped by the elevator.
Quin wheeled up to him. “I hope those graphs meant more to you than they did to me.”
Erik grinned broadly and shrugged. “Yeah, not so much.”
Quin’s eyebrows lifted. “But…don’t you sit on the board at Lyonsbank?”
“Yes, but that’s my father’s doing. That’s all I do with my life: I sit on the boards of things. Lyonsbank, this charity, that charity, the other… Doctors Without Borders, City Harvest, preservation committees…”
Quin laughed. “You don’t actually know anything about finance?”
“Not even a little,” he said. “I wait till they give me the bottom line: how big of a check do I have to convince my father to write, and how much of it will come from our money versus Lyonsbank’s money. I’m the PR man for the Schulze family and Lyonsbank.”
Quin shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true! I can’t even read a spreadsheet. I’m dyslexic; it’s a nightmare. So, there’s not much other use for a crippled gadabout,” he said cheerfully.
They grinned at each other for a moment.
Quin collected himself. “Oh, hey, I just wanted to thank you for giving me that phone number. Ron’s fantastic. I’ve been really feeling good since I started working with him.”
The last time the board had met, Erik had suggested that Quin take fencing lessons privately from a teacher that he himself had been working with. Ron specialized in working with people with disabilities or recovering from serious injuries, and although Quin had thought it was a weird idea, he’d been enjoying the sessions. They got his blood moving a bit. Unlike the kind of physical work it was to haul himself about for day to day things, it was enjoyable to do something that was primarily about a bit of physical élan. And he noticed that his upper body was feeling a little stronger, too.
Erik smiled. “I told you. He’s great.” He held up his left hand and waggled his fingers. “I’m still not as good as I was in my championship days, and I probably won’t be, but at least I can still do it a bit.”
Quin pointed at Erik’s right hand, which was a very convincing-looking prosthetic. “They did such a nice job on that, you’d think they could make one that could hold a lightweight foil or épée.”
Erik shrugged. “Yeah, well, too many muscles involved. And it’s the wrist that’s the real problem.” He paused for a moment and pushed the call button on the elevator. “Anyway, it’s my brother you have to thank. Somehow, he found time to seek Ron out for me in between all his mountains of hookers and coke—”
Quin frowned a little.
Erik caught himself short. “Ah, sorry—”
Quin shook his head. “No, really. Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to turn into a pumpkin because you mentioned drugs.” He’d been clean for a while now, but people sometimes still got awkward about even mentioning drugs in his presence. It didn’t bother him anymore.
The elevator arrived, and they got inside.
“Your mother doesn’t have issues with you and me being friendly, does she?” Erik as
ked carefully as the doors closed.
Quin shrugged. His mother, Eleanor, never had a good word to say about any of the Schulzes. His older sister had dated Erik’s nephew, Whitaker, back in prep school, and from what Quin had heard, he’d been a real monster, but he never got much more detail than that. “She hasn’t said anything so far.” This wasn’t strictly true, but Quin didn’t really want to get into it. Erik seemed like a nice guy. Why hold him responsible for the rest of his shitty family?
Erik smirked, clearly not believing him, but didn’t pursue it. The Sparrs and the Schulzes were always at the same society events. There was no getting around it. You had to keep it cordial.
A black town car was waiting by the curb for Quin when they got downstairs. After brief, friendly goodbyes, the driver opened the door for him. He gripped the doorframe and easily swung himself into the car. The driver moved to take the chair, but Quin told him, “Don’t bother, I’ve got it,” and then, with one hand, hit the catch to collapse it and dragged it into the car with him, sliding over to make room. His mother had had it built for him to make it easy to open and collapse on his own.
The car rolled quietly up the tangled arteries of the city to the peaceful block on the Upper East Side where the Sparr family brownstone stood, framed by softly budding birch trees awakening to springtime. With the same practiced ease that he’d had getting into the car, he hit the catch on his chair, watched it spring open, gave the seat a whack to make sure it had popped all the way into place, and then, gripping the top of the doorframe, slid himself into it. He rolled up the ramp, wondering if anyone else would be home now.
He called out, but nobody answered, despite a number of lights being on. It was spotless inside and had that lemon smell that told him the cleaning people had been in while he was out. He wheeled into the kitchen and put a pot of water on the squat rangetop, enough to make pasta for two people in case someone came home. Then he parked himself in the living room to wait. As it started to boil, the front door opened, and Ainsley came striding in.
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