City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Then he went to the old crime-scene photographs from Margolis’s apartment, going to the one of the fridge. He taped it up beside the other one.

  Then he did the same with the photographs from Oscar’s place, this time focusing on the pile of papers on his desk by the telephone. He taped it up beside the other two and took a step back.

  Whitaker came forward and looked up. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  Lucas grabbed his coat and began to thread his prosthetic through the insulated sleeve. Even though the photographs had been taken at different crime scenes, there was a matching item in each—a menu from the Amphora Diner.

  86

  Whitaker gave Nick Papadopoulos, the owner of the Amphora Diner, a quick rundown of who they were looking for, including a general description and what few facts they had. It took about thirty seconds before he said, “You’re looking for Connie.”

  87

  The SWAT team held position in the hallway, four on one side, five on the other.

  This was a standard sweep with a green light to kill anything that didn’t raise its hands without being asked.

  The entire apartment building had been evacuated in an effort to prevent an errant round shifting someone from the civilian category into the innocent bystander column.

  The point man pulled back the metal battering ram. He got a thumbs-up and slammed it home, taking the door off the hinges in one massive punch that rattled the floor and splintered wood.

  The SWAT men rushed in, going through the place in less than twelve seconds, their calls of Clear! Clear! Clear! offset by the sound of doors crashing into plaster.

  The CO came back out into the hallway and called down to Whitaker. “It’s empty.”

  Lucas followed her up the steps, and they cut through the gauntlet of black-clad tactical soldiers. Before the CO could say anything, she said, “Don’t worry, we won’t touch anything.” These kinds of people tended to be big on booby traps.

  They did a quick walk-through, taking in the general dynamics. The apartment was neat and boring, with very little in the way of personal touches. They split up.

  Lucas looked around the bedroom, and it wasn’t hard to see that Ruby Quaid, known to her boss and coworkers as Connie Ridzik and raised as Doreen Mercer, didn’t believe in a lot of unnecessary clutter. The only furniture was a single bed. Other than that one luxury, the room was completely bare. The open closet held two wire coat hangers, one supporting a waitress uniform from the diner, the other empty. The living room had a folding nylon camp chair and a beat-up card table. There were no books or magazines or any other personal items, as if no one lived there at all.

  “Page,” Whitaker called from the kitchen, the crystal ring of panic in her voice.

  He stepped through the open archway. Whitaker was looking at the fridge, and he moved around beside her to see what had her so spooked.

  A photograph was taped to the fridge. A boy was in the foreground, his tongue lolling out while he made a goofy face as snow came down. Four other children were in the frame, all in the background, enjoying the winter in what Lucas recognized as Central Park. Erin stood in the background, Lemmy at her side.

  88

  Off Fire Island

  The chopper ripped up the coast a mile off the south shore of Long Island. It appeared that they were zipping over the waves in a speedboat. But the illusion dissipated when you realized that the Bell 206 JetRanger was pulling more than 120 knots straight into a snowstorm.

  The ocean threw slush up at the windshield, and visibility faded a little over thirty yards out, but Lucas didn’t notice any of these incidentals—he was trying to get Erin on the phone. Since loading into Whitaker’s Navigator at the Quaid girl’s apartment, he had been pressing Redial in a Skinner box loop, trying to contact his wife.

  Maybe Erin and the kids were curled up in front of the tube, watching one of their standard Christmas movies, and house rules were being followed, everyone’s phone off and stored in the big fruit bowl on the kitchen island.

  In all their time together as a family, this was the first time Lucas wished they had a landline at the beach house.

  After what had to be the three hundredth redial, Lucas took a breath and focused on Whitaker across from him, her back to the pilot. She was speaking to the Southampton Sheriff’s Department. She was on a different communications link, and Lucas couldn’t hear anything through his headset, but judging by her lip movement and facial expressions, she was forgoing niceties in exchange for expediency.

  Whitaker signed off and gave him a look that was all questions.

  He shook his head and keyed the mic on his headset. “Nothing. You?” His own voice was tinny and distant, as if it were being broadcast from inside a shipping container.

  Her voice wasn’t much better. “Southampton SD has a cruiser on the way, and they are going to shut down Route 27 between South Lake Drive and Oceanside. If she’s not already there, she’s not getting there.”

  Lucas went through the geography in his head—that was the narrowest point on the entire isthmus and probably the easiest bottleneck on the route. But with everything Ruby Quaid had done so far, circumventing a roadblock hardly seemed like an insurmountable task for her.

  “Luke, she might not be anywhere near there.”

  He knew Whitaker wasn’t wrong—going to Montauk would be a dumb tactical decision and out of character with everything else Ruby had done; until now, her targets could all be shoehorned into her revenge narrative (except for the imam and Laroche, who both fit the role of warnings).

  He checked his Rolex and pressed Redial for the 301st time.

  89

  Montauk

  Ruby Quaid lay in the snow, her world reduced to the tunnel of the scope. She had her eye fastened on the door, a white rectangle against gray cedar shingles—1,350 yards out, according to the range finder. The weather out here was worse than in the city, but the wind was at her back, pushing in from the north, and would work in her favor.

  The ugly snout of the hunting rifle was aimed at Lucas’s house across the field and through the drive where the trees opened up. She wore white snow pants and a white parka, and even from ten feet away, she was invisible. She was comfortable and deadly and barely grown up.

  She didn’t feel the wind or the snow or the cold. She had become immune to the worst nature could throw at her long ago on the hunting trips up in the mountains. She could lie out here all night. She had proved that on the roof of number 3 Park Avenue; she knew standard protocol would be to review the security footage of the stairwell cameras going back at least six hours. If they were determined, they would go back twelve. When they found nothing, they might go back twenty-four hours. But more than that? No one expected a shooter to stay on a roof for thirty hours before a kill. It made no sense.

  But that’s exactly what she had done.

  Thirty.

  Hours.

  She could outwait all of them. Again and again and again.

  And she could outthink them.

  She wondered if they had figured out how she got down from that first roof. It was no great feat if you had a little imagination; all she had needed was an accurate SWAT uniform, which she purchased through some of Kirby’s friends. After killing Hartke, she skirted the perimeter of the roof on the outside wall, then shimmied down between the HVAC units. She crawled up inside one, hiding in the open space of the coil for two hours until the SWAT people showed up. Predictably, the initial team walked right by her. (And why shouldn’t they have? She had climbed down from the windswept wall, and left no prints in the snow.) When the roof became crowded, she had simply climbed out of her blind and walked down the stairs in the stream of law enforcement people.

  The dying sky glowed in the storm, and it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the heavens began.

  There hadn’t been enough time to scout out their schedule, but families tended to operate on a regular timetable, especially when they had kids. And nothi
ng made an evening walk more of a certainty than a dog.

  So she lay there, waiting for Lucas’s family to take their dog out for his evening poop so she could shoot them down.

  Ruby had no malice toward them. At least not the kind she had had toward Hartke or Kavanagh or Lupino; that had been a festering sickness that was still with her, even though she had taken their heads off. She would carry it with her until the moment she died, an event that was probably not that far off. She’d kill the family. Then maybe get one or two more on her list.

  But in the end, they would do what they did and run her down. They would win. But she wouldn’t let them take her alive. No, she was going to be with her family. And she would be buried on Bible Hill with her mom and dad and brothers and sisters. In the arms of Jesus overlooking God’s own country.

  Her parents had settled up there after God told her father it was a safe place. Her mother, who was really her aunt, raised her on the story. Her father had been out hunting on the mountain and stayed up there one night after getting pinned down by a storm. He had taken a big buck and didn’t want to leave it behind any more than he wanted to risk losing it on the way down, so he camped out for the night. He was a born woodsman, like his father and grandfather had been, and spending a night in a snowstorm was as easy for him as it now was for the daughter he never got to know in any meaningful way.

  He had been sitting at the fire, eating some beans and venison, when it whistled out of the sky. It hit a tree on the slope, a big pine leaning out over the valley. The trunk detonated in a shower of sparks and splinters that sounded like the earth opening up and the tree toppled over the edge, crashing into the forest below.

  God couldn’t have been more clear if he had pressed his finger into the earth; this was the spot he wanted Daddy to raise his family. Away from the cities and the government and the people who wanted to take what you had simply because they were too lazy to work for it themselves.

  But they had come nonetheless, orchestrated by Doug Hartke—a man whose name she wouldn’t learn until a few years ago, thanks to a document dump on one of the websites Myrna scoured. Myrna had told her the truth since she was a child, the way the people from the FBI and ATF had murdered her family and burned her house to the dirt. They used to take trips up there sometimes. And in the fall and winter, when no one else was on the mountain, they would hunt up there. It was where she learned to use a rifle and dress a deer and live in the snow, all with the angels of her family looking down.

  By the time she was fourteen, she was going up there by herself for a week at a time, in the worst weather God could conjure up. She knew he was training her; there was no other way to see it. Not if you opened your heart to Jesus and your eyes to the signs.

  He was training her for something, and that something was no secret. He wanted her to get revenge.

  An eye for an eye.

  A death for a death.

  A rifle round for a rifle round.

  A family for a family.

  Amen.

  Then, one night four years back, she found the meteor. It was a few hundred feet below the charred chimney of her home, wedged into a crevice. She was tracking a muley up through the forest, and when she sighted him in, she had knelt down to take the shot and her knee touched something that was much colder than the snow and ice covering the world. She knew what it was, because like everything else about her family, Myrna had told her about it.

  God was once again speaking through the rock he had dropped from the heavens.

  She showed it to the uncle she now called Father, and he figured out that it was mostly metal. And it didn’t take much discussion for them to figure out that metal from the heavens had only one divine use: to smite evil. And there was nothing more evil than the men who had killed her family. And that was when she was born for the third time.

  She had done so much to get here, endured a lot of indignities that she hoped wouldn’t upset her dead parents too much. The men she had used—Margolis and Atchison and Oscar and even Nick at the diner—had been necessary evils. She had done terrible things with them. Even Kirby had been a means to an end, and she hoped he could someday forgive her.

  Night was coming in fast, but the snow would amplify whatever light there was and help her sight them in. Of course, her muzzle blast would be visible, but so what?

  Once she began shooting, the bigger ones would move fastest, but the little ones would be harder to sight in. She’d hit the mother first, then pick off the older ones, moving down to the little girl. She’d save the dog for last, which was more than they had done for her brothers and sisters.

  And when it was all over, Dr. Page would know that he had sided with the wrong people.

  It wasn’t difficult to see that life had already taken a lot from him. His Wikipedia page described a man who had come as close to meeting God as you could get. The world had taken a lot from him.

  She was going to take everything else.

  And then he would know how she felt.

  90

  Montauk

  They were in the basement television room, watching Ralphie Parker wax poetic about a Red Ryder air rifle, when the doorbell rang. Lemmy lifted off the floor with a high-pitched fart that made the children laugh, and Erin proclaimed it the perfect time for a pee break.

  Kathy, their neighbor from down the street (and the only person in the neighborhood who hadn’t headed to warmer climes for Christmas) said she needed another glass of sauvignon blanc. Maude, always the resident pragmatist, said the fart was the dog’s way of letting them know he needed to go out. They all got up.

  “Any drinks?” Erin asked as the visitor bing-bonged again.

  After taking the order of two juice boxes and one milk, Erin headed upstairs after Kathy, Maude, and the dog, whom she could now hear woofing at the front door.

  Once upstairs, the ringing graduated to knocking—an incessant rap that egged Lemmy on.

  Maude was getting her coat off the back of one of the kitchen chairs, where she’d put it to dry after their last walk. “Must be those Jehovah’s Witnesses people again. Maybe they have some questions about the lecture on evolution Dr. Luke gave them the last time.”

  “Cut it, kiddo,” Erin said as she walked by the kitchen island. All the phones in the fruit bowl were lit up with missed calls, blinking in various shades of digital frustration.

  Outside, the Christmas lights were working overtime, sending bolts of blinking red and white into the kitchen.

  Kathy took Erin’s coat from one of the other chairs. “Mind if I come with you, Maude? I could use a little fresh air.”

  “If you want, but it’s snowing pretty hard.”

  Erin ignored Kathy and Maude and pulled her phone from the pile, giving it a cursory glance: seventy-one missed calls.

  What the hell?

  Then the visitor knocked again, sending Lemmy into another bout of barking. “I’m coming!” she yelled and slipped around Maude, heading for the blinking lights at the front door.

  91

  Somewhere south of Long Island

  Lucas waited for voice mail to kick in again as he listened to Erin’s phone ring. He was about to disconnect when she answered. “Luke? Jesus, what’s going on?” He could hear all kinds of commotion in the background, not the least of which was Lemmy barking.

  “Erin, listen to me—”

  “Hold on, someone’s at—”

  In the background, Maude piped in with, “Those aren’t Christmas lights; it’s the police. I’ll get it.”

  “No, I’ll get it,” Erin said.

  “Erin?”

  She no longer had her ear to her phone, and he helplessly called her name again.

  “Erin!” he repeated, the fear coming out this time.

  On the other end of the line—at what felt like the other end of the universe—Erin gave Lemmy a sit command.

  “Erin!” Lucas yelled.

  The sound of the locks being unbolted.

  �
�Erin!” Lucas screamed so hard that the copilot turned around in his seat, startled by the noise rising above the engine.

  There was a pause.

  The sound of voices—male voices. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am. We were told to—”

  There was an ugly smack—the unmistakable sound of a slug whacking into bone and tissue.

  Erin’s scream.

  A second round connecting with meat.

  Erin’s scream hitched up a dozen octaves.

  Then the sound of the first shot rolled in.

  Another ugly smack.

  Followed by two more rifle reports.

  And the phone went dead.

  92

  Montauk

  Ruby watched the SUV from the Southampton Sheriff’s Department fishtail up the road, lights thumping. It could have been heading to any points east, but the lights implied a purpose; Ruby had scouted the entire eastern tip of the island, and none of the homes between here and the lighthouse were occupied.

  She took a breath and automaticity kicked in, training and routine overcoming thought and effort.

  She kept the crosshairs locked on the vehicle and peeled back the finger on the shooter’s glove. The cold air licked her sweaty index, and the pad froze to the metal as she touched the grooved surface of the trigger.

  The Chevy slowed for the turn into Dr. Page’s drive, but it was moving fast and almost slid past the opening. The driver outsmarted the corner, hitting the gas hard over the last two hundred yards to the house.

  It pulled up in front and parked near the garage. Two figures emerged—local deputies clad in the usual rural cop attire of big boots and winter parkas. As they moved toward the front door, their dark clothes flashed blue and red in the cruiser’s lights.

  She slowed her breathing.

  Slowed down the wind and the snow and time itself.