by Daniel Pyne
“The dealer or the girlfriend?”
Albert couldn’t say. “I told him he needed Willa’s gun way more than I did. I had it on me, I gave it to him and—”
Finn interrupted, “You were lugging a gun around when you were looking after the little girls?”
“I was an ordnance specialist”—Albert sniffed—“and Willa was worried Charlie’s friends would come after her family, so, yeah, I went around packing. I have a permit.”
“Finn,” Riley cautioned.
Albert plowed on. “I took the kids for froyo and left their dad alone in the condo. Said he wanted time to figure stuff out.” Then he added, “I know that sounds like a mistake, but he wasn’t suicidal or anything. He was clear as I’d seen him in a while, and he was sober. I just . . .” Albert’s guilt overcame him. “Help me out here, Detective. I’ll confess I killed him if it’ll spring her.”
“I know. It won’t,” Riley said. “She made a mess of this by hiding that gun, and compounded it by thinking you pulled the trigger.” Riley started to push away from the table, but Albert wasn’t finished:
“Those little ones shouldn’t grow up without their mom. I had to raise Willa. I’m useless. Hell, everything I touch.”
Riley may have wanted to say something, but Finn beat her to it. “She thinks you did good enough that she’s trusted you with her children. What does that tell you?”
Finn felt Riley staring at him curiously. Albert sat back in the booth, sad, and jangled his hands loose on the tabletop.
“Well, are you cops gonna get the one who did it, then?” Albert asked.
“That’s not always how it works,” Riley said, a little bitterly, Finn thought. “We get the one we can best prove did it. And hope to God that does the trick.”
—
“IT NEVER OCCURRED to me that Charlie would have any direct contact with Mallory’s supplier,” Riley said, more to herself than Finn. “I just hoped he could help me get another step closer.”
Finn knew that he needed to tell her about the text message he’d sent out into the void, but he didn’t fully appreciate the monumental stupidity of not telling her right away. His ego had chosen an inopportune time to assert itself; everything that had transpired between them was so ragged, ungainly, and out of focus that one more badly framed and underexposed act of willfulness was inevitable, if ill-advised.
He was deep into second and third thoughts about it when they arrived at the front door of his loft building, and as he held the door for her he was weighing ways to broach the subject without pissing her off.
“From the way Mallory treated him, I figured Charlie for a foot soldier. A malleable boy toy,” she added ruefully. “I’m so clueless about relationships sometimes.”
Finn had his own opinion on this, but didn’t want to get into it. “The big boss killed Charlie, or had him killed, because Charlie wanted out?”
“Read between the lines, isn’t that what Albert is telling us?”
“I don’t know, it seems pretty thin,” Finn said. “I mean, he sent minions to take you out, why expose himself by doing Charlie directly?”
Riley looked cross and shut him down. “Don’t play detective, and I won’t take pictures.” She was hurrying ahead through the lobby to the elevator, wheel treads squeaking, when the phone in Finn’s pocket, Charlie’s phone, trilled a text message alert that he hoped Riley couldn’t hear. She stopped, punched the button, angled sideways, and looked back at him curiously. He didn’t react right away, but knew his hand had been forced.
As the elevator arrived, Finn casually took Charlie’s phone from his pocket, glanced at the incoming text, and tried to throw up a smoke screen. “Unless Albert’s lying.”
His diversion failed. “How is it you’re getting a text on Charlie’s phone,” Riley asked, backing in, “two months after he went in the ground?”
The doors didn’t close. Finn avoided her stare and tried to shift subjects. “So I guess we can conclude, from your safe’s combination, that you are a fan of the golden ratio?”
“Finn. Charlie’s phone. The text?”
He took an oblique angle in on it. “You know how you said, about people and their phones, always having them? Well, I thought, right, and a guy with a girlfriend is gonna have her on speed dial. So I messed around while I was waiting in the car for you and your boyfriend”—no reaction from Riley—“and I couldn’t find anything for Mallory in the normal places on Charlie’s phone, but there was this strange German chat app with a slew of messages from just a single source: King Friday. And I’m like, That’s weird. So I took a flyer and sent my own text out to see if anyone responded and thought if someone did I would tell you and if not—”
He pushed the third-floor button. The doors slid shut.
“—Lightning-in-a-bottle kind of thing.”
“You what?” Riley, like a scolding schoolteacher, reached and snatched the phone out of his hand—
“Hey.”
—and read the message:
who r u
She swiftly scrolled through the previous King Friday texts, not so much reading as absorbing them. “King Friday was the puppet ruler in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” she said. She looked up at Finn. Her expression could pretty much be summed up as: Oh, fuck. “You’ve texted Charlie’s killer.”
Still trying to downplay it, Finn pretended he had already made that connection. “Mr. Rogers is King Friday, okay, yeah, that’s pretty much what I was thinking, but . . .” He trailed off. “So this is good, right? Set a trap?”
Riley was staring at him, her mind churning. “He can track the phone and find us.”
“Well, find me, if you want to get technical—and we’ve been in motion all day, so.” Finn got defensive. “Look, I’m sorry, but at least give me some props for—”
She laughed. “Props? You want fucking props?”
Finn knew enough not to say anything more. Riley shook her head, less angry than he expected her to be. “I keep forgetting that you’re not a cop.” She was growing calmer, and colder, which Finn found odd. Then he remembered what Lennox had said: She thrived on threat.
“The bad news is you’re in over your head,” she said. “The good news is you’re with me.”
Third floor, the doors gaped while Riley was digging into her purse for her own phone, and Finn got a brief glimpse of the gun in it and felt a jolt of adrenaline and his mouth dried out.
“Nobody’s going to find anybody,” Finn said, with less conviction than he wanted, mostly trying to convince himself, “until we respond and . . .” He was looking down the hallway to his loft door, where, for some reason, Charlie’s girlfriend Mallory was rising up from where she’d been sitting, surely waiting for them. She looked small and strung-out. Pale without makeup, twitchy and helpless and scared, same as she’d been the night of the Sunken City shooting.
“Hi.” She looked past Finn, at Riley. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“How did you know to go here?” Riley asked, and Finn realized she already knew the answer and what he’d read as fear in Mallory’s face was a calculation altogether different. Lennox’s voice mail message bled thin from Riley’s phone until she hung up.
“Somebody texted me,” Mallory said, as she pulled a big .44 from her Longchamp bag and aimed it rock-steady at Riley.
For some reason he couldn’t even later explain, Finn reached back and punched the CLOSE DOOR button as he stepped out of the elevator, into the line of fire, raising one hand halfway, like a kid in class. “That was me.”
The elevator doors snapped shut on Riley as she said Finn’s name. She was safe inside. But Mallory came faster than Finn thought her capable of moving, swift, assured, and she pressed the gun barrel against his head so he could feel its perfect circle stamp into the skin of his temple.
She yelled at the elevator do
ors, “I will kill him, Detective. You have five seconds.”
10
FINN CLOSED HIS EYES, dizzy with panic, smelled gun oil and Mallory’s perfume, heard the whistle of her breathing, his thoughts swirling, circling back weeks to that first night and a crying girl in a slinky dress, and apes, Canadians, the moon in the skylight, and the frozen ticks of time, photographs, that had set all this in motion.
“Four.”
He felt like he might throw up.
—
IN THE ELEVATOR, Riley was staring at the control panel, thinking, Who am I kidding? She was wheelchair-bound, Mallory had a hostage. Every rational instinct said, Push the DOWN button and call for backup, now. Get help. Cops need legs.
Mallory’s voice cut through, muffled. “Three.”
But what about Finn?
“Two.”
Riley drew her gun from her bag, slipped the safety, primed the chamber, punched the DOOR OPEN button and aimed out, two-handed.
The doors split. The corridor was empty. Finn’s loft door was wide open, lights on inside.
“We’re in here,” Mallory called out.
In her career, in her life, Riley had never felt so exposed. She tried to keep her gun level with one hand and push herself forward with the other, but it all got clumsy wobbly with her chair pulling hard to the right and the wheel rubber squeaking, giving her approach away. Who am I kidding?
Mallory’s mocking siren call lured her on. “Weren’t you paid to protect everybody? Charlie delivered cash to you twice a month, and for that you were supposed to guarantee—”
“—I can protect you from Rogers,” Riley said, talking over her. She gave up the protocol of unsupported engagement, put the gun in her lap, and closed the distance to Finn’s doorway in one coasting thrust, stopping the chair just out of view.
“Rogers? You have no idea.”
“Try me.”
—
“HOW’S THAT WHEELCHAIR working for you?”
Mallory had walked backward into Finn’s loft, pulling him with her, thrashing with her free hand at the lines hung with photographs, tearing them down, prints scattering. “I bet it sucks, trying to work those wheels and hold a gun at the same time.” The Murphy bed was tucked away, giving her a lot of room to work with, Finn noticed, and no way for Riley to enter except through the open door. Mallory whispered, practically giddy, to Finn that all the stupid bitch was doing was stalling the ineluctable endgame, which, well, who could blame her?
Finn felt an eerie calm. Was he past fear, or just so scared it no longer registered? His mind was blank, his body on autopilot, everything in front of him playing out like a streaming video, remote, unreal.
“Was it Rogers who killed Charlie? Couldn’t have been Mexico, he would’ve known not to pick up the casings.” Riley’s voice sounded thin, and already defeated. “You must’ve been there. You got him to give you the gun.”
Mallory separated herself from Finn. Reached back and threw open the curtains on a big arching window of mullioned, beveled glass that faced, across a narrow alley, another loft building, which is why Finn generally kept the draperies closed.
Black eyes intent on the empty doorway, Mallory said to Riley, “You turned Charlie against me.”
Behind her, through the window, in the facing flat of the building opposite, Finn could see a lumpy shadow resolve into Detective Don Mexico and stand tall, bracing a sniper rifle with a scope lens that refracted Finn’s loft light, and a bright red sighting laser rose to fix its pinpoint on Finn’s heart, its beam frayed into a hundred threads of silky traces as it passed through the bevel panes.
“No,” Riley’s voice replied. “That was someone else.”
—
“WILLA?” Mallory spat the word like an obscenity.
“Love tends to unravel things.”
“Love. You think I was in love with him?”
Riley watched a splintered laser-sighting beam dust the wall across from her, opposite Finn’s loft doorway. She reevaluated her options, and confirmed that they were few. “I didn’t presume to judge. That was between you and him. You and Charlie,” Riley clarified. “On my end, it was always about getting to Mr. Rogers.
“Charlie gave you up. He thought it was his ticket out.”
“Charlie was a disappointment.”
Riley pulled her cell from her bag again, dialed 911, and let the call connect but didn’t risk talking. Instead she put the phone down on the floor so that the operator could listen in and trace it. She felt her pulse, it was steady. The only fear she had was for Finn, the sweet, hapless dope who had stepped in front of a gun for her.
“So dark up on those cliffs,” Mallory complained. “Dark, and the contract men made a hash of it, but I chose to let you live because I thought there was no way you’d connect the dots, that’d you’d go away and things could get back to . . . you know.”
“Normal,” Riley said.
“Besides, I don’t like having to be the triggerman,” Mallory admitted.
There was a moment’s stillness that Riley knew meant nothing.
“C’mon in, Detective,” Mallory said, impatient. “It’s not like you’re going to sneak up on me.”
—
FINN WAS FROZEN in the middle of the loft, arms tingling, swallowing metallic bile and with Mexico’s sight still pinned on his heart when Riley rolled through the front door, gun raised. He hoped she couldn’t see the fear in his eyes; he could read nothing in hers, but they fell to the dot on his chest and the flat line of her mouth softened. He grasped for something, anything, to put between himself and this terrible new unstable, slip-sliding terminus.
Mallory raised her .44 in two hands, and aimed it at Riley. “Put the gun down.”
“Let Finn go.”
Mallory shook her head. “How would that ever work?”
Riley’s forward momentum took her to the kitchen counter, where she stopped herself, put her gun flat on the counter, and pivoted, open hands spread out to either side. Mallory, still cautious, respectful, distrustful, took another step backward into the empty space beyond Finn, finding even more separation, while still using him as a shield.
“Wave the shooter off,” Riley said. “I don’t know who he is, I don’t care. If you finger Rogers for Charlie’s murder, we can make a deal. Maybe you’re a victim, here, too, Mallory. At the very least you could skate having to serve hard time.”
Mallory laughed. “Yeah, but, see, here’s the thing—” She let the sentence hang, milking it for all the drama she could. “Rogers is me, Detective. I’m who you were looking for all along.”
Stunned, Finn had to run Mallory’s confession through his head twice before it landed. But Riley just shook her head, calm, and said, “I don’t believe it,” in a way that again made Finn realize she’d already figured it out before Mallory had even spoken the words.
Mallory looked aggrieved. The red dot slid from Finn to Riley.
“It’s all me, Detective,” Mallory bragged. “My Charlie. My cop. My world. And I decide who lives and dies in it.”
—
RILEY KNEW she’d run out of time. “You’re going to have your cop do this?”
“Why not? He’ll be the first responder,” Mallory said. “I was never here.”
Riley nodded. “Okay, but Charlie—that was for love, right? Killing him for dumping you? You were the triggerman on him, couldn’t have been anyone but you gets that close, and shoots him with his own gun.”
“I fucked up with the casings.”
“You did. But love makes us do stupid things.” She looked right at Finn when she said it.
“Love. Love is a lie,” Mallory spat out acidly, as Riley’s hand found the cartoon lever for the Murphy bed and jammed it down. The big window was shattered by gunfire and Finn and Mallory disappeared under the fal
ling bedframe as bullets from the shooter’s semiautomatic ripped through it.
Sweeping her gun from the counter with her other hand, Riley fumbled for the grip and put four rounds into the breaker panel beside the door, plunging Finn’s loft into darkness. The shooter raked the room with pattern fire. But Riley had set her brake, yanked hard on the other wheel, and upended her chair. Bullets punched through the sling seat as she crashed out onto the floor, twisting her upper body as she fell, her gun held out at arm’s length in one hand while the other cushioned her landing, carefully locating and aiming at the muzzle flashes bursting from the building across the alley and then tapping the trigger with her finger in quick succession the way she’d been trained until her clip was empty and there was just the ringing in her ears and the desperate silence and a delayed flood of useless adrenaline that caused her hands to shake and a cold sweat to overtake her.
“Finn?”
A milky light cast in the open doorway from the building corridor held particles of dust and plaster and fabric, and smoke eddied in it, lazy and diaphanous.
“Finn?”
She heard Finn crawl out from under the bed. “Yeah. Yes. Here.”
“You hurt?”
“No.”
Riley couldn’t go to him. Couldn’t even get herself up to a sitting position without a lot of wrangling that she was too spent to attempt just now. Sirens wailed outside, approaching. A faint voice of 911 bled questioning from Riley’s phone, still active out on the landing.
“Did I forget to say ‘duck’?” Riley asked Finn, wry.
He didn’t say anything. She heard him moving, though, then saw the dull glow of his smartphone screen take his shadow to the work desks, then a brighter beam cut through the darkness, from a flashlight in Finn’s hand. It found Mallory knocked senseless, crumpled half under the Murphy bed. It swept across and found Riley where she was sprawled on the floor near the kitchen, in the scatter of photographs, hand up to shade her eyes, squinting in the glare.
