by James Tucker
Buddy studied his brother, who was sitting in the back seat. At forty-one, Ward was a couple of years younger than Buddy but seemed to be five or more. Buddy saw the perfect navy-blue suit under an unbuttoned camel hair overcoat. The perfect suntanned complexion even in midwinter. The perfectly cut and styled sandy-colored hair worn slightly long and pomaded back and to the side. The dark-blue eyes. Buddy also noticed something new. A wristwatch so large it must be some kind of machine.
Ward asked, “You all right?”
Buddy considered how he felt. His pulse thumped twenty beats more per minute than usual. He wasn’t nervous; he was angry. “Yeah,” he said. “A hundred percent.”
Ward leaned closer. “What the fuck happened?”
“Someone put a hit out on me.”
“Why?”
“No idea,” Buddy replied, though he did. He was thinking of the dead couple lying on the deck of Mack Berringer’s boat.
Ward asked, “But aren’t you on administrative leave?”
“I’ll be reinstated tomorrow.”
“So why kill you tonight?”
Buddy turned to him. He didn’t want the questions. He needed to think, and then act. A plan was forming in his head—one involving Mei and Ben. He changed the subject by pointing at Ward’s wrist. “What does it do, other than tell time?”
Ward Mills held up his wrist, showing him a large black watch with a profusion of dials and numbers and arrows. “You can activate a beacon that communicates with a satellite system so you can ask for emergency help anywhere in the world. It’s a GPS, meaning the service knows your exact location. And it’s also a phone, so I can communicate with Brick. Or with the police if things go south. It’s a satellite-based SOS.”
Buddy thought for a moment. He said, “By the time someone could help you, you’d be dead.”
Ward smiled. “You never know how fast help can get to you.”
Buddy thought about how quickly Brick and Ward had shown up tonight and asked the question his brother had never answered. “Do you have a place in the city?”
Ward held up a hand. “Enough.”
Buddy didn’t press further. His brother had a big country house up in Greenwich, Connecticut, but he was always in the city and never had luggage with him. Buddy thought his brother was odd, especially for keeping secret where he stayed in Manhattan. In the past few weeks, he’d come to appreciate Ward, even to need him. For most of his life, he’d hated his half brother, the secret love child resulting from his father’s relationship with Ward’s mother. Buddy’s father had left Buddy and his mother in near poverty while marrying Ward’s mother, heir to a manufacturing fortune. Ward had inherited hundreds of millions of dollars or more. Buddy had been a scholarship student at Juilliard, where Ward had been BMOC, the most precocious performer, tutored by their father, the legendary teacher of several of the most famous pianists on earth. Buddy had learned from his father, too. Not only piano, but how to destroy a family. By leaving it. By caring for only one of your two sons. By going for the money.
Ward’s wife, Anna, had been murdered over two years ago in Rome. These days, somewhat recovered, he traveled the world by private jet and dated movie stars. Buddy worked all hours studying the worst of humanity for modest pay. Yet Ward had helped him and Mei and Ben, and all of them had grown close.
Ward touched his shoulder, leaned closer to him, shifted the conversation. “Hey, man. Tell me what happened.”
Buddy didn’t answer, not right away. In his mind he replayed the events of the last hour and kept going through the entire day.
Ward gave him time, didn’t press. Covered up the large watch with the sleeve of his camel hair overcoat.
Buddy thought about Judge Miles. Were Ben’s aunt and uncle trying to take out Buddy in order to gain control of Ben and his money? No, he’d learned they wouldn’t go that far. He also considered his meeting with Mack Berringer at the Shinnecock Dock, and the bodies of the man and woman lying on the deck of Mack’s trawler. Discovery of the bodies wouldn’t have been enough. But then he’d told Chief Malone about what Mack Berringer had found and that he was going to investigate. By accident he’d told others, unknown to him, who’d passed him as he stood in the hallway outside Malone’s office and spoke with Mei by cell phone. He might have a target on his back for any one of these reasons. He thought he wasn’t paranoid. He thought he was hearing that bass in the orchestra playing a single B-flat, louder now, that set his teeth on edge. Shaking his head slowly, he said, “I don’t know. But I touched the third rail.”
Ward cocked his head. “What third rail?”
Anyone who’d grown up in the city knew that in the subway, the first two rails carried the train cars; the third rail, the electricity that powered them. When Buddy was a child, his mother had given him repeated bleak warnings: If you touch the third rail, you’ll die. You can’t survive. Nobody can. Now he opened his hands and said, “No fucking idea, but someone wants me dead—and fast.”
Fast.
He realized that speed mattered. If he’d been marked for death because he’d decided to pursue the bodies found off Long Island, the speed with which that had happened meant something about the bodies and those who’d tried to kill him. Speed also meant he’d have to move even faster and learn who was hunting him. It’s a race, he thought, in which the loser dies. Other men would have been more shaken if someone had tried to kill them. Not Buddy. He was jumping ahead, trying to figure out why.
Removing his gloves, he checked the NYPD directory loaded into his phone, and dialed.
Two rings, and he heard the clear, youthful voice: “Mingo.”
“Mario, I got into a scrape with a hit man in a tan jacket on Mulberry just north of Spring. He’s lying at the bottom of the entrance stairs to the office of T. J. Evers, CPA. Have someone from the Fifth Precinct pick him up and find out who he is.”
Mingo asked, “A hit man? You’re . . . you’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
Mingo waited a moment, then said, “Buddy, are you telling me someone tried to kill you?”
“That’s right.”
“What for?”
“No clue.”
Mingo’s voice showed skepticism. “You sure about this?”
“It was pretty damned obvious,” Buddy said. “Details later. For now, have the patrol scoop him up. He might need time in a hospital.”
Mingo took this in silently.
Buddy thought his partner had ended the call. He said, “Mario?”
“I’m here. But . . . you think the guy is where you left him?”
“He’s there,” Buddy confirmed. “No way he’s going for a jog.”
Mingo paused. Then he said, “I’m on it.”
Buddy said, “I already printed him, using my Visa card. I’m going to leave it on your desk in the morning. Send it to the lab, would you?”
Buddy ended the call. Speed, he thought again. Tan Jacket and someone in the NYPD—they’d come for him in a fucking blitzkrieg. And what had he done just before they’d tried to take him out? He’d told Mei about the case and even texted her an image of evidence.
Sweat formed on his forehead as he dialed her mobile number.
There was no answer.
He hung up and called their home phone.
The line rang again and again before going to voicemail.
He ended the call but held the phone tightly in his lap. Gazing out at rush hour traffic in the quiet comfort of the Range Rover, he saw they were heading uptown on the FDR Drive but slowly, stop-and-go the entire way. To his right lay the black water of the East River and beyond it, the residential towers and the few remaining warehouses around Bushwick Inlet.
He checked his watch. The drive home was taking too long. He thought Mei and Ben might be exposed.
15
After Mei picked up Ben from school, a taxi brought them to the Carlyle Residences. When the car had pulled along the curb on East Seventy-Sixth Street, she put a hand on his a
rm, indicating he shouldn’t open the car door.
He turned to her, his eyes questioning.
“Wait,” she told him, staring at the door to their building. “Just a moment.”
She didn’t want to make the journey of a few steps to the door unattended. Not when the man in black might be pursuing them. So she waited for Schmidt, the doorman whose head remained bandaged from a recent assault on the building and on her and Ben, to pull open the car door.
From under the black canopy that extended from the building door to the curb, Schmidt recognized them, smiled, and opened the door. “Welcome home, Ms. Adams and Benjamin!” he said heartily.
“Thank God,” she told him, allowing him to walk beside them and then open the building door. His presence, and their arrival at home, eased her fears.
As they entered the small lobby with the gray-and-white marble floors, the white walls with generous molding, and the comfortable black leather furniture, she made straight for the elevator. When they were inside, she held her access card in front of the electronic reader and pressed the button for the twenty-fifth floor. Moments later, as the elevator eased its upward motion and came to rest, Mei again held her key card up to the reader on the interior of the cab. The reader chimed, the elevator door rolled back, and they walked into the foyer. She set down her heavy tote bag along one wall by an antique Chinese medicine cabinet in black lacquer.
Ben shrugged off his navy-blue peacoat and set his backpack on the floor next to her tote bag. He stepped out of his New Balance running shoes and stood there in stockinged feet, khakis, and a button-down shirt under a wine-colored crewneck sweater.
Without his coat and backpack, he seemed more like a little boy than ever. Her heart swelled with affection for him. “Come here,” she said. “I need a hug.” When he lowered his eyes, suddenly shy, she walked over and embraced him. “I love you,” she told him.
He stood on tiptoe and kissed her cheek.
I can’t give him up, she thought. Not ever.
16
Later, after getting home and making sure everyone was unhurt, Buddy used the landline in the kitchen to order pizza for delivery, took a Michelob out of the refrigerator, and looked across the granite countertop to Ward and Mei.
Too much, he thought. Too much has happened in too short a time. Something was way off, he realized. Someone had declared war on his family, and he didn’t know why.
Looking first at his fiancée and then at his brother, he said, “They have power—power that can reach all of us. That can order the killing of a cop, which requires coordination and expertise.”
Mei’s eyes widened. “Which cop?”
He put his hands on the counter. “They tried to get me downtown after I left One Police.”
“Get you?”
“A guy shot at me.”
“My God, Buddy.”
“I’m all right.”
“What about the guy?”
Buddy looked away. “He’s not so good.”
“My God,” she said again. “Maybe it’s true.”
He turned back to her. “What do you mean?”
“I was fired today. And then—”
“Fired?” he asked. “Why?”
She glanced toward the hallway that led to Ben’s room, put a finger to her lips, and said, “When I left the gallery, a man in dark glasses was approaching me. He might have had a knife. But Jessica came outside and he went away.”
Buddy listened, but he wasn’t sure why anyone would threaten Mei. He suspected she’d become nervous after the events of the last month. But what if he were wrong and his experience with Tan Jacket were related to the man outside Mei’s gallery—the man who might have had a knife?
It hit him then like a brick smashing into his chest.
He reached across the counter and touched Mei’s arm. “You’re not safe here.”
Her eyes flashed defiantly. “Neither are you.”
Buddy knew she was right. Yet despite concerns about his personal safety, his mind churned through question after question.
Is Chief Malone or one of the others in the chief’s office dirty?
Did someone hear me in the corridor outside Malone’s office?
How did the bodies found off Long Island get there?
He had no answers, but he knew that here, in the city, he couldn’t protect Mei and Ben.
He said, “I’m being reinstated tomorrow. I’ll be armed with my usual service weapon. You won’t have that.”
She said, “I still have the small revolver Ward gave me last month.”
“That’s not enough. You know it isn’t. And what about Ben?”
Mei looked at Ward and then at Buddy. She was about to say something when Buddy interrupted her.
“Maybe you should take Ben and get as far away from me as possible. Until I’ve cleared this up.”
“Yes?” she asked, voice rising. “What then? I can’t be in danger, not anymore. Your last case was all I could handle. And it isn’t fair to Ben. You need to solve this problem, Buddy, so we can be safe and stay together. We can’t go on like this.”
Buddy recognized the warning for what it was. He knew she wasn’t worried only about the events of today. She was thinking of the future. That is, she wanted one that was safe and secure. For her and for Ben. He understood. He knew he had to change the situation and provide her with what she deserved. And yet her threat made him uneasy. As his chest tightened, he glanced down at Mei’s hand to be sure she was wearing the engagement ring he’d given her. Seeing that she was, he exhaled.
Buddy said, “I hear you. Things will change, okay?”
Mei only stared at him with her lustrous brown eyes. She said, “There’s risk in taking Ben out of the city—that’s against Judge Miles’s order.”
He set down his beer, put both palms on the countertop, and leaned toward her. “There’s more risk in staying. I don’t know what’s happening, Mei. I don’t know if the attack was related to the man and woman found off Long Island or if it was related to something else. Give me time to find out.” He realized he’d made the same plea to Chief Malone, and at the thought of Malone’s possible betrayal, his mood darkened. He said, “While I find out who attacked us, I can’t keep you safe. I admit it. So you should leave the city, go somewhere nice with Ben.”
Her cheeks flushed. “You’re forcing me to leave town?”
“I’m asking you. For your safety, and Ben’s.” Buddy saw her mouth tighten and expected the worst.
Ward must have seen it, too, because he gently touched her forearm before saying, “I know a place you can stay. You can rest up and decide the next step in your career.”
Mei remembered the terrible event weeks ago and shook her head. “Ben and I won’t go back to your house. Not after what happened there.”
He said, “No, no, no. I’d like you to stay with a friend of mine I’ve known since grade school. You’ll be safe. Buddy can work the case and figure out what’s happening. When he’s resolved it, you and Ben can come home.”
Mei was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “We’ll stay at a house owned by the boyfriend of one of my friends.”
Ward asked, “Where is it? And who is the friend?”
She shook her head. “It’s safer if I tell no one.”
17
Mei left the kitchen, walked down the hallway to the master bedroom, and closed the door. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she picked up the phone on her night table and dialed.
“Mei! I’m so glad you called!” Jessica’s voice was all Montana—Midwestern with a hint of relaxed California. “How are you doing?”
Mei’s spirits rose when she heard her friend’s concern. “I’m okay, but I’d like to see if the offer of Oliver’s country house stands. Just for a few days.”
“Of course it does.”
“Jess, I could pay you something.”
“Oh, please. That’s crazy! Why don’t I give you the address?”
Mei close
d her eyes, grateful her friend was closer to her and more generous than she’d believed. She picked up the pen and pad of paper next to the phone and said, “That would be wonderful.”
Jessica gave her the address of a house near Rockridge, a small town west of Bloomingburg and about ninety minutes northwest of Manhattan. Jessica said, “There’s no key, just a code to unlock the door and disable the alarm. The code is 1-8-3-2. Got it?”
Mei repeated and wrote out the numbers: “1-8-3-2.”
“Right,” Jessica confirmed. “Now don’t expect too much. It’s rustic and in the middle of nowhere. But it’s pretty and has a good kitchen and wireless.”
Mei said, “Is there a password for the wireless?”
“Yes,” Jessica told her, “it’s j-e-s-s-i-c-a.”
“I can’t thank you enough.”
After replacing the phone on its cradle, she stood and opened her closet doors. On tiptoe, she reached to the shelf above the rack of clothes and took down a heavy nylon case. After setting it on the bed, she unzipped the case and looked at the small revolver Ward had given her. She opened the cylinder and looked through the chambers. As she expected, all were empty. She replaced the gun in the case, zipped the case, and from the closet took down a box of .38-caliber bullets. Then she set the gun case and the box of ammunition in the bottom of her large Bottega Veneta handbag.
About to walk into the bathroom to collect toiletries and add them to her bag, she heard the chime of the doorbell. Her chest tightened with fear.
Who? she thought.
She stared at the gun in her handbag before leaving the bedroom and proceeding along the hallway. She stopped walking, ceased breathing, and listened.
18
Hearing the doorbell, Buddy hurried to the foyer. He took the small Glock from his IWB holster. Standing against the side of the elevator, he switched off the emergency lock and allowed it to open.
