Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  “Real fast,” she whispered. “What was it I took?”

  “Cocaine. You know the girl who gave it to you?”

  “Yeah. Her name’s Lucy. A friend of Blake’s. She told me I had to ‘look right.’ I changed into this dress. Put on suspenders and black stockings. Blake likes those. I made up my face. Black tears. The kind you cry inside.”

  Then her body convulsed as she began to sob. McCall held her tighter, gently pushing their way through to where he had left Laura.

  “You’re going to be all right, Emily.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Someone who’s trying to help you.”

  “Why the fuck should you care about me?”

  “I don’t. But your mother does.”

  “You don’t know my mother.”

  “Not well.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mother’s here.”

  Emily choked back the sobs, looking up at him. “My mom? She would never follow me to New York!”

  “She was frantic with worry about you. With good reason.”

  “Where is she?”

  McCall guided her around a raucous group drinking at one of the larger tables. Laura Masden stood exactly where McCall had left her five minutes before, looking out anxiously through the crowd. She hadn’t seen them yet.

  McCall pointed Laura out. “There’s your mom.”

  Emily wrenched out of McCall’s grasp so unexpectedly that he hadn’t been ready for it.

  “That’s not my mother,” Emily said in a fierce whisper.

  McCall was stunned. Several moments of the past hour spun through his mind. Amid the crank calls he had received after putting his ad in the classified section of The New York Times and on the internet—Gotta Problem? Odds Against You? Call the Equalizer—there’d been a desperate voice-mail message from a woman saying her name was Laura Masden. When he’d called her back, she’d asked him if he was “the Equalizer.” Hearing the name spoken out loud by a real client had given him pause, but McCall had said, “Yes. You have a problem?”

  He’d spotted her, elegant and frightened, sitting alone at a booth at the River Café in Brooklyn, overlooking the East River, nursing an apple martini. He’d slipped into the booth opposite her and said, “Hello, Laura, my name is Robert McCall. What’s your problem?” She had seemed a little disconcerted by his less than effusive greeting, but her sincerity about finding her daughter had been compelling.

  “It’s my daughter Emily. She’s twenty-two. She’s always been a difficult child, but she’s not into drugs or alcohol. She’s a dreamer. She wants to make a difference in the world.”

  “Why did she come to New York?”

  “She was accepted at the Art Institute of New York City. Media arts. After being at the college one month, she dropped out. And disappeared.”

  Laura had described Emily’s boyfriend, Blake Cunningham. He had told Laura that he’d broken up with her daughter and had practically thrown Laura out. Before that happened, Laura had heard Blake mention this address. McCall remembered how Laura had fought off the tears brimming in her eyes when speaking of her daughter.

  “I’m going to find your daughter,” he had told her. “If she’s in danger…”

  “You’ll equalize those odds?” she had asked, smiling through her tears.

  “Yes. I will.”

  He thought of their arrival at the rave party and how Laura had spotted Emily dancing and how her voice had broken when she’d seen her.

  “She’s changed her hair color. It doesn’t even look like Emily, but that’s her.”

  McCall had instructed Laura to put her back against the pillar and wait for him. That he would bring her daughter to her.

  He pointed out Laura again, thinking perhaps Emily had looked at the wrong person.

  “Right there, the woman in the gray suit with the black Dior coat, standing at that pillar.”

  “I know what my mother looks like. Duh. That is not my mom.”

  McCall suddenly wanted to get Emily out of there before Laura—or whoever she was—turned and looked in their direction.

  “This way,” he said tersely.

  He guided Emily back to one of the many side entrances to the abandoned building. Party wranglers wearing obscene burn masks, like bizarre Walmart greeters, were ushering more people in. McCall looked over to where Blake Cunningham had been standing.

  He had gone.

  So had his college chums on the ground floor. Behind him, the woman calling herself Laura Masden was becoming impatient. She starting pushing through the crowd toward where she’d seen McCall disappear.

  McCall hustled Emily to a doorway half-hidden behind one of the steel staircases. One of the grotesque burn masks stepped forward to stop them.

  “No one goes out this way.”

  McCall shoved him to one side. Burn Mask looked like he was considering doing something about that, then thought better of it. McCall pushed Emily out through the door into the night. He noted that it had started to rain pretty heavily.

  McCall looked behind him to make sure Blake Cunningham or any of his pals weren’t following them. They weren’t. When he turned back into the street, Emily had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 3

  The street was deserted, but McCall caught a flash of movement to his left. An old theater was nestled on the corner about ten yards up from the Whitehall subway station constructed of red brick. The theater was derelict, with scaffolding along the east side. The scaffolding looked like it had gone up just after World War II ended. Moonlight had picked up the bright suspenders flashing on Emily’s legs as she ran through the theater’s front door.

  McCall ran across to the theater. Faded letters just under the second-floor windows read MERCURY THEATER. On what was left of a marquee that had been added to the façade at some point was, in slim unlit neon, CREST with the C missing. McCall hoped that wasn’t an ironic message for him. Obviously the theater had been turned into a cinema at some point. Probably ran XXX-rated movies in the eighties, before it became as easy to find porn on the internet as your favorite lasagne recipe.

  McCall jogged over to a big blue Dumpster, took the two Smith & Wesson pistols he’d appropriated, and tossed them inside. Then he moved back to the theater’s front door. He noted a rusted padlock on it was broken. Probably a safe haven on cold nights for the homeless. The door groaned on blackened hinges as he pushed it open.

  Inside, the lobby was the quiet of the dead. Dust particles hung in the air like a translucent fog. Rectangular glass frames were on one wall, most of them empty, but a couple of old theater posters were left. The city had turned the movie house back into a theater again for a while. The dates on the two theatrical posters were from the early 2000s. In one, the Mercury Theater was proud to present the US stage première of a thriller titled Underground, and depicted was a London Underground subway car trapped in a tunnel, with the words 12 Passengers on a Subway Journey into Hell. The name above the play title was Raymond Burr. If McCall was put under oath, he would have to confess he liked watching TV reruns of Perry Mason. Next to this poster was one of a rustic cabin in a misty forest clearing, a scantily clad young woman running from it, with the demonic face of a cat superimposed over the woods. Above that was the title: Catspaw—A new stage thriller by Robert L. McCullough. It starred Greg Evigan and a New York cast McCall had never heard of. He thought wryly that this theater was about as off-off-Broadway as you could get and still be in New York.

  He stopped and listened. There were small scuttling sounds. Probably rats. Cockroaches made no sound. He heard nothing else. He moved over to a heavy door with small stained-glass panels depicting a knight in green armor slaying a dragon and pushed it open.

  Inside the actual theater, the quiet continued. Rows of faded onetime plush red seats were along both sides of a center aisle. The seating capacity was about 350. The stage was empty. A work light stage-right provided a harsh illumination. A ripped r
ed curtain was lying stage-left, never to rise on a performance again. Two ornate boxes were above the stage on either side. As McCall walked down the center aisle, he glanced up. A mezzanine with ten rows of seats was above him.

  She came at him from out of the gloom.

  She’d picked up a sixteen-inch nail from some construction debris and stabbed it at his face. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it, just enough for her to yelp and drop the nail. He threw her over his shoulder, her black dress riding up over her hips above the stocking tops and silver suspenders. She beat her fists on his back. He didn’t react. He reached row G, near the stage, and dumped her down into the first seat. She stared up defiantly, then dropped her eyes, as if just now realizing her dress was up to the level of her black panties. She pulled the dress down, but it didn’t cover the stocking tops and suspenders. It wasn’t supposed to. Her breath came out in ragged gasps. Her chest was heaving. McCall stood above her, allowing her to calm down, to get oxygen back into her lungs.

  She finally said, “You pretended to be me my dad. You dragged me over to some woman who is not my mom. You’re one of Blake’s asshole cronies.”

  “If that were true, I wouldn’t have taken you out of there.”

  “You were taking me to them.”

  “They didn’t expect you to come out of that side entrance. Take a couple of deep breaths. I’m not going to hurt you, Emily.”

  She nodded. Her breathing was less labored. She was coming down from her high. “How bad is the withdrawal going to be?”

  “Depends on how much you took. You mind if I sit down?”

  She moved over into the next seat.

  McCall sat down beside her. “We can’t stay in here.”

  She looked at the empty stage. “I don’t think the curtain’s going up anytime soon.”

  “They may search for you. This is an obvious place to hide.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get away.”

  “This will be fine for a few minutes.”

  “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “I can take you back to the party. Lots of people to talk to there.”

  She shook her head violently, then suddenly reached down and undid the suspenders on both stockings. She rolled them down her legs and pulled them off. Screwed them up into balls and threw them into the row in front. She lifted up her black dress, undid the suspender belt, and tossed it after the stockings. Then she demurely pulled the dress down as far on her calves as it would go. Her breathing had regulated. She looked back at him.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Your mother—the woman impersonating your mother—said you’d come to Manhattan because you’d been accepted by the New York City Art Institute. Is that true?”

  “Yeah. When I was six, I drew fairies and goblins and dragons for a ‘Sticker Fairy Calendar’ my mom was going to get published. It never happened.” Emily shrugged again. She did that a lot. “But the pictures were pretty good for a six-year-old.”

  “Why did you drop out of your art course?”

  “I got bored. I just wanted an excuse…”

  “To leave home?”

  “Yeah. You don’t know my real mom.”

  “Describe her to me.”

  “Thin, very pale, blond hair, but stringy, you know, like she never washes it? Her face is kinda pinched all the time, like she’s smelling something bad. Her eyes were always kind, but they had this haunted look in them. She does the best she can,” Emily added, as if defensively. “She’s bipolar, you know? Gigantic mood swings. One day she’s chipper about school stuff and my dad being gone all the time, two days later she’s a raving lunatic.”

  “Tell me about your dad.”

  Emily smiled. “You couldn’t have got him more wrong. He’s an archaeologist. Always off on some dig somewhere in Central America or Africa or some Arab caves. Looking for old bones and fossils or whatever the fuck it is they look for to try and discover secrets about people who’ve been dead for centuries. In 2014 he went to Huamparán, somewhere in Peru, on a dig for the University of Paris. Excavating that site and the areas around Huari and Royal Inca Road. I guess there was more cool stuff to find, because they asked him to go back again. He’s been there almost six months. Discovering little pieces of broken pottery, that’s what gets his dick hard.”

  She frowned and shook her head, as if the thought of her dad’s penis was pretty inappropriate. She looked again at McCall. “My dad would never be aggressive like you were with Blake. He’d be reasonable and soft-spoken, but he would have dragged me out of there, too.”

  “He loves his daughter.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “And I’m sure your mother also loves you.”

  “She didn’t leave small-town Americana to come and look for her daughter who’d been missing for three weeks.”

  “Maybe she sent someone else in her place.”

  A shrug. “Yeah, maybe.” A beat, then: “I’m sorry I attacked you.”

  “I’ll get over it. How did you hook up with Blake Cunningham?”

  “At a cocktail bash at one of the artist’s galleries whose work was on display at the Art Institute. Blake was mesmerizing, those blue eyes. I’ve never seen eyes so cornflower blue on a guy before. Have you?”

  McCall thought of his friend Granny, with his piercing ice-cold blue eyes. He wondered how Granny was faring on the North Korean covert operation that he’d organized with Mickey Kostmayer. It was a dangerous mission.

  “Just one guy,” McCall said.

  “Blake stunned me with his personality at first. Like, wow, being kicked right in the gut. He introduced me to his college friends. Most of them are in their last year at Columbia, but a few of them have graduated and are already on Wall Street making a gazillion bucks. I got caught up in a very intoxicating lifestyle. But I knew there was something wrong. Blake wanted to fuck me, and I wanted him to, but he kept his distance. He and his friends are into something—something dangerous and disgusting, but it’s making them very rich.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. They were all very careful not to say anything when I was around.”

  “Something illegal?”

  “More than that. It’s dark. It scared me.”

  “How’s your memory?”

  “Pretty good.”

  McCall told her his cell phone number, the one on his second Equalizer iPhone. She repeated it and nodded.

  “You won’t forget it?”

  “No, but why would I call you?”

  “Just a precaution.”

  She nodded again, then touched his arm. “Thank you for saving me,” she whispered.

  Now the tears welled up in her eyes. She looked away to the stage, as if she were seeing some performance in her mind.

  “I went to seven musicals in the first month I was here in Manhattan. Wicked—that was the best. Really funny and made your spirits soar. You like musicals? You look more like a Death of a Salesman kind of a guy.”

  “I like musicals.”

  “What’s your favorite?”

  “Les Misérables.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  McCall didn’t answer. He wasn’t listening to her any longer. He had heard a sound, one Emily certainly hadn’t heard. He squeezed her shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  “Someone came in here,” he said softly. “Could be a homeless person. I’d say there are a lot of them who use this place. Especially when it’s raining.”

  She turned around and looked back into the gloom.

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Don’t move from this seat. Hunker down a little, so you can’t be seen from the back of the theater.”

  She did as she was told. McCall stood and moved up the center aisle. He looked back and couldn’t see Emily’s figure in the seat, even though he knew she was still there.

  No one was in any of the seats. McCall reached the end of the last r
ow, row W, and took a step out into the darkness of the narrow corridor at the back. Reflected in the stained-glass panels he saw a shadow flicker in the illumination of the work light from the stage.

  He whirled to his left.

  It was one of the two young men from the River Café. His fist was aimed at McCall’s throat, looking to sucker punch him as he stepped out into the corridor. McCall ducked under the punch and brought the assailant to his knees with a shot to his solar plexus. He grabbed the young man’s wavy black hair and slammed his face down against his knee. He heard the sickening crack as his jawbone fractured.

  He didn’t sense the other River Café man until it was too late.

  He got an arm around McCall’s throat and hauled him back.

  The thought flashed through McCall’s mind that it was a good thing he’d relieved these guys of their Smith & Wesson guns at the rave party. He’d be very dead if they’d still had them handy.

  McCall fell to one knee. He had the lapels of the second thug’s coat in both hands and pulled him forward. He hit the floor hard.

  Just as the first young man was coming up for air.

  McCall kicked him in his broken jaw. He toppled to one side, moaning. McCall grabbed the second young man around the throat, thought briefly about snapping his neck, but they hadn’t actually attempted to kill him. They were pissed that McCall had taken their guns away from them. McCall could understand that. It was embarrassing.

  McCall slammed his knee into the young thug’s back. He writhed and tried to reach back for McCall’s face. McCall exerted more pressure around the thug’s throat and he slumped forward. McCall set him down gently onto the threadbare carpet.

  The first River Café thug had long ago lost interest in the fight. He was holding his jaw with both hands as if afraid it was going to come apart. McCall didn’t need to do anything more to him or his partner. They weren’t going anywhere.

  But it was time to get Emily out of there.

  McCall ran back down the center aisle to row G, knowing he would not see Emily’s figure until he reached it.

  She was gone.