Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  A scuffling sound snapped McCall’s head up. He caught a glimpse of two shadowy figures in the mezzanine, the work light barely reaching them. Emily was struggling in the grasp of one of Blake’s college pals. McCall edged down the row of seats, ran through the aisle doorway, and took the stairs two at a time. The stairs led right out onto the mezzanine. McCall ran up the right-hand aisle. Both figures were gone. A gunshot echoed and a bullet splintered the wall an inch from McCall’s face. He ducked down as two more bullets struck a seat in front of him with resounding thuds. McCall waited. A third bullet would have come right away. It didn’t. The assailant was trying to get away.

  And maybe Emily was not being a model prisoner.

  In his mind’s eye McCall could see her struggling in the assailant’s grasp, kicking him, trying to rip at his face with her long black-tipped fingernails.

  McCall moved down a row of seats to the mezzanine center aisle, crouching down fast. There was no movement ahead of him, but there was sound.

  Something scraping.

  A window being pulled up.

  McCall ran up the aisle stairs to the narrow corridor at the back of the mezzanine. Two doors were there, one of them open. Beyond was a small office, the furniture and empty bookcases covered with dust and grime.

  The second-floor window was open.

  The assailant was dragging Emily out through it onto a wide plank on the scaffolding. She bit down into the assailant’s hand. He snarled and swung around, but McCall was through the open window by then. He grabbed Emily and thrust her behind him. In the same fluid movement he executed a front snap kick that sent the assailant reeling. It was raining steadily now, and the man slipped and fell hard on the plank.

  It caused Emily to stumble and fall.

  McCall whirled and grabbed her arm.

  Her body tumbled off the plank into the void.

  McCall held on to her with one hand. Her weight felt like it was going to wrench his arm right out of its socket. He knelt on the slippery plank, grabbed her with his other hand, and started to pull her up.

  In his peripheral vision he saw her assailant scrambling to his feet.

  Emily’s right hand slipped out of McCall’s left and she screamed.

  He caught her wrist again

  For two agonizing seconds Emily dangled over the concrete below.

  The assailant steadied himself, grabbed for the gun in his belt.

  McCall hauled Emily back up onto the scaffolding plank. He hurled her down behind him, turned, and kicked the gun out of the assailant’s hand. Then he barreled right into him. The assailant sailed off the scaffolding to the ground below. He hit the concrete with a sickening thud. It split part of his head open.

  McCall was drenched now. He turned carefully as the plank wobbled and saw Emily crawling back through the open window. He went after her, but an arm closed around his throat from behind and he was hauled backward.

  He’d recognized the first assailant on the scaffolding plank as one of the men who’d strolled casually down the steel staircase at the rave party. McCall jabbed an elbow into the second assailant’s kidney in three fast strikes, weakening the grip around his throat. He threw his thumbs back into the man’s face, plunging them into his eyes. He howled in rage.

  The hold around McCall’s throat came apart.

  McCall turned and executed a Shuto-uchi knife-hand strike to the assailant’s throat. He fell to his knees, his hands over his eyes. Blood seeped through his fingers. The man’s face was a horror mask. But he grabbed McCall’s left leg, trying to topple him off the unsteady plank.

  McCall picked him up and threw him off the scaffolding. He fell with a cry right beside his friend, twisted and broken, unmoving.

  McCall had felt the bulge of a gun in the second assailant’s pocket. He wondered fleetingly why the man hadn’t used it. Maybe he’d been told to take McCall alive. To find out what he knew about Blake Cunningham and his operation.

  Which was absolutely nothing.

  McCall looked down at the two dead men.

  On the steel staircase at the rave party there had been three of them.

  McCall ran back to the open office window. He slipped on the wet wooden plank and had to grab hold of the windowsill to stop himself from pitching out into the darkness to join the others. He steadied himself, then stepped through the open window.

  Emily was not inside the office.

  She wasn’t in the mezzanine.

  McCall ran down to the front row of the mezzanine and looked down into the orchestra seats. He couldn’t see her. He edged his way across one of the mezzanine rows to the right-hand aisle, ran down the staircase, and burst out into the main part of the theater. He took out his Glock 19, which he hadn’t had to use as yet, and ran up the center aisle. When he got to the corridor behind the orchestra seats, he saw that both of the River Café assailants were gone. He threw open the theater doors and ran through the lobby.

  Rain sheeted across the narrow boulevard outside. Both of the dead assailants were no longer lying under the scaffolding. McCall ran across the street. He pulled on the half-completed building’s side door, but it was locked from the inside. McCall pocketed the Glock and ran around to the back. The cacophony of sound was overpowering. They’d cranked up the decibel level of the music even higher. Perhaps there hadn’t been enough people whose ears were bleeding. McCall moved through the partygoers, looking for Emily. There was no sign of her. No sign of Blake Cunningham or any of his asshole cronies either. And no sign of the woman who had told McCall she was Emily’s mother, Laura Masden.

  McCall stopped, the lights and the people and the music all fusing into a violent mosaic in his mind. He felt completely impotent. The victim was gone, his client was gone, and the bad guys were gone.

  So much for his first case as the Equalizer.

  CHAPTER 4

  McCall sat at an outdoor table of the Starbucks on West Sixty-Fourth Street waiting for her to arrive. The memory of the rave party and the old Mercury Theater had been tumbling through his mind. The deaths of the two men below the scaffolding had never been reported. He had not heard again from the woman who had called herself Laura Masden—and maybe she was Laura Masden, and Emily had been lying. He had not heard from Emily. He had not run into Blake Cunningham, although he hadn’t gone out of his way to track him down at his Morgan Stanley office at Rockefeller Center. But the strongest memory of that night was Emily turning to McCall in her row G seat in the abandoned theater and whispering, “Thank you for saving me.”

  Except he hadn’t.

  McCall saw the two of them walking down Sixty-Fourth Street toward him. They might have looked like a strange couple if they hadn’t been in New York. The pale young woman was Candy Annie, in her midtwenties, with a stunning figure and red hair, which cascaded down onto her shoulders. She was wearing a sheer white blouse and a long beige diaphanous skirt and pink Reeboks. Sunlight shone through the blouse and skirt. McCall was relieved to see she was wearing underwear, not something she chose to do every day. She was wearing a Vans Realm backpack in a floral pattern, pretty roses all over it. She also carried a battered suitcase that looked like it might have survived the Titanic. On the sidewalk, pedestrians were listening to music on their headphones, texting on their smartphones, or just hustling to make their appointments. Candy Annie didn’t see any of it. She was completely focused on the Starbucks at the corner of Broadway and West Sixty-Fourth.

  Walking beside her was a tall, wafer-thin African-American dressed in black jeans, a torn NYU T-shirt, and brown workman’s boots. Somehow the old clothes didn’t take a sense of elegance away from his skeletal figure. A young guy in khaki pants and a blue blazer ran up to him and asked him something. McCall wondered whether the young guy thought the old black man might be Morgan Freeman. He’d been mistaken for him before. He shook his head, with an almost apologetic shrug, and kept on walking.

  Unlike his young female companion, Jackson T. Foozelman took in every detail o
f the busy streets on both sides of Broadway. He shook his head, as if still amazed by the kaleidoscope of humanity, the rush of the traffic, the colors, sights, and sounds.

  McCall stood up as they reached his Starbucks table. “You look radiant, Candy Annie.”

  “I’m scared to death,” she whispered.

  “But she’s here,” Jackson T. Foozelman said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day. She’s got everything she needs. Didn’t leave much behind. Well, you don’t go into the tunnels with much, you don’t leave them with much.”

  “What will happen to her living space?”

  “I already got it rented out to Gina. She’s a big I’ll-crush-you-with-these-boobs-when-I-hug-you kind of a gal. She’s got two small kids and has been waiting for the day Candy Annie moved out.”

  “She’s been living over in the Amtrak tunnel with the Mole People, and the kids were getting sick,” Candy Annie said. “It’s warmer at my place.”

  McCall could see Candy Annie’s place in his mind, a seventeen-foot niche in a subterranean tunnel. It had furniture, a couch and chairs, a bright patchwork Norman Rockwell quilt on her bed, a TV set circa the 1990s, with stacks of DVDs beside it, a working sink, a toilet, a small shower stall. It might have been a nicer apartment than most NYU students get, except for the location.

  “Did that guy in the blue blazer think you were Morgan Freeman?” McCall asked Fooz.

  He grinned. “Sure did. Usually I say yes and scrawl an autograph, but this was too momentous an occasion to dally with strangers.”

  McCall understood. Candy Annie had lived down in the subway tunnels below Manhattan since she was sixteen. She never talked about her parents, if they were still alive. She never talked about siblings. Her only friends were the Subs, the subterranean people who populated the miles of subway tunnels. Some areas were like corrugated parks, some with artificial turf laid down, all of it surreal, like the human race had been forced down into the sewers after a terrible apocalyptic war aboveground. But there was tranquillity down in the tunnels, and no one had to pay for rent or parking or go anywhere except to the Upworld on occasion for food and supplies.

  But it had been no place for a young woman with a keen mind and soaring spirit. McCall had started walking the tunnels with Jackson T. Foozelman a year before, usually discussing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. McCall had met Candy Annie and had been immediately impressed by her passion for living. He’d tried for months to persuade her to give up her life below the streets and come and live in the Upworld again. She had stubbornly refused. Then one night McCall had received a call on his Equalizer cell phone. He’d been surprised to hear Fooz’s voice.

  All he’d said was, “She’s ready.”

  McCall hadn’t been certain that Candy Annie would come. For some reason his mind had gone to his favorite scene in one of the original Star Trek movies, where, after Spock’s death, Kirk had said to the assembled crew of the Starship Enterprise, “Spock said there are always … possibilities.”

  Fooz gently took the old suitcase out of Candy Annie’s death grip and set it down beside the wrought-iron table. She shrugged off the backpack and dropped it to the ground. Now she looked across Broadway as if seeing it for the first time. A young man in a suit and tie roller-skated by and gave Candy Annie a wave.

  “Why did he wave at me?”

  “’Cause you’re a babe,” Fooz said. “Better get used to it.”

  Candy Annie looked at Robert McCall and shook her head. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  Fooz turned her around and held on to her arms with both of his thin, gnarled hands. “Sure, you can! You can do anything you damn well please, because this is the US of A. You’re going to make a success of living in the Upworld. I know it. So does Mr. McCall.”

  Candy Annie pulled out of the old black man’s grasp and turned to McCall. “Are you going to equalize my odds?” she asked in an almost ironic tone. “Fooz showed me your ad.”

  “He said the odds were against you. I said I’d do something about that.”

  “But can you really?”

  McCall thought about Emily and Blake Cunningham and the bogus Laura Masden. “I can try. Mostly it will be up to you.”

  Candy Annie nodded vigorously, as if her decision hadn’t been made until that very moment. Now the tears came fast as she turned back to Fooz.

  “I can never thank you enough for all you’ve done for me.”

  She hugged him fiercely. Fooz let her go and looked at her with damp eyes. His voice had a croaky rasp to it, but then, it did most of the time.

  “Take care of yourself.” He looked over at McCall. “Don’t send her back.”

  Fooz walked down Sixty-Fourth Street with a brisker stride. He crossed Broadway, and Candy Annie watched him disappear. Then she looked back at McCall.

  “I can’t sit here.”

  They walked into Central Park from the Sixty-Fifth Street entrance. Bicyclists whizzed by, tapping their bike bells; rollerbladers and skateboarders weaved in and out. There were joggers, young women and businessmen strolling with sandwiches and coffees from Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts and dogs being walked and kids being pushed in baby carriages and the hot dog and pretzel vendors on either side. Candy Annie looked around, not with trepidation now, but with a kind of excited wonder.

  McCall cut across a wide expanse of grass down to where the chess tables were. He knew that Granny would not be sitting at his usual table. One of the chess players that Granny beat a lot—which is to say Granny allowed him to win an occasional game to preserve the man’s self-esteem—waved McCall over. He was a big guy with a weather-beaten face, chiseled as if out of red sandstone, with close-cropped brown hair, wearing dark jeans, Adidas Solar Boost yellow-and-black running shoes, and a black Doctor Who T-shirt that said DON’T BLINK and had a picture of a stone statue on it. It meant nothing to McCall, but Candy Annie broke into a big smile.

  “Doctor Who!” she said to the chess player. “The Angels! They move when you blink. Scariest Doctor Who aliens ever. How do you like the current doctor? I loved Matt Smith, but this Scots guy is kind of cranky and terrific.”

  “I like him, too. My name’s Mike Gammon.”

  Candy Annie shook his outstretched hand. “Candy Annie.” He seemed surprised and she shrugged. “I like candy.”

  Gammon looked at McCall. “I haven’t seen Granny in a month. It’s not like him to miss our tournaments.”

  “He went out of town.”

  The big man slowly nodded, as if he understood.

  “My friend Annie is new to this neighborhood,” McCall said. “If she needed some help, and I’m not around, I had told her to come and find Granny.”

  “But now he’s not around.”

  “So I thought I’d introduce her to you.”

  “So I’d have her back?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I could be a bad guy.”

  “You’re not.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Granny likes you. He doesn’t like bad guys. He told me you’re an ex-cop.”

  “Homicide, Sixtieth Precinct, Brooklyn South.” He looked at Candy Annie and indicated the chessboard, whose pieces were Game of Thrones characters. “Know how to play?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m always up for a challenge.” Gammon glanced at McCall. “You get word on Granny, let me know, okay?”

  McCall nodded, and he and Candy Annie moved away from the chess tables. They walked through the trees in silence, then she said, “He was nice, but you will be here for me, won’t you, Mr. McCall? I don’t think I can do this without you.”

  “I’ll be here. Just creating options.”

  “Your friend ‘Granny’—he’s someone close to you?”

  “No one’s close to me.”

  “But he’s a friend?”

  “He can be.”

  “Tell me about your other friends.”

  “There aren’t any. But
I’m taking you to the apartment of a colleague. He’s as close to a friend as I’ll get.”

  * * *

  He watched them walk away from the chess tables through the magnifying lenses of the small pair of binoculars. He had picked them up at Manhattan Pawn on Rivington near Essex Street for five bucks. He’d told the proprietor he needed them for his lifesaving work and had got a discount. Close up, Robert McCall didn’t look imposing or threatening. Really kind of ordinary. Which was a little disappointing. But the babe with him was pretty hot.

  He lowered the glasses and smiled.

  Who knew the Equalizer had a sweet girlfriend?

  CHAPTER 5

  Kostmayer’s apartment was on the second floor of a four-story walk-up on Fifty-Fourth and Second Avenue. Kostmayer had given McCall a key and told him to think of it as an alternate safe house if he ever needed one. The front door opened into a small living room with a kitchenette. McCall was surprised to find the walls were all pale sandalwood. There was a couch and two armchairs in a Pueblo motif, a Navajo rug on the floor, and Frederic Remington paintings on the walls. A forty-inch flatscreen TV was on one wall, and two floor-to-ceiling bookcases were filled with paperbacks and big coffee-table-type books on the Southwest, along with some exquisite Indian pottery. Against another wall was a wooden ladder like the kind the Mexican soldiers climbed to get up onto the ramparts of the Alamo. It was as if Kostmayer had taken this furnished apartment from Taos, New Mexico, and transplanted it into a New York City brownstone. And he might have. McCall had no idea of Kostmayer’s background.

  The place was absolutely spotless.

  McCall set down Candy Annie’s backpack and battered suitcase.

  Candy Annie opened a door that led to a pale-oak bedroom, with an old-fashioned four-poster canopy bed, a chestnut Mission rocking chair, and a cedar oak dresser with more pottery and Indian crafts on top of it. Beside the bed was a red-tiled bathroom. McCall noted a framed Frederic Remington engraved image from Harper’s Weekly over the bed titled I Am Ready—I Will Go, with a scene of soldiers on a field, receiving orders. McCall thought it apropos. Mickey Kostmayer was ready and willing to go wherever he was ordered, and do what had to be done.