Lucy’s nape prickled. “How did you get hurt?” she asked Keith. “You said you were fixing some—”
Keith shushed her and reached between the front seats to turn up the volume. The weather report was winding down. Fifty-seven degrees in Central Park. Scattered showers north and west of the city.
“Here we are.” She spied a blue hospital sign directing her to turn right at the next major intersection, which she did.
Mick settled a little closer to Lucy, letting his arm drape the back of her seat. She tensed and was about to ask him to move it when his cell phone rang. As he pulled it out of his pocket, Keith said, “Don’t answer it.”
Lucy swallowed hard. Something was wrong. She’d drop them off at the ER and make an excuse to get away.
“Who is it?” Keith leaned forward to peer at the display on Mick’s phone, which announced the caller.
“My mom.”
“Where’s she calling from? Her mobile?”
“The house,” Mick said.
“Shit.” Keith flopped back against the seat. “Let her leave a message.”
What was that about? Keith didn’t even know Will’s sister. “It should be around here somewhere,” she said.
“What?” Mick asked.
She glanced at him. No, she did not like the way he was looking at her. “The hospital?”
He tossed a smirk over his shoulder. “Hear that, Hal? We’re almost at the hospital.”
Lucy’s hands tightened on the wheel. “Why did you call him Hal?”
Keith’s breath was hot on her neck. “‘Cause it gives me the creeps when he calls me dad.”
Lucy willed her voice not to wobble. “What’s going on, guys?” The hospital complex loomed on the left—at last. Lucy put on her blinker and started to edge into the turning lane.
“Changed our minds.” Mick tugged the wheel to keep them on course.
“What are you doing?”
“Where do you live?” Keith—or Hal—asked.
“Why?”
“That’s where we’re going,” he said. “To your place.”
“No.” Lucy started looking for an opportunity to turn around. “I don’t know what game you two are playing, but I want no part of it.”
“Maybe not yet.” This time Mick not only placed his arm on her seatback, he actually fondled her hair. “But you will. We’re going to have some fun.”
“Get your hands off me.” She tried to jerk her head away. Mick laughed and yanked her back by the hair.
“Take it easy,” Hal told Mick. “We don’t need a fender-bender.” He tapped Lucy’s neck with something, something hard and cold. She flicked a glance at it, and every last scrap of air left her lungs. A gun. He lowered it, and she knew it was aimed at her back through the car seat. With his other hand he emptied her purse on the seat beside him and rummaged through the contents. “Here we go.” He read from her driver’s license. “Narby, Lucille M. Three Gloria Court, Crystal Harbor, N-Y.” He whistled. “Nice neighborhood. You rich?”
He didn’t seem to expect an answer, which was just as well. Lucy couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, as she struggled to make sense of what was happening. The last time she’d been this scared, it had turned out to be an elaborate practical joke. Mick’s fingers slid down her side and over her khaki-clad thigh, which he squeezed.
No. Will would never subject her to this kind of “joke.” She’d gone to his place to share her exciting news with him and Tom. In truth, if she hadn’t had a legitimate excuse to see Will again, she’d have made one up. She couldn’t leave things as they were, not after that frustrating encounter in her basement.
“Why don’t you tell me what you want?” she asked Hal. “Maybe I can help you and then we can . . . we can put this behind us. Will doesn’t have to hear about it.”
She flinched as Hal lunged forward, cranking up the volume on the radio even more. “—about an hour ago at the Grove Street Park in Soundhaven. No report yet on the condition of the victim, whom police have identified as Wesley McIntyre, a private detect—”
“Who?” Mick frowned. “That’s not the guy’s—”
“Shut up.” Hal whacked the back of Mick’s head.
“—arrest has been made in the case,” the radio announcer continued. “The suspect, thirty-four-year-old Wilbur Kitchen, was apprehended at the scene after a neighbor reported suspicious activity—”
Mick hooted in delight. “How’s it feel, motherfucker!” he yelled at the radio. “That’ll teach you to fuck with m— Ow!” He grabbed the back of his head, casting a baleful look over his shoulder.
“Think, idiot.” Hal kicked the back of Mick’s seat. “How’s Kitchen supposed to get me my two mil if he’s locked up?”
“Our two mil.” Mick rubbed his head. “Stop doing that.”
Lucy drove on autopilot, staring numbly through the windshield. Wilbur Kitchen. Arrested at the scene. Victim’s condition unknown. It wasn’t possible. She knew Will. She’d almost slept with Will. Lucy Narby did not almost sleep with men who shot people.
And what was this about two million dollars?
Hal told Mick to turn off the radio. “Did she leave a message?”
“Who?”
“Your mother. Who do you think?”
“Oh.” Mick checked the display on his phone. “Yeah.”
“Play it. Put it on speaker.” Hal leaned forward to listen as Mick tapped buttons. “Mick, it’s me,” Will’s sister said. “I’m home. Call me when you get this message. Call me on my cell. What?” A pause, an indistinct male voice in the background.
“Fergus,” Mick said. Hal nodded.
“Maybe he’s at Will’s,” Judith told Fergus. “I asked him to keep an eye out there, remember? Mick, listen, it’s really important that you call me. I need to talk to you. I need to know you’re safe.”
Mick snorted his derision.
Judith’s shaky voice got shakier. “That man I told you about. Hal Lynch. He’s dangerous, like I said. What I didn’t tell you . . . he just got out of jail. For murder.”
Lucy’s throat constricted. She forced herself to concentrate on the traffic.
“Hal’s trying to locate some money,” Judith continued. “A lot of money that kind of . . . got misplaced a long time ago.”
Mick hooted in laughter. “‘Misplaced.’”
“Shut up,” Hal growled.
“He’ll do anything to get it,” Judith said. “Please, please don’t try to deal with him yourself. Just . . . call me, okay, honey? I’m going to Will’s now, but my cell will be on.”
______
“WHO DID THIS to you?” Judith tore the duct tape off Ming-hua’s mouth. The old woman didn’t so much as blink. A rapid-fire string of Mandarin issued forth, punctuated by “Cousin Keith!” hurled like an epithet.
“Who?” Judith turned to Fergus, busy slicing the tape that bound Ming-hua to the chair. He shrugged. Neither of them had ever heard of a cousin named Keith.
“Keith Kitchen. He bad sheep.” Ming-hua eased her cranky bones off the seat, then bent to check on Quint, who hunkered under the chair, preening his feathers and muttering to himself. She coaxed him out with a licorice whip, turning to wag her finger at Judith. “Your boy, too. Bad sheep. Two bad sheep find each other, they many times bad.”
Judith had expected the worst when she’d seen the mayhem where Will’s costume racks once stood, though that was nothing compared to her own home where they’d gone first, looking for Mick. If she weren’t so accustomed to her son’s slovenly habits, she’d have thought that was the crime scene.
Fergus jerked his thumb toward the man standing under the ceiling chain. “Who’s this bloke, then?”
“Dave.” Ming-hua dismissed Dave with a flip of her gnarled hand. “He no like Chinese come to U.S.”
“Dave’s a paying customer?”
Ming-hua nodded. She placed her hands on the small of her back and unkinked her spine. “Schmuck pay five thousand dollar cash.”<
br />
Fergus peeled the tape from Dave’s mouth. “Is it everything you’d hoped for and more?”
“Absolutely!” Dave’s grin was ecstatic. “You’re Irish, aren’t you? Lazy, drunken parasites, the Ir—”
Fergus replaced the tape and gently patted it in place. “Hold that thought, Dave.”
Judith touched Ming-hua’s shoulder. “What did you mean, two bad sheep finding each other? Is Mick mixed up with this Keith?”
“Do it, Mick!” Quint squawked. “Shoot the fucking bird!”
“I’m goin’ to call that a yes.” Fergus lifted Quint to his shoulder as Ming-hua confirmed Judith’s son was indeed mixed up with Cousin Keith. Fergus sent Judith a look that asked if she was thinking the same thing he was.
With growing dread she asked Ming-hua, “What does he look like? This Keith? Is he . . . How old is he?”
“Young, very young,” Ming-hua said, and Judith began to sigh in relief until the old woman added, “Like you. Forty-five, fifty. Blond hair.” She gestured toward her temple. “Some gray.”
Fergus put his arm around Judith just then, as if he sensed how close her legs were to buckling. “What color are his eyes?” he asked.
“Brown. Light brown.”
Hope stirred anew. Judith turned to Fergus. “Hal’s eyes are gray. Like Mick’s.”
“Who Hal?” Ming-hua asked.
“We think this fella who calls himself Keith may be pretending to be Will’s cousin,” Fergus explained. “We think he may be someone Judith used to know, someone named Hal.” To Judith he said, “Eye color can be disguised nowadays.”
“No.” Ming-hua gave a decisive head-shake. “Keith family. From Seattle. He look the same. Eyes, mouth, the same.”
“Keith looks like Will?” Judith asked.
“No, not Will,” Ming-hua said. “He look like Mick.”
Judith couldn’t say how she ended up on the chair recently vacated by Ming-hua, with her head between her knees. She heard Fergus speaking to her, felt his big hands on her head, her shoulder. She tried to rise; the room tilted sickeningly.
“Easy, lass.” Fergus kept her pinned to the chair. “Give yourself a minute—”
“There’s no time.” She tried to throw off his hands. “Fergus, there’s no time. Hal has my boy. That animal . . . Oh God.” She cradled her head in her palms. “He knows. They both know.” How could this have happened? How could any parole board have liberated a psycho like Hal Lynch?
Fergus pulled out his phone.
“Who are you calling?” Judith asked.
“The police. Who else?”
Chapter 27
“BEEN A WHILE, McIntyre. Still a homo?”
Wesley, flat on his back on an emergency room gurney, squinted up at his visitor. Eight years evaporated in a heartbeat. “Hey there, Paulie. Still an asshole?”
A machine over Wesley’s head dinged every few seconds. Behind the privacy curtain on the left, an elderly woman moaned and raved nonstop. From the right came cursing, some soft weeping—a teenage dog-bite victim, from what Wesley had overheard in the hour or so he’d been there. Hospital sounds, hospital smells. It sucked, but what were you gonna do?
“I thought you were dead.” Paul Cullen looked around the minuscule ER stall as if expecting a La-Z-Boy to materialize. “Figured the AIDS woulda got you by now.”
“It did. Can’t you tell? I’m wasting away.” Wesley patted the mound of belly fat under the thin hospital johnny. The last time Wesley had seen Cullen, they’d both been street cops in the 114th precinct. Now here was the smug SOB all these years later with a Nassau County detective’s shield clipped to his suit jacket. “You the lead on this case or is this some new aversion therapy for homophobia?”
“Here’s how I see it.” Cullen stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, rattling his change. “You and this other fag hit it off, you tell him to join you there behind the band shell at the park. Lover boy shows up—only problem, he’s not there to blow a pitiful tub of lard like you. Bang bang.”
“Your powers of deduction amaze and thrill, Detective.” Wesley wanted to laugh, but it would hurt like hell, so instead he asked the obvious. “If that’s how it went down, why didn’t lover boy liberate my wallet?”
“’Cause our guys showed up before he could.”
“Why the vest?” Wesley tapped his chest. “What, the smell of Kevlar gets me off?”
A hint of uncertainty crept into Cullen’s meatloaf of a face, but he was all bluster. “I were you, I’d wear a fucking suit of armor to go trolling those gay bars.”
“Think you can stop fixating on the queer thing for a moment? Nah, probably not. You never could.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Wesley shrugged—a mistake. It felt like a hot knife in his chest, even with the painkillers dripping into his IV. “As if you didn’t know. I’m talking about your personal crusade to de-queer the department. All that time and energy devoted to snooping into my private life. Harassing me. Outing me. Turning the CO against me. Turning my partner against me.”
Cullen crossed his arms over his chest. “Guys on the job gotta be able to trust their backup.”
“Backup? You got some nerve, my friend, talking about backup.” Wesley tried to lever himself up—another mistake. He collapsed with a grunt of pain. “Where was my backup when that domestic went bad in Jackson Heights? I almost bought it in that rat-hole ‘cause I thought Jimmy had my back. I didn’t know the rules were different for queers. Is it still that way, Paulie? You still setting up any guy that doesn’t pass your sexual-orientation test?”
“Nobody set you up.”
“No? What do you call it when you wait till a fellow cop’s in a tight spot and make sure his call for backup goes unanswered?”
Cullen’s neck turned an unbecoming shade of purple, but he managed to hold Wesley’s stare. “The police force isn’t for everybody, McIntyre. Someone shoulda clued you in before you entered the academy.”
“Yeah, well, better late than never, right?” Wesley could never prove he’d been targeted by his brothers in blue. He could fight the bad guys on the streets or the bad guys on the force, but he couldn’t fight both. He walked away with a partial pension and a nine-millimeter slug lodged between the major blood vessels in his neck, meaning it was his for the duration; the docs couldn’t remove it without killing him.
“So that didn’t work with Tina, I guess,” Wesley said. “That cluing-in thing.”
Cullen’s glower hardened. “Who’s been talking about my daughter? What did you hear?”
“She was a cute kid. And smart. I liked Tina, the one or two times we met. Her mom, too. Say hi for me, will ya?”
That purplish color had spread up Cullen’s throat and turned his cheeks into big, overripe plums. Well, if he stroked out, he was in the right place. He took a menacing step toward Wesley. “I said, where’d you hear that about Tina? It’s not true.”
“Paulie, come on, I coulda told you when she was twelve. And anyway, you of all people should know how word gets around.”
The detective shoved a stubby finger in Wesley’s face. “I find out you’re spreading lies about—”
“Hey, I don’t gossip.” Wesley spread his palms. “Not about folks’ sex lives.” He wasn’t the one snickering behind Cullen’s back, calling his little girl a buzz-cut drag king and worse. “Do the ballistics match?”
“Huh?” Cullen’s simple mind struggled with the change of subject.
“The perp’s gun and the slug from my vest.” Wesley enunciated slowly, “Do they match up?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Have you checked?”
“You telling me how to do my job now?” Cullen sneered. “Guy was standing over you holding the weapon, for cryin’ out loud.”
“Don’t take any shortcuts is all I’m saying. Do it by the book. This is a bad man, Paulie. If he walks on a technicality—”
“Don’t get your knickers in a
twist. He’s not going anywhere.”
“Who are we talking about?” Joe appeared at the foot of the bed, clutching a box of Krispy Kremes. “Who’s not going anywhere? Besides you.” He jiggled Wesley’s big toe through the blanket. “Don’t scratch that,” he added as Wesley’s fingers drifted to the Band-Aid in front of his left ear. He still wasn’t sure how he’d gotten the small cut; must’ve happened when he fell.
Joe had driven into Oceanside to let Wesley’s folks know what had happened before they heard it on the radio. This was not a chore that could be done by phone. Wesley’s mother would be beside herself. To her, a hangnail was a crippling disability.
“Before you ask,” Joe said, “your mom will survive. Your dad and I talked her down from the ledge and fed her a couple of Xanax. Eight chocolate and four original glazed.” He plunked the doughnut box on the rolling table. “And only ’cause you’re so pathetic lying there all helpless. Enjoy them, ‘cause the instant you’re on your feet again, it’s Weight Watchers for you.” He raised a palm, as if Wesley were in any condition to object. “I already paid for the first ten weeks, so don’t even start. You look familiar.” Joe swung toward Cullen, who flinched and mumbled his name. “Oh! I know where we met.” He gave the detective’s shield a playful pat. “You’re one of Wesley’s friends from the force.” He squeezed Cullen’s hand between both of his. “It is so good of you to show your support at a time like this.”
Cullen grunted something unintelligible, his gaze shifting uncomfortably from Joe to Wesley to the box of doughnuts.
“Help yourself.” Joe opened the box. “God knows Wesley doesn’t need them all.”
Wesley couldn’t imagine eating even one, the way he was hurting. Maybe he should get shot in the chest on a regular basis. The .45-Caliber Diet.
Cullen backpedaled. “No, no, it’s okay—”
“Oh, will you pu-leeeze?” Joe thrust an original glazed at the detective, who had no choice but to accept it with muttered thanks. “A cop turning down a doughnut. Tell me another one.”
“You don’t have to be nice to Paulie,” Wesley said. “He just came here to gloat.”
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