He took a sip of beer, wiped his mouth with the napkin, and grinned. “Hey, I have you. You give me faith, Arch, that there’s still beauty and goodness out there.”
Archer looked at him, then laughed. Gavin took her hand, kissed it lightly, and then motioned to the waiter to bring the check. “Hey,” he said, “let’s take Hadley for a walk before catching that movie, okay?”
“Great,” she said, standing up and leaving her glass half full. “I’m doing a job in New York in two days, so I’ll need to leave kind of early this afternoon—have to review the particulars when I get back.”
“No problem.”
* * *
They had had a lighthearted break, for the most part. Good food, good conversation, lots of laughter. It was so weirdly sad. Both of them had been parents; both had once been part of a couple, part of a family. Now she and Gavin were singles—unwilling, childless singles rattling around the world, clanking against each other, hoping to find something to fill the void until their own deaths. Did that mean they believed in God, in some concept of heaven? That they would see their loved ones someday bursting through St. Peter’s gate?
Archer shook her head at that one but was unwilling to reject the notion out of hand. Still, she didn’t want to count on God to carry out justice. She laughed ruefully at herself. She’d never been good at delegating, even to God, but it was the height of arrogance to think she and the Group could balance the scales better than God.
The Group—it had been her salvation, her god, for the past six years. She had thought long and hard before becoming involved—after all, it was hardly like joining the PTA or the Smith Alumnae Club. Though not an irreversible choice, it was certainly a life-altering one.
Outsiders would call them vigilantes—or worse—and Archer had long since stopped being defensive about it in her own mind. It had helped her to recover somewhat; indeed, it was the only thing that had helped. Not the Valium, not the Zoloft, not the shrinks, not even the group therapy. The Group alone had helped. After her first job, she had stopped cutting herself.
Still, Gavin was right. Katharine and Barry hadn’t been cured by Old Testament justice. Their losses hadn’t been lessened, or their burden lifted; they had self-destructed. Maybe she could find something else. Or could she?
CHAPTER 33
Archer had reviewed her instructions before leaving the cabin. She had the essentials memorized. The job was straightforward. She didn’t need a hotel room; she was driving down and back in a rental car and taking her equipment with her. She did take the precaution of a disguise, however. Even in New York, a hospitable domain, she could take no chances.
At ten a.m., she set out for Springfield, Massachusetts, to pick up a rental car. She left the Jeep at the cabin and got a ride to the bus station from Jenny, explaining that the Jeep needed new brakes and that she was meeting a friend for lunch in Springfield. If something happened to her, she didn’t want her car found at the bus station.
When Jenny dropped Archer off at the bus station in Lenox, she didn’t see Archer slip into the ladies’ room, and she certainly didn’t see her emerge as an attractive Eurasian woman with straight black hair, dark eyes by virtue of colored contact lenses, pale skin made paler with the help of ivory make-up, and clear red lipstick. She wore fashionably narrow black pants, high patent leather heels, and a black cotton long-sleeved T-shirt. A shiny silver necklace held a modern free-form medallion close to her neck.
In Springfield, under the name of Lily Takata of Burlington, Vermont, Archer rented a Ford Taurus from a Hertz agency next to the train station. She drove to New York, reviewing her assignment in her head. The specifics were as bad as any crime she’d ever heard of—actually worse than most.
Gerald Jerome had been arrested two years ago, along with his wife, Antoinette, for torturing their two adopted children, leaving one dead and the other severely retarded from chronic malnutrition and physical abuse. The Jeromes were upper-middle-class professionals; he was a criminal defense lawyer, and Antoinette had worked in an advertising agency.
The problem was that Antoinette, known to her friends as Toni, was the primary witness against her husband. She was implicated as a coconspirator but also clearly had suffered his abuse herself. The broken bones and the bruises on her legs and back all bore witness to her own victim status. However, Toni had hanged herself in her jail cell a year after the arrests. Once she was dead, Gerald pointed the finger at Toni, claiming it was all her doing—that he was at worst a passive participant and that Toni had been the evil mastermind.
While Toni had written a detailed statement before her death, detailing Gerald’s abuse of Lee, their little girl, Gerald’s lawyer had successfully suppressed the statement’s admissibility, arguing that he could not cross-examine a dead woman. He argued that Toni’s statement, now incapable of being properly challenged, was so prejudicial to Gerald’s right to a fair trial that it had to be thrown out. While corroborating evidence from neighbors and teachers noted Lee’s bruises, without Toni the other statements were only thin suggestions of wrongdoing, with little clear connection to Jerome. The meat of the case was gone, and with Lee and Toni both dead, so was the case. Without more evidence, the judge said he had no choice but to set Jerome free. Several days later, to great public outcry, he walked down the courthouse steps, a scowl on his pudgy face, but a free man all the same.
Archer had scouted the site a few weeks earlier and quickly concluded that her preferred long-distance shot was not in the cards this time. Gerald Jerome lived in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, with no yard, no public hallways, and no easy access except directly from the street. He worked in a high-security high-rise on Broadway with just one way in and out. There was no patio that he routinely lounged on; he took cabs from his front door, not subways; there was no vacant building nearby. This would have to be a close-up.
Archer studied the photo of Jerome one last time. At fifty-three years old, he was bald and clean-shaven, had large, bulging dark eyes, and was build like a fire hydrant. Archer smiled slightly to herself. Finally, Mr. Jerome would have the opportunity to pick on someone his own size.
* * *
Archer sat in Starbuck’s, nursing a cappuccino. Looking at her watch, she took the last swallow and headed out into the street, hoisting her duffel over her shoulder as a middle-aged couple strode past, arm in arm. Today she was an employee of United Parcel Services, still Eurasian but dressed in dark brown. Her other clothes were a few blocks away, in the trunk of the rental car.
Archer walked the two blocks to East Eighty-third Street, between Second and Third Avenues. It was quiet, pretty, and tree-lined. She strode down the sidewalk, passing Jerome’s brownstone on her left as she waited for a man in a Mercedes to pick up his dinner date at the next building over. When the Mercedes pulled away, she turned back and walked toward the Jerome brownstone, a small empty package under her arm. She climbed the steps, her heart speeding. Okay, focus, she reminded herself. It’s just another job. Think of those kids.
At the door, she glanced at the name plate: Gerald and Antoinette Jerome. She knocked heavily on the door. Within a second, a raspy voice called out.
“Who’s there?”
“UPS package for Gerald Jerome.”
“Leave it at the door. I’m just out of the shower.”
“Sorry, can’t do that, sir. I need a signature.”
The voice turned nasty. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, all right. I’ll be right there.”
Archer set the empty package aside and waited a moment. Then, as she heard the lock on the door click, she coiled, ready to spring. As soon as the door cracked, she cocked her leg and thrust with all her might, slamming the door’s edge into Jerome’s forehead. His eyes opened wide, and he gazed at Archer for a split second, total understanding in his eyes, before teetering crazily back on his heels. He careened backward, slamming into a wall, then bounced forward. With effort, he steadied himself.
Archer then made a fatal
mistake. She looked at Jerome, one hand in the pocket of his white terry robe, bulging eyes wild. She hesitated for just an instant, but it was all the time he needed. Lurching forward, he pulled a small handgun from his robe pocket and fired twice. At the same instant, Archer dove to the floor in an aikido roll, which turned her around to face him. A quarter second later, she had taken a two-handed aim and fired one shot back, into the center of his forehead.
Jerome wavered for a moment, grabbed the end of a table, overturning it, and toppled heavily forward. He grunted, then was still. Archer allowed herself perhaps a second to rest, then moved to her knees, crawling to him, knowing he was dead but needing to be certain. She reached for his wrist, turned it over, and felt for a pulse. Nothing. She pressed a finger to his neck. No pulse.
Then, for the first time, she was aware of the pain in her side, and the growing maroon stain on the brown UPS shirt. She had been hit by at least one of Jerome’s bullets. Okay, focus, she commanded herself, already feeling her strength begin to ebb. She looked around the room. If she were going to die, it wasn’t going to be in this place of perversion, where children had been fodder for a monster’s sick fantasies. God damn it, get up! She righted herself unsteadily, feeling faint, and grabbed the back of the sofa to lean on. She had to get out of here with some passing resemblance to a UPS delivery person.
She could hear neighbors’ voices and doors opening. She had a suppressor on her gun, but Jerome hadn’t—the sound must have carried to every apartment in the building.
Archer scanned the room . . . no prints—she still had her gloves on. No hairs—the wig took care of that. No hand-to-hand struggle, so nothing of her under Jerome’s nails. Blood? She inspected the room at a glance. Only Jerome’s—hers was confined to shirt and glove. She had to move now. Stumbling to the door, she turned the knob, nudged her head out, and looked both ways. She took a tentative step. A few people were beginning to poke out of doors and windows. It took every ounce of her strength to straighten, stand tall, and move out the front door, doing her level best to assume a normal gait.
Grasping the handrail, Archer edged down the steps and onto the sidewalk. She steadied herself, turned right at the sidewalk, and walked stiffly toward Third Avenue, holding herself together by a thread. At the first opportunity, she staggered into an alley. It was narrow, barely wide enough for a car to pass, and dark. Doubled over, she stumbled as far back as she could into the darkness. As she moved, she peeled off the gloves, tore them to bits, and scattered them while lurching deeper into the gloom.
Archer knew she should keep moving—get as far from this crime scene as she could, move back up to Lexington Avenue, and get to her car—but she didn’t have the will. It was that simple. She had reached empty. Instead, she limped to a deep doorway, where she finally was free to tumble to her knees, then eased down onto her side, which was steadily seeping blood. She was having trouble getting her breath. A fatal bullet wound, she knew—just a matter of time now.
She ran down her checklist again. No ID on her. The rental car was in the name of Lily Takata. Dead-end trail there. Her personal car was safely at home. No hotel room to trace. Her revolver had no serial number and was untraceable. All cul-de-sacs. They would eventually discover she was Archer Loh, but nothing would tie her to the Group. It would remain in the clear, its identity safe.
As Archer slumped over to the ground, any pretense at normality gone, she thought she saw a figure in dark blue approach from the street at a walk, then break into a run, and finally stoop beside her. A cool hand gently brushed her brow. It was over for her, she knew, vaguely amused at the cosmic humor—a target enabling her to fulfill her preferred destiny.
Just before she lost consciousness, Archer thought, Thank God . . . at last. Merciful God, at last, at last. My turn.
* * *
The NYPD arrived at the scene within seconds. The assistant chief of police, Charlie Caruso, had been heading to a testimonial for a retiring captain when the call came in. Charlie was a popular veteran with twenty-five years on the force, still handsome with black curly hair and pale blue eyes, a born and bred New Yorker from the lower West Side. His car was a block away from the crime scene.
“Hey, Jimmy,” he said, “I haven’t been to an actual crime scene in over a year. Let’s go take a look and show ’em how it’s done.”
“Sure thing, boss.” Jimmy put on the lights, hitting the siren and the gas. Within a minute, they were on East Eighty-third, pulling up in front of the brownstone. It was chaos, with the street blocked off at both ends, with police cruisers and an ambulance crowding the curb. The paramedics were already inside the brownstone, checking the condition of the victim. Neighbors milled about in the street, chatting on the sidewalk: young women with crying babies; men with their hands in their pockets, chatting in low tones; old women clucking and shaking their heads.
One cop called to the crowd in general, “Anyone see a woman leaving this building?”
“Yeah!” yelled an old man leaning on a cane and gesturing in the opposite direction from where Archer had gone. “She went that way.” He then turned to the woman standing next to him. “Whoever killed him should get a goddamn medal. I hope they never catch her.” He crossed himself. “She’s a goddamned hero in my book.”
The woman nodded grimly and said, “I just hope the sick bastard did know what hit him. Anything less is too good for him.”
Assistant Chief Charlie Caruso surveyed the scene for a moment. He knew this building for some reason. He checked the address on his car computer and then understood why. Within seconds, he knew that the house belonged to Gerald Jerome, the scumbag child abuser who got off scot-free after killing his daughter and turning his son into a traumatized, severely retarded ward of the state. Not just killing his daughter, Charlie recalled. She had been beaten daily for years, tied to a chair for four days once for spilling her milk, burned with cigarettes on her arms and back, left on the kitchen floor with broken bones while Jerome went out for dinner, and finally was found dead after one beating too many. Poor little Lee Jerome. And the little boy hadn’t fared much better. Charlie had heard that the poor kid was institutionalized, with a kidney that no longer worked after repeated kicks to the back, and emotional problems.
Suddenly, Charlie blinked, remembering the confidential message on his personal e-mail last night.
“Hey, Charlie, want me to start scouting the neighborhood for the perp?” asked one of the patrolmen, leaning into the car and interrupting his train of thought. “Lady over there seems to think an Asian woman working for UPS ran out of the building around the time shots were heard.”
Charlie looked up, then shook his head. “No. Thanks, Scott, but I think I’ll take a look around myself. You go in and see if there’s any evidence in there. Forensics should be along any minute.” He didn’t add his customary warning not to touch anything.
“Okay, boss.” The officer turned and headed back to the brownstone.
Charlie stepped out of the squad car, looked right, then left, and headed down the street, flashlight in hand. He noted the three squad cars lining the street, lights flashing. At least three more were on the way. Soon Jerome’s apartment and the quiet East Side neighborhood would be crawling with black-and-whites.
Charlie strolled west up East Eighty-third. When he came to an alley, he hesitated, then continued past it, then stepped back and peered into the dusky gloom. He thought he saw a faint shadow near the back of the alley. Drawing his pistol, he headed down the narrow way.
He found her at the alley’s dead end—a woman bleeding heavily from her side, apparently from a close-range gunshot wound. Charlie shoved the gun in his shoulder holster, then stooped, and felt her pulse. Dead, he thought at first . . . but no, there was a faint heartbeat. He rummaged through her pockets. No ID, no wallet. Nothing. She sure as hell had on a brown UPS uniform, though.
He studied the face more closely. She looked Asian, but that could be the eye makeup. As he lifted her bo
dy to check for other wounds, the black wig slid, revealing a beige skullcap. He recalled the e-mail again, and finally it added up.
He whipped out his cell phone and speed-dialed a number.
“Gavin? Charlie Caruso here. You have an operative on the East Side tonight?”
“Yeah, I do. One of my best.”
Pause. “Well, I think I have her. She’s been hit, Gavin—hit really bad—and this place is swarming. She was seen, and someone may be able to ID her.”
There was silence for a moment; then Gavin said, “You’ve got to move her, Charlie. You’ve got to get her out of there. She can’t be taken, not this one. And she can’t die.” Gavin took a breath, then continued more slowly, “Please, Charlie, I can’t lose her. Not this one. I . . . can’t lose her. . . . Okay, here’s what I’d like you to do . . .”
He gave Charlie a contact phone number, which Charlie wrote down on a pad and pen pulled from his inner coat pocket.
“Charlie, she’s really special. I . . . I can’t do without her,” Gavin said simply.
“I’ll say, she’s special. She eliminated this town’s number one slimeball and got out of there with a slug—maybe—two, in her, to boot. By rights, she should be dead on the floor next to Jerome. . . . I’ll do everything I can, but I gotta be honest. This is a bad hit. Really bad. I’ll keep you posted.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Gavin. I really am.”
Charlie hung up and dialed another number. “This is Assistant Chief Caruso. I need an ambulance at East Eighty-third yesterday. Gunshot wound. This one has to go to Columbia-Presbyterian.”
“Mount Sinai’s closer, Chief.”
“Well, thank you so much for the geography lesson—me being new in town and all. I know where Mt. Sinai is and where a Hundred and Sixty-eighth is. And I still want Columbia-Presbyterian—you hearin’ me okay?” Charlie gave her the number of the building next to the alley.
Tell Me When It Hurts Page 22
