The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  They were a few minutes late, so McCall chose a row near the back. Up on the stage was the Glee Club of Scott’s high school, at least forty of them, a full orchestra. All of them were dressed formally, the boys in tuxes, the girls in long elegant gowns. Scott was one of six violinists in the second row. The auditorium was packed with parents and friends and teachers. McCall noted Cassie and Tom Blake in the third row. Candy Annie settled into the seat next to McCall and grabbed his hand. Hers were trembling.

  “So many people,” she whispered.

  “None of them are here to hurt you, Annie,” McCall said softly.

  “I know that. It’s just … I don’t see anyone for days, unless it’s Fooz dropping by to check up on me.” She looked at McCall with shining eyes. “You’re my only visitor from the upworld. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to seeing you.”

  “You know what would be better?” McCall’s tone was gentle. “You living here in the upworld. You’ve got a job. We meet for a coffee at Starbucks and you tell me all about your week.”

  “Too scary.”

  “You’re here. No hyperventilation. No panic attacks.”

  “I’m loving it,” she whispered.

  “All it takes is time, Annie.”

  She nodded, as if this was a revelation.

  The lights went down and the audience quieted and the performance began.

  The high school orchestra played Broadway show tunes. They started off with old favorites, from Damn Yankees, Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma!, Fiddler on the Roof, Annie, and went on to A Chorus Line, Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, Rent, and The Lion King. Scott and the six violinists did their thing. McCall felt a sense of pride he hadn’t experienced in a very long time. His son did not stand out from the others in the orchestra, but he didn’t need to.

  McCall thought he played a hell of a fiddle.

  The performance lasted seventy minutes without an intermission and at the end the orchestra was given a standing ovation by the audience. McCall and Candy Annie were on their feet applauding with everyone else. The high school students bowed and curtseyed. McCall noted that Scott was looking around the auditorium. Finally he spotted McCall at the back and his face broke into a smile. He made eye contact and nodded. McCall nodded back.

  In the third row, Cassie turned and saw McCall standing in the second-to-last row. She looked a little startled to see Candy Annie beside him, probably because she was so young. Cassie regarded him coolly, but it was clear she was glad he had made the effort to be there. Beside her, Tom Blake looked back to see what had caught her attention. She turned him back and shook her head and they both continued to applaud their son. The audience sat down and the student orchestra did an encore of numbers from Wicked. Then there was another standing ovation and the performance was over.

  McCall wanted to get out of there quickly. He didn’t want a confrontation with Cassie and her husband that would make Candy Annie uncomfortable. He’d have liked to congratulate Scott, but it was enough that his son knew he had been there.

  McCall and Candy Annie walked back up Broadway to Dante Park. Fooz was waiting for them on Broadway in front of the Dante Alighieri statue. Candy Annie grabbed his hands.

  “Fooz! Wait till I tell you about it! It was fantastic! I have to change. You guys make a screen around me.”

  She took a Puma bag from Fooz and darted back behind the big DANTE PARK sign. McCall stood on one side of her and Fooz on the other. Candy Annie grabbed clothes out of the Puma bag, stepped out of her dress, and slipped off her Prada shoes. She pulled on her jeans, dropped a sweatshirt over her head, stepped into her pink Reeboks, and laced them up. She put the folded dress and the shoes carefully into the Puma bag and handed it to Fooz.

  “We need to go,” he said.

  He walked away and waited for her.

  “I have your envelope of money,” Candy Annie said to McCall. “I want to give it back to you.”

  “Keep it. You’ll need it when you come back to the upworld. We’ll find you a nice apartment. Walk through Central Park. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “I will consider it,” she whispered.

  She kissed him on the lips and took Fooz’s hand. They walked quickly up West Sixty-third Street toward Columbus Avenue, Candy Annie talking nonstop about the music and the performance. McCall thought of her descending back down into the subterranean passageways and returning to her half-tunnel home. He felt a pang of despair. But there was hope for her. He believed he could coax her back up into the real world.

  But am I doing the right thing for her?

  The real world had claimed the lives of the two women McCall had truly loved.

  * * *

  He watched McCall walk away from the old black man and the young bitch and followed him.

  CHAPTER 52

  McCall sat down for dinner at his usual table in Luigi’s. He’d picked up his Frontier Peacemaker at Moses’s place and had the shopping bag on the floor beside him at the table. Jenny came over. She seemed very happy to see him again. She told him it made all the servers anxious when he stayed away for several nights in a row.

  “We like it when we see you come in,” she said in her thick Brooklyn accent. “The world hasn’t stopped turning. So, fusilli with zuccini and herbs and a glass of Schiopetto Rivarossa?”

  “I wouldn’t want to disappoint you,” McCall said.

  “Just give yourself the chance one night,” she said, and winked and glanced over to make sure Luigi, who was at the hostess station, hadn’t seen her being so saucy and moved off.

  McCall ate his fusilli with zuccini and herbs and drank two glasses of the Schiopetto Rivarossa. He thought about his future. He knew what he was going to do. He turned over various scenarios in his mind as to the best way to accomplish his goal. He paid for his meal with cash, adding a generous tip, picked up the Antiques & Collectibles shopping bag, and walked to the front. He glanced into the big alcove on his right. There was another boisterous group at the long table, all young men, most of them in suits, eating pasta and laughing and telling stories and drinking Pinot Grigio.

  But they weren’t, McCall thought ironically, the guys from Dolls.

  Luigi handed him his coat.

  “Mr. McCall! The fusilli was good?”

  McCall shrugged on the coat.

  “Superb, as always.”

  “Excellent. Cold out. They’re forecasting more rain. There are dangers in the streets. So…”

  “I’ll be careful out there.”

  “Yes! We will see you tomorrow night? Molto bene. Be well.”

  He shook McCall’s hand and McCall walked out into the night.

  He stopped at the Vietnamese mom-and-pop grocery store on the corner and bought milk, eggs, a loaf of whole-wheat bread, a jar of Maxwell House coffee, and a 12-pack of Diet Pepsi. He bagged them himself. The old Asian woman shook her head.

  “You not let me work.”

  “You deserve to rest,” McCall said.

  Another ritual. He was glad it didn’t change.

  The old Asian man sat watching a Canadian hockey game on a small TV on a shelf above the main counter. Montreal Canadiens against the Vancouver Canucks. The sound was low. The Habs were up four to three in the second period.

  “You honor us with your business, Mr. McCall,” he said.

  “The honor is mine.”

  The old man did not take his eyes from the screen.

  “The young hoodlums who come by for their protection money every week. We don’t see them anymore. I was wrong. We did need your help.”

  That was all he said. The Habs just missed making it five to three. The Canucks goalie had made a spectacular save. The old Vietnamese man gave him a round of applause.

  McCall walked the three blocks down Grand and turned onto Crosby Street. He looked up at the windows of his third-floor apartment. Nothing moved in them.

  He climbed the stairs to the third floor, turned his key in the lock, and nudg
ed the door open. The apartment was dark and silent. He kicked the front door shut, moved into the kitchen, and dropped the grocery bag on the counter. Moonlight hazed in through the small window. He didn’t bother to turn on the kitchen light.

  He walked through the archway into the darkened living room. He clicked on the Tiffany lamp in the bookshelves. It cast a soft glow across the couch and low coffee table.

  McCall sat down on the couch, took the redwood case out of the Antiques & Collectibles shopping bag, and set it on the coffee table. He lifted the lid and removed the Colt Model P Peacemaker Single-Action Cavalry Standard revolver from the case. He tilted it in the rosy light. Acid-etched on the barrel on the left side was: COLT FRONTIER SIX-SHOOTER.

  He turned the Colt over.

  Read what was etched along the other side of the barrel.

  Daudov was like a shadow detaching itself from the other shadows behind him.

  He attacked from out of the darkness.

  McCall hadn’t heard a thing.

  Daudov looped a cheese cutter around McCall’s throat and yanked back on it. The wire bit into McCall’s flesh, blood running hot down his throat.

  He was taken completely by surprise.

  It would be over in two seconds.

  There are forty-four forbidden cavity strikes in White Crane karate. One of them was the Hichu point, in the center in the hollow of the neck, at the jugular arch and the branch of the inferior thyroid artery. The human body was never designed to take a traumatic strike and the neck was the most vulnerable part of it. McCall struck upward with the fingers of his right hand bunched together in a single blow of strong chi force. It suppressed Daudov’s windpipe and momentarily stopped his breath. He gagged, stunned. The strangling hold on McCall’s throat loosened.

  McCall thrust both his thumbs back up into Daudov’s eyes.

  The strangling hold relaxed a little more.

  McCall grabbed the killer’s lapels and hurled him forward over the couch. He hit the coffee table, sending it and everything on it to the floor. The bowl of M&M’s didn’t smash, but the candies went flying in all directions.

  Daudov jumped to his feet, pulling a Taurus 740 G2 Slim pistol from his black leather coat pocket. McCall kicked it out of his hand. It flew through the air, scattering the Alamo defenders and Mexican soldiers on the chess table and fell behind it.

  Daudov didn’t see where it went.

  McCall was gasping, his hand at his raw throat, trying to force breath back down into his lungs. He was still in a somewhat weakened state after taking the bullets in the fight in the City Hall subway station. He half rose, but he’d given Daudov the seconds he needed. He hit McCall twice in the ribs on both sides, doubling him over.

  Pain pounded through his body.

  Reflexively he brought up his hands to protect his face. Daudov grabbed his arms and threw him into the bookshelf. Some of the books toppled to the floor. Daudov looked around, but couldn’t see his gun.

  McCall’s vision cleared enough to see his assailant fully for the first time. Daudov was all in black, his face oily, his eyes burning with the thrill of a predator who has at last found his prey.

  “I hated Kirov,” he panted. “If anyone was going to kill him, it was going to be me.”

  “Sorry if I rained on your parade,” McCall said.

  His right hand felt along the shelf directly at his shoulders.

  The bookmark dagger was not in its place.

  Daudov took the small dagger out of his coat pocket. It caught the glow from the Tiffany lamp.

  “Looking for this?” he hissed.

  He lunged at McCall with the dagger, right for his throat. McCall twisted to one side and executed a knee strike to Daudov’s left leg, causing him to stumble. McCall caught Daudov’s right wrist, twisting it, yanking his right arm up and down, trying to break it.

  Daudov’s left hand swept the heavy glass ashtray from the bookshelf and slammed it against the side of McCall’s head. He staggered, but caught Daudov’s left hand and smashed it against the edge of the bookshelf. His fingers opened in a spasm and the ashtray dropped to the floor. McCall found the ulna nerve in Daudov’s right wrist and pressed in toward the bone and up toward the wrist. He twisted the man’s hand viciously at the same time.

  The bookmark dagger dropped to the littered floor.

  Daudov reached for McCall’s throat.

  McCall head-butted him.

  Daudov staggered back, dazed.

  But that was just for appearances.

  McCall lunged forward, but Daudov picked up the sculpture of the eel walker and swung it at the side of McCall’s head. It connected with a shuddering force. The blow sent McCall to his knees. Pain wrapped around him like a suffocating blanket, his head throbbing fiercely.

  He collapsed onto the floor.

  He was too far from the chess table to retrieve Daudov’s fallen gun.

  One thought burned in his mind.

  Get into the kitchen!

  Daudov brought the heavy sculpture down at the back of McCall’s head.

  McCall rolled away at the last instant. The naked girl’s figure struck the hardwood floor, making a dent in it. Daudov raised the sculpture again. He was tremendously strong. McCall jumped to his feet, aimed a karate kick at Daudov’s head. He missed, but his foot connected solidly with the Chechen’s arm. He dropped the sculpture. McCall expected the eel to be severed from the girl’s grasp, but she held on to it. Daudov slipped on a floor rolling with M&M’s and had to grab the side of the couch to stop from falling.

  McCall staggered into the kitchen. His ribs felt like they were on fire. He had to force breath down into his lungs. When he’d entered the kitchen earlier he hadn’t really looked at the counter. Bad mistake. He always swept a room when he walked into it. Too complacent. All the bad guys taken care of.

  Except one.

  McCall looked at the knife block beside the toaster.

  All of the knives were gone.

  He was sure Daudov had also taken the knives out of the kitchen drawers, along with a pair of kitchen scissors and the carving knife set McCall had bought even though there was never a holiday occasion for him to use it.

  But McCall was betting Daudov hadn’t looked in the microwave.

  He hadn’t.

  McCall pulled open the microwave door and grabbed the Smith & Wesson 500 revolver. It was fully loaded with five .500 S&W cartridges.

  He had only half turned with the gun in his hand when Daudov seized him from behind in a bear hug. McCall’s arms were pinned at his sides as if they were being held there by steel ties. He tried to maneuver himself so that even though the gun barrel was pointing at the kitchen floor, he could fire a bullet into Daudov’s foot.

  It was inches too far away.

  “You think you’re a hero, McCall?” Daudov rasped. “Rescuing Katia and that little cunt of a daughter? They spit on you. They know what you are. You know what you are.”

  Daudov sent McCall pitching forward into the kitchen cabinet, which had oval sunflower knobs that opened them. The blow reopened the wound above McCall’s right eye. Blood spilled down and obscured his eye so he couldn’t see out of it.

  He didn’t have the strength to break Daudov’s grip.

  Sense-memory: McCall in the playground of his school when he was fourteen. The football jocks attacking him. Jerry Stiles, the quarterback, standing behind the young McCall, his hands trying to crush his windpipe. McCall had rushed backward with him, slamming him into the steel spar holding up one of the basketball hoops.

  McCall ran backward now, propelling Daudov with him, through the kitchen archway into the living room. Daudov’s back slammed against the wooden top of the couch. Daudov twisted McCall’s hand with a violent jerk and the Smith & Wesson revolver went spinning to the floor, landing a few feet from the ajar bedroom door.

  McCall slammed the back of his head into Daudov’s forehead. His hold on McCall’s arms loosened, but he wouldn’t let go. Still hal
f blinded by the blood pooled in his right eye, McCall went down on one knee, at the same time grabbing the lapels of Daudov’s leather coat and hurling him forward. Daudov pitched over McCall’s body and hit the floor hard.

  But he was nearer the Smith & Wesson revolver now than McCall.

  McCall lunged toward the floor, wiping the blood out of his right eye.

  Daudov kicked McCall’s legs out from under him. He grabbed on to the top of the couch to stop from falling.

  Daudov lunged for the S&W revolver on the floor.

  McCall didn’t try to stop him. But he did something Daudov didn’t expect. He threw himself over the couch, tumbling down onto the floor beside the overturned coffee table and the debris around it.

  Daudov picked up the Smith & Wesson 500 and got to his feet. He took in a shuddering breath and let it out. Plenty of time now. McCall was on his hands and knees in front of the couch with nowhere to go. Daudov’s Taurus 740 pistol was not on the floor anywhere near him. He couldn’t reach it in time, even if he knew where it was. Daudov checked that the Smith & Wesson revolver was loaded and walked forward.

  “In the microwave. Very good.”

  McCall grabbed the Peacemaker Cavalry Colt vintage gun. He found one of the 44–40 Winchester cartridges on the floor, snapped open the chamber of the revolver, inserted the cartridge, and snapped the chamber shut. Dauvdov didn’t see this. McCall’s hands were below his line of sight.

  It occurred to McCall in that moment that Moses might have leaded up the barrel. A lot of antique dealers did that with vintage firearms.

  Daudov reached the back of the couch, holding the Smith & Wesson aimed directly at McCall. He was breathing heavily, wheezing badly. Emphysema. Too many of those Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. He stared down at McCall’s beaten figure, his face bloodied, and smiled.