Chill of Night

by John Lutz

  More awake now than she’d ever been, her mind raced as she made the calculations, figured the gravity of her choice, and factored in the risk.

  Decision time. The edge of the blade.

  She came unstuck from her terror and indecision and ran away from Terry, toward the bedroom and her gun.

  He was moving now, too. She knew he was close behind, heard the rush of his body, could even imagine she felt the heat of his breath. The gun in the nightstand drawer. That was what she concentrated on, what meant everything to her now.

  The gun.

  “I can’t raise Garcia.”

  The voice came to Beam over his two-way, from the bundle of rags on the concrete stoop.

  Garcia was Sergeant Wayne Garcia, the uniform stationed at the end of the hall outside Nell’s apartment.

  “Sir?”

  “I heard,” Beam said. He thought for a moment. The problem was most likely simple equipment failure. He couldn’t imagine Garcia falling asleep. But there were other things he could imagine. “Let’s go see.”

  He twisted the ignition key and heard only a low groaning sound. Tried again and got only a faint series of clicks. The van’s battery was dead. It held enough juice to power the radio, but not enough to turn the starter and kick over the engine. Instead of driving down the street to the apartment building, Beam would have to walk.

  Shit happens, he thought. Especially around three in the morning.

  He got out of the van and began trudging down the eerie dark street toward Nell’s building.

  Ahead of him, the bundle of rags stirred and stood up.

  Nell made it to the bedroom ahead of Terry and slammed the door behind her.

  Almost immediately it crashed open, bouncing off the wall. Nell hadn’t stopped moving. She dived onto the bed, lunged to the far side of the mattress, and fumbled to open the nightstand drawer.

  “Nell!” he said behind her. “Listen, Nell!”

  She yanked the tiny drawer too hard and it came all the way out and fell to the floor.

  Damn it! Gun!

  She couldn’t see the gun.

  It must be down there on the floor somewhere in or around the drawer. The drawer she couldn’t reach.

  “Nell!” Terry pleaded again. He was on the bed with her, his weight bearing down hard on her upper body. Her right bicep was clamped painfully in his powerful grip. “Nell, damn it!”

  Terrified, she craned her neck to glance up at him.

  Then froze.

  Terry and Nell weren’t looking at each other.

  They were staring at the uniformed cop in Nell’s bedroom. He was holding in his right hand a gun with something bulky fitted to its barrel.

  Terry acted first.

  He rose from the bed and flung himself at the figure with the bulky handgun.

  And ran into an iron fist that struck his shoulder and staggered him.

  He knew he’d been shot.

  He took a few backward steps, still with the presence of mind to stay between the cop and Nell. The cop very deliberately edged to the side to get a better angle on his target.

  And Nell’s powerful Glock exploded the night’s silence.

  The bullet snapped past Terry’s right ear and shattered the window.

  “Get the hell outta the way, Terry!”

  A faint sound came to Beam and the raggedy cop through the night, a flat bam! that reverberated only once, almost instantaneously.

  More noise. Tinkling glass? A woman—Nell?—yelling something?

  There was no doubt about the first sound. A shot.

  Both men began to run.

  In Nell’s bedroom, Terry didn’t get out of the way. He knew he couldn’t let Nell have the shot without making her vulnerable to the cop. Keeping himself between the two, he backed to the bed, feeling his right calf contact the mattress and springs.

  He whirled and scooped a pillow backward toward the cop, seeing Nell kneeling on the side of the bed, seeing a perfectly round hole appear like a magic trick in the wall inches from her head.

  He dived across the mattress and her body folded down under him.

  Nell was trapped in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, with Terry on top of her, shielding her with his body.

  His hip was jammed against the wall, his left arm beneath Nell. She was squirming beneath him, breathing hard. Something—her fingernails?—was scraping on plaster. Pain was like a red tide assaulting his consciousness. Every muscle tightened in Terry as he waited for a second bullet to hit him.

  It did. In the back of the shoulder that was already shot.

  More pain erupted. He moaned but managed to remain conscious.

  Nell squirmed even harder beneath him, her breath hissing between clenched teeth. Finally she gained leverage and mustered enough strength that she forced him above the level of the mattress, and he saw the cop bolting from the bedroom.

  He must know the sound of Nell’s shot drew attention.

  The cop whirled, taking one more chance and trusting to luck. The gun made its muffled pop! The bullet went wild, hit the bedside lampshade, and made the lamp dance but not fall.

  Nell was sitting up now, struggling to get Terry’s weight off her so she could work herself up the wall to a standing position and give chase.

  Then she looked down at the blood on her hand holding her gun. At the blood on the wall. On her nightshirt.

  “Jesus, Terry. Is this from me or from you?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Think it’s all me. Hope…”

  “Ah, your shoulder! That bastard!”

  “Go get him, Nell.”

  “Screw him!”

  She tossed her gun aside and reached for the sheets, anything to stop the bleeding.

  They were in the lobby of Nell’s building. Beam was aware of something, a faint stirring above, as if the shot had awakened every tenant, made everyone afraid in a way that was almost palpable.

  Fear is in the building.

  “Take the stairs,” he told the bundle of rags that was a cop. “I’ll take the elevator.”

  Rags pulled a Remington shotgun from beneath his worn raincoat and dashed for the stairs. Beam heard him going up, treading light, taking two, three steps at a time. Then Beam turned back toward the elevators. He’d already pushed the up button.

  One of the elevators had descended to lobby level. The door opened, and da Vinci stepped out. He was in uniform, and holding a handgun with a sound suppressor fitted to its barrel.

  He didn’t notice Beam until he’d taken three or four steps. Then he stopped and made a half turn back toward the elevator.

  But he was too late. The elevator door was just finishing sliding shut.

  Beam stood between da Vinci and the street door.

  Rags encountered no one on the stairs. He reached Nell’s floor and slowed down, moving carefully now.

  He edged open the door to the hall.

  There was Garcia, sitting slumped against the wall. His mouth was gaping, and his chest and stomach were black with blood. His eyes were lifeless marbles.

  Rags had gotten winded coming up the stairs. His breath seemed to him as loud as a steam engine as he stepped over Garcia’s legs and made his way down the hall toward Nell’s apartment.

  At her door, he looked up and down the hall, but saw no one. The elevator should have beaten him up here. Where the hell is Beam?

  Maybe inside.

  He tried the knob, found the door unlocked, and went in fast, shotgun at the ready.

  The living room was dim, unoccupied, but there was light down at the end of a hall.

  “Who’s out there?” a woman’s voice called.

  “Police!”

  “C’mon back here. Come back here and help, damn it!”

  Rags made his way down the hall, shotgun still raised and ready to fire.

  He was slower going into the bedroom. Faint noise from in there, familiar, like bedsprings in shifting rhythm. Someone having sex?

&n
bsp; Then he saw the man on the bed—looked like half his shoulder was blown away. Saw the bloody figure of Nell straddling the man, desperately using a wadded sheet in an effort to stanch the bleeding.

  Rags glanced around. Nobody in the bedroom other than him and the two bloodstained figures on the bed.

  “Goddamn do something!” Nell pleaded.

  Rags didn’t figure there was much he could do. “I’ll call 911,” he said.

  “I already did,” Nell told him. “See if you can help me stop this goddamned bleeding.”

  Down in the lobby, Beam understood it now, as he stared at da Vinci standing there in his old motorcycle cop uniform, the boots, the jacket that helped hide the bulky silencer, the cap with its eight-pointed wire frame removed, so it was worn crushed already and would fit beneath a motorcycle helmet.

  The puzzle clicked into coherence: da Vinci’s fuzzy familial past, the passion for justice, the questionably earned citations, the MRP cops with their crush caps and leather jackets, the frustration with the slow, slow wheels of the legal system that didn’t grind exceedingly fine, the rapid advance in the NYPD at a comparatively young age.

  Andy da Vinci, Deputy Chief da Vinci, was the Justice Killer.

  “Surprise,” da Vinci said flatly.

  “Not when I come to think of it,” Beam said. Sirens were sounding outside. Both men knew da Vinci wasn’t going anywhere other than down or to jail.

  “I got tired of seeing it,” da Vinci said, “the scum of the world coming and going through the system, free to rape or kill again. After April—my wife, Beam—killed herself because the sick scum Davison went free, goddamned free, after what he did to our son, I decided to do something about it.”

  “About what?”

  “The imbalance in the world. The unfairness. The way the wheel is rigged. So I worked for a while as a civilian in the St. Louis police department, then I joined the NYPD.” He gave a tight smile. “You might say I advanced with a vengeance.”

  “You knew everything we were trying to do to nail you,” Beam said.

  The smile again, somehow infinitely sadder than a frown. “I controlled the investigation, saw that the controversial cases we investigated went back only ten years—not quite far enough to include Davison’s trial and acquittal.”

  “Harry Lima’s ring?”

  “I knew about you and Nola. Had a duplicate of Harry’s pimp-ass ring made in Toronto. Used it to point you in another direction and throw you off the scent. Being a cop, even a high-ranking one, has it’s limitations, Beam. I was on a mission, and rules and regulations meant less and less to me.”

  “You took too many unnecessary risks,” Beam said. “You could have kept coming and going as a uniformed cop, running the investigation of yourself. Helen was right. You wanted to be stopped.”

  “Helen? Maybe she was right. Could be the book on serial killers has them—us—pegged. Maybe I even assigned you to the case because I knew you’d eventually stop me. Maybe that was my way of stopping myself. After a while it became obvious to me that Nell was figuring out what was happening. Nell’s smart. And dangerous. I had to kill her.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “No. She’s alive. Lucky. I’m glad.”

  “But upstairs—”

  “I wanted to prolong the game.”

  “That’s what it was to you, a game?”

  “Not only to me,” da Vinci said. “And I wasn’t the one who made it a game, played between cops and prosecutors and high-priced attorneys. But it is a game.”

  Beam wondered how far back da Vinci’s own game went. “What about Rowdy Logan, in Florida?”

  Da Vinci paused before answering. “The left-handed killer who murdered your son. His death wasn’t a suicide. He was one of mine.”

  Beam held his breath. “And Lani?”

  “I didn’t murder your wife to lure you out of retirement for revenge. Or because I knew she’d talk you out of accepting the challenge. I didn’t murder her at all. She must have taken her own life, Beam, for her own reasons. I’m sorry.”

  Beam believed he was.

  “Some things you can never know for sure, Beam. Some things you just gotta let go of.”

  “Some things.”

  “You understand, the game isn’t really about justice. That has to change.”

  The chorus of sirens grew louder, then stopped one by one outside the building. A glimpse of blue uniform. Someone was in the lobby beside and behind Beam. Sweeney.

  “That has to change,” da Vinci said again.

  Behind him, the elevator door opened silently. Rags, with his shotgun. He stepped out of the elevator, the Remington leveled at da Vinci. Beam knew he’d been talking to Nell upstairs. Where was Nell?

  “Game’s over,” Beam said, but he knew it wasn’t.

  Da Vinci made his last move, raising his silenced handgun to point at Beam. Beam saw that da Vinci’s finger wasn’t anywhere near the trigger.

  Rags stepped to the side and let loose with the shotgun, spinning da Vinci completely around in a spray of blood. Beside Beam, Sweeney’s nine millimeter banged away. The blue crush cap once worn by the young motorcycle cop went spinning into a corner.

  Da Vinci was sitting on the floor, legs straight out in front of him. The back half of his skull was missing. He bent forward, as if he might attempt to touch his toes, then fell to the side.

  Rags kicked aside da Vinci’s gun, needlessly keeping the shotgun aimed at his fallen body. Sweeney advanced, still holding his nine in both hands, pointed down at da Vinci. Procedure.

  Looper opened the lobby door and came halfway in, gun drawn, and scanned the scene, taking everything in.

  His eyes lingered on da Vinci. “Holy shit!”

  He holstered his gun, then signaled to someone outside, and came all the way in, followed by two EMS paramedics lugging equipment. They glanced at da Vinci’s body.

  “Not that asshole,” Sweeney said.

  “Upstairs,” Rags said. “I’ll show you.”

  Looper couldn’t stop staring at da Vinci’s corpse. “Jesus!”

  “That thing still work?” one of the paramedics asked, pointing to the elevator door peppered with bullet holes.

  “Try it,” Beam said.

  The paramedic did. It worked.

  “What about Nell?” Looper asked.

  “She’s upstairs,” Rags said. “She’s okay. Somebody else isn’t.”

  More uniforms streamed into the lobby. Two rode the elevator up. Others went thumping up the stairs. A crime scene investigation team would be here soon.

  “We better get upstairs, see Nell,” Beam said.

  They waited for the elevator to return to lobby level.

  “Helen will need to be told,” Looper said, glancing back at what was left of da Vinci.

  Beam was surprised by Looper’s insight and sensitivity. Must have shown it.

  “I think he was in love with Helen,” Looper said. “And she felt the same way about him.”

  “They were in love,” Beam said. “He must have known she was slow poison. It works that way sometimes.”

  “Well,” Looper said, “she’ll have to be told.”

  Barely five minutes had passed since da Vinci had been shot. Outside in the night, the city was alive with sirens.

  “My job,” Beam said.

  73

  The city soon became itself again, a sprawling construct of chaos seeking its own balances and levels. And justice. Business was conducted, for the most part legally. Trains and subways ran more or less on schedule. Trash was picked up on designated days, late or early. Crime was committed, collars were made, defendants cut deals or stood trial, and were convicted or walked.

  Adelaide Starr was released from custody, as well as jury duty. Her book debuted at number three on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Television talk show appearances led to the starring roll in a new musical about Evita Perón.

  Helen Iman left the NYPD within a yea
r and became a profiler for the FBI. She became involved with a former agent, and they bought a house together in Virginia, in a secluded, wooded area not at all like New York.

  Terry Adams lost the use of his right arm, but he continued his acting career with more success, beginning with a role as an Argentine general who was Evita Perón’s secret lover.

  Nell and Jack Selig were at opening night, applauding.

  A month after da Vinci’s death, Nell quit the NYPD and married Jack Selig. Nell had saved Terry’s life, but not their love and trust for each other. She’d made her choice around three a.m. in the crackling darkness of her apartment living room, and she and Terry both knew it.

  The Evita Perón play is still running, but with its third cast. The Seligs spend time in New York, but live most of the year in Europe. Selig manages his investments on his computer, and finances construction projects in France and Germany. Often he does this from an office on his yacht. Nell is reasonably happy.

  Beam slipped back into retirement, and a deepening relationship with Nola. Neither of them fears or yearns for the past, but Beam spends much of his time at Things Past. He’s developed a passion, and a discerning eye, for antiques. He and Nola expanded the shop, and moved into an apartment on the same block. They are more than reasonably happy.

  While they deal in antiques, they live for the present and future, and don’t do a lot of thinking or talking about Harry, or Lani, or Beam’s former life as a homicide detective. They have friends, most of them in the antique business, or collectors. They meet at conventions or auctions, and now and then go out for dinner, or travel together. Their friends notice nothing unusual about Beam and Nola, other than they don’t have a cute story about how they met.

  Occasionally Beam wonders about the one Justice Killer victim, Bradley Aimes, who was shot with a bullet that matched none of the guns found among da Vinci’s effects. But he doesn’t wonder a lot.

  Gina Dixon moved away to attend college in California.

  She majors in Criminal Justice.

  Don’t miss John Lutz’s next spine-tingling thriller…