The muddy echo of shouts filtered through her buzzing eardrums. Multiple shots sounded in the hallway. Three thuds sounded against the heavy wooden door.
A spray of blood and small pink flecks of flesh blasted through the broken window. They speckled Laura’s arms and hair. Darius’s hand jerked and then went limp. The dead weight of the .45 pulled Laura’s hands to the floor, where the weapon clattered on the polished white tile between her legs. The gun lay there like a severed snake head, no longer able to deliver its venom. Darius’s flaccid arm slithered back out through the windowpane.
The adrenal rush that had sustained Laura retreated like water down an unplugged drain. Her repressed terror came roaring in. She couldn’t process what had just happened. She couldn’t believe what she had done. All she was certain of was that Tamika and the others were all safe. Her hands began to tremble and she could not make them stop.
Chapter Three
If there was a seedier place to meet, Doug Locke didn’t know about it.
The basement bar on New York’s East Side hadn’t had an exterior face lift since the ’50s. The rusted sign still read Mickey’s in faded green letters, even though the neighborhood hadn’t been Irish for dozens of years. The steps down to the door were black and slick with whatever years of clientele had tracked out of the place.
Doug parked his car on the street a block over and wondered if his Volvo would still be in one piece in an hour. He doubted his editor at the New York Dispatch would sign the expense report for his insurance deductible. He should never have let Fisher talk him into meeting here.
Well, he thought, if you do dirty work, sometimes you work in dirty places.
Doug ran his fingers through his short brown hair and then pushed his sunglasses back up his nose. Doug was average height but still had the wiry build his college marathon days had created. He took a deep breath to prep for handling Fisher.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was an unfamiliar number with a Nassau County area code. It would have to wait. Fisher couldn’t.
It took a moment for Doug’s eyes to adjust from the afternoon daylight outside to the bar’s tomblike darkness. The smell of stale beer reminded him of the morning-after frat parties at college. A rail-thin Hispanic bartender with a pencil moustache languidly sliced lemons at the bar to the right. The oak booths on the left stretched back to the rear. Amorphous wall decorations hid in the shadows. In the last booth sat Joey Fisher.
Joey had a receding hairline and a sharp nose that gave him a distinctively weasel-like appearance. That put him out of the running for political office but was practically a qualification for his job behind the scenes. He was the deputy chief of staff for the mayor, just far enough removed from the limelight to do the dirty work every politico needed done. He took a sip of whiskey from a glass and then saw Doug. He put the glass down and straightened his suit.
“Doug Locke,” Fisher said. “A pleasure.” He clearly didn’t mean it.
“I didn’t know you were a fan,” Doug said.
“Nothing wraps garbage better than your column in the New York Dispatch,” Fisher said.
“People warned me you’re a charmer, but I didn’t believe them.”
“Let’s cut the foreplay,” Fisher said. “You wouldn’t have wanted to meet me unless you had some hatchet job in the works for my boss.”
“It’s called investigative journalism,” Doug said.
“Investigative journalism tells you there’s salmonella in your hamburger,” Fisher said. “Your ‘who’s humping who’ shit is sub-tabloid material.”
There was more truth to that statement than Doug liked to admit. His well-paid position on the Dispatch was due to just those kinds of stories.
“I’ve got proof,” Doug said, “of the mayor’s wife doing some shopping on the city’s credit card.”
The fleeting grimace that flashed across Fisher’s face told Doug he hit pay dirt.
“Gracie Mansion has legitimate expenses that the city covers.”
“But,” Doug said, “none from Gucci or Cartier’s. The mayor polishes himself up as a man of the people. A revelation like this might dull that luster.”
“No one’s going to give a shit about rumors like that.”
“If you believed that, you’d already be out the door.”
Fisher gave a defeated sigh. Doug perked up. Fisher was about to take the bait. Doug didn’t have more than rumors about the mayor’s wife. But a good threat would usually blackmail some sordid scoop out of the amoral Fisher.
“How about a trade?” Fisher said. He pulled an envelope from his suit pocket.
“You came prepared,” Doug said.
“Your subhuman reputation precedes you.”
“Coming from you, that almost hurts.”
“This is Councilman Reese,” Fisher said with a wave of the envelope. “Pictures and dates. The man likes to party and prefers strippers and cocaine.”
Doug’s phone buzzed again. Same Nassau county number. He switched off the phone.
“That ought to sell more papers than a story that says the mayor’s wife is a bitch,” Fisher said. “Which is old news.”
The sharks always turn on each other when there is blood in the water, Doug thought. He put out his hand for the envelope.
“It doesn’t hurt that Reese is opposing the mayor’s taxi regulation plan, is it?” Doug said.
“Coincidence,” Fisher said. He handed over the envelope and stood. “Let’s not meet again.”
“The pleasure would be all mine.”
Doug looked over the photos after Fisher left. They were good quality. Reese at a private party in one of the VIP rooms at Boom Boom’s in Brooklyn, out of a suit and looking like any other white male middle-aged New Yorker. There were enough details in the shots that he could verify the allegations, not that his boss was a stickler for multiple-source confirmation.
He looked at Reese’s face in one shot, laughing as he pointed at one stripper’s breasts. Reese had done a lot of good in office, standing up for the poor in his district. Yeah, well, facts are facts. Doug didn’t make him take up strippers and coke, he was just telling the world about it.
He remembered he’d shut off his phone. As soon as he powered it back up, it rang. Third try from that Nassau County number. Who’d have his cell number? Doug flipped it open.
“Who is this?”
“This is St. Luke’s hospital. Is this Douglas Locke?”
Hospital? Doug’s mind snapped out of the world of sleazy politics.
“Yes. What’s wrong?”
“Sir, your wife Laura has been admitted. There’s been a shooting.”
Doug’s heart sank to his knees. She was dead. He knew she was dead. He was smoking out sleaze in this stupid bar and someone shot his wife. He could barely ask the next question.
“Is she all right?”
“The wounds are minor, but she wanted us to call you.”
Doug was already through the front door.
“I’m on my way.”
Chapter Four
Ms. Rosa Elizondo had been glued to Laura’s side since the shooting. There was even a question about whether the surgical team would need to use force to keep her out of the OR. She was a short, stout, middle-aged woman with close-cropped black hair and a wide face with a permanent scowl. There wasn’t a more intimidating teacher in Idlewild Elementary. The doctor breathed a sigh of relief when she agreed that her support would not be needed in the surgical theater.
Rosa had adopted Laura her first week at Idlewild, after Laura had collared a kid about to slash Rosa’s tires in the parking lot. She’d more than repaid the debt with insightful advice and shoulder that absorbed tears like a sponge.
She had assumed a station at Laura’s bedside. Cups of ice and water stood in formation on the bed stand and two extra blankets lay folded at the end of the bed. The room was overly bright, even though the solitary window faced the bricks of an adjacent building. Laura sat up in the bed,
hands wrapped in gauze like two cartoon boxing gloves. Her eyelids fluttered.
“¿Como esta, Mami?” Rosa said in an uncharacteristic soft voice.
Laura managed a faint smile. “Not bad.” She searched the room with glassy eyes. “Is he here?”
“Nowhere to be found,” Rosa snorted. Rosa had drilled Laura enough during lunch periods this year to have the full background story on Doug Locke, Lousy Husband.
“He’ll be here,” Laura said.
“Are you sure?” Rosa said. “He’s not at PTA nights. He’s not at your award dinner…now he’s not even answering his phone. You even know where he is?”
Laura didn’t want to admit that she didn’t. She’d stopped asking years ago why he was out at all hours all over the city. She had heard the “pursuit of the story” answer too many times.
Married life hadn’t always been so fractured. When they first arrived in the city, it was an adventure. She had Doug to herself, away from the Delta Nu party scene and the online campus lit journal he’d obsessed over senior year. Their poverty created struggle, but they struggled together. They still found laughter and love amidst clipped coupons and a crumbling apartment.
But working at the Dispatch changed Doug. The job could take as much time as you gave it, and Doug gave all. She hated the trashy line of work he’d ended up in. She dreaded the nights she spent alone. She loathed the reek of cigarettes that he dragged home on his clothes. But the pay rate had elevated them out of the sections of town her students lived in. She had tried to bring it up a few times, see if he would move to something else, see if he remembered the literary aspirations he had in their previous life. The third fight they had about it was the last. She resigned herself to the fact that reporting sleaze was her husband’s job. She didn’t mention Doug’s career to anyone, like some crazy uncle in the attic.
The last two years, their life together was more like two lives apart. They lived in the same place, slept in the same bed, shared the same bathroom, but now their two orbits just intersected when they used to circle each other. Between Doug being out late and Laura getting up early, there were days when under a dozen words passed between them. To Laura, what hurt the most wasn’t the loss of companionship, though that was painful. It was that Doug didn’t seem to miss it at all.
In the aftermath of the shooting, this sad state of marital affairs had weighed on her. Every step of the process, some EMT or admitting nurse was asking if her husband was here, like some sort of sick running joke about her marriage. Rosa was right that he had missed many an event these past few years, but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t miss this. If Doug Locke didn’t walk through that door this afternoon, any hope of re-floating her shipwrecked marriage would be dashed.
A nurse knocked on the door. She had a wheeled tray of plastic plates, each filled with equally plastic-looking food.
“Mrs. Locke?” she said. “How about some dinner?”
Laura glanced at the clock. Five forty-two. How long had she been asleep?
“Dinner?” Laura said. “Will I be here that long?”
“Doesn’t matter how long you be here,” Rosa said. She took up a blocking position between the wheeled tray and Laura’s bed. “You aren’t eating this stuff.” She gave the nurse the same glare that had literally made guilty children wet themselves. The nurse backed out of the room.
“I’ll get you some real food,” Rosa said. “I know what you like.” She strode out the door with such determination a doctor on rounds moved out of her way.
For the first time since Laura arrived, she was alone. With the offshore breeze of others’ company gone, memories of her last tragic stay at St. Luke’s began to wash ashore. She pushed them back, unable to handle more than what today had already delivered. This was no time to relive that awful loss of the miscarriage.
She stared at the empty doorway and wondered if Doug would walk through it. When, she corrected to herself, not if. She had to believe it could only be when.
Chapter Five
“God damn it!” Doug cursed as a Hummer wedged itself into the tiny gap between his car and the one in front of him.
The thirty miles to St. Luke’s was going to take forever. Cars jammed every bridge off Manhattan and the traffic on the Long Island Expressway crawled like a wounded soldier. A detective named Simmons gave Doug the nutshell version of the school shooting by cell phone before Doug had even crossed into Queens. Creeping through traffic, Doug had too much time to worry, too much time to think.
He pounded the steering wheel in frustration, but it wasn’t just about the traffic. He had let life get to this point, the point where his wife sat in a hospital bed with gunshot wounds and a Gordian knot of automobiles kept him from her. He created their life plan seven years ago, and his sweet, supportive college girlfriend had gone along with it. A wedding after graduation, and then they’d ditch the Midwest for the Big Apple. He’d use the million stories of the City That Never Sleeps to fuel his breakthrough novel. She would put her Elementary Education degree to work teaching school. Both would achieve their dreams, everyone living happily ever after. Laura went with the plan. She trusted his judgment, believed in his potential and had faith in the future.
But the literary world ignored Doug Locke’s talent. After a few months, he’d realized he needed a job to keep them afloat and found one at the Dispatch, one with long hours. He’d been doing mundane local stories for a year when he caught wind of a call girl ring servicing the board of directors at a local foundation. He made the front page.
One story led to another and he became the go-to-guy for any sleazy exposé and it became his niche. His pay got much better as he boosted circulation, but it was more than that. There was something a bit alluring about that dark section of society, about dipping into the smarmy side of people’s character.
Laura found a job right away, but at a hellhole school. She never complained. She said those were the kids who needed her the most. But why should she have to work in a place with as much security as Riker’s Island? He blamed her work stress for her miscarriage two years ago, though Laura refused to link the two.
Now as he sat in the exhaust fumes of the stalled Long Island Expressway, he couldn’t believe the situation he was in. It was as if this tragedy had opened the shades and let sunlight fully illuminate the life he had been living. He was away from home all hours of the day and night, tracking down leads. And for what? One more smarmy story about some actor getting drunk at a party. What difference did it make? He’d taken for granted the woman he’d fallen in love with at college, the one who married him and said “Sure, let’s give New York a try.” Now the job she took to support his abandoned dream almost got her killed. What a mess he had made.
Doug dreaded returning to St. Luke’s. The last time he was here, he brought three souls in with him, but left with only one. Laura had miscarried the twins here. The staff treated them both with immense compassion, but nothing could assuage the pain of having the girls they created together ripped from them. Seeing the hospital made all that pain roll back in. He pushed the hurt back, like he had in the silent months after the tragedy.
Back then, he considered his agony unbearable, yet he could only imagine by what factor Laura’s was worse. He would hold her when she inexplicably broke out into tears. He wanted to console her, but did not know what to say. She did not talk about their loss, so neither did he. He thought that if they just put it behind them, the emptiness would refill. If he talked to her about the lost twins, he would just remind her of what they were missing. He buried himself in work instead. Later, when time had healed the wounds, they would talk about it. So far, later hadn’t come.
His exit was two miles away. Crawling traffic stretched to the horizon. Screw this.
He yanked the wheel right and punched the accelerator. In a cloud of smoked rubber his car leapt to the shoulder. It fishtailed as Doug yanked it back straight and he blasted down to the exit. Accusatory horns honked in his wake.
> Several moving violations later, he was at St. Luke’s. Inside, the harried receptionist gave him Laura’s room number and he dashed through the hallway maze. The tang of antiseptic and the ice-cold temperature reminded Doug of the many things he hated about hospitals. Nurses in blue floral scrubs chatted behind the central nurses’ station. Doug stopped at the threshold of room 122.
Laura sat upright in the hospital bed, framed by silver rails on three sides. She wore one of the perpetually uncomfortable aqua hospital gowns. Her two hands rested awkwardly in her lap, two bundles of white bandages. She stared out the window at her brick-wall view, looking at nothing, eyes glazed and vacant.
Doug choked back a sob. This was his life, his love, his existence right here on that bed. The love he felt for her, the love that had somehow been smothered under his indulgent quest for dirt, burst out like spring tulips.
“Babe,” he said.
Laura turned, and at the sight of her husband, her thousand-yard stare dissolved into a relieved smile.
“Oh, Doug,” she exhaled. “You made it.”
Doug sat on the side of her bed. He leaned over and hugged Laura as hard as he dared. The bandaged hands made him think she was fragile. The acrid scent of gunpowder clung to her hair. Guilt dug into him again. His wife, his lover, his college sweetheart, his future. It was as if he hadn’t seen her in years, and perhaps he hadn’t.
Doug kissed her lips. One of her tears rolled onto his cheek. He sat up at her waist. She laid one hand across his lap. The bandage looked like a big swollen white mitten.
“I’m so happy you are okay,” Doug said with a smile of relief. “You look pretty good after your bout with heroism.”
“It wasn’t heroism,” Laura said. “I reacted without thinking. A few sensible seconds and I might have grabbed his hand instead of the gun.”
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