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?
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
