In the instant before the explosion, as Carla rounds the corner and mounts the steps, she feels the air being sucked out of her lungs, even before she feels the searing heat of the blast.
On the third step, something punches through the drywall, just over her head, showering her in blackened gypsum. Then, a streak of flames chases down the stairs to her left, followed by a dark shape.
Carla Davis falls to her knees, lungs full of smoke, eyes burning, and realizes that the smoldering shape is Bobby Dietricht.
69
The gun is in his coat pocket. For the moment. He had stepped inside her apartment and shut off most of the lights. She looks at the bloody silver earring on the coffee table. Celeste’s earring. She chances another look out the window. Jesse Ray is still waiting in his car.
Her one thought is: Can I throw something that far?
“I don’t care anymore,” she says, trying to stall. On the mantel is a heavy bronze bust of Beethoven, about the size of her fist. If she could just get the window open, or broken, she would have one shot at pitching as far as she could, hopefully hitting somewhere, anywhere, on Jesse Ray’s car. “I’m done. I’m not going to hurt anybody. My daughter will be cared for. Do what you have to do.”
“Do you know how much could happen to you by the time your friend makes it up here? A lot. All of it bad.”
“Take your best shot.”
“I want you to pick up the phone, call him, tell him everything is all right.”
“No.”
Jean Luc steps over to the window. Mary takes a step back, away from him. They look at the parking lot together, where the dark sedan idles next to the pay phone, at the cigarette smoke curling up into the night sky.
Jean Luc laughs. “That’s your savior?”
Mary is just about to pick up the bronze bust when a white van pulls into the Dairy Barn lot across the street, screeching to a halt. On its side is the NBC peacock logo. On the roof, a satellite rack.
What the hell’s going on here? she thinks. Why is a news crew setting up across the street from my apartment building?
When Jean Luc removes his coat and begins to roll up his shirtsleeves, she knows. But it is a wisdom she does not want, a keen palisade of memory that tells her that the horror of this night had been ordained a very long time ago.
Because, there, on Jean Luc’s forearm, is the tattoo of a bright orange rattlesnake.
This is the man who was fighting with Celeste in the hotel lobby two years ago, she thinks. My life has been on a collision course with this moment for two years.
Her knees trick painfully, her mind reels out of control, her stomach revolts. She grabs onto the windowsill to steady herself and looks down to see the driver of the NBC van angling his vehicle toward Jesse Ray’s sedan.
The man puts the van in park, exits, crosses over to Jesse Ray’s car, stops. He turns to glance at his partner, a quizzical look on his face, then reaches for Jesse Ray’s arm and removes it from the car window. It is a mannequin arm clad in a black coat sleeve and a bright white cuff, the hand holding an all-but-burned-down cigarette.
The man from NBC scratches his head and smiles. The cigarette falls to the ground.
Four floors above, Christian del Blanco-known over the years as a hundred different men, including a bon vivant named Jean Luc Christiane and a shadowy grifter named Jesse Ray Carpenter-laughs as he closes the shutters and draws the blinds, sparing the night this tableau for the moment, denying those madmen, who can surely hear such things, the song of Mary’s scream.
70
Paris checks the door, the stench from the cauldron a thick, fetid fog that invades every cubic inch of air in the room. The door has an ordinary interior door lock, reversed. The door itself is solid core. The lock would go first. He feels along the ink black wall, finds the heavy plywood over the window, the black-painted heads of the lag bolts. Solid, too.
He surveys the small room, made smaller by the blackness. The cauldron, dead center. A sturdy wing chair. And, across from the chair, a small table with a computer and keyboard.
Not his father.
The computer is on, but the screen is deep blue, blank. Paris sits in the chair, tries to clear his head. He checks the magazine in his weapon. One bullet. The son of a bitch had left him with one bullet. He returns the magazine, jacks the round, clicks on the safety.
He checks his pockets. Right pocket. Twenty or thirty dollars in a paper clip. A packet of relish or ketchup from Subway. Left pocket. Empty.
One bullet, with condiments and hallucinations to go, Paris thinks.
Great.
71
The man is tall and thin, red-haired. He wears a cheap overcoat, sturdy black lace-up shoes. In the stale light thrown from the caged bulb on the wall in the underground service tunnel linking the Cain Manor and Cain Towers apartments, he looks tired and wan and deeply etched with worry. A man running on coffee, sugar, animal fat, liquor.
A cop.
“Evening,” I say, the barrel of the twenty-two up against Mary’s back. We stop walking. We are now about ten feet from the man.
“Evening,” the red-haired man replies.
I feel Mary tense, about to bolt. “What’s the weather like out there?”
“Getting pretty bad,” the man says, turning his body slightly away from me, the sort of move a left-hander would make if he were going to unsnap the holster of a gun on his left hip, a weapon hiding beneath his coat. His voice echoes slightly in the concrete tunnel. Above us, a water pipe clangs.
“Looks like we’re in for the evening,” I say. “Wife’s a little under the weather. Had to leave the party next door. Thank God for this walk-through, eh?”
“Oh yeah.” The cop takes a step forward. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
“Like I said, she’s a little nauseous. Bad shrimp or something, you know? Can’t trust those bargain basement caterers.”
“If you don’t mind sir, I’d like to hear it from her. Now, ma’am, are you-”
Suddenly, the crackle of two-way radio traffic bursts from inside the red-haired man’s coat.
Our eyes meet again. And we are linked forever.
Before he can make his move I step behind Mary, lock an arm around her throat, put the barrel of the gun to her temple. The redheaded cop freezes.
I say: “Put your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers. Officer.”
Slowly, reluctantly, he does. But he does not take his eyes from mine. His eyes are a deep green, unreadable, stoic in their calm. I know that this man can do me great harm.
“You have your handcuffs with you?” I ask.
