Harry shifted his weapon in Hall’s direction. “Stay!”
Harry glanced down at Ray. He’d rolled over onto his side to keep from suffocating and now let out a syrupy moan. His hands were wrapped tightly around his face, but blood seeped through his fingers.
“Muhjerfushur,” Ray gurgled.
Sunlight had spread through most of the room now, and Harry let his gaze wander across it for a moment, knowing that what had been his home, his sanctum, was lost to him. But what truly hurt was the recognition that everything he’d be leaving behind had come to him because of his chosen line of work.
The sloshing sound leaking from behind Ray’s palms was growing louder. He finally managed to get himself up into a sitting position without moving his hands. Harry took a step back.
“Shit,” said Harry. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
Hall snorted and sat down on the sofa again. “Yes, you did, Harry. My guess is you’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. You just didn’t know it till now.”
To Harry’s chagrin, he realized that he had, in fact, felt a joint-loosening sense of release, a cleansing liberation. He turned and looked at Lily. She was sitting up, hands in her hair, fingers twirling and untwirling a long black hank of it in a mute, private ritual.
“I’m going to put on some pants,” Harry said.
He picked up Ray’s gun and walked to the bathroom, his eyes still on Hall. He put the gun in the sink, pulled the sport coat from around his waist, and took his trousers off the toilet seat. As he stepped into them, he heard Ray spit out something thick and viscous. Harry tried not to think about what it was.
“I’m going to have a smoke,” Hall said. “Reaching in my pocket, okay?”
Pulling on a shirt and then his sport coat while switching the gun from hand to hand, Harry came back out into the living room. “Be my guest.”
Hall took a pack of Camels and a lighter from his pocket. Lighting a cigarette, he said, “Why’d Geiger do it, Harry?”
“He figured if you were willing to take the kid to Dalton, then he was expendable-and so maybe we all were. I’m gonna get out of here now, with my sister. Do I need to take all the guns?”
“If you’re asking whether I’m going to come out into the street running after you, guns blazing-then no, you don’t have to take the guns.”
Harry stuck his feet into his loafers, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and came back out into the living room. He was getting used to the weight of the Beretta in his hand, but he felt like a stranger in someone else’s place.
He got halfway to Lily and stopped. Turning to Hall, he held out a palm. “My cell phone.”
Hall tossed it to him. Harry lifted Lily up and held her close. He could feel her heart beating against his chest. She started humming something very softly, stopping and starting in even, repetitive intervals. It sounded vaguely familiar to Harry, but he couldn’t place the tune.
“How long has she been like that?” Hall asked.
“Too long,” Harry replied. “I’ve got to ask you, Hall. Would killing both of you end this?”
“Think you could do that?”
“Strictly hypothetical. Would it?”
“De Koonings are hard to come by, Harry.”
Harry nodded and looked over at Ray.
“Hey, Ray,” he said. Ray raised his head, his large, blood-soaked hands still clamped onto his face. Harry tossed him the towel. It landed at his knees, and Ray reached down with both hands to pick it up.
Harry saw that the Beretta had done tremendous damage to Ray’s face. The proud, aquiline nose was pancaked and off-center, and the plane of the upper lip was crushed and raw. The unseen teeth beneath the bloody plexus were broken if not gone.
Harry set Lily on her feet, turned away from her, and vomited. He had watched DVDs of Geiger’s sessions with the keen, assiduous eye of an analyst, but this was his handiwork. He ran his tongue across his three false front teeth and remembered parts of him coming asunder, the searing clarity of pain and breakage, the stirring knowledge that death was an even-odds bet. He straightened up.
Ray had the towel pressed against his mouth, and his eyes held Harry like a prey in crosshairs. He mumbled something indecipherable, but the promise of vengeance was crystal clear. Harry took Lily’s hand in his.
“Come on, Lily. We gotta go.”
“We gotta get outta this place,” she sang, “if it’s the last thing we ever do.”
Harry started leading her toward the door, walking backward with the gun still held waist-high in his hand.
“Good-bye,” he said.
Hall nodded. “Tell Geiger I’ll see him around.”
Hall ached from his waist to the top of his head. He’d never had a problem dealing with the physical aspect of pain, but it made him feel stupid, because in his job, pain meant you’d screwed up. You always had the “just in case” mind-set. You always assumed that a wrench was perched somewhere, waiting to fall into the gears. But the last twenty-four hours had rolled out a brutal trifecta: Matheson shakes them, Geiger decides to play moral relativist, a computer geek turns into Rambo. Hall took a last drag of his Camel, stubbed it out on the coffee table, and went over to Ray.
“Give me your cell.”
Ray spat out a large dollop of blood and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Hall dialed.
“Be ready, Mitch. Boddicker is coming out-with his sister.”
“Sister?” a voice said. “What happened in there?”
“Boddicker and Ray got into it, but later on that. I’ve got to get Ray’s face stitched up.”
“That bad? Jesus, Richie. We’re turning into the three fucking blind mice.”
“Stay close, Mitch-but not too,” Hall said. “And don’t get cute. You know he’s our best bet to get to Geiger, right?”
“Wanna know what I think? I think maybe somebody who keeps making wrong choices should stop sounding all the time as if he knows what the fuck he’s doing.”
Hall had wanted to punch the guy in the face for years, but he kept his sigh silent and hung up. Since the beginning of this clusterfuck, he’d been assuming that if things got much worse the three of them would end up at each other’s throats, but he couldn’t let it happen yet. He had another call to make, and for this one, he sat down in Harry’s chair and took a deep breath, letting it out in a measured release. He dialed and the call was picked up on the first ring.
“Yes?”
“It’s Hall. We have a problem, sir.”
“‘Problem’ is one of my least favorite words. What is ‘our’ problem?”
“We lost the kid-before we were able to get any information. Geiger has him.”
“ Has him?”
“Took him, sir.”
“Then find Geiger.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the plan. But we don’t know where Geiger is… yet.”
“Hall…”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if I should start being concerned. Yesterday you said you had Matheson lined up. Now this.”
“I understand, sir, but there’s no need to-”
“Find Geiger.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And keep me up to date. I don’t like hearing about ‘problems’ after the fact. If you foresee more complications, I want to know about them before they happen.”
“Yes, sir.”
The call ended. Hall could hear the sky starting to crack, and unless he turned this job around, it would surely
