bottle of beer just won’t do for the elegant dinner parties she intends to throw. Thus, she studies, perfecting her craft as Carter perfects his. Angel is majoring in Art History at Brooklyn College, reads every upscale fashion magazine she can find, attends weekend seminars on antique American furniture and French wines. When the time comes, she intends to be prepared. She will strike while the iron is hot. She will seize the day. She will laugh all the way to the bank.
Or she would, if her attention didn’t keep wandering to Leonard Carter. That business with the knives? By the time Carter finished, his body was as chiseled as the daggers he so carefully wiped off. The glistening sweat didn’t hurt either. Now she wonders when he’s coming home. What’s it been? Six hours? It feels like forever.
FOURTEEN
Carter’s been sitting on Lieutenant Solly Epstein’s house all evening, scrunched into the van’s back seat, munching on bag of a Granny Smith apples, drinking cans of Red Bull to stay alert, peeing into an empty bottle when necessary. Carter and Epstein have a history, a past in which Epstein twice attempted to take Carter’s life. Epstein hadn’t been up to the job, not even close, but Carter let the man live, a favor that now has to be repaid. There are no freebies in Carter’s world.
Epstein finally drives up to his small home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, at eight o’clock. He parks his Taurus against the curb, shuts the engine and gets out of the car. Before he can lock up, the screen door on his house opens and a little boy, a toddler, runs out to stumble across the grass and into his father’s arms.
‘Daddy, daddy, daddy.’
Carter’s touched, no doubt, and not a little jealous. He will never have this for himself, this simple pleasure. Lo Phet would have laughed if he’d even raised the subject.
‘No daddies in Hell World. Only sires.’
Carter watches father and son disappear into the house. If there are no moms and dads in Lo Phet’s universe, he thinks, there are definitely men and women. He’s smitten and he knows it, his mind instantly calling up the rise and fall of Angel’s breasts, the hiss of her drawn breath, an image and a sound, so clear she might as well be in the van. And they’d done that, too, in the cargo area by the rear doors. The windows had fogged over long before they finished.
All of which is not to say that Carter trusts Angel Tamanaka. No, Carter doesn’t trust Angel because he doesn’t trust anyone. Trust, as Angel might put it, is not Carter’s thing. It’s not what he does.
Carter settles a little deeper into the seat. There are folks about, dog walkers, a jogger or two, and he doesn’t want to be noticed. The address he had for Epstein, now four years old, is still good. That’s enough for now.
Carter needs intelligence and Epstein’s long-standing assignment to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau makes him the perfect candidate to supply it. Epstein’s sold information in the past. There’s no reason to suppose he won’t go that route again. The trick is to get him alone, the woman and child being, of course, innocent civilians.
The lights in the upstairs bedrooms, as they’re turned on and off, mark the family’s progress. First in a room at the east side of the house. The curtains in the room’s single window are open, the shade drawn up, and Carter assumes he’s looking at the boy’s room, that Solly’s putting his child to sleep. In any event, the light goes out twenty minutes later.
Another hour passes, with the lights on the lower floor, in the living room and the kitchen, remaining lit. Then the lights go out, the kitchen light first, as lights come on, in an upstairs bedroom and in the bathroom, more or less simultaneously. Carter’s thinking he might leave at this point. Tomorrow’s another day and there’s Angel back in Woodhaven. Hopefully.
But Carter doesn’t move, and his patience is finally rewarded at eleven o’clock when the bedroom goes dark as a light comes on downstairs. Epstein emerges a moment later. He ambles to his car, jingling his keys, whistling to himself. Then he’s off and running, with Carter following shortly behind.
The trip isn’t very long, only a few blocks to a pedestrian bridge crossing Shore Parkway. New York’s upper bay is just a hundred yards distant and Carter’s nostrils fill with the odor of the sea, though the harbor is screened by trees and bushes. When Epstein pulls to the curb near the overpass, Carter passes by and drives another block before sliding the van into a parking space. By the time he gets out, Epstein has crossed the bridge and disappeared.
Carter jogs to the overpass and takes the steps two at a time. Epstein’s nowhere in sight when he reaches the top, and he crosses the bridge quickly, the traffic zinging along beneath him. Carter intends to pursue Epstein, to run him down – this is Carter’s big chance to engage the cop in a long, pointed conversation – but the scene before him is too compelling and he stops for a moment. To his right, the towers of lower Manhattan rise like the phalanx of some great advancing army. Lady Liberty, alone on her island and lit from top to bottom, holds her torch aloft as if leading the charge. Across the harbor on Staten Island, single-family homes run in parallel lines across low shadowy hills. To his left, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, with its lit cables and towers, unites Staten Island with Brooklyn. The Verrazano is the most slender and graceful of the city’s suspension bridges, at least in Carter’s opinion, despite it being the longest by far.
Carter has been here before, to walk the promenade running between the highway and the water on a bright fall afternoon. When he spots Epstein sitting on a bench nearby, the faint glow of a cigarette in his right hand, he knows exactly why the man has come to this spot. The view is stunning.
Carter drops on to the bench next to Epstein a moment later, but Epstein doesn’t flinch. ‘I was hoping you were dead,’ he says.
‘Sorry to disappoint.’
Epstein tugs on his cigarette. He’s a short man, barely five-eight, and bald on top, with a barrel chest and heavily muscled shoulders. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he says, ‘Maybe I’m dense. But I don’t think I’m in your debt. I think we had a deal and I kept my end.’
Carter had exacted a price when he allowed Epstein to survive the second attempt on his life. Yes, I’ll let you live. But only if you put a gun to your partner’s head and pull the trigger. With his wife about to give birth any minute, Epstein had complied.
‘Benedetti,’ Carter says. ‘Bobby and Ricky, the Ditto brothers.’
‘Like I said, Carter, I don’t owe you a thing.’
The cop rises, grinds his cigarette into the pavement and begins to walk south, toward the bridge. Carter follows, not yet ready to pull out the big guns. He will, though, if it comes to that. From their right, the pulsating roar of high-speed traffic assaults their ears, reducing the splash of the waves against the boulders protecting the shoreline to an insinuating murmur.
‘How have you been, Solly?’ Carter asks.
Epstein laughs. ‘I got a kid now, a boy, and another on the way, and then Mr Death shows up. That would be you, in case you’re interested. So, how good can I be?’ Epstein hesitates, then lowers his voice. ‘I know you hit Ricky Ditto. The way it happened, inside the house, the alarms defeated, no sign of forced entry, one shot through the forehead? It had to be you.’ Epstein stops suddenly, but doesn’t meet Carter’s gaze. ‘And there were others. A Polish gangster shot through the head from three hundred yards away. A Russian dead from a single knife wound just below his sternum. You already used that one, Carter, in Macy’s a few days before Christmas. I thought you were more creative.’
Carter thinks he’s now supposed to ask the cop if he, Carter, is a suspect in any of these cases, if his name has come to the attention of the authorities. He doesn’t.
‘I’m gonna have to invoke my constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination,’ he says. ‘Mum’s the word.’
‘Yeah, well I wouldn’t sweat it. The FBI and the NYPD are places where nobody knows your name.’
Carter stares for a moment at a line of oil tankers and container ships anchored in the harbor. He wonders if they’re waiting to unload, or if they’re off to some faraway port with the turn of the tide. ‘I’ve been sitting in the van for the last eight hours. You mind if we keep walking?’
They continue on for several minutes, Carter watching headlights flicker in the superstructure joining the bridge’s upper and lower decks. Epstein needs time to adjust and Carter’s a patient man. He will not be the first to
