Why?”
I didn’t have to answer the question for her. I saw the answer in her eyes.
…
It had been easy enough to get her address from Nathan Martyr and to confirm it with Chef Liu. It was no shock that the address matched Tillman’s. Of course they had lived together. Now it was only a matter of waiting outside her apartment, the top floor of an unremarkable house in the Long Island City section of Queens.
“If she was extorting more than two women, she could do better than this,” Pam said, staring up at the house for a second before returning her gaze to the passenger’s sideview mirror.
“Tuition.”
“What?”
“Tuition costs a fortune at SVA,” I said. “And she’s put her film education to good use.”
“Funny fella. I don’t think Maya Watson would have seen it that way.”
“None of them would.”
Pam tensed. “Here she comes. My side of the street, half a block down. You’re sure you want to do this?”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not me you should be worried about,” she said. “Are you sure he’s going to go for it?”
“If he is who I think he is, yes. If not, we’re all fucked.”
On that cheery note, I got out of the SUV. Hiding behind the side of the Suburban, I dialed the number DiNardo had given me from Maya’s cell phone, the same number Natasha had given me: her blackmailer’s number. I heard the muffled ringing of a phone just as she passed me. I stepped out from around the Suburban, phone in hand.
“Hello, Esme,” I said.
She wheeled around. She knew immediately who I was, but pretended not to. “Do I know you?”
I waved my cell at her, smiling. “Why don’t you answer your phone?”
She ignored that. “Who are you?”
I clicked my phone off and the ringing in her bag was silenced. “Aren’t you curious how I got your number?”
“Not really, no. Who are you again?” Now she was just stalling for time, trying to make sense of the situation.
“Maybe you don’t recognize me without my old badge or a drink spilled all over me.”
“Oh, I remember now, yes. From the High Line.” She smiled at me, running her tongue over her lips as she had the second time I spoke to her. “How did you find me?”
“Finding your address was simple, almost as simple as blackmail.”
“You are crazy. I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Weak, Esme. That was weak. And you were doing so well up to then. See, I know all sorts of unexpected stuff about you, like how to email you at RT6969@constop. com.”
That chased the flirtatious smile right off her lips. Her face hardened and her eyes busied themselves burning holes right through mine. That was good because she was so focused on me she never even heard Pam come up behind her. Only when Pam pressed the tines of the Taser to Esme’s neck did she realize the tables were about to turn on her and turn hard.
…
I would have dismissed it as a scene out of a bad movie-a woman duct-taped to a chair in a semi-dark room in a warehouse. Only the warehouse belonged to my brother and me, and it wasn’t a movie. There were times when there weren’t very many options and this was one of those times.
When Esme stirred, she tried shaking herself fully awake. She tried moving her arms and legs to no avail and then looked down at the strange clothes she was wearing.
“You shit yourself when you got zapped,” I said, straddling a chair directly across from her. “It happens sometimes.”
“I’m gonna fuck you up for this.”
I clucked my tongue at her. “Sorry, Esme, but your fucking people up days are over.”
“You think so?”
“What’s the matter? Not so much fun when you’re not in control, is it?”
“Fuck you!”
“I’m not the one who’s fucked here.”
“What are you going to do, kill me, old man?”
“It’s a distinct possibility.”
I stood up and reached under my jacket for my. 38. I opened the cylinder and emptied the cartridges onto the floor. I picked a lone bullet up and made a show of putting it back in the cylinder. I walked over to her and spun the cylinder very close to her right ear. Then walked behind her, spun it again and snapped the cylinder shut. “Click, click, click, click… I love that sound. This is a trick I learned to play as a cop, Esme. Now let me teach it to you. You see, it’s stupid beating a confession out of someone. Too messy, too much potential fallout. In any case, we don’t really need you to confess, do we? No we don’t. Keeping that cell phone on you, that was really sloppy, and picking the money up yourself was just plain stupid. And sorry, but we’ve got your computer here, all your little sex toys and outfits, and all your video equipment too. I’m sorry. I’m getting off the point. Where was I? Oh, right. The trick.
“Yeah, like I said, it’s dumb hitting a suspect. And you know, I was always in uniform, so I never got to learn how to ask clever questions in that manipulative way detectives ask them. Some of those guys were amazing. They could get real hard-case motherfuckers to confess to terrible things, but sometimes it took hours, days sometimes. No, see, out on the street, we had our own way of interrogating suspects and we also got hard cases to confess to all kinds of shit, but it never took more than two minutes. That’s where the trick comes in. It worked every time too, ’cause no matter how different people are from each other, tough or weak, brave or cowardly, sane or psychopath, they all have one thing in common: they don’t want to die. And, Esme, I bet you think you’re different. I bet you always think that, huh? That you’re gonna be the exception to the rule. Well, you keep thinking that, okay?
“So here’s how it would work if you were a hard case. I would take this gun here with the one bullet in it and I’d jam it against the back of your fucking head or press it to your temple.” I lightly brushed her hair with the muzzle of the. 38. “Then I’d start asking you for where the video footage is stored, for all your access codes, and the master codes for your accounts. I’d ask you for a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of the people you’ve been blackmailing. And the minute you stopped answering or started lying to me, I would pull the hammer back and squeeze the trigger and I would keep doing it until I got the answers I was looking for. See how it works? But here’s the trick,” I said, walking around in front of her and showing her the bullet in my left hand. “The trick is that I palmed the one bullet you thought was in the cylinder the second I moved out of your line of sight. The gun’s empty.” With that, I pressed the muzzle up to my temple, pulled the hammer back, and squeezed the trigger. I did it over and over and over again. “See?”
The look of utter horror on her face was astonishing. The cop who taught me this trick many years ago told me it would work just this way.
“It scares ’em more if you put the empty gun against your own head or put it in your own mouth and keep squeezing. That really scares the shit out of them. They’re already scared to begin with, but seeing that makes ’em think you’re just crazy enough to really kill them if you have to. And that’s the whole point.”
It went off perfectly, but I wasn’t feeling particularly proud of myself. Nor was I quite done, not yet.
I leaned over her and put my lips very close to her ear and whispered, “Someone is going to come talk to you now. He’s a real cop, a detective, but if you don’t cooperate with him and give him all the things we talked about, including your bank account and pin number, I’m gonna come back in here and we’re gonna play that game again. Except this time, I won’t palm the bullet. I’m dying, Esme. I have gastric cancer and, unlike you, I’ve got nothing to lose.”
“You are full of shit,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to keep her voice steady.
