Robbins wasn’t moving as much. Maybe the effort to crawl had exhausted him, Ava thought. Still, she approached him cautiously, looking to see where his hands were. She slid one of the cuffs over his right wrist. It barely fit. Then she lifted his left arm and moved it across his back. He flinched and she felt the arm begin to resist. Quickly she yanked it towards the other, slipped the second handcuff on, and closed it. Then she reached again for his neck. He tried to twist away but she persisted, and finally she managed to put him completely out.
On her knees, Ava pushed herself back towards the bedroom. Easing into a sitting position, she leaned her back against the wall. She took deep, slow breaths, trying to calm herself down. But even as her body’s tension eased, her mind raced with an anger that was directed mainly at herself — for having taken the Robbins brothers too lightly, for letting herself be blindsided. Calm yourself, she thought. The worst is over.
Then the doorbell rang.
Ava struggled to her feet. She had no idea who was there, but she wasn’t going to open the door for anyone. She looked through the peephole. A young man in powder blue pyjamas was standing at the door looking concerned.
“Hello,” Ava said through the door, her voice hoarse with emotion that hadn’t completely dissipated.
“I’m from the apartment next door. Is everything okay in there? I heard a horrible racket. I was just about to go downstairs to get someone,” he said, his face clouded with confusion.
“Please don’t,” Ava said. “My husband, he’s epileptic. He had a fit, that’s all. It was a bad one, even for him, but he’s all right now. He would be mortified if he thought strangers were looking in on him.”
“It was a hell of a noise.”
“He’s a big man and he hit the wall. It’s passed. Please believe me, there will be no more trouble.”
She watched him through the peephole. He looked at least partially convinced. “Thank you for your concern, though. It’s really appreciated,” she said.
He took two steps back and looked around as if waiting for someone else to voice a complaint. “Okay, no worries then. Like I said, I’m next door, in 310. If you need anything, let me know.”
“Thanks again,” Ava said, watching as he moved away, glancing back at the door.
She took a deep breath and turned. The apartment was a disaster. There was blood in several places on the floor and a cracked crater in the drywall she’d been backed into, and sometime during their struggle the coffee table had collapsed, two of its legs broken. There was no point in trying to clean it up. Robbins was on the floor and Seto was in the bed, and they weren’t going anywhere. Ava knew she had better things to do and not that much time in which to get them done.
She had to step over Robbins to get into his room. A gun and a police badge were on top of his dresser. He was a sergeant, and still active. She figured he’d been crawling towards the gun. Her cellphone was in the bottom drawer, resting on some very large men’s underwear. She took it out, turned it on, and walked into her own bedroom. Then she picked up her notebook and pen and took three sachets of VIA instant from her bag. The clock said six forty. She needed her morning coffee. She needed to think. The morning had barely begun, and Ava didn’t need the day to get any more dramatic.
(40)
Ava stood by the stove watching the water boil, the mindlessness of it comfortably distracting. She made her coffee and went out onto the balcony. The sun was creeping up the side of the building and soon she’d be engulfed in it. She was thinking how pleasant it was outside when the William Tell overture called from the kitchen. She stuck her head through the door and looked at Robbins’s phone until it went quiet. It was only a short reprieve, she knew. The Captain would call back soon, and she’d better be prepared to talk to him.
She sat on a chair and hoisted her legs onto the railing. She knew if she rolled up her pants the bruising would already be visible. What a mess, she thought. What a fucking awful mess. When was the last time, she thought again, she had misjudged a situation so badly? When was the last time she had misjudged a man so badly? Why hadn’t she simply sent him the money in the first place and avoided all this chaos? Because it wasn’t her nature to give in so easily, and besides, she hadn’t trusted him to honour his commitments. And why hadn’t he given her a chance to resend the money without all that unnecessary violence? Because that wasn’t his nature, she answered herself again. He needed to hurt her. He needed to be dominant.
Ava finished her coffee and went back to the kitchen for another. She put two sachets into her second cup to really get a jolt. Then she picked up Robbins’s phone and her own and returned to the balcony. She placed his on the table and pressed her voicemail key. There were more than twenty messages, most of them old. Uncle. Uncle. Uncle. Derek. Derek. Her mother. Mimi. Her mother. Uncle. Uncle. He’s worried, she thought.
And then Andrew Tam. “I need to hear from you,” he said, his voice a mixture of fear and anticipation. “I have a meeting with my bank tomorrow morning, and I don’t know what to tell them. You need to give me something, anything, that can help me hold them off. Please, Ava, call me. Call me.” Ava checked the time of his message. It had come in the middle of a Hong Kong night, right around when she was showing Seto to Bates, a few hours before Bates had sent the wire.
She scanned the other messages quickly. More of the same, until she got to Tam again. He sounded as if he was bouncing up and down. The five million had reached his account two hours before his meeting with the bank. As he was speaking, his emotions overcame him and he began to cry. Well, at least some good has come of this, Ava thought, listening to him say “thank you” over and over again. As Uncle always said, they didn’t just get people’s money back, they got them their lives back. Now all she had to do was take care of her own.
The last voicemail was from Derek. “I don’t know if you have access to your phone yet. Just a heads-up — I have the information you wanted. Call whenever.” You darling, she thought, reaching for her notebook before calling him back. Then Robbins’s phone jumped to life again.
The William Tell overture was rapidly becoming the most annoying piece of music she’d ever heard. She thought about not answering, even turning off the phone, and then instinctively knew that either of those choices would be wrong. Nothing good could come from putting him off. The last thing she needed was for him to go crazy on her, to do something unpredictable like calling in the cops or Morris Thomas and his boys. She needed to slow things down, not force his hand and have him speed them up. So she had to deal with him. She left the balcony, went into the kitchen, and sat down, her eyes looking out towards the harbour.
“This is Ava Lee,” she answered.
“Ms. Lee?” he said.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“I would like to speak to my brother,” he said.
He was cool, she gave him that. “Your brother is indisposed.”
“I’ll wait. Ask him to come to the phone.”
“Not that kind of indisposed.”
“I would still like to speak to him. Ask him to come to the phone.”
“He isn’t in a position to walk.”
He paused. “Then take the phone to him.”
“There isn’t much point in that either, because I don’t think he can talk.”
A longer pause. “You’re a nasty little thing, aren’t you?”
Ava said, “There is a French saying that applies to my situation: ‘Be careful of that animal — it is very vicious. When you attack it, it defends itself.’”
“We could have a debate about who attacked whom, but I don’t think that would help this situation,” Robbins said. Then he added, “Is he alive?” as casually as if he were asking whether she had eaten breakfast.
“I think so. I haven’t checked in the past ten minutes.”
She could hear him breathing through the phone but he didn’t sound particularly stressed, and again she had to give him credit. “Ms. Lee, I hope you don’t think this mistreatment of my brother changes your position in any material way,” he said.
“I wasn’t thinking that far ahead when he was swinging a belt at me and threatening to break my bones with a baton.”
“Maybe that was ill-advised on his part.”
