When Malloy had stopped firing, he paused and saw
LeRoy Culvert cowering behind one of the couches. He was muttering sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus over and over again as he rubbed a gold cross hanging around his neck.
“Jesus won’t save you,” the woman said, walking over to the cowering man. “But give him my best.”
With one thrust, she buried her knife up to the hilt just under LeRoy Culvert’s jaw. He tried to open it, instead aspirating a cloud of blood. When Culvert’s eyes rolled back in his head, the woman pulled the knife free.
Culvert’s body toppled to the ground.
The woman looked at the bloody knife in her hand.
“Three days,” the woman said to her associates. “Once
Paulina Cole does her job, and the police tie this into it, we’ll have enough product on the street to saturate the entire city in less than a week.”
Malloy stood there, staring at the bodies. He made the sign of the cross. The woman turned to Malloy and put her arm across his shoulder.
“I know you’re thinking about him,” she said. “But I promise you, he won’t have died in vain.”
“Thursday,” Malloy said. “I’ve been waiting for this day for twenty years.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Now come on, we have some new recruits coming in. I want this room to look like something out of Stephen King’s nightmares.”
The woman took the knife and drew it across the wall, leaving a bloody smear. Just a few strokes later, the F was visible. When she completed the rest of the word, and the apartment was sufficiently coated, they left the building and waited for Detective Sevag Makhoulian to report the crime.
5
Amanda Davies arrived home at eight o’clock. She called it home even though it was anything but. The reality was it was the home of her friend and coworker
Darcy Lapore, and Darcy was campaigning for most altruistic human being on the planet by allowing Amanda to stay there.
Living here wasn’t what she’d expected after coming to New York for law school. She figured she’d graduate from NYU near the top of her class, which she did, then find a cushy job in some high-profile firm and become one of those high-powered career women who had brassy blond hair (hers was auburn, so this would be tricky), wear smart Hillary Clinton pantsuits, get married at thirty-six, kids at thirty-nine, realize by fifty that you never really spent much time with your family, sixty before you realized you were never really happy in your marriage and my, didn’t life go by fast?
Instead, she met a guy named Henry Parker who changed her world. Well, part of it was her own doing, choosing the not-for-profit sector of legal aid rather than one of those cushy jobs. She didn’t make the money most New York lawyers did, but she was pretty sure she slept better at night.
It took a few years, but looking back Amanda realized how much of her life she’d missed. It was as if she’d taken her expected life and turned it around. Her parents had died when she was young, and after being shuttled back and forth for years, she was adopted by a kind couple named Lawrence and Harriet Stein. The Steins were everything foster parents could be. Except for real parents.
Amanda went through the first twenty years of her life without knowing a real relationship of any kind, and she didn’t figure that would get any better.
Then she met Henry in extraordinary circumstances, literally picking him up on the side of the road, later to find out he was wanted for murder. Thankfully he was innocent. That would have been a deal breaker.
They’d leaped into a relationship faster than either of them knew what they were doing, and for a while it was good. Really good. Then just as they met under extraordinary circumstances, so were they torn apart. Henry broke up with her for reasons that he believed were noble, but devastated them both. And after some tentative patchwork, they’d decided to give it another go. Slowly this time. They were starting like they should have from the beginning. Movies. Dinner. Holding hands while walking through Central Park, picnic lunches on the Great Lawn.
She’d moved in with Henry too quickly last time. For now, Darcy would do, but every night spent in that cold guest room, with the hard mattress that was meant more for show than for use, with the artificial orchids everywhere and paint so white that it seemed to have been bleached of all personality, she couldn’t wait for the day when she could feel his warmth next to her every night, where she could lean her head on his chest whenever she felt like it and listen to the beating of his heart. She craved that intimacy, that security. He needed it, too, she knew it. But if it took a few extra months to build protection for the rest of their lives, she supposed she could wait.
The alternative would have been unbearable.
When she used her spare key to open the apartment door, she had to fumble around in the hallway for the light switch. It wasn’t by the door like it would be in a normal apartment. The hallway light was part of some intricate module by the entrance of the atrium that controlled all the lights in the house. That was one of the things she loved about Henry’s previous apartments. There were no modules, and definitely no atrium.
Once she found the panel and turned on every light in the house before finding the one to her bedroom, she went inside, stripped out of her work clothes and threw on a pair of shorts and a tank top. Darcy and her husband,
Devin, were out at their summer home in Oyster Bay.
Every weekend they begged Amanda to come with them, and every weekend she declined. She hated being the third wheel, and having to do it four and a half days of every week (they usually left for Long Island early on
Friday) was enough. And while sitting at the edge of a beach, dipping her toes into the luscious water of the
Long Island Sound seemed like the perfect antidote to the stressful Manhattan life, it didn’t mean a thing without
Henry. And he wasn’t the “dip your feet in the water and laugh like a fool” kind of guy.
He had two modes: work and play. When the switch was on Work, Henry was as driven and ambitious as anyone she’d known. When it was on Play, there was nobody else in the world but the two of them. Everything faded away when he held her in his arms.
And she loved both sides of him unconditionally.
Amanda called Henry’s cell. It went right to voice mail.
“Hey, babe, hope you’re having a good day and Jack hasn’t led you off a cliff or something. Give me a call when you get a chance.”
When she hung up, Amanda turned on her laptop and put Aimee Mann on high. She was a massive fan, but found she couldn’t listen to her favorite song, “Wise Up,” as often as she used to. The lyrics were about finding what you thought you wanted most, only to realize that once you had it, it wasn’t what you thought it would be. Every time she heard it, she thought about their relationship.
She’d never been a goopy girl, the kind who read her horoscopes or gossiped over cosmos while wearing outfits that cost more than the GDP of the Congo. She wasn’t superstitious either, but she didn’t want to think about losing what she wanted. What she had.
She figured if Aimee knew what she and Henry had been through in their few years knowing each other, she wouldn’t take offense.
Kicking her shoes off, Amanda lay back on the hard bed, wanting to think about nothing until it was time to get up for work the next morning. The one thing she did like about Darcy’s place was that the girl didn’t spare the pillows. The guest room had no less than a dozen pillows of various shapes and sizes covering the bed. Amanda had spent her first week deciding which ones were right, and picked the right half-dozen to fall asleep to. When she and
Henry lived together it always drove him crazy. Mainly because he would wake up on one side of the full-size bed with one nostril covered and a feather sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
Amanda groaned as she rolled off the bed, blowing a hair strand from her eye. Darcy and Devin had a fifty-
