And the money was still in the city.
Saugherty decided maybe it was worth getting out of bed after all.
At long fucking last.
Lisa had heard the whole thing.
She had been asleep on the mattress the night before when they came back in the early hours, the mystery guy and his girlfriend. Lisa thought she would just be confronting the guy, asking him what the hell he was doing here, but it didn’t turn out that way. Besides, it sounded like both of them were hurt; she could hear it in their quiet gasps and moans.
When Lisa heard them walking up the carpeted staircase, the wooden floor beneath them creaking from the weight, she came to her senses and scrambled across the floor and into the bedroom closet.
They entered the room just as she was easing the closet door shut.
“Take it easy,” someone said. The mystery guy.
“I’ll be okay.” His female companion. “Where are you hit?”
“It doesn’t matter. Wait … there’s a mattress here on the floor. Ease down onto it. Keep pressure on your belly.”
“It’s just grazed,” she said.
“You have an M.D. now? Lie back.”
“Don’t worry. The baby is fine. I can feel that much.”
“It’s not the baby I’m worried about.”
Lisa cracked open the closet door a fraction of an inch. The room was dark, but she saw the outline of a man lowering a woman onto the mattress on the floor.
She could tell they were a couple—aside from the fact that the woman was apparently pregnant—because they bickered so much. Neither wanted to admit they were hurting, and both wanted to attend to the other’s wounds. The mystery guy seemed to have the upper hand, though, because he had the number of a doctor scribbled on a napkin. The tide turned when Lisa heard that the woman was the one with the cell phone, and she insisted on making the call.
“He won’t know you,” the guy said.
“Who is he, anyway?” she asked.
“He came with the house.”
“And where did the house come from?”
When Lisa heard the mystery guy tell the abbreviated story, she almost put a foot through the drywall in the closet.
The mystery guy didn’t mention names, but he said that an Italian gentleman had agreed to let him use the house in exchange for half of “the take.” The house came with guns, a set of clothes, and an unlicensed doctor to take care of injuries.
“Wait—you needed a doctor before tonight?” the woman asked.
“Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really?”
“We were ambushed in the getaway car, then stripped and thrown into body bags. I woke up as two assholes were trying to shove me down a pipe, down by the river. Later I was shot. But I’m feeling much better.”
“You were shot? By the Russians?”
“No. But the guys from earlier … one of them was Russian. The other was a college kid. Not Russian. American.”
“Are they still out there?” the woman asked. “Will they be coming after us?”
“No,” the guy said, quietly.
Lisa turned this over in her brain. A Russian. And a college kid.
Mikal. And Andrew.
This is why she almost kicked the wall in.
“So let me call the doctor. Have him look at us both. And then we can get the fuck out of this city. We need to regroup.”
“We need to talk,” the woman said. “I have a lot to explain.”
There was no torture greater than Lisa’s hours in that closet, trapped, enveloped with rage. Right out of her closet door was the man who had killed her boyfriend. And the salt on that particular wound was the fact that her own father was this guy’s partner in crime. Her dad had given them the use of this house! Her house! Her and Andrew’s house! And guns. And clothes. And a doctor.
Lisa seethed as she listened to the phone call. She even knew the doctor they were calling. It was Dr. Bartholomew Dovaz, her own pediatrician. She had grown up afraid of Dr. Dovaz—he had an awful bedside manner, sticking you with needles when you weren’t ready—until his wife got sick, and he started doing drugs. Lisa had assumed her family had severed all contact with Dr. Dovaz after a messy arrest in Lower Merion back in 1993, but apparently, her father had kept in touch with the man.
Her father had kept him on hand for special occasions. Like treating murderers he was hiding.
Had Lisa a weapon of any kind, she would have bolted from the closet and used it. Repeatedly. A gun. A baseball bat. A knife. A chainsaw. A nail gun. And then she’d confront her father later.
But she had nothing, and she had no idea what this couple was packing. They were professional criminals of some kind, and most likely had guns. Which made sense. They were talking about gunshot wounds. It would do no good to pop out of the closet and get shot in the head.
Lisa decided to wait for Dr. Dovaz to arrive, and then she’d figure out her move from there. There would be time to sneak away, to run back to her house and talk to her father.
She repeated things to herself, in her mind, so she could remember them later. They were important.
A while later, Lisa fell asleep.
He’d scraped together what he could. The clothes on his back from yesterday were ripped and blood-soaked; his house—and his pitiful wardrobe inside it—had probably burned to the ground. That left one choice. Doctor’s lounge. Saugherty knew his way around hospitals from his cop days, especially this one: Pennsylvania Hospital. He knew the ER. He knew the ER lounge, and how nobody really paid any attention to people popping in and out of it.
He found a pair of khakis and a nice black Eddie Bauer mock turtleneck in one of the lockers. He kept his own shoes, but glommed a shabby-looking black blazer from another locker. Didn’t they pay these docs anything?
The Rittenhouse Towers were only twelve or so blocks away, across town, but since Saugherty had a busted arm, a sack full of broken ribs, and various other oochies and ouchies, he opted for a cab.
Getting in was not a problem; he knew the acting chief of security, Al Buchan, from his working the Fifteenth District. Saugherty fed him some line of bull about working a freelance bank robbery consulting thing for Lt. Earl Mothers, which Al swallowed without complaint. Let him up to 910, where a couple of uniforms told him he should check out 1809, where they hid out for a while.
“They” = Patrick Selway Lennon plus an unidentified female companion.
Saugherty got what he could from the guys on the scene; eyewitnesses weren’t much use coming up with a name. The description was hazy, too. “Hot as balls,” one guy had said, describing the unidentified female
