When Bartok speaks next, his voice is just an inch from Doyle’s ear. Doyle can feel the man’s warm breath pushing through the cloth.
‘Kill you? I ain’t gonna kill you, you stupid fucking mick. I want you alive. And you know why? To show you that I’m smarter than you think. I’m gonna help you, Doyle.’
‘I don’t need your help.’
‘Oh, yes, you do. Think about your situation. Think about your ex-boss lying in pieces behind that rock over there. Think about his missus with your bullet in her brain. She’s got great tits, by the way — I copped a feel on the way out.’
Doyle tries to suppress his anger. His mind struggles to work out where Bartok’s going with this.
Something — probably his gun — taps against his skull.
‘This,’ says Bartok, ‘gives you a story. You say that the lieutenant tied you up and put the hood on your head. That he was going to shoot you and dump you in that hole over there. And then somebody else came along. You have no idea who. You heard noises and that’s it. You got that, Doyle?’
Doyle doesn’t answer. He feels his coat being opened, a hand reaching into his inside pocket.
‘And this,’ Bartok continues, ‘gives you the rest of what you need to get out of the fix you’re in.’
‘I don’t want it. Whatever it is, I don’t want it.’
Bartok laughs again, but it’s more of a chuckle this time.
‘We
Doyle swallows down some blood. ‘I don’t owe you shit. Take your crap out of my pocket. I’ll take my chances.’
‘It stays, Doyle. And I think you’ll use it. But even if you don’t, you still owe me.’
‘Yeah? How d’you figure that?’
Another cruel laugh. ‘Because I got something else up my sleeve. Something you don’t want anybody to know about. Any ideas yet?’
Doyle’s mind races, but doesn’t seem to get off the starting line.
Bartok’s voice drops to a whisper. Although carried on lungfuls of air that feel almost burning against Doyle’s ear, the words themselves chill him to the bone.
The breathing moves away. When Bartok speaks again it sounds as though he’s standing up again.
‘Think about that, Doyle. Not so much the dumb brother now, huh? We’ll talk again soon. Oh, and one other thing before I go. .’
Doyle waits for more words he doesn’t want to hear. What he gets is something hard smashing into the side of his skull, and then a feeling of sinking into the soil as though it’s quicksand, swallowing him up and closing over him.
He thinks he’s dead.
When he opens his eyes he sees nothing, feels nothing. His brain sends out commands to the rest of his body, but nothing responds. It’s like he’s become some kind of disembodied soul, floating in a featureless limbo.
Gradually, he realizes that his limbs are moving, but the cold has numbed them — turned them into unfeeling slabs of frozen meat. He manages to roll into a sitting position, then starts pumping his legs along the ground to get the blood circulating again.
Next, he flexes his biceps, rubs his arms up and down his back, wrings his hands together until they start to thaw a little. When he has finally re-established the perimeter of his own body, he goes to work on the cord binding his wrists. He frees his arms more quickly than expected, and when he pulls off the hood he sees why: the lack of sensation in his hands meant that he didn’t notice he was sloughing off layers of skin as he pulled and twisted them against the rope.
He stands up. Shakily at first, he stamps his feet and slaps his arms across his body, trying to dispel the iciness that seems to have sunk right down into his bones. Each movement sends jolts of pain coursing through his battered body.
He burrows his hands deep into his pockets, then scans the clearing. It’s so quiet, so peaceful here. It’s almost impossible to believe that this place was recently witness to such extreme, sickening violence.
He knows he has to look, has to confirm what he already knows to be true. He’s a cop. He has seen numerous corpses, in various states of decay and putrefaction. But as he circles the rock and glances at what lies behind, even he feels the bile rise in his throat.
He performs a quick search of the area. There’s no sign of either his gun or the lieutenant’s, but what he does find is Franklin’s flashlight. He switches it on, but just before he aims for the woods he takes another look at the hole he started digging. The site that almost became his grave.
With no idea of the route, and nothing that looks familiar, it takes him a long time to get back to the house. When he finally arrives, he stamps across the back porch, enters through the kitchen, then goes straight to the living room. He wonders why he finds it surprising that Nadine is still there in the armchair. Still half-naked, still staring sightlessly, still dead.
There’s one slight difference: Nadine’s skirt is pushed up around her waist, and Doyle’s Glock has been tucked under the waistband of her panties. A parting message from Bartok.
‘Sonofabitch!’ Doyle mutters.
Gingerly, he retrieves his gun, then smoothes Nadine’s skirt back into a more respectable position. As if it makes any difference to her.
He looks long and hard at the face of Nadine, tries to see past the mask of blood she now wears. He pictures her laughing, smiling, teasing, flirting. He tries to comprehend how such a vision of beauty can be the trigger for such a tidal wave of destruction. How she could possibly have acted as the inspiration for all that hate, all that evil. He wonders, too, whether she managed to convince herself that it was none of her doing, or whether she suspected the real reasons for what was happening to Doyle and chose to say nothing.
He reaches into his inside pocket, takes out Bartok’s present.
A cassette tape. Presumably containing a record of everything said in this room since Franklin arrived home.
Doyle goes over to the tape recorder he left on the table. He slips the tape in, rewinds it a little, then hits the play button. He hears Franklin’s voice telling how he used a nanny cam to confirm his wife’s infidelity, how he was convinced that Parlatti and Alvarez couldn’t be allowed to live after that. And then. .
Nothing.
Just hiss. Nothing about Rocca or Bartok. Nothing about the dirty cop in the precinct.
When a voice cuts in again, it’s Doyle asking what happens next.
So, okay, Lucas, you’re not so stupid after all.
He ejects the tape, holds it in the air and looks at it questioningly. And what, he thinks, do I do with this? Destroy it? Consign it to the fire like the other one?
What the hell. Bartok was right. This tape is the only proof of what really happened. Much as Doyle hates to admit it, this tape saves him. Unless Bartok’s whispered message was a bluff, destroying the tape gains him nothing and could lose him everything.
Sighing, he pockets the tape and reaches for his cellphone.
THIRTY-TWO
It’s one of the longest days of his life.
The Westchester County police get him first. They bring in a doctor to look him over. After listening to the parts of the medical assessment that suit their purpose, they pummel him with questions until he feels he’s just gone ten rounds in the boxing ring.
The cops from the city get him next. To the obvious relief of the Westchester guys, who seem overjoyed not to have to deal with such a complicated case, his ass gets dragged down to One Police Plaza, where he undergoes another grueling sequence of interviews. Despite the fact that he’s had no sleep, and that he keeps telling this to everyone he meets, the questioning continues throughout the day. The Puzzle Palace, as the police headquarters is
