an attorney-”
“He was thrown out of the bar,” shouted a second man, walking the curb like a tightrope and failing, probably a function of the brown paper bag he clutched and the bottle of booze it surely contained. He was about the same age as Smith but shorter and stouter. He too wore a blue business suit and gray overcoat. His shirt collar was open and the knot of his tie was halfway down his chest.
“That’s my friend, for lack of a better word, MacKenzie,” Smith apologized to Charlie. “The bar he referenced is the Blarney Stone on Flatbush. Probably by now you’ve developed a theory as to which of us in fact was the problem.”
Clever guy, this Kermit Smith, thought Charlie. But ambulance chaser all the way. In this part of Brooklyn, at this hour, the Samaritans were only bad.
Seeming to have read Charlie’s edginess, Smith said, “Cutting to the chase, I overheard some of your chat with the fire chief. I’m with Connelly, Dumbarton and Rhodes, notable for winning twenty-four of twenty-four negligence suits against boiler manufacturers by convincing juries that the victims would have needed to be rocket mechanics to adequately maintain the dozen or so indeterminate valves on the older electric ignition units. If you’re at all interested…”
The fire had made selling the house hugely problematic. Who knew how long it would take and how much work would be required to collect the insurance-assuming Drummond had remembered to make the payments? “I guess it couldn’t hurt to know about, on my father’s behalf,” Charlie said, faking a yawn so as not to appear overeager. This was an arena in which a clever ambulance chaser could yield a big score.
MacKenzie griped, “Come on, we’re gonna miss last call at Flanagan’s.”
Turning his back on his friend, Smith said to Charlie, “Why don’t we step into my office for a moment?” He took a few steps down the sidewalk.
“Just give him your card already,” MacKenzie said, prompting Smith to stray farther.
“Dad, please don’t go anywhere for half a second?” Charlie said.
Drummond nodded. Charlie’s concern was eased only a little.
Catching up to Smith, he noticed a sparkling new black BMW Z4 roadster four parking spots down. “I’ve always wanted to win a boiler manufacturer negligence suit and buy one of those,” Charlie said.
Smith advanced to take the car in. “Well, this could still be your lucky night.” He halted in a pool of shadows between streetlamps and reached into his coat, presumably for a business card or BlackBerry.
Smith’s larynx was crunched by a fist, thrown by Drummond on a dead run.
So strange was this turn of events that Charlie closed his eyes, expecting that when he opened them, the hallucination would be over and Smith would be standing there, by himself, BlackBerry at the ready.
When Charlie opened his eyes, he found Smith teetering, his attempt to breathe resulting in a feeble croak. Charlie saw Smith had drawn from his coat not a BlackBerry but a pistol with a barrel capped by a silencer.
Drummond’s right fist blurred into an uppercut, snapping Smith’s wrist and costing him his hold on the grip. The gun hit the sidewalk with a metallic bass note and bounced away.
Drummond drilled a left into Smith’s abdomen. The tall man reeled.
Eyes aglow with more than the reflection of the streetlamps, Drummond kept after him, heaving a roundhouse into his jaw and driving him backward. Smith stumbled over a cluster of full trash bags and appeared to lose consciousness in the tumult of cans and bottles.
Charlie looked on, cold air filling his gaping mouth. As far as he knew, Drummond had a hard time hitting a Ping-Pong ball.
Drummond meanwhile darted after the pistol. With it just inches from his grasp, he stopped abruptly and reversed course, leaping onto a stone stoop. From up the block came a muted cough. A bullet rang the metal banister inches above his head.
Halfway up the deserted sidewalk, Smith’s stocky friend MacKenzie wobbled, no longer like a drunk, but rather, a concussion victim. A chute of blood from his nose glowed as he staggered past a streetlamp. Drummond must have started on him, Charlie figured, but hadn’t had time to finish in his rush to stop Smith. In MacKenzie’s hand was the paper bag Charlie had imagined concealed a liquor bottle. Protruding from it now was a silenced gun just like Smith’s.
Charlie stood in place on the sidewalk and watched him advance. Fear jammed everything, not least of which was Charlie’s mechanism for deciding what to do. The next thing he knew, he was falling.
He hit the sidewalk between the stoop and a trio of steel trash cans. Drummond, he realized, had reached through the banister spindles and pulled him down.
Another bullet hissed from MacKenzie’s silenced barrel, stinging the sidewalk inches from Charlie’s knees.
The most rudimentary survival mechanism enabled him to bunch himself so that the trash cans at least blocked him from MacKenzie’s sight. From there he eyed the rest of the block. There were no pedestrians or motorists to provide help. Still, he thought, the neighbors would be deluging the 911 switchboard, as he would have himself if his cell phone, along with his coat, hadn’t been a casualty of the blast. Then he considered, with a wave of nausea, that the neighbors had been given no reason to glance out their windows. There had been no roar of guns, no noise at all as cities go. And if someone happened to raise a blind, what would he see now? The shadows concealed MacKenzie’s gun if the open lapels of his overcoat didn’t. It would appear a clean-cut yuppie was ambling home.
Every part of Charlie trembled at the dull patter of MacKenzie’s soles, the volume increasing as he neared.
Within thirty yards, or close enough that he was unlikely to miss, MacKenzie fired again. The bullet bored into a steel trash can on a direct course for Charlie’s head. It exited on his side of the can and hit the stoop, ricocheting harmlessly away. Because Charlie was in flight, his elbow in his father’s firm grip.
12
Nostrand was a still life, save the yellow cab idling in a parking spot halfway down the block. Drummond ripped open the rear driver’s side door and dove in with Charlie in hand like a suitcase. A plump Middle Eastern man of perhaps forty-five sat behind the wheel, munching a kabob to “Jingle Bells” on the radio. “Where to?” he asked, as if their means of arrival were nothing out of the ordinary, which, Charlie thought, probably was the case in late- night Brooklyn.
Charlie turned to Drummond with the expectation that he would announce a destination. Indeed, Drummond pointed straight ahead and opened his mouth. But nothing came out. It seemed the words had stumbled along the way or gotten lost. And the glow in his eyes was fading, as if his power cord had been yanked.
“How about the police?” Charlie said.
Drummond appeared to think about it. Or he just sat there and said nothing. Charlie wasn’t sure which.
Charlie’s eyes flew to the movement in the rearview mirror. He whirled around to find MacKenzie in a crouch at the corner of Prospect and Nostrand, a hundred feet behind them, using the top of a Daily News vending machine to steady his gun.
A chunk of the rear window burst apart. Bits of glass sprayed inward, stinging Charlie’s neck, ears, and scalp. A slug imbedded itself behind the driver’s head in the inch-thick sheet of Plexiglas dividing the cab.
Drummond ducked beneath the window line. If PlayStation games represented reality with any accuracy, Charlie knew the car’s chassis offered little protection against a full-metal-jacketed round traveling at near the speed of sound, and the seat essentially provided no additional defense. Nevertheless he dropped all the way to the floor and lay there, petrified.
“Just go anywhere,” he managed to call to the driver.
Ibrahim Wallid was the driver’s name, according to the ID rubber banded to his sun visor. He tried to reply, but no sound would come. He gripped the wheel and stomped on the accelerator, bringing the engine to a throaty roar.
But the taxi was still in park.
Drummond’s headrest burst into particles of foam. Again a bullet bashed into the Plexiglas behind
