Rukaj sat on the table in front of Dance, reached into his pocket, and withdrew a large switchblade, flicking it open.
“There is a price for the life we have chosen to lead.” Rukaj ran his finger down his left eye and trailed it along the thick scar on his cheek. “Our egos, our invincibility, sometimes need a reality check.”
Rukaj laid the blade against the second knuckle of Dance’s right ring finger.
“Do you have one million dollars, Mr. Policeman?”
Dance remained silent, his face impossible to read, though sweat had begun to appear on his brow.
“You cost me fifty thousand dollars and I would like it back, plus damages. You have access to drug money, to drugs, stolen merchandise,” Rukaj said with his slithering accent. “This is not a question.”
Dance’s eyes were on fire as he stared defiantly at Rukaj.
Without another word or a dramatic pause, Rukaj pressed all his weight onto the blade, severing Dance’s finger with a single slice.
Dance’s head snapped back in agony and he roared in pain.
“It’s okay to scream, there is no shame. I promise to tell no one.”
Rukaj wiped the blood-soaked blade on Dance’s pants, folded it back up, and tucked it into his pocket.
“You are a valuable man, Ethan Dance, so I will trade you one million dollars for your life. Now before you get all nervous, I’ll give you one year. That will give you time to find the right situation to take advantage of. Pay in installments or in one lump sum, whichever you prefer.
“Consider this”-Rukaj held up his severed finger-“a down payment.”
It had been fourteen months. Dance heard from Rukaj daily now, reminding him that there would be no more extensions, no more leeway. “Time is up. Time to pay or time to die,” Rukaj said every morning.
Now, as Dance sat as a prisoner in his own car, with its trunk full of antiques and diamonds-a fraction of which would pay for his life-he was filled with an anger and rage such as he had never known. He had been betrayed by Sam Dreyfus, who had run off with a box of untold value, he had been arrested by a nine-to-five soldier, and someone else was looking forward to removing the rest of his body parts.
Dance glared at the young private who was playing policeman, who would go back to his real job come Monday and talk about how he arrested a dirty cop and recovered-
“Hello, Colonel?” McManus said into his cell phone, turning his back to Dance as his superior finally came on the line.
Dance leaped out of the open door of the Taurus, threw his hands over the unsuspecting McManus, and violently pulled his cuffed wrists back, crushing McManus’s trachea.
McManus dropped his cell phone and released his hold on his M-16, his hands going straight to his throat. He had been trained in combat, trained with a rifle, but as a National Guardsman, he had never seen or tasted anything close to war. The young private had never even been in a bar fight.
Dance leaned back with all of his two-hundred-pound weight, grinding the handcuff chain into McManus’s broken throat, driving the broken cartilage of his trachea into the soft inner flesh of his windpipe while cutting off the flow of blood to his brain. He fell back into the Taurus, pulling McManus off his feet and into the car with him, the young man’s arms desperately tugging at the chain about his neck, legs flailing, seeking purchase, as a wet gurgling sound of death escaped his now-blue lips.
McManus’s struggle finally abated, his arms falling limp. A spastic twitch began in his right leg.
And he died.
On the side of the road that led to a disaster, Private Neil McManus became the 213th death at Sullivan Field.
Dance reached into the dead private’s pocket, pulled out the cuff keys, and freed himself.
He threw the dead body into his backseat so as not to draw attention, pulled the jack and spare from his trunk, and changed his tire as if he were on pit-crew time. Two minutes later he picked up McManus’s M-16 and his cell phone and threw them into the car. He hopped in the front of his unmarked police car, started up the engine, and peeled out, leaving the jack and the wheel in the middle of the road. He’d dump McManus’s body in the reservoir when he had time, but for the moment, there were more pressing matters.
Before he hit sixty miles per hour, he flipped down the keyboard on his police computer and punched in the license plate he had memorized. The owner of the Blue Audi A8 popped up. Nicholas Quinn, 5 Townsend Court, Byram Hills. The picture was a spot-on match to the man who had just run out of the woods to stop him, who had cuffed him and left him to be hauled off to jail. The man who somehow knew the exact contents of his trunk.
He looked down at the address on the Post-it stuck to his dash, the address for Hennicot’s attorney, whose offices contained the security video, who had probably viewed it.
Dance had already spoken to her. He had already gained the trust of Nicholas Quinn’s wife.
NICK DROVE DOWN Route 22. As he headed onto the overpass of Interstate 684, he saw the uninterrupted flow of traffic below. It was like another world, cars filling the roads, people chatting within their vehicles, unaware of the disaster just a mile off the highway. It was as if Byram Hills were a dead town, under quarantine, the disaster already pushed from the minds of the world beyond.
Nick continued into the vacant town and pulled into the empty parking lot of Valhalla, his friend’s restaurant.
“You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” Nick asked, as put the car in park.
“I’m fine,” Dreyfus said. “I’ve gotten more banged up from hits in a flag football game.”
“Well, where do you want me to take you?” Nick asked as he looked at his car’s clock. “I have to be somewhere at three.”
“I can’t go back to the airfield, yet.” Dreyfus said.
“Tell you what,” Nick said. “You drop me at my house, take my car.”
“I can’t do that.” Dreyfus shook his head.
“Yeah, you can. It’s not like you’re going to keep it. Just call me when you’re done with it. With the loss of your brother and everything else going on, you need it more than me.”
Dreyfus nodded in thanks.
“Besides, I’ll have another car just like this one at my house in ten minutes,” Nick said, with an irony no one could ever understand.
“I appreciate it.”
“But you need to help me in return.” Nick looked at Dreyfus. “One of Dance’s men is going to try to kill my wife, I just don’t know who.”
“You know, I didn’t realize… I didn’t make the connection between you and your wife, Julia. I met her, Nick, on more than one occasion. She’s terrific. Hennicot really cares for her, thinks the world of her, and in my book, nobody is a better judge of character than that old man.”
“Yeah, well, if I don’t start getting some help,” Nick said, “she’s not going to live through the day.”
Dreyfus pulled his briefcase up on his lap, opened it, and pulled out three sheets of paper.
“I only figured out what my brother was doing this morning. I tore through his files and found this.” Dreyfus handed the paper to Nick.
Nick read quickly. It was a haphazard checklist and hastily typed notes on the planned robbery.
“It’s not much, just his notes, but it gives the names.”
Nick skimmed the details of the mechanics of the break-in but paid close attention to the bullet-note bios Sam had compiled:
DROP DEAD-7/28
Dance-Ethan Dance. 38. Detective. Dirty. Two-faced.
His three:
Randall-Cop. 58. Fat
Brinehart-Cop. New guy. Kid. Punk.
Arilio-Cop. 30s.
Fence-Confirmed-Chinese national, five million cash for weapons.
diamond price t/b/d upon inspection.
Rukaj-Not a cop. Who is this? Called Dance at lunch, unnerved him,
scared him. Dance in debt? Owes him?
“If someone’s after your wife,” Dreyfus said, pointing at the names. “It’s got to be one of these.”
“Drop dead?” Nick said, looking at the top note.
“That’s today’s date.”
“Who’s this Rukaj?”
“Not completely sure, but I believe it may be Ghestov Rukaj, an Albanian who has been staking claim to organized crime in New York. But I’ll tell you this, if he scared Dance, he can’t be all bad.”
“Or maybe,” Nick said ominously, “he’s far worse.”
“I’d keep my focus on Dance,” Dreyfus said.
“As insane as he is,” Nick said, “I don’t think it was him.”
“Did you say,
“Is.” Nick quickly corrected himself. As much as he agreed with Dreyfus, he held the evidence in his pocket. Without doubt, the St. Christopher medal hung on the neck of Julia’s killer, and Nick had seen Dance’s neck, his exposed chest: There was nothing hanging there. Randall, the fifty-eight-year-old fat cop on Sam’s list, wasn’t the trigger man, Nick was sure of this, as he had seen him getting in the blue Chevy Impala at the moment Julia was shot. It had to be one of the other three who pulled the trigger: Brinehart, Arilio, or Rukaj.
“After the robbery this morning, Dance came after my brother. If he hadn’t died in the plane crash, they were going to kill him. Dance was relentless looking for this
