know what to do about it.
And this man they were calling Morris, it was like he’d been hit by lightning. He seemed frozen and electrified simultaneously. Stunned by what I’d said, too shocked to react in any way but to look stupefied. And yet, I could see that wheels were turning. There was something about his eyes, like they were moving around at a hundred miles an hour, processing this latest bit of information.
In that instant, it was as though everything had changed. Some kind of balance had shifted. We were now in a very different situation from the one of five minutes earlier. Whether it meant things were better for Thomas and me, I didn’t know, although I hadn’t thought our situation could get any worse.
And about Morris. The moment he’d walked into the room, I recognized him.
I couldn’t place him at first, maybe because I wasn’t seeing him in the proper context. If I’d been watching the news, I’d have known instantly. But seeing him here, in the back of this toy store, with three very bad people, I couldn’t figure out who he was. It was like when, every morning, the same person hands you your coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and then you see that person at the mall. You know you know them, but can’t figure out from where.
So it took a minute or so before I realized this man was the attorney general for the State of New York.
Morris Sawchuck.
I’d read about him. I’d seen him on the news. In fact, hadn’t there been a lot going on with him a few months back…
In the midst of everything that was happening in that room, my mind was racing. Why had he been on the news so much? Why had I seen his picture so often? And in all those pictures, wasn’t he usually shown with a beautiful-
Oh fuck.
I didn’t actually put it together until after I’d said what I’d said.
About Bridget.
Now I remembered the stories. The sudden, unexplained death of Bridget Sawchuck, the wife of New York’s attorney general. You had to read between the lines to guess what had happened. She’d killed herself.
Except Lewis had said this shop was owned by someone who’d helped him move Bridget’s body.
Oh God, Thomas, what did you get us into?
The silence that followed my comment felt as though it lasted minutes, if not hours, but in reality it was probably no more than four or five seconds.
Morris was the first to speak. And he spoke to me.
“What did you say?”
“The person who got killed. It might have been Bridget.” Now I realized the significance of what I was saying. I was talking about this man’s wife. What I didn’t know yet was whether Morris Sawchuck looked shocked because he didn’t know, or because I did. For all I knew, the man had had his wife killed.
All that was about to become clear. Or clearer.
Morris said to Howard, so calmly that it was frightening, “What’s he talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Howard said, rattling the words off too quickly. “He’s some kind of crazy person, him and his brother. They’re a couple of nutcases, going around spreading stories that could damage you. That’s what they’re doing.”
“No,” I said. “My brother found out what they did. They brought us here to kill us and-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Lewis said.
“No, let him talk,” Morris said. “I want to hear what this nutcase has to say.”
“Thomas was surfing the Net,” I said. “Whirl360. He saw someone being murdered in the window of an apartment on Orchard Street. I think it was your wife. Bridget, right?”
He nodded slowly. His face was becoming flushed.
“Really, you shouldn’t listen to-”
“Howard,” Lewis interrupted. “Enough.”
“What? Lewis, let me-”
“No, we have to bring him into it,” Lewis said. “He’s either on board, or we’ll have to kill him, too.”
“What?” Morris said, turning on Lewis. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m a survivor,” he said. “So’s Howard, and so are you. There’s only one way everyone survives this, and that’s to get on board.”
“What happened to Bridget?” Morris demanded. “I want the truth.”
The room went quiet for another few seconds. It was Howard who spoke first. “It was an accident. A horrible mistake.”
“Dear God,” Morris said. “You didn’t.”
Howard continued. “There was a woman, Allison Fitch. She was blackmailing Bridget. She was trying to damage her, to ruin you. We-I was afraid there were things she knew that could hurt you very badly.”
“Howard.”
“Politically fatal, Morris. I was going to pay her at first, I was, but it became clear that wasn’t going to solve our problem. Lewis and I talked and we decided we had to deal with the Fitch woman more…permanently.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Morris couldn’t take his eyes off Howard.
“But when it came time to do it, to take care of the problem, something no one could have foreseen came up. She wasn’t there. Fitch wasn’t in the apartment.” He paused, swallowed. “But Bridget was. She was mistaken for Fitch.”
“But…but we found her. In her old apartment,” Morris said. “You and I, we found her there.”
“She…was moved.”
“But you talked to her!” Morris said. “You spoke to her on the phone! She told you I was sucking the life out of her! She was going to kill herself!”
Howard had to look away. “I…it was faked. There was no call. I made that up.”
Morris grabbed Howard by the lapels and threw him up against the shelves, knocking that Esso tanker truck and a Batmobile to the floor with a loud clatter. “You son of a bitch!” he shouted, shaking the man. He let go of a lapel, made a fist, and drove it straight into Howard’s face. Howard yelped and fell to the floor. Morris pounced on him and was about to punch him again when Lewis locked arms around him and dragged him off.
“Stop!” Lewis said. “You can sort this out later, but right now we have to figure out what to do.”
“I’m gonna kill you,” Morris said, still in Lewis’s grasp, staring down at Howard. “You bastard! You son of a bitch!”
“It wasn’t my mistake!” Howard said. “It wasn’t my fault!” He pointed across the room. “It was hers!”
Now all eyes were on Nicole.
Morris said, “You?”
“Like they said, it was a mistake,” she said coolly.
“You killed Bridget?”
“They told me Fitch would be there. And someone was there. But it wasn’t Fitch.” Nicole shrugged. “Sorry.”
Morris said, “Excuse me?”
“I said, sorry. Not much else I can say at this point, really.”
Morris, aghast, looked at Howard, then Lewis.
Lewis said, “She’s kind of right.” Noticing that Morris was speechless with rage, he continued, “Howard, I think there’s a good-faith gesture we can make with Morris as a way of moving forward.”
“What are you talking about?” Howard said.
“We can’t bring Bridget back, but we can help make things right,” Lewis said, reaching into his jacket and taking out his gun.
He spun around, pointed it at Nicole, and pulled the trigger. I was expecting a louder bang, but the gun was equipped with one of those silencer things on the end of the barrel.
What made noise was Nicole being thrown up against the shelves, the back of her head banging into them, then dropping facedown onto the floor. Two shelves gave way and an avalanche of toys crashed to the floor. A Super Ball bounced in tall arcs across the room.
“I was going to get around to it sooner or later, anyway,” Lewis said.
