I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (44 page)

The waiter set down the cup then gave it a half-turn so that the handle was positioned perfectly. They both looked good. He realized how hungry he was but stared down at the creamy foam and the ham inside the fancy bread. He wished that he could just eat and drink without having his brain racing.

He sipped at the coffee, tasting the rich bitterness on his tongue and licking the creamy foam off his upper lip. The tablet sprang to life with six live views per page, every exterior view between 68th Street Station and 77th and between Fifth and Lex: looking out from residential entrances, street cams looking out to traffic, security cams covering retail door fronts; dozens upon dozens of views, so many that they made all the windows looking down to the Whitney seem digestible in comparison. He bit through the flakey crust into the salty, thick-sliced ham and scrolled through page after page as his tongue reached out to snatch back a gush of mustard dangling at the corner of his mouth.

Again, he had that feeling that he was missing something.
What?
He wished he could just talk it through with Callie. She was good at that, seeing the things he missed when he got into his head too much in a case.

A hundred thousand dollars would be amazing. Callie couldn’t ignore that, he told himself, picturing her reaction if he walked up to the door with it in both fists.

“But there is no way to do this,” he griped aloud. “People are going to die.”

He stuffed a huge bite into his mouth and tapped his fingers on his chest as he chewed through it like a masticating cow, then swallowed it all, choking it down when it came to him. At the auction house, Al had found a microphone that Spencer had put into a bouquet. What would keep Spencer from using a camera?

Nussbaum answered Owen’s call. “Is there any way to find out when the camera feeds came live?” Owen asked intently.

“That data point is inherently compromised,” Stephen told him. “These cameras are resetting constantly. I suppose we could deduce when a current feed initiated, but I doubt that it would be of any value.”

“Humor me. Call it a hunch.”

“’Humor you’? What do you think we do here twelve hours a day, longer even? Dale, one of my techs, is developing keywords to screen web traffic from Yonkers and every place north and south for ten miles. Right now, I have Kip identifying every use of mapping technologies for Manhattan from the same area. Can you imagine how many people are looking for a restaurant or mapping for a business appointment? Now I need to apply a filter for every search for the ten blocks around Whitney Museum. Humor you!” Stephen said sarcastically.

But a moment later, he called out begrudgingly: “Dale, take the area ten blocks around the museum and try to find out when the camera feeds went live.” There was a pause, and then Stephen responded to a question someone on the other end had asked: “How am I supposed to know? I have no idea why. You get to humor the lieutenant.”

*****

Spencer knew that they wouldn’t be scouring the hills of West Virginia forever. They would find him eventually, whoever they were. What he did to them on the farm was just prolonging the inevitable. Killing one team was going to bring on more; the next time it would be better-trained units coming in wary. No used-up gimp was going to get through that a second time.

“You’re a dead man walking,” he acknowledged aloud. That was ok. He had gotten right with death a long, long time ago.

Sleeping in a stinking basement. Living on borrowed time. He flashed on the roof of the tower at Walter Reed. At least with suicide you control the time, the place, and the method. But suicide was a parasitic disease; he wasn’t letting it creep inside his ear and dig into his brain or let it swim up his dick hole and breed in his guts.

Suicide by cop? Going out in some blaze of glory? That was even more pathetic than curling up in the 4Runner, pushing a hose inside the tailpipe and huffing carbon monoxide.

“Nobody is taking me. Not ever again,” he promised.

All the training, every jump, every desert, every action against superior force—white guys, black guys, Mexicans, kids straight out of high school, college graduates—warriors always had one thing in common: the ones who got through, the men who earned their patch, they would die before they would give up. No matter how hurt and how low and how fucked the situ gets, you don’t give up. You never give up!

He might make it north to the Saint Lawrence; he might find a way across to Canada. Then what, find an empty spot on some mountain and fight the elements instead of fighting people?

Canada.
Right.
Borders didn’t matter to the men who were coming after him. “People with their own prisons don’t care about borders,” he reminded himself.

Spencer looked over the fresh roll of fifty self-stick stamps, the black felt-tip marking pen, and the 3 X 5 lined index cards on the floor in front of him. He tried and couldn’t remember whether last time he had written it out in all caps.

“What the hell does the font matter when you don’t know what to say?” he scolded. What did it matter if he still couldn’t find the words?

KISS, he told himself. Keep It Simple, Stupid. But the more he worked on it, the less he said anything like what it was that he wanted to get across.

“What do I say?” he grumbled in frustration. “I’m an instrument of God?” That sounded like a schizophrenic hearing voices.

“God ain’t talking to you, Johnny Boy,” he told himself. “All you’ve got is raging tinnitus.”

Maybe I can just leave my thumbprint,
he thought. But what would that do? Prove he existed? “Nobody is going to rush out for Jonathan Spencer tattoos.”

*****

Emerson Elliot could do it again, Spencer thought. Speak to the city. Let people know that he was alive. Get the city agitated, get those rich people Park Avenue primed and ready to run for their lives. With all the radio stations and television and newspapers, Elliot was the only voice to look at
why
anyone would attack billionaires. Everyone else wailed about ‘leading citizens’ and how the city was losing its critical philanthropic leadership.

It took him fourteen calls, but Spencer stayed with it until he got through to the call-in line. An automated voice told him, “At the tone, clearly state the topic of your comments, then hold the line.”

“This is Bullets,” Spencer told the machine. “I’m back.”

Crazy Thumbs, Emerson Elliot’s producer, read the transcription and disconnected the line. “Not cool,” he said.

Spencer listened to the disconnected line, figuring that it must have been an error. Emerson Elliot had made “I Kill Rich People” into a media phenomenon.

He dialed again. Busy. He dialed again. This time he was luckier and got through.

“The prior call from this telephone number was screened and rejected,” the machine puked at him. “Thank you for listening to the Emerson Elliot Program.” Then it disconnected again. Spencer looked at the phone in disbelief.

After a minute, he pulled another cell phone out from under the mattress, one of the phones he took off the six-man team. He inserted the sim card and connected the battery, dialed and waited.

When he finally got through again, he told the machine, “You were wearing bright purple with frills. You kissed the little bald man on top of his head.”

Crazy Thumbs felt chills down his spine when he read the words. He switched over to commercials during the middle of an interview.

“EE, what were you wearing that night of the shootings?” he asked. When Elliot paused, he switched on the booth microphone and asked overhead, “Were you wearing purple?”

The blood ran out of Elliot’s face. He didn’t need to say a thing. Thumbs didn’t need to hear. He could see his answer through the glass.

“There is no Dimitri Vosilych,” Spencer told them. “I was at the stadium. I didn’t kill the detective, either. He unloaded on me. If I hadn’t been wearing a vest, I’d be the dead one. We both fell. He died; I broke my legs and got caught. They put me in a secret prison. No lawyer. Torture. Right here, right in Washington, D.C. But I’m out. I escaped. They came after me in West Virginia and murdered the two women who helped me.”

Thumbs used hand gestures to tell EE that he was calling the police, but EE waived him off.

“What do you want from me?” EE asked.

“Tell them I kill rich people. Tell them I’m back.”

Elliot looked frantically at Thumbs and shook his head.
No way.

“I can’t help you,” Elliot insisted. “Don’t call here. Ever.” Elliot slammed down the line. “I’m not going there. Never again. Its bullshit, Thumbs. The whole thing. Delete it. Right now! That’s never going on the air. You hear me! Delete it!”

*****

From the top of the highest roof, at 23 East 74th, Owen watched with binoculars, scanning the constant flow of delivery vans, florists and liquor vendors, caterers, musicians, and furniture rental companies passing below on Madison with frenzied staff barking orders and pointing directions as men and women rushed to offload. He counted sixteen of them, trucks and vans both, in just a half-hour. Nearly every one of them had boxes and tables and rolls of linens large enough to conceal a long weapon.

“Hell, Spencer might already be inside,” he muttered.

Using the tablet, Owen emailed Dale, questioning him about the timing. “When did the cameras come online?”

The reply was succinct. At least one-hundred-ninety-three had come on during the prior two weeks. It was therefore impossible for Spencer to have set the others up.

Dale sent the links. The first displayed the sidewalk looking outside from a building that could have been anywhere. The second was inside the subway station at 35th; Owen didn’t need a flag for that one since the camera looked straight onto the platform and a pole that said “34th St.” He tapped the third link, the one that had caught his eye. He glanced at the odd street view below, then saw it was all the way over on 71st. Zip. A dead end.

After the vans were offloaded and pulled away, young men in black pants and athletic shoes, all carrying daypacks, started showing up on the sidewalk, greeting one another and congregating in small groups. When another van pulled up, three of the closest men recognized it and trotted over to open the doors. The driver stepped around and shouted greetings then pointed to where he wanted the men to position the podium and the key rack they had just dragged out from the back of the van. All at once, they dropped their backpacks and peeled out of their various sweaters and hoodies, revealing white shirts underneath. They pulled black vests from their packs, pinned on nametags, and fumbled with black clip-on bow ties, helping one another to get these straight before jamming their other clothes into the packs and tossing these inside the van.

Three men who looked like the Road Warrior walked past with knives and ammunition hanging from their thick black vests and black helmets with dark visors, each obviously carrying a rifle inside a soft case in their black-gloved hands. Miller’s snipers. All the way from the rooftop, Owen could see the outlines of their weapons through his binoculars.

They calmly deployed right past the valets and all the people walking down the sidewalk on Madison. None of these New Yorkers seemed bothered or flustered or even curious. They emerged onto the Whitney’s roof a few minutes later, positioning themselves behind sand-colored fabric shields that looked like full-length kites.

Are those supposed to fool Spencer?
Owen wondered.

More two-man teams came out onto the roof tops all along the west side of Madison where there were the best vantage spots looking down onto the Whitney. They were unzipping their rifles before they were out the rooftop doors. The first man, carrying the longer weapon, positioned himself kneeling along the short wall at the edge of the rooftop while the second man, carrying a shorter weapon, dropped into a prone position aiming back toward the rooftop access door. Owen saw nine of them deploy. He heard through the headset fourteen chill voices calling off by number. It came off like just another day at the office for them.

Hearing them left Owen’s heart pumping even faster.

Owen turned around and was nearly blinded. The sun reflecting off the lake inside Central Park shocked his retinas. He squinted to see rowboats before turning his eyes back to the Whitney. The casual efficiency playing through his earphone left the upsetting impression that he was the only man there with any sense of urgency. One after another, he spotted places where a shooter could be hidden right now; huge HVAC units were on every roof, at least three vehicles were parked illegally across the street. Spencer could be inside a moving vehicle. He could be standing behind the curtains in twenty, thirty, fifty windows!

Below Owen, the valets drilled on their lineup and rotation to the cars, over to the garage, and back to the keyboard. While Owen paced back and forth with the binoculars, he could tell that the valet manager was instructing a new hire about tearing the tickets and attaching the matching stubs to the key rings before hooking them onto the board. Then the manager gathered the whole group to bring them out to the curb, where he pointed out the second garage on East 80th. He looked like a coach settling down his team with last-minute instructions before the big game.

You have no fucking idea,
Owen thought.
Bait.
Miller might as well be tying them all up like sheep.
While you stand and watch, boyo.
For money.

Owen watched as down on Madison a black Cadillac limo arrived at ten minutes to six. Four more limousines arrived directly behind that first Cadillac. Valets ran to the doors while the drivers stood at the front of the first and second cars, waiting until their passengers were safe before ducking behind the wheels to pull away. Owen’s hand reached out unconsciously to pat the leather wallet holding his gold medallion as women in fashionable evening gowns looked up from their phones to waive at other guests.

Owen tried to spot Spencer, knowing that it was impossible.

He clearly remembered watching the “Bigfoot” camera footage taken from the Central Park West attack. He could smell the gasoline that had been all around their speedboat and sensed the black smoke and the fire. “Jesus.”

More people were arriving now. The valets opened doors for the drivers and passengers then took the wheels and pulled out onto Madison with practiced efficiency. In two minutes there were already dozens of guests bunching on the sidewalk in front of the Whitney.

Owen swept down Madison Avenue, where a steady stream of traffic was bumper-to-bumper along the east-side lanes. He counted the cars. There were New Yorkers inside every one of them; people out to have a good time. He was supposed to protect them!

Owen scanned the windows and rooftops another time. At least a hundred people were gathered into smaller groups below him, kissing cheeks, shaking hands.

“The old man would knock you out of your socks!” he yelled at himself. “You don’t think twice. Nobody buys you! You do what you were trained to do. You do the fucking job!”

The medallion came out of his pocket as if on its own while he sprinted for the elevator. His eyes were glued to the numbers while it took forever getting down. He turned his body sideways to get through and leapt into the ground floor lobby, then charged toward the center of Madison with his medallion held high above his head.

Waving his arms, he stopped traffic then curled his lower lip to let go the loudest whistle he’d blown. Two of the off-duty rental cops looked up.

“Sniper!” Owen screamed. “Shut it down! Get these cars out of here!”

He snatched the walkie-talkie from the closest officer.

“This is Detective Lieutenant Cullen, Intel,” he called in. “Level Three! Repeat. Level Three! 10-31 at Whitney Museum, Madison at East 75th. Live sniper.”

Miller’s team spotted Cullen below and broke off from their positions, hustling down their egress routes in lock-step as sirens joined into a cacophony for blocks around.