Monkey in the Middle (11 page)

Carter imagines receiving a pink slip in the mail, imagines being fired, and laughs. His notice of termination will be delivered in the form of a bullet. Without doubt.

Well, live by the gun, die by the gun, an equation that works equally well no matter who's on the dying end.

For Carter, sleep is a skill, one he picked up in Afghanistan when every cell in his body demanded vigilance. You had to sleep, you had to eat, you had to clean your weapon, you had to have ammo, you had to exploit your technological advantages. As far as Carter's concerned, there's no essential difference between any of these imperatives. Thus he sleeps soundly for the next four hours and wakes up refreshed. With nothing to do. With no further assignment.

Good news, maybe. At least Thorpe's debt to him isn't growing.

By four o'clock that afternoon, Carter has moved out of his Astoria apartment and into Janie's Woodside co-op. He takes only his personal possessions, leaving the furniture and the kitchenware behind. The move attracts attention from three of Janie's neighbors. This is unavoidable and Carter patiently explains that he's Janie's brother. One, a young woman, asks about Janie's condition.

‘She was always so brave,' the woman tells Carter. ‘She was like a role model for me.'

‘I visit her every day and I can tell you that she's still brave,' Carter declares. ‘But I don't think she'll be coming home again.'

‘That's a shame. I'm so sorry.'

The good news is that he'll be accepted once the word gets around. The bad news is that he'll be remembered. But there's no alternative, not in the short run. The thing about Thorpe is that he likes to talk, but hates to listen. Never, in the time they spent together, did he inquire into Carter's personal life. Thorpe knows nothing of Janie, much less her cozy apartment. Now it's a question of who will be the first to break cover.

But maybe it won't come to that. Maybe the mark is ready to fork out and maybe Thorpe will pay up, maybe they'll both move on to some new challenge.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Carter walks into the Cabrini Nursing Center at six o'clock. Dinner is being served and most of the staff and the patients are gathered in the dining room. But not Janie. Janie's food travels from a plastic bag down through a rubber tube that passes through her abdomen and into her stomach.

Though Janie's sleeping when Carter enters, a television on the far side of her bed is tuned to CNN. Wolf Blitzer and a pair of experts are commenting on the video taken by the surveillance cameras in Macy's.

‘Let's roll the tape,' Blitzer says.

Fascinated, Carter watches himself commit a murder. He feels a certain amount of pride – at no point does he reveal his face, and his movements are extremely precise, from the withdrawal of the knife to its final placement. But maybe he shouldn't congratulate himself too quickly. The truth is that he hadn't felt anything approaching an emotion when he killed Tony Maguire. His focus was entirely on the job, as though he was a trapeze artist performing an especially difficult trick. Or, better yet, a machine programmed to accomplish a specific end, a machine whose programming didn't include second thoughts.

This wasn't always the case. The first time Carter executed another man, he and Cornelius Halbert were operating as a sniper unit in the hills of Tora Bora. A veteran of Gulf One, Halbert was the spotter, Carter the marksman.

‘Target at two o'clock, back there in the shadows across the gorge.' A black man from rural South Carolina, Halbert spoke slowly and with a pronounced drawl.

‘Got him.'

Peering through the 10X scope, Carter instantly recognized another human being. An enemy, true, weapon in hand, wearing the black-and-white keffiyeh of a Palestinian fighter. But still a human being.

‘You waitin' for exactly what?' Halbert whispered into his ear. ‘You hopin' he'll have a heart attack, maybe die of a stroke?'

As he pulled the trigger, Carter sensed that he was crossing into another world, a parallel world with its own customs. A year later, a Nepalese mercenary who called himself Lo Phet gave this world a name.

‘We already die, go to hell world,' Lo Phet explained over a bottle of Australian wine in Kirkuk.

‘Hell world?'

Phet's smile exposed a set of worn brown teeth. He used those teeth to rip off a chunk of tobacco from a slimy plug he carried in his shirt pocket. ‘Hell world better,' he said.

‘Better than what?'

‘Better than world of hungry ghosts.'

Though Carter failed to get the joke, Lo Phet chortled for the next ten minutes. By then, Carter was killing without a second thought.

Janie's eyes are open when Carter turns away from the TV. She blinks twice, then twice again. This means that she wants to spell out a message. Carter has no objection, but the process is necessarily slow and he shortens it by dividing the alphabet in half,
A
to
K
, or
L
to
Z.

‘
A
to
K
?' Carter asks.

Blink.

Carter begins to recite the alphabet, stopping at
B
when Janie blinks. Again he asks, ‘
A
to
K
?' Again Janie blinks. This time Carter get to
I
before Janie stops him.

‘Bible?' he guesses.

Blink.

‘You want me to read?'

Janie blinks twice and Carter continues to work the alphabet until his sister's message is clear: ‘Bible, do you feel it?'

Carter wants to ask, Feel what? but he doesn't have the nerve. From early on, Janie had demonstrated a talent for reaching into his mind. He couldn't lie to her, and he eventually stopped trying.

‘The words are for you, not me,' he says. ‘The words don't apply to me.'

What can you see in a paralyzed face? The mouth, the chin, the flesh covering Janie's cheekbones and along her jaw, all remain slack. There's no shake of the head, no disapproving frown, no stern lecture. But Carter reads the bottom line. He realizes that his sister hasn't bought any of his lies. Salesman for a French sporting goods manufacturer? Yeah, right.

‘Should I read?' he asks.

Blink.

‘Be diligent to know the countenance of thy cattle, and consider thy own flocks. For thou shalt not always have power, but a crown shall be given to generation and generation. The meadows are open, and the green herbs have appeared, and the hay is gathered out of the mountains. Lambs are for thy clothing, and the goats are the price of the field. Let the milk of the goats be enough for thy food, and for the necessities of thy house.'

An hour later, as Carter's about to leave, he leans forward to kiss his sister's forehead. ‘I love you, big sister,' he says.

Carter settles down in Janie's apartment at eight o'clock that night. The apartment is fully furnished, perhaps over-furnished. The living room is crammed with upholstered chairs, polished tables and bookcases filled to overflowing. A long couch nearly covers a side wall. The bedroom contains an armoire, a triple dresser and a king-sized bed. It smells faintly of the powders and perfumes arranged on a vanity table next to an open bible. In the small kitchen, the counters are crammed with gadgets, a Cuisinart, a blender, a crock pot, a deep fryer, an electric can opener. A linen closet in the hall encloses enough sheets, blankets and towels to outfit a platoon.

There's a reasonable chance that Carter will eventually inherit the apartment, along with Janie's modest savings, and he tries to imagine himself settled down, maybe after he kills Thorpe. But that can never happen. Carter's spent the better part of his adult life prepared to move on a minute's notice. His profession – freely chosen, he reminds himself – demands mobility. At any moment, he might be forced to retreat, to place himself beyond the reach of an adversary. That's why he has a half-dozen passports from a half-dozen nations tucked into a half-dozen safe deposit boxes.

Ten minutes later, his future decided, Carter settles down before his computer. He checks his e-mail, but the only message is from a spammer who wants to sell him a septic system. Carter's been hoping against hope that his pal, Thorpe, would finally come across. But Thorpe hasn't even bothered to respond. Well, Carter tells himself, at least he got one thing right. Maybe he'll never settle into the sort of life most people take for granted, but he's definitely going to kill Montgomery Thorpe at the earliest opportunity. Either that, or be killed himself.

Fifteen

E
pstein has come to hate Dr Gwen Morgan's office. Morgan is Sofia's obstetrician and her office is straight-ahead cutesy. There's a pink wall and a blue wall, and lots of lambs and puppy dogs and babies frolicking in kelly-green meadows. Yellow, black, red and white, the rug rats are as healthy as cherubs, while the skies above are as innocent as the kids themselves. Like any cop, Solly Epstein knows that life is a moment-to-moment crapshoot, and the atmosphere is an affront to his sensibilities. But the murals aren't the worst, not by a long shot. No, the worst is the total disconnection between the serendipity of the décor and the way Dr Morgan treats her patients. As on every other visit, all the chairs are taken when Epstein enters the office, Sofia clinging to his arm. This means that Sofia will have to wait a good ninety minutes before being ushered into an examining room, told to strip, then left to wait some more.

Without hesitation, a man gets up to offer Sofia his seat, leaving Epstein to stand, his arms crossed as he tries to contain his anger. From early on, he urged his wife to change obstetricians. His argument was simple: if your doctor treats you this badly in a public setting, what will she do in the privacy of the delivery room? Say, if you're unconscious?

But Sofia would not be moved. She offered the packed waiting room as evidence of Morgan's skills. If all these people were willing to put up with a ninety-minute wait, how bad could she be? Plus, there weren't many obstetricians out there, what with the lawyers ready to pounce if the kid was born cross-eyed.

Epstein looks down at Sofia, at her broad forehead and sharp nose. He's thinking that maybe she's experiencing a moment of regret, what with her back aching 24/7 and having to pee every ten minutes. Sofia has her arms wrapped around her belly and she's staring at a clock in the shape of a kitten. The clock is mounted on the far wall behind a counter that shields the clerical staff. There are three of them today, in pink scrubs, and they work non-stop, pulling charts, verifying insurance referrals and making appointments. Epstein wonders if they feel the hot waves of animosity that roll toward them, as he did when he was on foot patrol in the South Bronx. If looks were bullets, Sofia would already be collecting his death benefits.

An hour later, as the room gradually clears out, Epstein finds a seat next to his wife. By now, Sofia's been to the ladies' room three times, as have two other late-term women. A fourth woman, her stomach flat as a board, has also been running back and forth, in her case to throw up. And that's another thing. Only one bathroom? You'd think, given her specialty, that Morgan would have made allowances. A few square feet of productive space surrendered to her patients' comfort? Was that too much to ask? Especially with the endless waits?

‘How ya doin'?' he says to his wife for the fifth time.

Sofia takes his hand. ‘I spoke to my sister this morning before we came over. She's up against it, Solly.'

Epstein's grin is admiring. As always, Sofia's timing is flawless. His wife's sister, Eleana, is asking for a loan because her investment-counselor husband is under a RICO indictment for his role in a pyramid scheme. This is the same husband who once lived in a Manhattan penthouse and drove a vintage Mercedes, who lorded it over Epstein at family gatherings. The same husband who is now unable to pay his lawyers or feed his family.

‘We've been through this.' Epstein struggles to keep his tone neutral. He's in a waiting room, surrounded by strangers, which is why Sofia chose this moment to bring up the subject. Epstein doesn't object to helping Sofia's sister and her two children. In fact, he's eager to help. It's just that he knows Alex will funnel the money to his lawyers and Eleana will have her hand out again within a week.

Epstein gives Sofia's arm an affectionate squeeze. ‘Look, it's your money as much as mine. But think about what happened last time.'

‘I know, Solly, but she's my sister. Her kid's are my nephews.
La familia
? I can't just throw that over.'

Sofia lapses into a momentary silence, her eyes returning to the clock on the far wall, then changes the subject. ‘When I read that book about the joys of motherhood, nobody mentioned this part.'

Epstein looks at the clerks. He wants them to suffer as his wife is suffering, as every woman in the room suffers, a matter of fairness. He wants Dr Morgan to suffer, too, but she remains out of sight.

‘We should've dumped this asshole a long time ago,' he says.

Epstein's voice is loud enough to attract the attention of the woman sitting next to Sofia. ‘You'd be wasting your time,' she declares. ‘I've been to three and it's always the same deal. Your time is their time.'

The phone clipped to Epstein's belt starts to vibrate before he can respond. He answers to find a detective named Lemlem Takile on the other end. The son of Ethiopian immigrants, Takile's nickname is Flash. Not because he's quick, though he is. Lemlem has the darkest skin and whitest teeth that Epstein's ever seen. His smile is a strobe light in a dark alley.

‘I gotta take this outside,' Epstein tells Sofia before retreating to the hallway. When the door closes behind him, he says, ‘Let's hear that again.'

Epstein listens for a minute, then says, ‘Don't move until I get there. And I don't know exactly when that'll be. I'm at the doctor's with my wife. But what I'll do is call Billy Boyle, tell him to keep you company.' After a pause, he adds, ‘You did good, Flash.'