Parker 01 - The Mark (9 page)

I
shouted into the phone, “Mya? Mya? What happened?”
Run,
she’d said.

Not a simple
Please go, Henry.
She was pleading with me, warning me.

I stepped away from the phone booth like it had contracted the plague. My cheeks felt hot. I looked left and right, saw nothing out of the ordinary, only the familiar sounds of traffic horns and pedestrian conversation.

Run.

It didn’t make sense. What had made Mya so afraid? A rumbling in my gut said I needed to get out of there. I’d come uptown with the hope of seeing Mya, but I also had a backup plan in case she couldn’t help. Now I’d have to scrap them both. I wasn’t safe. Unease swept over me like a frigid wave.

Then I heard a sound that froze my blood. Footsteps. Not just the pitter-patter of feet stepping in tune to their bodies’ rhythm, but the hard pounding of sprinting strides. I listened closer. There was more than one set of feet.

I spun around, and to my horror saw two men running toward me, less than a block away, their eyes deadlocked on mine. One of them held a gun. Light glinted off another object that I instinctively knew was a badge.

Run.

“Henry Parker!” the taller, thinner one yelled. “Don’t you move a fucking muscle!”

My feet moved before I could think, and suddenly I was sprinting east down 116th Street, cutting between two lanes of traffic. The honking of horns filled my ears, drivers cursing at me in foreign languages. A car’s bumper sideswiped my leg, knocking me off balance. I pulled myself together, saw a turbaned man in a taxi giving me the finger.

I darted to the other side of the street, rounded a corner, then wound my way through stunned pedestrians. Heads turned in unison as I sprinted past. My lungs felt ready to explode, the wind ripping at my face. I had no concept of how close the cops were, the pounding in my ears as loud as thunder.

Suddenly an arm shot out and grabbed me, tearing a large hole in the fabric below my armpit. I managed to spin away as a muscular man in a sweatshirt yelled, “That’s Henry Parker! Stop, you fucking cop killer!”

My only salvation was the subway. No chance I could make it anywhere on foot. I had to get out of New York. People had begun to recognize me. Even if I could outrun the two cops, I couldn’t outrun an entire city.

I dodged a line of garbage cans on the corner of 115th and Madison. Bracing myself, I shoved the cans one by one, sending them rolling down the street, littering the sidewalk with foul-smelling debris, creating a makeshift rolling barricade.

“Parker! Stop where you are!” a voice shouted. It was close; too close. I weaved in and out of traffic, my body a strange mixture of burning heat from the sweat and cold from the wind and fear. Every nerve in my body was on fire.

I beat the next traffic light, running as fast as I could, legs churning, my bruised ribs throbbing.

“Parker!”

“Henry!”

I made out two distinct voices. Both angry, vigilant. They weren’t going to stop.

Between Lexington and Park, I finally reached the entrance to the downtown 6 train, my sides aching, ready to collapse.

Then a terrifying crash ruptured the air, like lightning on a clear day, and pedestrians around me ducked for cover. I felt something pinch my leg, like a bee sting.

Jesus…
what was that?

I leapt down the stairs three at a time, knocking over a Hispanic woman who called me horrible names. No time for apologies.

I slowed down as I entered the station, reached for my wallet. Jumping the turnstile would draw unwanted attention. The station manager would see me, call the transit cops. Finally my slippery fingers ripped the MetroCard out and ran it through the scanner.

“Please swipe card again.”

Oh, God. Not now.

I swiped it again, and a beep confirmed the fare was paid.

Breathing hard, I walked quickly to the end of the platform, trying to stay inconspicuous to strangers buried in newspapers and paperback books.

I went to the far end of the platform and ducked behind a column, my lungs heaving. I leaned over the yellow line and peered into the dark tunnel. Two bright lights were visible, and they were drawing closer. The train couldn’t get here fast enough. I looked at my thigh, saw the hole in my jeans, my blood reddening the blue cloth. There was no pain, as though my nervous system had shut down. Oh, God…

Please let it get here before they do. Just give me more time.

Glancing at the turnstiles, my heart sank as I saw the two cops run onto the platform, their eyes darting back and forth. I plastered my body against a grimy pillar, trying to slow down my breathing. I couldn’t hear any footsteps; the train was too close, the screeching of metal drowning out all other noise.

The first car of the giant metal snake rushed past, the air around me shattered in an instant, damp hair plastered against my forehead.

Come on!

Then the train began to slow down. Brakes grinding against the tracks, the wind subsiding.

When the train came to a halt and the doors slid open, I waited for the passengers to exit then slid inside the last car. I took a seat next to a young woman in a navy pinstripe suit wearing headphones, her head bobbing to a silent rhythm. A man across the aisle was reading a folded newspaper. Neither of them looked at me. I took slow breaths, my heart rate mercifully dropping.

I exhaled as the doors began to close. I knew exactly where to go next. It would only be a short few minutes before I got there.

Then right before the doors sealed shut, they sputtered open. Someone was trying to enter the train at the last second. Nobody in my car was holding the doors, so I stood up and peered through the windowpane into the adjacent car.

No.

Two pairs of arms were prying the door open like spiders caught in a Venus flytrap. I recognized the glint of a badge, then saw the faces through the window. The cops were coming inside.

Trying to act casual, I stood up and inched toward the opposite end of the car.

The conductor’s scratchy voice came over the loudspeaker.

“Let’s go, people! There’s another train right behind us!”

I had no time to think. When the doors opened again, right as the cops entered the train, I bolted back out onto the platform. I sprinted toward the subway entrance, noticed a gun barrel jammed between another set of doors. The cops had seen me leave and were trying to pry their way back out into the station. The conductor’s irritated voice echoed once more as the subway doors again flung open, the cops spilling back out onto the platform. Less than twenty feet away from me.

Run.

I followed the exodus of people who’d gotten off the train at 116th, ducking between two men, then sidestepping a woman lifting a baby carriage. I ran up a flight of steps to the upper platform. The musty smell of spilled coffee and extinguished cigarettes coated my nostrils with every sharp breath. The entrance to the street loomed just past the turnstiles, but I wouldn’t make it outside. The cops had surely called for help. Any minute now they’d be circling the station like sharks aching for blood. In this situation, evasion was better than confrontation.

I ducked into a newspaper kiosk and grabbed the nearest magazine.
Penthouse.

Whatever.

I splayed the pages open, standing just behind the soda cooler so I was out of sight. Peering over a picture of breasts the size of beach balls, I watched the cops scamper up to the platform. They spoke in staccato bursts, gesturing wildly around the station, then the younger one pointed to a mass of people walking up the stairs to the street. They ran toward the exit, shouting and elbowing past frightened commuters. When they disappeared from view, I collected myself and slowly walked back down to the lower platform. Another train was just pulling into the station.

I stepped behind a pillar—just in case—and waited.

The train stopped, the doors opened and I stepped inside. When the doors closed behind me and the car began to move, I knew I was alone. I took a deep breath and sat down.

An elderly woman seated across the aisle eyed me with contempt, shaking her head with disdain. Could she know?

Then I looked down and noticed the
Penthouse
still in my hands. I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and held the mag up for her to see.

“Sorry,” I said. “Thought it was
Newsweek.
”

I
t took everything Blanket and Charlie had not to turn around, to simply stare at the man following them. Blanket looked to his right, saw Charlie biting his lower lip, and knew they were thinking the exact same thing. Mere steps behind them was the most brutal and cold-hearted killer they had ever known, and for men in their profession they’d known every cutthroat, backstabbing, soulless bastard to walk the earth. But
he
was different. He scared the life out of two men who’d grown up frightened of
nothing.

The musty smell of the basement had grown all too familiar this morning. Blanket listened to the footsteps behind him, the enigma nearly silent. He’d only seen the man briefly—opening the front door to let him in—and was now doing his very best to hide his quickening heart rate and sweaty palms.

“Almost there,” Charlie’s voice rang out. A pointless statement, Blanket thought, said just to see if the man would respond.

“Watch your head,” said Blanket, ducking under a swinging bulb. He eyed Charlie again. They shared a smile.

At the large door in the building’s sub-basement, Blanket rapped the code. The metal slot opened. A pair of eyes looked out at Blanket and Charlie, unimpressed. Then they caught sight of the man behind them. The eyes widened. The man behind the door whispered.

“Is that…him?”

Blanket nodded solemnly.

The door swung inward. The three men entered. This ghost, whom powerful men like Michael DiForio called when they needed odds tipped in their favor, a man whom the shroud of death hovered over permanently, was mere inches behind them. That Michael had summoned him only underlined the severity of last night’s incident.

As they entered the large conference room, a dozen men, none of whom had ever bowed to any man save Michael DiForio, stood, craning their necks for a better look. With no empty chairs available, Blanket and Charlie stood on either side of the door as it slammed shut. After a tense few moments, the men all sat down. Except Michael DiForio.

“Welcome,” Michael said. “Glad you could make it on such short notice. Hope I didn’t interrupt your morning tennis game.”

The man said nothing. For the first time Blanket was able to see him clearly.

He stood a shade over six-four and looked slightly north of two hundred pounds. His brown hair was done in a Caesar cut, short bangs dripping over his forehead. He wore a black leather jacket—not frayed, but worn—and dark pants. Blanket estimated the man’s age in the early thirties. But his dark eyes were reminiscent of policemen who’d been on the beat far too long, men who’d seen the depths of hell and had sunk too far to ever return.

“Michael,” the Ringer said. He bowed his head slightly, more a formality than out of respect. “I don’t imagine you called to talk trivialities.”

DiForio grinned and said, “No, I didn’t. So let’s get right to business. You know, that’s what I’ve always liked about you. No bullshit. Cut right to the chase.”

Blanket noticed Charlie fidgeting, his fingers clenching and unclenching. They were in the presence of a ghost of the New York underworld, a man whose past was well-documented, revered like a disturbing bedtime story, and feared to the point of paralysis.

The Ringer had cut his teeth as a professional assassin at the tender age of fifteen. He worked as a contract man for low-level hoods, men who didn’t care if the job was a little sloppy, a little too bloody to keep under wraps. The Ringer killed with a vicious disregard for cleanliness or subtlety. His targets were drug dealers who skimmed profits, middlemen who didn’t deliver payments on time. Small-timers. Deaths the cops would pay little attention to. Lives that wouldn’t be missed. Barely into manhood, the Ringer was a minor leaguer with all the ruthless tools to make the majors.

Once word spread of his brutal efficiency, the Ringer was given a healthy retainer to work exclusively for a single organization whose last mercenary for hire was found missing several vital organs and smeared across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. This new employer offered the Ringer his first meaningful assignment: the assassination of a rival organization’s consigliere, a power play that would have citywide ramifications.

The Ringer ambushed the man at a trendy nightclub, killing three bodyguards in a spray of gunfire and smoke and blood. But somehow in the mayhem, the target survived. And for the first time, there was a living man who could identify the Ringer.

Two days later, four armed men broke into the Ringer’s home, a fifth-floor brownstone on the lower east side. The shotgun blast that buckled the front door woke him and his wife, a struggling actress named Anne who was just a notch below gorgeous and talented enough to make the big-time.

The Ringer killed one man before the assailants fired a second shot. Realizing they had little chance of outfighting three armed men, the Ringer took his bride and ran for the fire escape. Then a bullet caught him in the lower back. The assassins grabbed him by his numb legs, pulled them back inside. One held them at gunpoint while the others doused the apartment with gasoline and ripped out the gas pipe from the stove.

The lead gunman leaned over the Ringer’s limp body and said, “This is your first and last lesson, asshole.” Then he put the barrel of the gun to Anne’s head and pulled the trigger.

The Ringer took another bullet in the chest. One of the gunmen lit a cigarette, took a puff and offered it to the Ringer, who lay dying on the bedroom floor. Before leaving, the gunman tossed the lit cig into a puddle of gasoline.

Your first and last lesson.

As flames spread through the apartment, the Ringer managed to drag himself to the window, hurling his maimed body onto the fire escape. He tumbled down a flight of steps, then the apartment erupted in a massive fireball.

Four weeks later, all of the assassins were dead, their body parts strewn throughout the city with the precision of discarded cigarette butts. All save one man. One man who’d survived the Ringer’s vengeance. One man who was never hunted down. And it was that man, the lone gunman who’d somehow escaped his rage, the man who’d sent a bullet crashing through his lover’s head, who kept the Ringer’s heart beating to this day.

The Ringer was dead to the world. Another statistic for the FBI. Another record closed. Two charred bodies were found in the smoldering wreckage. One was Anne, the other a failed assassin. The authorities assumed the Ringer had been caught in the blast. Now, years later, his name and face were a mystery to everyone but those he killed for.

But the Ringer’s soul, his lost love, was the driving force behind every murder. The picture of Anne he kept in his breast pocket.

Right before climbing onto the fire escape, cradling his wife’s body in his arms, the Ringer managed to grab an old photograph from the dresser. The photo was of Anne, sitting on a sandy beach wearing a beautiful yellow dress, an orange sun dipping over the horizon. It was taken the first night of their honeymoon. As blood leaked from his body, the Ringer put this photo into his right breast pocket. The photo was his final memory of the woman he’d loved so dearly, the only memory left of her. Anne’s photo was his second heart, and it beat with the venomous blood of a man whose thirst for vengeance could never be quenched.

He would never love again, never care for another soul, living every day only to avenge his lover’s death. And someday, everyone knew he would.

This was the man standing two feet from Blanket.

DiForio walked around the table. He held a newspaper in his hand. Blanket recognized the picture on the front. Nobody had to say a word. As soon as the Ringer accepted the job, if he accepted the job, Henry Parker’s life was over.

DiForio held the front page up for the Ringer to see, then handed it to him. The man didn’t even look at it.

“Henry Parker,” DiForio said, “has something that belongs to me. A package with some important materials that I can’t afford to lose. I need you to bring it to me. And when that’s done, I want Parker to disappear.”

The Ringer didn’t move. DiForio looked him over.

“Don’t you need a notepad or something? Jot all this down?” Michael asked. The Ringer stared straight at DiForio. His eyes showed nothing.

Michael continued. “We have one source rather close to the investigation. We know that the police haven’t found Parker yet and that they expect him to try and flee the city. Most major departure points are guarded—Port Authority, JFK, LaGuardia. They think there’s a possibility he got on the Path. You know, the train that goes to Jersey?”

“He didn’t do that,” the man said.

“Oh, no?” DiForio said, amused.

“No,” the Ringer said, his voice monotone. “If Parker’s going to run, it’s not going to be across the Hudson. It’s going to be far, far away from here.”

“How do you know that?” Michael asked.

“Because that’s what I would do.” The Ringer thought for a moment. “Parker will need clothes and money. If he tries to use a credit card, the cops will be on him in no time. Get me his credit card numbers. There are too many variables the police can control that we can’t. They have more manpower. They’ve already started looking. We’re playing catch-up.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Hopefully Parker is as smart as his pedigree suggests. He’s not going to make stupid mistakes. With any luck, he’s already fled and we’re on even footing with the Department of Justice. Have the police started running taps yet?” DiForio looked at Blanket, who gulped, then spoke.

“They, uh, yeah. They’ve got taps up and running to, let’s see…his girlfriend, this Mya Loverne broad who’s a Columbia law student and…”

“Daughter of David Loverne. Where else?”

“His parents’ house in Oregon.”

“What else?”

“Cell phone, too. Police couldn’t find one at his apartment, they assume he still has it. They’re keeping a tap in case he’s stupid enough to carry it around.”

“He won’t. If he’s smart he’ll lose the cell phone,” the Ringer said. “Is that all?

“For now, yeah.” The Ringer nodded.

“Now, your price,” DiForio said. He fixed his tie and took a glass of water from the table. He put it to his lips but didn’t drink. The room was silent, half the eyes on the Ringer, the other half on DiForio.

“I’m offering your usual fee,” Michael said. He hesitated a moment, took a small sip of water, then added, “Times two.”

The Ringer shook his head. “Ten,” he said.

DiForio whistled. “A million bucks. That’s a rich asking price to track down one hippie kid asshole.”

“You wouldn’t have contacted me if Parker wasn’t threatening the sanctity of your organization,” the Ringer said derisively. “I’d be working against the police and federal government to find a man wanted for the murder of a New York police officer. The price is one million. That or nothing.”

DiForio looked at the ceiling, as though consulting the God of asbestos, then looked back and said, “Let’s split the difference. Five hundred K.”

Without warning, the Ringer turned, opened the door and left the room.

“Don’t you walk out on me!” DiForio yelled. The Ringer ignored him and began to disappear down the corridor. “Hey, asshole, I didn’t say you could leave!”

The Ringer turned around. His eyes held no interest in anything DiForio said.

“Your time is almost up, Michael. You won’t find Henry Parker. At least not before the police do. And from the look in your eyes, I can tell you’d rather not have the police find this package.” Blanket watched as DiForio’s face reddened, his jaw muscles tightening.

The Ringer turned to leave. Then Michael spoke.

“I meant to ask you,” DiForio said, the faintest glimmer of a smile on his lips. “How’s your wife?”

Blanket gasped. A hush fell over the room.

The Ringer stopped dead in his tracks. Slowly the killer’s head dipped into shadow. When he turned around, even in the darkly lit hallway, Blanket could see that his eyes were burning fire, hatred he never knew a mortal man was capable of.

Swiftly the Ringer stepped back into the meeting room. He whipped a pistol from his coat and pressed it to the base of Charlie’s neck. He took a moment to look at DiForio, then squeezed the trigger and sent a bullet into Charlie’s skull. The blast thundered around the small room as hands leapt to cover shattered eardrums. Charlie’s eyes flickered, his brain and skull sprayed against the wall like a bloody Rorschach.

“Charlie!” Blanket yelled as his friend’s lifeless body slumped to the floor. He looked at the Ringer with murder in his eyes. The man returned the glare, icy cold, and Blanket looked away. The Ringer turned his gaze to DiForio, the smoking pistol tracing a straight line to the powerful man’s heart.

“This entire room can die before you open your mouth again,” the Ringer said. “Now if you open your mouth and I don’t like what I hear, not only will this package disappear but I’ll hang the head of every miserable scum in this room from the tallest building in the city, and I’ll watch the sun roast your ugly faces every single day until all that’s left are your rotted, hollow skulls.”

DiForio barely seemed to notice either this or the dead man slumped against the wall. Instead he smiled and tented his hands in front of him.

“One million it is,” Michael said. “For that I want my package and Henry Parker. The package I want delivered without a scratch. Parker…his condition is entirely up to you.”

The Ringer nodded slowly and stepped outside.