The Second Chair (53 page)

He gave her a ghastly, empty smile. “On the road. But first,” he said, “there’s you.”

“Please,” she said, “please don’t. Put the gun down.”

“Don’t make me use it then. I don’t like sitting with a corpse. They stink. So you stay sitting there and shut up.”

“All right, I will,” she said. “I won’t move. What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I want it to get dark.” Again, that empty-eyed smile. “It’s so much easier to walk away when it’s dark.”

Brandt crept away from Amy’s door and descended from the fourth down to the second landing, which he figured was the closest spot where he couldn’t be heard from above. He took out his cellphone and turned it on and couldn’t get a signal in the stairwell.

His breath coming in ragged gasps, he broke out of the building onto the sidewalk, got his signal and punched in the number for police dispatch, which, like all assistant DAs, he knew by heart. He didn’t want nine one one, somebody getting it wrong and showing up with lights and sirens. “This is Jason Brandt. Patch me through to Deputy Chief Glitsky, please, at the Hall of Justice. Yes, it’s an emergency. Tell him I’ve found the Executioner.”

34

T
he sun kissed the tops of the cypresses, next the roofs of some of the low buildings, and then suddenly full dusk had fallen. There were no shadows anymore, no reflection of the setting sun in the windows of Amy’s place across the street. The sky in the east had gone from turquoise to a deep indigo. Behind Brandt, at the western horizon, a garish orange sunset was fading to a purplish yellow bruise.

But no Glitsky.

Four patrol cars had arrived, silently, then three more. Then Brandt had lost count. All of the police cars had parked invisibly somewhere in the surrounding streets and dispatched their occupants out to encircle Amy’s place and evacuate anyone inside who lived on the floors below her, and even people in the surrounding buildings. Brandt showed his badge to Sergeant Ariola, the initial ranking officer at the scene, and identified himself as the person who’d called the police. But that cut him no slack with Ariola, who shunted Brandt with an escort back behind the police line.

He could still see Wu’s windows, but now he was around the corner on Cervantes Boulevard. Looking behind him and down the other streets, he realized that the entire block had been cordoned off—squad cars parked perpendicular to the curbs in the middle of the streets, stopping any automobile traffic. Teams of cops were keeping pedestrians out of the area, although now small crowds of the curious had begun to gather at the perimeter.

Next, bad to worse, the TV news vans were arriving—the very scenario Brandt had tried to avoid by calling Glitsky direct. If the TV happened to be turned on in Amy’s apartment and they broke the story as late-breaking news, there was no telling what would happen inside, but it could not be good. Next, Brandt watched with some admixture of dread and disbelief as the motor home command post of the tactical unit pulled up. He saw Ariola moving toward it and again tried his DA’s badge trick with one of the uniformed cops, who this time let him through with barely a glance. He stood right behind Ariola as he reported the situation to the TAC unit commander, and neither of those men paid him the slightest heed either.

The whole TAC unit wasn’t here yet—it usually took forty minutes to an hour for all the members to check in—but the sharpshooter had been one of the first to arrive, and the commander sent him up to the roof of the building directly across the street from Amy’s to see what, if anything, he could do. Brandt heard the order, “If you get a clear shot, and he’s got a gun on her, take it.” Then, motioning to the TV vans, he turned to Ariola. “Inform those jackals that if anyone runs a live feed, I’ll hunt them down and kill them and their children.”

In the crush of events, Brandt’s presence continued to go unnoticed. Ariola went to talk to the newspeople, while the commander ran across the street and disappeared into Amy’s building. Every minute or so, another policemen in a black TAC unit jacket would show up and report to the deputy commander at the door to the motor home. At some point—any normal measure of time had long since become meaningless—Ariola reappeared next to Brandt, and they both watched as the commander came out of the lobby, looked up into the sky and jogged back over to where they stood. He spoke to his deputy. “I don’t see how we can wait much longer.”

“I don’t either.”

“The Chief ordered me to wait for him. If we bust in, we could lose her. Although I don’t know what else he’s got in mind.” Again, the commander glanced at the rapidly darkening sky. Shaking his head, he sighed with exasperation, looked up again. “Five minutes,” he said, “and it’s dark. We’ve got to go in.”

He’d been sitting the whole time, holding the gun with its awkward attachment, the silencer, resting on the arm of the chair. His finger continually, unconsciously, teased the trigger as he flipped one by one—casually, relaxed—through the pages of the various magazines Wu kept next to her reading chair. She became nearly hypnotized with fear, watching it. Once she shifted her weight in her chair at the table and it was as though she’d prodded him with electricity, so quickly did he have the gun raised, all focus and menace. “Don’t move!”

Then, satisfied that she wouldn’t, he sat back, crossed one leg comfortably over the other and began turning pages again.

Wu didn’t know what she could do to save herself, and so sat in a numbed state of panic and resignation. She’d already considered what she thought were her only options. In his chair, he was probably close to ten feet away from her, farther than she could leap in a quick rush. The front door was still deadlocked and chained. The bathroom—the only place she might conceivably escape to—was all the way at the back corner of the large, otherwise open room.

She thought that when the time came, if indeed he gave her any warning at all, she would bolt and try to throw something—the saltshaker, the chair she sat on. But she realized from his demeanor throughout this excruciating wait that he was just as likely to lick his finger, turn a page, check the window (as he’d done a dozen times), decide it was sufficiently dark, lift the gun without a word or warning and shoot her. Then unlock the door and walk downstairs and out into the sheltering night.

Unable to bear watching his twitching finger any longer, she closed her eyes, trying to find some place of inner peace, but found there was nowhere she could go. This was the end of her life, and all she could feel was the coming void. Opening her eyes again, she watched him flip a page, glance at her as though she were a piece of furniture, look back down at his magazine, turn his head to the window, flip another page.

The small hole in the barrel of the silencer, the finger dancing over the trigger guard, had so dominated her consciousness that she hadn’t looked at the window herself in what must have been minutes. But now she did and realized that the night had truly come on—she was looking at her own reflection now in the glass, as though in a mirror. There was no more light from outside to dissipate the image.

He would not wait much longer.

Knock! Knock! Knock!

The sound startled them both. Wu gave a little involuntary yelp and he jumped where he sat, the chair legs giving a little screech on the hardwood floor. At the same time, the magazine slipped and fell out of his lap. After all the silence in the room, the two sounds—the knock and the dropped magazine—seemed to Amy to echo like thunder.

She shot a startled glance at him. He lifted the gun, his arm outstretched, centered on her heart. The gun never left her. His eyes went to the door, back to her. The initial moment of panic passed. She felt she could see him plotting what he would do. With the inadvertent noises from inside, there was no way to pretend that no one was home.

Quickly, he pointed the gun at the door, then back to her, and nodded.

“Who is it?”

“Amy. It’s me. Diz. We had a meeting?”

She turned to him. Mouthed, “My boss.”

Something like a smile curled the corner of his mouth.
All the better.
He nodded. The message was
Let him in.
He got to his feet.

“Just a second,” she said.

In a few steps, agile as a cat, suddenly he’d come around the table and pressed himself against the wall by the door. He moved the gun up and now held it on her head. One foot from her head.

Wu read his intentions with crystal clarity. When she opened the door, it would block him from sight until Hardy was inside. And then he would shoot. And then both of them would die. She couldn’t let that happen.

What was he doing here? They hadn’t planned any meeting.

She undid the chain, fumbling with it, her hands shaking.

If she threw the door back quickly, could she disable him? She looked down for an instant, saw that he’d planted his foot to prevent that. The door could open only enough to let Hardy in, nothing more. And meanwhile he could fire at will.

If she let him in, Hardy would die, too. She couldn’t be responsible for that. If she was going to die anyway, maybe at least she could warn him first.

Her thoughts tumbling over one another, she watched as though from a distance as her hands turned the dead bolt, went to the knob, turned it.

Dropping her hand, resigned now to the gun there at her ear, she heard herself saying, “I don’t feel well. You have to go, Diz.”

“We need to talk,” he said, “face to face. It’s urgent.”

Hardy knew she’d undone the chain. He’d heard her throw the dead bolt, watched the doorknob turn and heard the little
click.
The door was unlocked. He guessed she was stalling for time, but there was no more time.

He grabbed the knob, turned, lowered his shoulder and exploded into the crack where he’d opened the door, hitting her with a tackle at the waist, taking her down with him.

Before they’d even hit the floor, the four TAC unit specialists who’d crammed into the landing behind Hardy crashed in through the opening with their guns drawn, splintering the door completely off its hinges. There were another four behind them, and then yet another team, rushing unstoppable as a flash flood into the apartment.

The force of the door flying back knocked the gun from his grip and somersaulted him back over the table and onto the floor. Crashing against the counter where Wu kept her dishes and cooking supplies, for an instant he lay stunned on the floor amid the splintered wood and broken glass. But in the half-second before anyone could reach him, emitting an animal cry, he made a last desperate scramble and lunge for his weapon.

But he never made it, as the first pair of TAC unit specialists reached and fell upon him.

Writhing and screaming, a run-over animal whose back had been broken, he grunted and kicked and gouged and spewed his vile rage until they’d gotten his hands behind his back and cuffed him. Now, facedown in his own blood and spread-eagled with a TAC guy on each leg and another kneeling on his back, he couldn’t move a muscle.

Glitsky was standing in the doorway, his own gun drawn, but now held down at his side. He could see that his plan—well, his and Hardy’s—had worked. And they’d managed to pull it off without anyone having to die. Their backs against the wall, Hardy sat next to Wu on the floor, a protective arm around her. Wu’s head was down, her shoulders heaving a little as she cried out some of the tension.

Fine.

Glitsky walked over to where his troops had the suspect in righteous custody, and looked down at the now pathetic and restrained figure of the Executioner. They’d only discovered his name in the minutes before Brandt had called to say he knew where they could find him.

The Youth Guidance Center bailiff, Ray Cottrell.

The TAC unit police had wasted no time getting Cottrell up and taking him away, and now the room fairly buzzed with the spent energy and the detritus of chaos.

In the destroyed half of the apartment, Wu, Hardy and Glitsky went to almost robotic wordless motion, getting the shattered door to one side and leaning it up against the wall, setting the table back on its legs, righting the chairs, two of them still unbroken, picking up the larger pieces of plates and pottery.

At last, Wu sat heavily in one of the chairs. Hardy took the other.

Glitsky crossed to the dish counter and filled a glass of water from the tap. He went over to the table and handed it to Wu, then went back to the counter, cleared a spot and sat on it. “How did he get here?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I had no idea he knew where I lived.”

“But what did he want with
you
? You were—what?—twelve years old during his father’s trial. You had nothing to do with it, did you?”

Seeming to notice the glass in her hand for the first time, Wu drank off half the water. She dropped her head and appeared to gather herself for another minute. Finally, she began to tell them what Cottrell had said he had wanted with her, as best she could explain it—her connection to the system that had mistakenly and tragically convicted his father.

“No, more than that,” she said. “It wasn’t just that I was another lawyer. He saw me as exactly like Allan Boscacci had been when he’d prosecuted his innocent dad and sent his dad up. I was doing the same thing to Andrew Bartlett, bartering away years of his life when Ray
knew
Andrew was innocent.” She was coming out of her state of shock, and seemed suddenly to realize the import of what he’d told her. “Because he was the one who’d done what Andrew had been arrested for. Don’t you see? He killed Mooney and Laura.”

“We’d pretty much gotten to that ourselves,” Glitsky said.

She raised her voice a notch. “But he
told
me he did it. He actually told me. He called Mooney by name.” She turned to Hardy. “That’s important,” she said, urgency bleeding out of her. “It makes a difference.”

“I know.” He put a hand over hers at the table. “I don’t think Abe’s missing it.”

Glitsky nodded. “We’ll get his statement, then see where we are,” he said. “But unofficially, I don’t think you need to worry. It’ll all come out.”