Truth or Die (12 page)

“This one’s fine,” I said, already reaching for my wallet.

He spun the price tag around. “You’re in luck. It’s on sale.”

“Good,” I grunted, or something to that effect, as I pulled out my Amex.

I didn’t care about the price. I also didn’t care about using a credit card. The charge—and my location—could be traced in an instant. Even quicker than an instant. It would be like drawing a straight line to me, then lighting it like a fuse.

So be it.

Trevor, maybe you should sit down again. There’s something you need to know …

“Are you all right?” asked the clerk. He certainly didn’t think so. It was bad enough that I had all the charm and charisma of a cinder block. Now I was standing there frozen like one.

“Sorry,” I said, handing over my credit card. He ran it and I signed. As he handed me back the receipt, I nodded at the zip tie holding the keys. “Do you have any scissors?”

He glanced around under the counter, finding a pair. “Here, let me,” he said, cutting the tie. Then he leaned in as if he were about to whisper some nuclear codes. “Just so you know, that lock really doesn’t offer much protection. It’s super-easy to open without the key.”

“Not if you’re a cop,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

But I was already halfway out the door. Me and the Fourth Amendment.

Without just cause and a warrant, my new duffel bag might as well have been Fort Knox with two side pockets and a shoulder strap.

Good thing.

Because I wasn’t about to fill that duffel bag with jelly beans.

WALKING INTO a bar with a gun tucked under your shirt is one thing. Doing it in a bank?

One block shy of my Chase branch on the Upper West Side, I dumped the Beretta M9 in a trash can. I didn’t need it. Trust me.

“Do you have your key?” asked the safe-deposit box attendant on the lower level.

Maybe the woman picked up on my vibe, or maybe this was how she acted with everyone who came through the bank, but her monotone delivery was music to my ears. There would be no polite chitchat. No delay. In fact, she even had her guard key raised in her hand, ready to go.

Quickly, I reached for my key—sandwiched between the one for my apartment and the one for my office up at Columbia Law—and showed it to her. The irony. I never used to keep it on my key chain. Then, one day, I’d asked Claire about a certain key on hers.

“This way I don’t have to remember where I put it,” she’d told me.

I never knew what Claire kept in her safe-deposit box. I never asked. That was because I didn’t want her asking what I kept in mine.

She hated those “damn things” even more than I did.

Standing alone in the small viewing room with nothing but white walls and a shelf, I opened the lid and removed an original SIG Sauer P210. Steel frame, wood grip, locked breech. Old school. And, in the right hands, still the most accurate semiautomatic pistol in the world.

Then out came my Glock 34 with a GTL 22 attachment giving it a dimmable xenon white light with a red laser sight. As a weapons instructor during my first year at Valley Forge once declared with the kind of sandpaper voice that only a lifetime of smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes will give you, “Sometimes shit happens in the dark.”

Both guns went into the duffel along with four boxes of ammo, one shoulder holster, and one shin holster, the latter being custom-made to accommodate the light and laser sight on the Glock 34.

Like I said, I didn’t need the Beretta M9.

Finally, there were some paper goods. Two wrapped stacks of hundreds totaling ten grand. Cash for a rainy day. Or, in this case, when it was pouring.

And that was that. Everything I’d come for, everything I needed. Before zipping the duffel closed, I took one last look inside it. Then I took one last look inside the safe-deposit box.

If only I hadn’t.

Sticking out from underneath my birth certificate was a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie card. My father had given it to me after my very first Little League game. “Take good care of it,” he told me.
“It’s your turn.”

The card was far from mint condition. One of the corners was dog-eared, and there were a couple of creases along the side. But it had been given to me by my father, who had gotten it from his father, and that made it absolutely perfect.

I picked up the card, staring at it in my hands, and suddenly it weighed a million pounds. My knees buckled and my legs gave out. I fell back against the wall, sliding slowly down to the floor. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t breathe. I could only cry.

“The autopsy …”
Sebastian had begun.

Claire was an organ donor, so it had already been performed. He’d seen the results. He’d had to. Leave it to the
Times
to need a corroborating source before reporting the cause of death of one of its own.

“What?” I asked.
“What is it?”

Sebastian hesitated, his eyes avoiding mine. But it was too late for second thoughts; he had to tell me.

“Claire was pregnant,” he said.

READY OR not, you sons of bitches, here I come …

I took the stairs, walking the six flights up to my apartment on the top floor. The SIG Sauer was in my hand, my hand was hidden in the duffel, and the duffel was hanging off my shoulder.

Fog or no fog, there was a small part of my brain that knew exactly how stupid I was being. Whatever fine line existed between risky and crazy, I was nowhere near it. What I was doing bordered on insane. I was a walking death wish, and if it hadn’t been for the rest of my brain, I would’ve surely turned around and hightailed it out of my building.

But the rest of my brain was consumed by one thing, and one thing only.
Love of justice perverted to revenge and spite.
That was how Dante defined it during his tour through Hell.

Vengeance.

I shared the sixth floor with only one other tenant, a trader at Morgan Stanley who left each morning at the crack of dawn. His apartment faced the back of the building; mine faced the front. I got the natural light, he got the quiet.

Fittingly, there was nothing but silence as I passed his door, heading toward mine at the opposite end of the hall.

Out came the SIG Sauer from the duffel, leading the way. All the while, I kept waiting for a sound, a noise, something up ahead to let me know I had company. But that would be too easy, I thought.

Sometimes you just have a feeling you’re about to catch a break. This wasn’t one of those times.

Which was all the more reason why I wasn’t expecting the door to my apartment to be wide open, or kicked down, or hanging off its hinges like some giant calling card. And sure enough, it wasn’t.

The door was closed. Locked, too. Easing my back against the wall and out of the line of fire, I reached over for the knob. It barely budged. Maybe the whiz kid, Owen, was wrong. They never came. They weren’t inside.

Maybe.

I took out my key—everything was one key or another now—and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. It was a losing battle. There was simply no preventing the audible snap of the dead bolt retreating. In the silence of the hallway, the way the sound echoed, it might as well have been a giant gong announcing my arrival.

I waited for a moment, trying to listen again into my apartment while staying clear of the door. I could hear every beat of my heart, every swallow, every breath I was taking—but nothing more. Each second passing was all the more reason to believe no one was waiting for me on the other side.

Still, that didn’t stop me from putting the duffel down on the floor and pulling out the Glock to go with my SIG Sauer. I was like the title of a badass wannabe country song. “Double-Fisted with Pistols.”

I peeled my back off the wall, my shirt damp with sweat and sticking to my body.
Damn, it’s hot.

Whether I was steeling my nerve or just stalling, I suddenly found myself counting back from ten. That, and thinking of Dante once again and the final line of the inscription he encountered on the Gates of Hell.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

I STEPPED back, raised my right foot, and let it fly, my heel hitting the door dead center with a deafening
bam!
The door flew open and my duffel bag quickly followed as I kicked it into the foyer to draw their fire. But the only noise I heard was the bag sliding across my hardwood floors.

My turn.

Crouched low with both guns drawn, I angled around the door frame, my eyes darting left, right, and everywhere. Nothing moved. No one was there.

Correction. No one was
still
there.

Creepy isn’t bursting into your apartment to see it ransacked. It’s bursting into your apartment to see everything as you left it … and still knowing someone’s been there.

Owen wasn’t wrong; I’d had company. The vibe was immediate. The proof came soon after.

I’d already done a quick sweep of every room to ensure I was truly alone when I circled back to my foyer and tried to think how
they
would think. Owen had summed it up. They’d want to know as much about me—and what I knew—as they could.

I started in my library and the easiest egg in the hunt, my laptop on my desk.
Gone.

Next was the fruit bowl in my kitchen, where my mail piled up instead of fruit. All the mail was there, but at the bottom of the bowl was where I kept a spare key to the apartment, as well as one for my car and my office at Columbia.

All three keys?
Gone.

By then, the old yew-wood chest in my bedroom was a foregone conclusion. I pulled open the top drawer on the right, which held my passport along with the lone weapon I kept in the apartment for protection, a 9mm Parabellum.

Gone and gone.

They had my hard drive. They had access to my home, my office, my car. They had one of my guns and the only way I could leave the country. Maybe they’d taken a few other things, but by that point I’d stopped looking.

Then I just stopped.

I froze in the middle of my bedroom, trying to listen. I’d heard something. The sound was faint but definitely there, or at least somewhere. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

There it was again.

I took a few wrong steps toward the door out to the living room, only to turn around when I heard it yet again. The sound was coming from my bathroom. I was positive I’d already looked in there.
It wouldn’t hurt to check again, would it?

I sure as hell hope not.

Guns up and elbows locked, I put one foot in front of the other and moved toward the bathroom. After a few steps, I had the sound pegged. It was water. Not running, but dripping.

There was no need to channel Chuck Norris again. The door to my bathroom was wide open. The only kick I needed was one to my pants.

After a few deep breaths, I slowly peered around the hinges … and saw everything I’d seen the first time. My sink. My toilet. My shower. Nothing and no one else.

Ker-plop.

Immediately, my eyes went to the shower. The sliding doors were two-thirds closed. I could see enough through the frosted glass to know the boogeyman wasn’t standing behind them. I simply hadn’t turned off the water all the way after showering that morning.

I should’ve known, though. The déjà vu alone was enough of a tip-off.
Those motherfuckers …

After a few steps forward to reach for the knob, I took one giant jump back. I wasn’t surprised about anything they’d taken from my apartment, not at all.

It was what they’d left behind.

“DETECTIVE LAMONT, please,” I said, although the “please” was hardly polite. It sounded more like
Right away, dammit!
I couldn’t help it.

Not that it changed the officer’s answer on the other end of the phone. “He’s off duty, do you want his voice mail?”

No, I want his actual voice.
I stared down again at the business card Lamont had given me, even flipping it over twice, as if somehow that would make his cell phone number magically appear. It wasn’t printed on the card.

“Is there a way you can reach him for me?” I asked. “It’s important.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” said the officer, his voice trailing off as if he were reaching for something. “There’s a note here. Are you Trevor Mann?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on a second.”

It was more like thirty seconds, but I hardly cared so long as the next voice I heard was Lamont’s. On second thought …

“What the hell were you thinking?”
he immediately barked, skipping right past any pleasantries. The way he said “hell,” it pretty much rhymed with “truck.” He was pissed.

I knew he was referring to Bethesda Terrace. There were a few ways he could’ve found out already, but I wasn’t interested in asking. I had my own line of questioning, beginning with “Where are you?”

“At home,” he answered. “They patched the call from the precinct. Where are you?”

“At home as well.”

“I tried calling.”

“I just got here,” I said. “More importantly, how fast can you get here?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not going to believe this.”

“You might be surprised,” he said.

“Not as much as I was.
Claire’s killer is in my bathtub
.”

I was expecting any number of responses from Lamont, all of them falling under the heading of disbelief. Instead, I got sarcasm.

“Is the guy still dead or is he doing the backstroke now?” he asked.

“You think this is funny?”

“Do you hear me laughing?”

No, I didn’t. This was about more than Bethesda Terrace. I was missing something.

“They must have put him there,” I said. “They’re trying to frame me.”

“
They
, as in the two federal agents who just left my apartment twenty minutes ago?” he asked. “The ones you shot at in Central Park?”

“They were there to kill me. Christ, what the hell did they tell you?”