Don't Look Now (30 page)

Rita’s heart sank. She could feel the moment slipping away. She reached quickly for her purse but, in her haste, knocked it over, spilling everything into the sink.

Paris barely heard the crackle of the two-way radio that signified that someone was on the channel. He ducked into a hallway and put the speaker to his ear, but Faustino Nava’s music was still deafening.

He signaled to Nick Raposo and the two of them bulled their way to the front of the club and up the steps. Sandy, who was speaking to a petite Asian woman, didn’t give them a second look. They stepped into the night. ‘Rita,’ Paris said, whispering into the radio.

Paris heard the channel open and close. Then, nothing.

‘Rita.’

A short blast of static. Then: ‘Jag
.’

Paris looked at Nick. ‘Say again?’

‘…
yov goneer
…’

‘Where are you?’ Paris asked.

Another burst of static.

The radio went silent, save for a thin veneer of electronic noise.

Paris began to pace. Come
on
, come
on
, come
on
,’ he said, tapping the abbreviated antenna against his thigh. Nick leaned against the building, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the sidewalk, waiting.

Then it came. A loud whisper. Clear as a bell.

‘Meet me out front. I have Melissa. I’ve got her. Everything’s okay.’

Paris hit the button and positioned his mouth an inch from the radio. ‘You’ve
got
her?’

‘I’ve got her. She’s fine.’ The words were whispered now. ‘Meet me out front of the Swing Set.’

Nick and Paris exchanged a quick high five, then walked over to the entrance. Paris put the radio into his pocket and stepped back into the vestibule, freezing Big Sandy to his stool with a flash of his eyes. He waited for Rita and Melissa to come around the corner at the bottom of the stairs.

Nick stood out front.

Minutes later, as Paris ran down St Clair Avenue at full speed, toward the alley next to the Good Egg, two thoughts came to him like a crystal bullet between the eyes.

One: There hadn’t been any music in the background. Whoever had talked to him on the radio could not possibly have been
inside
the Swing Set.

Two:
Saila
was
Alias
backward. It had been there the whole time, taunting him, a rookie’s ruse dressed up like a clue.

Saila. Only one type of person would be that fucking bold.

Nick Raposo, lagging well behind Paris, went left, up East Sixtieth Street. He turned the corner and cut across the vacant lot, where he found a dark alcove set into the building that overlooked the alley, a perfect vantage point from which he could see the parking-lot and the BMW. He caught his breath and hunkered down in the darkness.

Moments later, the darkness put the barrel of a 9-mm handgun to his head.

RITA WEISINGER HAD
always prided herself on her ability to adapt to any situation. You date a country boy, you wear your Levi’s and chambray shirts. You date a doctor, it’s Calvin Klein and pearls. Easy. Snow tires, reversible belts, wet-dry vacuum cleaners, she was good at it.

And she had a mouth. She could
talk
. Hers was one of the highest-grossing hotel bars in the city for one reason and one reason only. Rita Weisinger could schmooze the gilt off a gold card.

But when the woman in the ladies’ room saw the cop-issue two-way radio lying in the sink, next to the Buck knife, all of Rita’s systems shut down. She found herself trapped with a monster and there was nothing she could do or say.

With a force Rita thought reserved only for linebackers and dockworkers, the woman pushed her, head first, into the middle stall. She hit the door hard and it flew open with enough force to smash into the partition, shattering its lock. Rita tried to get up but the room was spinning out of control now, the floor was slick with filthy water. By the time she was able to right herself, the woman put her spiked heel gently up against Rita’s chest and thudded her back down to the floor.

The last thing Rita saw, before she fell unconscious, was the upside-down face of Melissa Adelaide Paris, staring out from under the partition, surrounded by a cartoon universe of stars.

SAILA HAD JUST
gotten her key into the BMW’s door. Her other hand held Melissa firmly by the wrist. They both heard Paris’s footsteps in the alley before they saw him, but it was enough time for Saila to walk Melissa to the center of the parking-lot and put the barrel of the .25 semi-automatic pistol to the girl’s temple.

Melissa closed her eyes and waited for the pain.

WHEN PARIS SAW
the two of them – perfectly posed, oddly familiar statuary under the lone street-lamp – he pulled up in his tracks and held his hands out to his sides.

He was twenty-five feet away.

‘Hello, detective,’ Cyndy Taggart said. ‘Good work.’

‘Cyndy, don’t.’

‘Pull it out, left hand, and place it on the ground,’ Cyndy said. ‘You know the drill.’

‘Are you okay, Missy?’ His daughter remained silent, but Paris could see in her eyes that she had not been harmed. If anything, at that moment, she looked simply exhausted. She wore a short black dress and earrings in the shape of red cherries.

‘
Now
, detective.’

‘Okay, Cyndy.’ Paris slowly reached inside his jacket and extracted his weapon with two fingers. He placed the gun on the ground and kicked it along the asphalt.

‘Talk to me, Cyndy.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I want to know how we get out of this with no one getting hurt.’

Cyndy thought for a moment. ‘What do you have for me?’

‘What do you want, Cyndy? My hand to God, if I can get it, I go get it right now, and I lay it at your feet. Tell me.’

‘You know what I want. Everything you have on Pharaoh.’

‘You’ve got it all. Think about it. Without those photographs, they’re never going to reopen the case.’ Paris tried to remember something, anything, from his three hours of hostage-negotiation training. Of course, it was never supposed to be his daughter. ‘The house on Tarleton Street is history. Everything
in
it is history. You get to keep the straight razor with my prints on it. You can set me up three years from now if you feel like it. What more do you want?’

Cyndy looked from Melissa to Paris, then back at the car, calculating the odds. ‘
She’s
not going to shut up about this,’ Cyndy said, fingering the trigger, nodding toward the trunk of the car. ‘Neither is little Lois here.’

‘Let me handle it,’ Paris said, the motion not lost on him. His experience was that it meant that the shooter was getting ready to shoot. ‘Diana will be pissed off, sure. But I’ll take care of it. If you didn’t hurt her, she won’t press charges. I promise.’

Cyndy laughed. ‘You don’t know the first fucking thing about women, Jack.’

Then came a sound, a steel-on-steel sound, echoing from an alcove immediately to Paris’s left. Although the alcove was engulfed in darkness, Paris figured it was Nick Raposo, trying, and failing, to arrive quietly at the scene. The sound instantly drew Cyndy’s attention, causing her to relax her grip, her guard, for the briefest of moments.

But the moment was long enough.

Melissa, sensing the opportunity, shifted her weight, lifted her right foot high into the air and brought it down hard on the top of Cyndy’s right foot.

‘
Heee-yah!
’ Melissa shouted.

‘
No
!’ Paris screamed.

Melissa ran toward her father as fast as she could.

In that moment, in that brief instant that Jack Paris saw his daughter running toward him – her long hair swirling fiercely about her face and neck and shoulders – he noticed, with curiosity, that she had Beth’s face. Beth’s wise, motherly, made-up, adult face on Melissa’s gangling figure, the figure of a still-growing girl, a girl destined to become a tall, graceful woman.

But Paris also knew, in his shattering heart, that everything he had ever feared for his daughter was happening all at once: crib death, undertow, scarlet fever, cocaine, the pervert in the car parked near the school.

In that moment, Jack Paris knew that his daughter had lived her whole life.

And that he had killed her.

In that moment, in that brief instant, Cyndy Taggart hesitated, her right instep afire, her two lives colliding in a hurricane of procedure and pain and sexual disgrace. Her arms felt leaden and weak, her body seemed loath to respond to her immediate demands.

Then, just as quickly, she recoiled and sprang.

She raised her weapon into the air, took careful aim at the center of Melissa’s back, and squeezed the trigger.

In that moment, in that brief instant that Jack Paris saw a mad-eyed woman fire a small handgun at his daughter, a much larger 9-mm bullet, fired from the alcove, tore into the left side of Cyndy Taggart’s chest, then exited her shoulder blade in a furious gush of red tissue. The bullet clanked against the steel fender of a GMC truck halfway across the parking-lot, then skittered on to the asphalt.

Sergeant Cynthia Jean Taggart stood for a few moments, rusted in time, poised to make one final appeal, then followed the warm lead slug to the ground.

MELISSA SCREAMED ONCE
and stumbled forward the last few steps, slamming into her father’s chest. Paris scooped her into his arms, turned on his heels and sprinted back down the alley, head down, not knowing for certain who had fired the other shot or where it had come from, not knowing if Missy had been hit.

They rounded the corner and burst into the fluorescent brightness of the Good Egg Restaurant. Paris ran the length of the black and white diner and lifted Melissa into the last booth, far away from the windows. He shielded her from the street.

‘Are you okay, baby?’ Paris dropped to his knees and frantically checked her back, her arms, her legs, her face, hoping,
praying
, that his fingers would not come back coated with red. ‘
Did she hurt you, baby?
’

‘No, Daddy,’ Melissa said, shivering now, nearing her ballast of tears.

‘I’m so sorry, baby.’ Paris held her tightly. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He pulled back and took another long, careful inventory of Melissa’s well-being. Cyndy had missed her completely, it appeared. Paris grabbed a napkin and began dabbing Melissa’s face.

A minute later Paris arose and turned back to the diner. The restaurant’s five or six patrons were watching his every move in a state of near-catatonic silence, their sandwiches and eggs and Danish pastries poised halfway to their mouths. He asked of them all: ‘Who’s the owner?’

A pair of elderly rock-and-rollers in studded denim, sitting at the counter, pointed to a man restocking a potato chip rack near the front. Paris vaulted the counter and approached him.

‘What’s your name?’ Paris asked.

‘Akim,’ the man said, his hands locked around five or six bags of chips each, his eyes nearly vibrating with alarm. He had heard the shots in the alley and now this man had run into his place of business with a little girl made up to look like a harlot. What was coming
next
?

‘This is your place?’

The man nodded, his mouth too dry to speak.

‘Akim,’ Paris said. He put his hand on to the shoulder of the short, solid man in the greasy blue apron. ‘I’m a police officer, and this is my daughter. This thing may not be over out here, I’m afraid. I have to leave for a while and I want her to stay right in that booth. I’m going to leave her in your care. Let
nothing
happen to her. Do you understand me?’

Akim had dealt with many police officers – first in Beirut, then in New York City, and now at the Good Egg in Cleveland – and he knew exactly what this particular brand of
Do you understand me?
meant. He dropped the chips.

‘She will be safe,’ Akim said. He looked into the back room, snapped his fingers twice and shouted something in Arabic. Almost immediately a stout, broad-shouldered woman of fifty appeared. She plopped down next to Melissa and thrust her big legs into the aisle.

Paris stopped at the front door and turned back to Akim. ‘Call nine-one-one. Tell them shots were fired in this alley. Tell them a woman has been badly injured. Tell them to send an ambulance.’

Akim picked up the phone behind the counter and punched in the numbers.

Paris left the restaurant and stepped, haltingly, weaponless, into the blackness of the alley.

The whole transaction had taken less than two minutes, yet Paris felt years older.

CYNDY HAD LOST
a lot of blood. Her body had the twisted, tangled look of someone just pulled from a hellacious high-speed crash. Her face bore a milk-blue pallor.

Paris had come around the corner and immediately found his weapon where he kicked it. It was still fully loaded. He called Nick’s name a few times, but figured, after firing the shot that dropped Cyndy, Nick had probably come looking for
him
.

Paris followed the trail of blood around the green Buick parked next to Cyndy’s car. When he skirted the trunk, and saw Cyndy’s condition, his heart nearly went out to her.

Nearly.

Then he remembered Eleanor Burchfield’s throat.

Cyndy was propped against the rear fender of the BMW. From the right side of her chest grew a short, purplish sprout of viscera. She was alive, and she had the barrel of her pistol pressed tightly against the car’s gas tank.

‘Don’t come any closer Jack,’ Cyndy said. ‘Got your girlfriend in the trunk.’ She tapped the back fender with the gun. ‘Half a tank of gas, too.’ She looked skyward for a moment, calculating something, then back at Paris. ‘Five bullets.’ She managed a crooked grin, then placed the barrel of the gun back up against the tank.

‘Where’s Rita?’ Paris asked.

‘Who?’

‘Rita,’ Paris said. ‘The one you took the two-way radio from?’

‘Oh
her
,’ Cyndy said. ‘Taking a nap on the ladies’-room floor. Probably having the time of her life, too, considering the way you dressed her for the evening.’ Cyndy smiled, her teeth red and glistening in the light thrown from the nearby streetlamp. ‘You sick
fuck
.’