A Is for Apple (21 page)

I didn’t need to check the airlines. I already knew where they were.

I slammed the receiver down, collected my quarters, then stared feeding them back in again.

“Docherty? Thank God I got you. I’m in New York. The kids are here.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m waiting for them at Xander’s apartment.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

The subway, I’m told, is not place for a nice girl after midnight. But tonight I was not a nice girl. Tonight I was bleeding and shaking and numb with every kind of pain, and if anyone came anywhere near me they vanished when they saw my face. So I looked like a hooker junkie. So what.

Walking through the meatpacking district after dark was educational, but I wasn’t in the mood to learn. As I approached Xander’s apartment, a shadow detached itself from the darkness and held something out to me. It glinted. A gun.

“Glad you could make it,” Docherty said, smiling in the darkness.

“Wouldn’t be a party without me.”

“You look like hell.”

“Been there and back. It’s fucking freezing out here.”

“You want my coat?”

I shook my head. “I want to go inside. I’d rather wait for them.”

“The door’s been padlocked…”

I gave him a look of contempt and checked out the gun. It was one of his matching Heckler Koch .45s.

It made very short work of the padlock.

No one seemed to bat an eyelid at the sound of a gunshot. The pair of transvestite hookers on the corner made loud dirty jokes about bangs and I ignored them, kicking the door open, shooting off the inner lock, and stalking inside.

“You really do look like hell,” Docherty said helpfully as I looked around the place.

“Thanks.”

“Want to tell me why?”

I closed my eyes and an image of Luke sliding down the concrete wall made me catch my breath.

“No.”

Docherty came up behind me and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Not by a long shot.

“I’m fine.”

“Why are you here?”

I took a deep breath and turned to face him. I told him about Clara, and about my attacker, and how I was pretty sure it’d been Amber.

“And Luke didn’t come with you?”

My insides twisted. “No,” I said, trying not to let him see my face in the darkness. “We, uh, we broke up.”

“Again?” Docherty sounded faintly despairing, and at that I smiled.

“Yeah. Again.”

“Won’t last,” he said sadly.

Wanna bet?

But we were prevented from any further discussions by the sound of voices outside. I ducked down behind the sofa and Docherty slipped behind the curtain pulled between bedroom and studio.

“Shit,” that was Marc’s voice, “the lock’s been broken…”

“Probably just vandals,” came Amber’s voice. “Can we get inside? I’m freezing. Unless you want to warm me up out here…”

She sounded drunk. Or stoned. Or both. I wondered if the heroin had been a one-time deal or if she was used to it. I wondered if Marc was. I wondered when the hell they’d open the sodding door.

It felt like hours, during which the most revolting smoochy noises and little girlie moans came from the other side of the door, but eventually it opened, and Amber and Marc fell in, her hand slamming the light switch as she went.

I fired my gun, a split second after Docherty fired his. Neither missed, but unfortunately both had been aimed at Marc.

“Shit,” I hissed, as Amber froze in horror. I swung my gun at her, but I’m a dreadful shot, and if it hadn’t been for Docherty smacking a bullet into her thigh, she’d have got away.

She crumbled to the floor, falling bit by bit, clumsy and messy and clutching at her thigh, her mascara stark and black against her white face.

“Where’s Lucy?” I demanded, and she looked up at me in shock. “Where. Is. Lucy?”

“I don’t know,” Amber said, clearly terrified. “She—she went off on her own. She said she wanted to see the Brooklyn Bridge…”

“Shit, she’s going to jump,” Docherty said, and I knew he was right.

“Go,” I said. “I can handle this.”

“Sure?”

I looked at Marc, sprawled facedown, bleeding from the leg and shoulder, and Amber, sitting rocking on the floor, holding her leg and crying, and knew they were only kids.

And felt really old.

“Sure. Go. You know what she looks like?”

He nodded. “I’ll call you on this number.”

And then he was gone, and it was me and the murder twins alone together.

“Mind the blood on the floor,” I said. “Probably won’t bother Marc, seeing as it’s his father’s, but you don’t want to mix blood, do you, Amber? You can get all kinds of nasty things.”

She was shaking, looking up at me with mascara stained eyes.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“You killed Luke,” I snapped, “so it’s all you deserve.”

Amber cowered.

Yes, I’d known it was her. The balaclava had been a nice touch, but she’d forgotten to take off her amber eyeshadow and mountains of mascara. Bizarrely, I remembered a school play where a couple of girls had painted over their orangey stage makeup with their own foundation because they were too vain to walk around looking like Oompa Loompas, and consequently looked like ghosts under the stage lights. Teenage vanity.

“But I’m trying to be professional,” I continued, my voice as steady as I could make it, which was to say not very. “So I’m going to get a confession out of you. And then I’m going to kill you.”

I still had the gun aimed at her. If the cartridge was full, and knowing Docherty it would be, then I had eleven more shots. Plenty to keep me going.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said. “I don’t know my own strength…”

“Right,” I said, “the rugby training. Thought you’d have gone for someone a bit beefier than Marc. Although it explains how you managed to haul Doyle and Maretti’s bodies around. Did you kill them because they knew?”

A pause, then she nodded tearfully.

I needed to start at the top. I probably didn’t have too much time before Marc bled to death. “Who killed Shapiro? Who killed Marc’s father?”

Amber took a few very pretty heaving breaths. “He did,” she said.

“Who?”

“Marc. He didn’t mean to.”

“How can you not mean to slit someone’s throat? Or shoot him?”

“He came over here to see his dad. He was buying this hideous portrait from some gay kid who lives here. Lived here,” she amended. “But he was hardly ever here. He was always out at bars and stuff. And Marc’s dad kept coming over to see him. I think he fancied him, the kid.”

Jeez. No wonder Xander wanted to get his money and get out.

“When did Marc kill his father?”

Amber sniffed. Her mascara was making trails down her face. “I don’t know. A week—two weeks ago? He’d just brought the portrait home and he and Marc had this big fight and Marc stabbed him in the neck with the knife from room service dinner. He didn’t mean to.”

Yeah, ‘cos I so often accidentally stab my family in the throat over dinner.

“At the hotel?”

“We hid him there for a couple days.” Already inflecting Americanisms. “I went out and got a really big suitcase and wheeled him out and we tried to think of somewhere to put him.”

“And this sofa was your best choice?”

“Marc was still mad at the painter guy. He said we should bring his dad over here.”

I nodded. Twisted, but in a scary way it made sense.

“So what about the bullet?”

“That was so people would think it was the painter.”

“His name is Xander,” I snapped.

“Yeah, you were friends with him. Doyle said so.”

“When did you meet him?”

She laughed suddenly. “God, it was so stupid. They found out about Mr. Shapiro, so they came here to move him, and they knew it was us… That’s why they came to England.”

“And why you killed them?”

She nodded. “They thought you and that Xander guy were in on it too.” Her face lit up with a sort of sly innocence. “We saved you guys from them.”

“No, you didn’t. You knew about them hitting me with the car.”

“Okay, all right.” Amber pouted. “So we figured that out.”

“Did you do it? Kill them?”

She hesitated. “Marc and Lucy helped.”

No wonder Lucy wanted to top herself.

“Who put Maretti outside my door?”

“That was Lucy. But it was my idea,” she said proudly. Stupidly.

“Well done. But I’m not so easily scared, Amber, it’s not the first time I’ve come home to a corpse.”

She looked exasperated. “Look, who are you?”

“I’m doing the questions,” I snapped.

“You’re not a sixth-former.”

“No, I’m not,” I agreed.

“You or your boyfriend. Did you have to follow us
everywhere
?” she whined, petulantly, and I decided I really didn’t like Amber. Sometimes I respected criminals a bit. The first time I even quite liked the girl.

But I still shot her.

I ran through my head any other business I had with her. Oh yeah.

“Laurence,” I said.

Amber shifted her leg, which was bleeding copiously all over her skirt. “I thought he was you,” she admitted.

“There’s not much difference.”

“It was dark, okay, I had a bloody scarf over my head. A person is a person.”

Well, yes. In some respects. “Why did you try to kill me?”

“Because you knew.”

Not really. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.

“You were always
there
. You were up to something, always asking all those questions. And driving that car, God, what are you, a farmer?”

I narrowed my eyes at her for that, and she looked away. Her eyes fell on Marc’s body.

“Did you have to kill him?” she asked, sounding more like her age.

“Check his pulse.”

I followed her movement with the gun, my arms aching horribly. She held his wrist with a bloody hand, and then she looked up at me in amazement. “He’s still alive!”

“Oh, well, never mind. Be careful about mixing blood,” I told her again. “Or do you already know about that?”

She looked away. “It’s dangerous.”

“Do you always use clean needles?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly, and I breathed an internal sigh of relief. “Usually.”

My finger nearly squeezed the trigger. “
Usually
? Was my needle clean?”

“It was supposed to be killing you, I didn’t—”

“Do you realise you could have given me
anything
?” I yelled. “I could have hepatitis or fucking AIDS and it’s all your fault.” I felt like one of those Victorian rape victims who is punished for what happened to her.

And just like that, I understood
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
.

“I’m sorry,” Amber was sobbing. “I’m so sorry. This is all a horrible mistake. It’s all horrible…”

Maybe Shapiro was a mistake, I thought grimly, but the rest weren’t.

Not moving the gun from its position, I reached over for the phone by Xander’s sofa, praying there’d be a dial tone. I dialled 911, and waited.

As so often, there was a soundtrack in my head as I turned around and said good morning to the night. Elton John again. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters—well, right now, I wasn’t much of an oil painting. I guess that made me a mad hatter.

It figured.

The NYPD had taken quite a lot of convincing that, although I was the one holding the gun, I was the good guy in this equation. It had taken most of the night to explain the overcomplicated situation to them, and by the time Marc and Amber had been fitted into an ambulance and driven away, and I was released (without the gun; Docherty would not be pleased), the sky was getting light.

“Hey,” a voice stopped me as I trudged towards the subway on 14th and 8th. Didn’t know if it’d be open; right then, didn’t care. “Subway’s no way for a good man to go down.” Docherty paused. “Or a good girl.”

“Do I look good to you?”

He hesitated.

“No, I don’t,” I answered for him. “Did you find Lucy?”

He nodded. “She wouldn’t have jumped. She’s in custody now. With her friends.”

I felt sorry for Lucy. I had the feeling she’d been swept up a bit. Like Clara had said, she was a sheep.

Poor Clara. What would she do now, all on her own?

“Where are you headed?” Docherty asked.

“Hotel.”

“Why?”

I blinked. “To sleep. I’ve hardly slept in days.”

“So sleep on the plane.” He looked at me for a moment, unruffled and dark and handsome in the early morning light. I must have looked like a train wreck, yet here he was, just as sexy as ever. It wasn’t fair. “They’ll manage without you. Do they have SO17 contacts?”

I nodded. “I told them to speak to Harvey.”

“Good girl. So go home. There’ll probably be a flight out soon enough.” He stepped out in the street and raised his hand, and a yellow cab came to a halt not far away.

“How much to JFK?” Docherty asked the driver.

He shrugged, looked me over. “Fif—seventy dollars. Plus tolls.”

Docherty handed me a couple of hundreds, like Monopoly money. “Don’t spend it all at once.” He pulled me towards him and kissed the top of my head. “Safe journey.”

I sniffed and nodded. “I’ll pay you back.”

He gave me a slight smile. “You will,” he said. “You will.”

Uh-oh.

I dozed off in the back of the cab, and then again on the flight home. When I landed it was dark, and I couldn’t remember what Clara’s car looked like. God knows how I made it home without collapsing at the wheel, but I eventually did, and fell into bed, exhausted.

I was woken in the morning by the phone ringing. Groggily, I ignored it and let it go to answerphone.

Karen’s voice rang out.

“Sophie Green, you will answer your phone! What’s wrong with your mobile? When you get home, call me.”

And that was it. Karen wouldn’t leave a message that would get her in any trouble.

I looked at the clock and was surprised to see it wasn’t morning at all. It was nearly three in the afternoon.

I pulled myself out of bed and made some coffee, and when I felt I could stand up unaided I made myself stand under the shower until all the travel dirt had gone down the drain.

Dressed, fed and made up, feeling a little more prepared for the world, I heaped loads of food into Tammy’s bowl (thank God she’s a vicious little killer, or I’d worry about her starving) and replayed Karen’s message. Then I called her.

“I’ll need a full report,” she said. “I’ve been contacted by the New York police, who are not happy that you left Manhattan—”

“Bully for them,” I yawned. “If I stayed there any longer I might never have got out.”

“Can you come in now?”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Your point being?”

My point being, my plans for today involved sitting around crying into my cat’s fur, then going to Luke’s house in order to smell his pillow and clothes, staring at pictures of him, and sobbing uncontrollably.

“I have plans.”

“You’re going to see Luke?”

I blinked. I wasn’t that macabre.

“I—she found him, then?”

“Yes. And just in time.”

The world sort of whooshed to a halt around me, as if the earth had stopped spinning and everything was still.

What
?

I forced myself to breathe, and it sounded very, very loud, even over the pounding of blood in my ears.

“Just in time?” I said, and my voice sounded surprisingly normal.

“He woke up this morning. I—well, I was quite worried. There was a subdural haematoma, but they’ve operated and apparently the outlook is good.”

Outside, a tree swayed.

“And I have to say I was surprised at you leaving him, Sophie. I’m not sure if I'm impressed or not.”

I dragged in a wheezy breath. “He’s alive?” I croaked.

“Well, of course he is.” Karen sounded puzzled. “You thought he was dead?

Duh.

“I—I saw him die, she smashed his head. There was blood…”

“He’s alive,” Karen said more gently. “And I think he’d like to see you.”

I needed no second bidding. I was back in Clara’s poor little Nova in a shot and up at the hospital as fast as the one litre engine would allow me. I swear, that car’s only horsepower was supplied by old nags. I rushed along the corridors, getting lost several times, hot and flustered, knowing I looked a wreck. And when I found the ward, I was stopped by a nurse who said I couldn’t go in.

“But I
need
to see him,” I said urgently. “Luke Sharpe. I have to see him.”

“Are you family?”

“His family hate him,” I said dismissively.

“Then I’m afraid—”

“Please, can’t you go in and ask him?”

“It’s really not up to him.”

I sniffed.

“Look, can I take your name,” the nurse asked, not unkindly, fetching a clipboard, “and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Sophie,” I told her. “Sophie Green.”

She stopped, and looked up in surprise.

“What?”

“You’re Sophie?” She put down the clipboard. “Why didn’t you say so? He’s been asking for you.”

“He has?”

“Yes. Even in his sleep. You’re his girlfriend?”

I was too tired to lie. Adrenaline had drained me completely. “Ex.”

“Oh.” She looked surprised. “Not very ex?”

“No. Not very.”

She led me to a private room—lucky Luke—and I stood in the doorway, looking at him for a while.

He looked appalling. I don’t know what kind of shoes Amber had been wearing when she kicked him across the dock, but it looked like they’d broken his ribs. His bare chest was crisscrossed with wires and he was hooked up to a lot of things. One of his hands was wrapped tightly in a splint and the other had a drip feed stuck in it. I winced at the thought of the needle, but not as much as I winced at the sight of Luke’s face.

For a start, his head had been shaved, and there were several rows of stitches running across his scalp, along with the mother of all bruises. His face was bruised too, badly, one side of his jaw and cheekbone almost deformed.

He looked to be sleeping, so I said a very soft, “Hey,” and prepared to leave. But his eyes opened, he looked at me, and one side of his mouth moved in a tiny smile.

He lifted a hand and waved.

“You okay?”

Yes, I know it was really stupid question. Luke’s look said he thought so too.

“How come you’re so talkative?”

He tapped the air above his bruised jaw.

“Is it broken?”

He shook his head and pointed to a pad and pen by his bed. I handed them to him, and he looked at me patiently, waving his splinted hand, until I realised he wanted me to hold the pad so he could write. I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling surreal.

“Not broken,” Luke wrote. “Fucking hurts tho.”

I smiled. “And the rest?”

“Dunno. All hurts. Lost teeth.”

A wound more to his vanity than anywhere else, I guessed.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Y?”

Good question.

“Because I left,” I said. “I should have stayed.”

There was a pause, and I thought Luke was going to tell me to go. But then he wrote, “Did you get them?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh. They’re in custody. Marc and Amber and Lucy.”

“Lucy? Surprised.”

“Me too. She tried to top herself.”

“You stopped her?”

“Docherty did.”

Luke said—or rather, wrote—nothing. The silence went on too long, and eventually I blurted, “I thought you were dead.”

He blinked. “Really?”

I nodded. “I saw her hit you—”

I broke off, because Luke’s pen was tearing through the paper: “It was a
girl
?”

I laughed. “Amber. She played rugby, if that’s any consolation. And she had a spanner.”

He looked sulky under his bruises. Finally he scribbled, “Bloody girls.”

I laughed again, and it felt good. “Hey,” I tried out a Buffy quote, running my fingers along his arm, “you’re all covered in sexy bruises.”

Luke scowled. “Not going 2 dignify with answer.”

I smiled.

“Girl helped me,” he wrote. “Blonde dreadlocks. Who she?”

“Clara. She helped me out a bit too. She even let me nick her car.”

“What car?”

“Nova.”

Luke winced, and I smiled. Then I remembered something, and my smile faded.

“What?” Luke wrote.

“I left you.”

“Yeah, and still mad at you. Even if did only just find out.”

There was that half smile again. It was heartbreaking.

“I left you to do my job,” I said, and I know I sounded heartless for it, but I meant it. And I even hated myself for it, but it was true. “And I’d do it again. I had to stop them. It was more important than…”

Luke dropped the pen and covered my hand with his. There were tears pricking my eyes and I sniffed.

“God, I’m such a bitch.”

He nodded sympathetically, making me laugh, then he picked up his pen and wrote, “Is OK. Did right thing. I’m OK.” Was he really? “Mostly.”

There could be complications, I knew. Massive head trauma was never a good thing. It was only because of his unusually thick skull, I surmised, that he’d survived at all. But then there were complications for me, too. I was still awaiting the outcome of blood tests. Then there was Laurence, probably still in his coma. If he died it would bode even worse for the terrible trio in New York.

Luke was writing more, but he wasn’t looking at me as he did.

“Would have done same.”

“Oh, cheers.”

Half of me wanted to believe I was more important to him than his job. That was the heart part. The head part of me said, of course his job’s the most important thing to him. He doesn’t need to choose. That’s why he’s such a good spy. You’ll never be heartless enough, Sophie.

But didn’t I dump my boyfriend and leave him for dead? Isn’t that heartless?

My head had no answer.

“I should go,” I said, and Luke grabbed my hand again.

“Don’t,” he wrote.

“I have a million things to do. I still have to talk to the police in New York. They don’t believe I’m a spy.”

Luke rolled his eyes. He twirled his pen for a few seconds, thoughtfully, then wrote, “Are we” and stopped, frustrated. But I knew what he meant.

I took a deep breath. “I think we’re over,” I said carefully. “I think neither of us can do our jobs properly if we’re thinking about each other.”

“Will still think about you,” Luke wrote, and there was a note of pleading in his eyes. I nearly cried.

“Bye,” I said, and slipped out before I said anything I didn’t mean.

I went to the office and made out a report, or half a dozen. I spoke to fast-tempered NY cops on the phone. I called Clara and arranged to return her car. The school was on hiatus now that parents and teachers had been informed of the trio in America.

And then I went home, feeling lost, nothing to do and no one to do it with. I thought about going up to Angel’s to see how Xander was getting on, but I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the idea.

I couldn’t even really be bothered to watch
Buffy
.

So I fed Tammy and cleansed my poor grubby face of all the New York dirt my shower didn’t seem able to clear, and I massaged my feet and I rubbed arnica into my bruises.

And then, for want of anything better to do, I went to bed.

It was late when the knock came. A sure, hard knock. Not someone who was going anywhere without me answering.

I tried to peek out of my bedroom window but it was raining and dark, and I could see nothing. So I got my gun and rearranged my pyjamas into something more respectable, and I went to answer my door.

Docherty stood there, tall and dark, his eyes all over me.

“You’re back,” I said, stupidly.

“I am.”

His shirt was plastered to his body. His excellent body.

“You’re wet,” I stood back to let him in, wondering when my brain had gone on strike.

“I’m that, too.”

We stood and looked at each other for a while. My gun was loose in my hand and my heart was thumping.

“Did you want something?” I asked, knowing the answer.

Docherty nodded, and moved closer, and cupped my face.

“I came to get my apology.”

Oh, boy.