Death Dance (55 page)

"Are you crazy?" she yelled at Kehoe. "What's wrong with you?"

"Stop the damn thing!" he said, stepping away as the seat of
the swing jerked up and down while Mona tried to unravel herself.

She came to a stop, threw her head back, and started laughing.
"You're nervous, aren't you? You're as goddamn nervous as I am, aren't
you?"

I watched as she jumped off and walked over to Kehoe. I
couldn't hear what they were saying to each other but I could see that
they were arguing, which couldn't be good for any of us.

I was too wired to close my eyes, even though I was aching
with exhaustion and fear. I looked over at Chet Dobbis, who had hung
his head, slumped in his seat, and started crying—turning his
face away from me when he caught me watching him. With every ounce of
whatever strength I had reserved, I twisted and turned my wrists,
pulling the silken strips as far apart as I could.

Kehoe and Mona had gone back to sitting against the headboard
of the bed, fidgeting and whispering to each other, until it must have
been after two o'clock in the morning. I looked over when I saw her
stand up and start to approach, probably on a command from Kehoe to
check on Dobbis and me. I stopped wriggling and held my hands in place
behind me.

My heart began racing faster as I saw that Mona was holding
the revolver.

"You don't need that with me," I said. "I'm too scared to make
trouble."

"You've caused more than enough for me and Ross already. Look
what you've started," she said, waving her hand with the revolver over
her head. "It's your fault we're trapped in here."

I needed to calm her down as badly as I wanted to calm myself.
I had no idea whether Mona Berk had ever held a gun before and I was
even more frightened to think we were in the hands of an amateur.

"Ross seems to know what he wants to do," I said, hoping she
was annoyed enough to tell me what was in store.

"Maybe he did before he started drinking," Mona said, looking
over at him to see whether he was paying attention to her. He had
gotten up to stretch and splash water on his face from the wet bar
across the room. "I should never have waited here for him. I should
have left all this dirty work up to him to get done."

"So how come you trusted Ross when you first met him?" I asked
tentatively. Maybe I could talk her down. Maybe I could convince her
that she had so much more to live for than he did. "I mean, wasn't he
working for your uncle?"

"Like that would have mattered to me? Like I thought anybody
in the world would have had an allegiance to Joe Berk for longer than
the first paycheck?" Mona asked me. "You know what Joe did to me? You
people who think he didn't deserve to die a miserable death, you ought
to know this. He paid Ross to break into my old
apartment—even my office—to hook up some of his
surveillance cameras so the mean old prick could know what I was up to.
Not naked, not in the bedroom. Joe just needed to know who I was
hanging out with, who I was seeing and what I was doing. So he'd have a
reason to fuck me out of my inheritance. Any reason. That's how I met
Ross."

She was seething now at the thought of the old family history
and I continued to try to shake off the chill as I shivered in the face
of her rage.

"What do you mean?" My wrists ached and I could feel the blood
accumulating above them as I stopped moving my fingers.

"Ross felt bad for me. Listened to Uncle Joe talk all the time
about how he was going to screw me out of my share of the money. Came
to me and told me what was going on, that he felt guilty about being
the one to set up the works—you know, the electrical stuff.
Told me what Joe was doing to me and to Briggs, too."

So Ross Kehoe double-crossed Joe Berk. And did it with the
perfect enemy to make it a win-win situation for himself. Could Mona
really think Ross was in love with her, and could she possibly believe
he wouldn't cross her, too, when the right time came? His contempt for
the Berks was palpable.

"I could have killed the old bastard myself. This was all I
needed," she said, patting the gun barrel with her left hand.

I hated guns. I'd been around them a lot in all the time I'd
worked in the office and had friends in the NYPD, but I'd never wanted
to use them. I watched Mona's hands carefully, hoping to figure out if
she was familiar with this one. I tried to tell if she knew it was
loaded or not, whether it had a safety, and how to use it. If she was
into guns, then I'd still be at a great disadvantage, even if I could
finish loosening my bonds to try to take her on.

I vowed to myself to start going to the range to learn to
shoot the very next time Mike or Mercer had to be there, if I got out
of this alive.

"Why did Ross break into my building last night?" I asked her,
trying to distract her from the weapon she was playing with so
casually. "Why was he coming after me?"

Mona Berk didn't answer.

"Really, I had no idea he'd done anything wrong. I—I
still don't know why he's doing this now," I said. I could kick myself
for not figuring it out earlier, but I hadn't.

"Rinaldo."

"Rinaldo Vicci?"

"Yeah. He called me this weekend," Mona said. "He thought he'd
made a mistake while he was talking to you."

"Me? He never said anything to me." A sense of desperation had
crept into my voice. It was way too late to convince her I didn't know
anything bad about Kehoe until the confrontation just a few hours
earlier. Now I couldn't look at him and think of him as anything else
except a killer.

She glared at me. "Rinaldo knew that Ross had told the police
he'd never met Talya. That he didn't know her. But Rinaldo said he was
alone with you at the Met the other day. He said he told you that he
had seen Ross in Talya's dressing room."

"No, no. Vicci never told me he saw them," I said, stammering
a denial.

"Well, he thought he had told you too much about Talya and
Ross," Mona said, dismissively. "Rinaldo was just trying to suck up to
me, like he was doing me a favor by covering up that connection. But
when I told Ross about the conversation, it made him crazy."

"Why? I just don't understand that."

"Ross figured he was a few steps ahead of the cops. He didn't
think they were onto him at all. It was you he was worried about after
Rinaldo made that slip."

"But—"

We both turned our heads toward the staircase because we were
reacting to the very same noise. It was a low whirring sound at first,
and if Mona hadn't looked that way, too, I wouldn't have been certain
that it wasn't just a tingling in my ears, the result of my exhaustion.

But Mona heard it and seemed frozen in place.

I started to get up on my feet and she pushed at me, screaming
Kehoe's name.

The noise was steady now and it was coming from the heavy
metal door at the bottom of the stairs.

"I told you not to move, dammit," Mona said, slapping me
across the face with her left hand. Her shouts scared the whimpering
Chet Dobbis, who rolled onto the floor and tried to crawl behind his
chair.

Kehoe was back at her side within seconds. "What? What
the—?"

"It's the door," Mona yelled. "What's happening?"

I strained at the bonds, certain that the silk ribbons were
shredding into strips and that I could slip my hands out now.

Kehoe reached for the gun and Mona threw her right arm back in
the air, wildly discharging a bullet.

"You lied to me!" she shouted at her lover. "You told me no
one could find us here."

My eyes flashed between the staircase and the gun in her hand.
I could reach the bottom of the steps in seconds, but she and
Kehoe— and the revolver—would get to me before
anyone could get the door to open.

Whoever was on the other side of that door—theater
workers who'd figured out this might be a place to explore, or better
yet, the police—would be in greater danger if I drew the
gunfire in their direction. On the other hand, I had no idea how they
would be armed and how I could protect myself, Chet Dobbis, and
them—if I didn't alert them to the fact that our captors had
a gun.

Mona had gone into a panic, confirming my realization that she
and Kehoe were not expecting any allies to come to their aid. I watched
as she went running away from the door—from the approaching
enemy—and farther into the large domed room. Kehoe ran after
her, trying to overtake her so he could get his weapon back.

I used my right fingers to yank on the binds one last time,
releasing my left hand and then freeing both. My chances of being
killed were just as good if I didn't make a dash to get out, once Mona
and Ross stopped fighting with each other for the gun.

As fast as I could move, I got to my feet and ran down the
steps to the door. I threw myself against it and pounded on it with my
fists. Perhaps it was my imagination, but there seemed to be the
slightest of cracks where the solid metal panel slid into the wall. I
banged again and again, until Mona Berk screamed my name from across
the room and fired a shot that glanced off the wall next to my head.

I turned to look and saw Kehoe struggling with her to grab the
gun. She was kicking at him but calling out at me. "You'll get us all
killed, you bitch," Mona yelled. I dropped to the floor as she let go
with another round.

"How could you trust someone who met you in the middle of a
double-cross?" I shouted at her. "It's not you he's after, it's the
Berk fortune."

"You keep your fucking mouth shut," Kehoe said to me. Then he
turned his attention back to Mona, who had run to the far side of the
bed. "Give it to me, babe. I can finish them off and still get us out
of here."

I was crawling up the stairs on my stomach, ready to make a
run for the darker side of the cavernous room. I could see Mona
pointing the gun right at Kehoe's chest and I inhaled, ready to give
her some more emotional ammunition.

"You must have made a deal with Briggs," I called out to her,
crouching at the top of the stairs. "The kid drops the the lawsuit
against his father that you two started, in order to get back in Joe's
good graces. Then you make a deal with him to get your share of
everything he stands to inherit, promising to keep him up to his
eyeballs in cocaine and showgirls. But you had to kill Joe to make it
work. You two had to kill Joe before he disinherited Briggs for some
other indiscretion."

"There aren't enough rounds left for you to fuck with this,"
Kehoe said to Mona Berk. "Give it back to me."

"He's going to kill you, too, Mona. As soon as he's got your
money."

"Shut up," she screamed at me frantically. "I told you to shut
up."

"I can shut her up, babe. I want the gun," Kehoe said.

"It doesn't matter now, Ross," I said. "It doesn't matter
unless you can boost yourself up and out of that skylight on your red
velvet swing. Don't let him fool you again, Mona."

"They can't drill through that door. It's impossible. They'd
never be able to get the kind of equipment they'd need to do it up
here," Kehoe said to her as she continued to back away.

"They're not drilling. They're opening the door," I said.

He turned from her and looked down the staircase.

"Jaws of life, Ross." The sweetest sound I'd ever heard.

The hydraulic rescue equipment used by police and military
under the most dire of circumstances—for excavating bodies
from aircraft and automobile accidents, building collapses, military
disasters—and occasionally for getting lucky and extricating
live ones from the jaws of death. I had seen the Emergency Services
Unit use it in the most extreme and dire circumstances, and I knew that
it could get the job done here this morning.

Mona Berk held the gun with both hands and pointed it at me.
"Stand still. I've got nothing to lose if I shoot you now. You're the
reason we're stuck in here, dammit."

The flickering neon shining in from the cityscape above the
skylight made the jerky movements of Mona Berk and Ross Kehoe appear
like they were caught in the rays of a strobe. I watched from my squat
as he lunged at her to get the gun.

Again, Mona screamed as he punched her jaw and the gun fired,
by accident more than design.

The bullet must have hit something close to Chet Dobbis, who
had tried to flatten himself on the floor. I heard him gasp and saw him
struggling to get to his knees, his hands still tied behind his back.

I knew I'd be safer in one of the dark recesses of the domed
ceiling, but it would leave Dobbis exposed to the feuding killers.

As he reached behind himself to the chair he'd been sitting on
to straighten himself up against it, Mona Berk turned and saw him as
clearly as I did in a beam of light that streamed in from overhead.

"Stop moving around, you idiot!" I heard her call to Dobbis as
she aimed the gun and discharged another round.

This time he yelled out in pain. He had only been upright for
seconds, but Mona had found her mark. Dobbis had been hit.

I pushed up and ran toward him. "Get away from me," he yelled.

There was blood coming from his right shoulder and I grabbed
hold of his left elbow to start dragging him with me away from the
wildly frantic Mona Berk. I was trying to keep count of the bullets
that had been spent, assuming the revolver held six and not knowing how
many more Kehoe had in his pocket.

"Give it up," Kehoe said, trying to get his gun away from his
out-of-control cohort. "I won't miss."

"We're never going to get out of here, you damn liar," Mona
said, refocusing her rage on her partner. "You're going to get us both
killed."

I saw the flash of the gun firing and again the sound of the
blast echoing within the domed room. Another shot followed immediately
and I saw Ross Kehoe fall backward from the impact and heard the crack
of his skull against the surface of the floor.