Seven Grams of Lead (16 page)

“Mr. Kentucky?” O’Clair asked.

“Yes, sir,” the man said. Deep, smoky voice. He reached for the plastic cups.

O’Clair handed them over. The man regarded the purple sand with a twisted smile.

O’Clair pleaded. “They’re in there, you have to believe me.”

Mr. Kentucky’s matter-of-fact nod offered some comfort. “They said you’d probably keep the things in something funky like this.”

He poured the play sand into a sieve he had at the ready. The purple grains fell to the floor, some bouncing away, the rest coating his shoe tops. He studied the devices through the binocular lenses.

Nodding his satisfaction, he snapped up a cell phone and muttered into the mouthpiece. “Birds in hand, Alpha.”

“Roger that,” came the voice like Sarah’s through the receiver.

“So my son’s okay?” O’Clair begged.

“He will be.” Mr. Kentucky handed him a clipboard with a sheaf of shipping forms. “I’ve just gotta get your signature first.”

O’Clair took it reflexively. “Why?”

“Diversion.” The man leveled a pistol that had been concealed by the clipboard.

Gaping at the silenced barrel, O’Clair backed toward the door. As he reached for the handle, the gun coughed. Pain flared in O’Clair’s forehead and—

Thornton paced the
sleek floor of the Faraday tent, his anticipation dissolving into misgiving in the fifteen minutes after O’Clair’s departure. Five minutes more and a sticky trepidation coated him. Hearing men walking out in the corridor, louder as they drew closer, he stopped pacing. He recognized the Gujarati-accented voice of the lobby guard, saying, “What good can the paramedics do for him now?”

“We need to have official confirmation of death,” said the guard’s companion, a man with a gravelly voice lacking any distinct accent. His sturdy step was accompanied by a distinct medley of jangles and squeaks—a combination, Thornton suspected, of metal handcuffs, flashlight, thick gun belt, holstered standard-issue Glock 17, ammo pouches, a canister of pepper spray,
and a baton: New York City cops were walking armories. “The more important thing now is securing the crime scene—physical evidence that could convict the murderer can be rendered useless if a single unauthorized person gets in.”

“Poor Dr. O’Clair, he had a little boy, just seven years old.”

Anguish speared Thornton. He needed to ignore it, he knew, and to entirely deactivate his emotions. Turning to Mallery, he shot a finger to his lips.

Unnecessarily. She’d heard the conversation too. Shock pinned her to her stool, it seemed, leaving her a shade paler than usual.

“The other thing is, it didn’t happen very long ago, so the shooter may still be on the premises,” said the policeman in the hall. He paused when his radio broadcasted a transmission from a dispatcher requesting that a unit in the vicinity of Broadway and 93rd respond to a 10-31. The policeman continued, “I’ll want to talk to a Mr. Russell Thornton and a Ms. Beryl Mallery.”

Thornton could think of no reason that a policeman would have their last names. No good reason. Mallery’s arched brow said she was on the same wavelength.

“These people were the two visitors to Dr. O’Clair?” the guard asked, as he and the cop strode past the lab in the direction of the elevator.

The other man lowered his voice. “Caucasian male and female in their thirties?”

“Yes, yes, they arrived in the lobby perhaps an hour ago, but they seemed so … You do not suspect them in this, do you, Officer?”

“Not as yet. Do you know where I can find them?”

“Possibly Dr. O’Clair admitted them to a laboratory.”

“Which laboratory?”

“Sorry, I do not know.”

“You got a building passkey?”

“Not a passkey, but …” The security guard shuffled what sounded like a stack of plastic key cards.

“Thanks. Now, can you go back down to the lobby to admit the backup team?”

“Certainly, Officer Logan.”

The elevator tolled its arrival. Thornton heard the guard board and the doors clap shut, leaving behind Logan, who obviously was not a police officer, Thornton thought. Thornton listened to the man unlock and open a door, then let it fall shut.

“Searching for us?” Mallery mouthed.

Thornton nodded. He drew his reporter’s pad from his back pocket to jot down the plan he had in mind, until remembering he could speak freely. Or at least whisper. As he tiptoed to Mallery, another door opened, then closed. Any key card now and Logan—probably not really named Logan either—would find them.

Thornton whispered the first half of his plan to Mallery. Footsteps outside the laboratory door brought an untimely end to their plotting.

“Just follow my lead,” Thornton said, as if everything would be fine. In fact, he’d yet to fully formulate the other half of the plan.

He pushed open the tent flap. She exited ahead of him, without a sound, turning right and then right again around the corner of the Faraday tent, into the two-foot-wide gap between it and the inner wall. Another right turn and she disappeared from his view into the space between the tent and the building wall that faced uptown.

Thornton was halfway down the gap between the tent and the inner wall when the door popped open; he froze in midstride next to a tall wooden bookcase. Logan clanked through the doorway, entering the tent. The heavy door thudded shut behind him.

When the echo dimmed, he called out, “Hello?”

Thornton said nothing. There was no sound of Mallery, in hiding behind the tent.

“Mr. Thornton? Ms. Mallery?”

Over the pounding pulse in his temples, Thornton heard only the buzz from the fluorescent tubes overhead and the whistling of air through the heat register.

“NYPD. Just need to ask you folks a couple quick questions is all.”

Thornton struggled to remain still. In their haste to get out of the tent, he realized, they had left their coats on the backs of the stools.

“Please come out where I can see you,” Logan said.

Thornton improvised, reaching across the bookcase
for the pair of ring binders whose spines extended from the edge of the top shelf. A gentle nudge sent them toppling from the bookcase, dimpling the tent wall before thumping against the floor, one after the other, motion and sounds that might be mistaken for a man dropping to his knees.

Logan responded with gunshots that sounded like thunder in the confined chamber. Hands held tight over his ears, Thornton watched nine holes appear in rapid succession in the tent wall by the ring binders’ landing spot. The laboratory wall became a haze of plaster dust. The two uppermost bullet holes in the tent combined to form a slit through which Thornton glimpsed Logan, a clean-cut, sinewy young man, kneeling in a practiced firing position. He wore a navy blue eight-point police cap with shiny black visor and a black nylon patrolman’s jacket. His blue turtleneck collar was embroidered with gold letters, NYPD. A distinctive black SSE5000 radio—custom-made for the New York Police Department by Motorola—clung to his belt. Like his navy blue whipcord trousers and black oxford shoes, every element in the uniform looked authentic. Except it was brand-new, all of it. Meaning Logan could be a member of New York’s Finest who’d recently been to the outfitters, or he was a killer in an NYPD costume procured in a haste that precluded a few washer and dryer cycles. Whoever he was, he exited the shot-up tent and, batting his way through a cloud of plaster dust, rounded the corner into the gap where Thornton stood.

Thornton backed up, flattening himself against the wall on the side of the bookcase facing away from Logan. He held his breath rather than risk inhaling and coughing the plaster dust. When he sensed that Logan was within reach, Thornton sprang, swinging the syringe sidearm. He drove the needle through the purported cop’s pants and into his thigh, then hammered the red plunger, hopefully sending the drug flowing into the femoral artery, the main supply line of blood to the lower leg.

Surprised, Logan leaped backward. Seeing the plastic tube stuck in his quadriceps, he smirked and said, “Nice try.”

O’Clair had said that the anesthetic acted instantly, but he was an electrophysiologist, not an anesthesiologist. And injecting the femoral artery had been Thornton’s idea. Maybe a shoulder or biceps would have been better. Regardless, Logan was still standing, leveling a stout Glock 17 still containing as many as six bullets.

“You’re dead,” he said to Thornton.

“In point of fact, you are, or will be shortly,” came Mallery’s voice from behind the tent. “Without the antidote.”

Keeping the gun locked on Thornton, Logan looked in her direction. “Antidote?”

“If you want it, you need to tell us who sent you,” she said.

As Logan looked in her direction, Thornton inched a hand toward the shelves, planning to capitalize
on her diversion by flinging a book at Logan’s face, then rushing him to take him down.

Logan glanced back at him, his eyes narrowing. “Is this some kind of joke or—?” He fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes, out cold before his body landed.

“A stall tactic, actually,” Thornton said. To Mallery, he added, “And a good one.”

Peeking around the corner of the tent, she shook her head. “Beginner’s luck.”

Thornton stepped toward the fallen man with the intent of dislodging the Glock. But he heard two hurried sets of footsteps in the hallway, accompanied by now-familiar sets of squeaks and clanks. The backup unit. Thornton reversed course.

“We need to get out of here,” he whispered, rounding the corner to the back of the tent. Stepping past Mallery, he unfastened the latch securing the lower window sash.

She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “This is the fourth floor.”

“There’s no other way out.” Balancing expediency and stealth, he raised the heavy window. The influx of cold air numbed him. “Out alive, that is.”

Something impacted the door to the lab with a crunch of splintered wood. A battering ram, Thornton guessed.

Climbing through the window, he looked over his shoulder to find Mallery directly behind him, her look of resignation hardening into one of resolve.

He stepped out onto a steel ledge extending from
the base of the window by just four or five inches. Clinging to the building’s icy metal skin, he rotated his feet so that his toes pointed away from each other. Mallery lowered herself onto the ledge beside him, tentatively, until confident it would support both of them.

Thornton pressed the window shut, hoping to add a few seconds before the backup team considered that he and Mallery had resorted to such a foolish escape route. Through the glass he heard the door to the lab fly inward. The illuminated Exit sign in the hallway cast shadows of the men hurrying into the lab.

Ducking out of their sight, Thornton told Mallery, “Two of them.”

“Better than eight.”

The bitter air caused her to tremble but added a healthy pink to her face. Until she looked down. “Shit,” she said.

Thornton shared her assessment. “We can do this,” he said, clasping her forearm. He led her toward the next window, inches at a time. Then he reconsidered. “I’m not so sure what the point is, actually. Smash through the next window so we can be sitting ducks in that lab instead?”

Mallery nodded. “But what choice is there?”

Frosty wind sliced through the gaps between the buttons on Thornton’s shirtfront as he studied the two-lane 120th Street, the sidewalks populated by a dozen or so pedestrians, none appearing to notice the
man and woman up on the ledge. A taxi sped down the mostly deserted street. Parked parallel to the sidewalk directly below was a brown UPS delivery truck. The boxy truck’s translucent white roof, meant to admit light to the cargo area, looked to be constructed of plastic malleable enough to provide some give. But even if they could jump onto it and keep themselves from bouncing to the street, the initial impact would seriously damage them—best-case.

As if reading Thornton’s mind, Mallery said, “Dropping forty feet means hitting the truck at thirty-four miles per hour.”

“Yeah, let’s not do that.” A rank gust of wind shifted his focus to an open boxcar-size dumpster on the sidewalk below, brimming with black plastic bags full of garbage. Pointing, he said, “Smells like the other day’s manicotti, which would be a lot better to land on than, say, bottles and cans.”

Mallery indicated a trio of young women descending the steps from Columbia Teacher’s College, directly across 120th Street. “How about we call to them, and they get the real police?”

The women turned toward Broadway. In seconds, they would be gone. Leaving no one else in sight.

Thornton said, “Sometime in the next month, if we’re lucky, homicide detectives would determine that the lobby guard was duped by men impersonating cops who had long since shot us and gotten away.”

From inside the lab came an assortment of crashes,
the Faraday tent being torn down. The members of the backup team made their way closer to the window. Mallery stared at the trash bags below, her reluctance appearing to yield to a grim acceptance.

Thornton pressed his palms against the building and tensed his knees in preparation to spring off, all the while hoping some turn of events would prevent the need to do it.

“It’s important to try and land feet first, then roll so that you absorb the impact with your shoulder,” he said.

“How do you know this?”

“News story.” Best to keep the rest of the details to himself, he thought. The story’s subject, an MTA electrical worker, had jumped a similar distance from an unstable scaffold to a patch of grass at the edge of Union Square. He didn’t roll, consequently breaking both legs, his jaw, his nose, and an orbital socket. “I’ll go first.”

His reasoning, that he wanted to make sure the trash bags would give sufficiently, was curtailed by a hoarse male voice from within the lab: “They couldn’t have gone out the window, could they?”

“They might’ve,” said the other man. “Text the New York COS and get some more warm bodies up here.”

Although the dumpster was almost as big as a boxcar, the height made it look like a shoebox to Thornton. Not the time to become acrophobic, he thought.