Speak of the Devil (18 page)

“Stop here!”

Jigs hit the brakes as I was shouldering open the door. I tumbled out and had to move my legs double-time to keep from falling. I crossed the lawn of the apartment building and headed for the fence that bordered the property. Beyond the fence, I could see a figure standing under the light at the convent’s front door.

I reached the fence still unseen. I climbed over it as quietly as I could and hit the ground in a crouch. The figure at the door still hadn’t seen me. He was about a hundred feet away. I yanked out my gun and sprang out of the crouch. I thought about calling out. I thought about taking aim at his knees. I was running at full speed when the door opened and the figure stepped forward and disappeared inside. The door closed. He was gone. I slid to a halt on a pile of damp leaves. I surfed them a good six feet.

I MADE MY WAY ALONG THE SIDE OF THE BUILDING. THE GROUNDFLOOR windows were dark and, in any case, were set too high to be of any help. Near the back of the building was a smaller window that was giving off a flat, harsh light. I spotted a copper kettle hanging from a wooden rack. Rounding the corner, I froze. A shadowy figure was at the back door, dropping a bulging black plastic bag into a garbage can.

I hissed, “Sister!”

“Oh!”

A wedge of light shone through the partially open door. I hated to do it, but I stepped into the light so she could see my gun.

“Oh!”

“I’m with the police,” I hissed. “I’m sorry to scare you. I need to get inside. Quietly.”

The woman nodded. I stepped into the kitchen and she followed. She was in a blue and white habit. She was olive-skinned, with gentle Asian features, and looked hardly old enough to vote. Cheeks like a chipmunk’s. Her eyes were wide, staring at my gun as she sidled up next to a wooden stool.

“I need to know where the prioress would greet visitors,” I said.

Her voice was barley above a whisper. “In the Great Room.”

“How do I get there?”

She pointed at a door. “You go through the dining room. The Great Room is just past it, on the left.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to stay here,” I said. “How many other people are in the building?”

“We have fourteen residents.”

I indicated the wooden stool. “Sit.”

She scurried onto the stool like her life depended on it.

I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH THE LONG DINING ROOM WHEN MY CELL phone went off. I yanked it from my pocket. I wanted to smack it silly. It was Tommy Carroll.

“Where the hell are you?” he snapped.

I answered in a whisper. “I’m inside the convent.”

“What?”

“The convent. I’m inside.”

“What’s happening?”

“The prioress is with a visitor. I’m on my way to eavesdrop.”

“He’s
there
?”

“Somebody’s here.” The long rough wood table where the nuns ate looked like something from the Cloisters, which is to say, from around the twelfth century. A large candle was burning in an iron holder in the middle of the table. Its flame was casting fidgety shadows on the walls. I asked Carroll, “Where are you now?”

“I’m a block away from the convent.”

“Are you alone?”

“There’s a cruiser here with me. I’ve got a uniformed. We’re coming in.”

“No. Just hold on. Send the cruiser down to the far end of the block. You stay where you are. He’s essentially trapped. You keep your cell phone clear, and I’ll call you if he’s coming out.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Just plug up the street, Tommy.”

“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do.”

“If you want a full-scale assault on a nunnery, go right ahead. I should warn you, the prioress has already made noises about calling in the media.”

“Where’s Dugan?”

“He’s out there. Ford Fairlane.”

“Where’s the money?”

“With Jigs.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I’m hanging up. I’ll call you back. Five minutes tops.”

I set the phone to vibrate and made my way to the dining room door, my gun at the ready. I moved out of the dining room and into a hallway. At the end of the hallway was the front door. From the room to my left, I could hear talking. I edged forward. The voice doing all the talking was a female’s. Sister Anne.

“. . . to thank you for coming. If you’d sit tight while I give our friend a call . . .”

A shadow passed over the buttery light at the same instant that I spotted a telephone sitting on a small table only a few feet from where I was standing. A second later, a woman stepped into the hallway. She spotted me and let out a cry. “Who are you?”

I ran past her into the room. A man with stringy hair and a patchy beard was already rising to his feet.

“Don’t move!”

But move he did. He darted to his left and out of the room. I turned and sprinted back into the hall with the idea of drawing on him there. But I hadn’t factored in the woman. As I ran from the room, we collided. She went down with a high soprano yelp. At the end of the hallway, the man was yanking open the front door.

“Stop!”

I took aim, but he was already out the door. I jumped over the woman and ran for the door.

He was angling across the grass toward the street. I took off. A fast-moving car braked to a halt in front of the convent, and the driver’s door flew open. The guy swerved and changed direction, running toward the rear of the convent. Tommy Carroll lumbered from the car. His gun was out. I saw a small flash; the shot sounded a half-second later. His bullet clanged off the metal fence.

Carroll grumbled, “Son of a
bitch
.”

Our prey dashed into the darkness behind the convent. I followed some fifty feet behind, but his fuel was fear, which is the swiftest. As I raced past the rear kitchen door, I spotted someone coming around the far corner of the building. It was Jigs. He angled into the darkness behind the convent. An instant later, I heard a
thud
, followed by what sounded like a rattling of chains. Then I heard Jigs’s voice, the low, deadly version.

“You can move, brother. Or you can live. Those are your choices.”

Then I heard the cocking of his pistol.

THE GUY WAS ON THE GROUND, ON HIS BACK. ONE OF HIS LEGS WAS slung over a swing-set seat, the chain curled around his foot. Jigs was next to him, on one knee. The barrel of his gun was pressed right where the man’s eyebrows met. Amazingly, Jigs was smoking a cigarette. He must have been running with the thing dangling from his lips. Jigs looked up at me, squinting through the smoke.

“What say, Fritz? Should he stay or should he go?”

In the faint moonlight, the man’s complexion already looked like that of a corpse. His eyes were wide in pure panic. They were the only part of him that dared move. Before I could answer, Tommy Carroll ran up to us. He stopped short. He hadn’t heard Jigs’s question, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. He glanced at me, raising an eyebrow.

“He’s unarmed,” I said.

Carroll was fighting to catch his breath. “That can be fixed.”

“Like with Diaz?”

I didn’t even see the fist. It might have been a Jimmy Reese special.
Pop
! My jaw took the jolt. A flash of light split my vision and I backpedaled several steps to keep my balance. I hit one of the swing-set poles and grabbed hold of it. The chains danced.

“Let him up,” I said to Jigs.

Another figure had appeared from the front of the building. It was a policeman. I recognized him.

“What’s up here?”

Carroll answered, “It’s fine. Get back to your car. Just wait there.”

Officer Leonard Cox retreated. Not before he and I had traded a look. Not a terribly chummy one. I ran a sleeve across my mouth. A little blood. “Cox, huh? It’s nice to know we’ve got a bona fide hero so close.”

“Shut up,” Carroll snarled.

Jigs tossed his cigarette aside. He removed his pistol from the terrified guy’s head and slipped it into his belt. He grabbed hold of the guy’s collar. “Get your feet under you, mate.” With a swift yank, he lifted him from the ground. He reached into the man’s pants pocket and pulled out a wad of twenties. Holding him as if he might fall over otherwise, Jigs ran a quick check over the rest of him.

“He’s clean.”

Tommy Carroll stepped forward and showed that he had more than one punch in him. He landed this one right in the guy’s abdomen. This time the guy really would have fallen if Jigs hadn’t been holding him.

I started, “Tommy—”

A light came on, casting the scene in harsh yellow. We all froze.

“Mr. Malone?”

Standing at the rear door was the woman I had tumbled into in the hallway. Next to her stood Sister Mary Ryan. The young nun was there, too, along with three other nuns, each in blue and white habits. The woman I had tumbled into was standing with her arms crossed.

We were outnumbered.

HIS NAME WAS GARY HARVEY. HE HAD RECENTLY BEEN FIRED FROM his job doing road maintenance for the city. It’s not easy to fire a city worker, but apparently Harvey had managed to make it happen. To begin with, he chewed drugs like they were candy; we found a baggie on him with an impressive assortment. Harvey didn’t even seem to know what the different pills and capsules were, nor did he seem to care. He looked at the baggie as if it were his cherished child.

Harvey was not our man. Twice in one day, our man had sent a messenger: first the nun, now this guy Harvey, who knew nothing. Harvey told us he’d been approached in a bar near Yankee Stadium by a man he could describe only as “quiet.” Carroll asked him what he meant by that.

“Quiet,” Harvey repeated. “Spoke in this real soft voice. Almost like a whisper. You could barely see his lips move.”

I pressed. “But what did he
look
like? White? Black? Hispanic?”

“Puerto Rican, I guess,” Harvey said. “It’s dark in the bar, you know? I wasn’t, like, staring at him.”

Carroll looked up beseechingly at the ceiling. “Jesus Christ.” Sister Anne made a face.

Harvey said that after a few drinks, the “quiet” man asked if he wanted to make a little money. He had a package he wanted delivered. He would pay Harvey two hundred dollars to deliver it to an address in Riverdale. Harvey told us that he had negotiated for taxi fare above and beyond the two hundred. He seemed proud of this fact. His instructions were to not simply leave the package at the door but to deliver it personally. He was told that he would be invited inside.

“He told me to ask for a glass of wine,” Harvey said.

Indeed, a half-empty glass of red wine sat on the table next to the chair where Harvey had been sitting when I’d rousted him from the room.

Tommy Carroll drilled him with several dozen questions about the quiet man. Had Harvey ever seen him before? Was there anything distinctive about the clothes he was wearing? Harvey told us that the man wore a wool watch cap. Dark blue. Or black. Maybe dark green. He said he was wearing aviator sunglasses.

“What about his hair?” Carroll asked. “Did it stick out from the cap? Long? Short? Kinky? Give us something, goddammit.”

Harvey couldn’t remember if any of the guy’s hair had poked out from under the watch cap or, if so, anything particular about it.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It could have been a wig. Face it, Tommy, the guy was invisible.”

Carroll agreed. He was also disgusted. He glared at Harvey, who was glaring at the half-finished glass of red wine. “This scum knows nothing.” Carroll called Leonard Cox inside. Cox and I exchanged another cool look. Carroll instructed Cox to take Harvey back to the bar where he had encountered the guy in the watch cap. “Ask around. Put the jitters in the owner. Lean on the bartender. You know the routine. See if there’s anyone who can give us anything useful.”

Harvey went off with Cox. Carroll turned to Sister Anne, who had been sitting in an upholstered chair at the far end of the room. “I’d like to see that package, Sister.”

Sister Anne had already opened the shoe-box-sized package. It hadn’t exploded. That was the good news. Inside the box was a smaller box. It was addressed simply: ML. Carroll looked at me and nodded. Martin Leavitt.

“We need to take this with us,” Carroll announced. “We’ve got to get the crime lab on it.”

Sister Anne narrowed her eyes, but she nodded. “I understand.”

Carroll cleared his throat. “We’re in the middle of an ongoing investigation here. I’m sorry I can’t give you the details at this point, but I’m going to ask for your cooperation in keeping all this to yourselves for the time being.”

Outside, he muttered, “I want to see what the hell this is.”

“Do you want my guess? It’s nothing that’s going to make you happy,” I said. “This guy is all about pulling our chain. This is all one big sick joke to him.”

Jigs offered, “Maybe it’s a hand buzzer.”

We took the package to Carroll’s car. He set it on the hood and opened it.

Jigs was wrong. It wasn’t a hand buzzer.

I was right. It didn’t make Tommy Carroll happy.

I FLIPPED OFF MY CELL PHONE AND SET IT DOWN ON THE TABLE NEXT to my plate.

“Confirmed. The prints are Philip Byron’s.”

Margo’s chin was in her hand. Her other hand was holding her fork. She was letting the tines drop onto her bacon like a slow-motion jackhammer. Her appetite was gone.

“Everyone already knew,” she said.

“They did. Now it’s official.”

“Horrible.” She let the fork drop again. “Incredibly horrible.”

She was right.

It was an index finger and a pinky. Severed. Bound together by coarse brown twine into the shape of a cross. In case there was any mistake about the intended shape, the nail of the index finger had been scrawled on: a crude happy face in red ink. That’s what had been in the package that Gary Harvey had delivered to the Convent of the Holy Order of the Sisters of Good Shepherd. Even Jigs Dugan had gotten a chill.

No note. No new demands. No new hoops to jump through. Everyone was waiting. It would come.

Something
would come.