The Nicholas Linnear Novels (60 page)

“Let me go in alone.”

“You’re nuts.” He leveled a finger. “Let me tell you something, Nick. This is a police operation. You know what that means? I could be suspended just for taking you along. And you want me to let you go after him on your own? The commissioner would publicly string up any part of me left intact after Finnigan, my captain, had gotten through. Uh uh. You’ll just have to be content with the way it is now.”

“You and me then.”

“No dice. That would mean I’d have to leave you to cover the rear. Can’t do it.”

“There’s going to be trouble, then.”

“Not if we contain him in Ah Ma’s. That’s what we’ve got to do.”

What worried him most in those last few moments as they had climbed the steps to Ah Ma’s was the tactical disadvantage they were under. True, the element of surprise was in their favor, but only the man up in that suite knew the layout of the place, including the number of exits. Nicholas did not like any part of it.

On the first landing, he stopped Croaker, said, “You know, if we don’t get him within the first few seconds, we’ve had it.”

“Just concentrate on getting the bastard,” Croaker had said and started up to Ah Ma’s door.

Crouching in the dim hallway, Croaker had his .38 in one hand, the warrant in the other. That piece of paper had not been easy to obtain; Ah Ma had many influential friends.

Somewhere, behind them, the intermittent buzz of a defective lighting fixture. A car passed in the street outside, honking its horn. The clatter of running feet. A sharp abrasive laugh.

Then the door was opening, Croaker was pushing aside a tall, elegant Chinese woman. The warrant flew through the air like a broken bird.

And Nicholas saw it all before him as if in a film. The killings, one by one, like links in a chain. One chain. Terry’s historical clues. Three signposts:
Hideyoshi, Yodogimi, Mitsunari,
as obvious now as if they were glowing neon. Satsugai, Yukio, Saigō. The policeman sent to guard the dead Shōgun’s mistress, a close enough approximation.

Idiot! he thought savagely as he stumbled into Ah Ma’s after Croaker. Why did I withhold it from myself?

An American man, eyes wide in terror, stood up awkwardly, dumping a tiny Chinese woman onto the floor. He ran from them, through one of the living rooms, into a side suite.

Croaker was already midway down the long corridor leading to the back suites. Willow, who had opened the door to them, had been calling for Ah Ma. She was calm even in this seeming crisis.

Ah Ma appeared just as Nicholas began following Croaker back through the place.

“What is the meaning of this?” She grabbed at Nicholas. “How dare you break into my apartment? I have many friends who will—”

“The Japanese,” Nicholas said in perfect Mandarin. Ah Ma started. She was borne along as he rushed through the long corridor. “Where is he?” Nicholas said. “He is all we want.” He turned his head slightly. Doors passed them up, half-open, empty rooms lurking, mockingly. “Are you Ah Ma?” Noise up ahead. Croaker kicking at a locked door.

“He will destroy the place!” Ah Ma cried. She thought of the communists coming in the dead of night, destroying the house before dragging out her husband. But this was America.

Nicholas perceived her agitation. “The Japanese is a very dangerous man, Ah Ma. He could hurt your girls.”

This she understood immediately and she fell silent, looking at him.

“Where is he?”

“There. There. Take him then.”

He broke away from her, calling, “The left one. The left!”

Croaker swiveled, put a shot through the lock on the left-hand door. He went in with his shoulder and that was when the screaming began.

A blur of movement and Nicholas instinctively threw his arm across his eyes.

Flash of light, blue-white. The stink of cordite.

Croaker reeled and, running, Nicholas saw the last of a leg and shoe disappear through the open window.

“Christ Jesus!”

He turned. Croaker had one hand over his eyes.

“What happened?” His voice seemed hoarse.

“Flash bomb,” Nicholas said. “A miniature.”

Noise from the corridor, quickening.

“He’s gone, Croaker. Out of the rear window.”

Patrolman Tony DeLong received his final instructions from Lieutenant Croaker via the two-way radio and drove the blue-and-white slowly along the length of Pell Street.

“There it is,” said Sandy Binghamton, his partner. “Pull over.”

DeLong doused the lights, parked the car on a diagonal, blocking the street. It served a dual purpose. It would help keep the suspect within their perimeter if he came out the back of the building and it would discourage civilians from poking their noses into a potential red sector.

Binghamton was out first, swinging his big black bulk around the right side of the slewed patrol car. He paused, one hand on the chrome, and turned his head back toward the beginning of Pell Street. DeLong, still in the blue-and-white, was at this moment in radio contact with the second car but Binghamton wanted a visual fix. Civilian infiltration could be disastrous at this point and curiosity was a powerful motivator. He took his cap off, wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his uniform.

He turned back, studying the configuration of the end of the street, the specifics-of the target building.

DeLong shut down the radio and came out into the street and together they melted into the deep shadows thrown by the architecture on either side. The lieutenant had been quite insistent on this score. No sound and no sight. He watched the line of windows three stories up and thought about this. It was an unusual procedure where more than one blue-and-white was being used. But DeLong had no worries. He had faith in the lieutenant. He had worked with him for just under a year and a half and was now virtually assured, the next time the exam was given, of making sergeant. He wanted that very badly. He had had enough of the uniformed division and now he longed for a permanent assignment to a detective squad. There, too, the lieutenant could help him. And the extra money would come in handy now that Denise was due.

He felt Binghamton’s bulk reassuringly near him. They were a vet team and this was his long regret in moving up. He did not want to break up a partnership that had been so successful. But Sandy had no desire to become a detective. He was content to be on the street with the people. “It’s where I belong, man,” he had told DeLong often enough. “I don’t want to be no desk jockey.” It was just that they conceived of the same job in different ways. Lieutenant Croaker’s life wasn’t filled with paper work but he could not convince Sandy of that. Once the big man had made up his mind about something, it took the devil’s own—

Binghamton nudged him but he had already seen it. A hot flash of intense light, followed by a surprisingly soft
phutt.

“Trouble, maybe,” DeLong said. They both drew their weapons, crouched in darkness, waiting tensely.

Movement at the windows, shadows flickering like a children’s shadow play.

“Get ready.” Binghamton’s voice was a basso rumble. “I gotta believe he’s on his way out.”

DeLong nodded and, together, they began to edge closer to the rear of the building. They moved as quietly as they could, keeping to the shadows. For the first time, DeLong noticed that several of the streetlights were out. Odd, since the new Chinatown Association lost no time in bringing such problems to the city’s attention. But that was New York for you.

They both saw the blur of movement at the same time. DeLong gave his partner a pat and ran across the street into the concealing shadows on the far side. The black man kept his eyes riveted to the building at the end of the street. He knew from long years of experience where DeLong was headed.

They began to close in, keeping the old-fashioned iron fire escape between them. Looking up, they saw the moving shadow racing over the slats and then—nothing. No vertical movement downward.

The two men glanced at each other, then, cautiously, they moved forward until they were almost directly beneath the vertical ladder of the fire escape. From this perspective, it seemed an angular jungle of stripes and deep shadows. Randomly spaced lit-up windows made detection that much more difficult—insufficient light in many areas, spurious illumination in others creating three or more shadows of the same object.

“What the hell happened to him?” DeLong asked.

“I dunno.” Binghamton holstered his .38, swung the iron ladder down with a grate. “But I’m going up to find out. He may have gone over the roof.” He scrambled up onto the first-floor fire escape landing and drew his gun. Moving quickly and quietly, he climbed upward. He had difficulty maintaining a clear view through the forest of metal striations.

He paused for a moment on the second floor at the sound of a police siren, rising and falling, as a blue-and-white sped along the Bowery. Apparently it was heading uptown because the sound dopplered abruptly away, sounding odd and echoey in the summer night. Nothing to do with him.

“Anything?”

DeLong’s voice drifted up to him along with-the background wash of Chinatown, the traffic, slowly along the narrow streets, the distant chattering of a foreign language, sing-song, rapid-fire. Gave a negative wave of his free hand and heard the buzzing in the same instant. Some kind of insect. But the impacts—one two three—pinpricks puncturing the flesh of his chest and spinning him around were from nothing so innocuous.

He stumbled, reached out with his left hand, saw a movement, fired, grasped the railing. He thought only of getting enough air into his lungs. The .38 clattered against the iron grillwork at his feet.

Turned drunkenly and saw the dark figure before him as if it had appeared out of nowhere. Looked spectral in the wreaths of light and dark stripes, broken into oblique shards like a fun-house mirror as he lurched from side to side. He wanted to vomit.

Impression of a pale face dominated by black almond eyes. In a moment the eyes moved and a thin line of white lights appeared along their curving edges. Pupils dilated, he saw. Drugs, he thought, irrelevantly. His mouth opened and he grunted like a stuck pig. “DeLong.” Had it been loud enough? His ears rang as if he had just come from a rock concert.

The figure came at him, ballooning dangerously. He reached out, barring the figure’s way with a stiff left arm while he brought his right up to the horizontal so that the gun was brought to bear—where was his gun? His thoughts as slow and stupid as a Neanderthal’s.

Felt as if he were at the bottom of the sea, gravity dragging as cruelly at him as if he weighed five hundred pounds. Almost all of his strength was now being used to maintain his standing position. His chest was on fire—a cool numbing flame that seemed to set him floating inside himself, his consciousness detached itself from the useless husk of his body. Freed at last, it shot upward through the top of his head and into the humid squalor of the night.

Now the entire blaze of the city was spread out below him, a pinky-blue shell of light pulsing above the buildings like a shroud. Beyond it, infinite space.

Peering down through the haze, he could just make out in dwindling perspective his swaying body as the shadow ran past it, arm outstretched. He could even make out the pale blob of DeLong’s anxious upturned face, moving nervously in the shadows of Doyers Street.

When he looked again his body was toppling ever so slowly, losing its balance. It seemed as if he had to strain to see clearly now, so high was he. Everything cloaked in an aurora and he wondered, fleetingly, whether he had exceeded his limitations and had gone too high.

Like Icarus, he thought. And descended into darkness.

DeLong felt it before he even saw it. Like an elevator unexpectedly coming down, the sheer bulk was oppressive.

He sidestepped, though he had no idea what had been thrown down. Then it landed, quite near him, with a heavy sound that had no analogue in life.

“Jesus Christ!” he said under his breath. He began to sweat. He knelt beside the crumpled body of his partner. “Jesus, Jesus. Sandy, what happened?”

Shock. He knew he must look for whoever it was that had done this, but for the moment he was incapable of looking away. The shock. And blood seeping silently in a rivulet along the asphalt. The left side of the head had impacted first, then the shoulder and so on.

DeLong got up and backed away two paces.

Heard a sound, soft as only a cat might make, and he tore his eyes away. Pell Street had become a trap now for him and he scuttled back into the shadows of a doorway, looking up. For the first time he found himself wondering what the lieutenant had gotten them into. Where the hell was he, anyway?

He caught the movement now, this time soundless, along the horizontal plane of the fire escape one flight up. In other circumstances he would have passed it up as an animal prowling the night. Not now. He raised his .38, and, leading the target, squeezed off a shot. The report was very loud in the confined space, echoing off the walls, zigzagging from left to right. The
spang
of the ricochet told him he had hit metal.

“Shit!” He aimed, fired again. This time, no ricochet. Had it been a hit?

There was a vertical and the last horizontal row before the suspect could get to street level and he would be most vulnerable, DeLong reasoned, in descent. With difficulty, he held himself in check. Binghamton’s broken body was like a heavy weight close by him and he fought the rising desire to empty his pistol at the moving shape. Wait, he cautioned himself. Wait and get this bastard when he’s closer and there’s no doubt.

Now the shadow was at the end of the first-floor fire escape landing and DeLong sighted carefully, using both hands, one cupped over the other to steady his aim. He fixed on the point of the access to the hanging ladder. His forefinger tightened on the trigger. Wait. Tidal breathing. Wait. Now. Here he comes. Shots, three in rapid fire.

Nothing happened.

DeLong raised his gun, puzzled. Where was the bastard?

Then he picked up movement on the street in the periphery of his vision. Impossible, he thought. How the hell had he made the drop without using the ladder? And without a sound?