We brought the car in close, parked, and as we got out, I asked, "How many of these do you have?"
"In the five boroughs? Four." She handed me the key, leaning on her crutches. "At one point I had six, but one was broken into last year, and the other has most likely been compromised, so I won't go near it. This one is very clean, I haven't visited it in six years. It's never been used."
I unlocked the door and ran it up on its rails, and before we stepped inside she used one of her crutches to pull a piece of fishing line out of the darkness. The string had been run about five inches high, across the opening, and there was still tension on it.
"Safety," she said. "If it's broken, I know someone has been inside."
"Unless they replaced it."
"Unless they replaced it, yes. I don't think anyone has."
We stepped inside and I pulled the string that ran to the single bulb hung in the space. It was low wattage and didn't penetrate to the corners, but it didn't need to, because all that was inside were two pieces of luggage, a large blue duffel and a smaller black rolling bag. I put them in the car, closed the locker again, and we stopped at the manager's on the way out to return the key with thanks.
In Manhattan we checked into the SoHo Grand and got ourselves into a large room on one of the pet-friendly floors. I stuck with the Paul Lieberg identity; Alena called herself Jessica Bethier.
Before we headed up, I gave the FedEx envelope I'd been carrying in my go-bag to the young woman who checked us in, asked if she could send it out that afternoon. She assured me it would be no trouble at all.
Our room had a king bed and a couch that would convert to a queen. As soon as we were inside, Alena opened the carrier and Miata sprang out and stretched, then began snuffling his way through all of the corners. The hotel directory actually had a separate menu for pets, and Alena used it to order him something to drink and eat. The food arrived in under ten minutes, and Miata dove into his bowls. Once she saw that he was happy, Alena sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her crutches up after her. I opened the bags we'd taken from the cache and dumped them out on the bed, and Alena and I began going through the pile. She'd cached a couple changes of clothes, three pistols, and one HK PDW submachine gun. There were also three wads of well-used bills, twenties and tens bound with rubber bands.
"How much is there?" I asked.
"Here? A little under fifteen."
"And there's money in every cache?"
"Always. The U.S. is expensive."
"Oxford works the same way?"
"I'd expect he does. Money is pretty integral to the work." She started loading the pistols. "It's time we talked about what we're doing."
"I want to get you someplace secure, somewhere that you can recover from your injury."
She had been sliding bullets into the cylinder of a Colt revolver, and now she stopped and looked up at where I stood. "I will not recover. My left leg below the knee is permanently crippled. It cannot support my weight, it will never support it again."
To prove the point, she extended and raised her leg, then set it on the bed, her foot pointed at me. She reached down and pulled up the cuff of her pant leg, folding it back quickly to just below her knee. A large gauze rectangle was taped to her shin. She pulled it free, then turned her ankle to give me the full view. The stitches ran from just above her ankle to almost behind her knee, a zigzag of thread thick and black with dried blood. Her calf was only half as wide as it should have been.
"I've lost a large portion of my lower leg," Alena said, her face entirely neutral. "It's possible that the tibia and the fibula were both splintered, if not broken. The doctor in Kingstown did the best he could without a hospital and without more skill, and there is no infection, and the skin is knitting. But I will never walk on this leg again, not without assistance."
"We can get you proper medical help," I said. "Not some backroom surgeon. We can get you someone who knows what they are doing."
She folded the gauze back into place over the stitches, began rolling her pant leg down. "Atticus, even if you are correct, what you are saying requires time and money. Money I have. Time I do not. Oxford is on his way here, if not in New York already."
"All the more reason to get you someplace secure."
"I have not disputed that." She picked up the Colt, slid another round into the cylinder. "What do you suggest?"
"I want to bring in my colleagues," I said.
She finished loading the revolver, closing the cylinder with a push, a calm motion, very controlled. "Will you tell them who I am?"
"Yes."
She turned the gun in her hand, looking at it thoughtfully. "I will not go to prison. I will not allow that."
"They're my friends. They'll respect my wishes. If I tell them to keep it quiet, they'll honor that."
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
"Sure enough to bet my life on it?"
"Yes."
She smiled, setting the gun back onto the bed.
"You must have very good friends," she said.
"Absolutely not," Dale Matsui told me. "No way. I can't believe you'd even ask us to do this!"
He looked around the table, to Corry and Natalie, and then to Special Agent Scott Fowler, to see if they were going to offer him support. From their expressions, I suspected he would get it.
It was nearly midnight, and we were at the back of The Stoned Crow in Greenwich Village, the same bar where once, months ago, Lady Ainsley-Hunter was supposed to join students from NYU in merry pitchers of beer. All around us on the walls were representations of crows, paintings and pictures, some literal, some more loosely interpreted. Over Corry's head hung a poster from The Crow movie, and farther down the wall was a promotional flyer for a concert by the band of the same name.
It had taken a couple of hours to assemble everyone because I'd had to go carefully, unsure of who Oxford might already have under surveillance. In the end I'd made contact through Scott, thinking that he would be the most risky for Oxford to mark, and therefore the least likely to watch. Scott had taken it pretty well, saying only, "I was wondering when you'd call," and then he'd agreed to contact the others. He'd arrived at the bar first, with Natalie close on his heels, but he'd had just enough time to pull me aside.
"Gracey and Bowles are looking for you," he'd said. "We really need to talk."
Now he was staying silent, and I suspected he'd let the conversation run its course before weighing in with his own opinion and whatever facts he himself had.
Corry said, "I'm with Dale, Atticus."
"She's a paying client," I said. "Like any other."
"Uh, no, I don't think so," Dale said.
"Look, we take money to protect people we don't like all the time. It's never been our job to pass judgments…"
"Okay, hypocrisy readings are off the charts," Corry said. "Perhaps you may recall you're the guy who was complaining about spoiled-brat movie stars. Those are jobs you were all too willing to turn down."
"I never turned them down, I just never liked them," I replied.
Dale was shaking his head. "It's a personal choice, Atticus. I'm not going to protect the Grand Wizard of the KKK. I don't give a damn about how professional I'm being or not. I'd have thought you would agree with that."
"She's not who you think she is."
"She's the woman who nearly killed me twice," Dale replied. "So you tell me, Atticus – who am I supposed to think she is? How am I supposed to get past that?"
"I did," I said.
Natalie, who had been watching me closely the whole time, looked down at her beer, and I realized it had been the wrong thing to say.