There was something in his right hand.
I had something in my right, too.
He came up fast. My boxer's training made my body sway to the right. As I swung the brass knuckles of my killing knife I felt the searing hot pain of his blade in my left triceps. He made ready to attack again but my first blow had slowed him. The second chopping punch knocked him back into the open door of his Dodge.
His head was on the passenger's seat and his feet were tangled on the driver's side. I could feel warm blood trickling down the baby finger of my left hand, but before I saw to my own health I leaned in and hit Patrick one more time.
That pudgy little guy had come closer to killing me than anyone ever had. Four inches and he would have had my heart on a skewer.
I shoved him into the car, jumped in behind, closed the door, and secured his wrists behind him and his ankles together with police-grade plastic ties that I always carry on serious cases.
It was only after putting electrical tape over his mouth and shoving his unconscious body into the backseat that I pulled off my coat, sweater, and shirt to check out the wound.
Another thing I carry around when I'm doing fieldwork is a first-aid kit.
The cut was deep but the bleeding was only moderate. I slapped two broad cloth bandages over the wound. Patrick had left the keys in the ignition. I drove to a comparatively desolate block near the West Side Highway, a few blocks north of the Convention Center. There I stopped to put pressure on the wound until the bleeding stopped-or at least slowed. That took about twenty minutes.
I slumped down then, exhausted from the survival mode I'd been in.
When the head popped up in the backseat, I sat up, too. Without thinking I threw a deadly straight right hand, knocking Patrick at least into unconsciousness.
After four more minutes had passed I used my newfound energy to drive some blocks to the north, where I knew there was street parking and a few pay phones.
46
There's a man I know named Barry Holcombe. Barry's business is subletting various specialty properties around New York. People often need rooms for assignations, secret meetings, and other activities that have to be held off the grid. Sometimes these rooms need to be soundproofed and partitioned, with see-through, one-way glass between one space and the next.
I only ever call Barry from a pay phone.
"Hello," he answered on the first ring.
"It's Leonid. I need a place to interview a potential employee."
"I might have something. You want to see the property?"
"No time."
"Rent's gone up five hundred."
"That's not a concern."
"It's a pleasure doing business with you."
I DROVE DOWN TO Eighteenth Street near the West Side Highway, opened the trunk of Patrick's car, and was pleasantly surprised to find a large swath of burlap deposited back there. Then I went to the backseat and trussed the unconscious Patrick up, making him seem somewhat less than human. Then I waited seventeen long minutes-until no car or pedestrian was coming.
I hefted the little man, moving as quickly as I could, and installed him in the trunk. I used two more ties to secure his feet and hands to a hook under the latch. This greatly lessened his chances of noisily beating against the trunk lid.
There was an envelope waiting for me at the front desk of the Tesla. Barry Holcombe is an efficient and speedy landlord.
THE ADDRESS I WAS given was near the Brooklyn Naval Yards. The directions led me down an alley on a street of abandoned warehouses. I drove down the narrow lane, used the first of three keys on an outer door and the second one on a two-man elevator. I dragged Patrick's body into the lift and traveled three floors down to a hallway that ended at a maroon metal door. This led to two concrete rooms that were connected by a door and by a jury-rigged monitor and camera that allowed a man in one room to watch what happened in the other. The second of these rooms had an aluminum chair that was bolted to the floor replete with manacles and leg irons, also bolted down, for the prisoner's hands and feet.
Just when I'd finished chaining Patrick my cell phone sounded.
I went into the watcher's room, closing the door behind me, and answered the phone.
"Hello?"
"It's me," Diego said. "Baggage of American Airlines, international."
"Twenty-five minutes."
STANDING STRAIGHT, AN OLIVE duffel bag on the floor next to him, Diego was an image of something not of this world. His collarless jacket was black, as were his shapeless trousers. His shoes were of woven red-brown leather, and the straw hat he wore was an ancient ancestor of the Guatemalan-made Panama variety.
Diego's skin was the dusky color of dark-red brick that they made factories from when children still worked fourteen hours a day. His face was wide and filled with empathy for something long gone-or maybe just hidden.
"Hey, man," I said, approaching him. No names in public.
He was my height, with only a slightly smaller bone structure. There was a vitality to the South American that made me appear sleepy by comparison. His hands seemed powerful enough to crush single walnuts.
He held out a paw and we tested our strength with the show of friendship.
"Come on," I said.
"THERE'S ONLY ONE THING I need to know from this guy," I was saying as we rode toward the temporary hideout. "Who hired him to kill Angelique Lear?"
"That's all?"
"That's everything."
"How's Twill?" he asked then.
Twill and I had gone fishing with Diego up near Lake Tahoe a few years before. Dimitri refused to come along, and Shelly didn't like doing anything where she couldn't wear a dress.
"In trouble."
Diego grinned.
"He's a good boy," my very foreign friend said. "He will always be there for you like you are for him."
My emotional state at that time made the timbre of my voice untrustworthy, so I nodded and drove on.
WHEN WE GOT TO Barry Holcombe's rooms, Patrick was awake. We could see his eyes via the monitor. They were boring into the camera lens.
After looking at him for a quarter of an hour Diego picked up a three-legged wooden stool from a corner and walked into the room. I watched him as he set the stool in front of Patrick and squatted down.
A kind of jolt went through Patrick's body, giving the impression that the prisoner had something to say. He didn't speak, however, and neither did Diego.
For at least twenty minutes the men stared at each other. Finally Diego stood and moved closer to the prisoner. The left side of Patrick's jaw was swollen from the blows he'd received in our brief contest. When Diego reached over to touch that side, Patrick tried to bite him. But my friend was quicker. He pulled the fingers away and delivered a vicious slap with his other hand.
Again he tried to touch the swelling. Again Patrick snapped, and was slapped. Again…
Somewhere around the thirteenth or fourteenth attempt, Patrick allowed Diego to touch the swollen left side of his face. By this time the right side was puffed up, too. His mouth was bloody and his right eye almost closed.
Diego sat there, staring, for six or seven minutes more. Then he picked up the stool and exited the room.
He didn't talk to me at first, instead moving close to the CCTV to watch his unwilling penitent.
IT'S NOT EASY TO explain my relationship with Diego. We rarely talked, and yet a certain sympathy had formed between us on that job in L.A.
One day when we were following the actress's brother, mapping out his routine, we were sitting in a car near a big house. There was a team of men in the front yard hacking away at a broad and hunched-over old oak. The tree was gnarled with age. It took a lot of work to bring that old monster down.