“Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really?”
“We were ambushed in the getaway car, then stripped and thrown into body bags. I woke up as two assholes were trying to shove me down a pipe, down by the river. Later I was shot. But I’m feeling much better.”
“You were shot? By the Russians?”
“No. But the guys from earlier … one of them was Russian. The other was a college kid. Not Russian. American.”
“Are they still out there?” the woman asked. “Will they be coming after us?”
“No,” the guy said, quietly.
Lisa turned this over in her brain. A Russian. And a college kid.
Mikal. And Andrew.
This is why she almost kicked the wall in.
“So let me call the doctor. Have him look at us both. And then we can get the fuck out of this city. We need to regroup.”
“We need to talk,” the woman said. “I have a lot to explain.”
There was no torture greater than Lisa’s hours in that closet, trapped, enveloped with rage. Right out of her closet door was the man who had killed her boyfriend. And the salt on that particular wound was the fact that her own father was this guy’s partner in crime. Her dad had given them the use of this house! Her house! Her and Andrew’s house! And guns. And clothes. And a doctor.
Lisa seethed as she listened to the phone call. She even knew the doctor they were calling. It was Dr. Bartholomew Dovaz, her own pediatrician. She had grown up afraid of Dr. Dovaz—he had an awful bedside manner, sticking you with needles when you weren’t ready—until his wife got sick, and he started doing drugs. Lisa had assumed her family had severed all contact with Dr. Dovaz after a messy arrest in Lower Merion back in 1993, but apparently, her father had kept in touch with the man.
Her father had kept him on hand for special occasions. Like treating murderers he was hiding.
Had Lisa a weapon of any kind, she would have bolted from the closet and used it. Repeatedly. A gun. A baseball bat. A knife. A chainsaw. A nail gun. And then she’d confront her father later.
But she had nothing, and she had no idea what this couple was packing. They were professional criminals of some kind, and most likely had guns. Which made sense. They were talking about gunshot wounds. It would do no good to pop out of the closet and get shot in the head.
Lisa decided to wait for Dr. Dovaz to arrive, and then she’d figure out her move from there. There would be time to sneak away, to run back to her house and talk to her father.
She repeated things to herself, in her mind, so she could remember them later. They were important.
Getaway car.
Stripped, and thrown into body bags.
A pipe, down by the river.
A while later, Lisa fell asleep.
Am I Blue
SAUGHERTY FELT WOEFULLY UNDERDRESSED TO BE calling on the Rittenhouse Towers on a Sunday morning.
He’d scraped together what he could. The clothes on his back from yesterday were ripped and blood-soaked; his house—and his pitiful wardrobe inside it—had probably burned to the ground. That left one choice. Doctor’s lounge. Saugherty knew his way around hospitals from his cop days, especially this one: Pennsylvania Hospital. He knew the ER. He knew the ER lounge, and how nobody really paid any attention to people popping in and out of it.
He found a pair of khakis and a nice black Eddie Bauer mock turtleneck in one of the lockers. He kept his own shoes, but glommed a shabby-looking black blazer from another locker. Didn’t they pay these docs anything?
The Rittenhouse Towers were only twelve or so blocks away, across town, but since Saugherty had a busted arm, a sack full of broken ribs, and various other oochies and ouchies, he opted for a cab.
Getting in was not a problem; he knew the acting chief of security, Al Buchan, from his working the Fifteenth District. Saugherty fed him some line of bull about working a freelance bank robbery consulting thing for Lt. Earl Mothers, which Al swallowed without complaint. Let him up to 910, where a couple of uniforms told him he should check out 1809, where they hid out for a while.
“They” = Patrick Selway Lennon plus an unidentified female companion.
Saugherty got what he could from the guys on the scene; eyewitnesses weren’t much use coming up with a name. The description was hazy, too. “Hot as balls,” one guy had said, describing the unidentified female companion. “But an ice queen.” Yeah, that helped. Saugherty poked around the condo, marveling at the appliances and utensils. The owner of the place, some guy named Feldman, even had a set of Tenmijurakus sitting on the counter. Swank.
It was getting to be that time, and the Percocets he got at the hospital were starting to lose their luster, so Saugherty found the appropriate cabinet, appropriated the appropriate bottle, then sequestered himself in the guest bathroom, near the entrance. Nothing fancy—just a bottle of Johnnie Walker. But when he closed the door behind him, Saugherty realized he’d hit the fucking lottery. It was Johnnie Walker Blue. He’d never tasted it; only read about it in the storybooks and musty volumes of Greek and Roman fables. Saugherty took this surprise as a good omen. With $650,000, he’d be able to enjoy J.W. Blue on a regular basis.
He unscrewed the cap and breathed in the smoky aroma through his nose. It was almost a contact high.
There was a dispenser of small plastic Dixie cups on the bathroom sink. Saugherty plucked one off the stack and poured himself a tall one, almost to the brim. This was not something to be sucked from the bottle, nor cut with tap water. Presentation was one thing.
The taste was everything else.
Saugherty sat on the closed toilet, in a frayed blazer not his own, drinking some incredibly fine Scotch that was not his own, either. For having woken up in a hospital bed and been grilled by humorless jackasses from Internal Affairs, he thought he was doing all right.
He let the liquid pleasantly burn down into his stomach, and felt the attitude-adjustment mechanisms turning in his brain. He lifted his face to heaven, by way of thanking God.
As his head returned to its usual forward-facing position, Saugherty spotted it.
The bathroom closet door, slightly ajar.
Saugherty didn’t go to it right away. He wanted to finish the Scotch in his Dixie cup first, because he knew what he was going to find in there. The lead he needed. And once he found it, he would be leaving the bathroom, and tracking down more leads, and eventually, tracking down his money.
The morning had been so charmed, how could it be otherwise?
Ten minutes later, the bathroom closet yielded a small black suitcase. Which yielded a set of women’s clothing and toiletries. And beneath that, identification and a passport.
Hiya, Katie Elizabeth Selway.
Paterfamilias
“SO WHO’S THE FATHER?”
“Mary, Mother of God,” she said, sighing.
“You’re not gonna tell me?”
“Yes, I’m going to tell you. But this isn’t how I’d planned it.”
“Ah. Right. Puerto Rico. He supposed to meet us there?”
“He’s there right now.”
“And why aren’t you there now?”
“I got worried.”
Lennon leaned his head back against the wall and shut his eyes. Katie was a few feet away, reclining on the mattress.
He didn’t want to say it, but he’d told her a million times: no matter what, even if I’m arrested, don’t come looking for me. I can take care of myself. That was Rule Number One. That had always been Rule Number One, ever since Lennon had reunited with his sister, and confessed to her what he did for a living. But Katie wasn’t much for rules.