“I need a small duffel bag that comes with a lock,” I said.
“A lock, huh?” he repeated, tapping his chin in thought. “Combination or key?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Will you be flying with it? The TSA folks can—”
“Really,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
He led me over to a wall display of cubbyholes that looked like a tic-tac-toe board. Before he could even make a suggestion, I saw what I needed.
“The one in the middle,” I said.
He took down the bag and I gave it a quick once-over. It was black, medium-sized, with a small padlock — the key for it, along with a spare, hanging from a zip tie around one of the handles.
“Yeah, I’ll take it,” I said.
“Do you want it in its box or would you like this one?” the clerk asked. By this point, it was abundantly clear that what I really wanted was to get the hell out of there.
“This one’s fine,” I said, already reaching for my wallet.
He spun the price tag around. “You’re in luck. It’s on sale.”
“Good,” I grunted, or something to that effect, as I pulled out my Amex.
I didn’t care about the price. I also didn’t care about using a credit card. The charge — and my location — could be traced in an instant. Even quicker than an instant. It would be like drawing a straight line to me, then lighting it like a fuse.
So be it.
Trevor, maybe you should sit down again. There’s something you need to know...
“Are you all right?” asked the clerk. He certainly didn’t think so. It was bad enough that I had all the charm and charisma of a cinder block. Now I was standing there frozen like one.
“Sorry,” I said, handing over my credit card. He ran it and I signed. As he handed me back the receipt, I nodded at the zip tie holding the keys. “Do you have any scissors?”
He glanced around under the counter, finding a pair. “Here, let me,” he said, cutting the tie. Then he leaned in as if he were about to whisper some nuclear codes. “Just so you know, that lock really doesn’t offer much protection. It’s super-easy to open without the key.”
“Not if you’re a cop,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
But I was already halfway out the door. Me and the Fourth Amendment.
Without just cause and a warrant, my new duffel bag might as well have been Fort Knox with two side pockets and a shoulder strap.
Good thing.
Because I wasn’t about to fill that duffel bag with jelly beans.
Chapter 39
Walking into a bar with a gun tucked under your shirt is one thing. Doing it in a bank?
One block shy of my Chase branch on the Upper West Side, I dumped the Beretta M9 in a trash can. I didn’t need it. Trust me.
“Do you have your key?” asked the safe-deposit box attendant on the lower level.
Maybe the woman picked up on my vibe, or maybe this was how she acted with everyone who came through the bank, but her monotone delivery was music to my ears. There would be no polite chitchat. No delay. In fact, she even had her guard key raised in her hand, ready to go.
Quickly, I reached for my key — sandwiched between the one for my apartment and the one for my office up at Columbia Law — and showed it to her. The irony. I never used to keep it on my key chain. Then, one day, I’d asked Claire about a certain key on hers.
“This way I don’t have to remember where I put it,” she’d told me.
I never knew what Claire kept in her safe-deposit box. I never asked. That was because I didn’t want her asking what I kept in mine.
She hated those “damn things” even more than I did.
Standing alone in the small viewing room with nothing but white walls and a shelf, I opened the lid and removed an original SIG Sauer P210. Steel frame, wood grip, locked breech. Old school. And, in the right hands, still the most accurate semiautomatic pistol in the world.
Then out came my Glock 34 with a GTL 22 attachment giving it a dimmable xenon white light with a red laser sight. As a weapons instructor during my first year at Valley Forge once declared with the kind of sandpaper voice that only a lifetime of smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes will give you, “Sometimes shit happens in the dark.”
Both guns went into the duffel along with four boxes of ammo, one shoulder holster, and one shin holster, the latter being custom-made to accommodate the light and laser sight on the Glock 34.
Like I said, I didn’t need the Beretta M9.
Finally, there were some paper goods. Two wrapped stacks of hundreds totaling ten grand. Cash for a rainy day. Or, in this case, when it was pouring.
And that was that. Everything I’d come for, everything I needed. Before zipping the duffel closed, I took one last look inside it. Then I took one last look inside the safe-deposit box.
If only I hadn’t.
Sticking out from underneath my birth certificate was a 1951 Bowman Mickey Mantle rookie card. My father had given it to me after my very first Little League game. “Take good care of it,” he told me. “It’s your turn.”
The card was far from mint condition. One of the corners was dog-eared, and there were a couple of creases along the side. But it had been given to me by my father, who had gotten it from his father, and that made it absolutely perfect.
I picked up the card, staring at it in my hands, and suddenly it weighed a million pounds. My knees buckled and my legs gave out. I fell back against the wall, sliding slowly down to the floor. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t breathe. I could only cry.
“The autopsy...” Sebastian had begun.
Claire was an organ donor, so it had already been performed. He’d seen the results. He’d had to. Leave it to the Times to need a corroborating source before reporting the cause of death of one of its own.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
Sebastian hesitated, his eyes avoiding mine. But it was too late for second thoughts; he had to tell me.
“Claire was pregnant,” he said.
Chapter 40
Ready or not, you sons of bitches, here I come...
I took the stairs, walking the six flights up to my apartment on the top floor. The SIG Sauer was in my hand, my hand was hidden in the duffel, and the duffel was hanging off my shoulder.
Fog or no fog, there was a small part of my brain that knew exactly how stupid I was being. Whatever fine line existed between risky and crazy, I was nowhere near it. What I was doing bordered on insane. I was a walking death wish, and if it hadn’t been for the rest of my brain, I would’ve surely turned around and hightailed it out of my building.
But the rest of my brain was consumed by one thing, and one thing only. Love of justice perverted to revenge and spite. That was how Dante defined it during his tour through Hell.
Vengeance.
I shared the sixth floor with only one other tenant, a trader at Morgan Stanley who left each morning at the crack of dawn. His apartment faced the back of the building; mine faced the front. I got the natural light, he got the quiet.
Fittingly, there was nothing but silence as I passed his door, heading toward mine at the opposite end of the hall.
Out came the SIG Sauer from the duffel, leading the way. All the while, I kept waiting for a sound, a noise, something up ahead to let me know I had company. But that would be too easy, I thought.
Sometimes you just have a feeling you’re about to catch a break. This wasn’t one of those times.
Which was all the more reason why I wasn’t expecting the door to my apartment to be wide open, or kicked down, or hanging off its hinges like some giant calling card. And sure enough, it wasn’t.