“Just like you were saying. It clicks. Can’t explain it, don’t think about it.”
“Lucas has some problems with him. You know, being in the chair.”
“Happens some.” Amelia laughed. “Of course, Lincoln rides people hard and then they get fed up and go, ‘You’re such an asshole.’ Or, ‘Fuck you.’ They forget he’s a quad. That breaks the ice and it’s all good.”
“With Lucas, I think it’s something more. He won’t talk about it.” Lily lowered her voice. “For me, I have to say, when Lucas and I met, it was, a lot of it was physical. I need that. You and Lincoln?”
“Oh, yeah. Believe it or not, it’s good. Different obviously. But good… Ah, here comes our lord and master.”
Wiping his nose with his fingers, Verlaine was oozing his way through the crowd. Amelia was sure he turned sideways intentionally to rub against an ass or two.
One of his “accidental” victims — a petite redhead in a leather skirt and black blouse — turned fast and, eyes dark angry disks, shouted words they couldn’t hear. Fast as a gun hammer falling on a primer, he wheeled and shoved his face into hers.
“Christ,” Amelia muttered, reaching toward her purse, where a baby Glock rested. “He’s going to hurt her.”
“Wait. We move in, that fucks up the whole op.”
They watched closely. A cold smile blossomed on Verlaine’s face as the woman looked at him warily. She was attractive and her figure was perfect, though it was clear she’d had acne in her youth or some illness that left scarring.
In the space of a few seconds, as he spoke to her, still smiling coolly, her expression morphed from confused to shocked to devastated; Amelia knew he was commenting on her complexion. He kept leaning forward, taunting, taunting, until she picked up her purse and fled into the bathroom, sobbing.
Amelia said to Lily, “His expression. What’s it look like to you?”
“Like he just fucked somebody and wants a cigarette.”
Verlaine eased through the crowd back to the bar.
“Hey, there, ladies. Miss me?”
The thing about burglary was, the careful burglar was rarely disturbed by the homeowner. It was always some snoopy neighbor who did him in.
Lucas sat on a darkened stoop across the street from Verlaine’s building, just watching and listening. The neighborhood was a tough one, not far from the East River, and not yet gentrifying; the buildings might be a little too rotten, a little too undistinguished, a little too far upriver. Verlaine’s building was a bit of a puzzle — only two stories tall, but wide and deep. Too large for a single inhabitant, Lucas thought. It had a shallow entrance above a wide one-step stoop, with bricked-up spaces on the bottom floor that were once windows. The place could have been a hardware store at one time, with walk-up apartments above it; in another neighborhood, farther downtown, it would have become a nightclub, or a restaurant. Here, it was just a derelict building, without a single light showing, either through the barred windows on the main door, or from the windows on the second floor. Was there somebody else in there? Verlaine himself, Lucas knew, was at a Midtown bar.
Nothing moving. And still Lucas waited.
He’d had a little heart-to-heart with Lincoln. When the women were gone, Lincoln said, “If you go to the black cabinet by the window, in the bottom section, the left side, there’s a drawer.”
Lucas went to the cabinet, opened a lower-level door, pulled out the drawer, and found an electric lock rake.
He took it out and pulled the trigger. Dead.
“An artifact from my former life. It’ll still work, but you’ll have to put some double-A batteries in it.”
“You want me to crack Verlaine’s apartment?”
“Lily said you occasionally used unconventional tactics.”
Lucas said, “I’ll take a look at it. Even if this thing works, there could be other problems. Might be other people around, locks have gotten better.”
“So then you don’t go in,” Lincoln said. “I just feel it would be useful if somebody could take a preliminary look. Can’t use it as evidence, of course.”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah. Once you know, everything else gets easier.”
Then he said, “Look, I know I pissed you off because I was having trouble dealing with your disability.”
“You did. Piss me off,” Lincoln said.
“Yeah, well,” Lucas scratched his neck. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s purely out of fear. This scar”—he touched his neck again—“a little girl shot me in the throat with a .22. Went through a coat collar, through my windpipe, got to my spine, but not into it. The kid should have killed me — she would have, but there was a doc right there, and she did a tracheotomy, and kept me breathing until we got to the hospital. But if the kid had had any other kind of gun, or if the slug hadn’t gone through the collar first, she would have either blown my spine out, and I would have been dead on the spot, or I would have been like you. It was a matter of a quarter inch or so, or any other caliber. I look at you and I see me.”
“Interesting,” Lincoln said.
“After the accident, did you think about suicide?”
“Yes. Quite considerably,” Lincoln said. “Sometimes, I’m not sure I made the right choice, staying alive. But my curiosity keeps me going; I always seem to have work.” He smiled. “God bless all the little criminals.”
“And then there’s Amelia,” Lucas said.
“Yes. Then there’s Amelia.”
“You’re a lucky man, Lincoln,” Lucas said.
Lincoln laughed and said, “It’s been a while since anyone told me that.”
After an hour on the stoop, Lucas decided that he’d either have to make a move on the building, or go away. He stood up, dusted off the seat of his jeans, and saw a man walking along the sidewalk toward him, alone. The man spit in the gutter and came on. When he got to Lucas, he stopped and said, “You got an extra twenty?”
“No.”
“I’m not really asking,” the man said.
“Take a close look at me,” Lucas said.
The man took a closer look, then said, “Fuck you,” and went on down the street. He looked back once, then turned the corner and was gone. Lucas waited another few minutes, to see if the man came back, then crossed the street and, using his cell phone as a flashlight, looked at the lock. An old one — a good one, when it was made, but now old. With a last look around, Lucas took the rake out of his pocket, slipped the pick-arm into the lock. The rake chattered for a moment, as Lucas kept the turning pressure on, and then the lock went.
He stepped inside, closed the door, and called, “Anybody home?”
He listened, got no response, except a scrabbling sound in the ceiling — a rat.
“Hey, anybody? Anybody here?”
Nobody answered. He took a flashlight from his pocket, turned it on. He was in a wide hallway, with steps going up to his right, and with a double door to the left. The hallway smelled of burned metal, as though somebody had been working with a welding torch. He was in the right place.
He tried the double door and found it open, with a bank of light switches on the wall to the left. He closed the door behind him and turned on the lights. He was in a wide-open studio with several two-foot-tall bronze sculptures sitting on heavy wooden tables, with a variety of metalworking tools — files, electric grinders, polishers, hand scribes. The air inside smelled of burned metal and polishing compound.
The sculptures were all on sadomasochistic themes: nude women being whipped, bound, beaten. Just what you need to add that extra spark to your living room, Lucas thought.
At the far edge of the studio was a low, wooden wall, perhaps ten feet high, which was two or three feet short of the ceiling. Behind it, Lucas found a queen-sized bed, a chest of drawers, a large closet stuffed with clothing, a bathroom, a second closet with an apartment-sized washer and dryer stacked one on top of the other, a kitchenette, and a small breakfast table with two chairs. A television was mounted on a swing arm at the foot of the bed. He poked through the living area for a moment, found nothing of particular interest, and continued his tour of the studio. And found, at the back, an internal door, sheathed in metal, that was set in a frame a step below the rest of the floor — a door that most likely led to a basement, Lucas thought. He looked at the lock, and realized that the rake wouldn’t work: the thing was probably a year old, a Medeco.