Fifty-Nine
New York, NY
Rhys and Broderick had each ordered a beer. They’d taken a booth in a bar on Third a couple of blocks north of Bloomingdale’s.
“Been a while,” Rhys said.
Broderick nodded. “We haven’t talked since my legal problems.”
Rhys smiled. “All seems to have worked out okay.”
Then Broderick smiled. “Could have gone another way if it hadn’t been for you. I owe you one.”
“Kinda why I got in touch,” Rhys said. “I’ve had a little trouble recently. You heard of Jeremy Pritkin?”
“That’s like asking if I’ve ever heard of money.”
“Been doing some work for him,” Rhys said. “Big job, not finished. Things went sideways.”
“Like?”
“Lost a partner.”
Broderick smiled. “So what’s the job?”
“Pritkin has two girls at his place. They’re a liability. He can’t release them into the wild, but they think they’re getting their freedom, that they’ve got an appointment with a lawyer to sign some NDAs, walk away with a substantial cash settlement to keep quiet. That way, they leave the building without trying to make a break for it, and it gets them out of there so we can do what we have to do off-site.”
Broderick nodded. “What’s it all about?”
“Do you want to know what this is all about?”
Broderick shrugged. “Curious.”
“Even I don’t know the scope of it. Pritkin’s needed some people to disappear. Completely. No DNA traces left behind. They’re all over. We ran into a problem in Fort Wayne.”
“Fort Wayne?”
“Yeah.”
Broderick moved his tongue around, poking it into his cheek. “Hadn’t thought of Fort Wayne in a million years and now it pops up twice in a very short period of time.”
Rhys waited.
“Met this woman. Had a scheme to get a fortune that should go to her husband, but he got fucked over by his brother. Got her daughter to make nice with this nerd who was going to come into a lot of money, eventually.”
Rhys’s eyes narrowed. “You got a name for this nerd?”
“Travis Roben.”
Rhys leaned back in the booth and shook his head. “You’re shittin’ me.”
“No.”
Rhys said, “That’s the thing that went sideways.” He gave Broderick the bullet-point version. “Small fucking world.”
“Not really,” Broderick said. “Not a lot of people in our line of work. Sometimes our interests overlap.”
“You know what?” Rhys said. “Bringing you in, it was meant to be.” He raised his bottle and clinked it against Broderick’s. “I got a good feeling about this.”
Sixty
New York, NY
Chloe and Nicky decided to they would do it after dinner, which, as it turned out, was pretty damn good. Veal lasagna and chocolate mousse for dessert.
“This is even better than usual,” Nicky whispered to Chloe. “They probably are getting ready to kill us.”
Their occasional attempts at gallows humor did not mask how scared they were.
Nicky, whispering to Chloe with the television volume turned up, had gone over, several times, how things worked around here. Whenever anyone came to the room, like the maid or Roberta, they couldn’t leave until someone responded to their rap on the door. The man who stood guard at the top of the stairs, a short distance down the hall, would come open it, then return to his station. Like in a prison movie, when the lawyer lets the guard know he’s done talking to his client.
The door was always open for a few seconds. Now that there were two of them, there was a better chance that between them they could keep that door open long enough to escape.
What about the guard? Chloe had asked.
He was big, Nicky said, but that also meant he was slower than them. And the thing was, he wouldn’t be standing where they intended to go.
“You ever play basketball?” Chloe had asked.
“Sure.”
“We fake him out. Look like we’re going one way, he moves to block, we go the other way.”
“He’ll think we’re heading for the front door.”
Chloe said, in a voice loud enough to be picked up by their captors, “Gotta pee.”
She went into the bathroom and closed the door. She grabbed a hand towel, wrapped it around the drinking glass sitting on the shelf above the sink and lightly rapped it on the edge of the porcelain sink until she heard it shatter.
Then she set the towel down in the bottom of the sink and carefully unwrapped the glass, now in several pieces. Chloe examined the shards and picked two larger pieces she believed would suit their purposes. They needed to be large enough to be effective, but small enough to be concealed in their hands. About the size of a book of matches.
She set the two curved pieces next to the taps, then gathered up the rest of the shards in the towel and put them in the garbage receptacle. She wadded up some tissues and tossed them over the glass to hide it. She flushed the toilet, for the benefit of any bedroom listening devices, and rejoined Nicky on the bed.
They were sitting atop the covers, their backs propped against the headboard. Chloe tucked one of the two pieces of glass just under Nicky’s jeaned leg. They were both fully dressed, shoes on.
“It’s sharp,” she whispered.
“Duh,” Nicky said.
The glass briefly caught on the bedspread as Nicky reached down and palmed it. Then, in a normal voice, she said, “I gotta move around.”
She hopped off the bed and began to pace the room, her path taking her close to the door with every lap. The plan was simple. When the maid came back for their tray, Nicky would keep the door from closing while Chloe kept the maid in check by threatening to cut her.
Simple.
Nicky might have tried something like this long before now, but the rest of the escape plan needed Chloe’s skills to be executed.
Nicky, still speaking so that she could be heard, “Tell me again what a DNA agreement is?”
“Not DNA,” Chloe said. “NDA. Nondisclosure agreement. We sign it, they pay us, and we agree never to be tattletales.”
“But what if we told anyway?”
“They could sue us and we’d have to give the money back and maybe even more. And we’d have to hire lawyers to fight it for us and we’d be in debt up to our assholes.”
“Even if holding us here is against the law?”
Chloe shrugged. “You really want to challenge this? If it gets us out of here? You don’t want enough money to have you set for life? Because believe me, they’re going to have to pay up to keep us quiet.”
They believed their performance was Oscar-worthy.
“Fine,” Nicky said. “If all I got to do is sign something, I’ll do it. How much money you think they’ll give us?”
Chloe shrugged. “Thousands, I bet. This Pritkin guy’s loaded, right?”
“Uh, look around,” Nicky said. “He’s got more money than—”
Knock knock.
Chloe got off the bed. Nicky stopped her pacing two feet from the door.
Chloe felt the glass shard digging into her palm as she delicately closed her hand around it. The slightest squeeze and she’d start to draw blood.
Nicky was doing the same. They exchanged a quick glance.
Here we go.
The door began to open.
Sixty-One
New York, NY
On the first part of their trip into Manhattan, as the sun was setting, Dorian had asked to sit in the back with Miles. Gold was put up front next to Charise.