Jack leaned back, thinking. Jorge was the type of customer that kept Jack in the business. A guy with a genuine beef and nowhere else to turn. But right now, Jack had no idea what he could do for him.
"I will if I can. But I need to know more about Ramirez. Tell me all you know about him. Everything you've learned during all these months of working for him."
Slowly, as Jorge spoke, a plan took shape…
6.
Alicia wasn't hungry, so she put off lunch. She liked this quiet time when no IV-therapy sessions were scheduled for the clinic and the day-care kids were having lunch; the staff and volunteers who weren't with the kids were out grabbing a quick bite. Usually she stayed in her office and caught up on her paperwork. But today she was restless.
And she didn't know why. It wasn't because of Hector—the little guy with the "mad buth cut" seemed to be responding to the antibiotic. She simply had to move.
She left her cluttered desk and took a stroll through the empty halls, lost in thought, wondering what to do next. Wait for Jack, or make another contact? She'd scraped up the name of someone else. Should she—?
She stopped. She'd heard a sound… almost like a whimper. She stood frozen, her body tingling as she listened.
And then she heard it again, fainter. And then a low voice, whispering… from somewhere around the corner…
Moving on tiptoe, and glad she was wearing sneakers, Alicia peeked around the corner and saw…
An empty hall.
She was beginning to think she'd imagined the noises when she heard the whisper again… coming from a hall closet just a few feet away. The door was cracked open, and the voice was definitely male…
"See? Didn't I tell you it wouldn't hurt? There now… doesn't that feel nice?"
Biting back a surge of bile that almost choked her, Alicia reached for the door. She watched her hand tremble like a leaf in a gale as it neared the knob. She forced it to grip it and pull.
And then she saw them, like a flash picture: a middle-aged white man—a volunteer she'd seen around recently but didn't know by name yet—blinking in the sudden light, his hand down the pants of a little black girl, no more than four years old—Kanessa Jackson.
And then the light exploded around her, as if her world suddenly became an overexposed video in which she heard her voice shouting, screaming, with glaring light everywhere as she spun into a wild 180-degree pan, stopping at a fire hose and chemical extinguisher recessed in the wall. Her hands pulling open the glass door, grabbing the canister and turning, swinging it at the man, watching him duck but not soon enough, catching him on the side of his head, watching him try to stumble in one direction as Kanessa ran in the other, following him, beating him on his head, his back, beating him down, and then bludgeoning him until—
"Alicia! Alicia, my God, you'll kill him!"
She felt hands grabbing her arms, restraining her, but she didn't want to stop. She wanted to kill him. She wanted him dead.
"Alicia, please!"
Raymond's voice. She stopped struggling. She looked down at the bloody man, cowering and whimpering beneath her. And suddenly she wanted to be sick. She stumbled back but did not release her grip on the fire extinguisher.
"Call 911!" she gasped.
"Why?" Raymond said. "What happened?"
She glanced at Raymond and saw the shock and concern in his eyes. He'd never seen her like this. Of course not. No one had. She'd never been like this. And it wasn't over. Blood lust still pounded in her ears like a war drum. Alicia didn't know who was more afraid—the creep on the floor, Raymond, or herself.
"Get the cops!" she said. "I want this perv out of here and locked up! Now!"
"Okay!" Raymond said, backing away, "but just be cool, okay, Alicia? Just be cool."
"And find Kanessa Jackson. Have one of the nurses check her over. Make sure she's all right."
As Raymond moved off, she turned back to the creep. The sick feeling waned as rage flared again.
"And you," she said through her teeth. It took all her restraint to keep from taking a few more swings at him. "You stay right where you are, or so help me God, I'll kill you."
7.
After leaving Jorge—they'd come to an agreement on how they'd approach Ramirez and on Jack's split of the proceeds—Jack walked east, crossing Fifth Avenue into Murray Hill.
The area reminded him a little of his own neighborhood, with its brownstones and occasional trees. But Murray Hill was a lot older. Robert Murray's farm used to sit here back in revolutionary times. And when Jack's neighborhood was still "the country," this area here between Park and Fifth had been home to the highest of New York's high society.
Murray Hill seemed to be changing. Jack noticed a fair number of the stately old brownstones sporting discreet plaques engraved with Whatever, Inc. Through the windows he could see bustling offices belonging to architects, designers, and boutique ad agencies.
He found the address Alicia had given him and checked it out from the other side of the street. A three-story brick front nestled in with others of its type on Thirty-eighth Street, but even without the unsightly plywood sheets bolted over the windows, this building stood out. It had a yard.
Well, not a real yard, not even close to the small front yard of Jack's tiny family home back in Jersey. But the Clayton house was set back a couple of dozen extra feet from the sidewalk, and a few blades of pale grass sprouted in the hard-packed dirt behind the low wrought-iron fence.
He spotted an occupied gray Buick with a faded Clinton/Gore in '96 bumper sticker parked at the curb before it. Two shadowy forms slouched in the front seat. Must have been there awhile: The street outside the driver's window was littered with butts.
Jack kept moving, ambling to the corner, then crossing over and returning along the near side.
On this pass he spotted a walkway around the east side of the house, passing under a trellis that once might have sported roses; now only a gnarled tangle of dead brown branches remained.
He sneaked a glance inside the Buick as he passed. A pair of tough-looking slabs of beef, one bearded, one mustached, sat hunched in the front seat. The "private security" Alicia had mentioned, no doubt.
Jack finished his circuit of the street and stood at the west end of the block, looking back. He imagined the Clayton house in flames, saw those flames spreading, jumping from building to building…
He wondered if Alicia had thought about that. She might be crazy enough to try to destroy the place, but he didn't think she wanted to raze the entire block.
Maybe he ought to mention that possibility to her. He found a pay phone on the next corner and called the Center.
He recognized Tiffany's voice, but she told him things were "a bit confused" there at the moment. Could Dr. Clayton call him back?
He wondered about that and asked to speak to Ms. DiLauro, if she was there. She was.
"I didn't see it happen," Gia told him, "but I saw the guy as the EMTs took him out. He was a mess."
"A fire extinguisher, ay?" Jack said, smiling. "I like it. Sounds like the guy deserved every bit of it."
"What's wrong with people, Jack?" Gia said, and he heard a note of despair in her voice. "Are there any limits to the depths people will sink? Isn't there a floor where you say, I won't go below that?"
"If there is, I don't think it's been found yet." He shook his head, reluctantly remembering some of the slimeballs that had slithered through his life over the years. "Every time you think you've found that floor, Gia, I'm afraid you're going to learn it's some guy's ceiling."