‘Found two more upstairs. Both shot in the head.’
‘Was this a robbery?’
His partner stared at the blood-stained and bullet-riddled walls around them.
‘No. This was an execution.’
The other man looked down at the corpses. The body closest to his feet was a big man in shorts and a white shirt, lying flat on his back. He had a gold chain around his neck, thick chest hair protruding through the gap in the fabric, his hair combed back.
He’d been shot three times in the chest. Blood had dried around him, his lifeless eyes staring up vacantly at the ceiling.
Shifting his gaze, a body ten feet away caught the officer’s eye. The guy had a pistol in a holster on his hip, lying face down in a pool of his own blood. He wasn’t the only corpse in the room who had a weapon.
Staying where they were, the two cops both heard the sound of wailing sirens somewhere in the distance. Back up was almost here.
Then a noise came from inside the house. The two men froze. They pulled their side arms and looked at each other.
It had come from one of the rooms along the corridor.
They lifted their pistols and stood there, listening. They heard it again.
A rustle.
Movement.
Keeping their weapons in the aim, the two men moved down the corridor slowly as the sirens outside grew louder. There was the sound of a series of cars screeching to a halt in the drive, the quiet villa about to become a hell of a lot busier.
Behind the two cops, the thin curtains rippled gently in the sea breeze.
And the tinkling of the wind chimes echoed through the house.
*
Two weeks later and almost fourteen hundred miles south of East Hampton, a man twisted a key in a lock and pushed open the door to his second-floor apartment. He lived alone and had just come back from a long day’s work. He’d been having a rough time at the office lately and today had been especially gruelling, full of questions and not many answers. He felt like a boxer with his back to the ropes, taking an onslaught of punches, desperately trying to make it to the bell and back to his corner. He was hanging in there.
Just.
Closing the door behind him and ensuring it was locked, the man laid the keys on the side, along with a pistol he pulled from his belt and a cell phone he drew from his pocket. Walking over to the fridge, he yanked the door open and took out a cold Corona from the shelf, unscrewing the cap and tossing it at the trash. Scooping up a take-out menu, he wandered into the lounge and collapsed onto a chair, tired and pissed off in equal measure.
He grabbed the remote control from the arm beside him and flicked on the television, taking a long pull of cold beer. The last thing he felt like doing was concentrating on anything right now, but considering what he did for a living, it was important to stay abreast of current affairs.
He also wanted to see if he or anyone he knew had made the headlines.
He flicked onto CNN and took another swig of icy beer, looking at the take-out menu and thinking about what to order. He glanced at the screen again.
And he froze.
The footage was of a small girl leaving an urban Police Department Plaza in what had to be Washington or Philadelphia or maybe New York. She was being moved quickly, escorted fast by a male and female security team, reporters and journalists being kept well back.
The man scanned the banner headline and the images.
Slamming his beer on the table beside him, he jumped up from the chair and rushed across the room, grabbing his cell phone. Dialling a number, he moved back in front of the television and continued watching the screen, at the little girl being ushered towards a blacked-out car.
Someone picked up the other end.
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s me!’ the man said hurriedly.
‘What is it?’
‘You’re not going to believe who I’m looking at right now.’
‘Who?’
‘CNN, right now. Now!’
‘OK. Hang on.’ There was a pause. A shuffling the other end of the line. ‘Hurry!’
Another pause.
Then the man the other end came back.
‘Holy shit.’
‘It’s her,’ the man said, staring at the screen. ‘It’s her.’
TWO
‘C’mon, push!’ 3rd Grade NYPD Detective Josh Blake ordered, standing inside a gym eight days later in New York City. ‘Push! Let’s see some effort!’
‘What do you think this is?’ his detective partner hissed through gritted teeth, fighting with a barbell on a bench underneath. The weighted bar in his hands was halfway up but it wasn’t moving fast, two hundred and twenty five pounds of nothing but solid metallic resistance.
‘Sometime this week would be nice,’ Josh said, watching him struggle.
Gritting his teeth, the blond man on the bench eventually locked out his arms and exhaled, the repetition complete. Josh nodded, helping him rack the barbell and the man sat up, wiping sweat off his brow and glancing around.
The gym was an upmarket one, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was late afternoon on a Sunday but there were still a few people around the place, some working hard on treadmills and stair climbers, others using the weight stations. The cost of a month’s membership here equalled the blond man’s rent in Queens for the same period, but Josh had paid for the year and was allowed to bring a guest every now and then. He was a great advertisement for the gym, the fruits of his labours clear in his physique. Black and just turned thirty, Josh was built like a Sherman tank or someone who stood outside a club with his arms folded asking to see some ID. Despite looking so physically intimidating, he possessed an even temperament and an even cooler head, and was one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. He and the blond man on the bench had been NYPD partners for eight months, and had become great friends outside of the Department.
‘Getting there,’ Josh said.
The other man nodded, rising from the bench, and took a seat on another positioned near the window. His name was Sam Archer. Twenty eight years old, he was also a 3rd Grade Detective and worked with Josh in the NYPD’s Counter Terrorism Bureau, a division formed recently in the last couple of years. A hair over six foot and a hundred and eighty five pounds, Archer was blond with blue eyes and had a face that looked more suited to magazine covers than law enforcement, a fact he was constantly ribbed about by his colleagues. However, like many before them, they’d quickly learned not to judge a book by its cover where he was concerned. He may have looked like a movie star but he was as tough as nails, carving out a damn good reputation in the short time he’d been a NYPD Detective. The two men operated in a five-man field team based out of the CT Bureau’s headquarters across the East River in Queens. However, Archer had spent the last three months trapped behind a desk whilst he recovered from a broken ankle and a nasty case of pneumonia after an unexpected hard fall into a freezing river at Christmas.
What had started out as an irritating chesty cough at the beginning of January, which he’d ignored, had eventually landed him in hospital and being pumped full of antibiotics for two weeks. He’d lost twenty pounds in weight and felt about as strong as a new born puppy once he got back on his feet, not aided by the broken ankle which had complicated his recovery. He’d finally ditched the cast and the crutches five weeks ago, and had been doing intense physiotherapy ever since, working on getting the strength and mobility back in the damaged joint. Between physio sessions he’d spent much of his spare time in the gym either out in Queens or here under Josh’s expert tutelage, trying to get back to full physical health. It had been tough going, but muscle memory had kicked in and he’d regained the weight he’d lost and most of his power. He’d just been assessed and finally cleared for field work again, starting officially tomorrow morning, the best news he’d heard all year. Considering the types of people the Counter Terrorism Bureau were tasked to deal with, he had to be in peak physical condition to do his job. Now, he felt he was pretty much there.