“How the fuck do you think I feel? I’m the one who hired Engelmann. The chairman blames me for his failure.”
“Aw, c’mon. You’re his handpicked guy. He can’t stay pissed at you forever. Hell, maybe putting Segreti in the ground will get you back into the chairman’s good graces.”
“Maybe. But first, I gotta be the guy to tell him the shitheel’s still alive. One thing’s for sure, though.”
“What’s that?”
“This time, I’m not leaving anything to chance. I wanna see him die with my own eyes. It’s the only way we’ll know that this time, the motherfucker stays dead.”
9.
HENDRICKS LEANED HEAVILY on Cameron’s shoulder as she helped him from the car, the wound in his side stamping her T-shirt red with every step. “C’mon,” she said. “My apartment’s upstairs. Let’s get you in before someone sees you.”
She struggled to support his weight as they crossed the patchy lawn. “Wait,” he said, trying to wriggle from her grasp and turn around. “The car.”
Cameron eyed his eight-year-old Accord-four-door, silver, nondescript. She’d driven it two miles inland from the restaurant while Hendricks lay in the backseat applying pressure to stanch the bleeding and cursing every time she hit a pothole. Now it was parked at the curb in front of an ugly prewar home that had been converted, shabbily, some decades ago into multiple apartment units. “Is stolen, I’m guessing.”
Who was this girl? he wondered. “Nah. It’s clean. I bought it from a private seller and paid in cash. But it doesn’t matter now. If anybody saw us leave the Salty Dog, it will lead the cops right to your door. We need to ditch it.”
“What we need is to get you inside. You’re barely upright. You’re covered in blood.”
“Damn it, kid, this isn’t a negotiation. The car has to go.”
“Look-there’s a strip mall a half a mile from here. Let me take you upstairs and get you situated. Once you’re safely off the street, I’ll come back down and move it to their lot, okay?”
His gaze traveled from the car to his blood-soaked shirt. Realized that of the two, the latter was more likely to be noticed. “Okay,” he conceded.
They scaled the concrete steps to the porch. Hendricks braced himself with his free hand on the rust-flecked pipe railing. Up close, he could see the house’s aluminum siding was dingy, and the nearest downstairs window’s bottom pane was split by a diagonal crack. Several mailboxes hung crookedly beside the door, each marked with peel-and-stick reflective letters, A to E, and handwritten names scrawled on masking tape. Hendricks scanned them as he went by: Ndiaye. Williamson. Goldenstern. Samuels. Karasiewicz. “Which one’s you?” he asked.
Cameron chuffed as if to say, Nice try. “None of them. I never peeled the old name off when I moved in.”
The front door was unlocked. Inside was a narrow hallway that smelled of cigarettes. The brown indoor/outdoor carpet was worn bare. They bypassed two doors labeled A and B, respectively, and headed up the rickety stairs. The wound in Hendricks’s side flexed excruciatingly as they ascended. He was breathing heavily by the time they reached the second floor.
“Sorry,” Cameron said, “but I’m in E. We’ve got one more flight to go.”
Hendricks set his jaw, and they pressed on.
The top floor was narrower than the first two because it was essentially attic space, tucked into the pitch of the roof. It was hotter up here by a good fifteen degrees. There was no hallway, just a small landing with one door. As they neared it, a dog inside went apeshit.
“You failed to mention you have a dog,” Hendricks said.
“Oh, don’t sweat it. That’s just Cujo.”
Claws scrabbling on hardwood. Snarls punctuated by a snapping jaw. “Sure, a pissed-off dog named Cujo-what’s to sweat?”
“No, I’m serious,” she said, swinging the door open with a flourish. The barking trebled in volume. Hendricks tensed, but inside, there was no dog-just a motion sensor jury-rigged to an off-brand MP3 player that was plugged into a speaker dock. “It’s the actual Cujo…you know, from the movie? My landlord’s a sketchball. This keeps him from prying. On the upside, he takes cash and didn’t ask a lot of questions when I moved in.”
She reached down and shut the barking off. Then she helped him to her futon. Hendricks collapsed atop it, panting.
She disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a towel. “Lemme see your side,” she said.
Hendricks peeled off his ruined shirt. Cameron blanched when she saw the jagged gash across his rib cage. She took a steadying breath, then folded up the towel and pressed it to the wound.
“Hold this a sec.”
He complied. She stripped off her belt-military-style, canvas-and wrapped it around his chest, over the towel. Then she yanked it tight to hold the towel in place.
Hendricks sucked air through clenched teeth.
“Sorry,” she said. “But we need to keep applying pressure until the bleeding stops.”
“I could’ve just held it.”
“Maybe, but I don’t trust you not to pass out while I’m gone.”
“I’ll be fine. This isn’t the first time I’ve been stabbed.”
Cameron eyed his naked torso, taut and riddled with scars. “Yeah. Guess not.”
“Okay, I did as you asked-I came inside without a fight. Now go move the car.”
“All right, all right, I’m going.”
She crossed the room to the dresser. Grabbed a fresh shirt from the drawer. Turned her back to him. Hesitated briefly, then pulled her bloody top up over her head and tossed it to the floor. Hendricks saw a flash of lower back, lean and sun-freckled, but looked away before she exposed her bra.
When she reached the front door, she paused and turned. “Don’t die on me, okay? I won’t be long.”
Hendricks nodded, grimacing at the effort, and reluctantly, she took off down the stairs.
As soon as the door swung shut behind her, Hendricks rose shakily from the futon and began ransacking her apartment. He was hobbled by the wound and knew he didn’t have long, but luckily the place wasn’t very big-maybe one hundred and fifty square feet, bathroom included. And, thankfully, it was nearly bare of furniture, just a futon, a dresser, and a papasan chair, all of which-if the patterns on the sun-bleached floorboards when he moved them were any indication-had come with the place.
He removed drawers and overturned them. Rifled through their contents and checked to see if anything was taped to their undersides. He checked inside the futon’s cushion and the papasan’s too. Ditto the toilet tank and minifridge.
Every time he twisted, lifted, or bent, the knife wound tore a little-but it wasn’t deep, and the towel had slowed his bleeding significantly. His jaw clicked when he moved it, thanks to the punch Dimitris had landed, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t broken.
He was furious that he’d allowed Pappas to get the drop on him, and while he was grateful to Cameron-or whatever her real name was-for saving his life, he had no idea who she worked for, so he couldn’t discount the possibility that she had shot Pappas to silence him. If she was working for the Council, though, why hadn’t she just put him down when she’d had the chance?
Fine, then. Maybe she was on his side-but why? And who the hell was she? Hendricks didn’t know, but he aimed to find out.