“And if I don't tell you?” From the corner of my eye, I saw the woman produce a gun and aim it at me. As she moved, so too did Mr. Pudd. His left hand, which had been concealed in the pocket of his coat until then, appeared from the folds. In it, he held a syringe.
“I'll shoot you. I won't kill you, but I will disable you, and then…” He raised the syringe and a stream of clear liquid issued from the needle.
“Is that what you used to kill Epstein?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “Compared to what you will endure, the unfortunate Rabbi Epstein passed comfortably into the next world. You're about to experience a great deal of pain, Mr. Parker.”
He angled the gun so that it was pointing at my belly, but I wasn't looking at the gun. Instead, I watched as a tiny red dot appeared on Mr. Pudd's groin and slowly began to work its way upward. Pudd's eyes dropped to follow my gaze and his mouth opened in surprise as the dot continued its progress over his chest and neck before stopping in the center of his forehead.
“You first,” I said, but he was already moving. The first bullet-blew away a chunk of his right ear as he loosed off a shot in my direction, the rain hissing beside my face as the heat of the slug warmed the air. Then three more shots came, tearing black holes in his chest. The bullets should have ripped through him, but instead he lurched backward as if he had been punched hard, the impact of the shots sending him tumbling over the wall.
Shards of stone sprang up close to my left leg and I heard the dull sound of the suppressed shots echoing around the arcade. I drew my gun, dove for the cover of the chapel tower, and fired at the pillar where the woman had been standing, but she had stooped low and was scuttling toward the door to the Glass Gallery, her gun bucking as shots came at her from two directions: from the wall where I stood and from the arcade where Louis's dark form was moving through the shadows to intercept her. The door to the gallery opened behind her and she disappeared inside. I was about to follow when a bullet whistled past my ear and I dived to the ground, my face buried in the clump of Our-Lady's-bedstraw. Across from me, Louis leaped over the wall of the arcade as I raised myself up and crawled behind the main wall. I took a deep breath and peered over.
There was nobody there. Pudd was already gone, a smear of blood on some flattened grass the only indication of his former presence.
“Follow the woman,” I said. Louis nodded and ran to the gallery, his gun held discreetly by his side. I climbed onto the wall and then jumped, landing heavily on the ground and rolling down the slope. I sprang up quickly when I came to a stop, the gun outstretched, but Pudd was nowhere to be seen. I moved west, following the trail of blood along the main wall of the Cloisters, until somewhere at the far side of the building I heard a shot fired, then another, followed by the squealing of tires. Seconds later, a blue Voyager sped down Margaret Corbin Drive. I ran to the road, hoping for a clear shot, but an MTA bus turned the corner at the same time and I held my fire for fear of hitting the bus or its passengers. The last thing I saw as the Voyager disappeared was a figure slumped forward on the dashboard. I wasn't certain, but I thought it was Pudd.
Brushing the grass from my pants and coat, I put my gun away and walked swiftly around to the main entrance. A gray-suited museum guard lay slumped against the wall, surrounded by a crowd of newly arrived French tourists. There was blood on his right arm and leg, but he was conscious. I heard the sound of footsteps on the grass behind me and turned to see Louis standing in the shade of the wall. He had obviously made a full circuit of the complex after pursuing the woman in order to avoid passing through the museum again.
“Call nine-one-one,” he said, staring up the road the Voyager had taken. “That's one nasty bitch.”
“They got away.”
“No shit. Got myself tangled up in the damn tourists. She shot the guard to make them panic.”
“We hurt Pudd,” I said. “That's something.”
“I hit him in the chest. He should be dead.”
“He was wearing a vest. The shots blew him off his feet.”
“Shit,” he hissed. “You planning on staying around?”
“To explain Mickey Shine's head on a tree? I don't think so.” We climbed onto the MTA bus, its driver oblivious to the furor at the main door, and sat in separate seats as he pulled away. For a brief moment, as he turned onto the main road, he was able to see the entrance to the Cloisters and the crowd around the fallen guard.
“Something happen?” he called back to us.
“I think somebody fainted,” I said.
“Place ain't that pretty,” he replied, and he said nothing more until he dropped us at the subway station. There was a cab turning at the curb, and we told the driver to head downtown.
I dropped Louis off at the Upper West Side, while I continued down to the Village to collect my overnight bag. When I was done, I dropped into the Strand Book Store on Broadway and found a companion volume for the Cloisters exhibition. Then I sat in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue, leafing through the illustrations and watching the people go by. Whatever Mickey Shine had guessed or suspected had died with him, but at least I now knew what Grace Peltier had taken from the Fellowship: a book, a record of some kind, which Mr. Pudd acknowledged to be an Apocalypse. But why should a biblical text be so important that Pudd was willing to kill to get it back?
Rachel was still in Boston, and would join me in Scarborough the following day. She had refused an offer of protection from Angel and an offer of a Colt Pony Pocketlite from Louis. Unbeknownst to her, she was being discreetly watched by a gentleman named Gordon Buntz and one of his associates, Amy Brenner. They'd given me a professional discount, but they were still eating up Jack Mercier's advance. Meanwhile, Angel was already in Scarborough; he had checked into the Black Point Inn at Prouts Neck, which gave him the freedom to roam around the area without attracting the attention of the Scarborough PD. I'd given him a National Audubon Society field guide to New England; armed with a pair of binoculars, he was now officially the world's least likely bird-watcher. He had been monitoring Jack Mercier, his house, and his movements since the previous afternoon.
Outside Balducci's, a black Lexus SC400 pulled up to the curb. Louis was sitting in the driver's seat. When I opened the door, Johnny Cash was solemnly intoning the words to Soundgarden's “Rusty Cage.”
“Nice car,” I said. “Your bank manager recommend it?”
He shook his head sorrowfully. “Man, I tell you, you need class like a junkie need a hit.”
I dumped my bag on the leather backseat. It made a satisfyingly dirty sound, although it was nothing compared to the sound Louis made when he saw the mark it left on his upholstery. As we pulled away from the curb, Louis took a huge contraband Cuban cigar from his jacket pocket and proceeded to light up. Thick blue smoke immediately filled the car.
“Hey!” I said.
“Fuck you mean, ‘Hey’?”
“Don't smoke in the car.”
“It's my car.”
“Your secondary fumes are a danger to my health.”
Louis choked on a mouthful of smoke before raising one carefully plucked eyebrow in my direction. “You been beaten up, shot twice, drowned, electrocuted, frozen, injected with poisons, three of your damn teeth been kicked out of your head by an old man everybody thought was dead, and you worried about secondary smoke? Secondary smoke ain't no danger to your health. You a danger to your health.”
With that, he returned his attention to his driving.
I let him smoke the cigar in peace.
After all, he had a point.