‘Mallory, no cowboy shots this time out. I backed you with Coffey, but he was right and you know it. If you gotta spend a bullet, you do it right and you do it clean. Okay? School’s out.’
They passed through the lobby in a testy silence and rode up to the third floor in a gray metal box the size of a coffin. The elevator doors opened on to a single room the length and width of a city block. Irregular corridors, made of stacked packages and bundles, extended far into the illusion of converging parallels. Dust hung in the air around the forklift shuttling back and forth down the wide center aisle, picking up cartons as numbers were called out over a bullhorn in the hand of a man with bandy legs and a beer belly.
Mallory flashed her badge and fell into step with the man as he walked in the center aisle. Grimy light from never-washed windows gave the place a secondhand look to go with the smell of the clothing. Riker had worn such clothes as a child, and he could never lose that smell.
He followed behind Mallory, pulling out his notebook.
The bandy-legged crew chief was alternately calling out numbers from his clipboard and carrying on a conversation that Mallory was not listening to.
‘No one would touch one of those bundles,’ said the crew chief. ‘Who’s gonna risk a job for a crummy secondhand rag?’
Riker smiled. He guessed the rag in question had set Mallory back at least nine hundred dollars, if not more. Nothing but the best for Mallory. Helen Markowitz had seen to that, beginning in the early days when Riker was still allowed to call her Kathy. But despite the designer wardrobe Helen had lavished on the child, Kathy had gone everywhere in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirts.
Today, that wardrobe only varied in the tailored, gray wool blazer that bulged on the left as a warning that she carried a large gun in a shoulder holster. And she had traded her canvas tennis shoes for the most expensive leather running shoes God ever personally cobbled.
‘Who handled the bundles when they came in?’ she asked.
‘Could’ve been any one of eight guys,’ said the crew chief and then called out, ‘489,’ in the amplified scream of the bullhorn.
‘Get them out here, all eight of them.’
‘Look, honey, I’m always happy to cooperate with the cops, but I ain’t – ’
‘Did I ask you for cooperation? Get them.’
And now Riker could see that the crew chief was from the old school – no woman was going to dress him down and get away with it. The man turned on Mallory with all the indignation of a pit bull, lips parted to a display of teeth. And then, something in her face shut his mouth. Perhaps he had just remembered that he had come out this morning without a weapon.
He cleared his throat, lifted the bullhorn and barked off the names. The men came out of all the stacks with clipboards and pencils, sweat and curiosity, leers for Mallory, and puffs of cigarette smoke. They fell into a ragged line.
As she looked them over like a prospective buyer, the leers dropped away and Riker watched discomfort settle in. There was shifting of feet and the small talk of eyes between them. One man was sweating more than the rest, and his Adam’s apple had a life of its own. Mallory seemed to like this one with the red hair and freckles. Now she kept her eyes on him alone. His shoulders hunched, and his head lowered as he made himself smaller. His muscles were tensing, bunching through the thin cloth of his T-shirt.
Mallory turned to Riker and lifted her chin a bare quarter of an inch. She looked back to the redhead. Riker circled around to the right. As Mallory moved forward, the redhead balked and ran. Riker reached out to grab the T-shirt and missed. And now Mallory was pounding after the man, and Riker jogged behind her in the dust kicked up by her shoes.
‘Jimmy,’ the crew chief screamed, ‘come back here, you jerk! It’s only a secondhand sports coat!’
But Jimmy was out of earshot.
Jimmy Farrow was running as fast as he had ever run from a cop, and he’d outrun a few. He looked back to see the old guy turning red trying to keep up, but the woman was almost on top of him. Every time he chanced to look over his shoulder, she was right there, four feet behind and not even breathing hard, her blazer flapping open to expose a very big gun.
Oh, Christ, was she grinning? She was.
She stayed with him through the narrow streets, then across all the lanes of traffic on wide Houston, and over the courtyard wall of an apartment building in the West Village.
He made the leap of his life and hooked his hands on a fire escape. He hauled his body up and climbed the metal stairs. As he gained the next landing, he looked down through the grate. She was nowhere in sight.
He was looking up to the landing above when he was grabbed by the hair and pulled backward.
Where did she come from?
A kick to the inside of his knee and he was off balance, falling to the grate of the fire escape, rolling to the edge. Blood rushed to his head as he was leveraged over the side and dangling, arms waving in circles. He was looking down at the sidewalk three flights below. Twisting his head to look up through the grate, he could see her holding the back of his jeans and kneeling on his legs. He stopped struggling. If she let go, he was gone. She could dump him any time she wanted to.
‘So you stole the cashmere blazer and…?’
She eased off his legs and let him hang a little lower.
‘The jacket!’ he screamed. ‘That’s what this is about? That stupid sports jacket?’
‘You stole it, right?’
He saw the pavement come up a few more inches to meet him. A winter breeze chilled the sweat on his body and made him shiver.
‘Yeah, I did it! Okay?’
‘Didn’t she like it?’
What? Crazy bitch. What does she want?
‘Yeah, she liked it! She liked it just fine!’
He wondered if he might be right-side up after all, and it was the world that was upside down. The old cop was down below, snagging the ladder for the fire escape and lowering it down to the pavement. The old guy took his sweet time walking up the stairs, like it was nothing to see some poor bastard hanging in midair and pointed headfirst toward the cement.
Damn cops.
‘Mallory, don’t do this to me,’ said the old guy. ‘You don’t want Coffey on my ass, do you?’
And the woman said, ‘He won’t complain. I can do anything I want with him.’
‘You drop him, and that’s three days of paperwork.’
She loosened her grip. He dropped lower.
‘Okay, okay!’ screamed Jimmy Farrow. ‘I already told her I did it! Let me up!’
He was being hauled up by four ungentle hands. When he was right-side up and sitting down, the old guy took out his notebook. ‘You wanna make a statement, kid? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Yeah, okay. My grandmother’s Social Security check got screwed up this month. A neighbor bought her groceries for a few days till my mom could replace the money. I just wanted to give Amanda – she’s the neighbor. I wanted to give her something. It was my grandmother’s idea.’
‘Now let me get this straight,’ said the old guy, pen circling over his notebook. ‘First you give Amanda the blazer, then you killed her – and your grandmother made you do it?’
Oh, God, they’re both nuts.
‘I didn’t do anything to her. I just gave her the sports jacket.’
‘Were you very close to Amanda?’
‘No! I go to my grandmother’s building twice a week to sweep out the halls. My grandmother’s the super, but she’s not up to slopping all those floors and stairs any more.’