The blood...
Daniel directed her east. “The apartment’s that way. About eight, ten blocks. Not far.”
But before they started walking Gabriela took his arm and said, “Wait. Let’s ditch the hats and get some better camouflage.” She tapped the dark, logo-free baseball cap she was wearing. “We need more than this to fool them.” Nodding at a discount clothing store up the block. “Let’s go shopping.”
Five minutes later they were out, wearing jeans — his blue, hers black — and sweatshirts and windbreakers, also dark. His top said, NYU. Hers was bare of type or images. The clothes they’d been wearing were in shopping bags.
She grimaced and clutched her rib cage, coughed. Then wiped a spot of blood from her lip.
“Mac!”
She said dismissingly, “It’s all right. I can handle it.”
They continued walking.
Her phone pinged, a text. She glanced at the screen. A smile, dampened by a wince, appeared.
“The Complication.”
“What did he say?”
“He got his present.” Gabriela decided not to tell him the rest that Frank Walsh had texted.
They were at the corner when a dark sedan sped by — clearly an unmarked police car. This one, unlike the squad cars a moment ago, slowed as it grew close. Then sped up and continued on, vanishing around the corner.
No other police cars or uniformed officers were in the area. “I think it’s clear,” Daniel said.
Into his backpack he stuffed the shopping bag containing the gray Canali suit and shirt he’d changed out of at the store. Gabriela examined the contents of her bag and noticed spatters of blood on her sweater and windbreaker. “I’m dumping these. Shit. I loved that sweater.”
She went through the pockets and kept only the money; everything else — receipts, bloody tissues and a Bic pen — she left in the bag. She looked around and noticed a Department of Sanitation truck, filled to the brim, en route to the processing facility on 14th Street at the Hudson River.
She slung the shopping bag into the back of the truck as the driver waited for the light to change.
Gabriela gripping his arm, Daniel set a good pace and they wove through the herds of pedestrians filling the streets on this blustery Sunday afternoon.
Chapter 31
Gabriela’s Wednesdays
2:15 P.M., SUNDAY
1 HOUR EARLIER
Detective Brad Kepler watched his boss read the media release once, twice, again.
Captain Paul Barkley looked up at the NYPD press officer, a wobbly young man with persistent acne, who sat before him in this hellhole of an operations room. Then, without saying a word, he looked down and read once more.
Barkley’s stomach made a Harley-Davidson noise that everyone in the room pretended to ignore.
Kepler knew that most Sundays, this time of day Barkley was tucking away his wife’s roast beef, along with — when she wasn’t looking — massive forkfuls of buttered mashed potatoes. The detective was aware of this routine because he’d been invited to dinner a few times. He had three repetitive memories of the occasions: Barkley telling the same quasi-blue jokes over and over. The roast beef being very good. And Kepler’s spending the entire time trying to figure out if there were any possible scenarios for telling Barkley’s know-it-all college-student daughter to shut the fuck up. Which, of course, there were not.
Kepler himself read the release again.
Fred Stanford Chapman, 29,... wife, Elizabetta, 31, two children, Kyle and Sophie... Surgery to remove a bullet lodged near his heart is planned for later today... Investigations continue... Prognosis is not good...
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
“How many calls?” Barkley asked the youngster.
“From the press? A hundred.”
Barkley snapped, “That’s an exaggeration.”
Kepler thought: Probably isn’t. His partner, Naresh Surani, seemed to concur.
“I wanted to keep it quiet,” the captain said.
“A shooting?” From the PA youngster.
“Yes, a shooting. In goddamn Manhattan. I wanted to keep it goddamn quiet. But I guess that didn’t work out, did it? This was a leak the size of the Titanic.”
Kepler corrected, The Titanic wasn’t a leak. The Titanic was a ship that got fucked because of a leak.
But, of course, the edit was tacit.
Barkley snatched up a pen and began to revise.
Which gave Kepler the chance to look around their new digs. This was the second room the Charles Prescott Operation — the CP Op — had been assigned to in the past two days. Sure, this happened to be a busy time for bad guys and little operations like the CP Op didn’t mean very much, in terms of chalking up cred, so they had to take whatever room was free at the moment. But this one was the pits. The twenty-by-thirty-foot space did have a few high-def monitors, but they were off, and they didn’t even seem hooked up. The walls were scuffed — nothing new there — and the government-issue furniture was cheap. Nearly a third of the floor space was devoted to storage. Something smelled off too, as if a take-out turkey sandwich had fallen behind one of the filing cabinets a long, long time ago.
At least it couldn’t get any worse.
Barkley slid the press release back like an air hockey puck. “Fix it. And by the way, no comment from me, other than the investigations continue. Stop at that. Nothing more.”
The press officer tried again. “But a hundred calls, sir.”
“Why’re you still here?” Barkley made a sound like a disagreeable transmission. This one came from his throat, not his belly.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” The Public Affairs officer scooted out.
Why the hell does that kid wear a sidearm? Kepler thought.
Barkley turned to the two detectives, sitting at a battered fiberboard table, and barked, “Jesus.” He nodded toward Kepler’s copy of the release.
Fred Stanford Chapman, 29,... gunshot wound...
Then the boss changed direction. “Now, her.”
He didn’t need to say Gabriela. There were no other women causing them so much anxiety at the moment.
“I told you yesterday I wanted her under surveillance. Twenty-four seven. What the hell happened? You were at her place, right? Cameras, microphones.”
Her.
Brad Kepler shrugged. “She tipped to us. I don’t know. And then started using evasive tactics.”
“The hell does that mean? Sounds like something from a bad cop movie.”
“But,” Kepler said, “we’re still on her.” A glance at his partner. “Right?”
Surani called Surveillance, had a discussion, then clapped his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Barkley and Kepler, “We’ve got officers close. It’s righteous.”
Which sounded like something out of an even worse cop movie.
Righteous?
The captain asked, “How’d you manage the tail, if she slipped you at her place?”
Surani explained, “Brad got a GPS on her.”
“How the hell you do that?” The captain gave one of his broad frowns that he used for emphasis, a gesture several of his detectives had developed pretty good imitations of, Brad Kepler included.
“She was distracted. It was chaos, weapons, screaming, diving for cover. I got the thing into her jacket pocket.”
Barkley was pleased, Kepler could tell, but his nature required him to ask, “You think that was a safe idea?” The captain could never just say, Good job.