The sturdy brick building with its line of dormers seemed to call to her more strongly every time she passed it. It was like a fortress with a pale concrete stoop and solid wood double doors. Each door had a large brass knocker beneath a small leaded glass window. There was black iron grillwork over the ground-floor windows. The building didn’t look as if it could be easily broken into. A person might feel safe there.
Lavern leaned against a NO PARKING sign and sighed. She knew that a person couldn’t stay inside Broken Wing forever. That was the problem. She’d heard about women who’d found refuge there and stayed for months, and then left only to be reclaimed by their patiently waiting abusers.
Lavern knew Hobbs was patient.
He would wait.
She took a final glance at the thick wooden doors that would provide protection for only so long; then she limped away along the sidewalk. Lightning still flickered and charged patches of purple sky between the tall buildings, but whatever breath of air there’d been had now ceased. No more tentative raindrops found their way to earth. It wasn’t going to rain this evening. It had been a trick. Life was a damned trick, a painful practical joke.
As she walked, Lavern tried to think of lots of things, but found her mind focusing on the shotgun at home in the hall closet. The sharp pain in her left side whenever she took a step kept bringing her back to the gun. It was a twelve gauge, like the one her father had let her fire once in some woods behind a rented cabin. She remembered the deafening bark of the gun, the heavy recoil against her right shoulder. She’d fired at a paper target he’d nailed to a tree, and she’d hit it.
She’d hit it.
A pretty damned good shot.
I could do it again.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the shotgun. It was unhealthy, a fixation like this, but she couldn’t seem to control it. She guessed that was why they called them fixations. It was all Hobbs’s fault.
Hobbs’s damned fault.
He’d blocked every avenue of escape, made her into something that would have no choice other than to do to him what he might secretly want but not have the courage to do himself.
Suicide by wife.
I could do it again.
The pain in her side became more intense, and she wondered if Hobbs had cracked one of her ribs,
Traffic was backing up because the signal at the next intersection was red. A young couple, a tall man and a blond woman, climbed nimbly out of a stopped cab and disappeared into one of the buildings. They ran hunched over with their arms linked and their heads down, as if they were trying to get in out of the nonexistent rain or escape the paparazzi.
Their own dreamworld. Do they know, or even care, what’s real?
Lavern felt a pang of envy so sharp it made her break stride.
She knew that inside the building the couple had entered was a small fusion restaurant with a bar, where she could get a drink. Alcohol would moderate her rage and dull the pain.
Every step was agony, but she began to walk faster. The shotgun remained on the edge of her thoughts.
I could do it again.
PART III
A few strong instincts, and a few plain rules.
—Wordsworth, “Alas! What Boots
the Long Laborious Quest?”
57
He would need a few things from a hardware store: a steel bicycle hook, a length of strong nylon rope, a roll of wide duct tape, a plastic drop cloth, some rubbing alcohol to clean flesh so it would dry fast and completely and the tape would be well bonded. He already had the rest of what he’d need—a portable electric drill to create a starting hole, so he could make sure he was fastening the hook in a solid wood joist capable of supporting body weight.
As always when collecting his materials, he acted circumspectly.
A short subway ride got him within walking distance of a big-box chain store in Queens, where he bought the required items. It might raise suspicion if he made his purchases in Manhattan, especially the steel hook, after all the publicity about Terri Gaddis.
Along with the hook he bought a bicycle tire pump, a diversionary item just in case the dazed-looking teenager behind the checkout counter was more alert than she appeared. On the way home, he stopped in at a Duane Reade and bought the bottle of rubbing alcohol. No danger there of arousing suspicion.
In a luggage shop on Third Avenue he purchased a cheap blue canvas carry-on to put everything in so that people glancing at him wouldn’t fix him in their memories. He’d be merely a man in a hotel lobby carrying unexceptional luggage. One of hundreds of such men on hundreds of hours of security tape.
Once back in his room he’d phone Mitzi and tell her he’d reserved a table at Mephisto’s for them tomorrow night. She was expecting that. It was her birthday. After drinks and dinner, he’d suggest they go to her apartment. He’d hint that he had a gift for her. She’d see the blue canvas bag and assume it contained her gift, and in a way it did.
He had something rare indeed to give her on her birthday—the perfect symmetry of time. Enter and exit screaming on the same date, though thanks to the duct tape, exit would be much quieter than entry.
Check the birth and death dates on a lot of tombstones, he mused, and you’d seldom see such ideal closure.
He was sure that Mitzi, if she could, would instantly come up with a joke about it.
Quinn was sure the reason why Renz had chosen the corner of Forty-third and Broadway for their meeting was so he could eat one of the knishes sold by the street vender there.
They had to move down the block and back into the display-glassed doorway of an electronics shop in order not to be buffeted by the tourists and various Times Square area characters streaming past. Renz’s driver followed unobtrusively in Renz’s long black limo, gliding from one illegal parking space to another.
Renz shifted the knish to his right hand. “This guy comes into the two-one precinct yesterday and complains he found a package on his doormat. It was wrapped in brown paper and taped tight. His name was printed on it. Seems somebody left it there, rang the bell, and ran. Inside the package was a revolver.”
“A twenty-five Springbok?” Quinn asked hopefully, watching Renz take a bite of knish while holding his free hand cupped beneath his chin as a crumb catcher.
“I wish it wash sho,” Renz said around the knish.
Quinn knew something must have come of the man’s complaint, or Renz wouldn’t even have learned about it.
“Shmith an’ Weshon,” Renz said, and swallowed. “But the meaning here was clear, so the guy was told what all these poor schmucks are being told. There’s no way to know who put the gun there, and yes, he was probably being challenged to what the media and public are calling a duel, and could he list any enemies who might have left the gun.”
“Let me guess,” Quinn said. “He didn’t have any enemies.”
“No! The guy listed over twenty people he thinks might like to shoot him. He’s sales manager at a real estate agency, and apparently that makes for a lot of enemies.”
“If you do it the wrong way, I guess.”
“Oh, he even struck the detectives taking the complaint as a prick. I’m sure he’s a real bully. That’s what everyone’s saying now, including Berty Wrenner.” Renz took another bite of knish. Half of it broke off and fell into his waiting palm, and he flicked it away. Some of it got on the pants cuff of a man in a suit walking past, and he glared at Renz.
Quinn waited until Renz had chewed and swallowed, so as not to be sprayed by knish. “Who’s Berty Wrenner?”