49

Ella was running for her life.

She drove toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and after she passed through the tunnel, she was just going to keep going. Out of Manhattan, out of the state of New York, maybe out of the country. She was driving the car she’d rented under the name of Carol Owen and as soon as she could, she’d stop someplace and buy a used car with cash, and then just keep driving. She had no idea where she was going to go. All she knew was that she needed to stay out of sight and off the grid until she could figure out what to do next.

She was now sure the guy with the cane she’d seen walking by her car was DeMarco—and he’d fucked up everything. She’d been parked across the street from the ice cream shop in a place where she could see the interior through a picture window. She’d known that Rachel Quinn had been headed toward the shop when she took her mutt for a walk, so she’d driven past Quinn and arrived at the shop before her. The Jamaican girl was already waiting in front of the shop in her car when Quinn arrived, and Ella saw her get out of her car wearing a ski mask—and then that fucking DeMarco came out of nowhere, burst into the shop, and hit the Jamaican in the head with his cane.

And now her life, as she’d known it, was over.

Ella had decided that the only way she could ensure an acquittal for Toby Rosenthal—and make sure she collected the million Slade owed her—was if Quinn didn’t appear as a witness. If Slade had done his job and gotten another delay, she might have been able to find another way to deal with Quinn, but since he’d failed and she’d run out of time, killing Quinn was the only solution.

She’d asked Carmine Fratello to do two things. One of those things was to get her a gun—the snub-nosed .38 in her purse on the passenger seat. The other thing she’d asked Fratello to do, figuring a Mafia thug like him would know somebody, was to put her in contact with a professional killer, one brave enough or dumb enough or greedy enough to kill a person in broad daylight in the ice cream store. She was hoping the cops would think that Quinn and the clerk in the ice cream store had been killed in a robbery and not conclude that Quinn had been killed because she was a witness. But regardless of what the cops thought, Quinn would be dead, and the only witness left to testify against Toby Rosenthal would be the busboy.

She’d met with the Jamaican girl in the Bronx earlier in the day. She’d expected that the killer would be a man and was surprised when a young woman in her twenties walked up to her in Denny’s. The girl scared the shit out of her: slim muscular arms, a thin scar on the left side of her face, eyes so cold that Ella doubted she had a soul. The deal was that she’d pay the Jamaican forty thousand to take the risk of killing Quinn, twenty up front and the other twenty after the job was done.

Her real plan, however, had been to kill the Jamaican when they met the second time—which was the reason she’d bought a gun from Carmine. The last thing she wanted was to have some professional killer able to identify her and testify that she’d paid to have Quinn killed; she knew if the Jamaican was ever caught for some other crime she’d give up Ella in a heartbeat. But after Ella met the Jamaican in Denny’s, she began to wonder if she’d be able to kill her. Her conscience wouldn’t have bothered her—the woman was a killer, after all—but she was afraid the Jamaican would be too hard to kill.

Now she didn’t have that problem. She had a much bigger one.

The Jamaican didn’t know Ella’s name, but DeMarco did, and DeMarco would show the Jamaican Ella’s photo, and without a doubt—to get a reduced sentence—the Jamaican would testify that Ella had paid her to kill Rachel Quinn. Ella was willing to bet that within an hour—as soon as the Jamaican got over being cane-whipped by DeMarco—there would be a warrant out to arrest her for attempted murder.

Ella felt her eyes well up with tears. It just wasn’t fair. She’d worked so hard to become who she was today. She’d escaped the fate of being raised by shitty, apathetic parents, overcome a lousy education, and become a skilled professional in something she excelled at. If she’d been able to keep working just a few more years, she would have been able to retire in style. But now that wasn’t going to happen. Thanks to DeMarco, the cops knew who she was and what she did for a living and they would be hunting for her. It was going to be impossible to line up another job helping some slimeball lawyer get his rich guilty client off for murder.

Then she thought: Quit feeling sorry for yourself. It’s not the end of the world. It wasn’t like she was penniless. She had over four million bucks—the three million she’d had before the Rosenthal case and the million Slade paid her at the beginning of the case. Not as much as she wanted to have before she retired, but certainly enough to get by. She’d get a new ID, sneak across the border into Mexico, and from there head to someplace cheap but civilized—maybe Panama or some city in South America. Yeah, she’d be just fine.

And that’s when she saw the cop car behind her, its light bar flashing. That damn DeMarco. He must have gotten her license plate number and put out an APB on her, and then the cameras in the tunnel must have captured the license plate.

“Ella Sue,” she said out loud, “you are fucked.”