LEIGH CROSSED TO THE TABLE where she had left the two letters. For the first time she looked at the address. Her heart gave a sickening, lopsided lurch in her chest.
She turned and watched Luddie take off his jacket and drape it over the back of a chair. “Could I ask you something, Luddie? Why are you getting mail for Rick Martinez?”
The question hung a moment in the air, unanswered. Luddie seemed dissatisfied with the hang of his jacket. He rearranged it on the chair. The sound of Happy’s toy piano floated in from the bedroom.
Luddie smiled. “There are more Rick Martinezes in this city than the one that’s been so famous lately. The Rick Martinez you’ve got in your hand is me. It’s the name I used in my old soldier-of-fortune days.”
She gave him a long glance. The top letter had been postmarked two days ago. “Why do you use the name now?”
“My old employer still provides my health insurance.”
“I thought you’d severed all ties to them. At meetings you always call them your ex-employers—the bad guys from the bad old days.”
He sighed. “Not quite.”
The first two notes of “The Happy Farmer” repeated themselves, over and over, bell-like on the toy piano.
“Why does Tamany deliver your mail?”
Luddie shrugged. “It’s sent to my old address. She lives in the neighborhood.”
Leigh stood staring at Luddie. For the first time in her four years of start-and-stop sobriety, she didn’t believe her sponsor.
She looked at the second envelope. “And Al Nino Martinez? Who’s he?”
“It means to the Martinez child. Happy’s covered on my policy.”
“Why in Spanish?”
“My wife didn’t speak English. The hospital didn’t speak Spanish. They misunderstood her the night that Happy was born.”
She handed Luddie the letters. “What was your wife’s name?”
“Isolda.”
“She died the night Happy was born,” Leigh said.
Luddie nodded.
The sound of the toy piano came to her like a delayed echo, setting up a resonance in her memory. “And that’s the sound on my answering machine—Happy’s toy piano. You phoned me and left a message and Happy was playing his toy piano in the background and that’s how that sound got on my phone tape. You phoned Martinez and left a message and Happy was playing his toy piano and that’s how the sound got on Martinez’s phone tape. And Martinez used his phone tape in the boom box and that’s why the same sound showed up on my answering machine tape and the boom-box tape.”
The moment seemed to stretch out in space. A wave of silence and distance rushed in.
“You lied to me, Luddie. You told me resentment was poison. You told me to give up my resentments, the way you had. But you’ve never given yours up.”
She waited for him to deny it, to say the words that would make her life right again. But he didn’t speak. His face had a stunned look, as if she had thrown him completely off balance.
“You still work for the bad old company.” Understanding imploded on her. “You never stopped. The thrift shops are a front. Martinez was your agent. He was carrying out your revenge, not his. You sent him to kill six innocent people.”
Something metallic glinted in Luddie’s eyes, in the line of their narrowing. “They weren’t innocent.”
“Weren’t they? Who appointed you God—the CIA?”
“If they hadn’t been partying in that Emergency Room, Happy would have a mother today. I’d have a wife. Those selfish idiots took my family from me.”
“If all you got sober for was to kill people, you should have stayed drunk! You’re a clean and sober asshole!”
Luddie crouched down to pick up the revolver from the rug. His eyes never left her. “Leigh—just this once, shut your movie-star mouth.”
“Fuck you, Ostergate!”
He aimed the gun at her.
“I believed in you!” she shouted. “I was honest with you! You never believed in me, you never once were straight with me!”
Luddie drew in a deep breath. He clicked the safety off. His mouth shaped a half smile, and it left a sting as it flicked across her. “Because beneath that desperate veneer of occasional sobriety you’re the same as all your friends. So selfish you can’t even see the destruction you cause.”
“Don’t count on it.” She dove at him, hands flailing.
The barrel of the gun come down like a karate chop across her shoulder. She took a staggering step backward. The wall caught her and propped her up.
The barrel came down again and just as the shot ripped out, something pushed Luddie from behind and threw him off balance. Suddenly he was down on all fours, and Happy was running toward Leigh. She grabbed the child up into her arms. She lunged for the front door, twisted locks and slid bolts and couldn’t open it, twisted again, still couldn’t open it.
Behind her she heard Luddie trying to pull himself to his feet and pulling a bookcase down instead.
She twisted the lock the other way, and this time the door flew open.
The blood was thudding so hard through her veins that the image of the hallway trembled before her eyes. Pulling Happy with her, she ran to the elevator. She pressed the button. Ancient chains and counterweights clanked into motion. Too slow, she realized.
She pushed opened the door to the stairway. The clattering echo of her own footsteps pursued her. There was no light. There wasn’t time to find the switch. Her heart was pounding at her ribs, and a battle was going on in her lungs. She had to help
Happy down the steps one at a time. They reached the first half landing.
Above them the door slammed open.
“Bring him back,” Luddie shouted. “You’re not taking my son.”
THE ELEVATOR STOPPED. Cardozo stepped out onto the eleventh floor. He crossed to the door of Luddie Ostergate’s apartment.
He placed his ear against the wood, and that tiny pressure was enough to set the door in motion. It swung inward.
In front of him was a dark, narrow hallway opening into a wider, brighter room. The floor inside was littered with books, and halfway down the dimness he could see the humped shape of a bookcase lying on its side.
He stood listening, sniffing the silence. The faint, muffled vibration of a refrigerator came to him through the air.
He drew his gun.
He flattened himself against the wall and moved slowly forward. As he reached the end of the hallway he took a slow, deep breath, readying himself. He raised the gun in both hands.
He sprang forward, up and out and around the corner in one single, wall-hugging movement. His eye scanned the living room.
A man hog-tied with an extension cord lay unconscious on the floor.
IN THE DARK Leigh bent down toward the child, gripping him near, holding tight to his shoulders, feeling his terror and his heart beating against her.
On the landing twelve steps above, Luddie stood in a half crouch, his silhouette backlit by smoke-colored light washing in from the hallway. He held himself motionless. He had turned his head and angled it upward toward the next landing. She could feel him sniffing the darkness above him, reaching out for her with all his senses. The walls seemed to slant.
Now his head came slowly around and angled downward, toward her and the boy. As his head moved, the gun swept out a slow arc in front of him.
The door swung shut behind him, and darkness erased his shape.
Leigh’s eyes began playing tricks on her. The darkness seemed to sparkle with points of light. She had a drowning sense of standing on the edge of something about to happen, knowing she had to make her move now.
Her fingers went to the hummingbird brooch that she had pinned to her blouse. They found the catch, fumbled with it, snapped it open.
A little ping vibrated through the darkness.
She unpinned the brooch. She fixed her eyes on an imaginary point on the stairway above Luddie. She let her hand drop back. She pulled in a deep breath and swung the hand up. At the top of the swing she opened it. The hummingbird flew up into the vibrating blackness.
Time dilated. From the far side of a long silence the hummingbird clattered brightly on one of the steps near Luddie.
She sensed him shift position in the darkness. She heard him exhale, and the exhalation was directed away from her, toward the hummingbird. There was a metallic ricochet as the brooch bounced down a step, then another bright, clattering drop to the step below, then another and another.
And then absolute stillness, absolute blackness.
She heard the rustling movement of cloth against cloth.
Luddie yanked the door open. Light exploded, dousing her and the child in a bright silver spill.
For one instant Luddie’s eyes were searching the empty stairwell above him. The next instant he whirled and saw Leigh and the boy.
He took three steps down the stairway. He gestured with the gun. “Let the boy go.”
Leigh lifted her hand from Happy’s shoulder.
“Happy,” Luddie said. “Come here.”
The child did not move.
“Come here!” Luddie barked.
A figure stepped onto the landing behind him. “Luddie. Drop the gun.” The voice was Vince Cardozo’s.
Luddie’s gun hand came down slowly and hung at his side.
“Drop it,” Cardozo repeated.
Luddie’s arms whipped up into firing position, and in one seamless movement, he turned toward Cardozo and dropped into a crouch.
As his knee struck the step he howled in sudden pain. He lurched up and backward. The gun fired. It was a wild, uncontrolled shot. There was a white flash and the bullet pinged into the wall.
Luddie was half standing now, both hands waving, trying to grab some balance from the empty air. He took a stumbling step backward. He was kicking crazily, as though an animal had sunk teeth into his left leg and wouldn’t let go.
He fired again. The recoil slammed him against the steel banister. His weight was centered high. The banister held him like a fulcrum. Momentum levered him over and flipped him out into the well.
He seemed to fall in slow motion, as though he were an image on a prerecorded tape dropping down the stairwell toward some final moment that had already, ineradicably happened.
When the police found Luddie’s body ten stories below, the pin of Leigh’s hummingbird brooch was stuck two inches deep into the flesh of his leg.