Cassidy and Orso dropped the car back at the garage and walked to the Shamrock on Eighth Avenue and ordered drinks. Orso scooped a bowl of popcorn from the machine near the bar and carried it to a booth. ‘Why would he take the chance?’ he asked. ‘He already got away with murder. It’s too much risk.’
‘What risk? We think he’s in prison upstate. That’s what he’s counting on. Nobody’s looking for him.’
‘He’s free. He can do anything he wants. Why go after you?’
‘He could have killed me any time a couple of months ago. The night he shot up the front of my building, he could have put a bullet in my head. But he wanted me to know. He wanted to make me sweat, make me wait for it. It’s still what he wants.’
‘That’s nuts.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s say you’re right. What are we going to do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Bullshit. We get Bonner and Newly and a few other guys, and we put a detail on you. He shows up, and we grab him.’
‘He’s a trained spook. If you put a tight guard on me, he’ll spot it immediately. If you run a loose cover, he’ll be through it before you know it, and you’ll be too far away to do any good.’
‘So we’ll run it tight. Once he sees he can’t get to you, he’ll give it up.’
‘For how long? If he sees I’m covered, he’ll go away for a while, maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe two. Then when we’ve forgotten about him, he’ll come back.’
‘Call the agency. Tell them what you suspect. Put them on notice that we know what’s going on.’
‘The same thing happens. They ship him off to Italy, or someplace. I begin to forget he exists. He takes a week of leave, comes back here, and hits me. Right now I know he’s out there. He doesn’t know I know. That’s my edge.’
‘You’re using yourself as bait.’
‘What are my choices? If this doesn’t end now, I’ll spend the rest of my life waiting for him.’
‘There’s got to be something we can do. Let me talk to Bonner and Newly. We’ll come up with something.’
‘No.’
‘Mike.’
‘Tony, no.’
‘So why’d you tell me?’
‘In case I’m not as good as I think I am. If he gets me, you’ll know who to look for.’
‘This is fucked.’
‘Yeah, I know. We better have another martini. I want to be nice and relaxed when the bullet hits.’
‘You’re an asshole, you know that?’ Orso raised a hand for the waitress.
Cassidy wasn’t quite as easy with the situation as he made out to his partner. He left Orso in Times Square and went down into the subway station. He did not go through the turnstiles. He hesitated as if changing his mind about something, and then went across the lobby past the token booth and up the stairs on the other side. He grabbed a cruising cab and watched through the back window to see if any car suddenly pulled out of a parking spot to follow. The cab stopped right in front of his building, and he went up the stoop fast with the key in his hand. He opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it quickly. The muscles in his back clenched against bullet impact until he closed the door.
Cassidy paused in front of his apartment door and examined the two locks. Shaw was trained to get through most doors. Picking a lock left minute scratches. Cassidy saw none. He crouched down and looked at the toothpick he had wedged in the jamb to fall out if someone opened the door. It was still there. Did Shaw know that trick? Probably. He drew his gun before he unlocked the door, and he went in fast, ducked to the side, and flipped the light switch.
The empty apartment mocked him.
He drew the curtains across the living room windows, double locked the door, and drove the heavy steel security bolt into its socket. He made a drink, and carried it to the sink in the bathroom where it was handy for an occasional sip while he was in the shower.
He tried to put himself in Shaw’s mind. If killing Cassidy were his problem, how would he go about it? First he’d have to know Cassidy’s routine. Shaw could not risk being seen, so he would need a place to watch from. Was the routine the same as before, or had Cassidy been moved to a new assignment? Was he still working days, or was he back on night watch? When he was home, was someone else with him? Was Rhonda still in the picture? A good question. Was she?
Rhonda. It was almost eleven. Too late to call her? He wrapped a towel around his waist and used the phone on the bedside table. She answered on the third ring.
‘Hello?’ Her voice was expectant.
‘It’s me.’
‘Oh.’ The tone changed. She may have been expecting someone to call, but it wasn’t him.
‘Too late to call?’
‘No. I was up.’
‘We need to talk.’
‘What about?’ Her tone was flat now.
‘Let’s have breakfast.’
‘We can’t do it on the phone?’
‘It would be better in person.’
She thought about it for a while. ‘All right. It will have to be early. I’ve got an appointment.’
‘Seven thirty. The place on Bleecker.’
‘Fine.’ She hung up.
A cold morning with a sky like gray steel. At seven fifteen the streets near Cassidy’s building were nearly deserted. A few bundled figures hurried, heads down, toward the subway, a bus, a taxi, a coffee shop, someplace warm. Cassidy used the cold as an excuse to push his pace. If someone followed him, he would have to move fast to keep up. Just before Bleecker Street Cassidy stopped to light a cigarette behind cupped hands. He ducked his head to the match and used the movement to check the block. No one on the street slowed or took a sudden interest in a store window. He was not worried about Shaw following him. Shaw would not risk being spotted, but Cassidy did not know if he had helpers. If there was someone, he was not out this morning.
He needed Rhonda to stay away from him until this thing with Shaw was settled. If she were with him, she would be in the blast area for whatever happened. It was going to be hard enough to protect himself. But if he told her that Shaw had escaped and was looking for him, she would not go. She wasn’t a woman who would desert someone in danger. And, of course, there was the story: CIA agent escapes prison to kill arresting officer. She couldn’t resist that.
Rhonda was already in the diner when Cassidy arrived. He could feel the coolness of her look as he approached the booth. ‘Hi. Sorry if I’m late.’ He bent to kiss her, and she moved just enough so he missed her mouth.
Uh-oh.
He shrugged out of his coat, hung it on the hook above the booth, and slid in opposite her. The waitress poured Cassidy a cup of coffee and took his breakfast order.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘I haven’t seen you in over a week.’
‘I’ve been busy.’
‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Have you?’ She examined him over the rim of her coffee cup.
Uh-oh, again.
‘I have,’ he said. ‘But something’s come up on the job, and I think we better not see each other for a little bit.’
‘What’s come up?’
‘I can’t really talk about it.’ He hoped she would not push, because he did not have a plausible lie prepared.
‘Michael, if you want to break it off, break it off. Don’t give me some lame crap about work.’
He wasn’t expecting that. ‘I don’t want to break it off.’ Did he?
Her smile said she knew better. She reached across the table and patted his hand. ‘Let me make it easier for you. I’ve met someone.’
‘What?’
‘I was going to tell you.’
‘Who is he?’ What? What?
‘It’s nobody you know. He’s really nice. I really like him, and he likes me. You and I were great for a while, but we both knew it wasn’t going anywhere. The last few weeks … I mean how many times have we even had dinner together? Twice? I should have said something before. I’m sorry.’ She stood, picked up her coat, touched him on the shoulder, and left.
The waitress put down Cassidy’s eggs and bacon. ‘You all right, honey?’
‘Yes. Sure. I’m fine.’
‘She’ll be back.’
‘I don’t think so.’
She patted his hand, and went away.
Cassidy stood behind a wooden fence on Bethune Street. He stamped his feet against the cold and pulled his coat collar high. His breath smoked. A new building was going up behind him. The foundation excavation had been dug, and pilings had been driven, but no one was working the site today. He could see through the fence slats to the building on the south side of the street. It had been abandoned more than a year ago. Demolition work began. Then it stopped. Development money dried up, and the owners struggled to find new loans. At least that was the word in the neighborhood. The first-floor windows were boarded shut. Like a lot of light manufacturing businesses the first floor had been built big enough to allow trucks to enter so loading could be done out of the weather. A padlock secured the big double front door. The lock looked too new to have been on the door long. It could mean that the demolition was about to begin again and that the owners were storing equipment. Maybe a couple of bums were camping out in there and had invested in a good lock to keep their place secure. Maybe local scavengers were stripping the place of copper pipe and scrap metal and wanted to preserve the site from other lowlifes with the same good idea.
Or maybe Spencer Shaw had set up again in the room on the fifth floor where he had fired the rifle that blew out the fanlights above Cassidy’s entry door.
Right now the padlock meant there was no one in the building.
Cassidy crossed Bethune and went down the alley between the abandoned building and the warehouse next to it. All the first-floor windows along the alley were heavily boarded, and someone had taken the trouble to gouge the screw heads so they could not be unscrewed. It was the same at the back of the building.
He returned to the alley. Halfway back to the street, metal doors slanted out from low on the brick wall. They closed the chute that delivered coal to the basement furnace. The doors were bolted and the bolt was rusted shut, but no one had bothered to attach a lock. Cassidy crossed to the construction site and found a three-foot-long piece of rebar in a pile of scrap. He used the rebar to hammer the bolt that held the two halves of the coal chute door. Flakes of rust flew off it from the blows. He hammered the end of the bolt and slowly it began to work its way back through the staples. One more smash, and the bolt moved an inch back and no longer held the doors shut. Cassidy grabbed one of the door handles and pulled. It did not move. One of the doors had a metal lip that fit over the other. Rust sealed its length.
Cassidy found a place where he could get the end of the rebar under the lip. He leaned hard on the rebar. The door suddenly ripped free of the rust seal. Cassidy, unprepared for it, found himself on his hands and knees on the alley concrete. ‘Shit!’ He stood up. His right knee burned. His pants were torn, and the knee was scraped raw. ‘Goddamn it.’ That was a good pair of pants.
He went back to the door, gripped the handle, and pulled. The hinges squealed in protest as the door opened. A wave of cold, damp air came up from the cellar carrying the mingled smells of coal dust and mold. He could see the coal chute on the cellar floor ten feet down. Its upper end had rusted free, letting the chute fall. An iron ladder was fixed to the concrete wall at one side of the cellar opening. The top rung was rusted thin. Cassidy looked down into the gloom of the cellar. Some light fell through the door opening, but the rest of the cellar would be dark, and so would the first floor of the building where the windows were blocked. He wasn’t dressed for this. He was dressed for the office, not for exploration through a crapped-out building. He needed a flashlight. How the hell was he going to see anything down there? It had been a spur of the moment idea to go into the building, and now that he was there, he was going in before whoever put the padlock on the front came back. Clothes could be cleaned and mended. He had matches in his pocket. He needed to know if he was right about Shaw.
He slung a leg over the sill and put his foot on the top rung of the ladder. It bent under his shoe. He took more weight on his hands and moved his foot down a rung. It seemed more solid. He went down a few more rungs, testing each before giving it weight, and then reached up and pulled the doors closed. Now he was in darkness. A rung near the bottom gave way under his foot, but he caught himself. He eased himself down, taking his weight on his hands, until his right foot touched the cellar floor. He let go of the ladder and turned away from it. At his first step his left foot came down awkwardly on something, and he rolled his ankle and went down hard.
He lay on the concrete floor of the basement and took stock. A bruised elbow, a scraped knee, and the ankle. He tested the ankle. Tender, still useful if he was careful, but not good. He found matches in his coat pocket and lit one. It made a small circle of warm light in the darkness. He used the bottom of the ladder to pull himself up. The match burned out. He lit another match. There was enough light to see the floor in front of him was strewn with junk, pieces of coal, bricks, scrap wood. He limped toward where he thought the stairs up might be and used his good foot to kick things out of his path. When a match burned low, he lit another. Claws scraped on the concrete as something skittered away from him. Rats. He didn’t like rats. He found the bottom of a flight of rough wooden stairs. At the top of the stairs a line of dim light showed through the bad join at the bottom of the door. He lit another match and went up step by step. He could not afford another fall. The door at the top of the stairs opened to a broad hall. Light filtered down the stairs from the windows above, and he no longer needed the matches. The front door was twenty feet down to his right. The floor was made of concrete to support the weight of trucks. Oil stains showed where they had parked.
The stairs to the floors above were near the front of the hall. On the way to them, Cassidy passed a freight elevator. The doors were open a couple of feet. The elevator had come to rest on its last ride with its roof four feet below floor level.
The second floor was made up of big rooms fronted by a corridor. The ceilings were made of patterned pressed tin. There was nothing in the rooms that hinted at what the building had been used for. The elevator doors were closed. The third floor was identical, a big, empty echoing space. The doors to the elevator shaft were closed there too. Cassidy limped up the stairs to the next floor.
Building demolition starts at the top and works down. Gravity speeds the process. The wrecking crew had been at work on the fourth floor. They had torn the floors up from the south wall to the closed elevator, leaving the big joists and cross beams. Cassidy could see the pressed tin of the third-floor ceiling still nailed below. They had ripped down many of the walls, and there was a big pile of broken plaster and wood near the elevator. The destruction was even greater on the fifth floor. The rooms here were smaller and had probably been used as offices. The walls had been stripped to their studs, and Cassidy could see through, room to room to room, all the way to the front of the building.
One room remained intact. It was at the back of the building, and it looked south over low roofs to the front of Cassidy’s building a block away. A mattress covered by a couple of wool blankets was pushed against one wall. A squat propane tank held a big heating element. Near it were three one-gallon jugs of water. Two were full; the other was half empty. Blackout curtains were pinned back from the window. A Garand M-1 rifle was propped in a corner. Its butt rested on a green canvas beanbag. There was nothing personal in the room. Shaw was living somewhere else. This was his observation post.
Cassidy went over the room to make sure he had left no trace of his visit. He could be at the Ninth Precinct in fifteen minutes. All he would need is a couple of cops to throw a loose surveillance net on the building. As soon as the padlock came off the front door, they would know Shaw was inside. Then they could tighten the net. Teams front and back. They could wait him out until he left the building and take him on the street, or they could take him in the building. Better to take him on the street. Surprise and overwhelming force. If they tried to take him in the building and he didn’t go easily, they’d have to fight their way up five floors. Shaw had the rifle. Maybe he had other weapons. People could get hurt. Cassidy thought about jamming the M-1, but if Shaw was meticulous about his weapons, he might check it. If he found it jammed, he would know someone had been there. Be patient. Go get some cops. Take him outside.
Cassidy went down the stairs favoring his sprained ankle. He had just reached the third floor when he heard a car stop on the street in front of the building. Moments later he heard the rattle of the padlock and hasp, and then the creaking as someone shoved the big doors open. He hobbled to the window at the end of the hall. A four-year-old Studebaker was parked outside the double doors. As he watched, a man came out of the building and got back in the car. For a moment Cassidy did not recognize him, and then he realized that Shaw had dyed his bright, distinctive hair dark brown. Shaw pulled out, swung the car around, and then backed into the building. Cassidy went back to the stairs. He heard the car door open as Shaw got out to close the garage doors, then the thump as they slammed together, and the rattle as Shaw bolted the doors shut.
Take him now.
Cassidy pulled the .38 from under his arm and went down the stairs. He reached the second floor and limped into a room opposite the stairway. When Shaw started up toward the third floor, his back would be turned for a moment. Cassidy would take a couple of steps into the hall. Speed wasn’t necessary. The ankle would not matter. Shaw would be no more than ten feet away, back turned, surprised. What happened next would be up to Shaw. He heard the car door slam two floors below. Footsteps on the stairs, and then Shaw’s voice.
‘You’ve got a great ass, honey. I’d be happy to follow that ass anywhere.’
‘This is stupid. He won’t come for me. We broke up.’ Rhonda’s voice, angry and scared.
‘He’ll come for you. He won’t be able to resist.’
‘He’ll bring cops. You’ll either end up dead or back in prison.’
‘You know what? Women never know who the fuck their men really are. They make up who they want them to be, and then try to squeeze the guy into the mold. You think Cassidy’s some sort of pragmatic guy? Bullshit. He wants to be the hero. Why else would a rich guy’s son become a street cop?’
Cassidy found a crack in the wall where a piece of plaster had been knocked off. Through it he could see the stair landing fifteen feet away. He was confident of putting a bullet in a two-inch circle at that distance. All he needed was a clean shot. Rhonda rose into view on the stairs. Shaw was close to her, shielded from him by her body. She stopped on the landing.
‘Keep going,’ Shaw said. ‘We’re going all the way to the top.’
When they turned, Shaw would be exposed. Cassidy would take the shot then.
Rhonda turned to go up the next flight. Shaw went with her. When he turned, Cassidy saw the gun Shaw held. It was pointed at Rhonda’s back. The muzzle wandered with Shaw’s movements. Sometimes it pointed at her spine, sometimes at her leg. Once it wandered off to the side. Cassidy took up the trigger slack and let his breath out slowly. Now.
Rhonda stopped on the stairs, and Shaw bumped into her. They were too close together now to risk the shot. ‘Move it.’
‘No.’
He jabbed her hard in the back with the pistol. ‘Don’t be a pain in the ass. I’ll shoot you and send him your ear. He’ll come running. Move.’ He poked her with the gun again, and they went up the stairs together and disappeared.
Cassidy pulled the gun back from the crack and eased the hammer down. He could be out the door and at the Ninth Precinct in minutes, even walking on a bad ankle. They could have the building covered and sealed off in half an hour. Then what? Wait Shaw out. There was no electricity in the building. He would have to leave to call Cassidy. There’d be no reason to risk taking Rhonda with him. He could leave her tied down upstairs. He’d go alone, and they’d take him in the street. Cassidy looked it over from a couple of angles. He did not want to leave her here, but it was the smart move.
Cassidy listened for a moment. No footsteps on the stairs. Shaw and Rhonda must have reached the top floor. Cassidy left the shelter of the room on the second floor and headed for the stairs.
In the room at the top of the building, Rhonda screamed.