39. Mat
MAT
I fucking love when a plan works.
The service entrance to the Snyders’ apartment building on East Sixty-Ninth has a camera over the loading bay that has been busted for four days now, courtesy of a small, untraceable favor I called in on Tuesday.
The doorman on graveyard rotation is a Bratva-friendly Belarusian named Dima who, for the price of a thousand dollars and a bottle of Beluga, will be in the basement counting linens for the next forty-five minutes and remember nothing when the police arrive tomorrow morning.
I take the stairs. It’s twenty-one flights, but I’ve got fucking jet fuel in my bloodstream, so I do them two at a time, flying higher and higher. This is the best my body has felt in months—because for the first time in months, I am moving toward her instead of away. My ribs don’t make a peep.
I tell myself what I will do once it’s done.
I will let myself into the guest room. I will sit on the edge of the bed beside her and watch her sleep for one full minute, because I have earned it, and because I’m owed one minute in this entire wretched life where the only thing I have to think about is the rise and fall of her chest.
After that… fuck it. Who cares what happens after that? We’re free.
I reach the top of the staircase. The lock on the penthouse’s service door is a Medeco. I have the bump key in my breast pocket, next to the sonogram that I haven’t put down since the moment Cass gave it to me.
Turns out I don’t need the bump key, though.
Because the service door is unlocked.
The observation hits me like missing a step on a staircase. A fraction of a second of nasty imbalance, and then the cold rush of everything reordering itself.
The door is unlocked. Why the fuck is the door unlocked? Cass locked it after the cleaning lady left at four, and confirmed it on the burner at 5:53. Raymond would never deign to use this entrance. We had a plan, a fucking plan, and the plan is—the plan was ? —
Fuck.
The Glock is in my palm before my brain catches up to my body. The suppressor is screwing on by feel; I don’t even have to look down at it.
When I’m armed, I nudge the door open with the toe of my shoe.
The kitchen is as it should be. Dishwasher humming. Glass on the drying rack—two of them, one bourbon, one water—washed and tipped neatly upside down. A dim under-cabinet light. Crème br?lée ramekins stacked next to the sink, scraped clean. The crystal decanter of bourbon rests on the counter.
Cass did everything right.
I move through the kitchen silently, weight on the outsides of my feet, gun at the ready. The dining room shows more mundane signs of a normal domestic life. Between two guttered-out candles, there’s a water stain on the walnut. Looks like someone knocked over a glass.
I float past it and down the hall. The guest room is on the right, the master on the left, both doors closed, except?—
Wait.
The master is not closed.
It’s cracked, half an inch, with a black seam of nothingness showing through. And emanating from within that nothingness is a smell I know intimately…
Blood.
All sound fades away. Using the suppressor, I push the door inward.
The lamp on Raymond’s side is on. I wonder if they did it for dramatic effect. Or was it more chummy, teasing, taunting? Like leaving on a porch light when you want the neighbors to know you’re home? Courteous, almost.
Look at our work. Admire it. Tell Lukas we said hello.
Raymond is in the bed. The duvet is pulled up to his chin, but there are two holes in the center of the white cotton, the size of dimes, perfectly placed an inch apart over the sternum.
Above the duvet, between his collarbones and his slack lower lip, a third hole sits dead-center on the forehead, with the burn-ring of a contact shot smudged around it.
The pillow behind him is no longer white. It’s soaked red.
It’s beautiful work. As clean and professional as it gets. I’ll bet he never woke up.
Whoever did this knew what they were doing.
I stand there just long enough to take inventory and confirm that nothing’s been touched. This was not a robbery or an accident. For God’s sake, they didn’t even take his watch.
They.
Vainakh.
Vainakh got here first.
The why does not matter, not right now. That’ll come later, when I’m alone in the dark.
So many little theories to consider. Maybe Raymond got careless.
Or Bill’s whispers spooked him. Maybe Raymond kept thorough little files on his own bosses, his real bosses, and someone in the Vainakh hierarchy decided that the face they’d hired to smooth their entry into New York had developed an opinion of its own and needed replacing.
Maybe Raymond was always going to die tonight.
But again, none of that matters.
What matters is what’s down the hall, deep in a drug-induced slumber of her own.
Under any other circumstances, I’d never charge blindly through an apartment that known enemies had recently infiltrated. I’d have cleared corners, checked hiding places, all that shit.
Right now, I don’t have time for any of that. I just turn away from Raymond’s corpse and start to run.
I don’t get far, though.
Because right then, I hear the front door.
Not the service door, but the front door.
And it’s not a knock I hear. Nor is it the buzz of a doorbell.
It’s the dry, splintery, unmistakable crack of a battering ram slaughtering a deadbolt.
The wood gives on the third blow. The door hits the wall with a sound I will hear in my nightmares for as long as I am alive to have them.
Which, at this rate, might not be long.
After the crack comes boots. A lot of them, followed by crackling radios and barking voices. “NYPD! Hands where I can fucking see them! Don’t you move, goddammit, or I’ll shoot!”
I stand in the hallway, marooned halfway between sleeping Cass and dead Raymond, and let the dots connect themselves.
My options are far and few between. I’ve got a gun, so in theory I could fight.
There’s a chance that my knowledge of the layout gives me enough of an edge to make it to the service door and out into the night.
But I know at once I won’t do that. Cass is twenty feet from me, on the other side of a thin wall. A shootout in the hallway could hurt her, and I refuse to take that chance.
Hiding is similarly useless. I think I hear dogs going apeshit in the hallway, waiting to be cut loose. A K-9 unit will find me in a heartbeat.
Option three: surrender.
I have, in my entire existence, surrendered exactly one time. That was at fifteen, on my knees on a wet alley floor, with my father’s blood up to my elbows and my uncle pressing my forehead into his coat sleeve and whispering, Don’t look, nephew. It won’t do you any good to look back.
I told myself, that night, that I would never put my hands behind my head again. I’ve built a whole life on the back of that promise.
I am going to break it tonight.
For her.
Because the only way she sleeps through this, the only way that pill in her bloodstream has any chance of holding up as an alibi, is if the police have already made up their minds about who did this.
I lower the Glock and toss it on the runner, far out of reach. I’m trying to avoid a misunderstanding that ends with a blistering array of rounds going through my body, then through walls and into the body of someone I cannot bear to lose.
I put my hands behind my head.
The boots come down the hall in a tight grouping. Four-man entry. Vests, helmets, rifles up. The lead man rounds the corner with his muzzle on my forehead at fifteen feet and roars at me to get on the ground.
“Get on the ground. Hands where I can see them. Hands! ”
“They’re up,” I say, so calm it surprises even me. “They’re up. I am unarmed. There’s a weapon on the floor at my feet.”
“Get on the ground!”
I sink. Knees first. Then, as I start to tilt forward, the cops surge up and knock me forward until I’m plastered against the floor. My arms get wrenched behind me hard enough that I feel the shoulder I dislocated at twenty-two flare up. My ribs hurt so goddamn bad.
The cuffs ratchet in place. The policeman growls above me, breathing hard. “Clear the rest. Master, guest, kitchen. Move. Cuff anything you find.”
Two pairs of footsteps go past my head toward the master. Two go the other way, toward the guest room.
Toward Cass.
An unholy, involuntary roar flies out of my throat, a dying animal’s noise. I feel the knee in my neck press harder. “Quiet, motherfucker! Don’t move.”
The boots reach the guest room. There is a beat of silence and then, very faintly, a man’s voice, lower than the others, almost gentle, the voice of a cop who has done a lot of welfare checks: “Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me? Ma’am.”
She doesn’t answer, obviously. She’s got half a milligram of a sedative in her bloodstream. She is so far under that they might as well be calling to her from the bottom of a well.
A second voice yells into a radio. “We’ve got a female in the second bedroom, unresponsive but breathing. Pulse is good. Looks like she’s been drugged. Get a bus up here.”
She’s breathing. Her pulse is good.
My whole world fits inside those two sentences.
Then the other team comes back from the master, and a voice from there says, “Body in there. Male, three GSWs. He’s done. Cold.”
A dozen pairs of unfriendly eyes settle on me like laser beams. It’s not hard for them to put two and two together.
I know how it looks for them. A strange man in an apartment that’s not his?
A drugged woman? A rich, prominent citizen, dead as a doornail?
I’m a lawyer and I’m also not fucking stupid.
It doesn’t look good for me.
I lie there while they search the apartment.
I’m halfway out of the hallway with my head sticking in the living room.
The man’s knee in my torso is agony on my ribs, which are aching like they’ve never ached before.
It’s white-hot starfire burning under my skin.
I’d take the original knife wound again over this, because at least that was over fast. This feels like it might last forever.
I twist my neck, anything to relieve the pain. The man kneeling on my bellows to stay still, but truth be told, I barely hear him.
Because something has caught my eye.
Under the settee, where I flung it a week ago, where it has been living quietly in the shadows ever since…
… is Cass’s wedding ring.
A week ago, I promised her she’d never have to wear it again.
We were so fucking close.
And then the black canvas hood goes down over my head, and everything else is lost to me.