Chapter 50
M ICHAEL SULLIVAN COULDN’T go right home to his family in Maryland, not after what he’d just done to Benny Fontana and his girlfriend. He was too riled up inside, his blood boiling. He was hot-flashing scenes from his old man’s shop in Brooklyn again ? sawdust stored in a big cardboard barrel, the terra-cotta tile floor with white grout, handsaws, boning knives, meat hooks in the freezer room.
So he wandered around Georgetown for a while, looking for trouble if he could find the right kind. The thing of it was, he liked his ladies tucked in a little. He especially liked lawyers, MBAs, professor-librarian types ? loved their glasses, the buttoned-down clothes, the conservative hairstyles. Always so in control of themselves.
He liked helping them lose some of that control, while blowing off a little steam of his own, relieving his stress, breaking all the rules of this dumbass society.
Georgetown was a good pickup place for him. Every other chippie he spotted on the street was a little too tightly wound. Not that there were so many to choose from, not at this time of night. But he didn’t need that many choices, just one good one. And maybe he’d already spotted her. He thought so anyway.
She looked like she could be a trial attorney, dressed to impress in that smart tweed outfit of hers. The heels ticktocked a steady rhythm on the sidewalk ? this way, that way, this way, that way.
In contrast, Sullivan’s Nikes didn’t make much noise at all. With a hooded sweatshirt, he was just another Bobo jogger out for a late-night run in the neighborhood. If someone peeked from their window, that’s what they’d see.
But no one was looking, least of all Miss Tweedy. Tweedy Bird, he thought with a grin. Mistake. Hers.
She kept her stride city-fast, her leather purse and briefcase tucked like the key to the Da Vinci Code under one arm, and she stayed to the outside edge of the sidewalk ? all smart moves for a woman alone on the street late at night. Her one mistake was not looking around enough, not taking in the surroundings. Not spotting the jogger who was walking behind her.
And mistakes could kill you, couldn’t they?
Sullivan hung back in the shade as Tweedy passed under a streetlamp. Nice pipes and a great ass, he noted. No ring on the left hand.
The high heels kept their rhythm steady on the sidewalk for another half block; then she slowed in front of a redbrick townhouse. Nice place. Nineteenth-century. From the look of it, though, one of those buildings that had been butchered into condos on the inside.
She pulled a set of keys from her purse before she even got to the front door, and Sullivan began to time his approach. He reached into his own pocket and took out a slip of paper. A dry-cleaning ticket? It didn’t really matter what it was.
As she put her key into the door, and before she pushed it open, he called out in a friendly voice. “Excuse me, miss? Excuse me? Did you drop this?”