No pulse. The man was dead. He’d bled out from the hole in his heart.
It occurred to Craig suddenly that it had all gone down by the book. He regretted the fact that he’d had to kill the man.
Because he knew him. He’d seen him before. Several times. At Finnegan’s. With Jimmy.
It seemed obvious. He’d been at the pharmacy to kill Bailey Headley before she could give anyone a description of the woman who had purchased the phone.
The sound of sirens filled the air.
He hung his head. It would be hours now before he could leave. Hours before he could get to Finnegan’s.
And he had never before felt such an urgency to be there.
*
Kieran didn’t have to wait for the news to hear about the shooting.
Marty filled her in.
He was proud to be on duty all night, watching over her and the pub. Although, as he was quick to assure her, he wasn’t alone.
Detective Mayo had sent in several officers, two in uniform and two in plain clothes. The two in uniform were there to be imposing. The two in plain clothes were there for backup.
She had to admit she was worried, though also hugely relieved that Craig and Mike were all right. But, she reminded herself, she had promised to steal a cell phone.
Even with the place filled with cops and Marty there watching her, stealing Jimmy’s phone was, as she had promised Craig, a piece of cake.
She sat at the table with Jimmy for a few minutes while he told her about stocks and bonds.
She didn’t know much about either one and had no real idea what he was talking about, but she pretended to pay attention.
His phone was sitting on the table. She was easily able to lean toward him on an elbow as if fascinated by what he had to say, and ease it off onto her lap.
She could always say she had found it on the floor, but she doubted it was ever going to come to that. People lost phones at Finnegan’s all the time. She was pretty sure that Jimmy had left his on the bar more than once.
But after Jimmy had left and with his phone tucked safely in her pocket, they all stopped to watch the news and suddenly it all seemed so much more immediate and terrifying than when Marty had told her about it.
She found herself shaking with relief when the reporter on the scene emphasized that no one other than the shooter, who had died at the scene, had even been injured.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” a customer at the bar murmured.
Others echoed the sentiment. If a guy was shooting at innocent people in a pharmacy, it was probably a damned good thing that he’d gotten shot instead.
A lot of people left after that, and it turned into a quiet night. Kieran didn’t want to leave, so she decided to take advantage of all the empty tables to start scrubbing them down with the special polish they used to protect the wood.
She was on the third table when she found scratches that annoyed her. She tried to polish them out at first, then realized that they went too deep, that someone had written on a piece of paper and pressed down so hard that the impression had gone through to the wood.
“Idiots,” she murmured to herself. “Would they do something like this at home? I don’t think so.”
But just as she realized that they were going to have to sand the table to even out the surface, she paused. She’d seen Jimmy here the other night along with Gary and the two unknown men—the dark guy and the Nordic-looking guy.
She hesitated, then headed back to the office and found paper, a pencil and a heavy jade paperweight, before returning to the table. The impression was so faint that she hoped the paperweight would give her the pressure she needed to make it readable.
She almost crashed into Marty; she’d forgotten that he was there, watching over her.
“Please don’t go off without telling me,” he asked her.
“I’m sorry. I just needed something from the office.”
“Just tell me when you’re going to disappear, okay?”
“I’ll tell you next time, I promise.”
Marty nodded, apparently appeased, and she hurried back to the table. She realized that he was watching her closely and tried to appear nonchalant about what she was doing.
It was trickier than stealing a phone, but she managed to make it appear that she was trying to remove a spot, when in reality she was rubbing the paper into the indentations with the paperweight. A faint impression began to emerge on the paper, and she began to use the pencil to capture what had been written.
She almost couldn’t believe her eyes when something legible began to appear.
It was an address, but she couldn’t quite make it out. At first she thought it said Forty-Second Street.
The Theater District?
Then she realized that the number was a forty-seven. The address was on Forthy-Seventh Street near Fifth Avenue.
The Diamond District. And to the best of her knowledge, it was a store that hadn’t been hit as yet, not by the water-gun-wielding thieves—or by the killers.
She fumbled, reaching into her pocket for her phone. She dialed Craig, but the call went straight to voice mail.