Shit.
I hit the Mute button on my phone, leaning over to punch the steering wheel. Elizabeth, her back to the car, practically jumped out of her skin at the sound of the horn. She turned to see me circling my finger in the air. To that same newscaster it would look as if I were saying “Wrap it up.” To Elizabeth, it meant she could stop tracing the call. The Dealer was close by. So close that he was watching us. Maybe worse.
“Elizabeth!” I yelled, opening the door. I was frantically waving to her. “Get in the car!”
She was out in the open, exposed.
“No, no, no,” came the Dealer’s voice. My phone was still on mute. Wherever he was, he could see us. “I need you to get out of the car, too, Professor. There’s something I want you both to see.”
Said the spider to the fly.
I took the phone off mute, putting it on speaker as Elizabeth returned. She got back behind the wheel, her face asking, What gives?
Tribeca 212. The lobby. The Dealer shooting at us from the mezzanine. “We’re not about to be your target practice again,” I said.
“If I wanted to kill you at the hotel I would have,” he said. “And don’t pretend you haven’t already figured that out, Professor. You’re no good to me dead. Now, both of you…I need you out of the car.”
I looked at Elizabeth, my face doing the asking now.
Tick-tock…
What do you want to do?
Chapter 67
SOMETIMES YOU talk out a big decision, weigh the pros and cons, cover all the bases.
This wasn’t one of those times.
Elizabeth and I both reached for our doors without so much as a word between us. A spoken word, at least. Maybe it was pure stupidity. But if the Dealer wasn’t going to kill us, the curiosity was.
You’re no good to me dead, I kept repeating in my mind.
Everything I knew about human behavior was telling me I could believe him, but there was no shaking the first rule of being human. We all make mistakes.
“Okay, we’re outside the car,” I announced, holding the phone up in front of my mouth as though it were a slice of pizza. Elizabeth was right alongside me in front of Palmer’s brownstone. We were both slowly walking in a circle, our eyes moving along the rooftops.
“Take me off speakerphone,” said the Dealer.
Elizabeth gave me a nod, as if it only made sense he would ask that. She was right. With a tap of my finger, I put the phone to my ear. “It’s only me now.”
“Good,” he said.
“Can you see me?” I asked.
He ignored the question. He had his own. “Do you know why I chose you, Professor?”
Keep it simple, Dylan…
“Because there’s a reason you’re killing, and you want me to figure out why,” I said.
“Have you yet?” he asked.
“I’m getting close,” I answered. “You already know that, don’t you?”
He ignored that question, too. “Ask me what you really want to know,” he said.
“Fine,” I answered. “I will. There’s more, isn’t there? You want me to figure out more than just the why.”
“Right again, Professor,” he said. “Time is running out, though.”
“How so?” I asked. “You said I was ahead of schedule.”
“Only for the murderer on the third floor,” he said.
I turned to look up at Jackie Palmer’s apartment. “In other words, we got to him before you did.”
That goddamn laugh again through the modulator. I could barely keep the phone to my ear. “I wouldn’t go that far,” said the Dealer.
A tingling feeling shot up my spine. All at once, it was a premonition of something horrible about to happen and the inability to do anything to prevent it. Total helplessness.
“What do you mean?” I asked, if only to stall.
I couldn’t even do that. It was one more question that would fall on deaf ears.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “what I really should’ve told you is that you’re right on time.”
Tick-tock…
Boom!
Chapter 68
THE BLAST blew out the windows of Palmer’s apartment, the fireballs shooting out like cannons. The sound, the shock, the sheer force of the explosion buckled my knees, my legs giving way as I fell to the pavement. Only at the last second was I able to reach out with my hands so that I didn’t crack open my skull.
Somewhere along the way I caught a glimpse of Elizabeth doing the same, a split second that seemed to play out in slow motion—her legs staggering before she tumbled, her slim frame slamming against the ground amid the shards of glass that were raining down upon us.
For several seconds, all I heard was the echo of the blast, the sound pounding inside my head. I couldn’t even hear myself asking Elizabeth if she was okay.
I yelled back to her. “What?”
She answered again, louder. My ears finally kicked in. “I said I’m all right…I’m okay,” she told me.
As she got to her feet I thought she was saying something more, only to realize it wasn’t Elizabeth. There was another woman’s voice I was hearing. It was faint. It was also familiar.
I turned, looking around me along the street. The voice was coming from my phone. Huh?
My phone. I’d dropped it while I was falling to the ground. The screen was shattered, but through the cracks I could see that the call hadn’t ended. The line was still live.
“Thinking ’bout a life of crime…”
I looked up again at Palmer’s apartment, the black smoke billowing out from every window, the place entirely engulfed in flames. His neighbors would live to tell about it, but Jackie himself wouldn’t. He wasn’t merely dead, he was gone…and there was nowhere to put the card for the next victim.
Except in a song.
The woman I was hearing was Juice Newton, and the song was “Playing with the Queen of Hearts.”
“Knowing it ain’t really smart…”
Elizabeth came over and listened. She asked a question, only it was as if my ears had stopped working again. I could barely hear her. I could barely hear the song. Instead it was the Dealer’s words that were pounding inside my head. Our conversation. Something he had told me.
For the first time, he had made what seemed like a mistake. I was sure of it. Unfortunately, I was also sure of something else.
There was an inferno raging above my head, and people were spilling out onto the street in panic, crying out to God. The only way the metaphor would’ve been more obvious were if the devil himself had appeared and poked me with his pitchfork.
There was no doubt in my mind. None whatsoever.
The real hell was only just beginning.
Book Four
Down and Dirty and Very, Very Deadly
Chapter 69
THE GUY at the table next to us the following morning was eating pancakes and reading the Gazette. The front cover was staring right back at me. Taunting me, maybe.
Give it up for Grimes, though. He put it together all on his own regarding Jackie Palmer. There was no headline, just a giant jack of spades with a big X through it. Of course, Grimes had already called and left three messages for me trying to find out who was next.
“It’s you,” said Elizabeth.