The Night Watcher. John Lutz
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“My divorce,” Rica said. “You’ll learn.”
“How long have you been divorced?”
“Thirteen years. I was young and dumb, but I wised up fast. Lawyers haven’t changed.”
Stack thought about his own divorce attorney, Gideon Fine. He wasn’t anything like Rica had described. Or was he?…
“We should talk to Raymond Masters,” Stack said. “Where’s he being held?”
“He’s not. He beat the rap. And it would have been his third conviction, the first two for beating the hell out of his wife. Illegal search. Danner did a good job defending him.”
“We’ll locate Masters and talk to him,” Stack said. “See if we can find out what kind of confidences passed between attorney and client.”
“You smell motive?”
“Maybe. A lawyer like Danner might know an embezzler or two, but Masters would probably be his only acquaintance in the even less desirable corner of crime where violence is a regular occurrence.”
“Speaking of desirable,” Rica said.
“Get off my desk,” Stack told her, “before you char it.”
Rica didn’t bother playing dumb.
Rica knew this: Early in her life she’d let circumstances control her, push her around. She’d settled for whatever came her way and tried to make the best of it. That hadn’t worked. That had, in fact, become hell.
Not anymore, she’d decided just before becoming a cop. It didn’t matter what the other female cops said, or the men. She’d determine what she wanted, be at the mercy of what she longed for, and go after all of it hard, be it Stack or anything else.
There had been some tough times in the years after the divorce, in the department. Jagged emotional debris to sort through. But Rica ran Rica’s life. Rica would play the game hard because she’d learned she had to be hard.
Rica was afraid to play it any other way, of where it might lead.
Even lighting a cigarette, Chips had to stare at the lighter flame longer than was necessary. More and more often he thought a lot about fire, the way it warmed and destroyed, gave light and death, comfort and pain, protected and imperiled. It was a friend but it was dangerous. You couldn’t trust it even when you got to know it well.
Tonight, when there was no reason to stay and every reason to leave, he had to stand and watch how it danced and devoured. It fascinated, the way it licked at the fringe on the bottom of the sofa, writhed along the carpet, and flicked out a tongue of flame at the drapes, liked the taste, and began to devour the material, curled smoking black at the ceiling, testing, testing bare plaster, nothing there, across the valance to the matching drape, twisting and curling like a woman who couldn’t get enough—
“What the hell are you doing?”
He turned and saw the man standing in the doorway. A big man with bull shoulders, eyes wide and bright with the flames, face a mask of rage writhing like the fire. His fists were clenched, his bulky body tight for the charge.
The man did charge, but in a measured, ominous way, body hunched, fists balled tight and held at chin level. Maybe he’d been a fighter, a pro. He was so methodical. Maybe he could kill with a bare-fisted punch.
Christ! Fear took over. Nothing to do but show the gun, scare him. Stop him, for God’s sake!
The gun made the big man pause, then shrug. Something about his eyes and the way he cocked his head, as if he’d been drinking. “You really think that fuckin’ peashooter’s gonna stop me from tearin’ meat from your bones?” He kept coming. Faster.
The first shot merely made him grunt and brush his stomach with his hand where the bullet had entered, as if he might flick away the wound.
The second made him stagger.
The third dropped him to his knees.
Don’t get up! Please, don’t get up!
But he did get up. Slowly swaying in the hot wind. The only sound was that of the flames crackling. The fire was like the searing, rancid breath of a beast now, a dragon closing in like the man only from another direction.
The fourth shot brought the man down again but didn’t kill him. He was on his stomach, trying to raise himself with his arms, looking confused and scared for the first time. “Legs don’t goddamn work! Can’t…”
The heat was getting unbearable. Reflections of flame in the man’s saucer eyes. Terrified now. Bewildered. He began thrashing around, his arms and upper body, even his head. Everything but his legs. His left arm was bleeding where a bullet had caught it, bone or sinew showing glistening white. He tried again to raise his upper body and drag himself along with his arms, but the left arm bent at an unnatural angle and he flopped back down. “Help me! Help me stand up, damn you!…”
He was going to burn if he didn’t get help. He was going to die in flames.
Nothing to do now but run.
Christ!
“Help me! Can’t get up…”
Help us all! You’re the one that wanted trouble, asshole! Your fault! Why couldn’t you have just let me finish here and leave?
“Please!…”
Your fault, not mine!
Christ!
EIGHT
May 2000
Sitting in her luxuriously appointed office with its grand view of Central Park, Myra Raven thought about when she had been Myra Ravinski. Her gaze fixed on a horse-drawn carriage wending its way through the park, but its image didn’t really register on her mind. She was trying to conjure up the face of her first husband, the cop like Ed Marks and about Ed Marks’s age when he died.
But she found that she couldn’t. Not with any precision. That was the real tragedy, not that we remembered the faces of the dead, but that with time we forgot them. Only now and then, unbidden, did they appear out of time and with memory like pain.
A different life for Myra Ravinski so long ago, a young woman nominally educated, not particularly attractive, and—thank God!—not pregnant. Newly widowed, she’d returned to college at NYU, then left when her money ran out.
She’d thought her life was finally straightening out when she met and married Irwin Seltzer, a man in his fifties but still handsome and vigorous. But there were two problems: she was still in love with her dead husband, and Irwin couldn’t stop ending their increasingly frequent arguments by using his hands on her. Not his fists, which would leave bruises, but his palms, slapping so the red marks and occasional welts would fade quickly. It turned out that Myra was his second wife; the first had accused him of physical abuse and left him. Myra, no fool, left Irwin in the position of searching for piñata number three.
That’s when she learned why Irwin had gently insisted they sign a prenuptial agreement. The money she walked away with after the divorce lasted about six months.
No way to return to school now, and no desire. Myra had studied for her sales license and gone to work at a real estate agency in New Rochelle. Here was something she could do well, concentrating on the woman, if she were selling to a couple; letting the property seemingly sell itself; sometimes deftly steering the conversation so she could sense what the potential buyers really wanted, what they needed, rather than what they said were their wants and needs. Seeing into them. It was the gift everyone working in sales thought they possessed, or they belonged in other occupations. Myra didn’t only think she had the gift—she had it, and converted it into fat commissions.
But the commissions were even fatter in Manhattan, in the high-end residential property in the Upper East Side, Sutton Place, and areas of the Upper West