Bad Apple (13 page)

Gibbons pushed his way through Macy's revolving doors, jostled a pack of slow-moving, white-haired old bags weighed down with too many shopping bags, and fought his way into the store. When he got inside the inner doors, he scanned the huge main floor and scowled. The place was overwhelming—overwhelmingly female. There were pocketbook counters to the right of him, jewelry to the left of him, cosmetics up ahead. The whole place thrummed with women. He hated these kinds of department stores, and he hated going shopping. Better to walk through a minefield than set foot in any kind of women's department. But right now it wasn't the store and all these buy-happy women that made him want to strangle someone; it was his tooth. It still hurt like a bitch, and he'd specifically told Lorraine to meet him outside Macy's at the Thirty-fourth Street entrance near Broadway, right next to the subway stop. He'd told her to look for the dark blue van with
B
&
B PLUMBING AND HEATING
painted on the side and to bring the pills. He'd told her the van would be parked illegally at the curb, which it was. He'd also told her they'd be there at noon. It was almost one now. She knew he was dying with this goddamn tooth. So where the hell was she? Shopping? She and her goddamn cousin Tozzi were two of a kind.

Gibbons winced as he scanned the aisles. His tooth was doing an S&M rumba in his mouth. He knew Tozzi was somewhere in here doing something stupid because he'd heard a lot of yelling and crap come through Tozzi's transmitter as he and Dougherty, the surveillance techie, sat in the van waiting for goddamn Lorraine to show up.

After Gibbons had lost track of his partner back in Bayonne earlier that morning, he'd told Dougherty to go park by the busy entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, figuring that if stupid Tozzi came by that way, they'd pick up his signal. Gibbons didn't trust him to go disappear the way he'd told him to. If he knew Tozzi, Tozzi would be out hunting for Bells—by himself.

Gibbons's hunch paid off around eleven-thirty when they picked up a strong transmission and spotted the silver BMW with Tozzi in the backseat headed for Manhattan. They followed Tozzi's signal here to Macy's department store and listened to see if they could figure out who he was with. When Gibbons and Dougherty agreed that Bells was in there with him, they called in to the field office for a backup team. That was about fifteen minutes ago. But as they waited in the van, listening to Tozzi's transmissions, Gibbons and Dougherty couldn't figure out what the hell was going on now. All of a sudden there'd been a lot of hollering and screaming. Gina DeFresco was all excited about something, but Bells sounded real calm and even. Especially when he'd said “I've got a little present for you, Gina.”

The weird thing was that they hadn't heard Tozzi's voice in any of this after the commotion started, and Gibbons was afraid something had gone wrong. Ms. DeFresco hadn't screamed as much as bitched, and they hadn't heard any gunshots, but Tozzi could still be in trouble. All Gibbons could think was that Bells had stuck a shiv in Tozzi's side or slit his throat or something gruesome like that, and Ms. DeFresco, the Mafia princess, didn't
know how to cry and scream and react like a normal female who's just seen a guy get stabbed. All she knew how to do was bitch and complain. Probably got blood on her shoes or something like that.

Gibbons marched up the center aisle past all the makeup counters where the saleswomen stared at him and his swollen face, all of them made up like hookers. The whole place reeked of perfume, something else he hated. To him, all perfume smelled like dead old ladies laid out in flower print dresses. He looked all around him, hoping to spot Tozzi and the gang, but the first floor of Macy's was bigger than a gym, for chrissake. The whole store was gigantic, ten floors on an entire city block. How the hell was he supposed to find Tozzi in here? As he headed for the escalators, he figured he'd start from the top and work his way down. He had a feeling that if Bells was making trouble, he was doing it in private, away from the crowds, maybe in a dressing room or something.

But as Gibbons approached the escalators, he spotted something that made him slow down. There was a girl in tails and nylons spraying guys with perfume as they got on the escalator. Free samples of some new men's cologne. Gibbons hated perfume on men worse than he hated it on women. It reminded him of asskissers like his boss Brant Ivers, who left his scent on every piece of paper he touched like a dog marking his territory.

If that perfume broad even came near him with that spray bottle, he swore to God he'd deck her. Gibbons stopped walking and looked around the walls. There had to be elevators here someplace.

“Gibbons!”

He whipped his head around, ready to cold-cock anyone who got too close.

“Gibbons! Over here.”

He squinted against the pain in his tooth and saw his wife coming down the aisle from where he'd been. She was wearing one of her schoolmarm outfits: white blouse, plain black skirt, low-heeled black pumps. The string tie with the turquoise clasp and the black Persian lamb jacket with the big shoulders dressed it up a little, but she had her dark hair tied back the way she always did when she was going to work. Lorraine didn't think it was proper for a fifty-three-year-old tenured professor of medieval history at Princeton to wear her hair loose. Gibbons disagreed. She kept it long, down to the middle of her back, and when she did wear it down with a mother-of-pearl comb over one ear, she looked like a tall and stately lady of Spain. The silver hairs picked up the light when she wore it down, which made her even more intriguing. But only when she wore it down. The rest of the time she was a schoolmarm.

“How do you feel?” She sounded more exasperated than concerned.

“I'm ready to shoot myself with this tooth, I got three and a half hours of sleep last night, and I can't find that numbskull cousin of yours—how do you think I feel?”

“You don't have to bite my head off. I'm just concerned about you.” She was wearing her schoolmarm attitude, too.

“Did you get me the pills?”

“Yes, I got you the pills.” She opened her purse and pulled out a brown plastic prescription bottle.

Gibbons snatched it out of her hand and popped the top. “How many am I supposed to take?”

“Can't you read the label?”

He glared at her. “Yeah, I can read it, but I'm asking
you.
”

“How am I supposed to know? I'm not a pharmacist.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” He shook out a few of the round white tablets and read the label.

“I know you're in pain, Gibbons, but the sarcasm is uncalled for.”

He put all the pills back in the bottle but one, then tossed it back into his mouth, swallowing it dry. He looked at the label again. Percodan. He hoped they worked quick.

Suddenly she snatched the bottle away from him. “Why do you have to be such an ass? Would it hurt to say ‘thank you'?”

He gave her an evil look and held out his hand. “Thank you.”

“Look, I've got to catch a train to Princeton. Dr. Lewis said he could fit you in at two forty-five.”

“I can't go then—”

“Then suffer. I can't go to the dentist for you, too.” She looked like she wanted to strangle him.

“Call him and tell him I can't make it.”

“
You
call him! I'm not your secretary.”

“Look, Lorraine, I can't. I gotta find—”

“Oh, my God!” Lorraine's dark eyes rose, and she bit her bottom lip.

The cosmetic hookers and all their customers were looking up, too, their lipstick mouths hanging wide open. Gibbons turned around, expecting to see a flasher with his pants down around his ankles. But he was wrong.

“Jesus Christ,” he murmured.

The four of them were gliding down the escalator like they were coming down from heaven. Tozzi was shaking his head and blinking his eyes, leaning heavily on the railing for support. Next to him was a red-faced Gina DeFresco looking mad as hell, but looking pretty scared, too. Behind them, a step higher, was Tony Bells, and behind Bells was his legbreaker Stanley. Gibbons didn't like the look of this. Then he noticed the shiny metal cuff on Gina's wrist down by her side right next to the
sleeve of Tozzi's coat, and he realized that they were handcuffed together.

“Shit,” he grumbled, grabbing Lorraine's arm and pulling her out of the aisle. But she whipped her arm away, still angry at him.

“Lorraine,” he growled under his breath. “Come over here.”

She ignored him. “That's Michael,” she said out loud. “Don't you see him? He's not well. He looks awful.” She started to walk toward the escalators to help her cousin.

“Lorraine, come back—”

“Hey, Gib, what the hell're you doing here?”

Gibbons turned toward the whispering voice. It was Freshy DeFresco, stooped and cowering behind a counter, looking like he'd just run out of a haunted house.

“Bells is somewhere around here, Gib, and he's lost it, man. The guy's in hyperspace. I just took off when I saw it starting, man. I'm getting outta here. I'm sorry. I'm goin'.”

But Gibbons wasn't listening. He was watching his stupid wife walking straight toward her dumbass cousin, putting herself in the middle of a very dangerous situation. “Lorraine!” he hissed. “Get over here.” He rushed up behind her and gripped her arm, pulling her away.

But as he glanced up quickly at the four on the escalator, he suddenly made eye contact with Tony Bells, who was staring right at him, staring like he knew who he was, staring like he intended to do something about it. Gibbons felt his insides drop out. This was all wrong. Bells wasn't supposed to know who he was.

Bells's arm came up over Gina's head, and Gibbons saw it happening as if it were in slow motion. Bells had a gun. Instinctively Gibbons reached into his jacket for his gun, Excalibur, got it out of the holster, and was just about to yell “Freeze!” when
the perfume girl in the tails screamed and dropped her spray bottle. It smashed to the floor at the same moment that the gunshot rang out, and Gibbons saw the automatic jump in Bells's hand just as he felt the impact of the bullet somewhere on his chest.

That friggin' perfume is gonna stink up the whole place, he thought as he fell backward, and he hoped he wouldn't get any on him.

That was the last thing he thought just before everything went fuzzy . . . then black.

Lorraine turned and saw Gibbons skidding across the floor on his back. She thought he was trying to sneak away, and this seemed like a peculiar way to do it. But then she felt the whoosh of someone running past her, the man who was on the escalator standing behind her cousin Michael, the gaunt-faced but good-looking man. He moved like a dancer, she thought, or a dancer imitating a ghost. A smooth, continuous flowing motion. The man swooped up to Gibbons, and before she realized what the man was really doing, the crack of a gunshot roused the crowd again. His arm was extended like a matador's sword over the downed bull. He'd fired into Gibbons's body, which bounced off the floor as if there were no life in it. Immediately she wondered why she thought of Gibbons's body as an “it,” as an object and not a person, not “her husband.”

“Gib!” It was a croak more than a shout, the voice of a far-off spirit coming to take Gibbons away. But it was Michael, her cousin, coming off the escalator now, reaching out to his partner.

“Get back.” The handsome ghost dancer spun around and pointed his gun at Tozzi. “Move,” he ordered. “Go.” And without warning, the man grabbed the woman beside Tozzi by the hair,
the woman with the purple glasses, and he dragged her off in his wake. And for some reason that Lorraine couldn't understand, her cousin Michael followed, stumbling behind as if he were under a spell and unable to control his own body.

The ghost dancer whipped Michael and the woman ahead of him as if they were weightless and held the gun to Michael's neck. “Run,” he said. “Run!” And they ran, like horses pulling a sleigh, down the next aisle, disappearing behind the counters of hanging scarves and handbags.

Shoppers ran for their lives. Women in heels slipped and fell, scrambling on their knees to escape. The hard faces of the saleswomen melted in screaming panic. People pushed and shoved on both escalators, desperate to get upstairs.

Lorraine was the calm at the center of the cyclone. Her feet were bolted to the floor. She twisted her body to see her husband lying on the polished floor, his arm tangled in the high chrome stool of the Revlon counter.

A thick squat man was standing over Gibbons, shaking his head, saying “Jesus H. fucking Christ,” saying it over and over again. Another man, a pale, skinny, frightened man was there, too. They were the only ones not running for cover. They were both holding guns down at their sides, but the skinny man didn't seem comfortable holding his. They both seemed confused and upset.

People were yelling and shouting, some screaming, all of them fleeing down the other aisles, but Lorraine couldn't move. She managed to loosen her feet and inch closer to her husband, but she couldn't get to him. She was made of lead, and she could only look at him. She couldn't cry or wail or weep. She'd done all that before, in her nightmares, in her daymares. The fear that this would happen someday used to ambush her at idle moments, gripping her soul, hanging on, and refusing to let go.
She'd always fend off the attacks, eventually convincing herself that this would never happen to
her
husband, but before it was over she'd always end up crying for him in her mind, crying and crying and crying. She'd cried so much, it seemed pointless to cry now. There were no more tears left in her. The inevitable had finally happened, and the only surprise was that she wasn't really surprised because she'd rehearsed this so many times before.