John Lutz Bundle (156 page)

An hour later, Hazelhoff called back.

“Avis wasn’t there,” he said. “There are indications that he’s fled. Couple of long guns are still in his farmhouse, and there’s a box, opened, with half a dozen twenty-five-caliber Springbok revolvers and ammunition. Ain’t that the kind of revolver was used—”

“It is,” Quinn said.

“Well, my guess is he mighta taken one or more of those guns with him. He’s probably headed someplace where you can’t walk around with a rifle or shotgun, but he’d still wanna be armed.”

“Agreed,” Quinn said. “You sure he’s fled, not just out somewhere and he might come back?”

“His dresser drawers are hangin’ open an’ there’s signs he’s grabbed some clothes from his closet. Half a carton of milk’s settin’ on the kitchen table, like he took a drink an’ didn’t bother to put the carton back ’cause he knew he wasn’t comin’ back. Didn’t even put the cap back on. The milk’s still cool, so he couldn’t have left very long ago. Also, you can see where he musta dragged somethin’ large an’ heavy off the closet shelf, left a big space an’ knocked a few things onto the floor. There’s an indentation on the mattress where it looks like a suitcase sat. Top of all that, that old truck of his is gone from behind the house. He’s fled, all right. No sign of where, though.”

Quinn thought he might know where. To New York City, to avenge his son’s death by killing the woman who’d caused it.

He hung up on Hazelhoff and called Pearl.

“Quinn,” she said, when she answered. “What’s up?”

“I don’t want to take time to explain, Pearl, but I want you to leave your apartment right now. Don’t take anything with you, just hang up the phone and go.”

“Go where, Quinn?”

“To the corner deli down the street from your apartment. Stay there till I show up.”

“I don’t understand this, Quinn.”

“Do you have to? Right now?”

“Damned right I do.”

“Can’t you trust me, Pearl?”

“Do I have to answer that?”

“Damn it, Pearl!” He surprised himself by how anguished he sounded.

“I can trust you,” she said, hearing the same thing in his voice. “Quinn—”

“Go, Pearl. Please! Go now!” Quinn broke the connection.

Quinn immediately phoned Renz and explained the situation, then asked Renz to send radio cars to intercept Avis if he happened to show up.

On the way outside to climb into the Lincoln, Quinn phoned Fedderman on his cell and told him what was happening.

Then he drove fast toward Pearl’s apartment.

It had been damned hard work. Must’ve been, or Hobbs wouldn’t be so winded. And his right arm was sore, as if he might have messed up his rotator cuff again.

He’d been drinking a while and figured he must have a snoot full, the way the room was tilting this way and that, making it difficult not to bump into things as he made his way toward the bed. It was like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

Hard work, but worth it. Teach the bitch a lesson.

After beating Lavern harder than he ever had, Hobbs staggered across the bedroom and fell onto the bed. He snorted a couple of times and then let out a long sigh. He lay there in peaceful drunken slumber as she crawled from the bedroom, certain that this time he’d broken one of her ribs completely. More than one. He had to have, the way he’d hit and kicked her.

As she crawled, one of her elbows felt wobbly and kept giving, and she dragged one knee.

Damn him, damn him, damn him…

She crawled off the bedroom carpet, onto the hardwood floor of the hall, then onto the softer hall runner. Every inch she crawled brought pain. Lavern had been warned that Hobbs would go too far and kill her some day. Maybe this was the day. Maybe he had killed her. Maybe this was an exercise in revenge and not prevention.

If that’s what it is, so be it!

Damn him, damn him, damn him…

When she reached the closet, she opened the door, felt around behind the coats, and closed her hand around the shotgun.

She used the gun as a cane to aid her in struggling to her feet, where she could reach the box of shells on the closet shelf.

Leaning against the wooden door frame, breathing hard and hurting with every breath, she slipped a shell into the breech.

As soon as he turned the Lincoln onto Pearl’s block, Quinn knew he was too late. Police cars were angled in at the curb in front of her building. Several uniformed cops were standing outside the building but up close to it. Quinn could guess why. They didn’t want to be visible from an upstairs window and become targets. They were talking with a man in a brown suit. Quinn recognized the blocky form and head of tousled black hair. Sal Vitali.

Quinn parked the Lincoln fifty feet away from the nearest police car, then climbed out, stayed inside the protective angle of vision, and jogged toward the knot of cops and Vitali.

“What’ve we got?” Quinn asked when he’d joined the group. He glanced over. Fedderman had arrived out of nowhere, shirt cuff flapping like a signal flag.

Vitali pointed to a uniformed cop, a skinny guy in his forties with a long, pointed nose. “Everson here was first on the scene,” he said. “Officer Cullen, who’s inside helping clear the building’s tenants out the back fire stairs, showed up a few minutes later. Cullen used the elevator, and Everson took the stairs. Everson won the race and got to Pearl’s floor just in time to see the suspect back up with her into her apartment and close the door. He had an arm around her neck and a gun held to her head.”

Quinn looked at Everson. “What kinda gun?”

“Small handgun of some kind,” Everson said. He had dead-looking brown eyes.

“Revolver?”

“Coulda been. Blue steel, I think. He was jamming the thing in her ear, and her hair kinda blocked my view.”

“He display any other weapon?”

“None that I could see.”

“Got a ’scrip of the suspect?”

“Medium height, black hair, muscular build, maybe fifty.”

Quinn nodded. “Nice work.”

“’Nother thing, Captain. He didn’t look scared at all. A real calm one.”

“Drugged up?”

“No, not that kinda drowsy calm. He’s plenty alert.”

“Hostage team’s on the way here,” Vitali said.

Quinn knew what that meant. SWAT sharpshooters, a hostage negotiator. Somebody else in charge.

Fedderman was thinking the same thing. “Let’s go in and get her,” he said.

“Get her shot, maybe,” Vitali said in his gravel-pit voice.

Fedderman looked from Vitali to Quinn. “If what you say’s true,” he said to Quinn, “he’s got nothing to lose. He won’t negotiate. He’s just playing out the string.”

Quinn knew Fedderman was right.

Mishkin came out of the building, staying in tight to the brick and stone front. When he knew he was safe, he straightened up out of his protective hunch and walked over to them. He was wearing a tie and a white shirt with the sleeves neatly folded up to reveal thin wrists. He was sweating and looking like a harried accountant.

“We got everybody but Pearl and the suspect outta the building,” he said.

“I think we oughta go in fast,” Quinn said.

“Not ‘we,’” Mishkin said. “You.”

Quinn looked at him.

“You alone, or he swears he’ll shoot her and then himself.”

“Why me alone?” Quinn asked. But he knew why.

“He says you killed his son,” Mishkin said.

The other men stared at Quinn, saying nothing. Sirens sounded, blocks away but getting closer.

Quinn said, “Make sure nobody interferes, Feds.” He set off toward the building’s entrance.

“Like Pearl did,” Fedderman said when Quinn was out of earshot.

Lavern Neeson made herself crawl.

She made it into the bedroom with great difficulty and a lot of pain, dragging the shotgun by its long barrel. At some point the sleeping Hobbs must have awakened enough to use the remote to switch on the TV. It was flickering without sound beyond the foot of the bed. Closed-caption yellow letters crawled along the bottom of the screen, the words of a man and woman arguing in dead silence about where the stock market was going.

She waited a few minutes until she’d caught her breath, then reached out and gripped a chair leg and dragged the chair closer to her and to the bed.

Using the shotgun and chair for support, Lavern made it to her knees. When she thought she was steady enough, she leaned the shotgun against the mattress. It wouldn’t do to pull herself up onto the chair and then not be able to reach the shotgun where it lay on the floor.

It took her about five minutes, but she did manage to reach an awkward sitting position on the chair. She stretched out her right arm and pulled the shotgun to her. She sat very still because even the slightest movement of her body brought pain.

Lavern was proud of herself. She’d made it here, to her chair by the bed, with the shotgun. She was well on the way to what she’d decided to do. Hobbs continued snoring lightly, unaware of the monumental struggle so near him. One that would change his and Lavern’s world forever.

Lavern moved the shotgun’s safety to the off position. It was ready to fire. This close to her target, she wouldn’t even have to aim it.

But she would aim the gun. She wanted to be responsible for her decision and what would happen in the future. In the meantime, she’d endure the present with at least a modicum of comfort and a certain nostalgia. A sad glance over her shoulder before turning a corner. She knew she was second by second living out what remained of her old life.

The room seemed to block all sound from outside and become very small. Automatically, her breathing found the tempo of her husband’s as she sat and watched him sleep. They were both on the edge of an abyss. One difference between them was that she knew it. Another was that he had put them there.

It would be easy for Hobbs,
Lavern thought. She’d squeeze the trigger and he’d simply slip from one dream to another. She’d be the one left with the blood and the mess and every kind of horror.

The reality.

It wasn’t fair, but it never had been.

Quinn nodded to the uniformed cop in the lobby, who tried to look blankly at him, then gave it up and nodded back, wishing him luck. He was still watching as the elevator door closed, and then Quinn was on the way up.

He drew his old .38 revolver and held it tight against his thigh as he stepped from the quiet elevator into the silent hall. The building even
felt
empty.

Quinn advanced along the carpeted hall that smelled of time and dust and saw that the door to Pearl’s apartment was standing open.

Feeling fear that was on the edge of nausea, he moved closer to the doorway so he had a narrow view of the apartment’s interior. He saw a corner of the sofa, part of a lamp table, half of Pearl’s framed museum print of Munch’s
The Scream.

He swallowed to make sure his throat wasn’t dry. “Dwayne Avis?”

“I’m here with your lady love,” Avis said in a calm voice. “I ain’t so sure she’s a lady, though. Why don’t you come on into the apartment, Captain Quinn, so we can see each other?”

Quinn took a deep breath and willed his legs to move. He tasted bile at the back of his throat.

There was Avis, standing near the opposite end of the sofa, holding Pearl in front of him with one arm tight around her neck. The other arm was crooked so the .25-caliber Springbok revolver in his right hand pointed straight into Pearl’s right ear. Pearl’s eyes met Quinn’s. She looked afraid but calculating. She hadn’t given up and was trusting him to figure out something. To try, anyway. They both knew that the only way Dwayne Avis was going to leave the building was dead or in custody.

Avis seemed almost unconcerned by his predicament. He was simply using what leverage he had and was prepared to cope with whatever came of it.

Quinn moved away from the doorway, closer to them. Avis watched him, his hooded dark eyes unblinking, the gun steady against Pearl’s ear.

“That’d be near enough,” Avis said.

Quinn stopped and stood still.

“He’s gonna shoot you,” Pearl said. “Then me.”

“Or you and then him,” Avis said.

“What are your demands?” Quinn asked. But he knew Avis didn’t have demands. Pearl had it right. Avis simply wanted Quinn and Pearl, in whatever order, to leave this world before he did. Even if Avis by some wild chance was able to kill Quinn and make his escape, he’d still shoot Pearl.

Quinn tried to figure what he had to work with. Avis was skilled at using Pearl’s body as a shield. He was crouched with his head behind and slightly to the side of Pearl’s so that he was peering over her left shoulder. Only his left eye and the left side of his forehead were exposed. Quinn hadn’t actually shown his revolver to Avis, but he was sure Avis knew it was there in Quinn’s right hand, alongside and slightly behind his right thigh where it couldn’t be seen. If Quinn’s right arm began to rise to point his weapon, the bloodbath would begin.

Then Quinn saw the one possibility Avis had left him. Quinn was more familiar than Avis with the old Springbok revolvers, which had been used probably exclusively by Avis’s son Martin and the Quest and Quarry clients. Most likely the ones at Avis’s farm were simply stored there. The revolver in Avis’s hand wasn’t cocked. The hammer was still forward and would have to be thumbed back before the gun would fire.

The amount of time it would take Avis’s thumb to cock the revolver and for Avis to squeeze the trigger was the amount of time Quinn had to act and make whatever he did work. Seconds.

And the slight exposure of Avis’s eye and tanned forehead was a difficult target, even in these close quarters.

Seconds.

Seconds that might save Pearl’s life or end it. That might be ticking away now in Avis’s head.

Quinn knew that if he did chance it and take the shot, he’d have to move first in order to have time.

He did move first. Instantly and decisively.

As his hand came up with the bulky old .38, Quinn saw Avis’s stubby thumb moving toward the Springbok’s hammer.

Seconds.

Quinn turned off every other part of his mind, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

The room rocked with the deafening blast of gunfire.

One shot. Before either Avis or Pearl could react.

Quinn saw a red mist appear like a halo around Avis’s head, saw a fragment of skull and hair spin back and away. Avis’s arm fell away from Pearl. They both toppled backward.

Avis lay still on his back. Pearl rolled to the side and scrambled to her feet. She was trembling, and there were flecks of blood and what looked like gray brain matter on her left cheek.

Quinn had moved forward after the shot without realizing it. He and Pearl stared down at Avis’s motionless figure. A large piece of Avis’s skull was missing above his left eye. Without the vitality of life he looked diminutive and harmless.

Quinn and Pearl noticed at the same time how close it had been. Avis had managed to cock the pistol in the second before he’d died.

Instinctively, Quinn kicked the gun away from the dead hand, halfway across the room.

The bullet that had taken off part of Avis’s skull had also broken a window, allowing the breeze to enter through the shattered pane. A curtain blown in the wind momentarily created a shadow on the wall that looked like a huge feathered wing.

For the first time in her life, Pearl fainted.