John Lutz Bundle (71 page)

Killing could stimulate the appetite. The Butcher had finished his breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast at a diner over on East Fifty-first Street. He was walking along Third Avenue, using the tip of his tongue to try working a stubborn morsel of bacon from between his molars, when he stopped suddenly in front of a news kiosk.

A brick anchored a stack of
New York Posts
from the morning breeze. The brick, which had a red ribbon tied around it in a bow so that it resembled a wrapped gift, was slightly off center, revealing a color photograph beneath the large caption “BUTCHER’S MOM.”

He stood motionless, ignoring people bumping into him, some of them glaring or cursing at him as they hurried on. It took all his effort to move closer to the kiosk and slide the top paper out from beneath the brick.

She looked so young! So beautiful! As he remembered her, only more so. She’d aged as did most truly beautiful women, in a way that made them look simply more the way they’d appeared as young girls, a way that preserved the magic.

The black magic.

Very much more themselves. Every artifice stripped away by time. Very much more themselves.

The ancient magic.

Mom
.

Not in grimy jeans or a housedress with her hair a tangle. Not barefoot. Not bloody.

Not nude and bloody and screaming my name. Not dragging a black plastic trash bag across a wooden floor…thumping black trash bag. Reaching into it…into it…

Sam!

Oh, Christ! Sam!

“You gonna buy that or just memorize it?”

Jarred from the swamp of the past, the Butcher stared at the old man in the kiosk in a way that made the man blink behind his thick glasses and back up a step.

“They’re for sale, you know,” he said in a more moderate tone.

The Butcher tucked the folded paper beneath his arm, then worked a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and stuffed it into the man’s hand. He then picked up a
Times
and
Daily News.
They also made note of the fact that Mom was in New York. They also featured at least one photograph and promised more on the inside pages.

What was he feeling, staring at her
Post
photograph? He didn’t understand. This beautiful woman who’d given him life…

Pride? An insane pride?

Hate?

Rage?

He turned away abruptly and strode toward the intersection, where it would be easiest to hail a cab. He needed to get back inside the protection of his four walls,
safe inside the womb,
to recline in his chair, almost in the fetal position, with a Jack Daniel’s over ice, back to where he could read.

No, to where he could look at the photographs, stare at them, etch them with fire into his memory.

Mom…

“You want your change?”

He ignored the voice calling from the kiosk behind him.

Too late for change.

He understood now that he hadn’t escaped the swamp. He never would.

He walked faster and faster, elbowing people out of his way, and finally broke into a run.

Quinn and Pearl were in room 624, two rooms down the hall from Myrna Kraft’s. From there Quinn could observe the street and at the same time stay close to Myrna. Fedderman was outside running things at ground level according to Quinn’s instructions. He was in an unmarked car, from time to time changing parking spots, while he kept in touch with Quinn or the undercover cop posing as a bellhop and hanging around the hotel entrance with the real bellhop. The undercover cop’s name was Neeson and he hadn’t liked climbing into a bellhop uniform. On the other hand, he’d garnered some tips just holding the door open for arriving and departing guests. The last time Fedderman had checked on him, Neeson said he was considering changing occupations.

The bearded homeless man across the street, seated on a folded blanket in the shadow of a building recess and holding a cup, was also NYPD undercover. Probably making a little extra money today, too, Fedderman thought, as he sat in the car half a block down and waited for the overheated engine to cool enough so he could restart it and turn the air conditioner back on.

Two more undercovers were in the lobby, looking like a tourist couple, and another—Officer Nancy Weaver—was hanging around Myrna’s floor in a maid’s uniform. Quinn had requested Weaver. Pearl thought it was maybe to aggravate her, Pearl, because of her short-lived affair with Jeb Kraft. He’d even mentioned he thought Weaver looked cute in her maid’s outfit. Pearl told him Weaver should change linens and scrub toilets as part of her cover. (And maybe fasten another button on her maid uniform blouse.)

Fueled by three cups of coffee, Pearl was pacing, while Quinn sat in a comfortable chair he’d dragged across the carpet so he could sit by the window. A set of earphones was draped over the back of the desk chair. Myrna’s room was bugged, but she was out now, probably shopping, and being tailed by the rest of the unit Renz had assigned the task of protecting her.

As Pearl paced, she thought she smelled stale tobacco smoke. Every hotel room she’d been in lately smelled as if someone had been smoking in it. Had New Yorkers been driven to skulk like addicts or adulterers and appease their filthy vice in hotel rooms?

“I’m sorry about that Weaver remark,” Quinn said. “About her looking cute. I was trying to make you jealous.” He was addressing Pearl but continued gazing out the window as he talked.

“You only made it to
annoyed
,” Pearl said. “Does it smell to you like somebody’s been smoking in here?”

“No. You’re always thinking you smell tobacco smoke where there is none.”

“Maybe I do smell smoke, and you can’t because you’ve burned out your sense of smell with those illegal Cuban cigars you suck on.”

“You’re testy. Is it the coffee?”

“It’s you.”

“What you should do,” he said, “is only have relationships with other cops.”

We’re back on that, are we?
“I’m no longer a cop, except temporarily.”

“Bank guard, then. More or less the same thing.”

“No,” Pearl said. “If I were a bank guard I wouldn’t be here.”

Quinn continued to stare out the window, silently.

Pearl figured she’d better set things straight. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel
something
for Quinn. It was more that she knew
something
about herself. It wouldn’t work for them.

Maybe nothing would work for her with anyone. It was easy to think that way after Jeb Jones—Kraft. Her psyche was still bruised and confused. She did know she could no longer trust her emotions.
Build a wall around your heart…

“We’re friends,” she said. “Colleagues. That’s all, Quinn.”

“I don’t want to leave it at that. Not with you.”

If it was supposed to be a compliment, it hadn’t worked. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve,” Pearl said.

“I won’t give up.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to concentrate on the stalker
outside
the hotel.”

Quinn turned away from the window just long enough to smile at her. “I meant I won’t give up hope.”

“That’s your concern,” Pearl said, “and none of mine.”

“At this point,” Quinn said, “I know you’re not seeing anyone else.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

He smiled again. Didn’t turn his head, but she saw his cheek crinkle up just beneath the corner of his eye. She’d seen that enough times to know he was grinning. Anger rose in her.

“Milton Kahn,” she said venomously, as if casting a spell.

Quinn looked over at her curiously. “Who?”

“Never mind. He’s nobody you’re ever going to meet.”

Me, either, with any luck.

“I happen to like my life the way it is,” Pearl said. “Once I get back to the status quo.”

Did that lie even make sense?

Quinn was silent for a while. “I don’t think he’ll come tonight,” he said. “He’s more the sort to take his time.”

Pearl knew he wasn’t talking about Milton Kahn. “He’s also the sort to spring surprises. We seem to have everything taken into account, Quinn, but I still can’t shake the notion that this killer might figure a way around us. You ever get that feeling about him?

“Yeah.”

Quinn’s cell phone, lying on the windowsill, beeped the first few notes of “Lara’s Theme” before he snatched it up, pressed it to his ear, and said, “Yeah,” again. “Okay, Feds.”

He cut the connection and laid the phone back on the sill.

“Myrna’s back.”

Pearl instantly stopped pacing, sat down at the desk, and slipped the headphones back on.

“I happen to like being a bank guard,” she said, with a sideways glance at Quinn.

“Probably the uniform,” Quinn said.

No mercy.

“You have other things to do all the time,” Wormy told Lauri.

They were in the kitchen of the Hungry U, a busy place full of spicy aromas, the blur of motion, the clink and clatter of dishes and flatware.

“Not all the time, but tonight,” Lauri said. She was checking on a customer’s order of
shahi korma
, wondering what the delay was. She had to have something to tell the man, who was a valued regular, meaning he’d been in the restaurant at least twice.

“Be ready jus’ about three minutes,” said Jamal, the African American–Pakistani chef.

“Lauri—”

“Really, Wormy, you don’t have a title proving ownership of me. Women aren’t chattel any longer.”

“Cattle?”

“Chattel. It means we don’t have to spend every minute together you want to spend, but not a single moment you don’t.”

Wormy seemed puzzled by her phrasing. Or indignant. Maybe he was still thinking about chattel. Lauri didn’t have time to sort it all out.

“Damn it, Lauri. Ain’t any call to be so hard-ass. You know you’re my woman.”

Jamal, racketing a whisk around in a metal bowl to whip up a sauce, gave him a look.

Not half so withering as Lauri’s. “I’m nobody’s woman. And you don’t have any business in the kitchen, Wormy.”

“She be right on that one,” Jamal said. “Them two.”

“I know what you’re doin’,” Wormy said, ignoring Jamal. “You’re goin’ out with somebody else.”

“Whee-ooh!” Jamal said.

“If I were seeing someone else,” Lauri said coldly, “it’d be none of your concern. You think I don’t know about you and your friends, and what goes on at those clubs when I’m not around?”

Jamal stopped with the whisk and looked from Lauri to Wormy.

“That kinda thing’s nothin’, Lauri. Nothin’! I don’t feel about any of those girls the way I feel about you. You’re everything in the world to me.”

Nodding approval, Jamal began whisking vigorously again.

“You don’t act like it,” Lauri said. “And that’s the operative word—act!”

“Girl’s education showin’,” Jamal said.

Wormy stepped toward him, the upper half of his body seeming to move much slower than the lower half. “I about had it with you!”

Jamal smiled. “C’mon, I stab you with this whisk.”

Wormy took another threatening step toward Jamal, but Lauri stopped him, grabbing his stringy upper arm. “You’re going to get us all fired,” she said, squeezing hard enough to make Wormy wince.

“Screw that! Sometimes you gotta—”

“And no place in the Village will hire you again to play music.”

That gave Wormy pause.

“I don’t like what’s happenin’,” he said, wrenching his arm from Lauri’s grip and turning his back on Jamal.

“Nothing’s
happening.”

“
Shahi korma’
s happenin’,” Jamal said. “Right there ready to serve an’ startin’ to cool.”

Wormy glared back over his shoulder at him, then said again to Lauri, “I don’t, goddamn it,
like
it!”

“Like there’s some law,” Jamal muttered.

Wormy stormed out of the kitchen, not bothering to check and see if anyone was coming the other way through the swinging doors. Fortunately, no one was.

Lauri picked up the plate of
shahi korma
and placed it in the center of a circular tray, then lifted the tray so it was perfectly level.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said to Jamal.

“That Joe guy been around askin’ for you,” he said, deadpan.

“When?”

“Now an’ again.”

She carried the tray from the kitchen, careful to go up on her toes and check through the tiny window to make sure Wormy wasn’t lurking outside the swinging doors.

No sign of him. But that didn’t mean he’d left.

“Ever think of goin’ out with me?” Jamal asked behind her. “Shed yourself of that worm man?”

If Wormy was still in the restaurant, Lauri didn’t know it. She looked neither left nor right as she bore the
shahi korma
to its table with the regal bearing of a queen.

It didn’t take the Butcher long to locate the hotel. The low marble steps, the dark lower edge of the marquee, the glass revolving door set in a wall of brick and smooth white stone—all were like features of a face.

He’d spent a while at his computer, visiting the websites of New York hotels, before he’d found the right one—the Meredith—and compared it with the newspaper photograph to make sure. It was a mid-priced—which in Manhattan meant merely astronomical—business hotel, with all the amenities to make it competitive. He took a virtual tour of several rooms, as well as the restaurant and coffee shop. Most useful.

Later that day he rode past the Meredith in a cab in order to see it in three dimensions and get a feel for the place. Then he got out and walked around the surrounding neighborhood, terrain into which he might someday have to escape.

It had been only hours since he’d learned this morning that his mother was in the city, and already he knew her exact location. Knowing it somehow made her even more real, more menacing. Her presence haunted him like a specter as he walked the streets, mulling over what to do. Even in a city this size, it was possible they’d pass each other on the sidewalk, perhaps not even glance at each other.

Or one of them might glance. The thought gave him a chill.

He was surprised when he looked at his watch and saw that his research had taken most of the afternoon. Though he wasn’t hungry, he had a tuna melt and coffee in a small diner before returning to what he increasingly thought of as his lair.

He did feel somewhat better since gaining the essential knowledge of his mother’s whereabouts when she slept. The Meredith Hotel. Now what? Time to practice to deceive?

Not yet. Time to learn more.

He poured a Jack Daniel’s, walked to his recliner, and situated himself where he could see out the window at the darkening city. Such a long way from that time years ago in the swamp, but time could be folded like an accordion. More and more lately his dreams carried him back, his nightmares that weren’t as horrifying as the actuality that gave them birth. The swamp had invaded his mind and become a part of him, and there were things living and crawling there he didn’t want to touch. He thought he’d escaped them but they’d been there all along.

Some nights he lay in bed staring into darkness, terrified of falling asleep. Was it only because of his dreams, or was he feeling the pressure the literature on serial killers proclaimed them to feel as their victim count climbed?

None of us ever escapes.

Perhaps his mother wouldn’t escape. The things that crawled in the darkness of his mind crawled in hers.

It had been so long since they’d seen each other, but he was sure they understood each other.

He also understood Quinn.

Of course the Meredith would be a trap. He knew his nemesis, Quinn. He’d followed him, studied him. As Quinn had studied
his
nemesis. They’d crawled into each other’s brains. He knew Quinn’s mind better than Quinn himself knew it.

Quinn had his own miasma of problems, his own dark swamp. A record of harsh justice and violence, a stained reputation, an alcoholic past, a failed marriage, a troubled daughter, a woman he loved who didn’t love him. An insatiable need and talent for the hunt.

None of us ever escapes.

Do we really want to?

There was no doubt in Sherman’s mind that his mother was bait, an archangel of evil that had to be slain. That she was being used to lure him to destruction was fitting.

Quinn certainly had to understand that the Butcher wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of the very demon he’d been trying again and again to slay, the angel demon that wouldn’t stay dead. But Quinn didn’t understand Sherman’s mother as well as he thought. She was bait, but she was deadly bait. She wanted to kill her son as badly as when she’d tried all those years ago in the swamp, only now she’d be even more determined.

Deadly bait.

Sherman would have to plan carefully. Move carefully. He felt like a spider walking the web of a much larger, much deadlier insect. One that was waiting for him and would sense his slightest misstep. One that could paralyze him with a glance and suck him dry of life even before his heart stopped.

Mom…

Nine-year-old Sherman took a sip of Jack Daniel’s and told himself things had changed and he was grown up now, an adult. With an effort of will, he ignored his fear and engaged his mind.

He was nothing if not a problem solver.

The Meredith Hotel wasn’t precisely a spiderweb. There were different ways to approach it, and different ways to move within it.

Quinn’s trap was a problem that could be solved. That
must
be solved.

It was a family matter.