A Killing Gift (3 page)

Y
ou did a good job. Don't move. An ambulance is on the way."

Jack Devereaux heard the command and obeyed. Frankly, he couldn't have gotten up if he tried. His whole right side was a fireworks of pain. He couldn't feel his feet and couldn't lift his right arm at all. Not even the hand. He knew without even seeing that particular hand that he'd need a cast. This was a disaster for a person who lived his life by computer. But that was the least of tonight's disaster. His body was on hold, but his brain kept going without it, bumping along over relevant and irrelevant subjects like a jeep on a dirt road.

"Is she all right?" he croaked out. He was pinned to the ground and no one would give him an answer.

People were screaming. Sirens were going. And there might be a dead person a few feet away from him. He couldn't tell when he'd tried CPR on her whether it had worked or not. He'd been pulled away too fast, and now no one would tell him if the girl was dead. If she was dead, he'd never forgive himself for not moving fast enough, for not making enough noise. Sheba seemed to think she'd done something wrong. She was on her belly, trying to crawl closer to him. Whining deep in her throat.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, boss. Please forgive me.

"It's okay, baby." He tried to reassure her that she was a hero, she'd done right, but the words came out more like a moan.

Pain cut through his body, and anxiety cut even deeper. He'd failed again in the saving department. Then his thoughts switched over to smells. He couldn't help being aware of odors. When he was happy, when he was sad, when he was making love to Lisa they could distract him. During disasters especially, his emotions could easily be derailed by his olfactory sense. When his mother was dying of liver cancer three years ago, he'd rushed to the hospital hoping to make it in time. When he got there and saw that she was gone, he couldn't feel the terrible loss because the sheet covering her body had the incongruous odor of wet rubber. So wrong for her, who'd always smelled of the delicate tea rose. After a lifetime of wearing it, she had had the perfume lodged so deep in her pores it seemed part of her. And yet it was the odor of wet rubber that stuck with him. He was like a dog that way.

Now, lying on the damp cement and fearing another death, Jack was aware only of the agony of broken bones, and the smell of strong garlic and stale cigarette smoke. The mountain of a man who was holding him down had breath that could kill. But the sidewalk under his body also had a smell. So had the girl he'd tried to save; so did the bark and new leaves of the venerable Washington Square trees. Right at that moment Jack Devereaux could have named all the smells of flat-on-the-ground Washington Square. A faint odor of urine, too, from the dogs. What else? Something about the guy struck a chord. He couldn't pin it down. Then his thoughts spun back to the woman surrounded by cops on the ground near him. Dear God, he didn't want to have hesitated and been too late.

"Please… is she okay?" His voice was like ashes in his throat. Everything in his life had changed two weeks ago, but he still sounded pathetic, like someone who had no control over his life.

"Whose dog is this?" The question did not come from the mountain with the horrific breath. A new person had arrived. This one smelled of leather and bay rum aftershave.

"Mine." Jack tried to reach out with his other hand, his left one, but Sheba was beyond his reach, too. The chocolate lab also had a strong smell. It was always comforting to him. Now, restrained by a stranger holding her leash, she whined from the bottom of her soul.
Boss, boss, boss. Get over here.

"How are you doing?" The new person squatted by his side. Jack saw his mustache and thought cop, not doctor. "I don't know," he said honestly.

"Looks like your arm is broken. I'm Lieutenant Sanchez. We're going to move you in a minute. Can you give me your name and address? Someone to call?"

"Is she all right?" Jack asked about the woman.

"Yeah." The word came out curt. "She's all right. Your name?"

"Jack Devereaux."

There was silence for a moment. It was always like that these days. As soon as people heard Jack's name, it hit the famous-name register.
Yeah, know that one. A celeb.
New York was full of them. But Jack was a recent celeb. He wasn't used to it.

"The
Jack Devereaux?" the lieutenant said after a beat.

"Which would that be?" Jack might be paralyzed for life, but he couldn't resist playing out the famous-name game.

"Creighton Blackstone's son?" Already amazement was sounding in the officer's voice.

Jack and the rest of the world were pretty much with him on that one. Shock had echoed around the globe. It was difficult to believe that one of the founding fathers of the Internet, a man with a large empire, whose life had been written about and dissected a hundred times, had actually died leaving an heir no one knew he had. Including and especially the heir himself. Jack Devereaux, a perfectly ordinary young man, nobody of note, was suddenly immensely wealthy. Or soon to be wealthy. Who'd have thunk?

"Yes, sir, I am," Jack admitted. Until two weeks ago he'd been a young entrepreneur struggling to build his own Internet company. And his mother, bitter to the end because her husband had left her long before making his fortune and having to share it with her, had never told him.

Lieutenant Sanchez's response to the news was a low whistle. "Well, you've got another feather now. You just saved a cop's life," he said.

"That woman was a cop?" Jack was shocked. "She wasn't in uniform."

"She's a sergeant. Did you get a look at the attacker?"

Jack searched his mind, and the moment of chaos flashed back. He'd been walking in the fog with Sheba. He'd heard indistinct noises, like shuffling, scuffling. It had sounded like dancing on leaves until Sheba stiffened and began to whine and pull on the leash.

Despite his unwillingness to go in that direction, she'd dragged him closer. At first the blurred silhouette of two bodies moving apart, then together gave him the impression of a modern dance of some kind. But he heard grunts, and finally realized that what looked like an embrace was in fact a judo hold. Sheba was lunging on the leash and he dashed forward without thinking of anything more than to stop what he and the dog knew was a mugging.

He called out, reached out. The man dropped the girl and spun around behind his body so fast that Jack could not see his face or even get an impression of how tall he was. He turned blindly with no plan at all, just turned to where the danger was. As he turned, the man grabbed his arm and used his own weight to flip him. He didn't know if it was the hold or the fall that broke his arm. All he knew was that Sheba lunged at his attacker with her powerful teeth bared, and the man took off. It all happened in seconds.

"No. I didn't see him," he said finally.

Two medics interrupted the questions. Lieutenant Sanchez stepped back to let them do their work. Jack wanted to hang onto him, but a woman with a crew cut took his place, crouching down to talk to him. Another paramedic with the same hairstyle followed her, wheeling the gurney.
Oh, no.
He wanted to go home and hide out with his girlfriend, Lisa. Whatever happened, he couldn't take any more reporters.

"Could we keep this out of the news? Please!" he called after the lieutenant with all the strength he could rally.

"Press is here already, but I'll do what I can," he promised. "First we're getting you to the hospital. Later we'll talk. We'll be sending a few uniforms with you. You won't be alone."

Jack didn't have time to figure out what that meant. What did it matter if he was alone or not in the hospital? He gave the officer their home number, then turned his attention to the medic who was sticking a needle in his arm.

A
pril's eyes were closed. When she'd gone down like a wet noodle, the back of her head smacked the sidewalk hard. Two explosions went off at once. Her skull, like a baseball connecting with a bat. Her lungs, already screaming for air, further deflated on impact. April was no character out of a cartoon flattened by a steamroller who bounces right back. Uh-uh. All her training went for nothing that night. She didn't fight right. She didn't fall right. And when she fell, an evil dragon snatched the breath right out of her and flew away with it.

Seconds passed. She wanted to say, "I'm okay," get up, find her shoes, and get out of there. But her chest didn't rise. Her lungs didn't fill. There was commotion all around. She also had the sensation of a large animal, some beast from Chinese mythology, circling her body, breathing on her hotly. Marking her. She would have avoided that beast at any cost. But the grip of death held her as strongly as if her attacker still had her by the neck. She could not catch that breath the dragon had stolen.

The weight of defeat crushed her, and she could feel herself letting go. The next thing she knew was the screaming agony of air forced into her lungs. And Mike was talking her back into the world.

"Come on,
querida.
You're okay. You're okay." He said it over and over. "You're okay. You're okay."

Irritation filled her. What the hell did he know about that? She was not okay.

"You're okay," he said again.

A memory filtered through the black. April had heard those words her first year on the job when she'd been in uniform on foot patrol in Brooklyn. She'd just come on duty when there was a radio call of a shooting nearby. There, at the improbable hour of eight a.m., a young mother and her child on their way to nursery school had walked into a
dispute
between two males-what cops called a fight. April and her partner had been the first uniforms on the scene. They'd found the woman sitting on the sidewalk cradling her dead child in her arms, crooning, "You're okay. You're okay."

"You're okay," Mike told her in the same voice, then
"Mirame."
Look at me. As if he needed proof.

She didn't want to look at him. She wanted to float away on the cloud that had come for her. But her mother, the Skinny Dragon, reminded her that the heavens were the territory of angry ghosts and dragons. If she died right now, she would not be so lucky as to fly away with the harps and angels.

Did you get him?
She formed the words, but no sound came out. The dragon that stole her breath had kept her voice.

Mike whispered in her ear. "The ambulance is here. We're moving you. You did good,
querida;
he didn't break your neck. You're going to be fine."

That line they always used finally opened April's eyes, and she came back to the horror of being a vic, lying on the ground. Somebody's jacket under her head. Probably Mike's. Poppy Bellaqua was holding her hand. She may not have a broken neck like her boss, but she knew she hadn't done good, not at all. Chief Avise was standing above them, arms crossed over his chest, shaking his head at her. She'd messed up.

A
ieeyyee." Sai Yuan Woo hit the ceiling when Mike came to tell her that her only child was in the hospital again. The shriek said it all.
Last time shot in head. What now?

The skinny dragon that was April's mother could wake the dead with that scream. She wouldn't stop long enough to listen when Mike tried to explain what happened or why he'd come at the early hour of five a.m. He'd come at that time for multiple reasons. He'd wanted April to benefit from a few hours of sleep before the assault of her parents. But he had to come before anyone in the sizable Chinese extended family claimed by the Woos was up watching TV. They didn't have any actual blood relatives left, but the large circle of friends and acquaintances from the villages of another world called each other sisters and uncles and cousins and thought of themselves as such. This prodigious fake family watched the local news twenty-four/ seven, always on the lookout for trouble.

Skinny Dragon Mother would never have forgiven Mike if she'd heard that April was in the hospital from someone who'd seen the story on the morning news. It was his job to tell her before anyone else. He'd let them sleep as long as possible, but he himself had pretty much worked all night.

Mike had a reason for staying up all night. Alfredo Bernardino had been overweight and in poor condition. The attack on him was bad enough. But a second nearly fatal attack only a few minutes later on a black-belt champion in the middle of Washington Square added a few lethal details to the story. The killer was not just lucky. He was highly skilled and fearless. The man was a trained killer who could break a man's neck in the blink of an eye. Damn right he'd been up all night talking to Bernardino's children and getting organized.

Now he wasn't in the mood to listen to Skinny Dragon Mother yell bloody murder at him in Chinese. Never mind that he was telling her April was fine. Skinny screamed so loud she woke her husband, Ja Fa Woo, a chef in a fancy Manhattan restaurant who'd just gone to sleep a few hours ago.

Muttering in Chinese, he stumbled out of the bedroom wearing shorts and a T-shirt with the logo of Midtown North on it, April's precinct.

Skinny, who was dressed in black pants and a thin padded jacket, spun around to her husband and screamed at him for a while. He screamed back. At least he could understand her. Mike didn't interrupt what sounded to him like a dogfight. Finally Ja Fa Woo acknowledged him.

" 'Lo, Mike. What happen?" he asked.

In the early days of their courting, whenever Mike came by to see April, her father used to lean over and spit on the ground. But now he bobbed his head in respect. Mike was an important man. Almost son, so he gave him an almost bow in the middle of his wife's tirade.

Mike bowed back and went through the story again, because Skinny always got her facts mixed up.

"Somebody dead?" Ja Fa asked.

"Yes, somebody is dead. But not April." Some other cop. Her old boss. Mike left that out. "April is fine. Just a little shaken up."

"Then why in hospital?" Ja Fa demanded.

"Aieeeyee!" At the word
hospital
Skinny's wail went up again.

"Something wrong?" Gao Wan, the Woo's upstairs tenant, padded into the kitchen. He, too, was wearing a T-shirt and shorts.

Mike repeated his sanitized version of the story. The three of them conferred in Chinese while Mike stood there trying to reassure them. As expected, his worst fears were realized when they insisted that he drive them to St. Vincent's immediately because they had no other way of getting to the hospital fast enough to suit them, then drive them back to Queens when they were ready to come home.

Mike nodded. "I'll get you there and back," he promised. Of course he would. And April would kill him for bringing them. With the Woos he couldn't win. Either the parents would be furious because he didn't do enough, or April would be furious because he did too much. Today, because he'd almost lost her, he would err on the doing too much.

Mother, father, and tenant ended their discussion and disappeared to get dressed and collect important items for April. Immediate action for them took a long time. The minutes spun out into a very long wait. It was an hour and a half before they squeezed into his wheezing Camaro for the trip into Manhattan.