Losers Live Longer (21 page)

I could see why it hadn’t: a corner of the inside front mat stuck out and blocked it. I couldn’t tell if it had been placed that way intentionally or was just something that happened to happen.

After all, accidents happened.

I took out my gun and, keeping to one side, eased the door open with my fingertips before poking my head in. Nothing, no movement, no sound. A tall urn with three umbrellas in it stood under a hall mirror.

I entered crabwise, letting the door shut behind me, re-straightening the floor mat so it closed completely this time.

I inhaled through my nose and smelled it. An acrid odor wafting on the climate-controlled air. Sulfurous, it prickled my nostrils. The residue of a certain kind of burning. Cordite. Gunsmoke.

I lifted my gun and, very carefully, slid a live one into the chamber, trying to be quiet about it. But within that silent apartment it was like chiseling my name in stone.

I looked, I listened, I waited. More silence, more stillness, not even a reassuring gurgle from the pipes in the walls, everything was triple-insulated.

I walked forward, my sneakers whispering softly. There was a dusty outline on the parquet floor as if a narrow rug used to lie there.

At the end of the hallway, I came to a perfectly ordinary, empty room, lit a caustic orange by late-afternoon sunshine.

I stayed in the mouth of the hallway and helloed a few times, listening after each hello like I was measuring the depths and outer reaches with sonar. I got no response.

After a while, I felt a little silly, but only a little. I’d have felt a lot sillier getting shot. That stink in the air wasn’t Etruscan Musk, a gun had gone off recently. So I waited some more before finally going in.

No one home. I walked around. No one in the kitchen or bedroom, or bedroom closet or bathroom. I returned to the living room, at a loss for what to do. Wait with folded hands? Start poking around? Raid the fridge?

I was drawn to the south-facing floor-to-ceiling window of high-stress glass. It overlooked the skyline of lower Manhattan and, at this height, provided a view of Ground Zero.

Prophetically named. Seven years later, still nothing more than ground, a zero. Just two days before, the first steel beam of the memorial museum had finally been put in place. Great, I thought, now if only they can agree on the curtains. What really should’ve been done was transform it into a memorial park. At least now it would be something, instead of a pit, an unfilled hole, an open grave. Not an idle allusion: the people who died that day were crushed and their remains remained, now permanently a part of the island itself.

I’d won $50 on a scratch ticket the night before and cashed it that morning. How lucky can you get? Saw the first tower hit on TV, thought it had to be a hoax. Tigger was already up on the roof standing against the maddeningly clear blue sky. Not one single fiber of cloud to obscure the southern view. No hoax, it was all really happening. Then it happened again. Later, when I had binoculars to my eyes and Tigger asked, “Are those ribbons? What are those swatches of color falling from the south tower?” I put the binoculars down, and with the naked eye they did look like bright ribbons or banners fluttering in descent, and the falling glass and tumbling metal shards only a tinsel and confetti cascade. Tigger wept. I couldn’t. Nothing surprised me after a while, until the next morning when the sun came up—I’d have taken odds that that was no longer a sure thing. I went out for the paper at dawn. Had to go to Grand Central for it, walking thirty blocks up a vacant First Avenue empty of traffic but teeming with ghosts, an invisible legion of thousands marching shoulder-to-shoulder toward their common commute. Along the way, every available surface—bus kiosk, plywood construction wall, payphone window—was papered with MISSING posters. Once upon a time, a missing poster would’ve quickened my pulse with the hint of a case, the scent of a chase. But no one was missing, they just weren’t coming home
.

I felt dizzy, had to steady myself, my palm on the window glass. I felt the choppy throb of a news copter going by. I turned away. Get a grip, Payton, work, work it out, work is the answer. I asked myself, What would
Blue’s Clues
do?

I went over and looked behind the couch, a big mahogany affair with fluffed-up cushions upholstered in wine-dark brocade.

And there he was.

Paul Windmann lay on the ground collapsed in the shape of a backward dollar sign. His body on a long narrow rug, the sort found in entryway halls. One corner of the rug was still bunched up where someone had grasped it to drag it and its load out of sight behind the couch. Done quickly before he bled out, since no marks of it showed on the floor. On the rug however, a wide blot of blood now surrounded him like a crimson moat.

In the fleshy hollow just below his chin was a raw bullet hole, an entry wound. Another corresponding hole was at the top of his forehead below the hairline. A not very big exit wound, a small caliber, I guessed.

Only I didn’t have to guess, the gun glinted between his thighs. A square, silver-plated .22 neat as an Art Deco ashtray, exactly like the one I’d seen in Sayre Rauth’s hands.

I sighed and shook my head. I had no interest in tampering with evidence. But that wasn’t going to stop me.

I straddled Windmann’s body, careful not to step in his blood. It was like playing a twisted game of Twister, trying not to put right foot down on red.

Tucking my hand inside my sleeve, I picked up the pistol. Its snub barrel was warm, and reeked. I flicked its safety on before sliding it into my back pocket.

I was disturbing a scene that a moment before might’ve passed for suicide. Now it was nothing but murder. The angle of the shot told me something, though. There’d been a struggle over the gun and Windmann had lost. Everything.

I left the place without searching further. This time I skipped the elevator and headed for the stairs. And walked directly into the view of a security cam mounted in a corner of the facing hallway.

I was in a cold sweat about it for a second, except there was nothing to do but tuck my chin in and pray.

Walking underneath, I saw its cables hung loose in their factory-sealed plastic. It hadn’t been hooked up yet.

A block away from the Crystalview, I found a pay-phone and dialed Paul Windmann’s number, let it ring twice and hung up, just so my office phone wouldn’t be his last incoming call in case anyone dialed *69.

Then I caught a cab, because my legs were feeling wobbly.

There was a small television screen fitted into the back of the driver’s seat displaying a Channel 7 newsfeed. It ran an update on the death of Craig Wales, providing the latest tidbit: the police, it said, were searching for a woman suspected of providing Wales with the fatal dose. I switched off the TV and rode in silence.

The driver took an unexpected turn, swinging us crosstown on Twelfth Street between Seventh and Greenwich Avenues. It was a narrow ancient lane of unpaved cobblestones, picturesque but bumpy as hell. Maybe the cabbie thought I was a tourist.

With every swerve and hard bounce, I felt the gun in my rear waistband and the other in my back pocket pressing against me, two loaded guns shoved in my back. I fought the urge to take them out and recheck their safeties.

I had the driver drop me a block from my building. I’d become wary of my street door. No one was waiting outside it for me though.

I checked the opposite side of the street as I got closer, watchful for any sudden movement. But it was the end of a workday in Manhattan—there was nothing but sudden movements. People running to make buses or to beat that other guy to a disgorging cab. I gave up.

At the Siamese standpipe where FL!P had been seated waiting for me before, I saw curved white scratches on the sidewalk made by his whetting the edge of his skateboard like honing a tool.

I unlocked my street door and stepped in. Nobody jumped me in the vestibule. It was a good start. How I meant to go on.

The stairwell was empty. I climbed up. Eye-level with the upper floor, I peered through the railing, but no one was there either. I went the rest of the way up. My office door was locked. I opened it, looked in. There was no one inside. I entered and—

Jumped a foot as the downstairs doorbuzzer buzzed.

Shit
. Couldn’t even sit down.

Chapter Fifteen: HOT KISS AT THE END OF A WET FIST

I pushed the intercom’s SPEAK button, said, “Yes?”

I pressed LISTEN and heard street noises, then a woman’s voice asking, “Payton Sherwood?”

I pressed SPEAK again.

“
Yes, who is it?”

LISTEN.

“
Sayre Rauth.”

SPEAK.

“
What do you want?”

LISTEN.

“
I thought more about…hiring you. May I come in?”

“
Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”

SPEAK.

“
Come on up.”

I buzzed her in. And waited.

I breathed in and out, and braced myself for setting eyes on her again. I’d be cool, reserved, not betray with a single look or gesture the effect she illicit—no—elicited from me. Standard operating procedure was to never show how you really felt. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at concealing my feelings. Easier not to feel at all.

Two short raps. I opened my door.

As soon as I saw her, I started bleeding again. She stood before me dressed in an airy, chocolate-brown silk blouse, a short pleated black skirt, and tasseled calf-high calfskin boots. She smiled at me and gave me a hungry look, and the cut in my forehead started to trickle. A droplet ran down and around my brow, then continued to descend along my left temple like a rivulet of sweat.

She must’ve seen it, but she didn’t say anything. She must’ve seen even more, but if she did, she didn’t give it away.

I excused myself, turned, and headed for the bathroom. Over my shoulder, I invited her in. “Be right with you.”

I splashed cold water on my face and dried it. The cut had already stopped bleeding, wasn’t very deep. To be on the safe side, I put on a Band-Aid. It made me look tough, in a cartoonish sort of way, like Sluggo from the comic strip
Nancy
.

When I returned, Sayre Rauth was still standing on the threshold, hadn’t come in yet.

She raised both her arms up over her head.

“
Want to frisk me? I might be armed.”

“
Skip it. I’ve softened my stance on deadly force. Come in, nunchucks, machetes, grenades, and all.”

She looked disappointed, or at least she didn’t put her arms down right away.

What the hell, I knew she didn’t have her gun on her, it was in my back pocket. And I didn’t need to pat her down to pinpoint her other lethal weapons.

She finally walked in and stopped in the center of the room and surveyed it.

“
This is your office?”

“
I also live here.”

“
Alone?” She cocked an eyebrow.

I nodded.

“
You aren’t married, then?”

“
Not then, not now.”

“
Perhaps you are in a… relationship?”

“
If so, no one’s told me. Let’s stick to business, Miss Rauth. Have a seat,” I said. “But I gotta tell you up front, we’re all out of toasters.”

“
What?”

“
Nothing.” I sat behind my desk. “It’s just…you’re like my fifth or sixth client today. Hell, I’ve lost count.”

She crossed her legs. I watched the occasion; parts of me celebrated it. She said, calling my attention back up to her eyes, “Business must be good.”

I lifted up my hand in mid-air and tilted it side-to-side like a life raft on choppy waters.

“
It fluctuates. And there’s the mortality rate to consider. Hiring me could be hazardous to your health, by the way.”