Next Time You See Me (25 page)

Across the street.

Up Mrs. Petrini’s stoop.

Into her house—a widow’s house, sour, dust hovering in darkness—and wove two flights up to her top floor. A narrow doorway at the top of the final flight told me this one led to the roof. Normally these doors were closed and preferably locked. This one, however, hung open onto a rectangle of sweet blue sky and a trio of agitated voices.

Chapter 22

I
hid behind the door, watching and listening through the crack where it hinged open onto a slice of tar roof and an imperfect but telling view.

Jasmine.
Aiming a gun at Billy
. Her panicky eyes moved between him and Fred; she knew she was trapped.

My mind spun, disbelieving, reaching for explanations.

It couldn’t be true:
Jasmine?

But there she was. I was looking at her. Other than Billy and Fred (and me), she was the only one on the roof . . . which meant
she
had shot at me down on the street . . . which meant she had
never
gone missing in the line of duty but had been up to something else all along.

Why hadn’t it occurred to me that she was in New York? When we’d spoken I’d pictured her in front of her cottage, under a palm tree . . . I had pictured her in Florida. It was a thoughtless assumption. The area code could have been either a landline or a cell phone; she could have been anywhere.

Jasmine’s face wore a new mask, or maybe the old one had finally fallen away. Instead of pretty and shrewd and fun she was
malevolent
. I recognized her perfectly from past encounters with sociopaths. I couldn’t believe it. And yet I was looking right at her . . . not at the Jasmine I thought I’d known, but at someone else, someone capable of horrible things.

“Why don’t you just put the gun down, Jazz?” Billy’s voice was tighter than I’d ever heard it. Incredulous. Hurting. “Tell us what’s going on. We’ll figure it out. There’s got to be some kind of misunderstanding.” He went on and on, trying to convince himself.

But I couldn’t see where the misunderstanding was. She was pointing a gun at him. And she had just tried to shoot me: twice.

“You are
sweet
,” she said in a withering tone. Her eyes shifted to Fred.

And then,
and then
, Fred swung his gun toward Billy. “It’s game time.”

“What the
fuck
?” Billy said.

I could see from behind that he was shaking. His brain, like mine, exploding
Jasmine and Fred, Jasmine and Fred
and trying to figure it out in the split second before they went ahead and killed him. He was dead and he knew it. It was the coldest place a cop could go, a terror I knew too well: I had been there.

“You’re never going to get away with this,” Billy tried.

I stepped away from the crack. Peered past the edge of the open door. Got ready.

“Ruben should’ve already taken care of you,” Jasmine said. “You and Karin both.”

Ruben? . . .
Ruben? . . .

I moved from behind the door in time to see Jasmine’s fingers constrict around the gun’s handle while her trigger finger squeezed. In time to notice the surprise on her face as she registered my presence, as clouds of outrage and questions and frustration flitted across her eyes.

Fred was closer.

I took aim, saying, “Billy, you do her,” as I pulled my trigger and felt the powerful kickback of the gun’s discharge rocket from my hand into my shoulder.

There were two shots, only one of them mine. The answer to who had managed to get off the other shot came to me before the question had time to formulate.

The two men fell in what looked like choreography, both bodies jolting simultaneously but enacting different sequences of movement. In reaction to the force of the bullet that passed through his right rib cage, Fred dove leftward, arms flung out as if starting a cartwheel. By the way he bounced and settled when he hit the ground, I guessed I’d killed him. At the same moment that Fred curved sideways, Billy spun, rotating three-quarters of the way around in my direction and looking straight at me in a weird mix of astonishment and capitulation. His left eye—his beautiful brown eye with its soft curled lashes—
saw
me so deeply a quiver ricocheted down my spine. His right eye was gone, replaced by a bloody chaos of sinew and bone. He hit the ground with a dreadful heaviness.

Jasmine and I stared at each other, aimed at each other, calculating. I couldn’t stop processing the sight of Billy half blinded, in shock, going down, maybe dying, maybe dead. Cold to my core, I began to shake and ordered myself to
stop
.
Now
.
Or she will kill you, too
.

Jasmine’s face glowed with determination to be the last one standing in the scorched blue gun-smoke silence. And then, down on the street, sirens blared, cars jammed to a stop, voices gathered. In a few moments we wouldn’t be alone; but up here, right now, it was lonely in the most terrible way.

“Ruben Medina,” I said, suddenly remembering: He ran another cartel in Mexico; Ana had worried aloud about him taking over her territories. “When did you start working for him? How long before Thanksgiving? How long before Mac got pulled into it? How much did he pay you?” As the questions flew out of my mouth and the layers peeled away, the betrayal at the heart of this grew more and more putrid. “Where’s the money he paid you and Fred?”

“Like I’d tell you.” Her gun arm stiffened.

Just then Billy moaned and we both glanced at him, realizing he was alive, if barely. Jasmine’s eyes narrowed as they looked back at me.

“Let me go. I’ll cut you in. Half.”

“You are a certified bitch.”

“I never said I wasn’t.” She steadied her aim.

I steadied mine.

Shouting. Footsteps running up the stairway to the roof.

In a fragment of a moment, everything shifted. I didn’t need to kill her to stop her anymore. And if she killed me, it would only add murder to her list of crimes.

As her eyes metronomed frantically between me and Billy, I could practically see her tallying up the damage, weighing her options: If he didn’t die, she wouldn’t have killed anyone. Maybe she could cut a plea in exchange for everything she knew; maybe they’d even send her back to Mexico as a triple agent, working for the Feds she was supposed to have been working for all along. It made me sick to think there was a chance she could pull that off.

“I’ll testify against you. I’ll talk to the press. I’ll blow your cover if they let you keep it.” She knew I’d do it.

“Shoot me.” That was how badly she didn’t want to rot in prison while the government publicly debated when and where and how to execute her for treason.

“I’d love to. But no way.”

Cops stormed the roof. Mac was with them and after the briefest mental reckoning with what he saw—understanding that Jasmine had been the rooftop sniper—he pointed at her and they flooded in her direction.

I couldn’t tell if he was angry or terrified (or both) when he took the gun out of my hand. With his other hand he too-tightly gripped my arm, and I knew:
angry
. Because I had risked my life and our family’s future by running up onto the roof. What he didn’t know, what he hadn’t seen was how Jasmine’s iota of inattention as she prepared to shoot Billy, and then saw me, had shifted her aim and possibly saved his life.

In moments she was handcuffed, read her rights, hustled off the roof. She avoided looking at us but we watched her arrest avidly. Loathing her not just for her duplicity toward us but the toll it had taken on everyone. For blinding Billy in so many ways.

“I don’t believe it,” Mac muttered, but unconvincingly; he’d been a cop for twenty years and thus was primed to believe anything. Then he looked at me and said, “They found Hyo Park in Fred’s trunk. Apparently Fred killed him to shut him up.”

Vomit rose to my throat. I had given Hyo that phone number Fred and Jasmine had been so desperate to suppress, a number that must have linked them to Ruben Medina. I swallowed the guilty bile, refusing it. This whole thing was not my fault.

Tears gathered in Mac’s eyes when he turned and saw Billy lying in a spreading pool of blood. A pair of medics was working on him now. Filling the crater that had been his right eye with wads of sterile gauze that swiftly turned pink then red then purplish black. Stanching the bleeding as best and quickly as they could. Mac and I knelt down close to our friend. We both said his name in case some part of him could hear us. But we couldn’t tell. He was so quiet. And so still.

Chapter 23

C
ops in uniform and plainclothes, patrol cars and ambulances filled our street, which was now blocked off at both ends to civilian traffic. Red lights flashed from everywhere though all the sirens had been turned off. But to me the drone was grating, overwhelming: all the voices, and something inside my brain that wouldn’t let me forget the awful stillness of Billy’s half-wrecked face as he lay there on the roof.

Behind me I heard a knocking sound and turned around to see Mrs. Petrini standing at the window in my living room, holding Ben, who was crying. I waved and forced a smile I hoped would calm him. As he tried to reach for me through the glass, Mrs. Petrini took hold of his tiny wrist and made him wave back. Revulsion undulated through me: What had I been thinking? What if I hadn’t come off the roof alive? What about Ben? I waved and waved and smiled and smiled until finally he stopped crying.

A body bag was carried out of Mrs. Petrini’s house on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance beside which a television reporter dressed in a pink skirt suit spoke rapidly into her microphone, facing a camera.

“Breaking news from Brooklyn! Two rogue DEA special agents who were reputedly working for a Mexican drug cartel were just captured on a rooftop by NYPD Detective Billy Staples of the Eighty-fourth Precinct here in Boerum Hill. What you see behind me is the body of one of the rogue agents who was killed in gunfire just minutes ago—Special Agent Fred Miller. The other fatality is his partner, Hyo Park, whose body was found in the trunk of a car here at the scene. We’re waiting for details on Special Agent Park’s role in all this, but it’s our understanding right now that he is
not
the other rogue agent. We are told that
that
person is DEA Special Agent Jasmine Alvarez, who has been arrested and is on her way to Central Booking where apparently she’ll be charged with a long list of crimes. Detective Staples was wounded in the gunfire and we’re told Emergency Services is still working on him on the roof. An unidentified person is also said to have been involved in the capture of the double agents but we have been unable to confirm that. We’ll be following this story as the details emerge, so stay tuned.”

As the ambulance drove away, Mac came across the street, veering out of the range of the television camera, and joined me on the sidewalk in front of our brownstone. I wove my arm around his waist and pulled him close. I didn’t have to ask to know what was running through his mind: ten months ago, Bronxville, standing in front of his parents’ red-white-and-blue house, weeping as we watched them being brought out in body bags. I felt a sharp pang of grief for Aileen and Hugh, and squeezed Mac closer. He leaned in to kiss me.

“Karin?”

I felt the warmth of a hand on my shoulder and turned to see my mother’s worried face. She must have argued her way onto the sealed-off block.

“Are you all right? What happened? Where’s Ben?”

“I’m fine. He’s in the house with Mrs. Petrini. We’ll be right in.”

As she hurried up the stoop and went inside, a youngish man walked over—tall and thin, with black hair in a deliberate, stylish mess and small gold hoops in both earlobes.

“Karin Schaeffer?” He held out a veined hand that betrayed his age and he popped from thirty to forty.

“You know me?” We shook hands.

“Special Agent Rick Latham, FBI, Counterintelligence Division.”

“
Counter
intelligence,” I repeated. Because if that’s who he worked for, it told me Jasmine and Fred had been on the Bureau’s radar, that they were being investigated by another agency of the Department of Justice. It almost came as a surprise but shouldn’t have.

“You must be Mac.” Rick Latham offered his hand, and Mac took it.

“Yup.”

“This got ugly,” Latham said. “Sorry you people got dragged into it.”

“Into what, exactly?” I asked.

“Maybe the less we know the better,” Mac said.

“He has a point.” Latham glanced between the two of us.

“How long have you known they were double agents?”

“Karin,
please
. . . aren’t you tired of this yet? It probably never should have involved us in the first place.”

“But it did.”

Mac stopped arguing; he knew I was right.

Latham kept quiet, listening, as he dug into his jeans pocket, searching for something. He seemed to find it but didn’t take it out, nor did he remove his hand.

“Before Mac left for Mexico the first time?” I asked. “Just tell us that.”

He nodded. “Your husband’s right: it’s over now.”

“Was that a yes?”

“I’ve probably said too much already.”

“You haven’t said anything.”

Latham finally pulled his hand out of his pocket, a tortoiseshell guitar pick pinched between two fingers. He flicked his thumbnail against its edge a few times and then nodded at us. “Thanks.”

“For what exactly?” I raised my voice as he walked away, joining the others at the blue car where Hyo’s body was waiting to be bagged for the coroner.

“Thank us for what?” I asked Mac, as if he could answer that.

“I guess we’ll have to use our imaginations.”

“I’m thinking they knew all along.”

“I’m thinking so, too.”

We waited another fifteen minutes before Billy was finally brought down to the street. He was strapped to a stretcher, threaded with IV tubes, wearing an oxygen mask. Half his head and one eye was mummified in gauze. But he wasn’t in a body bag and that was something.

Mac and I hurried over to walk beside his stretcher as it was loaded into an ambulance.

“Can we go along?” Mac asked.

“Just one of you,” the chubby medic answered. He had a pencil-line mustache that barely moved when he spoke.

“I’ll go.” Mac looked at me. “You stay with Ben.”

What he really meant was that Billy was his best friend and he loved him. He couldn’t
not
go.

“I’ll see you later.” I kissed him. “Call me from the hospital.”

“Don’t ask anyone any more questions for now,” Mac added with an unmistakable note of exhaustion in his voice; he was advising himself as much as he was advising me. “We have to let this be over.”

I smiled and nodded but didn’t promise anything. Mac hopped into the back of the ambulance. The medic closed the doors, the engine started, and I stood there watching them drive away into the opposite end of a summer day that had started out so nicely. It had been a truly duplicitous day, promising one thing, delivering another. I realized that Mac was right: We knew everything we needed to know at the moment; our part was over.

And so I did as my husband suggested. I didn’t speak with Special Agent Latham again, nor did I seek out anyone else for answers. Instead, I turned around, walked up my front stoop, went through the front door—and closed it behind me.