The Equalizer (25 page)

Samuel Clemens was probably only a couple of years older than McCall, but he let it go.

“Good that you know what you're getting into,” McCall said. “Sinatra liked to hang out with the mob, but they never took him seriously. He didn't interfere with business.”

“This is damn excitin'.”

“You got any daughters, Mr. Clemens?”

“My eldest, Bonnie, is twenty-four, an attorney, don't that beat all? And I've got a teenage brat, Zoey, a giant pain in the butt.”

“Will this still be exciting when you do something that pisses Mr. Kirov off and he grabs your pain-in-the-butt teenage daughter and lets one of his errand boys fondle her breast while she's sleeping?”

That shut Clemens up. Kirov's eyes flicked over McCall's right shoulder, to where McCall knew Kuzbec was standing. Then those eyes came right back to McCall's face.

“The girl wasn't to be touched,” Kirov said.

“Good help is hard to find.”

“So, in your vigilante world, what happens now, Mr.…?”

“Bobby Maclain,” McCall said. “Nothing happens now. At least, not to Katia or her daughter. Life goes on. No one gets hurt. I never walk back into this nightclub and you never hear from me again.”

“And if life doesn't go on the way you want it to?”

McCall leaned against the table with one hand.

With his other hand he attached the little silver bug that Brahms had given him beneath the table. His fingers found a groove and wedged it in. It had a strong adhesive on the top. It would not fall off if the table was jostled or even moved. Of course, if someone was looking for a bug, it would be found, but McCall didn't think Kirov had regular sweeps through the club. He was secure here. This very table was where he watched and listened and did business.

It was sacrosanct.

“Katia's not important to you,” McCall said.

Kirov's expression betrayed nothing. “How can you be sure of that?”

A tickle crawled up McCall's spine. Something Katia had said.

I did not believe even Daudov would risk such an act. To kidnap my daughter
.

Something Melody had echoed. Katia
was
important to them. Perhaps Borislav Kirov had his own sexual fantasies about her.

“If you harass her in any way, from this moment on…” McCall leaned forward even farther and his voice was soft, although every syllable echoed in the small alcove. “I'll know about it. Whether she confides in me or not. I'll come back to this club. But I'll be coming back for
you,
Boris. May I call you Boris? I'll hold
you
personally responsible for anything bad that happens to Katia or Natalya.”

“Am I supposed to be scared by that?” Kirov asked.

“I would be,” McCall said.

He leaned back, the fingers of his left hand gently brushing against the little silver bug. Still in place. He'd seen the Slavonic type push himself off the table in his peripheral vision. His coat was unbuttoned. McCall could see the butt of a gun in a shoulder holster. But the man didn't move.

Now there
was
amusement in Borislav Kirov's eyes as he regarded McCall.

“I've gotta say…” And then he laughed. “You've got balls. You take something from me in the middle of the night, you march in here without a weapon, and threaten me to my face. I can't tell you how long it's been since that's happened to me. If ever.”

“I figured it would be a first,” McCall said.

Now Kuzbec grabbed McCall's right arm from behind. McCall didn't bother throwing him off. Kirov made an impatient gesture and Kuzbec let him go.

“I'm glad Natalya's safe,” Kirov said. “She's a fragile girl. When Katia returns to work her duties will be made clear. They won't include anything but dancing. That was…” He paused. “Someone else's idea.”

Bakar Daudov,
McCall thought.
You'd better rein in your pit bull a little tighter, Boris
.

“This is a nightclub, Mr. Maclain, not a strip club or a brothel. There are fifteen Dolls clubs in the United States and more are going to open. Like the one in Mr. Clemens's area of Fort Worth. I'm not looking for any trouble. No bad press. No misguided citizen complaining to the authorities. You've changed your friend's situation. We'll leave it at that.”

McCall nodded. He glanced once at the Slavonic type standing at the end of the table. His tension was palpable. But he would do nothing. McCall smiled pleasantly at him and walked out of the alcove, across the nightclub and out the front door, past the line of waiting patrons desperate to get in.

He felt exactly like he'd felt when he'd stepped into the alley to stop J.T. from beating Margaret to death. He was not supposed to interfere. He was supposed to stay off the radar. But he was back
on
the radar, wasn't he?

And as Samuel Clemens would say:
Damn! That was excitin'!

This time interfering felt good.

 

CHAPTER 18

Karen Armstrong loved going home on the weekends. Cold Spring was a beautiful village right on the Hudson River in Putnam County, New York. She'd adored the summers there, and even the winters, when the wind was howling and the rain sleeting. Being in the house now made her feel comfortable and secure. Especially when she watched her family.

Her mother looked like a slightly older version of herself, long blond hair, blue cornflower eyes, crow's feet around them, pale skin, lots of freckles across her face and chest. She described herself as an aging hippie who'd actually missed the hippie era of the sixties, although Karen was convinced she'd been conceived at a free outdoor Grateful Dead concert in Golden Gate Park where her mom had first met her dad. That chance sexual encounter had led to twenty-five years of marriage and three kids, Karen being the first, followed by her brother Todd, two years younger, and her sister Kelly, who was fourteen and had been a surprise. Karen's mother, whom everyone called Mandy, including her children, always wore soft silk blouses and long diaphanous skirts and enough jewellery to make Mr. T in that old
A-Team
TV series jealous. Her dad looked like that guy who played the leading role in
Picket Fences
—Karen could never remember his name—lean and tanned with a lot of lines etching his face and a terrific smile.

Karen watched her family playing flag football on the front lawn. Her brother, Todd, was very aggressive and her sister, Kelly, looked like she wanted to roll her eyes and be anywhere else, but then her competitive spirit took over and she tackled her brother to the ground. He jumped up and tried to patiently explain to her there
was
no tackling in flag football. Her mom and dad just laughed. The family golden retriever, Maggie, was romping around, but somehow she could never quite catch the football. She only managed to trip up the players who shouted at her.

The Gleasons from next door had joined in the game. Karen couldn't remember a summer when the Gleasons
hadn't
played flag football with her family on her front lawn. Ali Gleason was her mom's best friend and they'd lived next door to the Armstrongs
forever
. Ali and Tim Gleason had four children, two boys and two girls. The girls were away at American University in D.C., but both boys were older, in their mid-twenties, Jerry and Blake, both of them attorneys in New York City. They were like her older brothers, that's how close the two families were. They were in the thick of the football game.

Karen looked at Blake now, leaping up to catch the football that her dad had thrown across the lawn—interception!—avoiding being tackled again by Kelly, who either didn't understand the rules or chose to ignore them. Karen smiled to herself. Good thing these two strapping Gleason youths
weren't
her real brothers, as she and Blake had mutually discovered all about sex in an overturned rowboat on the sand on the beach when they were both fourteen. No one ever knew about it. Neither of them had ever told their siblings or their parents. It was their secret. It had happened quite a few more times after that, but once they'd gone to high school, other lustful crushes had happened, and the two of them remained just great friends. How couldn't they be? They had grown up within a few yards of each other.

Karen looked out at the beautiful Hudson River beyond their mansion. Her father told her they did not
have
a mansion, it was a nice Colonial four-bedroom on the river, but Karen had seen the square footage of most Manhattan apartments, and to her their Cold Spring home was a mansion.

She knew where her father kept his gun.

Karen walked back inside the house into the kitchen. She picked up her dad's ring of keys off the counter and moved quickly to her dad's office. She had left the windows open in the living room so she could hear the football game in progress. She didn't want to be caught and have to explain. On her dad's desk was a laptop and overflowing manila files with sketches in them. He was an architect.

She tried a small silver key in the lock of the bottom drawer. It was tricky at first, because it was slightly bent, but then it turned and she slid the drawer open. It was filled with old pens and batteries and crap. In the bottom of the drawer was a Smith & Wesson SD9 VE pistol with a 10
+
1 capacity. There was a box of ammunition beside it. She checked that the gun was unloaded, then set it onto the desk chair along with the box of ammo. She closed the drawer and locked it again. And straightened.

And thought she was going to have a coronary.

Her sister Kelly was standing in the doorway.

She couldn't see the gun and the box of ammo from where she was standing. The chair was blocked by the desk.

“What are you doing in here?” she demanded.

Younger sisters
always
demanded.

“I was looking for some Wite-Out. Dad's only got dried-up tubes he's kept for God knows why. What's up?”

“Mandy wants you on
our
team. We're getting out butts kicked.”

She rushed out of the doorway. Karen knew her sister. If she
had
seen the gun, she would have said something. She wouldn't have let it go to chat about it with Big Sis at a later time. Kelly wore her heart on her sleeve.

Karen picked up the Smith & Wesson gun and the box of ammo and walked quickly out into the ground-floor hallway. The front door was still ajar. No one locked their doors in Cold Spring. Karen could hear the football game continuing with more cries and falling and laughter. She ran back into the kitchen and dropped her father's ring of keys on the counter exactly where she'd found them. Then she ran up the stairs to her old room on the second floor. She grabbed her backpack from the floor, stuffed the Smith & Wesson SD9 way down in the bottom, with the box of ammo, and zipped it up.

Then she ran downstairs and out the front door into the brilliant sunshine to play flag football.

*   *   *

The Dakota building is on Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. When Kostmayer told the cab to pull up there, Katia thought this must be where McCall lived. A very expensive residence for a bartender. But then, she knew that was not who the true Robert McCall was.
Who
he really was she didn't know. But she clutched her daughter's hand and thanked God for him.

Kostmayer paid the cabbie. Katia looked up at the fabulous high gables of the Dakota, the balconies, balustrades, dormas, and terra-cotta spandrels and panels. It echoed a way of life for the rich and famous she could not even dream about. If there was a doorman, he was not outside at this moment. Katia saw a woman of about fifty, long blond hair in a ponytail, kneel down and set a rose in front of the gated entrance. She was crying.

Kostmayer walked up beside Katia.

“That's where John Lennon was shot.”

Kostmayer ushered Katia and Natalya into the building. He thought it was a shame the grand Old Lady, with all of its history and splendor, was best known as a murder scene. They walked through the ornate lobby, like a golden tunnel, to the elevators.

“They called it the Dakota,” Kostmayer said, “because in the old days the idea of going to the Upper West Side of New York was like going to the Dakotas.” He could see Katia was not tracking with him. “The Dakotas, North Dakota, South Dakota? Very far away, across the country. Never mind. It was only amusing in 1880.”

They stepped into an elevator and it took them up to the fourth floor. Kostmayer shook out a ring of keys from his coat pocket, put one of them into the door of a corner apartment, and pushed it open. He waited for Katia and Natalya to go in first.

The hallway had a table by the door, an ornate bureau in one corner, and a gorgeous old grandfather clock in another that ticked softly to itself. Katia walked through into the living room and stopped dead.

She gasped.

It was not the forty-foot ceiling, or the big windows that overlooked Central Park with a view to die for that took her breath away. It was the furniture in the big room.

It was
hers
.

Her
couch,
her
armchairs,
her
heavy oak table, an heirloom that she had carted all the way from Chechnya fearful it would arrive in pieces.
Her
paintings were on the walls. A copy of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers and a Sergei Tkachev portrait of a young girl with close-cropped brunette hair leaning on a fence rail. She looked like Natalya might have looked at ten years old. There were
her
bookcase and all of
her
books. There were fresh flowers in crystal vases everywhere. The furniture looked austere in the big room—there wasn't much of it.

“Your beds are in the two main bedrooms,” Kostmayer said. “I put your Evgeniy Shibanov
Anatoly Razumov, The Fisherman
over the bed in the master bedroom. McCall supplied the bureau and table in the hall and the grandfather clock. He's also put a bed and a bureau and table for clothes in each of the guest rooms. It's a six-room apartment, moderate by Dakota standards, some have ten rooms, but he didn't think you'd want that many.”