The Equalizer (74 page)

“Hey, there! Wow, you look awful. What happened to your face?”

“Window blew out beside me.”

“That's a bummer. But you're okay?” McCall nodded. “Brahms isn't here.”

“I could tell that. No Brahms concerto playing. Even the Beatles would curl his toes.”

“Hilda was transferred from Sloan-Kettering to the Cancer Care Center at Boston Medical four days ago. An experimental course of treatment. Brahms is with her. It's all been paid for. Thousands of dollars. Someone named W. Mays wrote the check. Who is that?”

“You've never heard of Willie Mays?” McCall asked, as if shocked. “The best baseball player of all time.”

“I doubt very much he's a friend of Brahms or is intimately aware of his wife's cancer diagnosis.”

McCall shrugged. “Must be another W. Mays.”

“I know who it was,” Mary whispered. “Brahms does, too, but he's too proud to say anything. Did you need him?”

“I'm returning a delicate piece of equipment. I'll drop it on his desk.”

McCall moved to the back of the store. Mary rushed back to her customers, taking money from one of them, ringing up a sale and fielding a question from the other.

McCall walked into Brahms's office and set the little bug down on his desk beside his laptop. He picked up a picture of Brahms and Hilda, twenty years younger, on New Year's Eve, both of them holding glasses of champagne and grinning foolishly for the camera in a big ballroom somewhere. McCall set the picture back on Brahms's desk. “Experimental treatment” always gave him pause, but sometimes it was the only way to go.

And miracles did happen.

When he came out of Brahms's office he saw that Mary had disposed of three customers and was showing the last one a package of ethernet micro-connectors. She ran over to McCall.

“When he calls, should I tell him you were in?”

“No need. But let me know how the treatment is going.” He took one of Brahms's Manhattan Electronics cards from a pile on a counter and wrote on the back of it. “That's the number you can reach me on, day or night.”

She took it and slipped it down the front of her plunging neckline. She grinned. “I've run out of pockets. I'd say the boss still owes you big time.”

“He doesn't owe me a thing.”

“Well, I owe you this,” Mary said, and hugged him.

McCall was on a roll.

“And don't tell him about the Beatles,” she whispered, and then she was running back to the counter to take the customer's money for the micro-connectors.

Paul McCartney was singing “Blackbird” when McCall walked out of the store.

 

CHAPTER 51

McCall got to the Starbucks on West Sixty-second Street a little after twelve noon. The playground of the high school across the way was jammed with students. He had promised Cassie he wouldn't go back there and “spy” on his son, but he wanted to make sure Scott was okay. Dana came out of the Starbucks with a venti Sumatra Asia/Pacific extra-bold coffee in a white china mug and set it down in front of him. She looked across at the high school playground and the cross-currents of good-natured high spirits.

“Why don't you ever walk over there?”

“I'm fine right here,” McCall said, with an edge.

“Sure. Enjoy your coffee,” Dana said, a little embarrassed that she might have crossed the line of server/customer relations.

McCall touched her arm as she turned away.

“Sorry. I've had a tough few days.”

She smiled at him. “That's okay. We all have those. I'm breaking up with my boyfriend.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“His loss.”

“I'd say so.”

She smiled at him again.

McCall was expecting a hug, but it didn't happen.

Dana walked back inside. McCall drank some coffee, searched the playground for Scott and found him. He was playing a pickup basketball game with his black friend against two other African American students, both of them in the Magic Johnson height category. Tough to dribble the ball past giants. Scott ducked under a block and took a shot. The basketball circled the rim and dropped through the net. His pal gave him a low five.

Then Scott did something that he hadn't done in all the months that McCall had been coming to watch him.

He turned and looked through the high mesh fence across the street at the Starbucks. Obviously he was looking for him. Scott tossed the basketball back to his friend, putting up a hand—five minutes. He ran over to a break in the fence, dodged traffic as he jaywalked across Sixty-second Street and jogged up to McCall's table.

“Mom told me you'd been watching me from time to time,” he said as he sat down at the table. “But you never let me know you were here.”

“I didn't think it was appropriate. I promised your mom I wouldn't do this again, but I wanted to make sure you were okay and back at school.”

“You mean after my ordeal?” Scott sounded caustic. “It was scary, yeah. But what was Mom going to do? Send a note to the principal? ‘Sorry, Scott can't come to school because he was a hostage in that mob shootout at the City Hall subway station and he needs some time to recover.' I don't think so. Anyway, I wasn't hurt and I'm not having nightmares about it.”

“That's good.”

Now there was silence between them. Dana came back out, looked at Scott, and smiled.

“If Muhammad won't come to the mountain. What can I get for you?”

“I'm fine,” Scott said.

McCall finished his coffee in a couple of swallows. Dana took his mug.

“One more venti Sumatra Asia/Pacific coming up.”

And disappeared inside.

Scott looked over at the noisy school playground, as if unable to meet McCall's eyes.

“I guess Mom gave you the stay-away-from-us speech.”

“She did.”

“Tom wouldn't want you coming around.”

“How do you get on with your stepfather?”

“He's cool. He's a tough guy, too, in a different way. He doesn't kill people, but he intimidates the shit out of them. You know, criminals he's prosecuting.”

“I've only killed people I had to. People who threatened the security of this country.”

McCall knew he sounded defensive and Scott looked at him.

“Then why did you resign?”

Now it was McCall's turn to glance away.

“Sometimes the lines get blurred.”

“Between good and evil?”

“Between right and wrong. Those lines are thinner, harder to see.”

Scott nodded. “But Mom says you're not working for the government anymore?”

“No.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“The same kind of work, but not for the government.”

“Then for who?”

Dana came out with McCall's venti and set it down in front of him. She was in a hurry, more tables needing attention inside, and left.

“Maybe for her.”

“Do you know her?”

“Just to be served coffee.”

“Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“She might be one day.”

“And you would help her out?”

“Maybe.”

“I don't understand.”

“I'm not sure I do yet.”

Scott looked back across the street. His friend was weaving in and out of the bigger guys' blocks and shot for a basket, but it hit the rim and bounced off.

“I'd better get back and help Kyle out. He's getting his butt kicked.”

Scott got up from the table, still looking at the playground.

“I play violin in the school orchestra. There's a concert at the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center tonight. It's kind of a big deal.” He shrugged. “Maybe you'd like to come? I mean, if you can make it. If not, it's cool.”

He wanted to leave, but somehow he couldn't.

McCall reached up and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I'll be there,” he said quietly.

Scott nodded. McCall let go of his shoulder. There was a break in the traffic on Sixty-second Street and his son jogged back across and reentered the playground and stole the basketball away from one of his tall opponents and passed it to the black kid, as if he hadn't stepped out of the game at all.

McCall picked up his new venti. He'd drink it down and watch the end of the pickup basketball game. Then he'd leave the Starbucks and wouldn't return.

But he
would
be at that concert recital.

Now all he needed was a date.

*   *   *

McCall walked back toward his neighborhood. He noted a yellow cab waiting outside the Setai Hotel on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-sixth Street. A well-dressed couple in their forties were arguing loudly on the curb, the back door of the cab open. The cabbie waited patiently. The couple looked fairly intoxicated. McCall figured they'd just finished lunch at the Ai Fiori restaurant on the second floor. They both wore wedding rings. The wife's eyes were swollen and red-rimmed and she was trying to get a word in, but her husband wouldn't listen. He was shouting at her. Pedestrians avoided them on the sidewalk, but otherwise no one took much notice. This was New York.

The husband said something that sounded like: “You're getting hysterical” and slapped her face. Then he shook her.

McCall was on the other side of Fifth Avenue. There was a break in the traffic. He took two fast steps to the curb, then stopped.

Kostmayer's words came back to him.

You can't save everyone, McCall
.

He didn't step off the curb.

The husband pushed his wife into the back of the cab and climbed in beside her. He gave an address to the driver and the yellow cab pulled out into the stream of traffic.

McCall took in a deep breath and let it out and walked on.

When he got to the antiques and collectibles store on Broadway he saw Moses through the window. The old man was gingerly lifting down a beautiful antique clock from a shelf. Beside him was a very attractive woman in her mid-thirties, McCall judged, wearing an expensive Soïa and Kyo double-breasted white belted coat with large black buttons. McCall entered the store and Moses gave him a nod.

The woman hovered anxiously.

“My dad's an astronomer at the Fuertes Observatory in Ithaca and my mom collects antique clocks. I think this would be perfect, Moses, don't you? It's their fortieth wedding anniversary. What is that?”

Moses furrowed his brow.

“Ruby,” McCall said.

The woman looked over at him and smiled. “That's it!”

Moses carried the clock to a counter.

“A lovely piece,” he said. “French Ormolu nineteenth century. The bronze statue is Urania, one of the nine muses in Greek mythology and the patron of astronomy.” He set the clock down on the counter and smiled at it like it was an old friend. “Urania the Heavenly, foretelling the future by the position of the stars.”

McCall took a closer look at the clock as he walked toward the glass cabinets of guns. Urania stood on one side of the golden gilt clock, a blue globe on the other. There were decorative embellishments of golden urns, rosettes, torches, laurel wreaths, and garlands. It
was
a beautiful piece.

“The hour and half hour are struck on a brass silvered bell,” Moses said. “Look it up on the Internet, it would cost you almost four thousand. On eBay, closer to three. I have it priced at twenty-eight hundred, but for a Ruby Anniversary?” He shrugged. “Twenty-five hundred.”

“Make it two thousand and you've got a deal,” she said.

Old Moses shrugged his acquiescence, like how could he argue with that?

She wrote him a check. “I'll come back in an hour and pick it up, okay? You're a lifesaver, Moses!”

She handed the old man her check, kissed him on the cheek, and rushed out the door.

McCall looked down at the various pre-1900 Remingtons and Colt revolvers. His Model P Peacemaker, Single-Action Cavalry Standard was in its place with the sign below it written in Moses's copperplate writing: “Frontier Six-Shooter.” McCall glanced up. In one of the large gilt mirrors he could see Moses setting the astronomy clock down on his desk.

“What did you really have it priced at?”

“Two thousand, but people like to think they're getting a deal. You've come to visit your Peacemaker Colt Revolver?”

“Today I'm in a buying mood. You said it was a tad over two thousand? I need to feel like
I've
got a deal out of you.”

“We'll call it fifteen hundred.”

“I'll take it,” McCall said.

Old Moses looked very pleased. He shook out a ring of keys, unlocked the back, and lifted out the Colt revolver.

“The case is in the back. I'll get it.”

He set the Colt down beside the antique clock on his desk and disappeared into his storeroom at the back. A few moments later he reappeared with a redwood box that smelled as if the tree had just been cut down in the forest. He opened it. The outline for the revolver was lined with velvet. The old man set the Peacemaker into it. There were empty slots for bullets.

“You want the 44–40 Winchester cartridges? I have them. No extra charge.”

“I don't intend to fire it, but sure, go ahead.”

Moses shuffled into the back and came out with a box of cartridges. He took twelve of them out and fitted the cartridges into the empty ammo spaces.

“I see that you're limping, Mr. McCall.”

“Stubbed my toe.”

“And your face is marked up.”

“I got into a fight.”

“The young hoodlums you saw here in my shop have not been in for their weekly cut. None of the merchants in the neighborhood have seen them.”

“They won't be back,” McCall said.

Moses looked up.

“You are responsible for that.”

“I had something to do with it.”

Moses closed the redwood lid and snapped it shut. McCall glanced at the Rolex Yacht-Master II in blue on his wrist. The one souvenir he'd kept from being Vladimir Gredenko. He had one more errand to run. Then he'd go home and change clothes.