Angel Face, page 25
The lobby was empty except for the clerk behind the desk. He gave Erin an odd look, his eyebrows raised. She ignored him.
At the main doors, Teresa started to pull up her jacket’s hood.
“No,” Erin said quietly, motioning with her hand. For the sake of witness statements, it was important that Teresa be seen to leave the hotel. There had to be no doubt.
The Suburban waited under the rain-streaked awning, black and ominous. Outside the halo of the hotel’s lights, only the driving rain was visible. Erin felt a swell of panic. She couldn’t see a gray car. Hell, she couldn’t even see the rest of the parking lot. Why hadn’t she double-checked for it when she’d first arrived? What if Corky wasn’t there? What if Carlyle wasn’t in position to set off the bomb? Their clever plan was going to fall apart if even one piece failed.
A black Lincoln pulled up behind the SUV. That’d be the Marshals’ car. Calley and Hodges split off, Hodges going to the front of the Suburban and Calley to the rear corner. Teresa hesitated, staring at the Chevy.
“Keep moving,” Erin said softly. She reached out and, without thinking, opened the back door.
The SUV’s dome light didn’t come on. Belatedly, Erin recalled that it hadn’t lit up when she’d gotten in and out previously. Carlyle, bless his clever heart, must have thought to disable the light. The interior of the Suburban was dark, the corpse cloaked in shadows.
Teresa swallowed, tucked her coat around her legs, and got in. Erin closed the door behind her, turned to Calley, and nodded.
There was a short pause. Erin started around the back of the SUV. She saw the driver of the Lincoln watching her. He’d be in a perfect position to see Teresa get out of the vehicle. Erin turned to face him, remembering something she’d learned on a previous case, a trick of stage magic. The key to doing a magic trick wasn’t to hide what you were doing; it was to make the viewer think you were doing something else. Cops were trained to watch hands. Magicians showed you the wrong hand. She needed a distraction.
At that moment, as if in answer to her prayers, she saw a silhouette. It was a man, a big one, coming up behind the Marshals’ car. She couldn’t make out his features through the driving rain, but the guy was running toward them.
“Calley!” she shouted, pointing. “Six o’clock!”
Calley and the other Marshals reacted instantly, as they’d been trained. Calley’s hands came up, gripping his pistol. Hodges was moving down the passenger side of the Suburban, his own gun in hand. Erin shifted to the driver’s side of the Lincoln and started toward the rear of the car. She was screening the Suburban from the Lincoln driver’s view and she’d bet he was watching his rearview mirror. She was also getting a little distance from the Suburban. It could go at any second.
The noise of the rain on the awning was loud, a continuous drumming. Had Teresa changed clothes yet? Had she gotten out of the car? Erin didn’t dare look.
“Stop!” Calley shouted. He was pointing his gun at the newcomer. Then he yelled, “Gun!”
The dark figure brought up its hands. Erin caught a glint of silver from the rain-soaked barrel of a pistol. The man was very large and strong-looking. And his face was familiar, from the buzz-cut hair to the twice-broken nose.
“Freeze!” the man shouted back.
“US Marshal!” Calley shouted. His finger went inside the trigger guard of his pistol.
“Wait!” Erin screamed. “Vic—!”
The night turned brilliant red-gold. Intense, almost liquid heat rippled across Erin’s back and shoulders. There was a tremendous noise and a giant, invisible hand shoved her away from the Chevy. Every pane of glass in the hotel’s awning shattered at once. Erin turned halfway around as she fell, landing heavily on her hip. She saw a rolling ball of fire burst through the skeleton frame of the awning, hurling shards of broken glass up and out. Sparkling fragments hung in the air like new constellations. Then they began to plummet to earth, raining down all around her. Something else was falling, too, solid pieces of something that had once been human.
Erin curled into a ball and wrapped her arms around her head. Glass tinkled off her upraised arms, accompanied by rain, falling through the ruined awning. Raindrops hissed like a chorus of devils as the water struck the blazing vehicle.
She risked opening an eye and raising her head slightly. The Suburban was a black cauldron, open on top. Flames and smoke boiled out of the shattered vehicle. A car alarm was shrieking plaintively from somewhere in the parking lot. Somebody screamed.
The rain was cool on Erin’s face. Her exposed flesh felt flushed, as if she’d gotten a bad sunburn. She smelled the thick odor of gasoline and spent gunpowder, along with a roasted-pork scent that was all too familiar. She lay on the brickwork, in no hurry to get up.
The thought of one of her father’s favorite movies came to her. Sean O’Reilly was a big Paul Newman and Robert Redford fan, and he loved Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. She remembered a scene where the bandits were trying to blow up a safe during a train robbery:
Redford manages to blow up the whole train car, destroying the safe, the money, and just about everything else. Newman turns to him and says, “Well, that oughta do it, Sundance Kid.”
Redford replies, “Think ya used enough dynamite there, Butch?”
“Think ya used enough dynamite there?” Erin muttered. That crazy urge to laugh was on her again.
Dimly, she heard men yelling at each other. Calley was telling somebody to stay back. Vic was shouting over him.
“Listen, buddy!” Vic yelled. “You don’t get outta my way, your jurisdiction’s going up your ass and out your goddamn nose! She’s NYPD, and she’s one of mine! Move it!”
Then Vic was there, standing over her, large as life. He had his phone at his ear and was talking to Dispatch, speaking very fast.
“Repeat, we’ve got a 10-13!” he said. “Officer down! Looks like a car bomb! Send everybody you got, right now! Hilton Hotel at JFK!”
“Hey, Vic,” Erin said. “What’re you doing?”
“Take it easy,” Vic said, dropping to one knee beside her. “Don’t try to move. You might have broken bones.”
“I’m okay,” she said. Her ears were ringing, but besides that and the weird flushed sensation on her cheeks and the back of her neck, she felt pretty much fine. Just tired; really, really tired. She almost felt like she could go to sleep right there on the wet parking lot.
Then Calley stepped up to face Vic. “Step back, sir,” he said. He’d gotten a handle on himself, but he was shaking with a combination of adrenaline and intense emotion.
“Screw you,” Vic retorted without sparing him a glance. “I’m NYPD and this is my partner.”
“This is an active Federal crime scene,” Calley said. “I’m ordering you to back off.”
Then Vic did look at him. “I’m starting to want you to try and make me,” he said.
“He’s okay, Calley,” Erin said, reluctantly sitting up. Her arm sent a jolt of pain from her wrist. She must have landed on it badly. It might be sprained. “I know him.”
Sirens were audible through the downpour. Blue and red lights came dimly into view, converging from two sides at once. In the lurid light, Calley and the detectives stared at one another.
“Christ,” Calley said. “What a goddamn mess.”
Chapter 26
Vic wouldn’t let Erin stand up until the paramedics arrived on scene. It was immediately obvious that the passenger in the Suburban was in no need of medical attention, and nobody else was hurt, so the EMTs went straight for Erin. After a few minutes, during which Vic hovered annoyingly, one of the medics pronounced her basically okay. Her wrist was mildly sprained, and she had some minor flash-burns, but they weren’t even blistering.
“You’re a very lucky woman,” he said. “I can’t believe you were standing that close. You ought to be dead.”
“The car was customized,” Erin said dully. “Armored door panels and windows.” Her head and wrist ached. What she really wanted was to find a quiet place to lie down, hopefully for a week or two.
Vic looked at the smoldering wreckage. “Still,” he said. “You were, like, ten feet away. That’s the sort of thing they need two or three body bags for. Or maybe a bunch of Tupperware.”
“You’ve got a clean bill of health, ma’am,” the EMT said. “Just take a few aspirin for any aches and pains. You’ll probably be sore in the morning.”
“Thanks,” Erin said, starting to get to her feet. Vic, seeing her movement, put out a hand and helped her up.
Cops were all over the place, standing around and getting wet, but nobody seemed to be doing much of anything useful. All they’d managed was to set up a perimeter around the blast site. A couple of officers were stringing yellow police tape. The Marshals had retreated to the doorway of the hotel, where a metal overhang shielded them from the worst of the rain. Calley was on the phone, talking to his boss. He didn’t look happy.
“How’re your ears?” Vic asked.
“Fine,” Erin said. “Ringing a little, that’s all.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “This is the second time you’ve been blown up, right?”
“I’ve never been blown up, Vic,” she said.
“You know what I mean. Last time a car blew up near you, you couldn’t hardly hear for ten, fifteen minutes. And you were a lot farther away.” He looked at the Suburban. “I guess this was a smaller bomb. That other one, practically the only thing left was the chassis.”
“Vic,” she said. “What the hell are you doing here? How’d you even know where I was?”
“Pinged your phone,” he said matter-of-factly. “You told me you were going to Long Island, so I booked it down here. I figured you were getting in trouble, what with all the Mob shit you’ve been dealing with. You had my back with that Russian thing last year, without even being asked, so I owed you one. So here I am.”
“You almost got shot by the Marshals!”
He shrugged. “You think I can’t handle a couple pencil-dick cowboys? Look, let’s get outta the rain while we wait for the Bomb Squad. You want to go inside, or wait in my car? I guess your ride doesn’t keep the rain out so good anymore.”
“Sure,” Erin said. “I don’t want your car to get wet, though.”
“It’s a police car,” he said. “Guys throw up in the back seat all the time. A little rainwater won’t make a bit of difference. C’mon, let’s go. You’re gonna get hypothermia or something out here.”
They crossed the parking lot and climbed into Vic’s Taurus. Vic started the engine to get the heater running. The police radio was full of chatter about the bombing. Vic turned it off. They sat there, listening to the rumble of the Taurus’s engine and the patter of the rain on the windshield and roof. They could see the flames of the burning Suburban through the rain. Somebody was spraying a fire extinguisher on it. This would wreck evidence, but Erin thought this was a good idea for two reasons: firstly, she actually wanted evidence to be compromised this once; secondly, the SUV’s gas tank hadn’t blown up yet, and if it did, there was an excellent chance it would kill a few of the cops that were still milling around like spooked cattle.
“They almost got you that time, huh?” Vic finally asked.
“What?” Erin hadn’t been expecting him to start the conversation that way.
“The friggin’ Mob. They almost took you out.”
She stared at him. His face was hard to make out in the darkened car. “Vic, I wasn’t the target.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “They got your witness, though.”
“Looks like it.”
“What happened? Look, I called you as soon as I heard from Firelli. He got the word from a guy he knows in the old neighborhood. You know, he’s got connections in the Lucarellis, and—”
“Vic, I’m not blaming you. Whatever happened here, it’s more my fault than anybody’s.”
“Shit, Erin, don’t go blaming yourself. How many times have you talked to victims who think it was their fault? You almost got killed! I just wish I could’ve got here faster.”
“There’s nothing you could’ve done, Vic.”
“Yeah,” he said morosely. “Well, there goes our case against Angel Face. That pretty bastard’s gonna walk. Hell, the DA will probably drop the charges. Not to mention what happened to that poor girl. What was her name again?”
“Isabella Romano.”
“No, not her. The witness. The one who just got blown up.”
“Oh. Teresa. Teresa Tommasino.”
“Geez, Erin, you sure you’re okay? You’re not thinking straight. You think maybe the explosion scrambled you a little? On account of that concussion you got from Mickey Connor?”
“I don’t think so. But how would I know?”
“Erin?”
“Yeah?”
“How come you hung up on me?”
He was studying her face. She wondered how much he could see in the dark. She tried to keep her expression neutral and to tell him as much of the truth as she could.
“I was busy, Vic. I was trying to figure out how to get Teresa somewhere safe.”
“Do you think the bomb was already under the car? Or did they plant it at the hotel?”
“I was only inside for a few minutes,” she said. “But I guess the hotel’s got a security camera watching the front door. If anyone messed with the car, it might be on tape.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But that means somebody knew what you were gonna use the car for. Who signed off on the vehicle?”
“Captain Holliday. But if you’re suggesting he’s dirty—”
“Nah, Holliday’s about as dirty as my Sig.” Vic patted the butt of his pistol. He took excellent care of his guns. Erin knew if she looked at his Sig-Sauer automatic, it would be as bright and clean as if it’d just come off the assembly line. “But someone knew,” he repeated.
“I guess so,” she said.
“You guess? Erin, you’re the one who’s supposed to be good at figuring this shit out. I’m just the meathead they bring in to scare the hell out of the bad guys. You don’t guess. You see stuff. And there’s something I can’t figure in this thing.”
“What’s that?”
He was still looking at her. “Where’s the mutt?”
Erin blinked. “What?”
“Your other half. And I don’t mean that slick Irish prick. I’m taking about your K-9. Where is he?”
“He’s at home.”
“You left him at home? You came down here to transport a witness to a Mob killing, a woman you knew bad guys wanted to kill, and you left your bomb dog at home? Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth, Vic.” She bristled slightly. “I was in a hurry, and—”
He cut her off with an impatient gesture. “Don’t give me that crap. You’re as likely to forget him as you are to leave your gun on your night table. I’ve seen you and him. He wouldn’t let you forget him. And you know how useful he is. Hell, if he’d been in the car with you, he’d have smelled the damn bomb before it went off! Then none of this would’ve happened!”
There was a pause. Little points of reflected light shone in Vic’s eyes like distant stars. Erin, looking at him, knew she wasn’t the only one who was telling lies. Vic was a lot more than just a thug, whatever he said. He was a first-class detective, when he wasn’t being intellectually lazy. Once he got on the right path, he usually knew how to follow it.
“Erin,” he said quietly. “Remember when we found out about your boyfriend? Remember what I told you?”
“Which part?” she replied. “I remember a lot of swearing.”
“I said you’d screwed with the Department and you’d screwed with me. And you promised you’d tell me the truth from then on.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“So tell me. You’re hiding something. What is it?”
She shook her head. “Vic, look. I’m not going to lie to you. But there’s plenty of things I haven’t told you, especially about what I’m doing with the Irish. You know that. You’re not cleared for that operation.”
“This hasn’t got anything to do with the Irish,” he said. “This is the Mafia we’re talking about here. Okay, I’ll tell you what I know. I know you got the Captain to sign off on a special vehicle. I know you drove it down here, without your bomb-sniffing dog, with what was obviously a bomb hidden inside. I know you yanked your witness away from the Marshals, who were doing just fine protecting her, and now she’s a big bowl of chunky spaghetti sauce in the Hilton’s driveway. I also know you’re sleeping with a guy in the O’Malleys who used to be in the IRA. Specifically, he used to build car bombs for the IRA. Now that’s one hell of a coincidence.”
Erin said nothing.
“So here’s how I figure it,” Vic said. “The Lucarellis want this witness out of the picture, so their golden boy can skate on his murder rap. But they couldn’t get to the Marshals, on account of the way they botched that hit on the Madonna punk. But they could get to you and your boyfriend. And you could get to this Tommasino chick. Jesus Christ, Erin, you killed an innocent fucking woman!”
She was already shaking her head before he finished. “No, Vic, you’re wrong,” she said.
“Your boy Carlyle built a bomb for you,” he went on. “Now, maybe he could’ve put it in the car without you knowing it, but then you’d have had your dog along, and he would’ve sniffed it out. So you had to know about it. Erin, I don’t want to believe this, but you’re not giving me a whole lot of choice here.”
Erin saw Vic’s hand was still resting on his gun. His fingers were now curled around the pistol grip. He honestly thought he might have to draw on her. She felt sick to her stomach, not from fear, but from disappointment and disgust.
“I didn’t kill her,” Erin said. “I swear, Vic, I didn’t.”
“Then who the hell did? You gonna split hairs, like Tom Cruise in Collateral? ‘I didn’t kill him. I shot him. Bullets and the fall killed him.’ Seriously?”
