Page 131 of Boardroom Ties
Not the service door, but thefrontdoor. And it’s not a knock I hear. Nor is it the buzz of a doorbell. It’s the dry, splintery, unmistakable crack of a battering ram slaughtering a deadbolt. The wood gives on the third blow. The door hits the wall with a sound I will hear in my nightmares for as long as I am alive to have them.
Which, at this rate, might not be long.
After the crack comes boots. A lot of them, followed by crackling radios and barking voices. “NYPD! Hands where I can fucking see them! Don’t you move, goddammit, or I’ll shoot!”
I stand in the hallway, marooned halfway between sleeping Cass and dead Raymond, and let the dots connect themselves. My options are far and few between. I’ve got a gun, so in theory I could fight. There’s a chance that my knowledge of the layout gives me enough of an edge to make it to the service door and out into the night.
But I know at once I won’t do that. Cass is twenty feet from me, on the other side of a thin wall. A shootout in the hallway could hurt her, and I refuse to take that chance.
Hiding is similarly useless. I think I hear dogs going apeshit in the hallway, waiting to be cut loose. A K-9 unit will find me in a heartbeat.
Option three: surrender.
I have, in my entire existence, surrendered exactly one time. That was at fifteen, on my knees on a wet alley floor, with my father’s blood up to my elbows and my uncle pressing my forehead into his coat sleeve and whispering,Don’t look, nephew. It won’t do you any good to look back.
I told myself, that night, that I would never put my hands behind my head again. I’ve built a whole life on the back of that promise.
I am going to break it tonight.
Forher.
Because the only way she sleeps through this, the only way that pill in her bloodstream has any chance of holding up as an alibi, is if the police have already made up their minds about who did this.
I lower the Glock and toss it on the runner, far out of reach. I’m trying to avoid a misunderstanding that ends with a blistering array of rounds going through my body, then through walls and into the body of someone I cannot bear to lose.
I put my hands behind my head.
The boots come down the hall in a tight grouping. Four-man entry. Vests, helmets, rifles up. The lead man rounds the corner with his muzzle on my forehead at fifteen feet and roars at me to get on the ground.
“Get on the ground. Hands where I can see them.Hands!”
“They’re up,” I say, so calm it surprises even me. “They’re up. I am unarmed. There’s a weapon on the floor at my feet.”
“Get on the ground!”
I sink. Knees first. Then, as I start to tilt forward, the cops surge up and knock me forward until I’m plastered against the floor. My arms get wrenched behind me hard enough that I feel the shoulder I dislocated at twenty-two flare up. My ribs hurt so goddamn bad.
The cuffs ratchet in place. The policeman growls above me, breathing hard. “Clear the rest. Master, guest, kitchen. Move. Cuff anything you find.”
Two pairs of footsteps go past my head toward the master. Two go the other way, toward the guest room.
Toward Cass.
An unholy, involuntary roar flies out of my throat, a dying animal’s noise. I feel the knee in my neck press harder. “Quiet, motherfucker! Don’t move.”
The boots reach the guest room. There is a beat of silence and then, very faintly, a man’s voice, lower than the others, almost gentle, the voice of a cop who has done a lot of welfare checks: “Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me? Ma’am.”
She doesn’t answer, obviously. She’s got half a milligram of a sedative in her bloodstream. She is so far under that they might as well be calling to her from the bottom of a well.
A second voice yells into a radio. “We’ve got a female in the second bedroom, unresponsive but breathing. Pulse is good. Looks like she’s been drugged. Get a bus up here.”
She’s breathing.Her pulse is good.
My whole world fits inside those two sentences.
Then the other team comes back from the master, and a voice from there says, “Body in there. Male, three GSWs. He’s done. Cold.”
A dozen pairs of unfriendly eyes settle on me like laser beams. It’s not hard for them to put two and two together. I know how it looks for them. A strange man in an apartment that’s not his? A drugged woman? A rich, prominent citizen, dead as a doornail? I’m a lawyer and I’m also not fucking stupid.
