The Steel Kiss Read online

  This, which has now become my new favorite implement, I place in a location of honor on the shelf. I have the absurd thought that the other implements will be jealous and sad. I'm funny that way. But when your life has been thrown off kilter by Shoppers, you breathe life into inanimate things. Is that so odd, though? They're more dependable than people.

  I look at the blade once more. A reflected flash from the light smacks my eye and the room tilts as the pupil shrinks. The sensation is eerie but not unpleasant.

  I have a sudden impulse to bring Alicia inside here. Almost a need. I picture the light reflecting off the steel onto her skin, like it's doing on mine. I really don't know her well at all, but I think I will, bring her here, I mean. A low feeling in my gut is telling me to.

  Breathing faster now.

  Should I do that? Bring her here tonight?

  That churning in my groin tells me yes. And I can picture her skin reflected in the metal shapes on the workbench, polished to mirror.

  I reflect: It will have to be done at some point. Won't it?

  Just do it now. Get it over with...

  Yes, no?

  I'm frozen.

  The buzzer sounds. I leave the Toy Room and go to the front door.

  Then have a fast thought, a terrible thought.

  What if it's not Alicia but Red?

  No, no. Could that have happened? Red has such sharp eyes, which means a sharp brain. And she did find me at the mall.

  Get my bone cracker from the shelf and walk to the door.

  I push the intercom button. And pause. "Hello?"

  "Vernon. It's me?" Alicia ends many sentences with question marks. She is such a bundle of uncertainty.

  Relaxing, I put the hammer down and hit the outside door release button and a few minutes later I see Alicia's face framed in the video screen, looking up at the tiny security camera above the doorjamb. She enters and we step into the living room. I smell her odd perfume, which has to me a faint scent of sweet onions. I'm sure it's not. But that's my impression.

  She avoids my eyes. I tower over her; she's tiny and slim but not as bean as me. "Hey."

  "Hi."

  We embrace, an interesting word, and I always thought it meant you brace yourself to touch somebody you don't want to touch. Like my mother near the end. My father, always. The word doesn't mean that, sure, but it's what I think.

  Alicia shucks her jacket. Hangs it up herself. She's not comfortable with people doing things for her. She's around forty, some years older than me. She's in a blue dress, which has a high neck and long sleeves. She rarely wears polish on her nails. She's comfortable with that image: schoolteacherish. I don't care. It's not her fashion choices that draw me to her. She was a schoolteacher when she was married.

  "Dinner?" I ask.

  "No?" Again, a question when what she means is: No. Worried that one wrong word, one wrong punctuation mark will ruin the evening.

  "You're not hungry?"

  She glances toward the second bedroom. "Just... Is it all right? Can we make love, please?"

  I take her hand and we walk through the living room, toward the far wall. To the right is the Toy Room. The left, the back bedroom, the door open and the carefully made bed illuminated by a soft glow of night-light.

  I pause for just a moment, eyes on the Toy Room door. She looks up at me, curious, but would never dream of asking, Is something wrong?

  I make a decision and turn toward the left, leading her after me.

  CHAPTER 5

  What happened?" Lincoln Rhyme asked. "The scene in Brooklyn?"

  This was his way of tapping the maple tree. Sachs was not normally forthcoming with details, or even clues, about what was troubling her--just like him. Nor was either of them inclined to say, "So what's wrong?" But camouflaging the question about her state of mind under the netting of specifics concerning, say, a crime scene sometimes did the trick.

  "Kind of a problem." And fell silent.

  Well, gave it a shot.

  They were in the parlor of his town house on Central Park West. She dropped her purse and briefcase onto a rattan chair. "Going to wash up." She strode up the hall to the ground-floor bathroom. He heard pleasantries exchanged between Sachs and Rhyme's aide, Thom Reston, preparing dinner.

  The smells of cooking wafted. Rhyme detected poaching fish, capers, carrots with thyme. A touch of cumin, probably in the rice. Yes, his olfactory senses--those clever ligands--were, he believed, enhanced following the crime scene accident years ago that had severed his spine and rendered him a C4 quad. However, it was an easy deduction; Thom tended to make this particular meal once a week. Not a foodie, by any means, Rhyme nonetheless enjoyed the dish. Provided it was accompanied by a crisp Chablis. Which it would be.

  Sachs returned and Rhyme persisted. "Your unsub? How are you identifying him, again? I forgot." He was sure she'd told him. But unless a fact directly touched a project Rhyme was involved with, it tended to dissipate like vapor.

  "Unsub Forty. After that club near where he killed the vic." She seemed surprised he hadn't remembered.

  "He rabbited."

  "Yep. Vanished. It was chaos, because of the escalator thing."

  He noted that Sachs didn't unholster her Glock and place it on the shelf near the front doorway into the hall. This meant she wouldn't be staying tonight. She had her own town house, in Brooklyn, and divided her time between there and here. Or she had until recently. For the past few weeks, she'd stayed here only twice.

  Another observation: Her clothing was pristine, not evidencing the dirt and blood that had to have resulted from her descent into the pit to try to rescue the accident victim. Since the unsub's escape--and the escalator incident--had been in Brooklyn, she would have gone home to bathe and change.

  Therefore, since she was planning on leaving again, why had she driven back here from that borough to Manhattan?

  Maybe for dinner? He was hoping so.

  Thom stepped into the parlor from the hallway. "Here you go." He handed her a glass of white wine.

  "Thanks." She sipped.

  Rhyme's aide was trim and as good-looking as a Nautica model, today dressed in dark slacks, white shirt and subdued burgundy-and-pink tie. He dressed better than any other caregiver Rhyme had ever had, and if the outfit seemed a bit impractical, the important part was attended to: His shoes were solid and rubber-soled--to safely transfer the solidly built Rhyme between bed and wheelchair. And an accessory: Peeking from his rear pocket was a fringe of cornflower-blue latex gloves for the piss 'n' shit detail.

  He said to Sachs, "You sure you can't stay for dinner?"

  "No, thanks. I have other plans."

  Which answered that question, though the lack of elaboration only added to the mystery of her presence here now.

  Rhyme cleared his throat. He glanced at his empty tumbler, sitting mouth level on the side of the wheelchair (the cup holder was its first accessory).

  "You've had two," Thom told him.

  "I've had one, which you divided into two. Actually I've had less than one if I saw the quantity correctly." Sometimes he fought with the aide on this, and a dozen other, subjects but today Rhyme wasn't in a truly petulant mood; he was pleased at how class had gone. On the other hand, he was troubled, as well. What was up with Sachs? But, let us not parse too finely, mostly he just wanted more goddamn scotch.

  He almost added that it had been one hell of a day. But that wouldn't have been the truth. It had been a pleasant day, a calm day. Unlike the many times when he was half crazed from the pursuit of a killer or terrorist, before he'd quit the police consulting business.

  "Please and thank you?"

  Thom looked at him suspiciously. He hesitated then poured from the bottle of Glenmorangie, which, damn it, the man kept on a shelf out of reach, as if Rhyme were a toddler fascinated by a colorful tin of drain cleaner.

  "Dinner in a half hour," Thom said and vanished back to his simmering turbot.

  Sachs sipped wine, looking ov
er the forensic lab equipment and supplies packed into the Victorian parlor: computers, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, ballistics examination units, density gradient measurers, friction ridge imaging hoods, alternative light sources, a scanning electron microscope. With these, and the dozens of examination tables and hundreds of tools, the parlor was a forensic lab that would be the envy of many a small-or even medium-sized police department. Much of it was now covered with plastic tarps or cotton sheets, as unemployed as their owner. Rhyme still consulted some on non-criminal matters, in addition to teaching, but most of his work involved writing for academia and professional journals.

  Her eyes, he saw, went to a dim corner where sat a half-dozen whiteboards on which they used to write down evidence gathered from scenes by Sachs and Rhyme's former protege, Patrolman Ron Pulaski. The threesome, along with another officer from CSU headquarters, would stand, and sit, before the boards and kick about ideas as to the perp's identity and whereabouts. The boards now faced away, toward the wall, as if resenting that Rhyme no longer had any use for them.

  After a moment Sachs said, "I went to see the widow."

  "Widow?"

  "Sandy Frommer. The wife of the victim."

  It took him a moment to realize she wasn't speaking of the person killed by Unsub 40, but the man who'd died in the escalator accident.

  "You have to deliver the news?" Forensic cops, like Rhyme, rarely if ever are charged with the difficult task of explaining that a loved one is no longer of this earth.

  "No. Just... Greg, the vic, wanted me to tell her he loved her and his son. When he was dying. I agreed."

  "Good of you."

  A shrug. "The son's twelve. Bryan."

  Rhyme didn't ask how they were doing. Verbal empties, questions like that.

  Clutching her wine in both hands, Sachs walked to an unsterile table, leaned against it. Returned his gaze. "I was close. Almost had him, Unsub Forty, I mean. But then the accident, the escalator. I had to choose." Sipping wine.

  "The right thing, Sachs. Of course. You had to do it."

  "It was just a coincidence I tipped to him--there was no time, zero time to put together a full take-down team." She closed her eyes. A slow shake of the head. "A crowded mall. Just couldn't get it together."

  Sachs was her own harshest critic and Rhyme knew the difficult circumstances of the impromptu take-down operation might dull the sting for some people but, with Sachs, they did not. He had evidence of this now: Sachs's hand disappeared into her hair and she scratched her scalp. Then she seemed to sense she was doing so and stopped. Started again a moment later. She was a woman of great dynamics, some light, some dark. They came as a package.

  "Forensics?" he asked. "On your unsub?"

  "Not much at Starbucks, where he was sitting. The unsub heard Greg Frommer's scream and, like everybody else, looked toward it. I was in his line of sight. I guess he saw my piece or the shield on my belt. Knew what was going down. Or suspected. So he left fast, took everything with him. Got some trace at the table but he'd been there only for a few minutes."

  "Exit route?" Rhyme was no longer working for the NYPD, but obvious questions naturally flowed.

  "Loading dock. Ron, some ECTs and some uniforms from the Eight-Four are on it, canvassing, and may have a secondary to search. We'll see. Oh, and I got a shooting team convened in my honor."

  "Why?"

  "I blew away a motor."

  "You...?"

  "You didn't see the news?"

  "No."

  "The vic wasn't stuck in the steps of the escalator. He fell through onto the gears of the drive motor. No cutoff switch there. I shot out the coils of the motor. It was too late."

  Rhyme considered this. "No one was injured by the shot so they wouldn't put you on administrative. You'll get a no-action letter in a week or so."

  "Hope so. Captain from the Eight-Four's on my side. As long as there're no reporters trying to make their careers with stories on cops shooting guns in malls, I'll be cool."

  "I don't think that's much of a journalistic subspecialty," Rhyme said wryly.

  "Well, Madino, the captain, he managed to purgatory the situation for a while."

  "Love the word," Rhyme told her. "You end-ran it." Pleased with his own verbing.

  She smiled.

  Rhyme liked that. She hadn't been smiling a lot lately.

  She returned to the rattan chair near Rhyme and sat. The furniture made its distinctive mew, a sound Rhyme had never heard duplicated elsewhere.

  "You're thinking," she said slowly, "if I changed clothes at my house, which I did, and if I'm not staying here tonight, which I'm not..." She cocked her head. "Why'd I make the trip?"

  "Exactly."

  She set down her half-finished wine. "I came by to ask you something. I need a favor. Your initial reaction is going to be to say no but just hear me out. Deal?"

  I wasn't brave enough.

  Not tonight.

  I didn't take Alicia to the Toy Room.

  I debated, but no.

  She's left--she's never stayed over--and I'm in bed, 11 p.m. or so. I don't know. Thinking of us in the bedroom earlier: unzipping Alicia's blue dress, the teacher's dress, the zipper at the back. Modest. Bra was complicated, not to undo, but the structure. Hard to see for certain, though, because, of course, we both prefer the lights dim.

  Then my clothes were off too, my clothes like queen sheets on a twin bed. Her tiny hands moved fast as hungry hummingbirds. Truly deft. And we played our game. Love that. Just love it. Though I have to be careful. If I don't think of something else, it's over too soon. Trot out thoughts and memories: A steel chisel I bought last week, considering what it would do to bone. Dinner at my favorite take-out place. The screams of the victim recently in the construction site near 40deg North, as the ball-peen hammer came down on his skull. (I take this as proof I'm not truly a monster. Picturing the blood, the snap, doesn't make me finish faster but dulls me a bit.)

  Then Alicia and I found the pulse and all was well... until, damn it, the image of that police girl came to mind. Red. I pictured looking toward the screams from the escalator, seeing her, badge and gun and all, as she was looking toward me. Shadowed eyes, red hair flying. Looking away from the bloody escalator and the screams, looking for me, me, me. But, odd, though she gave me a terrible scare at the mall, though she's as bad as the worst Shopper ever, picturing her as I pulsed atop tiny Alicia didn't slow me down. Just the opposite.

  Stop it! Go away!

  My God, did I say that aloud? I wondered.

  Glanced at Alicia. No. She was lost in whatever place she goes to at times like this.

  But Red didn't go away.

  And it was over. Snap. Alicia seemed surprised a little at the speed. Not that she seemed to care. Sex feeds women many different courses, like tapas, where a man wants a single entree to wolf down and wolf fast.

  After, we dozed and I awoke thinking I was still empty somehow and thought about the Toy Room, taking her there.

  Yes? I'd wondered. No?

  Then I told her to leave.

  Goodbye, goodbye.

  Nothing more than those words.

  And she left.

  Now I find my phone, listen to a voice mail message from my brother. "Yo. Next Sunday. Anjelika or Film Forum? David Lynch or The Man Who Fell to Earth? Your call. Ha, no actually it's my call. 'Cause it's me who dialed you!"

  Love to hear his voice. Like mine, yet not like mine.

  I then wonder what to do with my wakefulness. There are plenty of plans I have to consider for tomorrow. But instead I fumble through the bedside table drawer. Find the diary and continue writing passages. I'm transcribing, actually, from the MP3 player. It's always easier to talk, let the thoughts fly like bats at dusk, going where they will. Then write it down later.

  These passages from the difficult days, the high school days. Who isn't glad to have left those times behind? I write in pretty good script. The nuns. They weren't bad, most of them. B
ut when they insisted, you listened, you practiced, you pleased them.

  Well. What a day. At school until four. Civics club project. Mrs. Hooper was happy about my work. Took the secret way home. Longer but better (know why? Obvious). Past the house that drapes out cobwebs at Halloween, past the pond that seems smaller every year, past Marjorie's house, where I saw her that one time blouse open and she never knew.

  Was hoping, praying I'd get home today okay and I think I will. But then there they are.

  Sammy and Franklin. They're leaving Cindy Hanson's house. Cindy could be a fashion model. So pretty. Sam and Frank, so handsome, are the sort could go out with her. I don't even talk to her. I don't exist to her, I'm not on this planet. Complexion clear but too skinny too gawky too awkward. That's okay. That's the way the world works.

  Sam and Frank have never slugged me, pushed me down, rubbed my face in dirt or dog shit. But never been alone with them. Know they've looked at me some, well, of course, they have. Everybody in school has. If this was Duncan or Butler, I'd get whaled on, the crap totally beaten out of me, cause there aren't any witnesses around. So I guess same is going to happen with them. They're shorter than me, who isn't? But stronger and I can't fight, don't know how. Flail, that's what somebody said I was doing. I looked silly. Asked Dad to help. He didn't. Put on a boxing show on TV and left me to watch it. Lotta good that did.

  So now, getting beat up.

  Because there aren't any witnesses around.

  No way I can turn. I just keep walking. Waiting for the fists. And they're grinning. What the boys in school always do before the hitting.

  But they don't hit. Sam's like hi, and asks if I live near here. A couple blocks away, I tell him. So they know now this is a really weird way for me to get home from school, but they don't say anything.

  He just says nice neighborhood here. Frank says he lives closer to the tracks which is noisy and it kind of sucks.

  Then from Frank: Dude. Epic in class today.

  I'm like I can't say anything. What he means is Mrs. Rich's class. Calc. She called on me because I was looking out the window, which she does when somebody's looking out the window to embarrass them and without looking back I said g(1) = h(1) + 7 = [?]10.88222 + 7 = [?]3.88222.