She hung up, grabbed her jacket. “My mother’s house. I got her a blue hibiscus for her birthday. It’s in her backyard, right by a window to the basement. He rigged something there.”
Sachs sprinted for the door, making a call.
A circuit breaker had popped.
Rose Sachs was now in her Brooklyn town house’s the dank basement, the place redolent of mold. She was making her way slowly to the panel. Slowly not because of her cardiac condition, but because of the clutter.
Looking over the boxes, the shelves, the racks of plastic-wrapped clothing.
Even here she felt good—the “even” because she was dodging a spider’s elaborate web.
Good.
Spending some time in her own house for a change.
She loved her daughter, appreciated everything Amie did for her. But the girl—the woman—had been such a, well, mother hen about the surgery. Stay at my house, Mom. Come on. No, I’ll drive you. No, I’ll pick up dinner.
Sweet of her. But the fact was Rose wasn’t going to break apart in the days leading up to the operation. No, it was obvious what Amie was thinking—that Rose might not wake up from the deep sleep while the surgeon was slicing out components of her heart and replacing them with little tubes from a lesser part of her body.
Daughter wanted to spend as much time with mother as possible—just in case Part A didn’t get along with Part B, which, by the way, God never did intend.
Upstairs her mobile phone was ringing.
They could leave a message.
Or maybe Amelia’s persistence—and insistence—was simply her uncompromising nature.
And for this, Rose thought smiling, she herself was to blame. She was thinking of the turbulent days with her daughter. What had been the source of Rose’s moods, her paranoia, her suspicion? Thinking that father and daughter were conspiring to get away from Mom?
But that wasn’t paranoia at all. They were conspiring.
As well they should have. What a shrew I was. Who knew what was the reason . . . There were probably meds I could have taken, probably therapists I could have shared with. But that would have been a weakness.
And Rose Sachs had never done well with weakness.
At this moment, lost in these reflections, she felt a burst of pride. Because the upside of that attitude was that she’d created a strong daughter. Herman had given the girl heart and humor. Rose had given her steel.
Uncompromising . . .
The lights here in the cellar were working—it was on the second floor that the lamp had gone out. She wondered why the breaker had popped. She hadn’t turned anything on, no iron or hair dryer. She’d been reading. And pop, out went the lights. But the house was old; maybe one of the breakers was bad.
Now the home line was ringing—an old-fashioned ring, ring, ring.
She paused. Well, there was voice mail on that one too. Telemarketer on the landline probably. She didn’t use that phone much anymore, just her cell phone.
Welcome to the twenty-first century. What would Herman have thought?
Moving aside a few boxes to clear a path to the breaker box, she thought of Nick Carelli.
Rose supposed that the story was true, that he’d taken the blame for his brother. That seemed good, that seemed noble. But, as she’d told her daughter, if he’d really loved Amie, wouldn’t he have found a better way to handle it? A cop had to accept that you did things the right way when it came to the law. Her husband had been a lifelong policeman, a portable—a foot patrolman—walking the beat in a number of places, mostly in Times Square. He’d done his job with calm determination and was never confrontational, defusing conflicts, not fanning flames. Rose could never see Herman taking the fall for anybody. Because, even if for a good cause, that would have been a lie.
A tightening of her lips. Another matter: Her daughter was wrong, wrong, wrong to have any contact with Nick at all. Rose had seen his eyes. He wanted them to get back together, clear as day. Rose wondered what Lincoln knew about it. Rose’s advice would have been for Amie to drop Nick instantly, even if the mayor himself gave him a big, fat blue ribbon saying Pardon.
But such was the nature of children. You bore them, shaped them as best you could and then turned them out into the world—bundles that contained all your gold stars and all your cinders.
Amie would do the right thing.
Rose hoped.
Continuing toward the breaker box. She noticed the window next to it was quite clean, for a change. Maybe the gardener had washed it. She’d have to thank him when he came next week.
Rose passed some old boxes labeled A’s High School. Rose laughed softly, remembering those crazy years, Amie spending her free hours on car repair and fielding modeling jobs for some of the top agencies in Manhattan (remembered how one time the seventeen-year-old girl had had to wear black polish at a fashion shoot not because the scene involved gothic chic but because it had proven impossible to dig out the General Motors grease out from under her nails).
Rose decided she’d take one of the boxes upstairs. What fun to look through it. They could do that together. Maybe tonight, after dinner.
And began to slide boxes out of the way to clear a path to the breaker box.
CHAPTER 44
Sitting on a doorstep, in overalls and cap, I’m a workman taking a workman’s break. Newspaper and coffee at hand, lingering before I have to get back to the job.
And glancing through the basement window of Mrs. Rose Sachs’s town house in idyllic Brooklyn. Ah, there she is, coming into view.
It’s worked well, my plan. The other day, staking out Red’s town house, just six blocks away, I’d spotted an elderly woman stepping from the police girl’s doorway and locking the dead bolt. A clear resemblance. Aunt or mother. So I followed her here. A little touch of Google . . . and the relationship became clear.
Hi, Mom . . .
Red needs to be stopped and needs to be taught a lesson. Killing this woman will do the trick nicely.
Rose, a lovely name.
Soon to be a dry, dead flower.
I would have liked to use one of my trusted controller exploits again but the other day I scanned diligently and found no embedded circuits begging to be let into the network or shooting data heavenward. But, as I know from woodworking, sometimes you must improvise. Brazilian rosewood, short supply? So go with Indian. Not as rich. Not as voluptuously purple. Cuts differently. Smooths differently. But you make do.
And occasionally the pram, the dresser, the gingham-dressed bed works out better than you’d planned.
So. Let’s see now if my improv here works out. It really was quite simple. I rigged a circuit from a garage door opener to short out a light in Rose’s living room. A few minutes ago I pressed the opener button on the remote, which popped the breaker. And Rose started downstairs to find the box and reset it.
Normally she’d have an easy job of simply flicking the switch back into the on position.
Let there be light . . .
Except that won’t happen. Because I diverted the main line from the incoming wire to the circuit breaker box itself. The metal door is, in effect, a live wire, carrying 220 volts and many wonderful heart-stopping amps. Even if she’s inclined to do the wise thing, the safe thing and cut off the main power before resetting the breaker, she’ll still have to open the door to do that.
And zap.
Now she’s feet away from the breaker box. Then, unfortunately, she moves out of view.
But it’s clear where she is. And she’ll be reaching for the handle now . . .
Yes!
Anticlimactic. But I see it’s worked perfectly.
When she completed the circuit with her body the main line shorted out, extinguishing all the electricity to the house—the upstairs and basement and front door lights went dark.
I imagine I heard a growling buzz but that would have to be in my mind’s ear. I’m too far away for that.
Goodbye, Rose.
Rising and hurrying away.
A block down this pleasant street I hear sirens. Getting louder. Curious. Are they coming here? Could it be they’re en route to me?
Has Red figured something out? That I was about to visit the wrath of Edison upon Momma?
No, impossible. It’s just a coincidence.
I can’t help but be delighted with the handiwork. Have you learned your lesson, Detective Red? I am not someone to bully.
What a day, what a day.
He was so looking forward to getting home.
Dr. Nathan Evers eased the big sedan through traffic in Brooklyn, Henry Street in the Heights. Not too congested. Good. He stretched, heard a joint pop. The fifty-seven-year-old surgeon was tired. He’d been in operating suites for six hours today. Two gallbladders. One appendectomy. A couple of others. Didn’t need to. But the kid with the scalpel needed some help. Some medicine was about diagnostics and referrals and business. Some was about slicing open the human body.
That young resident wasn’t that sort.
Nathan Evers was.
Exhausted. But more or less content. He felt good, he felt purged. Nobody scrubbed and buffed as much as doctors, surgeons especially. You ended your shift—and it was a shift, just like an assembly-line worker’s—you ended your shift with the hottest of hot showers. The most astringent of soaps. Your body tingling, a humming sound in your ear.
The memory of the bile and blood washed away, he was now in his husband-and-parent frame of mind. Enjoying the pleasant drive through a pleasant part of the city he loved. Soon he’d see his wife and, later tonight, his daughter and his first grandchild. A boy named Jasper.
Hm. Jasper.
Not his first choice when his daughter told him. “Jasper, really? Interesting.”
But then, seeing the wrinkled little blob before him and touching his tiny, tiny fingers and toes and delighting in the perplexed infant grin, he decided any name was wonderful. Balthazar, Federico, Aslan. Sue. It didn’t matter. Heaven was here on earth and he remembered at that moment, eye-to-eye with his grandson, why he had taken the Hippocratic oath. Because life is precious, life is astonishing. Life is worth devoting yours to.
Evers clicked on satellite radio and hit a preselect button, one of the NPR channels, and began listening to Terry Gross’s wonderful show.
“This is Fresh Air . . .”
Which was when his car went insane.
Without warning, the engine began to scream, as if he’d floored the accelerator; the cruise control light blinked on spontaneously—his hands hadn’t been anywhere near the switch!—and the system must’ve been instructing the engine to accelerate to a hundred!
“Jesus, no!”
The tachometer redlined and the car surged forward, tires smoking, rear end wobbling like a drag racer’s.
Evers cried out in panic as he wove into the oncoming traffic and, at the moment, empty lane. The vehicle hit fifty, sixty—his head bouncing back against the rest, his eyes unfocused. He slammed his foot on the brake but the engine surge was so unrelenting that the car slowed hardly at all.
“No!” The panic was on him completely. He let up on the brake and jammed down again over and over. He felt a metatarsal in his foot snap. Now at sixty mph and climbing, his auto continued to skid and weave. Cars veered from his path, horns blaring.
He jammed the start/stop button for the engine but the motor kept up its demonic roar.
Think!
The gearshift! Yes! Neutral. He shoved the lever to the central position, and, thank God, that did the trick. The engine still howled but the transmission was disengaged. He pitched forward as the car slowed, dropping to sixty-five, sixty.
Now the brakes.
Which were not working at all.
“No, no, no!” he cried.
Consumed with panic, paralyzed, he could only stare forward as the car raced against a red light and toward the intersection ahead, noting the vehicles stopped or slowly crawling in the cross-traffic lane, perpendicular to him. Cars, a garbage truck, a school bus. He would strike one of them broadside at close to fifty mph.
A splinter of rational thought: You’re dead. But save who you can. Hit the truck, not the bus! Go right, just a bit! But his hands couldn’t pace his mind, and tweaking the wheel sent the car veering directly toward a Toyota sedan. He gaped at the panicked face of the driver of the tiny car he was speeding directly for. The elderly man was as frozen as Nathan Evers.
Another twitch of the wheel and the doctor’s car struck the rear driver’s side of the Japanese vehicle, a few feet behind the man at the wheel.
The next thing that Evers knew he was coming around, after the air bag had knocked him unconscious. He was frozen in position, embraced by bones of steel from the crumpled car. Trapped. But alive, he thought. Jesus, I’m alive.
Outside, people running. Mobile phones were filming the accident. Pricks . . . Had at least one person had the decency to call 911?
Then, yes, he heard a siren. Would he end up in his own hospital? That would be rather ironic, maybe the same ER doctor he’d helped out . . .
But wait. I feel so cold. Why?
Am I paralyzed?
Then Nathan Evers realized that, no, he had complete sensation; what he was feeling was liquid cascading over his body from the mangled rear portion of the Toyota he’d virtually cut in half.
Gasoline was drenching every inch of his body from the waist down.
CHAPTER 45
Amelia Sachs hit eighty on the FDR.
This was not easy to do. Incurring horns blares and extended fingers, Sachs ignored the protests and concentrated on finding gaps between cars, braking furiously, zipping through lane changes. Keeping the revs high, high, high. Fifth gear at the most. Fourth—she called it the gutsy gear—was better. And the meat and potatoes, third.
When you move they can’t getcha.
And the corollary: When you move they can’t get away.
“No,” she was saying into the hands-free, speaking to the patrolman from the precinct near her mother’s town house. “He’s there somewhere nearby. It’s his MO. He . . . oh, shit.”
“What’s that, Detective?” the officer asked.
She controlled the skid as she swept past the car that had braked hard to make an sudden exit that neither its driver, nor she, had been planning on. The Torino and the Taurus, distant relatives, missed a potentially deadly kiss by two inches, tops.
Sachs continued, “His MO is he’s nearby when there’s an attack. He could rig an accident and leave but he doesn’t. He probably flipped the switch and waited to make sure the vic”—her voice choked—“to make sure my mother would get to the trap. He’s only had a ten-minute start and we don’t think he’s got a car. Gypsies a lot.”
“We’re sweeping, Detective. Just—”
“More bodies. I want more bodies out there. He can’t get that far!”
“Sure, Detective.”
She missed what else he said, if anything. Concentrating on fitting between two vehicles in a space no third vehicle was meant to pass through. Over the roar of the Torino’s engine she couldn’t tell if contact was made. Horns blared. Sue me, sue the city, she thought. And, irritated that she’d lost seconds braking, she downshifted hard and explored the redline zone once again.
