Jack pulled the knife from his ankle scabbard and pointed it at him.
"Shut up and don't move."
"Jack, thank God!" Alicia said as he sliced through the duct tape. "How in the world—?"
"Tell you later."
She began peeling away the strips as soon as he cut them. In seconds she was free. But instead of jumping for the door, she turned and went at Bloodymouth, cursing and clawing at his face.
Jack pulled her away from the cowering figure.
"Come on! We've got to get away from here."
"Meet my half brother," she said through her teeth as Jack helped her down to the pavement.
Jack looked at the soft body, the lanky hair, and bulbous nose. "Must take after the other side of the family," he said.
"He does. He—"
She stopped and Jack saw she was staring at the two guys he'd flattened a minute ago. The driver had curled into a fetal position and was moaning as he clutched his left knee with his good hand. The other guy was already struggling to his feet. He had to be a tough one—a kidney punch like that usually put a guy down for the count.
He tugged on Alicia's arm again, pulling her away from the scene. Drivers backed up behind the truck would be wandering up to see what the hell was holding things up. He saw one getting out of his car now. Jack didn't want anyone giving his description.
"Let's go. Time to fade away."
8
After the collision, Yoshio had seen Baker come out and move around to the front of the truck. He did not return. The concerned citizen appeared instead and freed Alicia Clayton.
Unable to contain his curiosity, Yoshio approached the truck on foot. Peeking inside the open door, he saw a man he recognized as Thomas Clayton wiping blood from his mouth. He went around to the front and saw Baker and another man, both much larger than the concerned citizen, both looking battered.
This carnage was certainly not the work of an average citizen. It appeared that Ms. Clayton had found herself a samurai… a ronin.
And then Baker, holding a hand against his back, over his right kidney, noticed Yoshio and snarled. "Whatta you lookin' at? Get the fuck outta here!"
As Yoshio made a frightened gesture and backed away, he glanced down the street to where Alicia Clayton and her rescuer were vanishing into the shadows.
Yoshio's car was trapped behind the accident, and would be so for a long while, he feared. He would not be able to follow them.
But he wished he could. Yoshio wanted to know more about the ronin.
9
"I don't know how to thank you."
It must have been the twentieth time she'd said it. Jack sipped his Molson and said nothing. He'd given up on telling her not to worry about it.
They'd run a few blocks, then ducked into this sports bar to get off the street. The place traded on the Madison Square Garden crowd, and seemed to be lit solely by neon beer signs—must have been a hundred of them on the walls and over the bar. The long-haired guy in the apron on the Sam Adams sign stared at Jack over Alicia's shoulder.
At least the place was quiet. The Knicks were off tonight, so Jack and Alicia had a corner all to themselves.
And now with the adrenaline fading, his right flank began to throb where that big sandy-haired guy had connected. The man looked heavy and middle-aged but, he was in shape. Threw a mean punch.
He'd explained to her how he'd seen her pushed into the truck, how he'd commandeered a taxi and chased the truck until he could cut it off and stop it.
She was working on her second Dewar's, and when she lifted the glass to her lips he noticed that the adrenaline tremor in her hand was easing.
"If you really want to thank me," he said, "you'll forget about going to the cops."
"But this is my chance to put a stop to all this!" she said. She balled her free hand into a fist and held it over the table. "I've got them now. They abducted me! I don't have to worry about civil actions anymore. This is a felony and you were a witness. I know this detective, Will Matthews. We can go to him and—"
Jack felt his insides twist into a knot. "No, we can't."
She blinked. "Why not?"
"Because I can't be your witness."
"What do you mean? You saw the whole thing. You even cut me free."
"But I can't be a witness, Alicia. I don't exist."
Another blink. "What are you talking about?"
"I have no official existence."'
She shook her head. "How can that be? You've got to have a social security number. You've got to have a bank account, a credit card, a driver license. You can't function without them."
"I do. In fact, I have a number of them. All bogus."
"Well then, be a witness under one of those identities."
"No can do. Those identities hold up with a bank looking to get my money in its vault and hoping I'll start charging everything I buy on its credit card. And they hold up with a bored DMV clerk who's transferring the license of a dead man in Toledo to a nonexistent address in Park Slope. But they won't hold up under a real background check. Especially if they check with the IRS."
"You don't file?"
"Never. And please… you can't ever mention me to this detective friend of yours."
"Are you wanted for anything?"
"No, and I'd like to keep it that way."
Alicia leaned back, deflated. "Damn. For a minute there I really thought…"
"Sorry," Jack said.
"My God, don't apologize for pulling me out of that van."
"But maybe I shouldn't have," he said.
"That's not funny."
"I'm serious. It just occurred to me that I should have done everything the same except cut you free. If maybe I clobbered your brother like the other two and left the truck's door open with you still bound to that seat, and you started shouting for help, someone would have come along and seen you and called the cops. I'd have faded away to another part of the city, and those three would be locked up in Midtown South right now."
It annoyed the hell out of him that he hadn't thought of any of this at the time.
Alicia was nodding slowly. "That would have been perfect. But it didn't occur to me either. All I wanted right then was to be free of that tape and out of that truck."
"And I was trying to figure out how many more guys I was going to have to deal with."
"Yes," she said, leaning forward now. A small, tight smile played about her lips. The Scotch was getting to her. "Tell me about that. Both those men were bigger than you. And I know you didn't use your eyeball trick. So how did you beat them? Karate? Kung fu?"
"Surprise," Jack said, "The best weapon there is. The outcome could have been very different if they'd been ready for me. But they saw a guy who was scared, frightened, helpless. Easy meat. The second guy even smiled when he saw how helpless I looked. But I had my moves planned—went for their knees and noses. Doesn't matter how big a guy is, he's not much trouble after you pop one of his knee ligaments, or ram his nasal bones back into his head. Those two got caught napping. That only works once, though. Have to think of something else if I run into them again."
"I have to ask you this," she said. Jack noticed her looking at her hands. "Those thumbnails. You keep them so much longer than the others. Can I ask you why?"
"You'd probably rather not know."
"I do. Really I do."
Jack took a breath. "Sometimes you get into spots where things don't clean up as neatly as they did tonight. Sometimes you wind up rolling in the dirt or on the floor and you're dodging head butts and bites and you've got to use every trick you know and every part of your body just to survive. And that's when it's good to have a sort of built-in weapon." He held up his long-nailed thumbs and wiggled them. "Nothing like a gouged eye to end a fight."
Alicia blanched and straightened in her chair. "Oh."
Warned you, Jack thought.
He tried to stare down the guy on the Sam Adams sign. That didn't work, so he made to move
the conversation away from himself and into a more interesting area.
"This is the second time I've asked you this today," he said, "but things have changed since this morning: What's your next move?"
"I'm not sure."
"Snatching you off the street was a risky and dangerous move. It tells me they're getting desperate. And desperate people do crazy and stupid things. You might get hurt."
"I don't know if tonight had anything to do with desperation," she said slowly. "Thomas told me that they were going to win, that it's just a matter of time. I don't think he was bluffing."
"Maybe there's a clock running somewhere."
"Maybe. But I get the feeling that tonight had nothing to do with the legal battle. I heard something in Thomas's voice… when he said, 'If you ever, ever try to do harm to that house again'… he sounded as afraid as he was angry."
"So you think this is a direct response to your hiring Benny the Torch. Seems a little over the top."
"It does, doesn't it. But I think it really frightened him. The thought of that house going up in flames seems to have just about unhinged Thomas."
"And unhinged people are dangerous." Jack pounded his fist lightly on the table. "But what is it about that house that would unhinge him?"
Something inside him was screaming for answers.
"I didn't really care before," Alicia said, "but after tonight, I want to know. Help me find out."
Thought you'd never ask.
But he didn't want to appear too anxious. There was still the matter of his fee.
"Well…"
"Look." She leaned over the table, her expression intent, her voice low. "Thomas tried to frighten me off. I can't let him do that. Whatever's in that house has got to be valuable. Very valuable. I can't pay you cash, but you can have whatever we find."
"A contingency fee," he said, nodding slowly, as if he'd never considered it. "I usually operate on a cash basis, but since I'm already involved in this, I'll make an exception."
"Great!" She gave up one of her rare smiles.
"But I can't take it all. It's yours by right."
"I don't want it."
"I'll take twenty percent."
"Take it all."
How could he take it all? He wouldn't feel right. "You can toss your percentage in the river if you want, but we split or I'm out."
He finally backed her into limiting his take to a third, and they shook on it.
"When can you start?" she said.
"I've already started." He rose and threw a twenty on the table. "Let's take a ride."
10
Jack didn't have to tell the cabbie to take it slow past the house. Thirty-eighth Street was barely crawling.
"Thar she blows," he said.
The security car with the two guards was still parked out front.
He noticed that Alicia didn't even glance out the window. She sat with her arms laced tightly across her chest.
"When do you figure you'll make your first search?" she whispered.
The cabdriver's English had seemed pretty shaky, and Jack doubted he could hear much on the other side of his Plexiglas partition, but whispering wasn't a bad idea.
"For what?"
"For whatever they think is so valuable."
"Which is…?"
"That's the zillion-dollar question."
"Exactly. I'm sure your brother has tossed the place but good behind those boarded-up windows. Obviously he didn't find it. So how am I supposed to find what he couldn't find when I don't even know what I'm looking for?"
She mulled that a moment. "Maybe it isn't something in the house—maybe it's the house itself."
"Very possible. But when it's time to search, it won't be just me, it'll be we."
"Oh, no. I'm not setting foot in that house ever again."
"Yes, you are. You grew up there. You know every nook and cranny of the place. Be crazy for me to stumble around in there alone when you could be my guide."
Alicia seemed to shrink inside her coat as she tightened her crisscrossed arms.
What happened to you? he wondered. What went on in that house that you won't even look at it?
He decided not to push her any further now.
"But search talk is a little premature now anyway," he said. "We need lots more information before we do anything like that."
She visibly relaxed. "Like what?"
"Like who's backing Thomas. Finding out what they're into may move us a long way toward figuring out what this is all about. You said this is a big expensive law firm?"
She nodded. "Hinchberger, Rainey and Guran. Leo—my dead lawyer—told me HRG is mainly into international business law. He was flabbergasted that they were handling a will dispute. Said it was like having F. Lee Bailey handle a traffic ticket. And I believe him. You should see their offices."
"You been there?"
She nodded. "Leo and I had a meeting with Thomas's lawyer in his office early on. It didn't go well."
"Where are they?"
"West Forty-fourth, just off Fifth."
Jack had an idea. "Then that's the place to start." He tapped on the cab's Plexiglas barrier. "West Forty-fourth."
"Nobody's going to be there now."
"I know. But I want to get a look at the place. And I want to start work on getting a list of their clients."
"You mean, besides Thomas?"
"I don't think your brother is a client—at least in the usual sense. It doesn't sound like you can approach—what did you call them?"
"Leo called them HRG. It's easier."
"Okay. HRG. They don't sound like the kind of firm that lets you pop in off the street with a will problem. So I'm willing to bet that one of their existing clients—an important one—told HRG to handle this 'minor matter' for them. We connect Thomas to one of those clients and we may answer some questions."
She shook her head. "So obvious. But how do we connect—?"
"I follow him. But that's all later. Right now, I need you to fill me in on some details."
"Like what?"
"Like how your father died."
"He was on Flight 27."
The words jolted Jack. "Flight 27? When you said he was killed in a plane crash, I thought you meant some little Piper Cub or Cessna. But Flight 27… jeez."
JAL Flight 27 from LA to Tokyo had crashed into the Pacific with no survivors, and not too many of the 247 bodies recovered either. The TV and papers had talked of nothing else for weeks. Still no clue as to why. It went down in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific. The black box was never found.
"Did they recover his body?"
Alicia shook her head. "No. They say sharks got most of them."
"I'm sorry," Jack said without thinking.
"Me too," she said matter-of-factly, looking straight ahead. "For the shark that ate him, that is. Probably died of food poisoning."
You are a cold one, Jack thought. I hope you've got a good reason.
"How about your brother? You said he quit his job. What did he do before he began devoting his life to getting that house?"
"What I know I learned from that private eye before he was killed. He said Thomas had been stuck for years in a mid-level electrical engineering job at AT&T."
"Not the genius his father was, then?"
Another shrug. "Hard to say with Thomas. As a teen he always tended to take the path of least resistance. Under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a cage, he could do work. But give him any slack…"
New York cabs will be signaling whenever they change lanes before Thomas gets any slack from his sister, Jack thought.
Not that he deserved any after kidnapping her tonight.
"Here we are," she said, pointing through the side window as the cab swung into the curb.
Jack stepped out, paid the driver, then checked out the building.
The Hand Building was chiseled into the stone along the apex of the high-arched entrance. Impressive carving wound around th
e supporting columns. And inside…
"Look at that ceiling," Alicia said as the revolving door deposited them in the long, bright marble-walled lobby.
High above them, gods of some sort hovered among fluffy white clouds in a pale blue sky painted on the arched ceiling.
"Do you think they're Greek or Roman?" Alicia said.
"I think some folks are taking themselves just a bit too seriously. And do you really care?"
"Come to think of it… no."
"What floor are they on?" Jack said as he led her to the directory that took up a large section of one of the west walls.
"Twenty-something."
He found it. Looked like they called the whole twenty-third floor home.
Out of the corner of his eye he watched the guard at the security desk watching them. It was after hours and they didn't look all that presentable, what with Jack in jeans and Alicia wrinkled from being taped up.
"We shouldn't risk trying to go upstairs tonight. Don't want to arouse any suspicions or put anyone on alert. But I wish I could get a look at their office layout."
"Not much to see," Alicia said. "You step out of the elevator and face a glass wall with a receptionist on the other side. I'm sure she's gone now, but even when she's there, you don't get past that wall until she hits a button to release the door."
Damn, Jack thought. Getting a client list was going to be tough. Maybe impossible.
"Why all the security, you think?"
Alicia shrugged. "Well, you never know what kind of riffraff will be sneaking around after hours."
"Oh-ho!" he said. "The doctor makes a funny."
"Mark the date and time," she said. "It doesn't happen very often."
"Can I help you folks?"
The security guard had walked over. He was big and black, and acting friendly, but Jack could tell he was all business. If they didn't have any business in the Hand Building, he was going to ask them to please move themselves back to the street. No monkey business on his shift.
"Fascinating architecture," Jack said. "When did this building go up?"
"I'm not sure," the guard said. "I think there's some sort of plaque in the corner behind that tree by the door. Take a look at it on your way out."