Michael Palmer - The Society

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was about those X-rays.”

“Shit. He been callin’ me twice a day. Eight in the morning, eight at night. He said if he missed a call I was to get this envelope to you.”

His gun still leveled at Will’s midsection, Chris had already regained his swagger.

“The five hundred was your idea?” Will asked.

“What if it was? Like the man in the movies says, it’s all about the Benjamins.”

“How do you know Newcomber?”

For a second, it seemed to Will as if he was in for a flip answer, or none at all. Then a look that might have been sadness drifted across Chris’s face.

“Ol’ Charles liked me. I did things for him, he did things for me. You like to have things done for you?”

“I don’t think I like the kind of things you’re talking about.”

“Hey, don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it, and don’t go talkin’ like a smart-ass at someone with a gun pointin’ at you, neither.”

“Listen, Chris, why don’t you just let me have that envelope? You got your money. Now, how about giving me the envelope like Charles asked you to and let me go home?”

Chris hesitated, then passed it over. It was thick with X-rays, although in the gloom Will could tell nothing beyond that.

“Well,” he said, his pulse racing at the notion that in just a couple of minutes he would be behind the wheel of his Jeep heading out of Roxbury and back to his condo, “thanks for keeping your end of the deal. Charles would be very pleased with you.”

“Don’t mean shit to me whether a dead man is pleased with me or not,” Chris said, with forced bravado. “He’s gone, and there are plenty more like him out there anxious to take his place.”

“Is it okay for me to go now?”

“No, Grant, actually, it’s not.” The man’s voice came from the darkness along a brick wall just inside the alley. It was a voice familiar to Will, although he couldn’t at that instant figure out from where. “Drop the gun, Chris. Now!”

“You fucking bastard,” Chris hissed at Will.

“I didn’t-”

“The gun!” the voice snapped.

From the darkness, still looking like something of a bookworm despite the broad shoulders, narrow waist, and heavy pistol he held aimed directly at Chris’s chest, stepped Boyd Halliday’s executive assistant, Marshall Gold.

Will’s thoughts spun wildly as he tried to get his mind around what was happening and why. Nothing made sense.

“I have no beef with you, pal,” Gold said. “Just put your gun away in your pocket.”

Chris hesitated, then did as he was told.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“He’s the man who killed-”

Quick as a rattlesnake, Gold whipped the muzzle of his pistol across Will’s face, opening a gash on the side of his jaw and dropping him to one knee. Calmly, his cold eyes fixed on Will through his wire-rimmed glasses, Gold bent down and retrieved the X-ray envelope from the pavement.

“Okay, let’s go, hotshot,” he said.

He reached down, grabbed Will by the collar, and yanked him to his feet with little effort. Will felt blood dripping down his neck but refused even to touch his wound. He did use his tongue to probe the inside of his lip, which was cut, and his teeth, one of which seemed loose.

What in the hell is going on?

If Gold had killed Newcomber and left the two alphabet letters, then he was also the managed-care serial killer. It made no sense. Was he trying to mislead police by being a copycat?

“Listen, pal ,” Chris said suddenly to Gold, “those X-rays are for sale to the highest bidder. How much you got on you?”

Gold laughed.

“I’ve got the gun and here you are shaking me down. You are a pile of balls, my little friend, a pile of brass balls. But here you go. Where I come from, having brass cojones gets rewarded.”

He pulled a money clip from his pocket and with one hand worked off what looked like a hundred-dollar bill. Then he flipped it in Chris’s direction. It blew a few feet away and fluttered to the sidewalk. The teen made no move to pick it up.

Instead, Chris folded his hands disdainfully across his chest.

“That ain’t nearly enough,” he said.

“Well, get used to it, because that’s all you’re getting. Come on, Grant, you and I have some business to attend to.”

“I don’t think that’s all our man Chris is gonna get from this dude,” a rich, bass voice said. “Do you, Rod?”

A man, clearly older and heavier than Chris, stood up from between two parked cars at the moment an even larger man moved out from somewhere in the shadows of the alley. Both held guns pointed at Gold, one of them some sort of submachine gun.

“I don’t think it’s nearly enough,” Rod said. “How ’bout you, Smitty? What you think?”

“No way it’s enough. I say Mr. Tough here is downright cheap. That’s what I say. How about you guys?”

A third man materialized from the night and slid out from behind Gold, pistol ready, then two more appeared from across the street.

“Seems like we never get visitors around here anymore, eh, Biggs?”

A wiry man in his early twenties emerged from a tenement doorway and moved in next to Chris.

“This is Biggs,” Chris said to the two white men. “He says, ‘Jump,’ you ask, ‘How high?’ ”

Biggs had narrow, close-set eyes, a broad, flat nose, and a thick, north-south scar that crossed his upper and lower lips just to the right of midline.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” he said. “Now, Mr. Tough, why don’t you jus’ put that fine piece of hardware on the sidewalk and kick it over here.”

His eyes still all business, Gold complied. Will sensed that, despite the firepower fixed on them, he was actually evaluating his chances in a shoot-out.

“These X-rays belong to my company,” Gold said. “This man here killed to get them. I’m willing to pay you well to get them back.”

“That’s a lie,” Will said. “He’s the killer. He does it for a living.”

“How much more you got on you?” Biggs asked Will.

“Ten dollars.”

“Hand it over. I find you got any more, I’m gonna shoot off one of your fingers. You, how much?”

Moving with deliberate slowness, Gold slid the money clip from his pocket and tossed it over. Biggs counted the remaining bills, which Will thought might add up to as much as a thousand, and stuffed them in his deep pants pocket.

“You jus’ bought yourself some serious consideration, my man.”

“I’ll leave him and the X-rays here with you while I go and get some more,” Gold said. “Twice that much. Then I want them both.”

“I wonder what it is about you that I just don’t trust. What you all think, guys? You think we should let him just take off?”

“Bogus.”

“He sucks.”

“You can throw him farther ’n you can trust him.”

“We ain’t standin’ around here in the rain.”

“The will of the Cobras has spoken,” Biggs said. “We ain’t waitin’ around for you or anyone. You want this dude, Mr. Tough, you gotta catch him. Chris, will you feel you kept your part of the bargain if we give this hangdog, say, a minute’s head start?”

“A minute’d be fine, Biggs.”

“A minute it is, then. Give him that envelope, Mr. Tough.”

“You’re costing yourselves a lot of money.”

“We’ll decide what we’re costin’ ourselves. Now give it to him and lay down on your face.”

“But-”

“Down!. . Okay, now, hangdog, you got a minute. Ready, go!”

“Wait, I-”

“Fifty-five seconds. No, no, not back up that alley, down that way. Fifty seconds. Now get going. . Forty-five seconds.”