John Lutz - Night kills

"You with me, Pearl?

Quinn's voice. There was a horrible taste in Pearl's mouth, and her lips were glued together with dried mucus.

Yuk!

"Pearl?"

She didn't want to open her eyes, but she did.

There was Quinn, standing over her, looking serious.

It came back to her in a rush, the man in Jill's apartment, the struggle, the gunfire.

Jesus, I've been shot!

"Don't try to move, Pearl."

She felt her lips rip apart. "Wha' happened?"

"You were shot and spent five hours on the operating table. You've been unconscious for a while, and now you're back."

Mingled scents came to her: pine disinfectant, peppermint, fresh linen. She let her gaze roam, painfully and with one eye. Her vision was slightly blurred more than a few feet out, beyond a tray on which sat a green plastic glass and pitcher, a box of tissues. She was in a hospital bed.

"Unconscious? A while?"

"Three days," Quinn said.

Three days! Serious. Maybe critical.

"That qualify as a coma?"

"Sure," Quinn said.

"I'm gonna live?"

"Yeah, if from now on you do everything I say."

"Quinn…"

"I'm sorry. You're gonna be okay, Pearl. You're in Roosevelt Hospital. You were shot twice. One bullet broke your collarbone. Another entered your back near the shoulder blade and deflected downward and lodged near your liver. They've both been removed. You're gonna be fine."

"So I really will live?"

"You will." His smile came and went like a ghost. "You've got a lot of physical therapy ahead of you."

Pearl tried to move but found she was too weak. "My back, nothing hurts. Everything's numb."

"It's the drugs. It'll hurt later, Pearl."

"Good old Quinn, giving it to me straight."

"Few enough people will, in this screwed-up world."

"Don't I know it? When can I get out of here?"

"Maybe in two or three more days. They're gonna evaluate you again."

"Jill okay?"

"Fine."

"What the hell happened?"

"Feds and I caught up with Palmer Stone on the stairs of Jill's building, and he admitted faking his suicide, killing the man who had become his double and thought he was going to become Stone after the real Stone disappeared. We tried to get more out of him, but he went silent and asked for an attorney."

"He decided to lawyer up after admitting to murder?"

"Yeah. That's what struck Feds and me as wrong. We figured he had a reason, that he was maybe trying to delay us. And we could think of only one reason why he'd want to keep us in the stairwell as long as possible."

"He didn't want you to go to Jill's apartment. He wanted you to think any danger to her was over."

"Right. He knew what was going to happen up there, because he knew who was waiting. But you went to see Jill. You found Jorge Sanchez instead."

The name didn't mean anything to Pearl for several seconds. Maybe because of the drugs. Then it came to her.

"The infamous drug lord? But he was killed in Mexico City."

"Not the real Sanchez. The man the Mexican police shot to death was one of Sanchez's several doubles, who was tricked into leaving the hotel Sanchez and his wife were in. The police took him for the real Sanchez and killed him. Even Sanchez's wife, Maria, thought Jorge was dead. She had to have been shocked to see him in the dark passageway when he stepped out of the shadows and killed Greeve."

"Greeve had been shocked, too," Pearl said. "He wasn't killed by any prostitute. They just made it look that way. He was trying to pronounce Jorge's name before he died."

"Right. Jorge is in the hospital now, and talking. But he isn't going to make it. He was planning to join his wife in New York after assuming the identity of an E-Bliss client himself. They were going to meet again as two other people and move out of town, away from the drug trade. And it might have worked out for them if Jorge could have killed Jill. She was the only one who could swear she saw both Madelines and could tie them in with E-Bliss. Jill was the link he had to destroy. But Jorge's plans went about as sour as Palmer Stone's."

"So Maria Sanchez was the new Madeline."

Quinn nodded.

"What about Tony Lake?"

"Victor Lamping?"

"Yeah."

Quinn was surprised she'd forgotten; he'd told her all about Lamping while holding her and waiting for the medics in Jill's living room. "He was dead before they got him to the hospital."

Pearl let her head sink back into her pillow and thought about that. About handsome, smiling, lying Tony Lake. Everything about him a lie.

"Good," she said.

Quinn said nothing.

"E-Bliss," Pearl said. "What a nightmare."

"Even more than you think," Quinn said. "Stone and Victor's sister, Gloria Lamping, whom Stone ratted out, are trying to outtalk each other, cutting deals that aren't going to happen. That's where I got much of my information. Gloria's still recovering from being run down by a cab. She knew about the killings. Stone says she even committed some of them."

"A woman doing that to another woman." Pearl managed to shake her head slightly on the pillow. "A nightmare," she said again.

"One that's over," Quinn said. "You're awake now, Pearl."

He touched her hand as gently as he'd ever touched her.

Quinn stayed with Pearl until almost midnight, then went home to his apartment and found Linda's note.

She'd thought things through, the note said, and she realized she could never be a cop's wife. She was also going to quit her job with the city. She felt there was no choice, after being exposed as an informant who'd chosen sides in an NYPD internal dispute. No one would trust her after that. And she didn't deserve Quinn's trust.

She'd signed her name under the word good-bye.

Quinn felt like sobbing, then like breaking up the furniture, but he did neither. He thought about trying to phone Linda. But he didn't do that, either. He knew she'd made her decision, and he wouldn't be able to argue with the fatalistic logic in her note even if she did answer his call.

In truth, he was saddened but not surprised. He knew where she probably was now, someplace where they served booze. He cared but he understood that it was hopeless to try to help her. Some people you couldn't save. Some people you couldn't save from themselves.

Those were the ones who haunted you, because you could have tried harder even though you knew it was hopeless, because somehow or another, on the way out, they made others partners in their destruction. Even the people they loved. Maybe especially them.

He folded the note carefully, as if he might keep it.

Then he reconsidered, wadded it small and tight, and dropped it in the wastebasket.

A month later, Quinn was sitting at an outside table of a West Side restaurant nursing some kind of overpriced latte that was actually pretty good. An old woman sat at the table opposite his. She had three precisely aligned narrow gouges in her left cheek where her cat had clawed her. If that's what had happened. If the woman even owned a cat. Quinn never got tired of observing people in New York and trying to read them.

A signal changed and traffic streamed past in the street only ten feet away, raising the noise level and leaving a low-lying haze of exhaust fumes. Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk, occasionally bumping and shoving at each other in the narrowed space between restaurant railing and curb.

Quinn smiled. He knew that sooner or later one of those pedestrians would be Pearl. She was supposed to meet him here in five minutes for lunch.

Pearl was doing well since her release from the hospital. Last week she'd even begun working again as a guard at the bank. She continued to attract and befuddle Quinn, and he knew she always would.