Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“Will you be by my side to help me brush my teeth?”

“No, ma’am. But keep the bathroom door closed and locked when you’re doing it.”

She gave me an appraising look. “That was quite a monologue. Have you ever thought about taking up acting?”

“I can’t guarantee your safety, Miss Gilpin. But I can guarantee that anyone with an idea of wanting to harm you is going to have to work pretty hard to do it.”

“Rebecca,” she said.

The sound of the explosion came a half second behind the bright flash. It came in two stages, the second almost instantly atop the first. The first was like a large growl. A rumble. With the flash, I sprang to my feet and had already launched across the small table when the second sound arrived, and with it the bursting of wood and metal and glass.

Rebecca and I hit the floor together. I managed to slip my hand behind her head as we hit, giving it at least a little cushioning. Dishes and glass and wood and food and silverware rocketed over us. We were pelted, me more than her, as I had landed fairly square on top of her. A piece of the ceiling landed next to my head in a plume of plaster dust. I felt a sharp jolt to the small of my back, near my shoulder. At the same time, the roar was replaced by an anguished female scream from somewhere near the front of the restaurant. “ Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God !”

The sound of a wailing car alarm was coming in from where the restaurant’s front window had been. My eyes stung from the plaster dust, but I opened them anyway. Rebecca’s face was inches away. There was a hook-shaped gash on her cheek and a nasty split in her lower lip. Her face was covered by a film of plaster dust.

Her eyes were not open.

A droplet of some sort plunked abruptly onto her cheek, followed by another, then another. The plaster dust absorbed the water where it hit and then began to streak in globby trails along her face. It was water from the sprinkler system. I twisted my head to see a pipe dangling from the ceiling. I also saw utter destruction up at the front of the restaurant. There was a big empty nothing where the coat-check closet had been.

I started to move, and pain shot through my left shoulder. I flinched. Water from the sprinkler was falling like mist from a fountain. Below me, Rebecca’s eyes fluttered open. I should have been relieved. Not to say I wasn’t on some level. But a mantra was already going through my head, which was beginning to feel like it had exploded.

Margo is safe. Margo is safe. Margo is safe…

I MUST HAVE RESEMBLED A KID BUILDING A PLAY FORT. WITH MY ONE arm that worked, I dragged two upended tables together in front of Rebecca Gilpin and created a little wall. Then I pulled my gun from my shoulder holster and, on my knees, rose up and peered over the wall.

Bang-bang.

Our waitress was on her hands and knees looking like someone trying to find a contact lens. Her blouse had been blown half off, and her exposed right arm was riddled with thick red dots. The restaurant had been only moderately full. Most of the patrons I spotted were moving, though some more slowly than others. There were groans and soft cries rising into the hazy air. I spotted a hand on the floor near where the waitress was crawling. When I realized that it was no longer attached to its arm, I bit clean through my lower lip. The sprinkler system had ceased. There were no fires. The floor was a thick milky puddle, with swirls of pinkish blood mixed in.

People were already coming in off the street to help or just to witness the chaos. I braced myself. This is what the more insidious bombers want, a fresh new crowd for explosion number two. Moths to the flame. I eyeballed each person who came high-stepping into the rubble. The other possibility would be that one of these people was picking his or her way through the mess to see if the target had been hit. I had no way to be certain, but I would have given better than even odds that the target was currently on the floor on her back, behind my little homemade fort.

The safety was off. My finger was on the trigger.

My heart was banging against its cage, trying to get out.

Rebecca let out a groan. “I can’t move.”

“Don’t try.”

She groaned again. I checked over the edge of my tables to be sure no one was marching toward us, then I turned and gave Rebecca a quick once-over. I didn’t like what I found below her waist. Specifically, the left leg. A nasty chard of polished wood was lodged in her thigh, just above the knee, which itself looked like a bruised apple. Blood was pumping in small steady pulses from the thigh.

I set down my gun and scrambled around for a pair of cloth napkins. I knotted them together, then took hold of the two ends and spiraled the cloth into a narrow coil. I grabbed a small column of wood that looked like it might have come from a chair leg.

“Excuse me.” Pulling Rebecca’s torn skirt up to her waist, I held the piece of wood in place on the bottom of her thigh with the doubled napkins, then brought the two ends up around the thigh, crossed the ends of the napkins and bore down with all my strength, tying them off in a secure knot.

Rebecca asked, “What are you doing?”

“Hold on.”

I located two more napkins, knotted them as I had the others, spiraled them and wrapped them around her thigh below the rig I’d just secured. I tied this one off even tighter than the first. Only then did I work the ugly sliver of wood from her leg.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

The blood was still oozing from the wound, but as I watched, the pulsing seemed to lessen. I picked up my gun and raised myself to look over the upturned tables.

A blue and red light was flashing on the faces of the people gathered outside the restaurant. The cavalry had arrived. I flipped the safety back on and holstered my gun. There was a small crowd of people standing near the remains of the coat-check closet. As I stood up, two of the people moved away, and I saw what they’d been staring at. It was the Asian coat-check woman. I recognized her red beret. It was still on her head, which was still on her shoulders, which were still part of her torso. But that was where she stopped.

My kicking the nearest upturned table proved enough-I discovered later-to run a hairline fracture on my little toe. I turned not a few heads from the grisly sight as I unceremoniously lost it.

“Goddammit!”

CAPTAIN REMY SANCHEZ OF MIDTOWN NORTH’S HOMICIDE DIVISION did some kicking of his own, but he had wisely picked a safer target: a harmless piece of plaster exploded into dust against the toe of his shoe.

“Copycat, my ass. What kind of a fool do you take me for, Malone?”

The fact is, I didn’t take Remy Sanchez for anything remotely close to a fool. Sanchez was a thirty-odd-year veteran of the force who, through patience, solid work and, some would say, an uncanny ability to learn little tidbits about his superiors that those superiors would as soon no one know, had climbed steadily up the thin blue ladder from his days as a beat cop in Fort Apache in the Bronx to the point where he could now look out over a vast array of uniformed men and women and tell them what the hell they were supposed to do. He was a gentle-looking man. The eyes of a poet. Tight black curls showing inroads of gray. Married with children. I had met his wife on several occasions. She was quiet, nice. One got the feeling that if anyone ever harmed a hair on her head, calm and steady homicide captain Remy Sanchez would quietly see to it that it was the last hair on the last head that the person ever had the opportunity to harm.

He obviously wasn’t buying the copycat story. I hadn’t thought he would, but it was my job to stick with it.