Christopher Reich - Rules of Vengeance

New Bond Street was a commercial thoroughfare famed for its high-end retail outlets and tony art galleries. At 9:30, pedestrians crowded the sidewalk. Jonathan zigged and zagged through the onslaught of people, searching for his wife’s auburn hair. It’s impossible , he said to himself. There were simply too many people. Oxford Street was two blocks away, and he knew that if he didn’t spot Emma soon, he’d lose her for good.

He started to run, knocking into men and women, slowing only to stand on his tiptoes and gaze ahead. A hundred meters farther on, he pulled up. It was no use. The sidewalks were growing more crowded, not less. He put a foot into the street and stood exposed, canvassing the cascade of bobbing heads and shoulders.

There…

It was Emma. She stood on the far side of the street at the end of the block, one foot in the road like him, a hand raised to hail a taxi.

Jonathan looked to his right. Spotting a cab with its fare light on, he signaled for it to pull over. The cab docked at the curb expertly. Jonathan leaned into the passenger’s side window. “Make a U-turn. I need to follow a cab going in the opposite direction.”

“Can’t turn here, gov. ’Gainst the law, isn’t it?”

Jonathan threw a fifty-pound note onto the seat. “Emergency, isn’t it?”

“Hop in,” said the cabbie. “Which car is it you’d like me to follow?”

“Turn around and I’ll tell you.”

Jonathan hauled himself into the backseat, all the while keeping an eye pinned on Emma. As the cab negotiated a U-turn, he was afforded a perfect view of his wife climbing into a maroon taxi with a T-Mobile placard affixed to its doors.

“That’s the one,” said Jonathan. “And keep your distance.”

They followed Emma’s cab without incident to a home in Hampstead, a well-to-do neighborhood in the northern reaches of London. The driver was born to subterfuge. Effortlessly he maintained a safe distance behind Emma, never going closer than four car lengths. In a city where taxis nearly outnumbered private cars, he was invisible. Taking up position at the rear of a line of parked cars at the end of the block, they watched as Emma paid off her cab and walked to the side of a modest mock-Tudor-styled home, where she entered through a side door. Jonathan checked his watch. It was after ten. Emma had officially missed her flight to Dublin.

He had another concern. He was due back at the hotel in little more than an hour to deliver his keynote address. If he left now, he might just make it back in time, but he would have to shower and shave in record time. Blackburn and his associates had spent a lot of money to fly him to London and put him up in the five-star luxury to which they believed he was entitled. Jonathan didn’t want to disappoint them. And yet he could not make himself leave.

Just then the garage door opened, and all thoughts about rushing back to the Dorchester vanished. Jonathan leaned forward, his eyes trained on the gray BMW sedan pulling out of the garage and turning in their direction.

“Get your fare light on,” he commanded as he flung himself flat onto the rear seat.

“Already done.”

“Is it her?” Jonathan asked, still lying low.

“Bingo, gov. It’s her.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Get moving.”

It took Emma exactly thirty minutes to reach her destination. Her route took her south, back through Hampstead to Bayswater Road, where she cut through Hyde Park toward St. James. She drove slowly, more cautiously than was her habit. His Emma-or the real Emma, as he liked to think of her-was an Indy car driver in search of a track. She had only two speeds, fast and faster. This one braked for yellow lights instead of flooring it to make it through, signaled religiously, and rarely changed lanes. The implication was clear. Operational Emma, or Nightingale, could not afford to be stopped by the police.

From St. James it was a maze of narrow residential streets, constantly turning left, then right, but always keeping toward the Thames. Afraid to be seen, Jonathan shouted for the driver to lag behind, and two or three times they lost all sight of her. Luck, however, was with them, and after a tortured span of five or ten seconds, they spotted her again.

She parked in a space on Storey’s Gate Road. It was a narrow two-way street bordered by attached buildings dating from the late nineteenth century. All were five stories high, hewn from an identical batch of gray Portland cement, and constructed as part of a single ambitious project to gentrify the area. Only afterward did Jonathan remark on the perfect timing of the departing motorist, or recall that the car pulling out of the space had been a Vauxhall, the same car mentioned by code in the text message on Emma’s phone. At that moment, he simply attributed it to Emma’s good fortune.

“What now?” asked the cabbie as they stared at the BMW from a distance of a hundred meters. Emma’s silhouette was distinctly visible. She sat behind the wheel, as stationary as a statue.

“We wait,” said Jonathan.

It was past seven a.m. when Kate Ford returned home and closed the kitchen door behind her. “Good Lord!” she muttered as the scent of spoiled milk assaulted her senses. She flipped on the light and immediately identified the culprits: a bowl of half-eaten muesli and a quart of milk stood on the table exactly where she’d left them some twenty-six hours earlier. In her rush to get to One Park, she’d forgotten to clean up after herself.

Hurriedly she flung open the windows and waved the foul-smelling air out. Unlike Lord Robert Russell, she did not enjoy the benefits of central air conditioning. East Finchley was much farther from Park Lane than 20 map kilometers. Sighing, she dumped the cereal down the sink and followed it with the clotted milk. It was not how she’d envisioned coming home after her first day back on the job.

Upstairs, she turned on the shower. When it grew hot, she undressed and threw her suit and blouse into a pile on the floor. It was off to the dry cleaner for both. She didn’t like the idea of paying ten quid to have them cleaned and pressed, but she liked the idea of not smelling to high heaven. She took care climbing into the tub. The water was hot and the pressure was strong enough to peel paint, which was how she liked it. She washed her hair, then soaped her body, running a loofah over her arms and legs. She was careful to avoid the scar above her hip. A few weeks earlier, when she’d first come home from hospital, it had bulged like a swollen leech. The bullet had entered from the rear, just above the spleen, leaving barely a clean hole, and then blasted through the other side like a sledgehammer through rotting wood. Hollowpoints did that. The doctors had been unanimous in pointing out that it was a miracle that the splintered round had not nicked an artery or caused greater internal damage.

Kate remained under the showerhead until every last drop of warmth had been bled and the nozzle ran as cold as a Scottish stream. And then she stayed longer. She stood beneath the jets until her skin prickled with goose bumps and her flesh went numb. The numbness helped her deal with the silence. If she was frantic to towel herself dry, she didn’t notice that there was no radio blaring, no clumsy male hands clanking the breakfast plates, no East End baritone ordering her to hightail it to the car so they could drive in to work together.

A mirror hung on the wall, and she caught sight of her body, thinner now than it had ever been. She stared at her biceps, which looked taut and ropey beneath her pale skin, at her pelvis, so sharp and fragile, and at her scar. “The bullet destroyed one of your ovaries,” the surgeon had explained with maddening sympathy. “It also tore the lining of the uterus. To control the bleeding, we had to remove the uterus in toto. I’m so sorry. We did everything we could.”