Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

She disappeared into the dim corridor, leapt over the ancient wooden turnstile, and started along the platform toward the station.

She heard the voices before she got more than twenty feet.

“I have to leave… understand… I’m saying? Go away.”

White, male.

Was it the Dancer?

Heart slamming in her chest.

Breathe slow, she told herself. Shooting is breathing.

(But she hadn’t been breathing slowly at the airport. She’d been gasping in fear.)

“Yo, whatchu sayin’?” Another voice. Black male. Something about it scared her. Something dangerous. “I can get money, I can. I can get a shitload a money. I got sixty, I tell you that? But I can get mo’. I can get as much’s you want. I ha’ me a good job. Fuckers took it away. I knew too much.”

The weapon is merely an extension of your arm. Aim yourself, not the weapon.

(But she hadn’t been aiming at all when she’d been at the airport. She’d been on her belly like a scared rabbit, shooting blind – the most pointless and dangerous of practices with a firearm.)

“You understand me? I changed my mind, okay? Let me… and just leave. I’ll give… demmies.”

“You ain’ tole me where we goin’. Where this place we gotta look through? You tell me that first. Where? Tell me!”

“You’re not going anywhere. I want you to go away.”

Sachs started up the stairs slowly.

Thinking: Draw your target, check your background, squeeze three. Return to cover. Draw, squeeze three more if you have to. Cover. Don’t get rattled.

(But she had been raided at the airport. That terrible bullet snapping past her face…)

Forget it. Concentrate.

Up a few more stairs.

“An’ now you sayin’ I don’t get ’em fo’ free, right? Now you sayin’ I gotta pay. You motherfuck!”

Stairs were the worst. Knees, her weak spot. Fucking arthritis…

“Here. Here’s a dozen demmies. Take ’em and go!”

“A dozen. And I ain’ gotta pay you?” He brayed a laugh. “A dozen?”

Approaching the top of the stairs.

She could almost peer into the station itself. She was ready to shoot. He moves any direction more than six inches, girl, take him out. Forget the rules. Three head shots. Pop, pop, pop. Forget the chest. Forget -

Suddenly the stairs vanished.

“Ugh.” A grunt from deep in her throat as she fell.

The step she’d placed her foot on was a trap. The riser had been removed and the step rested only on two shoe boxes. They collapsed under her weight and the concrete slab pitched downward, sending her backward down the stairs. The Glock flew from her hand and as she started to shout, “Ten-thirteen!” she realized that the cord linking her headset to her Motorola had been yanked out of the radio.

Sachs fell with a thud onto the concrete-and-steel landing. Her head slammed into a pole supporting the handrail. She rolled onto her stomach, stunned.

“Oh, great,” the white guy’s voice muttered from the top of the stairs.

“Who the fuck that?” the black voice asked.

She lifted her head and caught a glimpse of two men standing at the top of the stairs, gazing down at her.

“Shit,” the black man muttered. “Fuck. What the fuck goin’ on here?”

The white guy snagged a baseball bat and started down the stairs.

I’m dead, she thought. I’m dead.

The switchblade rested in her pocket. It took every ounce of energy to get her right arm out from underneath her. She rolled onto her back, fishing for the knife. But it was too late. He stepped on her arm, pinning it to the ground, and he gazed down at her.

Oh, man, Rhyme, blew it bad. Wish we’d had a better farewell night… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…

She lifted her hands defensively to deflect the blow to her head, glanced for her Glock. It was too far away.

With a tendony hand tough as a bird claw, the small man pulled the knife from her pocket. He tossed it away.

Then he stood and gripped the club.

Pop, she spoke to her deceased father, How bad d’I blow this one? How many rules d’I break? Recalling that he’d told her all it took to get killed on the street was a one-second lapse.

“Now, you’re gonna tell me what you’re doing here,” he muttered, swinging the club absently, as if he couldn’t decide what to break first. “Who the hell’re you?”

“Her name’s Mizz Amelia Sachs,” said the homeless guy, suddenly sounding a lot less homeless. He stepped off the bottom stair and moved up to the white guy quickly, pulling the bat away. “And unless I’m most mistaken, she’s come here to bust your little ass, my friend. Just like me.” Sachs squinted to see the homeless guy straighten up and turn into Fred Dellray. He was pointing a very large Sig-Sauer automatic pistol at the astonished man.

“You’re a cop?” he sputtered.

“FBI.”

“Shit!” he spat out, closing his eyes in disgust. “This is just my fucking luck.”

“Nup,” Dellray said. “Luck didn’t have a bitsy thing to do with it. Now, I’m gonna cuff you and you’re gonna let me. You don’t, you gonna hurt for months and months. We all together on that?”

“How’d you do it, Fred?”

“ ’Seasy,” the lanky FBI agent said to Sachs as they stood in front of the deserted subway station. He still was dressed homeless and was filthy with the mud he’d smeared on his face and hands to simulate weeks of living on the street. “Rhyme was tellin’ me ’bout the Dancer’s friend being a junkie and living downtown in the subways, knew just where I hadta come. Bought a bag of empties and talked to who I knew I oughta talk to. Just ’bout got di-rections t’his livin’ room.” He nodded toward the subway. They glanced at a squad car, where Jodie sat, cuffed and miserable, in the backseat.

“Why didn’t you tell us what you were doing?”

Dellray’s answer was a laugh and Sachs knew the question was pointless; undercover cops rarely told anyone – fellow cops included, and especially supervisors – what they were doing. Nick, her ex, had been undercover, too, and there’d been a hell of a lot he hadn’t told her.

She massaged her side where she’d fallen. It hurt like a son of a bitch, and the medics said she ought to have X rays. Sachs reached up and squeezed Dellray’s biceps. She felt uneasy receiving gratitude – she was truly Lincoln Rhyme’s protégée there – but she now had no problem saying, “You saved my life. My ass’d be capped now if it wasn’t for you. What can I say?”

Dellray shrugged, deflecting the thanks, and bummed a cigarette from one of the uniformed cops standing in front of the station. He sniffed the Marlboro and slipped it behind his ear. He looked toward a blacked-out window in the station. “Please,” he said to no one, sighing. “ ’Bout time we had some luck here.”

When they’d arrested Joe D’Oforio and flung him into the back of a car, he’d told them that the Dancer had left only ten minutes before, climbing down the stairs and vanishing along a spur line. Jodie – the mutt’s nickname – didn’t know which direction he’d gone, only that he’d disappeared suddenly with his gun and his backpack. Haumann and Dellray sent their troopers to scour the station, the tracks, and the nearby City Hall station. They were now waiting for the results of the sweep.

“Come on…”

Ten minutes later a SWAT officer pushed through the doorway. Sachs and Dellray both looked at him hopefully. But he shook his head. “Lost his prints a hundred feet down the tracks. Don’t have a clue where he went.”

Sachs sighed and reluctantly relayed the message to Rhyme and asked if she should do a search of the tracks and the nearby station.

He took the news as acerbically as she’d guessed he would. “Damnit,” the criminalist muttered. “No, just the station itself. Pointless to grid the rest. Shit, how does he do it? It’s like he’s got some kind of fucking second sight.”