Jeffery Deaver - The Coffin Dancer

Let’s see, Stephen Kall, if we can’t give you a little more to be afraid of.

“You helped us once, Jodie. I need you to help us again.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Dellray barked. “And listen t’what the man’s sayin’, hokay? Hokay?”

“I did what I said I would. I’m not doing anything more.” The whine really was too much. Rhyme glanced at Sellitto. This called for people skills.

“It’s in your interest,” Sellitto said reasonably, “to help us.”

“Gettin’ shot in the back’s in my interest? Gettin’ shot in the head’s in my interest? Uh-huh. I see. You wanna explain that?”

“Sure, I’ll fucking explain it,” Sellitto grumbled. “The Dancer knows you dimed him. He didn’t have to target you back there at the safe house, right? Am I right?”

Always get the mutts to talk. To participate. Sellitto had often explained the ways of interrogation to Lincoln Rhyme.

“Yeah. I guess.”

Sellitto motioned Jodie closer with a crooked finger. “It woulda been the smart thing for him just to take off. But he went to the trouble to take up a sniper position and try to cap your ass. Now, what’s that tell us?”

“I -”

“It tells us that he ain’t gonna rest till he clips you.”

Dellray, happy to play straight man for a change, said, “And he’s the sort I don’t think you wanna have knocking on yo’ door at three in the morning – this week, next month, or next year. We all together on that?”

“So,” Sellitto resumed snappily, “agreed that it’s in your interest to help us?”

“But you’ll give me, like, witness protection?”

Sellitto shrugged. “Yes and no.”

“Huh?”

“If you help us, yes. If you don’t, no.”

Jodie’s eyes were red and watery. He seemed so afraid. In the years since his accident Rhyme had been fearful for others – Amelia and Thom and Lon Sellitto. But he himself didn’t believe he’d ever been afraid to die, certainly not since the accident. He wondered what it must be like to live so timidly. A mouse’s life.

Too many ways to die…

Sellitto, slipping into his good-cop persona, offered a faint smile to Jodie. “You were there when he killed that agent, in the basement, right?”

“I was there, yeah.”

“That man could be alive now. And Brit Hale could be alive now. A lot of other people could too… if somebody’d helped us stop this asshole a coupla years ago. Well, you can help us stop him now. You can keep Percey alive, maybe dozens of others. You can do that.”

This was Sellitto’s genius at work. Rhyme would have bullied and coerced and, in a pinch, bribed the little man. But it never occurred to him to appeal to the splinter of decency that the detective, at least, could see within him.

Jodie absently riffled the pages in his book with a filthy thumb. Finally he looked up and – with surprising sobriety – said, “When I was taking him to my place, in the subway, a couple times I thought I’d maybe push him into a sewer interceptor pipe. The water goes real fast there. Wash him right down to the Hudson. Or I know where they have these piles of tie spikes in the subway. I could grab one and hit him over the head when he wasn’t looking. I really, really thought about doing that. But I got scared.” He held up the book. “ ‘Chapter Three. Confronting your Demons.’ I’ve always run, you know. I never stood up to anything. I thought maybe I could stand up to him, but I couldn’t.”

“Hey, now’s your chance to,” Sellitto said.

Flipping through the tattered pages again. Sighing. “Whatta l gotta do?”

Dellray pointed an alarmingly long thumb toward the ceiling. His mark of approval.

“We’ll get to that in a minute,” Rhyme said, looking around the room. Suddenly he shouted, “Thom! Thom! Come here. I need you.”

The handsome, exasperated face of the aide poked around the corner. “Yessss?”

“I’m feeling vain,” Rhyme announced dramatically.

“What?”

“I’m feeling vain. I need a mirror.”

“You want a mirror?”

“A big one. And would you please comb my hair. I keep asking you and you keep forgetting.”

The U.S. Medical and Healthcare van pulled onto the tarmac. If the two white-jacketed employees, carting a quarter million dollars’ worth of human organs, were concerned about the machine-gun-armed cops ringing the field, they gave no indication of it.

The only time they flinched was when King, the bomb squad German shepherd, sniffed the cargo cases for explosives.

“Uhm, I’d watch that dog there,” one of the deliverymen said uneasily. “I imagine to them liver’s liver and heart’s heart.”

But King behaved like a thorough professional and signed off on the cargo without sampling any. The men carried the containers on board, loaded them into the refrigeration units. Percey returned to the cockpit where Brad Torgeson, a sandy-haired young pilot who flew occasional freelance jobs for Hudson Air, was going through the pre-flight check.

They’d both already done the walkaround, accompanied by Bell, three troopers, and King. There was no way the Dancer could have gotten to the plane in the first place, but the killer now had a reputation of materializing out of thin air; this was the most meticulous pre-flight visual in the history of aviation.

Looking back into the passenger compartment, Percey could see the lights of the refrigeration units. She felt that tug of satisfaction she always felt when inanimate machinery, built and honed by humans, came to life. The proof of God, for Percey Clay, could be found in the hum of servomotors and the buoyancy of a sleek metal wing at that instant when the airfoil creates negative top pressure and you become weightless.

Continuing with the pre-flight checklist, Percey was startled by the sound of heavy breathing next to her.

“Whoa,” Brad said as King decided there were no explosives in his crotch and continued his examination of the inside of the plane.

Rhyme had spoken to Percey not long ago and told her that he and Amelia Sachs had examined the gaskets and tubing and found no match for the latex discovered at the crash site in Chicago. Rhyme got the idea that he might have used the rubber to seal the explosives so that the dogs couldn’t smell it. So he had Percey and Brad stand down for a few minutes while Tech Services went through the entire plane, inside and out, with hypersensitive microphones, listening for a detonator timer.

Clean.

When the plane rolled out, the taxiway would be guarded by uniformed patrolmen. Fred Dellray had contacted the FAA to arrange that the flight plan be sealed, so that the Dancer couldn’t learn where the plane was going – if he even knew that Percey was at the helm. The agent had also contacted the FBI field offices in each of the arrival cities and arranged for tactical agents to be on the tarmac when the shipments were delivered.

Now, engines started, Brad in the right-hand seat and Roland Bell shifting uneasily in one of the two remaining passenger seats, Percey Clay spoke to the tower, “Lear Six Miner Five Foxtrot Bravo at Hudson Air. Ready for taxi.”

“Roger, Niner Five Foxtrot Bravo. Cleared onto taxiway zero nine right.”

“Zero nine right, Niner Five Foxtrot Bravo. ”

A touch to the smooth throttles and the spritely plane turned onto the taxiway and proceeded through the gray, early spring evening. Percey was driving. Copilots have flight authority but only the pilot can steer the plane on the ground.

“You having fun, Officer?” she called back to Bell.

“I’m just tickled,” he said, looking sourly out the large round window. “You know, you can see straight down. I mean, the windows go so far round. Why’d they make it that way?”