Robin Cook - Blindsight

Angelo took the Ninety-seventh Street transverse across Central Park and got on the Henry Hudson Parkway.

For a while they didn’t talk. Each was recovering from the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum: Angelo from fear and anxiety and Tony from pure exhilaration. Neither noticed the black Cadillac in the distance.

“It will be up here on the left,” Angelo said once they turned onto Bleecker Street. He pointed to a three-story town house with a lion’s head knocker on the front door. Tony nodded as they drove past.

Angelo felt his pulse start quickening. “It’s the man this time,” he said. “Same plan as before. You do him, I’ll cover the wife.”

“Got it,” Tony said, thrilled to have yet another turn.

This time Angelo parked farther away than usual. They walked back in silence except for the occasional clank of tools in Angelo’s flight bag. They passed a few pedestrians.

The streets weren’t empty as they had been uptown; the Village was always livelier than the Upper East Side.

The alarm at the targeted house was child’s play for Angelo. Within minutes he and Tony were tiptoeing up the creaking stairs.

Conveniently, there was a small night-light plugged into a socket in the upstairs hall. The rosy glow it cast was just enough to see by.

The first door Angelo tried proved to be an empty guest room. Since there was only one other door on the floor, he assumed it was to the master suite.

Once again the two men positioned themselves on either side of the door, holding their guns alongside their heads. Angelo turned the knob and briskly pushed open the door.

Angelo managed one step into the room when a snarling dog sprang at him in the half-light. The beast’s paws hit him in the chest, knocking him back through the door to the opposite wall of the hall. The dog snapped at him, biting through his jacket, shirt, and even a bit of his skin. Angelo wasn’t sure, but he thought it was a Doberman. It was too long and lean for a pit bull, although it certainly had the temperament. Whatever it was, it had Angelo terrorized and effectively pinned.

Tony moved quickly. He stepped to the side and shot the dog from point-blank range in the chest. He was sure he’d hit his mark, but the dog didn’t flinch. With a snarl he ripped another large patch of cloth out of Angelo’s jacket and spit it out. Then he lunged for another bite.

Tony waited until he had a clear shot before pulling the trigger again. This time he hit the dog in the head, and the animal went instantly limp, hitting the floor with a solid thud.

A woman’s scream sent new chills down Angelo’s spine. The woman of the house had awakened just in time to see her dog slaughtered. She was standing a few feet from the foot of her bed, her face contorted in horror.

Tony raised his gun, and again there was a hissing thump. The woman’s scream was cut short. Her hand went to her chest. Pulling her hand away, she looked at the spot of blood. Her facial expression was one of bewilderment, as if she could not believe she’d been shot.

Tony stepped over the threshold into the bedroom. Raising his gun again, he shot her at point-blank range in the center of her forehead. Like the dog, she collapsed instantly in a heap on the floor.

Angelo started to speak, but before he could say anything, there was a frightful yell from the first floor as the husband charged up the stairs with a double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun. He held the gun in both hands at waist height.

Sensing what was about to happen, Angelo threw himself onto the floor just as the shotgun discharged with a powerful concussion. In the confined area the sound was horrendous, making Angelo’s ears ring. The concentrated buckshot blew a hole twelve inches in diameter in the wall where Angelo had been standing.

Even Tony had to react by reflex, throwing himself to the side to avoid the open bedroom doorway. The second blast of the shotgun traveled the length of the bedroom and blew out one of the rear windows.

From his position on the floor, Angelo fired his Walther twice in rapid succession, hitting the husband in the chest and the chin. The force of the bullets stopped the man’s forward momentum. Then, in a kind of slow motion he tipped backward. With a terrible racket he fell down the stairs and ended up on the floor below.

Tony reappeared from the bedroom and ran down the stairs to put an additional bullet into the fallen man’s head. Angelo picked himself and his flight bag off the floor. He was shaking. He’d never come so close to death. Rushing down the stairs on shaky legs, he told Tony that they had to get the hell out of there.

When they got to the front door, Angelo stood on his tiptoes to look out. What he saw he didn’t like. There was a handful of people gathered in front of the building, gazing up at its facade. No doubt they’d heard glass smash when the bedroom window was blown out. Maybe they’d heard both shotgun blasts.

“Out the back!” Angelo said. He knew they couldn’t risk a confrontation with this crowd. They easily scaled the chain-link fence in the backyard. There wasn’t even any barbed wire at the top to worry about. Once they made it over, they went through a neighboring backyard and through to another street. Angelo was glad he’d parked as far away as he had. They made it to his car without incident. Sirens started in the distance just as they were pulling away.

“What the hell kind of dog was that?” Tony asked as they cruised up Sixth Avenue.

“I think it was a Doberman,” Angelo said. “It scared the life out of me.”

“You and me both,” Tony agreed. “And that shotgun. That was close.”

“Too close. We should have called it quits after the first job.” Angelo shook his head in disgust. “Maybe I’m getting too old for this stuff.”

“No way,” Tony said. “You’re the best.”

“I used to think so,” Angelo said. He glanced down at his tattered Brioni jacket in despair. By force of habit he glanced in the rearview mirror, but nothing he saw worried him. Of course, he was looking for cop cars, not Franco Ponti’s sedan, which was pursuing them at a discreet distance.

6:45 a.m., Friday

Manhattan

Ordinarily Laurie would be pleased to have slept through the night. Although no one from the medical examiner’s office had called her to report any more upscale overdose cases for her series, she wondered if that meant there had been no such overdoses or, as her intuition suggested, there had been and she had simply not been called. She dressed as quickly as she could and didn’t even bother with coffee, so eager was she to get to work and find out.

The moment she stepped inside the medical examiner’s office, she could tell that something out of the ordinary had happened. Once again there was a group of reporters huddled in the reception area. Laurie felt the knot in her stomach tighten as she wondered what their restless presence could mean.

Going directly to the ID office, she helped herself to a cup of coffee before doing anything else. Vinnie, as usual, had his nose in the sports page. Apparently none of the other associate medical examiners had yet arrived. Laurie picked up the sheet at the scheduling desk to check the cases to be posted that day.

As her eyes ran down the list, she saw four drug overdoses. Two were scheduled for Riva and two were scheduled for George Fontworth, a fellow who’d been with the office for four years. Laurie flipped through the folders intended for Riva and glanced at the investigator’s report sheet. Judging by the Harlem addresses, Laurie figured they were the common crack-house deaths. Relieved, Laurie put the folder down. Then she picked up the two for George. Reading the first investigator’s report, her pulse quickened. The deceased was Wendell Morrison, aged thirty-six, a medical doctor!