Jeffery Deaver - The Kill Room

He walked up to the door, reaching into his backpack and withdrawing a six-inch length of capped pipe, filled with lead shot. He wrapped his right hand around this, making a fist. The point of the pipe was to give support to the inside of the fingers so that if he happened to connect with bone or some other solid portion of his victim when he swung, the metacarpals wouldn’t snap. He’d learned this the hard way—by missing a blow to the throat and striking a man on the cheek, which had cracked his little finger. He’d regained control of the situation but the pain in his right hand was excruciating. He’d found it was very difficult to flay skin with the knife in one’s non-dominant hand.

Swann took a blank, sealed envelope from his bag too.

A glance around. Nobody on the street. He rang the bell with his knuckle, put a cheerful smile on his face.

No response. Was he asleep?

He lifted a paper napkin from his pocket and tried the knob. Locked. This was always the case in New York. Not so in the suburbs of Cleveland or Denver—where he’d killed an information broker last month. All the doors in Highlands Ranch were unlocked, windows too. The man hadn’t even locked his BMW.

Swann was about to walk around behind the house and look for a window he might break through.

But then he heard a thud, a click.

He rang the bell again, just to let Mr. Nikolov know that his presence was still requested. This is what any normal visitor would have done.

A grain of suspicion…

A voice, muffled by the thickness of the door. Not impatient. Just tired.

The door opened and Swann was surprised—and pleased—to see that Robert Moreno’s preferred driver was only about five feet, six inches and couldn’t have weighed more than 160 pounds, 25 fewer than Swann himself.

“Yes?” he asked in a thick Slavic accent, looking at Swann’s left hand, the white envelope. The right was not visible.

“Mr. Nikolov?”

“That’s right.” He was wearing brown pajamas and was in house slippers.

“I’ve got a TLC refund for you. You gotta sign for it.”

“What?”

“Taxi Limousine Commission, the refund.”

“Yeah, yeah, TLC. What refund?”

“They overcharged fees.”

“You with them?”

“No, I’m the contracting agent. I just deliver the checks.”

“Well, they pricks. I don’t know about refund but they pricks, what they charge. Wait, how do I know they not ripping me off? I sign, I sign away my rights? Maybe I should get a lawyer.”

Swann lifted the envelope. “You can read this. Everybody’s taking the checks but it says you don’t have to, you can talk to an arbitrator. I don’t care. I deliver checks. You don’t want it, don’t take it.”

Nikolov unlatched the screen door. “Lemme have it.”

Swann appreciated that he had no sense of humor but he couldn’t help but be struck by the man’s unfortunate choice of words.

When the door opened, Swann stepped forward fast and drove his right fist, holding the pipe, into the man’s solar plexus, aiming not for the ugly brown cloth of the PJs but for a spot about two inches beyond—inside the man’s gut. Which is where blows should always be aimed, never the surface, to deliver the greatest impact.

Nikolov gasped, retched and went down fast.

In an instant Swann stepped past him, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him well inside before the vomiting started. Swann kicked him once, also in the belly, hard, and then looked out a lacy window.

A quiet street, a pleasant street. Not a dog walker, not a passerby. Not a single car.

He pulled on latex gloves, flicked the lock, slipped the pipe away.

“Hellooooo? Helloooo?” Swann called.

Nothing. They were alone.

Gripping the driver by the collar again, he pulled the man along the recently waxed floor, then deposited him in a den, out of view of the windows.

Swann looked down at the gasping man, wincing from the pain.

The beef tenderloin, the psoas major muscle tucked against the short loin and sirloin, lives up to its name—you need only a fork to cut it when prepared right. But the elongated trapezoid of meat, known for Wellington and tournedos , starts in a much less agreeable state and takes some prep time. Most of this is knife work. You have to remove any tougher side muscle, of course, but most challenging is the silverskin, a thin layer of connective tissue that encases much of the cut.

The trick is to remove the membrane completely but leave as much flesh intact as you can. Doing this involves moving the knife in a sawing motion, while keeping the blade at a precise angle. You need to practice a great deal to get this right.

Jacob Swann was thinking of the technique now as he withdrew the Kai Shun from its waxed wooden sheath and crouched down.

CHAPTER 16

EN ROUTE TO THE HOUSE of Robert Moreno’s limo driver, Amelia Sachs enjoyed being out from under the Overseer’s thumb.

Okay, she thought, not fair.

Nance Laurel was seemingly a good prosecutor. From what Dellray said, from the woman’s preparation for the case.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like her.

Find out what church Moreno went to, Amelia, and how much he donated to good causes and how many old ladies he helped across the street.

If you would…

I don’t think so.

Sachs was at least moving. And moving fast. She was driving her maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane. The car delivered 405 sleek horsepower and boasted 447 foot-pounds of torque. Sachs had the optional four-speed transmission, of course. The Hurst shifter was hard and temperamental but for Sachs this was the only way to run through the gears—for her a more sensuous part of the car than the engine. The only incongruous aspect of the vehicle—aside from its anachronistic appearance on the streets of modern-day New York—was the Chevrolet Camaro SS horn button, a memorial from her first and favorite muscle car, which had been the victim of a run-in with a perp a few years ago.

She now piloted the Cobra over the 59th Street Bridge—the Queensboro. Her father had told her that Paul Simon had written a song about the bridge. She’d meant to look it up on iTunes after he’d told her that. Meant to look it up after he died. Meant to look it up every year or so since.

She never had.

A pop song about a bridge. Interesting. Sachs reminded herself to look it up.

Eastbound traffic was good. The speed nudged a bit higher and she slammed down the clutch and popped the Cobra’s gearbox into third.

Pain. And she winced.

Goddamn it. Her knee again. If it wasn’t the knee it was the hip.

Goddamn.

The arthritis had plagued her all her adult life. Not rheumatoid—that insidious immune system disorder that works its evil in all your joints. Hers was the more common osteo, whose genesis might have been genes or the consequences of a motorcycle race at age twenty-two—or, more precisely, a spectacular landing after the Benelli decided to launch itself off the dirt track only a quarter mile from the finish line. But whatever the cause, oh, how the condition tortured her. She’d learned that aspirin and ibuprofen worked some. She’d learned that chondroitin and glucosamine didn’t—at least not for her. Sorry, shark bone lovers. She’d had hyaluronan injections, but they’d sidelined her for several days from inflammation and pain. And, of course, rooster combs could only be a temporary fix. She learned to swallow pills dry and never touch anything that had a Refill Only 3 Times label on it.

But the most important thing she’d learned was to smile and pretend the pain wasn’t there and that her joints were those of a healthy twenty-year-old.