Omega Dog (3 page)

He found the book. It had been published in 2001, was already out of print, and the library had just one copy. Reference only.

‘You’re in luck, sir,’ he smiled. ‘If you’d care to take a seat, I’ll go get it.’

The Brit stroked his chin, furrowed his brow. Very professorial. ‘If you don’t mind, young man, I’d like to come with you. There’s only one small detail I’d like to check in the index of the book, so I don’t need to peruse the entire volume. I can do it then and there, at the shelves.’

Secretly amused at the guy’s stilted language –
peruse the entire volume
? – Aaron said, ‘Sure, no problem.’

Nodding at the guy to follow him, Aaron made his way toward the stacks.

The scattering of students at the tables were a mixture of bored clock-watchers waiting till closing time so they could kid themselves they’d put in extra hours studying, and frantic, caffeine-fueled crammers desperate to complete term papers after beginning them way too late. Aaron had been both types of student, at different times, when he’d been an undergraduate here.

Now he was postgrad, doing a little tutoring here and there, mostly working as a librarian to make ends meet, writing his opus, his Great American Novel, in the evenings and at weekends in the cramped room he rented off campus. He told himself  his day job in the library was purely to make ends meet, but that wasn’t entirely true. He’d fallen in love with the Nicholas Murray Butler Library from the moment he’d laid eyes on its neo-Classical front. At times he’d walk through the echoing halls and imagine himself working here into his old age, becoming a part of the history of the place.

But that wasn’t going to happen, of course. Because Aaron was going to become the next Saul Bellow. The next Philip Roth.

He just needed to get that damned novel finished, first.

The book the guy wanted was located among a bunch of other equally obscure tomes on a distant shelf. Aaron negotiated the rows of aisles expertly, found the one he wanted and took the guy down it. Climbing on a small stepladder, Aaron found the book, lifted it down carefully as if its pages would crumble to dust, even though it was little more than a decade old, and stepped down off the ladder.

‘Here you go, sir,’ he said.

Things happened so fast after that, Aaron didn’t have time to register the guy moving behind him and sliding his forearm across Aaron’s throat.

Or the palm the guy placed against the side of Aaron’s head.

Or the sharp twist the guy gave to Aaron’s neck, breaking it, severing the spinal cord expertly.

Aaron was dead before the man had lowered him to the floor, so he didn’t see the man pick up the book he’d taken down.

And gaze at the cover, running his fingers across it with a small smile.

And climb up on the ladder, replacing the book neatly in the gap it had left on the shelf.

And walk away, in his elegant shoes.

––––––––

M
arcus Royle wasn’t born a killer. Nor had circumstances turned him into one. He had no time for the idea that people became murderers because their parents had been mean to them. Or because they’d had no friends at school. Or because their pet dog had died when they were ten. That was so much whiny, self-pitying garbage as far as Royle was concerned.

No. Royle had
chosen
to be an assassin.

It was a good life. A lucrative one, that bought Royle the time and the freedom to do what he enjoyed most, and that was study and write about philosophy. Not for him the miserable existence of tenure at an academic institution, where the pay was mediocre at best and pleasure in one’s vocation was ground under by the daily need to attract research grants and churn out paper after paper.

Royle was good at killing. He’d been doing it for thirteen years, and now, at the age of forty-two, he’d accumulated a considerable amount of expertise. Along the way, he’d taken a scholar’s delight in learning the minutiae of his trade. The different poisons and how they worked. The mechanisms of assorted firearms. The points at which the human anatomy is most vulnerable.

To be sure, there were challenges to be overcome in the mastery of the assassin’s craft. Royle had found his conscience a bothersome problem in the beginning. With each killing, he’d had to take a metaphorical blowtorch and cauterize the tender nerve endings of his moral squeamishness, until he could kill without feeling anything for his targets.

Despatching the boy, Aaron Rosenberg, had been just about the most straightforward job Royle had ever carried out. He knew the kid worked at Butler Library, and so rather than bother with the mildly laborious task of waiting for him at home or following him to a secluded spot outdoors somewhere, Royle decided to do it in the library itself. Not least because Royle’s own book,
The Epistemology of Conflict
, was there, and Royle knew exactly which shelf it was kept on, and just how secluded an aisle that was.

Would the police buy the idea that the Rosenberg boy had fallen off the library stepladder and broken his neck? Perhaps. Probably not. It didn’t matter. There was no way his death could be linked to Royle in any way. Or to his employer.

After he’d put some distance between himself and Morningside Heights, the site of the Columbia University campus, Royle slowed his stride, enjoying the warmth of the balmy May twilight. He took out his cell phone and dialed a number from memory.

‘Yeah.’ Rosetti’s voice was curt, roughened by decades of nicotine abuse. Royle pictured her, fumbling for her smokes as she always did the moment she started talking on the phone. Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember ever seeing her without a lit cigarette clamped in her mouth or smoldering between her orange fingers. She was sixty, squat, and hairy as a yak.

Royle didn’t bother to identify himself. It was an encrypted line, to which he had exclusive access. ‘Terminated,’ he said.

‘Good,’ rasped Rosetti.

‘The last payment was six hours late,’ said Royle. ‘Please do try to cough up on time in future.’

As if the word
cough
was a trigger, Rosetti erupted into a fit of hacking that exploded from the phone. Royle held it away from his ear, grimacing.

‘You’ll get the god damn money when you get it, Royle,’ she snarled, when she’d regained her breath. ‘You Limeys. Always complaining.’

‘On the contrary,’ Royle pointed out. ‘It’s you Americans who are famous for demanding good customer service.’

‘Whatever.’ She wheezed, and Royle thought he heard the puff of an inhaler. ‘Listen. I’ve got another job for you, if you’re interested.’

Like most assassins, Royle was freelance. His reputation was spread strictly through word-of-mouth. DeeDee Rosetti had approached him via a cut-out, a week earlier. Royle had been in Bangkok at the time, finishing off a job on a heroin dealer and his extended family, but had insisted on flying to New York and meeting Rosetti in person before he agreed to take on the work. He always wanted to be sure he wasn’t being lured into a sting operation by some law enforcement agency, and he could always tell by looking into a prospective employer’s eyes if he was being set up.

Rosetti’s eyes were like undercooked poached eggs swimming in a seamed, haggard face. They were the eyes of a jaded, shifty character, a profoundly untrustworthy soul.

But they weren’t the eyes of a cop.

Royle had met her in an abandoned warehouse on the west side, in the Meatpacking District. Rosetti’s gross body was crammed into an electric wheelchair that looked too small for her. Flanking her were a quartet of goons straight out of Central Casting, wearing shiny suits, mirror shades and immobile faces. They probably had twelve guns between them, and the same number of brain cells.

They’d negotiated terms, swiftly and efficiently, and then Rosetti had given him two names. The first target was a thirty-five-year old insurance salesman from Queens. Royle despatched him the next day, under the wheels of a subway train at Metropolitan Avenue.

The second target was Aaron Rosenberg. The kid in the library.

Royle didn’t ask who these individuals were, or why they needed to be killed. It was none of his business. It would be like working at the till in a sex shop and asking a customer why exactly he was buying a gimp outfit. You supplied the product, and took the money. No questions asked.

Now, standing in the last of the evening light on the Upper West Side, Royle said in reply to Rosetti’s query: ‘Yes. I’m interested.’

Rosetti listed the target’s details, then said, ‘Sending you a photo.’ A few seconds later a text message arrived on Royle’s phone, with a picture attached. He looked at it.

A pretty girl. Late twenties, maybe, with auburn hair and blue eyes in an earnest face.

‘Consider it done,’ he said to Rosetti, and killed the call.

Royle found a Vietnamese restaurant off Broadway and ordered supper. While he forked delectable salt-and-pepper squid into his mouth, he looked at the photo of his next victim again.

He wasn’t often hired to kill women. Not that he had any qualms about doing so. It was just that most of his hits seemed to be business related, involving the elimination of a competitor, and there were more men in business than women.

The victim’s home address was within walking distance of the restaurant Royle was sitting in right now. Royle decided to stretch his meal out to four courses, then do the hit afterwards. Three easy hits in one week. After he completed tonight’s one, he’d take a holiday. Florence, perhaps. Or Madrid. Or Rio de Janeiro. Somewhere he could relax, and soak up the culture, and read philosophy to his heart’s content.

Life was good.

––––––––

I
t was days like this that made Beth wonder why she’d ever gone into medicine.

Thirty hours into her shift, even the legendary autopilot every doctor discovers when they’re forced to keep going for prolonged periods without sleep was starting to fail her. Her eyes felt as if somebody had coated the insides of the lids with rock salt, her hair felt too heavy for her head and threatened constantly to bow it down, and her limbs felt draped with medieval chains.

A nurse scuttled up to Beth and thrust a chart under her nose, saying something that as far as Beth was concerned might as well have come through several fathoms of ocean. Beth scribbled on the chart, not one hundred per cent sure what she was signing for but trusting the nurse all the same.

Two more hours. One hundred twenty minutes. Then she could spill out the door and wade home, to her beautiful soft bed and blissful sleep.

Yes,
sleep
. At least twelve hours of it.

Oh, God. The thought of it was almost too much for Beth to bear. And it was still more than two hours away...

She glanced around the ER, saw nobody clamoring for her attention, and made her way to the staff mess. Nodding to the handful of interns and nurses lounging on the couches, Beth poured herself a paper cup of coffee from the pot on the hotplate. The coffee was the consistency of tar and didn’t taste much better. Beth thought she could feel it stripping the enamel from her teeth.

Still, caffeine was caffeine.

Beth Colby was a third-year resident physician in internal medicine, with a particular interest in neurology. Like all doctors at her stage in their careers, she was obliged to work a regular on-call shift at the hospital where she was based. Being on call meant she was the senior doctor responsible for the medical inpatient wards, as well as being available to take referrals from the ER.

Which was where she’d spent the majority of her shift.

During the course of the last day and a half, Beth had been vomited on, bled on, and peed on. She’d had a patient with TB cough ropes of phlegm into her face, had a delirious patient leap off the table just as Beth was performing a delicate pleural biopsy, and had to help cut the stinking boots off a drunk vagrant with diabetic neuropathy in his feet. She’d been sworn at, threatened with death, been slapped in the face and had her hair pulled.

And she’d had to tell a numbed young wife that her thirty-year-old husband hadn’t survived his cardiac arrest, a middle-aged man that his HIV test was positive, and a dying elderly grandmother that her family weren’t, after all, going to be able to make it to the hospital until next week. By which time it would be too late.

On the other hand, Beth reflected, she’d also diagnosed a pulmonary embolism with atypical symptoms that would have killed the patient if it had been left for an hour longer. She’d seen somebody who was choking with edema from heart failure improve dramatically over twenty-four hours, thanks to her. And her quick action had stopped an anaphylactic reaction to penicillin from becoming fatal.

So there were rewards. Big ones.

It was just sometimes hard to keep your mind on them, in among all the chaos and the trauma and the disappointments.

As luck would have it, an urgent case of septicemia came up to the ward fifteen minutes before the end of Beth’s shift. Resigned to leaving late – it wasn’t, after all, as if this hadn’t happened before – Beth pushed up her sleeves and set to work. But seconds later Rick bustled in, all boyish enthusiasm.

‘Beth, I hate to say it, but you look as old as my grandma.’

She swatted his arm, but her heart wasn’t in it. Besides, he was probably right.

‘What we got?’ Rick asked.

Rick was a fellow resident, slated to start his shift after hers. He was early, as usual. Beth began to summarize the case but Rick cut her off by holding up his hand.

‘Whoah. Back up a little. You just said the same thing, twice.’

‘Did I?’ Beth was confused.

‘Yeah. You need some sleep. Get outta here. I’m on it.’

Beth swept a hand through her hair, overcome with gratitude. ‘Rick, thanks a bunch. I owe you.’

‘Damn right.’ He grinned, waved her away, and set to work on the patient.

Beth stumbled to the locker room, shucked off her white coat, property of the hospital, and fired it at the laundry basket. Then she remembered her stethoscope, cell phone and pager were in the pockets, dragged the coat out again and retrieved the items. She got her purse and jacket from the locker, glanced at herself in the mirror inside the door – God, she looked a fright, with bags under her eyes like suitcases – and took off.