Trust Your Eyes (47 page)

“Shut up!” Howard said. “Morris, we’re leaving right—”

From behind, Howard grabbed him by the arms and tried to steer him out of the room, but Morris shook free.

“What murder?” he asked again.

The one named Ray said, “We don’t know, but it might be someone named Bridget.”

SIXTY-THREE

THE
moment I uttered the words, it was like the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room. Something palpable happened to Howard, Lewis, and Nicole at that moment. Their breath was taken away and they didn’t know what to do about it.

And this man they were calling Morris, it was like he’d been hit by lightning. He seemed frozen and electrified simultaneously. Stunned by what I’d said, too shocked to react in any way but to look stupefied. And yet, I could see that wheels were turning. There was something about his eyes, like they were moving around at a hundred miles an hour, processing this latest bit of information.

In that instant, it was as though everything had changed. Some kind of balance had shifted. We were now in a very different situation from the one of five minutes earlier. Whether it meant things were better for Thomas and me, I didn’t know, although I hadn’t thought our situation could get any worse.

And about Morris. The moment he’d walked into the room, I recognized him.

I couldn’t place him at first, maybe because I wasn’t seeing him in the proper context. If I’d been watching the news, I’d have known instantly. But seeing him here, in the back of this toy store, with three very bad people, I couldn’t figure out who he was. It was like when, every morning, the same person hands you your coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and then you see that person at the mall. You know you know them, but can’t figure out from where.

So it took a minute or so before I realized this man was the attorney general for the State of New York.

Morris Sawchuck.

I’d read about him. I’d seen him on the news. In fact, hadn’t there been a lot going on with him a few months back…

In the midst of everything that was happening in that room, my mind was racing. Why had he been on the news so much? Why had I seen his picture so often? And in all those pictures, wasn’t he usually shown with a beautiful—

Oh fuck.

I didn’t actually put it together until after I’d said what I’d said.

About Bridget.

Now I remembered the stories. The sudden, unexplained death of Bridget Sawchuck, the wife of New York’s attorney general. You had to read between the lines to guess what had happened. She’d killed herself.

Except Lewis had said this shop was owned by someone who’d helped him move Bridget’s body.

Oh God, Thomas, what did you get us into?

The silence that followed my comment felt as though it lasted minutes, if not hours, but in reality it was probably no more than four or five seconds.

Morris was the first to speak. And he spoke to me.

“What did you say?”

“The person who got killed. It might have been Bridget.” Now I realized the significance of what I was saying. I was talking about this man’s wife. What I didn’t know yet was whether Morris Sawchuck looked shocked because he didn’t know, or because I did. For all I knew, the man had had his wife killed.

All that was about to become clear. Or clearer.

Morris said to Howard, so calmly that it was frightening, “What’s he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Howard said, rattling the words off too quickly. “He’s some kind of crazy person, him and his brother. They’re a couple of nutcases, going around spreading stories that could damage you. That’s what they’re doing.”

“No,” I said. “My brother found out what they did. They brought us here to kill us and—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Lewis said.

“No, let him talk,” Morris said. “I want to hear what this nutcase has to say.”

“Thomas was surfing the Net,” I said. “Whirl360. He saw someone being murdered in the window of an apartment on Orchard Street. I think it was your wife. Bridget, right?”

He nodded slowly. His face was becoming flushed.

“Really, you shouldn’t listen to—”

“Howard,” Lewis interrupted. “Enough.”

“What? Lewis, let me—”

“No, we have to bring him into it,” Lewis said. “He’s either on board, or we’ll have to kill him, too.”

“What?” Morris said, turning on Lewis. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m a survivor,” he said. “So’s Howard, and so are you. There’s only one way everyone survives this, and that’s to get on board.”

“What happened to Bridget?” Morris demanded. “I want the truth.”

The room went quiet for another few seconds. It was Howard who spoke first. “It was an accident. A horrible mistake.”

“Dear God,” Morris said. “You didn’t.”

Howard continued. “There was a woman, Allison Fitch. She was blackmailing Bridget. She was trying to damage her, to ruin you. We—I was afraid there were things she knew that could hurt you very badly.”

“Howard.”

“Politically fatal, Morris. I was going to pay her at first, I was, but it became clear that wasn’t going to solve our problem. Lewis and I talked and we decided we had to deal with the Fitch woman more…permanently.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Morris couldn’t take his eyes off Howard.

“But when it came time to do it, to take care of the problem, something no one could have foreseen came up. She wasn’t there. Fitch wasn’t in the apartment.” He paused, swallowed. “But Bridget was. She was mistaken for Fitch.”

“But…but we found her. In her old apartment,” Morris said. “You and I, we found her there.”

“She…was moved.”

“But you talked to her!” Morris said. “You spoke to her on the phone! She told you I was sucking the life out of her! She was going to kill herself!”

Howard had to look away. “I…it was faked. There was no call. I made that up.”

Morris grabbed Howard by the lapels and threw him up against the shelves, knocking that Esso tanker truck and a Batmobile to the floor with a loud clatter. “You son of a bitch!” he shouted, shaking the man. He let go of a lapel, made a fist, and drove it straight into Howard’s face. Howard yelped and fell to the floor. Morris pounced on him and was about to punch him again when Lewis locked arms around him and dragged him off.

“Stop!” Lewis said. “You can sort this out later, but right now we have to figure out what to do.”

“I’m gonna kill you,” Morris said, still in Lewis’s grasp, staring down at Howard. “You bastard! You son of a bitch!”

“It wasn’t my mistake!” Howard said. “It wasn’t my fault!” He pointed across the room. “It was hers!”

Now all eyes were on Nicole.

Morris said, “You?”

“Like they said, it was a mistake,” she said coolly.

“You killed Bridget?”

“They told me Fitch would be there. And someone
was
there. But it wasn’t Fitch.” Nicole shrugged. “Sorry.”

Morris said, “Excuse me?”

“I said, sorry. Not much else I can say at this point, really.”

Morris, aghast, looked at Howard, then Lewis.

Lewis said, “She’s kind of right.” Noticing that Morris was speechless with rage, he continued, “Howard, I think there’s a good-faith gesture we can make with Morris as a way of moving forward.”

“What are you talking about?” Howard said.

“We can’t bring Bridget back, but we can help make things right,” Lewis said, reaching into his jacket and taking out his gun.

He spun around, pointed it at Nicole, and pulled the trigger. I was expecting a louder bang, but the gun was equipped with one of those silencer things on the end of the barrel.

What made noise was Nicole being thrown up against the shelves, the back of her head banging into them, then dropping facedown onto the floor. Two shelves gave way and an avalanche of toys crashed to the floor. A Super Ball bounced in tall arcs across the room.

“I was going to get around to it sooner or later, anyway,” Lewis said.

SIXTY-FOUR

THE
room was as still now as it had been when I’d first mentioned Bridget. Morris Sawchuck looked disbelievingly at Lewis, at Nicole on the floor.

“What in God’s name have you done?” he asked him.

“What I always do,” Lewis said. “Take care of problems for you and Howard.”

Suddenly, Morris reached into his jacket and now there was a gun in his hand, too. I guessed, when you were the attorney general, you packed heat. Lewis seemed to know instinctively what Morris was going for, so by the time Morris had his weapon pointed at Lewis’s head, Lewis had his pointed right back at Morris’s.

They stood there, frozen, guns pointed at each other.

“Let’s all try to calm down,” Howard said.

Morris, not taking his eyes off Lewis, said, “No one kills for me. No one does this kind of thing on my behalf.”

“It’s already been done,” Howard said softly, standing behind
Morris. “This isn’t going to get better if you shoot Lewis. We need him.”

“Jesus, Howard, just shut up.”

Lewis had his arms locked, his finger on the trigger, the gun still pointed straight at Morris’s head. His stance, his posture, suggested he was more used to doing this than Morris, but the attorney general looked equally committed, ready to shoot if he had to.

“No,” Howard said. “You have to listen. Things have already been done on your behalf. Bad things.
Ugly
things. Things that, if they come out, you’ll never be able to distance yourself from, never be able to convince people you didn’t order yourself. Morris,
listen
to me. They’ll put you away forever. Not just me, not just Lewis, but all of us. You may not be able to see it, but there’s blood on your hands.”

Morris and Lewis kept their guns trained on each other.

Howard continued, “It gets worse. The whole world will believe you killed Bridget. They’re going to think you had her killed, Morris. I know you want to do the right thing here, but we’re too far past that. And things will come out about her. About Bridget. Although…” His voice trailed off. “They hardly matter now.”

Morris was breathing through his nose. In and out, in and out, his nostrils flaring with each agitated breath. Then, as suddenly as he’d raised his weapon, he lowered it and looked down at the floor, an admission of defeat. He tucked the gun back into his jacket.

Lewis slowly put his arm down, but kept the gun firmly gripped in his hand.

Even though Morris shooting Lewis might have been in my interest, I breathed a sigh of relief along with everyone else. I looked over at Thomas, expecting him to be a nervous wreck, but he had his eyes closed. I was guessing he’d had them closed through most of this.

“Thomas,” I said. “You can open your eyes.”

He did, looked briefly at Nicole’s body, then at me. He said nothing, but his eyes were pleading. They were asking me to get us out of here. My eyes didn’t have a reassuring answer.

Morris was shaking his head. Lewis and Howard watched him warily, unsure of what he’d do next.

Morris turned, brushed past Howard, threw back the curtain, and started walking toward the front door.

“Morris?” Howard said.

“What the hell’s he going to do?” Lewis said. “Goddamn it.”

Howard went after him. I could see that Lewis wanted to, as well. He gave Thomas and me a quick look, figured we weren’t going anywhere, and followed the two other men.

I heard the door open, but it closed almost immediately, suggesting to me that Morris had tried to leave but one of the other men had slammed the door shut before he could. The three of them began arguing, talking at once. I didn’t know what they were saying, and right now, I didn’t care.

I figured if Thomas and I were ever going to have a chance, this was it.

I leaned forward in the chair so that my feet were planted firmly on the wood floor. They hadn’t taped my legs to the chair so I actually had limited mobility.

“What are you doing?” Thomas asked.

“Shh,” I said.

I waddled myself backward, with the chair attached, so that I was back to back with Thomas. I set the chair down gently, careful not to make any scraping sounds, although it’s unlikely the others would have heard anything with the kind of heated discussion they were having. The curtain had fallen back into place, and they’d have to actually come back in here to see us.

I placed my chair close enough so that my fingers could reach the tape securing Thomas’s wrists to his chair.

“We’re getting out of here,” I said, struggling to get fingers from both my hands onto the tape so I could tear it. There were several layers, and it was going to be tough to rip through them with only the tips of my fingers. If I could just start a small tear…

“Hurry,” Thomas whispered.

“Just hang on.”

“Ray, you should have told me you had me working for a mobster person.”

“It was all bullshit,” I whispered, manipulating the tape with my fingers. “I made it up to buy us some time.”

“Oh,” he said. “That was very smart.”

“—Christ’s sake, no, you wouldn’t dare!” Morris shouted, the first distinct sentence fragment I’d heard since they’d left the room.

I could feel the rip I’d started growing. “It feels looser,” Thomas said.

“When you’re free, you untie me, and we’re out of here.”

“Okay,” he said. “Ray, I don’t even know where we are.”

“Soon as we hit the street I’m sure you’ll know.”

I tore the tape another half an inch, felt it come apart.

“That’s it,” Thomas said. “I can get my wrists free, but there’s still tape around me.”

“Just get out of it as fast as you can.”

I could hear Thomas struggling with the tape. I twisted around, saw him trying to shake off bits of tape from his wrist; then he attacked the strips around his waist.

“Almost done,” I said.

The men weren’t arguing quite as loudly, but they were still talking.

“Faster,” I whispered.

“Okay, okay,” Thomas said, and he stood up from the chair, liberated from it. “Now you.”

Lewis said, clear as a bell: “I’ll go check on them.”