Some Like It Hot-Buttered (33 page)

But, I discovered, you can
spit
something at them.

The three Milk Duds I had in my mouth made a lovely projectile, and we were just close enough that they appeared to be headed directly for Leslie’s eyes. As soon as I shot them out, I ducked, and dove for her midsection, on the side away from the gun. Again, I got lucky. Her hand
was
tired, and drooped just a little as I hit her in the left side and went through the office door. The gun went off, over my shoulder. I didn’t stop to see what it hit. My projectile, however, clearly
had
hit its target: there was a chocolate smear in the middle of Leslie’s forehead.

Leslie didn’t fall, but she stumbled out of the way enough for me to get by. She was blocking my path to the front door, so I turned right and headed for the lobby before she could regain her balance and fire.

Since Leslie was trained as a cop, in excellent shape, and younger than me, she recovered quickly, and charged after me into the lobby. I dove behind the candy counter and lay on the ground, trying very hard not to breathe audibly after the run from the office. I made a mental note to eat fat-free muffins more often and have a salad for lunch at least twice a week.

Suddenly, the world exploded. Leslie had fired a round into the glass candy case, destroying it and showering shattered glass over the lower half of my body. I shielded my eyes.

She was advancing. I picked up two Kit Kat bars—the big ones—and positioned myself, still low to the floor, behind the popcorn stand.

Boom! Popcorn flew everywhere as I estimated insurance deductibles. I yelled out, “Do you have any idea what these things
cost
?” I was rewarded with another shot, a little nearer to my head than I would have preferred, which shattered the mirror behind the snack bar.

I dove out of the way, thankful that I didn’t feel any glass in my shoes. That took me closer to the auditorium entrance. Inside, there would be more places to conceal myself. So I took my chances and ran for the doors.

I heard the shot fired, and felt something very hot crease my right calf. It seemed a silly time to worry about such things, so I just kept running. But it was obvious I wasn’t going to make it to the auditorium before Leslie could fire again, so I changed my angle and headed for the stairs. If I could make it to the projection booth, I could lock the door from the inside and use the phone in there to call Dutton. I ducked under the velvet rope and started up the stairs. The “Balcony Closed” sign caught on my heel for a moment, but I shook it loose.

Leslie had to run toward the stairs to see me, and by the time she got to the landing at the bottom, I was halfway up the flight. She took aim, but didn’t fire, as I ducked to the side away from her, where I’d be harder to hit. She’d have to shoot around the banister, and it was big.

So she started up the stairs. I couldn’t stand straight up or my head would be in her line of fire, so I kept down and continued climbing, more slowly than before out of necessity.

In other words, Leslie was gaining on me by the time I reached the top of the stairs. I bolted for the booth door before she could aim. And I reached it just in time.

But the door was locked.

In the time it would have taken me to get the keys out of my pocket, isolate the one for the booth, and open the door, I’d have been dead four times over. The booth was no longer an option.

I cut left and flattened myself against the floor behind the last row of seats in the balcony. Leslie reached the landing just as I lay down. I hadn’t turned the lights on in the auditorium, and I knew she couldn’t tell where I was.

I certainly wasn’t going to tell her.

“There’s blood on the carpet, Elliot,” she called. “I know I shot you.”

“Come on. You know you can’t get out. It’s not that large a balcony. I’m going to find you.”

I could see her feet coming up the aisle, slowly. At each row, they would swivel suddenly, one way, then the other. She was aiming the gun like a cop with a hostile in the room. She wasn’t going to be caught napping.

“Maybe we can work this out. I don’t have to kill you. We can share the money from the DVDs. Bender will be in jail; you can have his share. You keep quiet, and I can give you enough to really fix up this place the way you want it.”

She was only five rows away. And she knew she hadn’t seen me yet. That meant I was in a very contained space, and Leslie was more confident. She stopped walking up the stairs.

She’d seen me. Or thought she had. It was still very dark up there.

“Stand up, Elliot. I know where you are now.”

“We’re done, Elliot. You can’t get away. Just stand up.”

I couldn’t figure out a way to crawl silently, or I would have tried for the opposite aisle. And the pain in my leg was starting to become noticeable. I sure as hell wasn’t going to get up and let her blast away, but my alternatives were narrowing rather noticeably.

Leslie realized then that with the dim lights that are always on in the auditorium (except when the place is shut down), and a little altitude, she would be able to see where I was. So she walked to the middle of the row, maybe ten feet from where I lay, and stood up on the arms of a seat in the center. She balanced herself, and looked around.

But before she could adjust her eyes to the light, I heard exactly what I had hoped not to hear. From beneath us, either in the lobby or the auditorium—it was hard to tell— came Sophie’s voice. “Elliot?” she called. “Are you here?”

I couldn’t see Leslie, but I could hear her triumphant smile in her voice. “Trentino! That’s game!” she said, a line from
Duck Soup
. “Do you want to stand up, or shall I go and take a hostage?”

Shit. I couldn’t let Sophie become a casualty of my meddling with things that weren’t my business. For one thing, her parents would never forgive me. And I’d never forgive myself.

I stood up, painfully on the right leg. The wound wasn’t bad, but it was enough to notice. The problem was, I knew it was nothing in comparison to what I was about to feel, and after that, I’d feel nothing.

I’d been right about the frosty smile on Leslie’s face. It was exactly as I’d pictured it, but in this light, and with her towering over me like that, it was even more frightening. She kept the gun leveled at my head, and hopped down off the arms of the seat onto the floor of the balcony.

And then she just kept going.

The floor gave way under her, reminding me why I didn’t allow customers into the balcony to begin with. She plummeted, gun and all, through the hole her impact had created, and disappeared from view entirely.

I hustled down the steps as best as I could (walking especially gingerly now, as I didn’t want to join her, and after all had been shot in the leg) to the spot where Leslie had vanished. A sizable hole had opened up in the floor of the balcony just in front of row GG, seat 17, and when I looked down through it, I could see Leslie, on her back amid a pile of plaster, rotted wood, carpet, and candy wrappers from 1962, the gun knocked out of her hand. I was pretty sure she was breathing, but she was bleeding from a number of body parts, including her head, and her eyes were open, staring, and not seeing a whole heck of a lot.

“Now,
that’s
comedy,” I said.

48

"She’ll be well enough to stand trial,” Chief Barry Dutton said. “Former Officer Levant suffered a severe concussion, a broken leg, a few cracked ribs, and cuts and bruises. She was lucky.”

“She was lucky?” I asked. “
I
was lucky. Two more seconds, and she would have shot me. Again.”

My right leg now had eight stitches in it, just to prove it could take more than my left (they’re so competitive). The burning sensation was more of an annoyance, but the pain had subsided entirely. I could have lived without getting shot, but if this was the extent of the damage, I’d certainly tolerate it and consider myself fortunate.

“I had Officer Patel on his way,” Dutton said, a little defensively. “He would have gotten there in another minute or two. I knew something was wrong by the way you spoke to me on the phone.”

“You mean putting you on speaker phone?”

“No, I mean you were being polite.”

I asked about Joe Dunbar, and Dutton said he was recovering nicely and would be out of the hospital in another day or so. Christie hadn’t left his side, and gave every stranger who passed the hospital room door “the evil eye.” She was a mother lion and Dunbar was, apparently, her cub.

Amy Ansella was being charged with attempted murder and a few lesser charges, though she still complained that none of it was her fault, and had snagged some local reporter into covering “her side” of the story. The poor guy probably thought he had a chance with Amy once she got out of jail. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t be disappointed for quite some time.

There would, naturally, be no charges filed against Marcy Resnick, since having a minority sexual orientation was not illegal in New Jersey. As long as you call it a “civil union.”

Patel knocked on Dutton’s door, then entered when the chief waved him in. “Report from Sergeant O’Donnell, Chief,” he said, and placed the sheaf of papers on Dutton’s desk. Patel got a nod from Dutton, and left.

“Does that have anything about Anthony in it?” I asked.

Dutton scanned the top sheet of the papers over his reading glasses, and nodded. “The Feds gave him immunity for his testimony,” he said. “I doubt they’ll be able to use much of what the kid says, though. He lives in another star system.”

“It’s Planet Film, Chief,” I told him. “Many are called, few are chosen.”

I stood up to leave, and caught something out of the corner of my eye. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

“Chief,” I said, “do you ride a bicycle?”

Dutton, still reading the report, looked up at me over the half-glasses. “No.”

He seemed a little disconcerted when I walked around his desk and reached behind a file cabinet to pull out the object I’d spied there: the front wheel of a bicycle. “You know, this looks strangely like one of mine that was stolen from right in front of this building,” I said.

“How can you tell? Does it have special markings on it, or something?” Dutton said, but there was a hint of a grin trying to peek out of his face.

I sat back down, stunned. “It was you,” I said. “You took the wheel off my bicycle that day. Why would you do that?”

Dutton frowned. “You have no proof that I . . .”

“You
wanted
me to go home with Leslie Levant,” I said. “You were behind that whole thing. That whole speech about how ‘officers are freer to talk.’ You were setting us up. Why?”

“Close the door,” Dutton said, and I did.

Dutton pointed a finger and said, “If one word—
one word
—of what is said in this room is ever repeated to me by
anyone
, I’ll deny it. Then, I’ll have you arrested. For something. Whatever the worst crime on my desk is that day. Are we clear?”

Appropriately impressed, I nodded.

“You’re right. I wanted you to get to know Officer Levant better,” Dutton told me. “I didn’t expect you to get to know her
that
well, but I wanted to be able to have a little different view of her than you get by being her boss.”

“I didn’t get to know her as well as you seem to think, Chief, but I don’t understand why you wanted
me
, of all people, to provide that look.”

“Because I suspected something was up with her. Like I told you, her spending was far exceeding her income, and I knew her income. Then this piracy thing shows up and she’s the one who’s finding all the information, and giving others the credit. It all seems to point at a kid who didn’t even have a record of jaywalking. It didn’t add up.”

“You couldn’t find out what you needed to know on your own, so you recruited a civilian?” I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or flattered.

“You were one of the first people we investigated,” Dutton said. “I knew your background.”

“What background? I don’t have a background.”

“I read your book,” Dutton said. “You’ve spent some time around cops. And a friend of mine said you could handle it.”

“You have friends?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The first day we met, I took a look at your book,” Dutton told me. “I noticed a name in your acknowledgments, thanking a certain cop for being especially helpful in the research.”

Oh, sure. “Meg Vidal.”

Dutton nodded. “Meg and I have known each other for a long time,” he said. “I called her up and asked her about you.

“Meg said you were very good; you had instincts. She said while you were doing your ride-alongs to research your book, she almost suggested you take the entrance exam to the police academy. Then she decided you were too impulsive, and you take everything too personally, so you wouldn’t have made a good cop.”

“She was right. After seeing what she dealt with on one case, I never wanted to go back again.” I couldn’t believe Meg had told Dutton all this; they must have been very close, because Meg doesn’t open up to just anybody.

“She also said you thought I was a good cop, but an administrator who might not know how to work a case anymore. ”

My face must have been glowing red, because Dutton was grinning his best Yaphet Kotto grin. “I didn’t say that last part,” I told him.

“I asked her if she thought I could rely on you a little bit, and she said yes.”