Chapter 46

NOW, THAT CHANGED THINGS, didn't it? I stared across the room as Paul lifted up the throw.

"Get in here with me, Lauren," he said. "You've been working too hard. Hell, we both have. C'mere."

Seeing Paul lying there like that reminded me of the time when I'd thrown out my back, chasing a suspect down a Throgs Neck fire escape the year before. I was laid up for two weeks, and Paul had used his vacation to take care of me. Really take care of me. He'd cooked us three meals a day, and we'd eaten here together watching daytime TV, reading, Paul reading to me. The water heater gave up the ghost in the middle of the second week, and I'll never forget how Paul had washed my hair in the kitchen sink with water heated from the stove.

Bottom line was, he'd been there for me.

Now he needed me to be there for him.

I took a breath and stepped over and lay down beside him. Paul switched off the light. I reached out in the dark until I found Paul's hand, then I held it tight.

"Well, I'm glad you made it home to me," I finally said. "Even if your clothes didn't."

Chapter 47

THE NEXT MORNING, I got dressed quickly after Paul left for work. I'd been waiting for him to leave, actually. More accurate: I couldn't wait for Paul to go.

As I was about to dump my handbag into my Mini, I suddenly very distinctly remembered what ADA Jeff Buslik had said about the gun used to kill Scott. How it was absolutely critical to proving the case.

I moved away from the car and hurried toward the work shed, a single question racing through my brain.

Which river was I going to dump the gun in – the Hudson, the East, or the Harlem?

But I swallowed hard as soon as I unlocked the shed's door. I hadn't been expecting this. Not in my wildest dreams.

There was an empty space where the bag of evidence had been! There was just air.

I looked behind the rakes, the bags of fertilizer, the watering can. No gun. No bloody paper towels. No nothing.

What now?

I stared at the spot, wondering what Paul might have done with the murder gun. Had he dumped it when he went to return the car? If so, where?

That worried me. A lot. The murder weapon still around someplace, probably with Paul's prints on it.

I was standing there, stomach churning, when I noticed the shovel. The tip of its blade was dark. I touched it. It was wet with mud. I took it out of the shed with me and jogged toward the backyard.

Where would I bury a murder weapon if I were Paul? I thought.

I'd want to hide it someplace close, I decided. Someplace where I could glance out my window and see if the area had been disturbed.

I scanned my backyard. It got only afternoon sun, so it was still shaded. I paced its entire length, staring at the cool, shadowed ground for twenty minutes, but there were no obvious disturbances. Not in the plant beds, not beneath the hedges or azaleas.

About ten minutes later, next to the grill, beside a stack of garden bricks we'd bought at Home Depot a year before, I noticed something a little curious. To the right of the pile, I could see faint indentations of bricks in the dirt.

The bricks had been moved slightly over to the left, I realized.

I began removing the top row of bricks and placing them back in their original formation. Under the last row, the earth was loose.

I dug with the shovel until it squished into something. My breath caught and my heart pumped with relief. It was a plastic Stop amp; Shop bag. I opened it and saw the.38 sitting on top of the bloody towels.

I put the gun in my purse and tied the shopping bag and put it in the trunk of my Impala, the cop car I usually drove to work in. Then I went back, filled the hole, and painstakingly put the bricks back the way I'd found them.

I was sweating, placing the last brick back down, when I heard something at the corner of the house.

I turned.

And my heart stopped.

It was my partner, Mike.

Mike? Here at my house? Now?

Behind him were Scott's DETF group members Jeff Trahan and Roy Khuong. All three were wearing full ballistic armor.

I could feel my sweat glands open like a drain. This was it – endgame!

They'd been surveilling me, I thought. They knew exactly what had happened. Probably from the get-go.

Now it was over.

My mouth opened wordlessly as I stared at them from where I was, on my knees.

"What's up, Lauren? Don't you answer your phone?" Mike said, pulling me up. "We just got word from a confidential informant that the Ordonez boys are at their club right now. We decided to just come by and pick you up. Marut and Price are waiting in the van."

He slapped the dirt from my hands as if I were a naughty child he'd caught playing in the mud.

"You can plant your perennials later, Martha Stewart," my fired-up partner said with a grin. "It's time for us to bag some cop killers."

Chapter 48

RIDING IN THE BACK of a speeding van disguised as a plumbing company's, which the Bronx Narcotics Drug Enforcement Task Force used for surveillance, I studied the black-and-white photographs of the Ordonez brothers that Mike had brought with him. The pilot, Mark, was a year older than his brother, Victor, but the hard-eyed, pock-marked tough guys could have been twins.

I handed the pictures back to Mike, who was crouched next to me. He was sheathed in Kevlar, a tactical shotgun held port arms across his chest. I was wearing a full vest, too, and it felt incredibly heavy across my back and shoulders.

Or maybe it was just my head-about-to-explode guilt and anxiety dragging on me.

"Couple of real lookers," I managed to get out.

"Did you notice how light-skinned Victor is? Six foot. He matches Amelia Phelps's description almost to a T. He did it, Lauren. He's our guy. He just about killed a cop fifteen years ago, and he finally got his chance with Scott. The son of a bitch was Scott's shooter. I can feel it."

I stared at my partner. There was a far-off look in his eyes, a malevolent gaze. "These two are going to wish their mother strangled them at birth," he whispered.

I raked my hair back with my fingers. I remembered again that Mike's dad had been killed on The Job. Now we were going after cop killers. I wondered suddenly if this was such a good idea. Actually, I knew it wasn't.

"We're here," Trahan called from the wheel as the van slowed. "Lock and load, ladies."

There was a heady metallic smell in the van's enclosed space. Adrenaline probably. Or maybe testosterone. Things were happening way too fast. The click of weapons echoed off the stark, steel walls.

We were parked on East 141st Street somewhere off Willis Avenue. I guessed the Manhattan real-estate bubble had yet to blow in this direction, looking out at the weed-filled lots and crumbling buildings.

Anything to keep my mind off what was happening now.

Across the desolate street, a wind-blown page of El Diario caught against the skeletal bumper of a stripped-to-the-bones Escalade. The only structures that looked semi-sound around here were the housing projects across the gun-metal strip of the Harlem River behind us.

Trahan pointed at an ancient, listing, four-story walk-up midway down the block.

"There she blows," he said. "That's the club."

Club? I thought, confused. What club? What Trahan was pointing at were just two graffiti-covered steel shutters bookending the shadowed doorway of an anonymous-looking storefront. The crumbling tenement windows above it were empty. Not just of people. Of glass and aluminum frames, too.

Trahan caught my dumbfounded look.

"You have to see this place inside," he said with a rueful shake of his head. "It's another world."