Red Alert(NYPD Red #5)(71)

He watched her walk purposefully toward the station. When she was halfway down the stairs, he stepped out of the shadows and followed her. God, how he wished they could reconnect. If she saw him, she’d scoop him up in her arms and insist on taking him home and cooking up a big platter of pupusas.

If only, he thought as he came up behind her and wrapped his left arm around her neck and pushed her head forward with his right hand, putting enough pressure on her carotid artery to cut off the blood flow to her brain.

She went limp immediately, and he lowered her to the ground. He unzipped her purse, removed her keys, and went back up the stairs. She’d regain consciousness in a few minutes, check her purse, and breathe a sigh of relief when she saw that her wallet and her money were still there.

She’d be home before she realized her keys were missing. But she wouldn’t call the cops to report the attack. Even though she could produce a green card, Carlotta would never invite la policía into her apartment when there were that many undocumented skeletons in her family closet.

Segura walked back toward Wells’s home, tapped the digits 81175 into the keypad, and unlocked the door. As soon as he stepped inside, he heard the beep-beep-beep of the alarm system asking for yet another security code that would prove he was not an intruder.

That was easy. He’d learned it years ago, and he was sure it would never change. The password was 36459, which spelled e-m-i-l-y on the keypad.

Emily Gerson Wells was Princeton’s great-grandmother. Her singular sense of design and elegance permeated every corner of the mansion. Her portrait, painted by the renowned John Singer Sargent, hung over the mantel in the great room. And lest anyone forget their heritage, her name had to be spelled out every time one of her heirs wanted passage into the grand home that was her legacy.

Segura tapped in Emily’s name, and the beeping stopped.

Back in the day, Princeton’s father had an imposing office on the second floor. The old man had died a few years ago, so the office would be Princeton’s now. Segura trod silently up the stairs, put his ear to the mahogany door, and heard the soulful voice of Mary J. Blige coming from inside.

He opened the door and stepped over the threshold. Princeton was stretched out on a leather sofa, a book in one hand, a drink on the table at his side. He looked up at the bronze hard-bodied ghost from his past, and he froze.

“Hello, Princeton,” Segura said. “I see you’re still a reader. Is it a good book?”

“Hello, Geraldo,” Wells said. “Yes, I’m enjoying it.”

Segura nodded. “Too bad you’re not going to live long enough to finish it.”





CHAPTER 68



“Would you care for a drink before you kill me?” Wells asked.

“No thanks. But feel free to finish yours.”

Wells sat up on the sofa and downed his drink. “Do you mind if I have one more for the long journey ahead?” he said, getting up and going to the bar.

“You’re taking this rather calmly,” Segura said.

“Geraldo, it’s not like I didn’t expect you. Even so, I’m rather in awe of how you slipped in the way you did.”

“It helps to have a history. I’ll leave these here for Carlotta.” He dropped her key ring on the desk. “So tell me something: if you knew I was coming, why didn’t you get out of the country? You have a plane. You have money. You could have gone anywhere.”

“I didn’t want to go anywhere,” Wells said, pouring from a bottle of Balvenie thirty-year single malt. “New York is my home. My work is here. My charity is here. My whole life is here. I decided I’d wait for you to show up and try to do what I do best.”

“And what’s that?”

“Negotiate.”

Segura laughed. “You mean beg for mercy like Nathan did.”

“Give me a little credit, will you? I’m not begging. I’m trying to increase the value of my life.”

“It’s like old times, Princeton. You’ve totally lost me.”

“Right now I’m worth nothing to you. You kill me, and I’m dead. End of story. But what if I said I’d give you a hundred dollars not to kill me? Now I’m no longer worth nothing. Now it’s going to cost you a hundred bucks to kill me.”

Segura laughed. “And worth every penny. Pour me a little of that Scotch, will you?”

Wells took a clean rocks glass from the bar, added three fingers of the single malt, and handed it to Segura.

“You trying to get me drunk, mate?”

“I don’t think that would help my case. Now, where were we?”

“It was costing me a hundred dollars to whack you, and I happily paid the price.”

“Now what if I said a million dollars? You’d probably still kill me, but you’d walk out of the room knowing that revenge cost you a million dollars. You see where I’m going with this?”

“You’re very good at these high-finance shenanigans, aren’t you? So now you’re going to try to come up with a number that would make me think, I can’t kill the fucker. It’s going to cost me a fortune.”

“That’s the plan,” Wells said. “It’s a gentleman’s game. Very civilized. All I have to do is make me worth so much money alive that you realize you can’t afford to kill me.”