The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(41)

“Yes, I’m sure you will.”

Vimal set the stone down and rose.

A rueful smile spread across Mr. Nouri’s face. “I will pay you two thousand to separate it like I’d planned.”

“No.”

“Two thousand five hundred.”

Vimal started to turn. Then he stopped and leaned down, his face close to the older man’s. He whispered, “Take a chance.”

And thought: So timid with my father, so bold here.

“What?” Mr. Nouri asked.

“I know your work. I know the work of your son and the other cutters here. You’re all good. You create diamonds that your customers love—the newlyweds and the wives and the husbands and parents and grandparents. You make them happy. And you’ll be able to make them happy again and again—with thousands of other round brilliants. But this once, with this stone, do something different.”

“Business is business, Vimal.”

Yes, it certainly is, the young man thought. “I should go.”

When Vimal was five feet from the door, Mr. Nouri said, “Wait.”

He looked back.

“You think this is best, this cut?”

“It’s the cut this stone deserves, I can’t say anything more than that.”

Mr. Nouri shook his head, as if trying to process this comment. Then he stuck his hand out.

Vimal said, “Still, twenty-five hundred?”

A nod.

The men shook hands.

Vimal asked, “Where can I work?”





Chapter 20



Got your text,” Lincoln Rhyme said.

The man lying in the bed glanced up with a brief but glowing smile. Surprise too.

“Lincoln. You came. I mean in person. I just…Just wanted to chat. Phone call I was thinking.”

“Barry.” Rhyme directed his chair closer.

The complicated bed was in a room deep in the bowels of a complicated hospital complex on the East Side in Midtown. It had taken some minutes to find the place. Much color coding. It didn’t help a lot.

“Thom.”

“Hi.”

Barry Sales shifted a bit, tucked under excessively washed sheets and blankets. He found a wired remote control, pressed a button and rose into a sitting position, thanks to the hydraulic mattress. The man was in his late thirties. His skin was pale, his brown hair thinning.

His eyes game but hollow.

Rhyme wheeled closer yet. Both men nodded a greeting and Rhyme at least couldn’t help but grin at the irony, which Sales acknowledged with a smile of his own. The criminalist wasn’t able to shake Sales’s hand because his only working limb was his right. He couldn’t use his left.

And Sales’s left limb was the only one that remained after a firefight that had nearly killed him.

Rhyme looked around the room. He absolutely did not want to be here. There was not a single memory of medical venues that didn’t trouble, or torment, Lincoln Rhyme since the accident years ago. There’d been accommodation, there’d been a fierce punching down of recollections, there’d been stoic acceptance. But he would have avoided hospitals forever, given the option.

But this wasn’t one.

Sales had been a colleague of his years ago when Rhyme was running the crime scene operation for the NYPD.

Sales had been a star. He’d stay on a scene, walking the grid, for hours after any other forensic cop would’ve released it.

Rhyme hadn’t been happy when Sales had decided to move to general investigative work…but he’d followed the man’s career and learned that, even at a young age, he’d soared to a senior spot in Major Cases and then, after leaving the NYPD, led a suburban police department to distinction.

Rhyme said, “Do they have a bar here?”

“Jesus, Lincoln,” Sales said. “Never change.”

“Theorize after a drink. Analyze sober.”

“Sadly,” Sales said, “the hospital sommelier has the day off.”

“Fire the son of a bitch.” Rhyme nodded to Thom, who produced two bottles of iced tea. That is, they were labeled tea. The contents looked suspiciously more golden, like, say, single-malt whisky. The aide set one bottle on the sideboard and opened the other.

“Hell,” Sales said. “I’m not driving.” Then his voice choked and he struggled to control the tears. “Fuck me. This’s ridiculous.”

“Been there,” Rhyme said.

Thom poured two glasses from the opened bottle and handed them out. He retreated to the corner, sat and checked messages.

The men slugged down some of the whisky and judiciously slipped the glasses out of sight when a cheerful Filipina nurse came in to take some vitals. She left, saying, “Oh-oh, bad boys. Keep those hid.” A grin.

Sales sipped more liquor. Looked at the bottle.

“How’d you do it?”

“A funnel,” Rhyme said.

A moment, a blink. Then Sales laughed.

“You mean, the whole disabled thing,” Rhyme said.

“Yeah, the whole thing.”

“You remember I hated clichés.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“But sometimes they fit. This one does: One step at a time.” Rhyme, a quadriplegic, with a break at the fourth cervical vertebra, had suffered a trauma in a league very different from Sales’s. He’d been paralyzed from the neck down, with a few glitchy, renegade nerves that provided a bit of movement in a finger. Sales had lost his right arm just below the elbow; all else functioned fine.