Strong 03 - Twice Read Free Page A

almost supernatural gift for stealth had definitely been an asset in the past.
    The other thing Lydia liked about Dax was that his whole life was cloaked in mystery. He revealed little about his past, how he came to work for the firm, how he came to live in a palatial home in Riverdale complete with a basement that put dungeons to shame. His basement was a maze of rooms—one a weapons armory filled with enough firepower to equip an army; one with a cruel metal table, complete with five-point restraints; yet another adjacent to a second room connected by a two-way mirror. Lydia never tired of probing Dax for details about himself that he refused to disclose. It was as if Dax Chicago sprang fully grown from the earth in a full set of body armor and carrying an AK-47.
    “Come on, Lydia. Let’s go,” Dax said, a pleading look in his jade eyes. His pale skin was blotched with angry red patches from cold and exertion. A few brown curls snaked out of the charcoal wool stocking cap he’d pulled down over his ears. He was not bad-looking for a big dumb Aussie.
    “Dax, maybe we need to get you a girlfriend,” she said as they reached the bottom of the bridge and headed back into the court district.
    He snorted his contempt as Lydia’s cell phone rang. She unzipped the pouch at her waist and removed the tiny silver Nokia that rested against the not so tiny Beretta.
    “Hi,” she said, having seen Jeffrey’s number on the caller ID.
    “Where are you?”
    “At home, on the couch, like a good little prisoner.”
    He sighed on the other end of the phone. “Are you with Dax?”
    “I can’t seem to shake him.”
    “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you two hop in a cab and come to the office? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
    They walked across Chambers Street, the sickly sweet smell of honey-roasted nuts from a vending cart carrying on the cold air. An angry cabbie leaned on his horn as a Lincoln Town Car cut him off and sped past them. Sharply dressed yuppies rushed along in a blur of navy and black on their way to important jobs, tasks, meetings, carrying paper cups of Starbucks coffee.
    “What’s up?” asked Lydia, hearing the lick of excitement in his voice.
    “Did you see the news this morning?”
    “No.”
    “Then I’ll explain it to you when you get here. Half an hour?”
    “About that.”
    Dax and Lydia jogged to Sixth Avenue and hopped a cab heading uptown to Mark, Striker and Strong.

chapter two
    D etective Halford McKirdy, Ford to his friends, liked the dark. Darkness formed a cocoon where thoughts could gestate into theories, theories into answers. The light beckoned a man outside himself, encouraged him to be distracted. That’s why he always pulled the shades in his dingy, cluttered office so that only just the hint of sunlight leaked in between the blinds and the sill, between the slats, creating thin ladders of light across the files and photographs on his desk.
    This morning there was a strange odor in his office. It could have been the half-empty coffee cup—or half full, as an optimist, which Ford was not, might note—that was perched dangerously on the corner of his desk. It could have been the pastrami sandwich that he knew still lay on the bottom of his wastepaper basket beneath a drift of discarded paper, forms, and message slips. Or the stale cigarettes in the ashtray that he kept in the upper right-hand drawer of his metal and faux-wood desk, so that no one would notice that he was still sneaking the occasional cigarette. Or maybe it was just that the smell of death had followed him from the crime scene he’d left an hour before. Likely, it was some combination of all of those things.
    “He has come for me again,” she’d said slowly with a nod, her pink silk pajamas stained with blood, clinging to her, her voice quavering, her eyes staring off into some horror only she could see. The horror right before her eyes seemed to elude her.
    “I’ll never escape him now.