Chương 5
A gunshot.
Glass breaking.
And Warren Pike screaming.
Vale dragged her down behind the cruiser.
Bruno pressed against her chest.
“Stay down.”
“Where’s Pike?”
Another shot cracked through the dark.
A muzzle flash bloomed near the garage ramp.
Vincent fired back.
Someone yelled for everybody to get on the ground.
Mara smelled burned powder again.
Vale’s hand was at the back of her neck, holding her below the cruiser window.
Then emergency lights flickered on, bathing the garage in dirty red.
Pike was lying beside the elevator.
The officer who had been standing with him was crawling toward cover, blood darkening one sleeve.
Pike did not move.
Mara started to rise.
Vale pulled her down.
“He needs help.”
“So does the officer.”
“Let me go.”
“No.”
“He was about to tell us.”
“That is exactly why you’re staying here.”
Bruno growled toward the ramp.
Footsteps pounded somewhere beyond the parked cars.
Vincent disappeared after them with two officers.
Mara stared at Pike.
His right hand twitched.
“He’s alive.”
Vale looked.
Pike’s fingers moved again.
Mara shoved Vale’s arm away and ran before he could stop her.
Bruno ran beside her.
“Mara.”
She dropped to her knees next to Pike.
Blood spread beneath his shoulder, but his eyes were open.
His lips moved.
She bent closer.
“What?”
Pike caught her coat with surprising strength.
“The drive.”
“I have it.”
“No.”
His fingers tightened.
“Not yours.”
Mara stared at him.
“What does that mean?”
Pike’s eyes shifted past her toward Adrian Vale.
Fear transformed his face.
He pulled Mara closer until she could smell coffee on his breath.
“His.”
Mara did not look back at Vale.
Pike’s fingers trembled against the front of her coat, leaving a wet red streak near the zipper.
“His drive?”
Pike tried to nod, but pain caught somewhere inside him and turned the movement into a shudder.
“He gave it to me.”
Mara heard Vale come closer.
Bruno shifted between them, not growling now, only watching.
“When?” Mara asked.
Pike’s eyes kept drifting out of focus.
“Warren, when did Adrian give you the drive?”
“Not Adrian.”
The answer was barely air.
Mara leaned until her ear was almost against his mouth.
“Then whose?”
Pike swallowed and made a sound that seemed to hurt him.
“His father’s.”
For several seconds Mara could hear nothing except the emergency alarm pulsing through the garage.
She turned.
Adrian Vale had stopped six feet away.
The red emergency light crossed his face, disappeared, then crossed it again.
“My father died nine years ago,” he said.
Pike’s grip loosened.
Mara caught his hand before it fell.
“Stay with me.”
A paramedic shouted for her to move.
She resisted until two gloved hands reached Pike and a third person pulled her backward by the shoulders.
“Ma’am, we need room.”
“He was talking.”
“He can talk in the ambulance if he’s able.”
“He said—”
“Mara.”
Vale’s voice came from behind her.
She turned so quickly she nearly struck him.
“Don’t.”
He stopped.
“You knew about the drive.”
“No.”
“Your father did.”
“I heard him.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
The paramedics cut Pike’s shirt open behind her.
An officer was pressing gauze against the wounded officer’s arm while speaking rapidly into a radio.
Somewhere near the ramp, Vincent yelled that the shooter had gone over the west barrier.
Nothing in the garage had become less dangerous, but Mara’s attention narrowed until only Vale remained.
“You recognized the invoices,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You recognized Harbor East.”
“Yes.”
“You recognized Pike’s accusation.”
“Yes.”
“And you expect me to believe you had no idea why somebody put a drive with my initials inside my own car?”
“I expect you to believe exactly what I say when I know something and exactly what I say when I don’t.”
“That sounds convenient too.”
“It probably does.”
She almost laughed again, but there was nothing funny left in her.
The flash drive felt suddenly enormous inside her fist.
“Your father died nine years ago.”
“Yes.”
“When did Harbor East start?”
“The current redevelopment project started three years ago.”
“So why would his drive contain anything about it?”
Vale looked toward Pike.
The paramedics were lifting him onto a stretcher.
“I don’t know.”
“Try harder.”
His eyes returned to hers.
“My father owned property along the Harbor East corridor.”
Mara waited.
Vale said nothing else.
“That was not a complete sentence.”
“It was a complete sentence.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
Pike groaned as the stretcher wheels locked into place.
One paramedic called out a blood pressure.
The other told Pike not to pull at the oxygen mask.
Mara watched them push him toward the elevator, and the ridiculous thought came that his coffee was still spreading across the floor twenty feet away.
Someone would eventually have to mop it up.
Someone always had to clean the ordinary mess after everybody else finished making the important one.
Vale said, “My father bought six properties there between 2008 and 2012.”
“Under his own name?”
“No.”
“Of course not.”
“Through holding companies.”
“Why?”
“Because wealthy men enjoy making simple things require attorneys.”
Mara looked at him.
“That almost sounded like criticism.”
“It was.”
“You inherited them?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly to be casual.
Mara folded her arms.
“Who did?”
“My sister.”
That was new.
She had read enough about Adrian Vale during Calder’s due diligence review to know the public version of his family.
Industrial money, real estate, a dead father, a mother who lived mostly in Connecticut, and Adrian himself appearing in photographs beside buildings whose windows reflected people too poor to enter them.
There had been no sister.
“You have a sister?”
“I did.”
Mara’s anger lost its footing.
Vale looked past her toward the dark ramp.
“She died eleven years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She frowned.
“That’s a strange thing to say.”
“She would have hated being turned into a reason for strangers to be gentle with me.”
May you like
Mara glanced down at the drive.
“Did she own those properties when she died?”
