Night Kills (41 page)

A month later, Quinn was sitting at an outside table of a West Side restaurant nursing some kind of overpriced latte that was actually pretty good. An old woman sat at the table opposite his. She had three precisely aligned narrow gouges in her left cheek where her cat had clawed her. If that's what had happened. If the woman even owned a cat. Quinn never got tired of observing people in New York and trying to read them.

A signal changed and traffic streamed past in the street only ten feet away, raising the noise level and leaving a low-lying haze of exhaust fumes. Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk, occasionally bumping and shoving at each other in the narrowed space between restaurant railing and curb.

Quinn smiled. He knew that sooner or later one of those pedestrians would be Pearl. She was supposed to meet him here in five minutes for lunch.

Pearl was doing well since her release from the hospital. Last week she'd even begun working again as a guard at the bank. She continued to attract and befuddle Quinn, and he knew she always would.

Quinn glanced at the
Times
folded on the table. In it he'd read with satisfaction that the latest polls showed Harley Renz was the most popular police commissioner in the city's history. There actually were rumors concerning a mayoral bid, most of them probably generated by Renz. Quinn figured Renz had come out of the Torso Murders case better than anyone.

Fedderman had also come out okay. He was back in Florida, continuing his uneasy retirement, waiting for another call from Quinn. From time to time he sent Quinn citrus fruit.

Palmer Stone and Gloria Lamping had lawyered up, but in truth they were helpless now. The system had them in its teeth, and the system would shake them and chew them to a fineness that was nothing.

Two weeks ago the dead body of Maria Sanchez had been discovered in a bathtub in a Tijuana motel. Her tongue had been cut out and her mouth stuffed with cocaine.

The Torso Murders had ceased.

Jill Clark had reclaimed her life.

Quinn noticed a bobbing, dark-haired head in the oncoming stream of pedestrians and stood up so he could be seen.

He grinned. Pearl was here.

Don't miss John Lutz's next spine-tingling thriller…

 

Coming from Pinnacle in October 2009!