Storm Rising Read online

  “Kevin?”

  His face wore an otherworldly look. He pointed at the house and said, “Jossie.”

  A chill ran down Lucy’s spine. Her mind raced, unable to credit what had just happened.

  Kevin was pointing at the house where Jack grew up.

  And he’d just used Jack’s nickname for his kid sister, a Hollywood wannabe who had finally made it and was currently co-starring in a popular drama on cable TV.

  She damned well knew she’d never used that nickname in front of Kevin.

  She felt like she’d just plunged into an alternate reality.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later they arrived at Lucy’s house on West First Street.

  Lucy was still stunned by the paranormal event she’d just witnessed. Based on Kevin’s behavior, she’d expected a screaming fit when they drove away from Jack’s old family home on East Twenty-first. Before she started the car, she tried to explain, as calmly as she could, that “we” didn’t live in that house anymore. She told him that they’d bought a new house down near Bergen Point and that’s where they were going.

  To her surprise, Kevin hadn’t protested. He just said, “Okay, Mommy,” and reached for the battered toy car he’d been playing with off-and-on for the entire drive from Coral Gables. As she navigated the streets that brought them finally to the little white house across from Collins Park, Kevin matched every turn with the little car in his hand.

  The driveway was a foot deep in snow, so Lucy parked on the street. Clearing the driveway would be Job One. She would be working alone when she emptied her packed storage unit and moved the contents back into the house. Rather than dozens of trips across the front yard, up the steps to the front door, and then around the tight corner leading from the foyer, it would be much easier to move everything straight through the sliding doors at the rear. The two-story Radford bungalow was over ninety years old and, although the interior had been updated—most recently by Lucy and Jack themselves—it didn’t have the most accommodating floor plan.

  But it was her house and, despite the threat of painful memories, she intended to live in it.

  She unstrapped Kevin and helped him out of the car. He stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the house, and then took his mother’s hand. They crunched along the walkway past the sprawling red oak. The path had been shoveled, but a thin remaining layer showed the impressions of footwear coming and going from the front steps—artifacts, Lucy deduced, of the last tenants’ vacating move.

  She led Kevin up the steps and unlocked the door. She allowed him to enter first, then followed.

  Kevin hesitated for a second, and then ran through the foyer and cut to the right toward the living room. No longer sure of what to expect from her remarkable child, Lucy quickly followed. She heard his thumping footsteps come to a stop.

  She found him standing in the middle of the living room, looking around in wonder. As she reached him, he took her hand again. This time, he seemed to want to lead, so she let him. He escorted her from room to room, saying nothing, stopping to take in each room, his face wearing a serious expression. He reminded her of a grown man working his way through an art gallery. Lucy followed, watching and confused. They climbed the narrow stairway to the second floor. There were only two rooms on that floor, the master bedroom and a guest bedroom, each with its own en suite bathroom.

  In the short hallway at the top of the stairs, Lucy noticed that Kevin was limping again. He ignored the guest bedroom and led her to the master bedroom.

  After lingering for long seconds just inside the doorway, he sighed, looked up at her, and said, “Mommy, I’m tired.”

  When Lucy had moved out, five years ago, she left the house furnished.

  Except for one room: the master bedroom.

  She hated the idea of anyone sleeping in the bed she had shared with Jack for their entire married life, so she donated the bedframe, night tables, and dressers to Goodwill and sent the mattress to the landfill. Each set of tenants—there had only been two over the entire five years—had leased the house on the basis that they would furnish the master bedroom themselves. But when she’d called her rental agency a few weeks ago, she asked him to tell the departing tenants to take anything they wanted when they moved out because she was planning to refurnish completely.

  The only thing they’d left was the old sofa in the living room. That didn’t bother Lucy, because she’d packed air beds and sleeping bags for her and Kevin, and she’d budgeted for a major shopping expedition before she went back to work.

  She and Kevin headed back down to the living room. He sat on the sofa and patted the faded cushion beside him. She sat. He laid his head on her lap and immediately fell asleep.

  6

  Over the months since the events on the 440 loop, despite the fact that they’d been jointly awarded medals for their exploits that day, and despite their subsequent “bonding,” Tait had remained steadfastly close-mouthed about Cal Parrish’s death.

  Nevertheless, over those months, he’d let a few nuggets drop.

  During one investigation, after they’d turned over a guy for unlawful possession of a firearm, Tait had picked the weapon off Jack’s desk and muttered, “Cal was killed with one of these.” The gun was a Baikal-Makarov .380, a Russian make.

  Another time, on a quiet day, Tait mentioned his retirement date, which was eighteen months away.

  “Any plans for a post-retirement job?” Jack asked.

  “Looking at a few things. At least I’ll still be fairly young”—he caught Jack’s quizzical look and responded with a rare smile—“okay, relatively young. What they pay us … a man could starve to death if he stayed in this job too long. Point is: I’ll have time for a second career. At least I’m not facing what Parrish was facing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Must’ve been eight, ten years ago … before he and I partnered up. He had this son living out West—California, or maybe it was Nevada. Told me the kid got involved in some get-rich-quick scheme, a land speculation deal that went sour. Cal had to bail him out. Said it meant he’d have to delay his retirement, have to wait ’til he maxed out, maybe even go a few years past that. Dying when he did, he left his wife with a fuckin’ mess.”

  Jack was thinking: Money trouble … Russian-made murder weapon … the whole thing just doesn’t sit right.

  * * *

  Not long after that conversation, Jack took the leave time he’d promised himself. He and Lucy flew to Miami and spent several days at the Gables with Lucy’s sister and brother-in-law.

  Jack had always enjoyed visiting Lucy’s family. After several years in the police, he harbored a certain ingrained cynicism when it came to attorneys, but he genuinely liked Jeff Barnett. The man’s slightly rotund appearance and spaniel eyes belied the steel that lay within, and Jack imagined he would be deadly in a courtroom, consistently surprising strutting opponents who had underestimated him. He respected Jeff’s quiet wisdom, and was highly amused by his obsessive devotion to Wellington, their enormous cat. (Jeff referred to the feline as “my son and hair.”) And he got a real kick out of his sister-in-law, Erica, who somehow combined dazzling elegance with a quick and earthy wit.

  He loved Jeff’s story of how they had met.

  “I was wandering through a shopping mall. There was this smoking-hot chick wearing shorts and a skimpy top walking along in front of me. There were three words stitched across the ass of her shorts: TAKE A NUMBER. She went into a store. I waited outside while she browsed. She came out and I followed her to the next store. When she came out of that one, I got up my nerve and went up to her.

  “‘Hi. My name’s Jeff.’

  “‘Good for you,’ she replied, and started to walk away.

  “‘I’ll take that number, if I may?’

  “She turned around and just stood there, looking me over. Then she fished a pen and a scrap of paper out of her purse and wrote on it. She handed it to me.”

  “What was writt
en on it?”

  “‘One.’”

  Ricki, as she liked to be called, was undeniably alluring, and Jack wasn’t blind to that … but for all her charms, she wasn’t Lucy. In Jack’s eyes, Lucy’s languid, understated beauty couldn’t be matched. There was a mysterious, almost indefinable quality about her that had melted him on the spot on that afternoon, four years ago, when he’d pulled her over for running a stop sign. Before letting her go with a warning, he’d memorized the address on her driver’s license. Then, in the boldest move he’d ever made in his relations with the opposite sex, he showed up on her doorstep the following evening.

  There was very little in this world that frightened Jack Hendricks, but his knees turned to water when Lucy opened the door. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, but she recognized him. In obvious consternation, she peered past him, looking for a police car. Seeing her standing in front of him, three feet away, he forgot all the clever lines he had practiced on the drive over.

  “Miss Cappelli,” he blurted, “I’m sorry. I … I’m not here on police business. I’m here because…”

  “Yes?”

  “Because … because I’m hoping you’ll let me take you to dinner.”

  He saw those beautiful green eyes get big, just as they had when he’d pulled her over.

  His heart sank.

  And then, Lucinda Cappelli’s face broke into a smile.

  Later that evening, as he walked her to her front door, she turned, kissed him on the cheek and asked, with a mischievous grin, “Where have I been all your life?”

  Jack and Lucy had never looked back, and he worshipped her.

  Jack didn’t have much family of his own—at least, accessible family. His dad had died of a heart attack two weeks before Jack enlisted in the Army, which was no loss. His death had freed Elise Hendricks, Jack’s mother, from decades of mental abuse—and from the intermittent incidents of physical abuse that Jack had put an end to when, at the age of seventeen, he had laid out his father with a single punch. Before that memorable day, his older sister, Brigitte, had fled the turmoil, married in haste, and was now living, divorced and embittered, somewhere in New Hampshire. He hadn’t heard from her in two years. Jocelyn, his younger sister, a fresh-faced strawberry blonde with dreams of stardom, had moved to Los Angeles right after high school. Jack and Jossie had always been close, and she still stayed in contact. She’d picked up a few minor roles in TV productions, but mainly she’d become a Hollywood cliché, auditioning by day, waitressing by night. To top it off, while Jack was in the Army, his mother had reconnected with an old high school boyfriend who owned a guesthouse in Kauai. She’d married him and made her escape from the city that held so many traumatizing memories. Jack didn’t blame her, but he’d only made it out to Hawaii once since she moved, and his mother had sworn she’d never return to Bayonne, even to see her son.

  The bottom line was that Jack was the only member of his small family who had stayed in their hometown, and the only one who actually gave a damn about the place.

  * * *

  Jack and Lucy spent a few days shopping, exploring Coconut Grove, and gaping at the voluptuous spectacles on South Beach. They ended each day being seriously over-served at the Bronte. Finally, they rented a car and drove the Overseas Highway down to Key West.

  When they pulled under the porte cochere of their hotel, Lucy let out a squeal of surprise.

  Jack had kept the Avenida Miramar a secret. Built during the Roaring Twenties by New Jersey transportation mogul (and rumored mobster) Gaetano Morelli, the hotel had been a favored retreat of politicians and Hollywood celebrities for decades. Jack hadn’t told Lucy that he had booked them into one of the most expensive suites at the most expensive resort in the Florida Keys. She’d been flabbergasted, and thrilled, just as Jack had hoped.

  But she’d also been distressed.

  On their arrival, they’d been briefly ignored as they stood at the open trunk of their rented Pontiac while a doorman and a parking valet fussed over the occupants of the gleaming Rolls-Royce Phantom parked in front of them. When they finally entered the hotel, and Jack led Lucy through the stunning ship-style brightwork of the massive lobby, her legs went weak. There was a distinct flutter in her voice as she pressed close to him and whispered in fright:

  “Jack, look at this place! How can we afford it?”

  “We’ll be okay. It’s off season. And you got a deal.”

  “I got a deal?”

  “Yeah! I couldn’t accept it—against regulations—but you could. So I accepted on your behalf. The reservation’s in your name. Go ahead … sign us in.”

  In fact, Lucy had gotten a hell of a deal. In front desk lingo, their one-week stay had been “comped” for them by a crime victim who just happened to work for the head of the New York investment firm that had recently bought the hotel. One evening several months earlier, Jack and Lucy had been on their way to see The Da Vinci Code when Jack had interrupted a violent mugging in an alley. He’d spotted the commotion from the sidewalk and sprinted to the victim’s aid. Two men were in the process of dragging their young female victim deeper into the blackness, and it was obvious that their intentions involved more than just the theft of a purse. In one of the few firsthand examples of Jack’s professional skills that Lucy had ever witnessed, he disarmed both men in seconds, dislocating one thug’s shoulder in the process, and knocked both of them unconscious. While Jack stood guard over the pair, Lucy helped the woman to their car, staunched the bleeding from her badly split lip, and comforted her until the police and ambulance arrived.

  Yes, Jack had been offered a very good deal on their hotel stay, but when the bellman swung open the door to their breathtaking honeymoon suite, he wasn’t sure Lucy believed him. At that moment, he didn’t care. He tipped the bellman, latched the door, swept his matchless, irreplaceable wife into his arms, and carried her to the broad bed overlooking the Straits of Florida.

  It was only after the essential opening act of their romantic getaway had been taken care of, and Lucy was lying in his arms, that he told her about the phone call he’d received from the grateful woman he had saved that night. The call had come a few days after her two assailants had bowed to the inevitable, pleaded guilty, and received long prison sentences. The woman told him that her boss had agreed to offer him and his wife a free week at any of their company’s dozen or so luxury hotels in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Jack had thanked her, but responded that a BPD regulation prohibited him from accepting any benefit for services performed in the line of duty, no matter how long after the events took place.

  Apparently, his reply had been expected, because the woman continued, “We understand that. But my employer, Mr. Gennaro, is extending this offer to Mrs. Hendricks. I am deeply grateful for her help that night. I don’t have a contact number for her, so I called you. Would you be able to accept on her behalf?”

  “I suppose…” Jack replied, his mind tugging in two directions.

  “Good! I’ll send you an e-mail with a list of our resorts.”

  It had taken Jack about three seconds to pick the one Lucy wanted.

  Jack knew he should have reported the gift to his bosses, but he was so excited to surprise Lucy that he couldn’t face the possibility that he would be ordered to decline the offer. The adjective “idyllic,” so overused in resort literature, came nowhere close to describing their week at the Miramar. Diving trips, parasailing, romantic dinners on their private balcony, and making love morning, afternoon, and night—the experience had surpassed Jack’s wildest dreams.

  Too soon, the week was over. They returned to Miami, and then to Bayonne, and dropped back into what, for days afterward, seemed to Jack the most lackluster of existences. He and Lucy had always experienced post-vacation letdown, and they had joked about it mournfully, but this time was worse. As the final days of August drifted toward fall, Jack reflected that the summer of 2006 had been the best, the most intense, and the most loving he had spent with Lucy since their h
oneymoon, four years before. Now he faced what seemed like the most cheerless of prospects—solving crime in the six square miles of one of the most densely populated small cities in the Northeast. A city that was the birthplace of Sandra Dee, Frank Langella, Brian Keith … and Jack Hendricks.

  A city that Jack Hendricks wasn’t sure he loved quite as much as he had before.

  * * *

  In mid-October, Tait decided it was his turn to take some time off, so Jack’s captain paired him up with another veteran detective. A few days later, he and his temporary partner got drawn into the back end of a bank robbery investigation that had gone badly wrong for the criminals. A sharp-eyed off-duty cop had spotted them entering a branch of the Bayonne Community Bank and called it in. By the time the two gunmen ran out, their getaway driver was in custody and half-a-dozen cold-eyed cops were waiting to relieve them of their weapons and their take.

  With the trio in custody, Jack and his partner were assigned to interview one of the gunmen. The prisoner was in his forties, the oldest of the three. And, unfortunately for him, the intersection of his prior criminal record and New Jersey’s “three strikes” law meant he was facing a mandatory life sentence.

  A few minutes into the interview, Jack’s partner was called away. Assessing what he took to be a green rookie sitting in front of him, the prisoner decided to try him on.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to identify yourself to a prisoner?”

  “That’s right. You can call me Detective.”

  “Okay, Detective. And just how long have you been one?”