The Coffin Dancer

close range? How’d you like to face me down? On her mantel at home were a dozen trophies of gold-plated shooters aiming pistols. (The gilt figures were all men, which for some reason tickled Amelia Sachs immensely.)
    She stepped farther down the stairs, to the iron bars, then flattened against the wall.
    Sachs, the criminalist, examined the squalid spot carefully, smelling garbage, rot, urine, the salty smell of the subway. She examined the bars and the chain and padlock. She peered inside the dim tunnel and could see nothing, hear nothing.
    Where is he?
    And what are the cops and agents doing? What’s the delay?
    She heard the answer a moment later in her earphone: they were waiting for backup. Haumann had decided to call in another twenty ESU officers and the second 32-E team.
    No, no, no, she thought. That was all wrong! All the Dancer has to do is take one peek outside and see that not a single car or taxi or pedestrian is going by and he’ll know instantly there’s a tactical operation under way. There’ll be a bloodbath . . . Don’t they get it?
    Sachs left the crime scene kit at the foot of the stairs and climbed back to street level. A few doors away was a drugstore. She went inside. She bought two large cans of butane and borrowed the storekeeper’s awning rod—a five-foot-long piece of steel.
    Back at the gated subway exit, Sachs slipped the awning rod through one of the chain links that was partially sawn through, and twisted until the chain was taut. She pulled on a Nomex glove and emptied the contents of the butane cans on the metal, watching it grow frosty from the freezing gas. (Amelia Sachs hadn’t walked a beat along the Deuce—Forty-second Street at Times Square—for nothing; she knew enough about breaking and entering to take up a second line of work.)
    When the second can was empty she gripped the rod in both hands and began to twist. The icy gas had made the metal very brittle. With a soft snap the link cracked in half. She caught the chain before it fell to the ground and set it quietly in a pile of leaves.
    The hinges were wet with rainwater but she spit on them for good measure to keep them from squeaking and pushed inside, sweeping her Glock from its holster, thinking: I missed you at three hundred yards. I won’t at thirty.
    Rhyme wouldn’t have approved of this, of course, but Rhyme didn’t know. She thought momentarily about him, about last night, lying in his bed. But the image of his face vanished quickly. Like driving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, her mission now left no time for ruing the disaster of her personal life.
    She disappeared into the dim corridor, leapt over the ancient wooden turnstile, and started along the platform toward the station.
    She heard the voices before she got more than twenty feet.
    “I have to leave . . . understand . . . I’m saying? Go away.”
    White, male.
    Was it the Dancer?
    Heart slamming in her chest.
    Breathe slow, she told herself. Shooting is breathing.
    (But she hadn’t been breathing slowly at the airport. She’d been gasping in fear.)
    “Yo, whatchu sayin’?” Another voice. Black male. Something about it scared her. Something dangerous. “I can get money, I can. I can get a shitload a money. I got sixty, I tell you that? But I can get mo’. I can get as much’s you want. I ha’ me a good job. Fuckers took it away. I knew too much.”
    The weapon is merely an extension of your arm. Aim yourself, not the weapon.
    (But she hadn’t been aiming at all when she’d been at the airport. She’d been on her belly like a scared rabbit, shooting blind—the most pointless and dangerous of practices with a firearm.)
    “You understand me? I changed my mind, okay? Let me . . . and just leave. I’ll give . . . demmies.”
    “You ain’ tole me where we goin’. Where this place we gotta look through? You tell me that first. Where? Tell me!”
    “You’re not going anywhere. I want you to go away.”
    Sachs started up the stairs slowly.
    Thinking: Draw your target, check your background, squeeze three. Return to cover. Draw, squeeze three more if you have to. Cover. Don’t get rattled.
    (But she had been rattled at the airport. That terrible bullet snapping past her face . . .)
    Forget it. Concentrate.
    Up a few more stairs.
    “An’ now you sayin’ I don’t get ’em fo’ free, right? Now you sayin’ I gotta pay. You motherfuck!”
    Stairs were the worst. Knees, her weak spot. Fucking