The Coffin Dancer

single one.
    He’d been feeling fine as he moved the black van off the street and parked it deep in an underground garage. Stephen had taken what tools he needed from the back of the vehicle and climbed the ramp, slipping out onto the busy street. He’d worked in New York several times before but he could never get used to all the people, a thousand people on this block alone.
    Makes me feel cringey.
    Makes me feel wormy.
    And so he stopped here in the men’s room for a little scrub.
    Soldier, aren’t you through with that yet? You’ve got two targets left to eliminate.
    Sir, almost, sir. Have to remove the risk of any trace evidence prior to proceeding with the operation, sir.
    Oh, for the luva Christ . . .
    The hot water pouring over his hands. Scrubbing with a brush he carried with him in a plastic Baggie. Squirting the pink soap from the dispenser. And scrubbing some more.
    Finally he examined the ruddy hands and dried them under the hot air of the blower. No towels, no telltale fibers.
    No worms either.
    Stephen wore camouflage today though not military olive drab or Desert Storm beige. He was in jeans, Reeboks, a work shirt, a gray windbreaker speckled with paint drips. On his belt was his cell phone and a large tape measure. He looked like any other contractor in Manhattan and was wearing this outfit today because no one would think twice about a workman wearing cloth gloves on a spring day.
    Walking outside.
    Still lots of people. But his hands were clean and he wasn’t cringey anymore.
    He paused at the corner and looked down the street at the building that had been the Husband’s and Wife’s town house but was the Wife’s alone now because the Husband had been neatly blown into a million small pieces over the Land of Lincoln.
    So, two witnesses were still alive and they both had to be dead before the grand jury convened on Monday. He glanced at his bulky stainless-steel watch. It was nine-thirty Saturday morning.
    Soldier, is that enough time to get them both?
    Sir, I may not get them both now but I still have nearly forty-eight hours, sir. That is more than sufficient time to locate and neutralize both targets, sir.
    But, Soldier, do you mind challenges?
    Sir, I live for challenges, sir.
    There was a single squad car in front of the town house. Which he’d expected.
    All right, we have a known kill zone in front of the house, an unknown one inside . . .
    He looked up and down the street, then startedalong the sidewalk, his scrubbed hands tingling. The backpack weighed close to sixty pounds but he hardly felt it. Crew-cut Stephen was mostly muscle.
    As he walked he pictured himself as a local. Anonymous. He didn’t think of himself as Stephen or as Mr. Kall or Todd Johnson or Stan Bledsoe or any of the dozens of other aliases he’d used over the past ten years. His real name was like a rusty gym set in the backyard, something you were aware of but didn’t really see.
    He turned suddenly and stepped into the doorway of the building opposite the Wife’s town house. Stephen pushed open the front door and looked out at the large glass windows in front, partially obscured by a flowering dogwood tree. He put on a pair of expensive yellow-tinted shooting glasses and the glare from the window vanished. He could see figures moving around inside. One cop . . . no, two cops. A man with his back to the window. Maybe the Friend, the other witness he’d been hired to kill. And . . . yes! There was the Wife. Short. Homely. Boyish. She was wearing a white blouse. It made a good target.
    She stepped out of view.
    Stephen bent down and unzipped his backpack.

 . . . Chapter Four
    A sitting transfer into the Storm Arrow wheelchair.
    Then Rhyme took over, gripping the plastic straw of the sip-and-puff controller in his mouth, and he drove into the tiny elevator, formerly a closet, that carried him unceremoniously down to the first floor of his town house.
    In the 1890s, when the place had been built, the room into which Lincoln Rhyme now wheeled had been a parlor off the dining room. Plaster-and-lath construction, fleur-de-lis crown molding, domed icon recesses, and solid oak floorboards joined as tight as welded steel. An architect, though, would have been horrified to see that Rhyme had had the wall separating the two rooms demolished and large holes dug into the remaining walls to run additionalelectrical lines. The combined rooms were now a messy space filled not with Tiffany’s stained glass