“Ahhhhhh,” the man said, and nodded. He liked the gun. He showed Michael the key again, and then inserted it into the padlock that hung from a hinge and hasp on the metal door, and as if performing a magic trick, he turned the key and opened the padlock, and grinned and nodded at Michael. Michael nodded back. The Chinese man took the padlock off the hasp, and then moved aside. If there really was a sniper out there, he wasn’t going to be the first one to step out onto the roof. He almost bowed Michael out ahead of him.
“You stay here,” Michael said.
“More cops,” the man said, and nodded. “I call more cops.”
“No!” Michael said. “No more cops. This is undercover.”
The man looked at him.
“What’s your name?” Michael asked.
“Peter Chen,” the man said.
“Mr. Chen, thank you very much,” Michael said, “the city is proud of you. But you can go back down, thank you,” Michael said. “Good-bye, Mr. Chen, thank you.”
“I come with you,” Chen said.
Michael looked at him.
Chen smiled.
Michael sighed in resignation, opened the door, and stepped quickly out onto the roof. He paused for a moment, getting his new bearings, trying to work out where he was in relationship to Connie’s building, where the sniper was. Because once he did that, the rest would be simple. The buildings here were all joined side by side, there were no airshafts to leap, it would merely be a matter of climbing the parapets that separated one rooftop from the next. So if the cross street was here, then Connie’s street was there, and he’d have to go over this rooftop and then the next one to the corner—
“What you do?” Chen asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“Ahhhhh.”
—and then make a left turn and continue on over the rooftops till he came to the middle of the block somewhere. Long before then, on a clear moonlit night like tonight, he’d have seen the sniper. The trick was to make sure the sniper didn’t see him. Or his new friend, Chen, who was now behind him and staying very close as he made his way across the roof toward—
“I see nobody,” Chen said.
“Give it time,” Michael whispered. “And keep it down.”
The snow had drifted some four feet high in places. It was almost impossible to tell where one rooftop ended and the next began. He discovered the first parapet only by banging into it. He climbed over it, Chen close behind him, and was working his way laboriously through the snow toward the corner where the buildings joined at a right angle when he saw up ahead—
He signaled with his hand, palm down and patting the air.
Chen got the meaning at once, and dropped immediately flat to the snow.
Michael raised his head.
There.
He squinted into the distance. Someone in black. Crouching behind the parapet facing the street. Rifle in his hands.
“Stay here,” he whispered to Chen.
Chen nodded.
Michael began creeping forward.
He did not want to kill anyone. He had Crandall’s .32 in his right hand and Frankie Zeppelin’s .45 in the left-hand pocket of his bomber jacket, but he did not want to use either of those guns to kill anyone. He’d already been accused of killing one person, and he did not want to add to that list the actual murder of yet another person. It was too bad, of course, that the person lying on the roof up ahead was armed with a rifle he’d already fired at Michael.
Because if that person wanted to kill him, as seemed to be the case, then he certainly wasn’t going to put down his rifle and come along like a nice little boy. In which case Michael might very well have to shoot him. Perhaps kill him. The way he’d killed people in Vietnam, where it hadn’t seemed to matter much. Kill or be killed. Like tonight. Maybe.
He suddenly wondered why this person wanted him dead.
Crawling across the snow—closer and closer, keeping his eyes on the man as he advanced steadily toward him, ready to fire if he had to, if he was spotted, if the man turned that rifle on him—the question assumed paramount importance in his mind.
Why does this person want to kill me? And then another question followed on its heels, so fierce in its intensity that it stopped Michael dead in his tracks.
Who is the person they’ve already killed?
The corpse wasn’t Crandall’s, that was for sure, even though Crandall’s identification had been found on it.
But there was a corpse, there was no mistake about that, the police of the Seventh Precinct had found a dead man in the car Michael had rented, so who was that man?
Maybe the man in black over there would have the answers to both questions.
Michael began moving toward him again.
He could see the man clearly in the moonlight now. Forty yards away from him now. Black watch cap. Black leather jacket. Black jeans. Black boots. Black gloves.
Crouched behind the parapet facing the street, hunched over a rifle, Michael couldn’t tell what kind at this distance. Telescopic sight on it. The man suddenly got to his feet.
Michael froze.
In an instant, the man would spot him, and turn the rifle on him.
In an instant, Michael would have to shoot him. But no, the man—
Huh?