Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

He was coming back into the kitchen when his knee exploded.

He didn’t feel it at first—it happened so fast. He was just walking toward the drawer to get the can opener, and then he was collapsed on the yellow pine floor with a bloody ragged hole in the knee of his slacks.

“Pavel, hello down there,” said a voice.

Starting to hyperventilate at the growing pain, Pavel looked up at a distinctly unghostly-looking blue-eyed man who stepped out of the shadows with a smoking suppressed H & K Mark 23 in his right hand.

“You don’t know me, Pavel, but my name is Matthew,” he said.

The sniper smiled as he squatted, getting down on his level.

“And I have a couple questions for you today.”

Chapter 34

“And the plot thickens,” said Paul Ernenwein as we stood by the nurses’ desk at the second-floor ICU unit of Montefiore Hospital, in the Norwood section of the Bronx.

Pavel had been admitted at a little after two in the morning. A cab had come to his place, and the surveil team had followed it and Pavel to the emergency room.

He had some broken ribs and electrical burns on certain sensitive parts of him, and someone had put a .45 clean through his right kneecap. Apparently, he’d been worked over by someone who knew what they were doing. Who that someone was we didn’t know, but we were very interested in finding out.

“We’re obviously getting some promising results in the Pavel-seems-to-be-a-player hypothesis,” I said. “Who do you think tuned him up?”

“All three of the Pep Boys, by the looks of him,” said Paul, pointing at the console’s screen, which showed a bruised Pavel covered in cords, sleeping.

“The Russians? The Kremlin?” I said.

“You’d think, right?” said Paul. “But why leave him alive?”

“What does the house look like?” I said.

“Clean. Too clean. He’s got dogs. Plus there’s no sign of entry. Someone picked the locks, it seems. There was water all over the kitchen floor. Either Pavel decided to do some bobbing for apples after he kneecapped himself, or he was waterboarded.”

“You think it was the president’s shooter? Pavel was a middleman, and something got screwed up and the shooter needed to find out some information the hard way?”

“That’s a good theory,” Paul said. “We should use it.”

“You want me to go say hi?” I said.

“Can’t,” said Paul. “He’s got some internal bleeding. Doctors said we need to wait until the morning.”

“Maybe this works to our advantage,” I said. “If he spilled the borscht about something during his little inquisition, he might be in big trouble, right? We could offer him some sanctuary.”

Paul Ernenwein looked at the screen.

“Good night, Pavel. Sleep well. We’ll more than likely flip you in the morning,” he said.

Chapter 35

At eleven fifteen that evening, Sophie, wearing a large camping backpack, walked east down East 20th Street, past the Gramercy Park neighborhood’s charming Italianate and Greek Revival town houses.

She sighed as she passed the awning of the famous Players club, which had been founded by Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes. Astors had lived in the famous neighborhood. Steinbeck, Thomas Edison, even Julia Roberts.

Though she lived in SoHo, she sometimes fantasized about moving onto the famously attractive historic block, with its exclusive, mysterious private park.

Too bad she wasn’t here to house hunt. Her pick was already out as she got to the Irving Place entrance to the park. A moment later, its famous cast-iron gate briefly shrieked, and she was in.

She walked alongside snow-covered benches and hedges to the statue of Edwin Booth in the two-acre park’s center. Walking past it, she panned her eyes left and right along the small park’s straight and winding paths. But it was too cold and too late for anyone else to be there.