Larkin’s momentum kept him going past Ricky’s prone body, and he managed to barely remain standing and skid to a stop before he crashed headfirst into a trash can on the corner. Breathing hard, Larkin swiveled around, keeping his weapon drawn as he demanded, “Hands on the back of your head, right—so help me if you reach half an inch more for that gun, I will blow your fucking nuts off, Ricky. Hands on your head, right now.”
“You broke my nose,” Ricky wailed in his slow speech mannerism.
“Hands, Ricky!” Larkin snapped.
“Larkin!” Doyle was holstering his weapon as he came toward them. “You okay?”
“Yes. Take his gun.”
Doyle crouched, yanked the pistol from Ricky’s jeans, and removed the magazine. “Two rounds missing,” he confirmed before pocketing it, sliding the gun into his own waistband, and retrieving a pair of handcuffs.
“Whose blood is on your shirt,” Larkin demanded.
Ricky moaned something into the ground.
“Whose blood is it,” Larkin asked again, more forcefully.
“She’d always been the one who got away,” Ricky sobbed.
Larkin lowered his firing stance and said to Doyle, “Read him his rights. Call it in.” He started running toward the walk-up.
“Where are you going?” Doyle shouted after him.
“Jessica Lopez!” Larkin reached the front door—locked, of course—and began pressing the buzzer to every unit. “NYPD,” he announced, when someone had finally answered in a skittish voice.
The door immediately buzzed open and Larkin plowed through the vestibule and up the stairs two at a time. He raised his SIG at the second-floor landing and moved carefully toward Jessica’s open door—the door she had shown to keep methodically locked.
But she had known Ricky for God only knew how long, had no reason to not open the door when he knocked.
2D opened. A wizened old man and another man who was likely his adult son both glanced into the hall. “We called 911,” the old man warned in a shriveled voice, like he had pegged Larkin as the attacker.
The son was holding a cell to his ear and said with courage he clearly wasn’t feeling, “Y-you better get the fuck outta here. The cops are coming.”
“I’m a detective,” Larkin said. “Everett Larkin. Tell the dispatcher that right now. Tell them I’m alone and I’m going into Jessica Lopez’s apartment.”
The father tried to open the door a bit more and peer into 2C, but his son pulled him back by the shoulder.
“Tell dispatch my partner is outside with a suspect,” Larkin ordered.
And he must have come across as honest, sincere, believable, because the son nodded vigorously and began relaying the information into the phone.
Larkin reached Jessica’s doorway and called, “Ms. Lopez, it’s Detective Larkin. Are you able to respond.” He waited only one breath. “I’m coming inside.”
He moved down the hall and entered the untidy kitchen. PomPom was cowering under the kitchen table. A slick trail of bright red blood covered the tile floor, heading into the next room. Larkin cleared the dark office before moving into the even more disorganized bedroom. Jessica lay facedown, a number of trinkets having fallen from the cheap shelf, her cell phone among them, like she’d been trying to reach for it. One of the windows had a hole through the glass and was cracked like a spiderweb.
Larkin holstered his pistol, eased Jessica onto her back, and yanked a sheet from her unmade bed. He wound it several times and then pressed it to the bloody gunshot in her abdomen.
The scene on East Sixth between Avenues C and D at 1:49 p.m. looked like a chaotic law enforcement block party. Black-and-whites with strobing lights were haphazardly parked along the sides of the road. One of two ambulances was pulling away with Jessica in critical condition, sirens screaming. Radios of uniformed officers crackled in the bus’s wake. Any minute, one of the fifty CSU detectives employed by the city would pull up and begin processing Jessica’s apartment.
Larkin sat on the bumper of the second ambulance. One of the paramedics was washing his hands of Jessica’s blood. A cabernet to a rosé to no one ever knowing he’d packed the gut shot of a dying woman with retro Rainbow Brite sheets. Larkin looked away from his hands. He studied Doyle, his exclusive-to-this-case partner, speaking with one of the responding detectives from Precinct 9. He was giving an official report as to their presence on the scene and the pursuit of Ricky when Larkin saw blood on his sweatshirt and had reason to believe an immediate connection to the gunfire. It was better that Doyle was taking the first pass. Larkin wasn’t feeling particularly amicable, and his report would undoubtably reflect that.
“Detective?”
Larkin blinked a few times and looked to the paramedic standing over him.
“I asked if you wanted to remove your ring for a moment—get the inside of it.”
“Oh.” He tugged the silver band free. Dried blood discolored his finger.
