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"How's 'paraphernalia'?" Berger suggested.
"Could you just leave them there, on the table?"
"You're sure?" he asked Sachs.
She nodded again.
T
he doctor set the pills, brandy and plastic bag on the bedside table. Then he rummaged through his briefcase. "I don't have any rubber bands, I'm afraid. For the bag."
"That's all right," Sachs said, glancing down at her shoes. "I've got some."
Then Berger stepped close to the bed, put his arm on Rhyme's shoulder. "I wish you a peaceful self-deliverance," he said.
"Self-deliverance," Rhyme said wryly as Berger left. Then, to Sachs: "Now. What's this I have to do?"
She took the turn at fifty, skidded hard, and slipped smoothly up into fourth gear.
The wind blasted through the open windows and tossed their hair behind them. The gusts were brutal but Amelia Sachs wouldn't hear of driving with the windows up.
"That'd be un-American," she announced, and broke the 100-mph mark.
When you move . . .
Rhyme had suggested it might be wiser to take their spin on the NYPD training course but he wasn't surprised when Sachs declared that that was a pussy run; she'd disposed of it the first week at the academy. So they were out on Long Island, their cover stories for the Nassau County police ready, rehearsed and marginally credible.
"The thing about five-speeds is, top gear isn't the fastest. That's a mileage gear, I don't give a shit about mileage." Then she took his left hand and placed it on the round black knob, encircled it with hers, downshifted.
The engine screamed and they shot up to 120, as trees and houses streaked past and the uneasy horses grazing in the fields stared at the black streak of Chevrolet.
"Isn't this the best, Rhyme?" she shouted. "Man, better than sex. Better than anything."
"I can feel the vibrations," he said. "I think I can. In my finger."
She smiled and he believed she squeezed his hand beneath hers. Finally, they ran out of deserted road, population loomed, and Sachs reluctantly slowed, turned around and pointed the nose of the car toward the hazy crescent of moon as it rose above the distant city, nearly invisible in the stew of hot August air.
"Let's try for one-fifty," she proposed. Lincoln Rhyme closed his eyes and lost himself in the sensation of wind and the perfume of freshly cut grass and the speed.
The night was the hottest of the month.
From Lincoln's Rhyme's new vantage point he could look down into the park and see the weirdos on the benches, the exhausted joggers, the families reclining around the smoke of dwindling barbecue fires like the survivors of a medieval battle. A few dog walkers unable to wait for the night's fever to break made their obligatory rounds, Baggies in hand.
Thom had put on a CD--Samuel Barber's elegiac Adagio for Strings. But Rhyme had snorted a derisive laugh, declared it a sorry cliche and ordered him to replace it with Gershwin.
Amelia Sachs climbed the stairs and walked into his bedroom, noticed him looking outside. "What do you see?" she asked.
"Hot people."
"And the birds? The falcons?"
"Ah, yes, they're there."
"Hot too?"
He examined the male. "I don't think so. Somehow, they seem above that sort of thing."
She set the bag on the foot of the bed and lifted out the contents, a bottle of expensive brandy. He'd reminded her of the Scotch but Sachs said she'd contribute the liquor. She set it next to the pills and the plastic bag. Looking like a breezy professional wife, home from Balducci's with piles of vegetables and seafood and too little time to whip them into dinner.
