had started constricting at the sight of those fingers with the missing tips.
When he felt confident he was far enough away from the murder scene to not be seen, he reached back into his pocket for that familiar object.
He brought out the inhaler, inserted it into his mouth, and inhaled deeply as he depressed the top of the tiny canister. A barely de-tectible puff of medicine entered his lungs. He held his breath nearly fifteen seconds, exhaled, and repeated the process.
Bourque tucked the inhaler back into his pocket. He took a few breaths through his nose, waiting for his air passages to open up again.
He turned around and walked back to have another look at the man with no fingertips.
Barbara sank into a leather seat opposite the mayor and Valerie. Glover and the good-looking bald guy made space for her in the middle, so her feet had to straddle the driveshaft hump. Even though the car was roomier than most, she found her shoulders squeezed by the two men. She was picking up a cheap aftershave scent from Glover. But the bald guy was giving off something subtler, an almost coffee-like scent. Barbara wondered whether it was an actual cologne, or if he’d been in the Starbucks line for too long. Either way, she kind of liked it.
She turned her head to face the bald man. “You’re new.”
He smiled.
“I’m Barbara Matheson, but I’m guessing you know that.” When he didn’t say anything, she looked at Headley. “Does he talk? Stomp his foot once for yes, two for no?”
“That’s Chris Vallins,” Valerie said. “Say hello, Chris.”
“Hello,” said Chris. Deep voice. If brown velvet could make a sound, Barbara thought, this would be it. “Nice to meet you.” He snaked a gloved hand around in the tight quarters and offered it.
“A pleasure,” Barbara said, shaking it. “And what do you do for His Holiness?”
“Part of the team,” he said. “Whatever the mayor needs.”
Barbara didn’t see her new friend Chris as much of a chatterer, so she turned her attention back to those sitting across from her. She wondered whether to make anything of the fact that Valerie was sitting next to the mayor. There was a foot of space between them, but Barbara tried to read the body language. If Valerie found her boss as unappealing as Barbara believed she should, she’d be pressing herself up against the door. But there was a slight shoulder lean toward Headley.
Maybe she was reading too much into it. And what did it matter, anyway? If Headley wanted to screw the help, and the help was okay with it, then what business was it of Barbara’s? Valerie was a grown woman capable of making an informed choice. Surely she had to know the mayor’s background, what a shit he reportedly had been to his late wife, Felicia. Everyone knew that, ten years earlier, the night Felicia died in their uptown brownstone after a long fight with cancer, Headley was fucking the brains out of one of her caretakers in a room at the Plaza. It was a young Glover who called 911 to report that his mother had stopped breathing.
Headley was already one of the most famous, if not most notorious, businessmen in the city, so when the media picked up an emergency call at his address, a couple of TV vans were dispatched to the scene. What ended up on the news was a shot of a weeping Glover, his father nowhere to be seen and not reachable by phone. Headley claimed later he had muted his cell because he’d been meeting with a possible investor whose name he was not at liberty to reveal. No one believed it for a second.
Barbara had wondered if that was when Headley’s relationship with his son had soured. The boy had humiliated him. Unwittingly, of course, but that was what he’d done. Headley had been on the cusp of a mayoral bid way back then but delayed it, hoping that as time passed his reputation would be rehabilitated. When he finally did announce his candidacy, he had created a myth about himself as the sad widower who had raised his teenage son on his own.
Felicia had been a looker in her day, a onetime model who worked her way up to a senior editor position at Condé Nast. Valerie had some of Felicia’s attributes, at least those the mayor valued. In her late thirties, she was younger than him by more than a decade. Long legs, busty enough without being too obvious about it, dark, shoulderlength hair. Probably bought all her clothes at Saks, went to some trendy salon like Fringe or Pickthorn to get her hair done. Unlike Barbara, whose salon was the bathroom sink, did quite well pulling together a wardrobe at Target, and whose makeup budget was a pittance compared to what she spent on pinot grigio.
More than once, at political events, when Valerie was looking the other way, Barbara had observed the mayor checking out his communication director’s ass as if it harbored some mystical secret. Not that hers was the only one.
But now, in the back of this limo, Headley had a very different expression on his face as he sized up Barbara. He was scowling at her, like she was a teenage daughter who’d ignored curfew for the fifth night in a row.
“So what’s happened uptown?” Barbara asked, looking out the window. The driver had found his way from City Hall to the FDR and was making good time heading north.
Beside her, Glover said, “Some kind of elevator accident.”
Barbara was underwhelmed. Elevator accident, crane collapse, subway fire. Whatever. It was always something in a city this big. It’d be news if something didn’t happen. If Headley felt a need to attend, it had to be more serious than usual, but still. Headley liked being seen at catastrophes. Say a few things for the evening news, give the impression he knew what he was talking about, show his concern.
Barbara was willing to cut him some slack on this. It was something all mayors did, if they were smart. A mayor who couldn’t be bothered to show up when New Yorkers endured something particularly tragic would be pilloried. Rudy Giuliani had set the standard, way back on September 11, 2001, as he walked through the rubble, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. Say what you wanted about the guy’s shenanigans since, you had to give him credit for his service back in the day.
Barbara doubted Headley had it in him to be that kind of mayor. She just hoped he—and the city—would never be tested like that again.
“They’re saying four dead,” Valerie said.
Barbara nodded again. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. But industrial accidents, car crashes, drive-by shootings, apartment fires, these just weren’t her thing. She covered city politics. Let the youngsters chase ambulances. She’d cut her teeth on that kind of stuff, and it was valuable experience, but she’d moved on.
“Nice of you to give me a ride, but this isn’t the way to my place,” Barbara said to Headley, who was still looking at her through narrowed eyes. “So, what? Am I grounded? Being sent to bed without my dinner?”
“Barbara, Barbara, Barbara,” Headley said, looking weary and disappointed at the same time. “When’s it going to stop?”
“What?” Barbara asked. “Your love of quid pro quos or my love of writing about them?”
“You think you can keep poking the bear and never get a scratch,” he said. “You’re not untouchable.”
Untouchable. Interesting choice of word.
“Well,
