Silent Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

needed more medication. Street cocaine was good, but not precise enough . . . .
    Then: Dink.
    Bekker turned his head. The intrusive sound came from a corner of his basement apartment. Almost a bell, but not quite. Instead of ringing, it simply struck once each time the old woman pushed the button.
    Dink.
    Bekker frowned, walked to the intercom, cleared his throat, and pressed the talk button. “Mrs. Lacey?”
    “My hands hurt.” Her voice was shrill and ragged. Old. She was eighty-three, hard of hearing, nearly blind in one eye. Her arthritis was bad and growing worse. “My hands hurt so much,” she complained.
    “I’ll bring a pill . . . in a few minutes,” Bekker said. “But there are only three left. I’ll have to go out again tomorrow . . . .”
    “How much?” she asked.
    “Three hundred dollars . . .”
    “My golly . . .” She seemed taken aback.
    “It’s very difficult to find these days, Mrs. Lacey,” Bekker said. And it had been for decades. She knew that. Morphine had never been street-legal in her lifetime. Neither had her marijuana.
     
    A few days after he’d taken the job as a live-in helper—the old woman’s word, she didn’t need bathroom assistance—he’d shown her a Wall Street Journal story about bank failures. She’d read it, nearly whimpering. She had her Social Security, she had her savings, some $370,000, and she had her building. If any of them broke down . . .
    Edith Lacey had watched the old street women as they went by, pushing their shopping carts along the broken pavement, guarding their bundles of rags. She knew them, she said, although Bekker didn’t believe her. She’dlook out and make up stories about them. “Now that one, she once owned a grocery on Greenwich . . .”
    Bekker suggested that she spread her cash among three or four unrelated banks, so more would be insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
    “Uncertain times,” he told her in his careful voice.
    She’d talked to her only ambulatory friend about it. Bridget Land, who didn’t like Bekker, had thought that spreading the money among banks would be a good idea. And she’d volunteered to go with them: “To make sure everything is on the up-and-up,” she’d said, her eyes moving almost involuntarily toward Bekker. “At the banks, I mean.”
    They’d moved the money in a single day, the two old women nervously guarding the cashier’s checks like mother hens. Edith Lacey carrying one inside her blouse, Bridget Land the other in a buttoned pocket, just in case. They’d focused so closely on the checks that neither had paid much attention to Bekker as he reviewed Edith’s applications for new accounts. Bekker had simply checked the “yes” box that asked if the applicants wanted automatic-teller cards. He picked up the mail each afternoon; a week after they’d moved the money to the banks, he’d intercepted the automatic-teller codes, and a week after that, the cards themselves. The cards were each good for five hundred dollars a day. During the first month, Bekker worked the accounts almost daily, until he had twenty thousand in cash.
    “Get fruit,” the old woman ordered.
    “I’ll stop at MacGuire’s,” he said on the intercom.
    “Apricots.”
    “Okay.” He started to turn away.
    “Be sure to get apricots . . . .”
    “Yes,” he snapped.
    “You didn’t get them last time . . . .”
    He was seized by a sudden urge to go up and choke her: not the urge that took him to his subjects, but an almost human desire to choke the shit out of a common nag. “I’m sorry,” he said, abjectly, hiding the sudden fury. “And I’ll try to get your pills.”
    That would shut her up . . . .
     
    Bekker turned away from the intercom and, through the dark living quarters, saw Cortese’s body in the bright light flowing from the operating room. Might as well do it now.
    From the kitchen, he brought a long roll of black polyethylene, sold as