Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,83

ominous.

In his gym shorts and ragged Fortescue College T-shirt, Nick walked, jogged, and thumbed along Lakeshore Drive before he caught a ride with a man driving a new, but phone-less, Cadillac. The man made a shy, lewd proposition as the car stopped twenty minutes later on St. Charles, in front of Audubon Park. Nick exited the car quickly, not bothering to shut the door. He jumped into his own car, parked nearby, and floored it into the thick traffic without looking.

At the next K&B drugstore, he called his office. No answer.

Then he drove like a madman, weaving from the street to the neutral ground, dodging joggers, dog-walkers, and streetcars, honking his horn as he sped through intersections.

But he was too late.

A fleet of police cars blocked the street in front of his office building. Three ambulances waited with open doors and flashing lights.

Nick charged inside and bounded up the stairs before any of the officers could stop him.

Pieces that had once been Hawty’s high-tech chariot littered the stairwell. On a landing, two paramedics were carefully placing Hawty herself on a gurney.

She was in a neck-brace, a leg was cocooned in an inflatable cast, and her bloody face was already swelling.

Tears of rage jumped into Nick’s eyes.

“Hawty, baby, how bad is it?” he asked, nearly choking on the words.

“How should I know? My body didn’t work so well before this,” she said, not much of her usual spirit subdued.

The female paramedic reassured Nick with a nod and a kind touch to his shoulder. She finished taping an IV tube to Hawty’s arm.

“Shelvin’s upstairs,” Hawty said, but broke off, overcome by sobbing. “And Ronald. It happened so fast. Ronald got it bad from two guys. White guys–a blond one and a dark-haired one–I think. Never seen them before. I’ve already told the detectives. We were coming back from lunch, and they just appeared from nowhere and pounced on Shelvin and Ronald from behind. Somebody kicked me down the stairs. They must have been just leaving our office, and we surprised them. Please, go find out how they are, Nick. They won’t tell me a damn thing.”

The paramedics started down the stairs with her.

She and the Balzar brothers, Shelvin and Ronald, had struck up a friendship, as now and then the two young men dropped in at the office, and planned aloud what great things they were going to do with the money the family was expecting from Artemis Holdings. Trouble was, the young men reported, the lawyers were having trouble finding out anything about this Hyam Balazar. Imagine that.

For all his bluster, Shelvin was really a nice guy; Ronald–lighter in color, slightly shorter, and less athletically honed than his older brother–was the charmer of the pair, the dreamer, and the one who seemed on the way to conquering Hawty’s impetuous young heart.

Nick had known they were going to lunch together. When he began to suspect that Armiger had summoned him primarily to get him away from his office, he immediately began to fear for their safety; he’d had a bad feeling about that upsetting phone call she took. Indeed, during the meeting in which Armiger delivered her ultimatum, the two goons were busy: they turned over his temporarily empty office–and his apartment before that, he later learned but didn’t report–and attacked Shelvin, Ronald, and Hawty when caught in the act. The phone call must have been the goons’ report of the unintended battle and of their failure to find the Natchitoches material.

“I’ll come see you later, Hawty…and I’ll do what I can for Shelvin and Ronald.” He watched until the group made a corner and sank farther down the stairway and finally moved out of sight.

Then he sprinted upstairs, taking two, three steps at a time. This is your goddamn fault! Still playing both sides of the game, like Armiger. Playing God.

In his hallway he saw uniformed cops and plainclothes investigators milling around; to the right, toward his office, paramedics worked frenziedly on a large, squirming human heap on the floor. Shelvin. He seemed to be still fighting off his attackers.

“My brother! Where’s my brother?! Let go of me!” Shelvin shouted over and over again. He knocked over a paramedic with a sweep of a bloody arm. Someone got a needle into him. His shouts faded to incoherent bellows and then to moans. Finally, he was quiet.

Blood pooled the hallway floor, particularly to the left of the stairwell, where one paramedic pumped a precise rhythm on Ronald’s chest, as another one tried