He trained his gaze on her fingers. Eight. One. One. Seven. Five. Gracias, Carlotta.
He knew where she was going. She’d follow the same path she took every day, five days a week, for thirty-six years: a block and a half to the subway station at 72nd Street, catch the uptown C train, take it ten stops to West 155th Street, and walk another block and a half to her apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue.
He and Carlotta had bonded from the very first day he set foot in Princeton Wells’s house. She was Salvadoran; he was Guatemalan. They had an almost identical coppery skin tone, a shared culture, and a mutual distrust of rich white people.
He remembered asking her once why she didn’t ask Princeton’s mother to have the family chauffeur drive her home, or at least pay for a cab.
“Mrs. Wells, she offered,” Carlotta said. “But I say ‘No thank you very much.’”
“Why would you turn down a ride in a limo?” he asked.
“A ride in a limo is wonderful,” she said. “But getting out of a limo in my neighborhood is not so smart. When you take the subway, nobody notices you.”
And Carlotta definitely did not want to be noticed. Thanks to the Wells family, she was a permanent legal resident of the United States, but her husband, Milton, his two brothers, and three of her cousins were not.
He watched her walk purposefully toward the station. When she was halfway down the stairs, he stepped out of the shadows and followed her. God, how he wished they could reconnect. If she saw him, she’d scoop him up in her arms and insist on taking him home and cooking up a big platter of pupusas.
If only, he thought as he came up behind her and wrapped his left arm around her neck and pushed her head forward with his right hand, putting enough pressure on her carotid artery to cut off the blood flow to her brain.
She went limp immediately, and he lowered her to the ground. He unzipped her purse, removed her keys, and went back up the stairs. She’d regain consciousness in a few minutes, check her purse, and breathe a sigh of relief when she saw that her wallet and her money were still there.
She’d be home before she realized her keys were missing. But she wouldn’t call the cops to report the attack. Even though she could produce a green card, Carlotta would never invite la policía into her apartment when there were that many undocumented skeletons in her family closet.
Segura walked back toward Wells’s home, tapped the digits 81175 into the keypad, and unlocked the door. As soon as he stepped inside, he heard the beep-beep-beep of the alarm system asking for yet another security code that would prove he was not an intruder.
That was easy. He’d learned it years ago, and he was sure it would never change. The password was 36459, which spelled e-m-i-l-y on the keypad.
Emily Gerson Wells was Princeton’s great-grandmother. Her singular sense of design and elegance permeated every corner of the mansion. Her portrait, painted by the renowned John Singer Sargent, hung over the mantel in the great room. And lest anyone forget their heritage, her name had to be spelled out every time one of her heirs wanted passage into the grand home that was her legacy.
Segura tapped in Emily’s name, and the beeping stopped.
Back in the day, Princeton’s father had an imposing office on the second floor. The old man had died a few years ago, so the office would be Princeton’s now. Segura trod silently up the stairs, put his ear to the mahogany door, and heard the soulful voice of Mary J. Blige coming from inside.
He opened the door and stepped over the threshold. Princeton was stretched out on a leather sofa, a book in one hand, a drink on the table at his side. He looked up at the bronze hard-bodied ghost from his past, and he froze.
“Hello, Princeton,” Segura said. “I see you’re still a reader. Is it a good book?”
“Hello, Geraldo,” Wells said. “Yes, I’m enjoying it.”
Segura nodded. “Too bad you’re not going to live long enough to finish it.”
CHAPTER 68
“Would you care for a drink before you kill me?” Wells asked.
“No thanks. But feel free to finish yours.”
Wells sat up on the sofa and downed his drink. “Do you mind if I have one more for the long journey ahead?” he said, getting up and going to the bar.
“You’re taking this rather calmly,” Segura said.
“Geraldo, it’s not like I didn’t expect you. Even so, I’m rather in awe of how you slipped in the way you did.”
“It helps to have a history. I’ll leave these here for Carlotta.” He dropped her key ring on the desk. “So tell me something: if you knew I was coming, why didn’t you get out of the country? You have a plane. You have money. You could have gone anywhere.”
“I didn’t want to go anywhere,” Wells said, pouring from a bottle of Balvenie thirty-year single malt. “New York is my home. My work is here. My charity is here. My whole life is here. I decided I’d wait for you to show up and try to do what I do best.”
“And what’s that?”
“Negotiate.”
Segura laughed. “You mean beg for mercy like Nathan did.”
“Give me a little credit, will you? I’m not begging. I’m trying to increase the value of my life.”
“It’s like old times, Princeton. You’ve totally lost me.”
“Right now I’m worth nothing to you. You kill me, and I’m dead. End of story. But what if I said I’d give you a hundred dollars not to kill me? Now I’m no longer worth nothing. Now it’s going to cost you a hundred bucks to kill me.”
Segura laughed. “And worth every penny. Pour me a little of that Scotch, will you?”
Wells took a clean rocks glass from the bar, added three fingers of the single malt, and handed it to Segura.
“You trying to get me drunk, mate?”
“I don’t think that would help my case. Now, where were we?”
“It was costing me a hundred dollars to whack you, and I happily paid the price.”
“Now what if I said a million dollars? You’d probably still kill me, but you’d walk out of the room knowing that revenge cost you a million dollars. You see where I’m going with this?”
“You’re very good at these high-finance shenanigans, aren’t you? So now you’re going to try to come up with a number that would make me think, I can’t kill the fucker. It’s going to cost me a fortune.”
“That’s the plan,” Wells said. “It’s a gentleman’s game. Very civilized. All I have to do is make me worth so much money alive that you realize you can’t afford to kill me.”
“You took twenty years of my life,” Segura said. “Do you think I can put a price on that?”
“I think you already have, Geraldo. That’s why you’re here. Del, Arnie, and Nathan all paid for what we did to you. If you kill me, you’ll have exacted revenge. But what about justice? Shouldn’t one of us compensate you for your twenty years of pain and suffering? Shouldn’t one of us pay for the forty or fifty years you have left ahead of you? I’m the only one with those kinds of resources. That’s why I’m still alive, and you’re here drinking my single malt.”
Segura grinned. “You’re right. In the beginning, I wanted to mow down the four of you with an AK-47. But as I got closer to freedom, I realized that while four dead former friends would make me feel good for a few brief moments, three dead and a shitload of money would keep me happy forever.”
“Hallelujah,” Wells said, tossing down half of his drink. “So tell me the number you have in your head, and we can both get a second chance at life.”
“Five million dollars—”
“Done,” Wells said quickly.
“A year,” Segura said. “Five million dollars for every year I spent in that rat-infested shithole wearing leg-irons and shackles in the stupefying heat, choking on the stench from the communal latrine, while you got fatter and richer, never once lifting a finger to rescue me from the hell you subjected me to.”
“A hundred million dollars,” Wells said, making it sound partly like a statement, partly like a question.
“Take it or leave it.”