Strangled - Brian McGrory [149]
As I said this, I eyed the boot carefully, though at the moment I wasn’t sure why. And then I was. Connected to the boot was a sock. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, hell, I’m not even Columbo, but the sock, I deducted, covered an ankle. The ankle belonged to a person hiding under the bed. The person hiding under the bed was undoubtedly Paul Vasco.
I stepped back, beckoned Vinny into the room with my hand, gave him the shut-up sign by placing a finger to my lip, and said aloud, “We missed him. He’s not here. Let’s get back to the newsroom, fast.”
Granted, I probably wasn’t ready for my Broadway debut, but I didn’t think this was bad.
I motioned Vinny out the door now. He left. I carefully stepped up on the one wooden chair in the room, summoning every bit of my athletic ability to remain as silent as I could. I leaned over and shut the door firmly.
My thinking was as follows: If I assumed that Paul Vasco was armed, and I had to assume that Paul Vasco was armed because it seemed like every single person I’d come across in the last week was armed, then I wanted to grab him while he was undertaking the awkward motion of emerging from under the bed.
Something else also pecked at my suspicions as well, and it was as simple as this: Why was Vasco hiding? And what did he have to hide?
I quite literally held my breath. Thirty seconds passed, and the boot didn’t move. Sixty seconds passed, still nothing. I let out little breaths through my nose and sucked in air through my mouth. I began to think he knew I was there. Either that or maybe sometimes a boot is just a boot, and all my deductive reasoning was out the window.
Two minutes in, I was furiously contemplating my next move. Do I look under the bed and risk being shot in the head? Do I simply grab at the boot? Do I step down from my makeshift pedestal and leave? And that’s when the boot moved, not anything subtle, but it virtually rolled over, and then a hand emerged from beneath the bed, grabbing at the top of the mattress, pulling the rest of the body out.
The form fully emerged from under the bed, facing away from me, still having no idea I was in the room. He was carrying something in his hand that wasn’t a gun. It looked like a sheath of paper. I had no time to think, let alone strategize. So what I did was pounce.
I leapt off the chair and on top of the guy’s back, slamming him down against the side of the bed, and then the floor. He let out a long, hard groan. I grabbed his neck in a headlock and slammed my fist into his gut. I’m not sure why I did this. Maybe it was all the violence that had touched me over the last week. Maybe it was rubbing off. I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth about this situation if I didn’t say it felt a little bit good.
Amid the cacophony, Vinny Mongillo flung open the door and raced into the room.
“Grab Vasco’s legs!” I yelled to him. I didn’t want the guy somehow kicking some particularly sensitive part of me while I tried to hold him down.
“I can’t,” Vinny replied.
I continued to hold Vasco down, his head facing away from me as his body furiously squirmed in an attempt to get free. “Why the hell not?” I asked, looking up at Mongillo.
“Because Vasco’s not here. This isn’t him.”
I pushed the guy away from me, down onto the floor. He had long, stringy hair, an unkempt beard that was born of nothing more than laziness, and needle marks up and down his skeletal