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A Criminal Game (The Criminal Collection Book One)

By D.L. Wood

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PROLOGUE

I can’t believe this is how it ends.

Evie’s heart slammed into her rib cage as her knees, weak and shaking, threatened to give way. A warm, sticky breeze kicked up the tendrils of sable hair that had long since shaken loose from her low bun. They danced around her face, oblivious to the danger on the rooftop in Queens, as the burnished rays of the early morning sun cut through the sky.

This can’t be how it ends. A wave of lightheaded panic rolled through her, making her dizzy. She forced herself to keep standing. To be steady. Because she needed to be ready. She needed to run—had to run. But there was nowhere to go. So, she stayed there, her insides like ice despite the stifling, humid air, holding her frozen where she stood. Just feet away from him.

He raised the sleek, black gun. She should have known better. She should have realized…but, that was the point, wasn’t it? She wasn’t meant to have realized. And now she was going to suffer for it. Except, she wasn’t the only one who would suffer. The physical pain of that reality stabbed her in the chest as she stared down the barrel, moments away from losing everything.

CHAPTER ONE

12 HOURS EARLIER

The number 7 westbound train rattled through Queens toward Manhattan. Evie Diaz stared out the window, the same, unchanging scenes that she witnessed daily whizzing past. The same people, the same cars, the same gaudy billboards…it was comfortingly routine. Chilled air from the ventilation system blew across her face and she sighed at its touch. August in New York City could be scorching, and after baking all day in the heat, the air inside the subway car was suffocating whenever the air conditioning failed. But today it vigorously pumped icy air into the compartment, keeping her sweat-free on the forty-minute ride from her two-bedroom apartment in Flushing to Grand Central. It was a good thing, too, because she would have plenty of opportunity to work up a sweat during the six-block walk south from Forty-Second Street to the Wexsor Hotel, where she worked as the night manager.

Unfortunately, the cool air did nothing to combat the stale smell that time and use had seared into the space, or the zesty scent of the curry-laced takeout held in the lap of the man sitting across from her. At 7:05 p.m., the westbound car was half full, likely with many other night-shifters heading in to start their workday. Several wore uniforms—delivery, hospital, and such. Only one wore a suit. At the far end of the car, an older woman Evie presumed to be a grandmother spoke to a young girl in rapid Spanish. The girl, who looked to be about six, shook her pigtails vehemently in protest against whatever the woman was saying, a sour pout emerging on her lips.

Evie smiled, reminded of her own spirited daughter, who had done more than her fair share of pouting in her five short years. Evie turned her gaze from the little girl, replacing her with visions of her Gabriella, laughing and running away from her last week as Evie demanded she leave the penguin exhibit and follow her to the exit of the Central Park Zoo.

She’ll be watching Disney Channel now, waiting for Eleanor to finish preparing her supper of…what? Probably hot dogs and mac and cheese, she thought, one of the three meals Gabby would agree to eat these days. Eleanor was a godsend, quite literally, Evie believed. The widow was a retired postal worker who lived across the hall and had befriended Evie and Mark when they moved into their apartment nearly six years ago. A year later, when their daughter Gabby arrived, Eleanor became something like a grandmother to her. When Evie had bemoaned the cost of daycare, Eleanor suggested Evie take her on as Gabby’s nanny. It had worked seamlessly—this warm, wonderful woman simply crossing the hall to keep Gabby whenever Evie’s shift overlapped with Mark’s workday, which, to their disappointment, was most weekdays.

As a stockbroker in the downtown office of Cripps Securities in the heart of the financial district, Mark would have to leave home around six thirty in the morning to catch his train. If they were lucky, Evie would get home from her night shift about an hour before that, giving them a tiny window of time together. But if she was delayed at all, or if the trains were slow, they would miss each other coming and going. The same thing was prone to happen even more so in the evenings. She had to leave home by 6:45 p.m. to make it into Manhattan for her shift, but as a junior trader, Mark often stayed late at work and wouldn’t make it home before then. Yes, they had the weekends to make up for it, but sometimes there would be several weekdays in a row when they wouldn’t see each other, and those stretches were awful.

Looking toward the East River, she saw an eastbound 7 train in the distance, racing toward her westbound 7. On nights when she didn’t get to see Mark before she left their apartment, she would stare out the windows of her train as it raced along, hoping for an eastbound 7 just like this one to pass her. Whenever one did, she would wonder if Mark was coming home on the other train, and whether he was reading one of his spy novels, or the Wall Street Journal, or catching a few minutes of sleep before taking over for Eleanor.

As she had so many times before, she shifted in her seat and waited for the trains to meet. As the opposite train rumbled by, a chill fluttered through her, and she put her hand against the window, reaching toward it. As if Mark could sense her presence there. As if there were a possibility he was in one of those cars, riding home again, instead of six feet underground in Capshaw Cemetery.

It would be three years next month since he died. Three years of leaving her daughter in Eleanor’s care each night that she worked. Three years of Eleanor sleeping over till Evie arrived home at around six in the morning to slip in before Gabby woke. She felt the tears coming again. They always did when she dwelled too long on Eleanor’s role in their lives and the reality rushing headlong toward them, that soon it wouldn’t work that way, couldn’t work that way, anymore. Soon Gabby would lose yet another person who loved her.

No. Can’t go there.

The train reached the Hunters Point Avenue station where the line burrowed beneath the ground, shutting out the sun as it prepared to travel under the East River on its journey to Manhattan. After taking a deep, cleansing breath, Evie exhaled, forcing her thoughts to something else as the train rattled on toward Grand Central Station.

As Evie emerged from the station at Grand Central on FortySecond Street, the haze of dusk had begun to settle over the streets of Midtown Manhattan. On this stretch, the streetlights had already flicked on, bathing the busyness in an artificial glow. Rush hour never ended in this city, and, the same as every other night, the incessant honking and bumper-to-bumper traffic of cars driving uptown, downtown, to the FDR, or one of the bridges was going strong. Every time she stepped out into the cacophony from the depths of the subway below, she marveled at how often people spoke of being “assaulted” by the noise, as if it were violent or unwelcome. To her it felt more like an embrace. Like a friend welcoming her home. It had taken seven years for this Texas girl to feel that way, but now, she could not imagine living anywhere else.

She crossed at the light and continued west for a few blocks toward Fifth Avenue. There she turned south at the corner of Forty-Second and Fifth, so that her path took her directly in front of the massive structure that was the iconic branch of the New York Public Library. She nodded a greeting at the twin lions cut from Tennessee marble that flanked the steps leading to the library’s entrance. “Patience. Fortitude,” she whispered, calling them by name.Her heart winced a bit as she passed them, longing for a brief visit, but she kept her pace steady. This place had been one of their favorites. They would make a picnic of it in Bryant Park, situated directly behind the library, grabbing sandwiches or sushi or whatever, and spread out a blanket on the small patch of green in the belly of this concrete jungle. Then they would pop inside and explore the current temporary exhibits, or the permanent ones that were their favorites.

Now, sometimes when she caught the train early, she would make a detour up those steps, into the room where the institution’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible was displayed, one of less than fifty left in the world. She would stand before the glass case that housed it, staring at the red and black inks that filled whatever page the book was opened to, wondering what it would be like to be able to read Latin and personally understand the precise message conveyed there.

Evie’s breathing slowed as the image of the book’s pages swam in her mind. Mark had brought her to the library that first week in the city after their graduation from Baylor University. They were full of promise then—graduates for six weeks, a married couple for four, moving back to the city of his youth and preparing to take on the world.

“Imagine,” Mark had said as they stood in front of that case, his dark eyes riveted to the pages. “Imagine the hand that set the blocks that produced that page. Do you think he knew? Do you think he knew how this would change the world?”

He was like that. Had been like that, she thought, catching herself. Mark had considered everything. He had always looked for the deeper meaning. Asked the deeper questions. It was one of the reasons she had fallen for him. He had seen something deeper in this ancient book, in this piece of the past and of his faith. It had been important to him and so it had become important to her. After everything, it brought her comfort to think that the messages represented by that text had been offering hope and answers to humankind for over twenty centuries, long before a car accident had taken a boy named Mark from a girl named Evie, and that it would continue to do so long after.

Ignoring the stinging in her heart, she sped up, crossing Fortieth Street at the next light. She kept up this pace for several blocks until finally turning right at Thirty-Fifth Street, headed toward the center of the block where the rippling redand-navy flag of the Wexsor Hotel flapped in the breeze.

The entrance of the hotel sported two revolving front doors, adorned with gleaming brass and spotless glass panels etched with the “WH” emblem. The building itself was a grand edifice that recalled the New York of another era. Originally constructed for a stately bank in the first part of the twentieth century, a veined, creamy marble covered the exterior of the first floor. To the right of the doors, a rectangular bronze marker read, “Third Bank of Manhattan, 1908.” Though the bank had gone under in November of 1929, the marker remained like a tombstone.

To the left of the doors, Wilson Vickers stood at his post, vibrant and enthusiastic as always. With a huge smile splitting his deeply lined, sepia-toned face, he greeted an arriving hotel guest emerging from a limousine parked at the curb. Wilson was a six-foot-seven tower of muscle and kindness who had played as an offensive lineman for C.W. Post College on Long Island in the eighties before a knee injury destroyed a promising bid for the NFL. He was the first to befriend Evie when she started at the Wexsor five years ago and the first from work to come see her after Mark’s death. As the crowd on the sidewalk in front of Evie parted, Wilson caught sight of her and winked warmly. Evie grinned back, just before her gaze fell on the hotel’s complimentary on-call Lexus SUV also parked against the curb, and its ginger-haired driver.

With his brownish-red locks, fair skin, and lanky range, you would expect, if movie stereotypes held true, that the driver boasted a name like Patrick O’Callahan or something equally Irish. But instead he had been christened “Bruno Agnellini” by his parents, a name that conjured up images of a sturdy, Popeye-armed bouncer, not the lithe man in his late twenties who was now opening the Lexus’s rear door for one of the Wexsor’s bejeweled senior guests.

Bruno turned and caught Evie watching him. She smiled, but as usual, he offered only a cursory nod. It had been this way since he began driving for the Wexsor four months earlier. Evie had tried at first to be friendly, chat when they would pass, smile wide and whatnot, but he had only ever tipped his head or replied with the briefest of answers when not responding at all would have been inexcusably rude.

She nodded back at him, fighting a desire to roll her eyes, then grasped the handle to the modest employee’s entrance to the left of the main doors and slipped inside.

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