Free A Killing Gift by Leslie Glass Page A

upstairs hallway looked like an attic, but Bernardino's office was another story. All signs of Bill's adolescence were long gone except for the red-and-green-plaid curtains on the windows and a matching spread on the single sleigh bed. Everything else was perfectly neat. The large office-type desk showed that a tidy adult had worked here. The phone had a blinking message light and caller ID with eighty-three calls stored in it. April's heart thudded with excitement. His whole world was opening. The computer was a Micron with a flat screen. April punched the on button and Windows 98 came up.
    Good old Bernardino. Everything on his desk was labeled and arranged just so, his notebooks, stacks of old files, the proposals Kathy had mentioned. Boxes of photos. It looked as if he'd trashed his home life, but had been carefully cataloging his work life. As if for some future reference. Amazing.
    "He was a good guy, right?" Kathy said.
    April sat down at the desk, cleared the screen, and typed,
The best!
Then she got to work.

Thirteen
    J ack Devereaux's right arm was bent at the elbow, frozen in a cast that pretty much immobilized him right down to the fingertips. Eighteen hours after he'd been treated, assured that he'd be fine, and sent home, pain started chewing him up again. Home was a one-bedroom apartment on the parlor floor of a falling-down town house in the heart of Greenwich Village. It wasn't even the whole floor, just half of it. Twenty-five feet long by sixteen feet wide, broken up into a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a tiny bedroom, all without windows to the outside, and a living room that faced the street. Jack, Lisa, and Sheba had been living there for a year and a half. Until two weeks ago the couple had felt very lucky indeed to have found a place in such a great neighborhood that they could just about afford.
    Now, with an unimaginable fortune heading his way, Jack's concept of the bare essentials was only starting to change. What does a person dream of acquiring when suddenly he can have anything at all in the world he wants? A week ago he'd been thinking of a bigger apartment and a new printer. Now all he wanted was for the pain to stop.
    He was settled uncomfortably on the sofa. The sofa had been his mother's, and was a restful tan-and-white tweed number that was long enough to sleep on. It fit snugly in the handsome bay windows with an excellent view of the street, the only windows they had. And even after years of continuous service the sofa still didn't show its age. Jack's computer and desk chair were placed outside the curve of the windows where the room widened. The computer sat on what might have been the dining room table if they ever actually dined, which they didn't.
    Until last night, Jack's task had been to accept the gift of sudden enormous wealth that would come when the estate lawyers got through with whatever it was they did. Tonight, as he fought the pain in his arm and shoulders, he tried to adjust to this new twist in his life. He didn't know which made him more uncomfortable, the unexpected riches or the unexpected role of hero. He sat awkwardly on the sofa, propped up by all the pillows off the bed, watching the TV version of his valor. Every word a lie.
    Nobody in the hospital had told him that two cops had been attacked, that one was dead and he'd saved the life of the other. Lisa hadn't known it either. But now, despite that cop's promise last night to keep Jack's part in the incident out of the news, the whole world knew it anyway. His picture was on the screen, the same photo they'd used before. And his personal story was back on the front page. Lisa sat beside him, watching with pride and delight.
    "Jack, this is so cool. My boss is all over me to sign you," she said excitedly. "You know, he's been talking TV movie. But now it's much bigger than that. You're a phenom."
    Jack didn't feel like a phenom, but he cracked a feeble smile for her.
    "What can I do for you?" She sat on his