“Yeah. Cops are excitement junkies in a job that’s mostly boring and tedious. A report of shots fired in Midtown Manhattan, half the cars in the borough would be roaring here. If they were, it would be a good idea to have called them ourselves. It’s what innocent people would be presumed to do. We could claim self-defense like you said and having called them would help. The problem is explaining why we’re here…”

“I have an explanation…” she said, sounding sure that the obvious explanation, given her profession, would cover the matter.

“Why am I here? Am I your pimp? Protector? Your father? Come on. The two of us here and then, maybe, probably, someone puts together that we two, both of us, were also there when McMunchun died. You were in the car with him. This time, your hand was on the gun. The fact that the cops aren’t here yet, makes me think that the building is empty or mostly empty, nobody heard…”

“What about the security, downstairs…”

“You had a black wig on. You were half hidden by Cohen’s umbrella. I had my hat down over my eyes…”

“The signing in?”

“The guard didn’t sign you guys in. I didn’t use my real name.”

“What do we do?”

“My guess is that maintenance, the cleaning crew, comes in around three, that’s how it used to be. We have at least an hour, hour and a half. What we do, is sort of empty your mind, go to the front door, then slowly go through each step you took. Take the bag out of the garbage bin there, anything you see that might connect to you, put it in there. Any place you touched with your hands, muss it up. I’ll do the same. We take his phone, too. I’m guessing that Owen has other clothes around. We change our clothes as much as we can. Whatever works to make us look different than the way we came in. He’ll have a gym bag, maybe even a suitcase for rush travel, we put our stuff in that. We also take a bunch of his files, his laptop, any backup device or extra hard drives. Make a mess. Like someone was after him about one of his cases. Now the cops have to track down all those different things.”

“Alright. That all makes sense.”

“Then we walk out the side entrance, the one they use for trash and such.”

“But what about my shoes?” she said, looking at the one that the acid had burned through.

“Duct tape,” I said. “I bet we can find some duct tape.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

THE ABYSS

“WHEN YOU FIGHT WITH MONSTERS, beware that you do not become the monster. When you stare into the Abyss, the Abyss is staring back at you.”