“Did he say what?”
“He said he’d killed someone else. A cop.”
“Seetha, did he have a name?”
“No, he never spoke of it. He just said he was forced to do it.”
“By who?”
Seetha stopped, her words trembling on her lips. “He spoke an awful phrase that day. And it’s not one I ever heard again, not until I was abducted last month. The man I shot, he said it, too. He claimed to be a friend of Rashad’s and said vengeance would be theirs for his killing. That the cops would pay.”
“What was the phrase?” Jimmy asked.
“Blue Death,” she said.
Jimmy’s mind went numb, and suddenly he was that fourteen year old boy watching as his father bled out on a Manhattan sidewalk. He heard his screams again, again, but the emotion stayed in the past, in that moment, like Jimmy had been taken back in time. Fr
