Page 114 of NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice tight with desperation. He sounded whipped, trapped—a man at the end of his rope. “Give me a minute, will ya?”

And then silence.

I radioed Edlund. “Can you see anything?”

“They’re in the living room,” he said. “She’s on the sofa facing the front door. He’s in an armchair looking at her. They’re talking.”

“Not loud enough for us to hear,” I said. I waited another thirty seconds and pounded on the door again. “Vincent, don’t make matters any worse. Open the door.”

“Zach,” Edlund said. “Vincent got out of the chair. He’s walking toward the door.”

“Don’t... you... fucking... goanywhere,” Priscilla wailed.

“Gun! Gun!” Edlund said in a sharp whisper. “She’s up. She pulled a gun on him.”

“Go ahead, Prissy,” Vincent yelled. “Shoot me. Put one right through my fucking heart. It don’t matter. I don’t have a life anyway.”

“I’myour life!” came the instant response. “I cook for you. I keep the apartment clean. I make you laugh. I protect you from neighbors who want to know our business. I’m the one who made Dad go away! You think your precious girlfriend is going to do that for you?”

“Youuuuu fuckinnnnnng cuuuuunt!” Vincent screamed, turning it into a war cry. And then the crash of furniture splintering, glass shattering, and Priscilla shrieking.

Kylie and I looked at each other. It was now or never, and we both knew it.

“Go!” she said.

We already had the key in the lock. We turned it and swung the door open. Priscilla and Vincent were on the floor almost twenty feet away, thrashing, the gun nowhere in sight, their hands shielded by their bodies.

“Police! Don’t move! Police, don’t move!” I ordered as we rushed at them, guns drawn.

But they didn’t stop. They either didn’t hear me or didn’t care. It was just the two of them, a brother and sister in alife-or-deathstruggle that had been building for years and had finally come to a flash point.

And then the gun went off. A single muffled explosion, and the thrashing stopped. Priscilla was on the bottom of the heap. Her head jerked, her lungs grabbed for air once, twice, three times, and she let out a final breath.

Vincent rolled to his side, and the gun clattered to the floor.

Edlund and McDaniel, who had come through the window, cuffed him, searched him, and pulled him to his feet.

“I’mthirty-eightyears old,” he said. “I did everything to make her happy all her life, and after all I did for her, she’d rather kill me than see me go off and find some happiness of my own. I don’t get it. I don’t understand.”

I looked at Kylie. We understood. We’d learned it from a fellow named William Congreve.

Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.

CHAPTER 76

By the timeI got to the office the next morning, Kylie had left copies of theTimes,theNews,andthePoston my desk. “Just in case you don’t keep a diary,” she said, “everything we did this past week isfront-pagenews.”

“I know,” I said. “I have a friend at Fox. He said this is like a managing editor’s wet dream. It’s Christmas in July for the media. And not just in New York. It’s gone viral around the world.”

For me, it was just another reminder that the public’s appetite for the latest dirt on boldfaced names is insatiable. Whatever Megan, Sonia, the Hellmans, and Wayman Tate may have accomplished in their lives, they would forever be remembered for every mortal sin, heinous crime, and minor peccadillo they ever perpetrated.

And then, in the middle of it all, there was Theo, aneighteen-year-oldnobody who was about to become somebody. But on his own terms.

Never mind that every newspaper, magazine, radio station, and TV network wanted to interview him, Theo stayed out of sight. His steadfast refusal to meet the press or even make a statement only enhanced his mystique. In no time, #WhoIsTheoWilkins was trending on Twitter.

The two of us sat down for a cup of coffee and a can of Red Bull that morning before I left for work.

“I’m not talking to anybody until I talk to my father,” he said.