Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

Finn didn’t waste time thinking about what she’d done; there could have been someone out there, and if Delaney was right about the man who had killed Peter and possibly killed Crawley too, eventually there would be somebody coming after her. Hanging on to the baseball bat she hustled back into the bedroom, grabbing her knapsack from beside the couch as she went.

She emptied her books out of the pack, strewing them across the bed, leaving only her digital camera and the makeup bag she carried with her everywhere. She went into the bathroom, loaded herself down with everything from shampoo to tampons, jammed it into the knapsack and then threw in four or five pairs of cotton underwear, two bras, half a dozen T-shirts and some socks.

She pulled and pushed herself into a skintight pair of black Gap jeans, slid on her sneakers and jammed her baseball cap on her head. A minute later she was out the door and taking the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. She reached the bottom a little out of breath, unlocked her bike from its place behind the stairs and pushed out into the night. She checked the glow on her Timex: quarter to two. Hardly the best time of night to be on the run, but she didn’t have much choice. Between Peter’s death and Crawley’s murder in his office she was feeling more and more as though she had a target painted on her back.

She dropped the pack into the big front basket, climbed onto the bike and pedaled herself up Fourth Street to First Avenue, got off her bike and went into the pay phone. She pulled her little black book out of the back pocket of her jeans, threw a quarter into the slot and dialed. It was answered on the third ring.

“Coolidge.”

“Is that you, Eugene?” His real name was Yevgeny but he’d Americanized it.

“Is me. Who is this, please?” He sounded a little concerned, as though the KGB or his mother were calling him.

“It’s Finn Ryan, Eugene. I’ve got a problem.”

“Feen!” the young man exclaimed. He was one of Finn’s ESL students and he had a fixation on her breasts-or her ass, whichever happened to be facing him at the time-even though he’d denied it several times. “What is this problem you are having? I fix for you, no swee-at.” Yevgeny was the night manager at the Coolidge Hotel.

“That’s sweat,” corrected Finn. “I need a room for the night.”

“Here?” said Eugene, horrified. Finn smiled. She’d seen the Coolidge Hotel. It was a four-story, brick pigeon roost lurking under the Manhattan Bridge approaches on the tail end of Division Street, as if trying to distance itself from the flop-houses on the Bowery. It was ungentrifiable and it didn’t look as though anyone had even thought of trying.

“Yes. There. Don’t worry. I’ve got a credit card. I can pay.”

There was bitter laughter from the other end of the phone. Outside her phone booth half a dozen black teenagers were chasing an old man on a bicycle who seemed to be throwing old phone books at them, pulling them out of a frayed mail-bag he wore across his shoulders. New York. She had to get undercover, fast.

“We don’t take no credit cards here, Feen-cash only.”

“We don’t take any credit cards here,” she said, correcting him automatically.

“Yes, any. That’s right.”

“But I don’t have any cash.”

“I do,” said Eugene. “You pay me back later, yes?”

“Yes,” she answered, not sure if she wanted to be indebted to an eighteen-year-old Russian boy with zits on his chin and designs on her body.

“You come now,” urged Eugene. “Not good for pretty girl like you to be out this late.” He laughed again. “Not good for ugly girl to be out this late.”

“I’m on my way. If I’m not there in twenty minutes, call the cops.”

There was a snorting sound from the other end of the phone line. “Eugene Zubinov never call for cop in his entire life. Not about to start, even for pretty girl like you, Feen. You hurry up your ass and get here quick so Eugene no worry no more, capiche?”

Finn smiled into the phone. “Capiche,” she answered. She hung up the phone and got back on the Schwinn Lightweight, pausing for a moment to figure out her route. First was one way the wrong way and there was no way she was going to try riding on the sidewalk at this time of night. She could go over to Second, then down into the Financial District, but she’d be heading into a dead zone this late at night; if anything happened to her down there she’d never get help. Instead she turned the bike around and went back down to Avenue A, pumping the pedals full tilt as she sped past her building, then hanging a right, the fat tires hissing on the pavement as she stood up in the seat, getting as much speed as she could. She turned onto Houston and into heavier traffic, even at this time of night, keeping as close to the curb as she could, watching for parked cars opening their doors and keeping her eyes peeled for the dangerous yellow rush of taxis playing thread-the-needle on her left.

By the time she reached Eldridge Street and turned left, heading toward the bottom of the island, she sensed that someone was on her tail. Every time she zigged or zagged around a car she’d catch a brief glimpse of another bike a hundred yards behind. In the streetlights it gleamed, sleek and expensive-looking, its gold and black molybdenum frame with rams’ horn handlebars and razor-thin racing tires ridden by someone in the full package: skintight black racing shirt with dark Spandex cycle shorts, jet-black riding shoes and a black Kevlar raptor-style helmet, pointed down the back with an opaque angled visor in front. The kind of getup you saw on top-end bicycle couriers during the day running packages and envelopes all over the city, driving like bats out of hell and not giving a damn for anyone else on the road, from buses and garbage trucks right down to other bicycle couriers and even pedestrians.

He stayed on her tail, never gaining and never falling back, and by the time she got as far as Grand Street she was starting to get frightened. At first she thought the rider’s presence had been simple coincidence-two people going in the same direction-but what bicycle courier is still working at two in the morning? It might have been a cop, but she knew they rode mountain bikes and wore easily identifiable, bright-colored nylon shells. She remembered the awful sound Peter had made just before he died and pedaled faster, the sweat running down her sides and between her breasts. There had to be some way to lose him.

The best way to lose him was to lose herself. Without pause she swung the bicycle to the right, suddenly finding herself in a dangerous maze of delivery trucks around the big residential block of Confucius Square, known to the people who traveled through it as Confusion. She skidded around a man carrying the gutted corpse of two pigs, threw herself down a narrow alley piled high with boxes of rotting vegetables, then turned again down an even narrower alley packed with wooden crates that went flying as she passed. She heard screaming in Chinese as the clutch of a hand grabbed at her T-shirt and a bottle flipped by in front of her face, smashing loudly into the brick wall on the far side of the alley.

Sobbing, she swerved, tires almost slipping out from under her as she made the turn onto Pell Street and into the thick of the late-night Chinatown trade. Slaloming around cars, she bounced the old bicycle up onto the sidewalk, sideswiped a display of mysterious fruits and vegetables outside a tiny storefront then cut in front of an old man in a black cap and bedroom slippers, coming so close her shoulder actually brushed the butt end of the hand-rolled cigarette from the man’s slack lips, sending up a trail of sparks.

She came out onto Doyers Street and pulled hard left, still seeing her pursuer’s reptilian helmet out of the corner of her eye. He was closer, less than a hundred feet, and now he was making no pretense about following her. Directly ahead of her was the intersection of Doyers Street and Bowery, the lights at the corner just going from yellow to red. Heart pounding and lungs aching she put out her last bit of strength, pushing as hard as she could on the pedals. Reaching the intersection just as the light went to red, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, said a quick prayer and sailed across the opening. Eyes still closed, she heard the screaming of brakes and blaring horns followed by the satisfying crush of metal against metal. Without the time or the inclination to look back and see what kind of havoc she had wreaked, she kept on going across Kimlau Square and onto Division Street, then turned onto Market, following it down toward the East River in the shadow of the bridge, finally turning directly under the giant structure and in front of the grimy front entrance of the Coolidge Hotel. Panting hard, she dropped down off the bike, pushing it through the creaking wooden double doors and finally came to a stop.