Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“Your flair for description is amazing, Billy, as is your appetite.”

“Well, they didn’t find anything. You want me to lie?”

“What about the canvassing?”

“The old guy in 5B says he heard someone go down the stairs at a little after two.”

“He see who it was?”

“No.”

“Anything else.”

“The pay phone at the corner.”

“What about it.”

“I had the LUDs checked just in case,” he said, referring to the local use details. “There was a phone call made about two ten.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, well, what’s more interesting is where it was made to.”

“Don’t be coy, Billy. It doesn’t suit you.”

“The Coolidge.”

“That flophouse by the bridge?”

“That’s the one. I got a uniform to drive over and talk to the night manager about the call. Turns out the night manager’s behind the counter with his throat slit. About ten minutes later some old wino comes in and says a black devil came through the window of his house and got blood over everything.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Some Vietnamese punk in black bike gear got tossed off the bridge or something and came through the window of an old Chevy the wino was sleeping in. Messy. Funny thing is, a switchblade was found just outside the car in some weeds.” Billy looked up at the building. “Think there could be a connection?”

“Yeah, Billy, I think there just might be. Maybe we should get over there and take a look.”

They climbed into Delaney’s unmarked Crown Victoria, Boyd behind the wheel, and drove against traffic up Sixth past the looming Village View project to the corner. Delaney glanced out at the phone booth and Boyd gave a whoop on the siren behind the grill, clearing the way across First Avenue. They continued along Sixth Street, Boyd’s big red nose actually twitching as they went by the half dozen restaurants that made up Little India. Doughnuts or tandoori chicken, Boyd welcomed it all with a totally unprejudiced gullet.

The big unmarked G-car swung south down Second Avenue. They reached the corner of Second and Houston and Boyd was about to turn west when Delaney screamed at him.

“Stop the car! It’s her!”

“Who?”

“Just stop the goddamn car, will ya!?”

Just as they’d gone into their turn Delaney had seen a flash of bright red hair coming up out of the Second Avenue subway station on the south side of Houston Street, the figure resolving itself into Finn Ryan. The tires on the Crown Vic screeched in protest as Boyd jammed on the brakes, and for some reason his hand jabbed out and pushed the siren button. The horn whooped and moaned as Delaney wove through the traffic.

Finn turned at the sound and saw Delaney pounding across the six lanes of Houston Street traffic toward her, dodging taxis and delivery vans like a running back trying to avoid being tackled. She stood for one frozen instant at the top of the subway stairs, then turned and ducked down into the darkness again. By the time Delaney reached the south side of Houston Street she was gone. He stood panting at the subway entrance. She was lost and he didn’t have the slightest idea where she was going.

Finn rode the F train one stop to Broadway-Lafayette, changed for a downtown G train and then changed again for a Brooklyn-bound 4 train, which she rode all the way down to Bowling Green. She stood rigidly, her hand wrapped around the pole, staring at the doors and not really seeing anything at all or anyone around her. Seeing Delaney had been the last straw. The look of the man as he came hurtling across the street wasn’t that of someone willing to offer a helping hand. He already thought she was somehow implicated in Peter’s death and probably had something to do with Crawley’s murder as well. Adding Raptor Head to the body count wasn’t going to make him any less suspicious even if it had obviously been self-defense. She didn’t even know who the Asian kid was, for crying out loud! Suddenly she was a suspect in multiple murders with cops chasing after her up and down New York streets and into the subway.

The train rolled into the Bowling Green station at the southern tip of Manhattan and Finn snapped out of her fugue. According to the map the next stop was Borough Hall in Brooklyn. She’d had a hard enough time learning how to navigate around Manhattan; this was definitely not the time to start on a new borough. When the doors slid open she stepped out along with a couple of dozen bright young things, male and female, out to make their mark on Wall Street, no doubt.

Finn climbed up to the surface, glanced briefly in the direction of where the Twin Towers had stood, then turned away and crossed over into Battery Park. She found a bench down by the jogging path that ran right around Manhattan’s big toe and stared downriver at the Statue of Liberty, a distant ghost in the morning haze. She stripped off her knapsack, put it on the bench then sat down beside it, curling one long leg underneath herself, thinking out her options.

Her name was Fiona Katherine Ryan from Columbus, Ohio, and she was an art history student at NYU. She’d slept with fewer than half a dozen guys, she liked Hдagen-Dazs better than Ben and Jerry’s and she didn’t really believe anything she heard on Howard Stern or saw on Sex and the City reruns. She’d traveled to Italy, spent a little bit of time in Amsterdam and Paris and she’d been well and truly drunk about three times in her life. She didn’t smoke dope or take drugs except for Extra Strength Tylenol when she had especially bad period cramps. She worried about zits in the winter. The biggest secret she had was the knowledge that she would have sex with Johnny Depp in the middle of Times Square if he asked her to, which wasn’t likely. She knew she was fairly intelligent, maybe a little smarter than average. She knew she was pretty, but not beautiful, which was fine with her. She liked small animals, especially cats. She didn’t much care for spiders or anchovies.

In other words, she was completely normal. So what was she doing being homeless, chased by cops and guys with great big knives? She was caught in the middle of something but she didn’t have the slightest idea what. All she knew right now is that she wished she smoked. She sighed and stared at the ripply patch in front of her where the waters of the East River and the Hudson met. That was kind of how she felt right now-swept along.

She had a twentieth-century English lit prof they called the Bald Bear because he had hair all over his body and none on his head. He was in his forties, wore argyle socks and shorts to school in the middle of February and talked on endlessly about the Ambler theorem. Eric Ambler was an early thriller writer and all of his books followed the same pattern: an ordinary person suddenly finds him- or herself in an extraordinary, and usually dangerous, set of circumstances. The Bald Bear had all sorts of his own theories about why Ambler wrote this way, but Finn was pretty sure he did it because he knew that spies and murderers weren’t going to be reading his books-ordinary people were, so why not deal them into the game?

Well, that was her, and for the moment she couldn’t see any way out. And in this case it was no game. If she went and handed herself over to Delaney she’d have to start everything by explaining why she ran. She had visions of Law amp; Order interrogation rooms, being interviewed by Lenny Briscoe and being thrown into some women’s jail. The only other option she could see was simply getting out of town and going back to Columbus. She had a key to the house, a bank account and friends. She could camp out there forever, or at least until her mother got back from the Yucatбn or wherever. At least she’d be safe there. Or would she?