Michael Walsh - Early Warning

He was only a little surprised the cops had not found him, but then they weren’t really looking for him. The main action was with the Brothers; a few dead Jews far away from ground zero would have to wait. Unless he did something stupid, he could spend the entire day picking off whomever he chose.

He peeked out from under some bushes. Even on a normal day, there wouldn’t have been many people stirring, just the custodial staff at the Museum, which he really should visit someday except that he’d heard it was boring. His extra ammo was still here, right where he’d buried it, and so he’d reloaded before he’d gone to sleep and was now ready to go.

He’d had a chance to think a lot of things over last night, and come to several conclusions. One was that he didn’t mind killing people at all. Upstate, during training, he’d been deemed a little squeamish, and he found he really didn’t enjoy it when he had to saw that guy’s head off with a kukri knife. They never told him exactly whose head was being sawed off, just that the man was an Infidel and an Enemy and that no one would miss him. To Raymond, the poor schmo looked like just another homeless black guy, probably some bum from nearby Hancock or, better yet, Callicoon. Anyway, he didn’t struggle much, but it was still gross.

The second thing he’d discovered was that he didn’t mind killing women. He’d been raised never to hit a girl, but when he saw that broad outside the Y something had just gone off inside his head or his heart or whichever, and he’d taken her out without so much as a second thought. She probably wouldn’t have gone to bed with him, either, just like every other girl he’d ever met, and so she’d had to pay the price for the crimes of her sisters. And then the rest of them followed.

So, now that he was over that hump, he knew that sex couldn’t be far behind. At last, it was going to happen, because-thanks to the Brothers and their endless talk about the virgins and houris and all the pleasures of the flesh that would be available to him in the afterlife, pleasures that may or may not be denied to him in this life-he could make it happen. All it required was the Will.

And then his cell phone rang-that special ring that came only from the commander of the Brothers. Good: more fun.

Principessa Stanley decided to use her head, instead of the rest of her, which is pretty much what had gotten her on the air in the first place. The days when on-air female journalists earned their face time thanks to the force of their personalities, the cogency of their reports, and the reliability of their sources was long gone. Fox News had blazed that trail, rediscovering, as if rediscovery were needed, the old adages that sex sold and that everybody, male and female, loved a pretty girl. Short skirts and a law degree didn’t hurt, either.

So, instead of heading toward the Y, where there was very likely nothing to be seen anyway except a lot of police-line tape, she decided to wander into Central Park. From her youthful days at the University of Michigan ’s journalism school, she’d been taught the old police reporter’s motto, that to catch a criminal, you had to think like a criminal. One of the reasons she was such a good reporter, in her opinion, was that it was easy for her to put herself in a psycho killer’s shoes; in fact, she prided herself on thinking that she would have made quite a good psycho killer had she chosen to go into that particular line of work.

Which is why she found herself at this moment crossing Fifth Avenue. Sure, it was obvious that the park was where to hide, which is why it made such a brilliant hiding place. In her opinion, police work had become far too sophisticated, too dependent on computers; the shortest way between two points was still a straight line, and that was exactly what she making at this point as she triangulated in her mind between a possible hideout and the scene of the crime, which so happened took her at a diagonal from the Y to the Museum and thence to the infamous copse of bushes behind the Met. Like the Empire State Building, they were there for all to see, but if you lived in New York, somehow you never actually visited them yourself.

So this was the famous spot. Like every other famous crime scene she had visited-and, truth to tell, there weren’t all that many, since Principessa Stanley’s reporting career had been almost entirely confined to the classroom at Michigan and the news desk of a couple of low-and medium-rent boondock TV stations until the Show had finally called-this one was fairly unprepossessing in person. Like Dealey Plaza in Dallas, it seemed unworthy of such a crime.

She loved New York at this hour. Many was the time she’d gone for a run around the Reservoir in the morning, sharing the well-pounded path with a few other celebrities and some of the hoi polloi who were either decent enough not to invade her sunglassed-and baseball-capped privacy, or else too stupid to know who she was. Even at the height of summer, which was approaching, the air at least pretended to be fresh before the smell of the uncollected garbage could perfume it, before the effluence of the subways could poison it, and before the body odors of the two million people who called Manhattan home, not to mention the millions of commuters, could foul it.

“Hello, Miss,” came a voice behind her.

He was not that bad-looking, for a geek or a homeless person. From the looks of him, he had spent the night in the park but had somehow remained relatively clean. True, there was dirt on both his hands, black dirt, and had she had time to think about its provenance, she might have realized that there was no black dirt in Central Park. But firearms training, like logic, languages, history, comparative religion, culture, and literature, was one of the things they didn’t teach you in journalism school, and so she remained innocent in her knowledge of all those arcane and most likely dangerous subjects. She was, however, proud of her ability to craft a lede and should the occasion ever present itself again, she could no doubt develop a fine inverted-pyramid of a news story.

“Hello.”

Raymond Crankheit just stood there, not sure what to do next. This fine-looking woman standing before him had caught him completely by surprise, and he was suddenly as deep into a conversation with a woman as he’d been in years. He had to think of something to say next, something that wouldn’t scare her away, and send her running, perhaps to the cops. He couldn’t cope with cops just now.

“I was wondering…do you have the time?”

Principessa Stanley unholstered her BlackBerry and consulted it. “Nearly seven,” she said.

“Thank you.” Raymond hoped he hadn’t exhausted all his conversational gambits in one fell swoop. “I was wondering-could you tell me…is this Central Park?” It was lame, but it was also the only thing he could think of. He was a little agitated by what the commander had just told him…

Principessa looked at him with a bemused smile. Of all the lame lines she’d ever heard, and she had pretty much heard them all, this was one of the lamest. This was the kind of line a guy might use in the early afternoon on Fifth Avenue, or when he caught her coming out of her office on Sixth. In fact, it was so dumb that it just might be genuine. “What do you think it is- Coney Island?” she replied with a laugh.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the correct answer. A real New Yorker-which Principessa had tried so hard to become-would have recognized it at once as a stock reply, the kind of answer one gave to the hapless tourists standing at the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, wondering if that tall building in front of them was the Empire State Building or, worse, the World Trade Center. It was the kind of response that said subtextually, what do you take me for, a fool? A fellow tourist? And the joke would have been on the interlocutor, not the respondent. But these were not normal circumstances. And Raymond Crankheit was not a normal person.