Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

It seemed to take forever to come down. When it did, it hit dead solid on something hard and heavy. The noise boomed like an explosion from deep within a cave.

They yelled to each other. I started to feel my way along, going in the direction I had picked. I put one foot lightly in front of the other, slowly at first, but then it was hard to hold back, hard not to shut down my brain, let my instincts take over, and go crashing out of there as fast as I could. I held back until I saw the light spilling down the ramp. I began to jog toward the entrance, and then a fire kicked in, and I was running full out, and I couldn’t have stopped for any reason. If they were behind me, I didn’t know, because the only thing I could hear was the drumbeat of my own feet pounding the ground, my own heart pushing me forward.

I was flying.

The opening was ahead, the light washing into the dark tunnel like the tide rising onto the shore. I wanted to feel that light on me. The ramp was steeper than I had realized. I was breathing in a rhythm-in-in, out-out-every two steps, but the air seemed to hold less and less oxygen. At the moment when I felt I had to slow down, I heard the shots, loud and sharp, like the crack of an old tree branch snapped off in a windstorm. One of the rounds ricocheted off the ground in front of me. I knew they could see me against the light. I ran left and right in a jagged zigzag, aiming for the top of the ramp. I started to feel that something was pulling me forward, pulling me to safety. The opening was in front of me. I would make it. Fifty feet. Thirty. Twenty.

I didn’t even see him.

The collision was monumental, at least from my end. There was no time to stop, to turn, to do anything but plow right into him, which was like running headfirst into a Sequoia. I slammed into his chest. My head snapped back, and I was crumpling to the ground when he caught me. He had me by both arms. If I hadn’t been dazed from the crash, I would have been too spent to do anything anyway, so all I could do was stare at him.

He was big, especially across the shoulders. His head was square. His sport coat looked, in the dim light, to be a dusty rose over a black turtleneck. With a dizzying, disorienting rush of recognition, I realized I knew this man, and if I hadn’t been nearly unconscious I would have been scared, because the last time I had seen him was in Chicago, where his jacket had been lemon yellow. I expected any second for one of his big hands to release my arm and grab me by the throat.

It didn’t.

He turned his thick shoulders and looked down into the tunnel, probably seeing down there what I could hear-my two pursuers coming up the ramp.

“Go,” he said. He let go of my arms and turned me around. “Run.”

I wanted to drop to my knees. I wanted to let my head hang down until I could breathe again, but I could hear the other two coming. I put one hand on my aching side and started moving again, limping back toward the fence. When I turned to look back, he was gone.

I couldn’t get the dust out of my nasal passages. I kept blowing, sniffing, snorting, and mashing my nose against my face. Whether it was in my snout or in my mind, I couldn’t say, but I had an itch there that I couldn’t scratch, and it kept me on the razor’s edge of a sneeze. I smelled as if I’d just come in from a long run, only terror sweat is more pungent and rancid than exercise sweat. Both of my shoulders throbbed, the right one more than the left. I hoped I hadn’t torn something important.

I had found my way to the Fleet Center complex, which led directly to North Station, where there were plenty of people hanging out waiting for commuter trains to the suburbs. I sat on a bench along one wall and watched them. It had been more than an hour since I had crawled out of the tunnel, and I was trying to figure out if it made sense to go back to my car in the North End. It was either that or call Harvey, which seemed almost harder than any other option I could think of.

I was pretty sure the two men at Monica’s had been waiting for her, not me, probably for the same reason as the big guy had been after me…her in Chicago. Blackmail schemes gone awry. This was a dangerous game Monica was playing. Why did I keep paying the price? The big guy must have figured out his mistake, which was why he’d had no use for me tonight.

I did not want to deal with Harvey, so I went outside and hailed a cab that took me to the North End. I gave the cabbie five dollars extra to wait until I got safely into my car.

When I reached up to grab my seat belt, I noticed the business card in the visor. Printed on the front was the name Djuro Bulatovic. Below it was an 800 number. On the back was a handwritten note.

My sincerest apologies. Please call.

They say first impressions are the ones that last. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to think of Djuro Bulatovic as anyone but the man in the lemon chiffon jacket who choked me until I passed out.

EVEN WITHOUT THE ROBIN’S-EGG-BLUE JACKET, he wouldn’t have been hard to spot. He was twice the width of any two people sitting on the benches around him, and he wore a smartly coordinated tam. Based on the data points I had collected so far, I imagined the Djuro Bulatovic closet to be a tidy repository of pastel, home to a disciplined row of ecru, dusty rose, mint green, and lavender sport jackets, all with muted silk linings, each as big as a sleeping bag.

He read his newspaper and never looked up. He seemed content to wait for my approach. The only problem was, I was having a hard time putting myself within the radius of his lightning-fast reach.

But there were plenty of people around on the street, many of them late-season tourists moving in the direction of the Prudential Center, embarkation point for the ubiquitous duck tours. It was the perfect low-humidity, light jacket day for such an outing.

The first step out to the sidewalk was the hardest. Then I put my head down, jaywalked across the street, and inched up to the man who had terrorized me…and saved me. When I was close enough to read his newspaper, he folded it and put it on his lap.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I brought you soup for lunch. Goulash. It’s good. Thick.” He pointed to the two cardboard cartons next to him on the bench. Steam curled up from the holes in the lids.

“You brought me soup?”

“Goulash. Did you want for us to take the tour? I wasn’t sure when you said to meet here. I bought tickets in case that was your intention.”

Goulash and a duck tour. He wasn’t exactly making me cower. The moon-shaped face, thick eyebrows, and sledgehammer forehead-they were all there, but now arranged in an expression that was deferential, almost gentle.

“I’ll skip the duck ride.” In spite of everything that had happened the night before, I had finally gotten a good night’s sleep. I’d spent the morning taking a long hot bath to soothe my aching muscles. I had no desire to go on an open-air, amphibious crawl through the crowded city streets of Boston and up the Charles River. “I don’t know where Monica is.”

“That is not,” he said, “why I wanted to see you.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Only to talk.”

“Why would I talk to you? You almost killed me.”

“No.” He was greatly offended. “I did not. I was asked to send a message in a forceful way. Did you get the message?”

“In the most forceful way. Except you gave it to the wrong person.”

“Yes.” His hands were on his knees and his large head tilted at an attitude of true contrition. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I hope I helped you last night.”

“You did.” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Thank you for that.”

“Please, sit.”