Manhattan Is My Beat (Rune 1)

She continued along the sidewalk, feeling exhilarated. She'd met her first black knight--a pock-faced man in his sixties, wearing an ugly brown hat--and escaped from him without being broadsworded to death.

Oh, she was a beautiful princess though she was too short to be a model. A beautiful princess--and would be a lot more beautiful when her hair grew out. Then one day the princess became very sad because a terrible dragon killed a kind old man and stole his secret treasure. A secret treasure that he'd promised to give her part of and that'd also save the bacon of a friend of his who was getting hassled by the creeps at Immigration and Naturalization.

Third Avenue. Broadway. University Place.

So the beautiful princess herself set out to find the dragon. And she did and she slayed him, or slew him, or at least bagged his ass so he'd have to hang around Attica for twenty-five to thirty years. She got the treasure of gold, which she split with the friend and they both netted a cool half million.

Rune walked into the video store, watching Tony inhale the breath that would come out as "Where the fuck've you been?"

"Sorry." Rune held up her hands to pre-empt him. "It's been one of those mornings.

"

She stepped behind the counter and logged onto the register so fast that she didn't notice, across the street, the man she'd thought of as Pretty Boy, the one in the meter-reader jacket, slide into a booth in the coffee shop. He continued to watch her, just like he'd been watching her as he'd followed her from the building on Tenth Street where they'd hit the old man.

Rune grabbed a handful of tapes, started to reshelve them. Thinking:

And the princess lived happily ever after.

CHAPTER NINE

On the phone with Susan Edelman.

The pink-suited jogger, the one who'd been struck by the car in the alley beside Mr. Kelly's building, couldn't talk long. She was very groggy. "I'm being released, uhm ... tomorrow. Can you ... uhm, call me then?"

She gave Rune her phone number but it had only six digits, then tried again and couldn't remember the last four numbers.

Oh, she'll be a great witness, Rune thought sourly.

"I'll look it up in the phone book," Rune told her. "You listed?"

"Uhm, yeah."

"Feel better," Rune told her.

"I got hit by a car," Susan said, as if telling Rune for the first time what had happened.

Rune reshelved a few more tapes, then, as soon as Tony left, she told Frankie she was going for coffee, then booked out of the store.

Outside, she looked around the streets of the city. Caught a glimpse of somebody who looked familiar--a young man with dark, curly hair--but she couldn't place him. His back was to her. Something familiar about the stance, his muscular build. Where'd she seen him?

Where?

But he stepped quickly into a deli, so she didn't think anything more about him. That was one thing about Greenwich Village. You were always running into people you knew. Everyone thought New York was a huge city but that wasn't true; it was a collection of small towns. A Yellow Cab cruised up the street and she flagged it down. She was in the New York Public Library in twenty minutes.

The books on general city history--there were hundreds--didn't help her much at all. The history of crime in New York ... that was something else. One thing she learned was that in Manhattan there were more bank robberies per square mile than anywhere in the country--and most of them occurred on Friday. The traditional payday. So with that volume of heists, the Union Bank stickup didn't get much coverage. She found a few references to it. The only one that gave any details was in a book about the Mafia, which reported only that the Family probably wasn't involved.

The newspapers were better--though the robbery didn't get a lot of coverage because it hadn't occurred on a slow-news day. At the same time the hero cop was bargaining with the holdup man for the hostage's life, the rest of the world was following King Edward's abdication, which had filled all the city papers with features and sidebars. Rune couldn't help but read some of the articles; she decided it was the most romantic thing she'd ever heard. She studied the picture of Mrs. Simpson.

Would anybody give up a kingdom for me?

Would Richard?

She couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer to that question and turned back to the stories about the Union Bank robbery.

After the shootout was over: the robber was in the morgue and the million bucks was missing, though that didn't seem too important at first because the hostage was safe and Patrolman Samuel Davies was a hero. The only hiccup was that there was no satisfactory explanation as to how the robber passed the suitcase containing the money to his partner outside the bank before Davies started negotiating with him.

An accomplice of the deceased robber, it is suspected, secreted himself outside the bank and, in a moment of confusion while Patrolman Davies was boldly approaching the bank, seized the ill-gotten loot and absconded.