Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

Too bad Rylan saw us at the same second. He immediately spun a lightning 180 and whipped to the right down Nassau.

I gunned the engine and roared forward into the intersection in pursuit.

For eight feet.

Nassau, the one-way street he’d turned down, at the moment was a no-way street. The middle of the road had been ripped up and a World War I–style trench was carved into the center of it, where earthmoving equipment stood behind barricades. Our car wouldn’t fit, and Rylan was on the left-hand sidewalk racing away.

I ripped the transmission into park and jumped out into the street, hitting the sidewalk at a dead run.

“He’s heading south!” I yelled to Arturo as I ran, clutching my radio like a sprinter’s baton. “There’s not much Manhattan left where he can hide. Coordinate with everyone. We need to box him in!”

On the sidewalk, I immediately almost plowed into a trio of Jamaican construction workers pushing a Sheetrock-filled Dumpster out of a building. As I ran stumbling into the street, alongside the construction barrier I could see that Rylan was already at the next corner, Ann Street, slaloming around pedestrians.

As I watched, Rylan blasted through an old Chinese food delivery guy, sending him flying back into the intersection. Then there was a sickening, bone-crunching crash as the Chinese guy got creamed by another bike messenger, a teenage Asian guy coming west on Ann.

As I ran up, I could see that the poor old food delivery guy’s nose and mouth were bleeding as he crawled around in the gutter on his hands and knees. On the ground beside him, the teen biker was making a hissing sound as he rocked back and forth, gently cradling what looked like a badly broken wrist.

“I need to borrow this!” I yelled as I jumped on the messenger’s fallen bike. “You’ll get it back. I think.”

CHAPTER 98

I LOOKED UP TO see Rylan make an abrupt left onto Fulton Street, but when I got there, no blue bike was to be seen down the narrow street or on either sidewalk. Then my eyes fell on the descending stairs to the subway in the left-hand sidewalk, and I jumped off the bike and lifted it as I ran down the stairs.

There was a yell as I hopped the turnstile with the bike and came out onto a train platform. I could see a businesswoman sprawled on her back and just beyond her, Rylan on his sky-blue bike pedaling like mad.

“Move, move!” I yelled to the waiting passengers as I followed Rylan down the platform. At the other end of it was a set of three steps that I had to hop off the bike to mount. At the top, I spotted Rylan pedaling furiously down a long, brand-new pedestrian tunnel with shining white graffiti-free tiled walls.

I watched Rylan go around a bend in the tunnel, and when I finally got around the bend myself, I was just in time to see him leap nimbly off his bike and carry it gracefully through an exit turnstile before taking the stairs two at a time.

Damn, this guy is in good shape, I thought, gasping as my elbow painfully clipped the metal frame of a billboard on the wall.

Finally coming up the exit stairs into daylight, I could see Rylan in the distance, south along traffic-fill

ed lower Broadway. He skidded around a dog walker in the crosswalk, then did an actual wheelie between an old tow truck and a Smart car blocking the box.

“Arturo! Come to Broadway! We’re on Broadway heading south!” I yelled into the radio as I split the gap between a flatbed and a Range Rover.

Through my sweat, I was just able to see Rylan shoot around a pedicab and hook a right off Broadway onto Dey Street. Following him a moment later, I slammed the side of a delivery truck with a palm as it almost ran me over. Then I wobbled to my right and scraped the left side of my face against the side of a stopped city bus. A jutting burr or bolt or something on the bus cut my ear, and I added blood to the sweat I was already dripping onto the blurring asphalt.

When I made a lane-shifting, skidding right onto Dey myself, I was just able to see Rylan’s sky-blue guided missile make a left onto Church. I knew Church turned into Trinity Place, where the first Manhattan robbery had occurred.

Is that where he’s heading? I wondered between my ragged breaths.

It wasn’t, I found out a few seconds later. Rylan made a right on Rector, and then as I hit Rector, I saw him make a left onto West Street.

“He’s coming south on West Street,” I called happily to Arturo as I pedaled like a man possessed. We were near Battery Park now, Manhattan’s southernmost tip, and Rylan, for all his phenomenal riding skills, was running out of city.

“Pin it down Broadway, Arturo,” I called into the radio over the driving tempo of my bike chain, “and you can cut him off by the Battery! There’s nowhere to run!”

But I spoke too soon.

Far ahead, I watched Rylan, racing down West Street, suddenly veer to the left and do a bunny hop over a low railing. Then he was rocketing down a short embankment onto an entrance ramp under an overpass. As I got closer, I read the sign on the overpass he’d just disappeared into and groaned.

HUGH L. CAREY TUNNEL, it said.

CHAPTER 99

WHEN I GOT TO the spot where Rylan had jumped the rail, I stopped and lifted the bike over it and jogged down the embankment with it like a civilized madman. A multitude of drivers lay on their horns as I hopped back onto the bike on the entrance ramp’s shoulder.