Run for Your Life (Michael Bennett 2)

THE TEACHER WALKED into Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, at eleven a.m.—still ahead of schedule. He’d stopped by his headquarters, a rented apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, and changed his appearance from head to toe. The Rolex was gone, replaced by a Casio sports watch. So was the Givenchy suit. Now he was wearing wraparound shades, a Jets cap, a traffic-cone-orange Mets spring training jersey, and baggy yellow basketball shorts.

No one could possibly have recognized him as the elegant businessman who’d pushed that worthless bitch in front of the train—which was precisely the point. To make the mission succeed, speed and surprise were key. He needed to strike like a cobra, get in and back out again before anyone even knew he’d been there. Melt into the crowds and use them as human shields. Exploit the multilevel, mazelike streetscape of Manhattan. Totally change his appearance—then strike again.

He found an empty folding chair in the park, removed his Palm Treo from his fanny pack, and brought up the other vital document it contained. To accompany his mission statement, the Plan was a fourteen-page blueprint for what he needed to accomplish. He scrolled to its last and most important page, a long bullet-pointed list. Almost in a trance, he read it over slowly, mentally rehearsing each and every possibility as he went along, visualizing how he would perform every act with calm, serious perfection.

He’d first learned about the power of visualization when he was a pitcher on the baseball team at Princeton. He wasn’t especially gifted—just a basic power righty, with a fastball in the low nineties. But his coach had taught him to go over the lineup of the opposing team before every game, imagining each strikeout in detail.

That coach had taught him a couple of more down-to-earth techniques, too. One was a velvety smooth delivery that made him seem faster. Another was to throw inside, which led to his well-deserved reputation as a headhunter.

And that was what had gotten him kicked off the team in his junior year. He’d plunked some blond pansy from Dartmouth so hard that the baseball cracked his helmet and gave him a concussion. The Dartmouth team assumed that he’d done it on purpose, because the asshole had gone three for three against him. The field had erupted in a bench-clearing brawl.

They were right that the Teacher had thrown the beaner deliberately, but wrong about the reason. What had pissed him off was the other guy’s hot girlfriend, sitting in the front row of the stands, who jumped up and cheered every time he was at bat. No way did that faggot deserve a girl like her. So the Teacher had decided to show her what a real man was all about.

He smiled at the memory. It had been his last game, but far and away the best of his life. He’d broken the Dartmouth third-base coach’s nose and all but spiked the ear off their catcher. If you had to go out, that was the way to do it. Too bad he’d never seen the girl again. But she’d remember him for the rest of her life.

The Teacher shook away the reverie and tucked the Treo safely back into his fanny pack. He stood, spent a moment stretching, then lowered himself to a runner’s on-your-mark stance, fingers digging into the gravel path.

He had his game face on now. It was time to get to work.

Bang! went an imaginary starting pistol in his head.

With his strong legs churning and gravel flying behind him, he bolted into a sprint.

Chapter 10

STEP ONE OF THE PLAN was to create a smoke screen. The Teacher was racing along the pavement between 41st and 40th when he spotted a perfect opportunity— a middle-aged businessman jaywalking across Sixth Avenue.

Strike like a cobra, he thought, instantly changing the course of his pounding footsteps.

He crashed into the suit like a linebacker, catching him in a headlock and dragging him to the curb.

“Hey! What the hell?” the guy gasped, struggling feebly.

“Cross on the green, not in between,” the Teacher sang, and spilled him to the pavement. “Like a human being—not a worthless animal.”

He spun away, and within seconds he was back at full speed, arms pumping, alert for his next target. He spotted it in an Asian restaurant deliveryman who was rushing south down the opposite sidewalk, jostling other pedestrians as he wove in and out of the crowd.

The Teacher made another instant turn, dashing out in front of the oncoming traffic and across the street, accompanied by a symphony of blaring horns, screeching brakes, and shouted curses.

-Take-out food bags flew into the air like startled pigeons as he clotheslined the deliveryman with a forearm across the throat.

“Where’s the fire, buddy?” the Teacher roared. “This is a sidewalk, not a racetrack. Show some fucking courtesy, you got me?”

He took off again, his flying feet barely touching the pavement. He felt incredible, invincible. He could run straight up the fronts of the glass canyon office towers and down the backs of them. He could run forever.

“WE WILL, WE WILL, ROCK YOU!” he screamed into startled faces. He’d always hated that song, but damn if it didn’t feel spot-on right now.

People stopped and stared. The street-smart ones, hot dog vendors and waiting radio car drivers and bike messengers, were wisely getting the hell out of his way.

It was hard to rouse attention on the jaded streets of Manhattan, but he was doing a bang-up job.

The light bouncing off the dark glass curtains of the monstrous buildings poured down on him like a holy baptism. His face split into a huge grin, and his eyes filled with happy tears.

He was actually doing it. After all the planning, all the obstacles, it was showtime.

He jumped out into the curb lane of the wide avenue and sprinted full bore toward the trees of Central Park.

Chapter 11