“Don’t you know that you are made for greatness?” he’d wanted to shout at them as he skirted the plastic bumpers and overheating SUV grilles. “Don’t you know you were put here for something more than this?”
He climbed the stairs to his apartment, now wearing the blue Dickies work clothes that he’d changed into before he’d escaped. He knew it was a pretty lame disguise, but the fact of the matter was, it didn’t have to be that great. With its millions of people and exits and entrances and subways and buses and taxis, the city was virtually impossible for the police to cover.
The cops had been actually screeching into the plaza in front of the building entrance as he’d left the stairwell. He had simply walked through the bank attached to the lobby and used its exit to the side street.
He sighed. Even the ease with which he’d gotten away was somehow making him feel blue.
Safely inside his apartment, he pulled his recliner over to the window and sat. He was tired after his walk, but it was the good kind—the manly, righteous exhaustion that came from true work.
The sun was starting to set over the Hudson, its light washing the faded tenements and warehouses with gold. Snatches of memory came to him as he gazed at it.
Scaling chain-link fences. The heat of the concrete through his sneakers. Stickball and basketball. His brother and he playing in one of the rusted playgrounds alongside Rockaway Beach.
Those were from his old life, his real life, the one he’d been ripped out of when his mother kidnapped him and took him to rot on Fifth Avenue.
The irrevocable nature of what had happened to him pierced him like a heated needle. There was no going back, no do-over. His life, so crammed full of all the crap that was supposed to make him happy, had been ultimately and completely worthless.
He cried.
After a while, he wiped his eyes and stood. There was still work to do. In the bathroom, he turned on the tap in the tub. Then he stepped into the spare room and lifted the corpse off the guest bed.
“One more,” he whispered to it lovingly. “We’re almost done.” With a tender, caring smile, he carried it to the bathtub.
Chapter 62
HALF AN HOUR LATER, the Teacher went to the kitchen and took a pint bottle of Canadian Club whisky out of the cabinet above the sink. Carrying it in both hands almost ceremoniously, he stepped into the dining room.
The corpse was now respectfully arrayed on top of the table. He’d washed it in the tub, even shampooed and combed the blood and brain matter out of its hair before carefully dressing it in a navy suit and tie.
The Teacher had also changed into a suit, tasteful black, appropriate funeral attire. He tucked the bottle of whisky into the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss the pale, lifeless forehead.
Back in the kitchen, he took his Colt pistols off the counter and quickly loaded and holstered them. The cops would be here anytime now.
He removed a full red plastic fuel can from beneath the kitchen sink and carried it into the dining room. The strong, faintly sweet smell of gasoline filled the entire apartment as he soaked the body, making the sign of the cross—starting at the forehead, spilling fuel down to the crotch, then shoulder to shoulder across the chest.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he said solemnly.
He looked at the face one last time, the sad blue eyes, the half frown on the rigid mouth. Sobbing quietly, he backed to the apartment’s front door, sloshing a generous gasoline trail across the hardwood floor behind him.
The Zippo he took from his pocket had a marine insignia on it. He wiped his cheeks with a deep breath and placed the cool brass of the lighter to his forehead for a moment. Had he forgotten something?
He booted the empty gas can back toward the dining room, thumbed back the lighter’s starter, and tossed it with a deft casualness, a winning card onto a gigantic pot.
Not a thing, he thought.
The loud basslike whump blew his hair back as a ball of flame shot back into the apartment like a meteor. The dining room went up like a pack of matches.
For another few seconds, he stared, mesmerized, at the ink-black smoke freight-training from the doorway.
Then he closed the door, took out his keys, and locked up tight.
Chapter 63
THE DOORMAN OF 1117 FIFTH AVENUE wore a suit and hat that were the same exact hunter green as the awning.
“Can I help you, sir?” he asked as I walked into the lobby.