Run for Your Life (Michael Bennett 2)

“Oh, no, I can’t take tips,” the Teacher said. “But I’m supposed to wait for a response.” He winked again as he handed Miller the envelope. “You might not want to open this in front of all those people, if you know what I mean.”

The mâitre d’ glanced around. The crowd waiting to be seated was growing. But his curiosity won out. Impatiently, he stepped into a small anteroom beside the reservation desk. The Teacher followed him, waiting at the doorway.

He watched as Miller tore open the envelope and stared at the letter it held. The maître d’s haughty face looked puzzled.

“?‘Your blood is my paint’?” he said. “?‘Your flesh is my clay’? What the hell is this crap?” He looked up at the Teacher, getting angry now. “Who sent this?”

The Teacher stepped into the room with him.

“Actually,” he said, pulling a silenced .22-caliber Colt Woodsman pistol from his bag and placing the barrel against the sycophant’s empty heart, “I did.”

He waited the split second it took for comprehension to dawn in the other man’s eyes. Then, before Miller could so much as blink, the Teacher pulled the trigger twice.

Even in the small room, the sound was inconsequential, like someone clearing his throat.

As the maitre d’ collapsed in a heap of dead flesh, the Teacher eased him into a chair, then quickly righted a sheaf of menus that had started spilling off a shelf. He tucked the bloody missive between the man’s shoes. Anyone who glanced in would think that Miller had sat down for a moment to read.

Shielding the gun from sight, the Teacher turned to the open doorway and scanned the scene outside. He preferred stealth, but he was more than happy to shoot his way out if he had to.

But in both the crowded dining room and bar, people continued to laugh and drink, talk and eat, like the pointless animatronic jackasses they were. The carnival wheel continued to spin. Nobody had noticed a thing. What else was new?

He slipped the warm gun into his bag, and a few steps later he was back outside, straddling his ten-speed. There was still nobody paying any attention to him. He shrugged. Might as well update the list. He took out his Treo, brought up the Plan on its glowing screen, and deleted “-Self-satisfied Prick at 21.”

“Hey, is that the 750?” a man’s voice said. A sleek, dressed-to-the-nines Wall Street type, jawing a hundred-dollar Havana, pulled out his own smart phone from his pin-striped jacket. “Treos kick ass, boyeee,” he said.

Boyeee? Even Wall Street Journal–reading, Ivy League bond traders were talking like crack dealers these days. It was bad enough that society had become a bunch of amoral, money-grubbing shitheads, but how had it turned into gangsta wannabes, too?

“Yeah, um, word to your moms, home slice,” the Teacher said, and gave the asshole a thumbs-up as he rolled the Frejus out into the street.

Chapter 14

MY OFFICIAL NYPD VEHICLE was in the shop for repairs, so I was reduced to using the family car. It was a sturdy, battle-tested Dodge van, bought used a few months ago, although the way my luck was running, the horn would go any second now, like on the VW in Little Miss Sunshine.

I was on my way to 72nd Street, steering with one hand and knotting my tie with the other, when Chief of Detectives McGinnis called my cell.

“Where the hell are you, Bennett?” His voice was forceful enough to burst a blood vessel.

“Moving as fast as I can, Chief,” I said. “I’ll be there within five. What’s up?”

“The maître d’ at the Twenty-one Club just got popped!”

I felt an all-too-familiar twisting in the pit of my stomach. The Polo store and now 21? Two murders, at two of the city’s highest-profile places, within an hour of each other? This was starting to look as bad as last night, and maybe worse.

“You got any take on it?” I said.

“Maybe Donald Trump finally went postal. Maybe there’s a roving shooter, maybe a couple of them and it’s a coincidence. We’ve mobilized the Counter-Terror Unit, just in case that’s involved. That’s your specialty, right—terrorism? No, I’m sorry, catastrophes.”

I shook my head. The cat was all the way out of the bag about my working for the CRU, wasn’t it? Pretty soon the whole NYPD would learn my dirty little secret. Michael Bennett had once been a Fed.

“I wouldn’t call it a specialty,” I said.

“I don’t care what you call it. You’re the commissioner’s handpicked expert. Now get your ass over here and figure it all out for me, huh?”

So that was why McGinnis’s britches were in a knot, I thought. I wasn’t his first choice to handle this, but he’d been overridden by Commissioner Daly.

“You think I volunteered for this, Chief?” I shot back. But he’d already hung up.

I stomped down on the Dodge’s gas pedal, sending a tangle of errant soccer cleats and Happy Meal castoffs rattling around in the passenger-seat footwell.