Run for Your Life (Michael Bennett 2)

I was setting a personal-best record for the number of times I’d put my foot in my mouth with women in one day, I thought. I decided to blame it on exhaustion. Or maybe I was coming down with the flu, too.

I looked at the papers she’d left me—a detailed computer printout, a medical chart of my quarantined family. Who needed which medicine, how much of it, and when. I shook my head in disbelief. This woman could do the impossible.

I should have asked her where the psycho killer was.

Chapter 22

THE TEACHER SCRUBBED his wet hair with a towel as he came out of the bathroom in his apartment. He stopped when he heard a strange sound outside the bedroom window. He hooked a finger to the drawn shade and peeked out.

Down on West 38th, a buggy driver was walking a beaten-down-looking gray horse into the tenement-turned-stable next door. His other neighbors included a greasy taxi garage and a check-cashing place with a steel grille over the windows and a perpetual litter of broken glass on the sidewalk out front.

He chuckled to himself. The corner of 38th and Eleventh Avenue was exceedingly crappy and run-down, even for Hell’s Kitchen. Maybe he was crazy, but he loved it anyway. At least it was authentic.

Still amped to the gills from the day’s adrenaline rush, he lay down on the weight bench beside his bed. The bar held two hundred-and-eighty pounders. He lifted it easily off its brackets, lowered it to touch his chest, and raised it back up until his elbows locked at full extension. He did this ten times with an exquisite slowness that burned through his throbbing muscles and brought tears to his eyes.

Much better, he thought, sitting up. What a day. What a freaking day.

He wetted a rag, put it on his forehead, and lay back on the bench. He had downtime now—time for everybody to catch up, like putting on the ol’ boob tube while waiting for mom and pop to get home from work.

The workout had helped to burn off some of his wired energy, and the cool damp cloth was soothing. He let his eyes shut. A little nap before dinner would be sweet. He’d wake up fresh and ready for the next phase.

But just as he was drifting off, a burst of loud laughter and the heavy, thumping bass of rap music made him sit up again. Angrily, he strode across the room and twitched the window shade aside. In the brightly lit, curtainless window of a loft across the street, a little Asian guy was taking pictures of two tall, anorexic white girls in long gowns. The girls started dancing like jackasses to the brainless noise of 50 Cent, bragging that he was a P-I-M-P.

What the hell? Last time he’d noticed, that building was a warehouse where some legless fat guy named Manny stored hot dog carts. Now it was some kind of fashion studio bullshit? There went the goddamn neighborhood.

In Iraq One, he’d been in a marine recon unit that had been given an experimental bazooka-like weapon called a SMAW. The SMAW had been outfitted with a new explosive thermobaric round. Leaking a fine mist of gas in the air microseconds before ignition, a thermobaric was capable not only of vaporizing masonry structures, but of actually igniting the oxygen within its blast zone.

He’d have given anything he had for one of those right now. His trigger finger actually tingled as he remembered the feeling of touching off one of those megarounds. His imagination kicked in, substituting the building across the street for the ones he’d destroyed back then, throwing a fireball and shock wave that would have torn off the top several floors.

He had plenty of other weapons on hand, though—half a dozen pistols, a Mac-9, a sawed-off tactical shotgun, a Colt AR-15 with an M203 grenade launcher, a selection of silencers. Behind them, appropriate cardboard ammunition boxes were stacked and arrayed in orderly little rows. A half-dozen each of fragmentation, smoke, and flashbang grenades sat in a Crate and Barrel carton beneath his worktable like an oversized container of lethal eggs.

But no. Trying to kill every annoying fool would be like pissing into a live volcano. He had to stick to the Plan and kill the ones who counted.

He stalked into the room he’d outfitted as an office, sat in a Pottery Barn retro office chair, and clicked on a green-shaded banker’s desk lamp. Every inch of the wall above the desk was covered. There were subway and street maps, photos of building lobbies and subway stations, and a framed poster of Tom Cruise from Top Gun in the center. More portraits of Marcus Aurelius, Henry David Thoreau, and Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver were taped over the credits. The desk itself was covered with worn marble notebooks, a laptop, and a police scanner connected to a tape recorder. Alongside it was a heavy worktable that looked like one of those bust pictures cops took after a raid.

His telephone and answering machine sat on top of it. Lately, he’d hardly been bothering to check his messages. But when he glanced at the machine, he blinked in astonishment. Thirty-six messages? That couldn’t be right.

Then he remembered where he was supposed to have been earlier that morning. Ah, yes, it made sense now. That appointment had seemed so infinitely important when he’d first made it. But since he’d had his Epiphany, he couldn’t have cared less about it.

That thought improved his mood. Smiling, he deleted the messages without listening to them and stepped back into his bedroom. He popped a relaxation CD into the player beside the weight bench and hit Play.

The sound of waves washing gently against the shore and the soft caw of seagulls drowned out the rap from across the street. He stretched out on the bench again, jerked up the crushing weight, and lowered it toward his chest.

Chapter 23

THE TEACHER AWOKE, completely starved, a little after ten p.m. He went into the kitchen, turned on the oven, and took a brown paper–wrapped package out of the fridge.

Twenty minutes later, baby lamb chops were sizzling in a port-rosemary demi-glace. He touched the hot meat with a fingertip to test it and smiled at the just-so give. Almost there, he thought. He drained the pommes frites and drizzled them with truffle oil.

After plating, he brought the steaming dish to the linen-covered table in the apartment’s small dining room. He opened the $450 bottle of ’95 Château Mouton-Rothschild with a pop, chucked the cork over his shoulder, and poured himself a healthy glass.

The lamb practically melted in his mouth as he slowly chewed the first bite, then chased it with a sip of the exquisite Cabernet. Tight tannins, floral nose, tastes of cassis and licorice in the finish. It probably could have used another six months to mellow to absolute perfection, but he couldn’t wait another six months.

He closed his eyes as he ate, savoring the truffle oil and Parmesan fries, the succulent meat, the kick-ass Cab. He’d eaten at pretty much every fine restaurant in New York and Paris, and this was as good a meal as he’d ever had. Or was it because of all the work he’d accomplished today? Did it matter? This was gastronomic nirvana. He’d truly nailed it.

He stretched the meal out as long as he could, but at last, regrettably, it was done. He drained the wine bottle into his balloon glass and took that into the darkened living room. There, he dropped onto the couch, found the remote, and flipped on the sixty-inch Sony plasma on the wall.

The crystal-clear image of a CNN anchor, Roz Abrams, appeared with her mouth going at full speed. There was a flu going around the city, she informed her audience. No shit. As if he cared.