Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“You and your girlie art books,” Mark Evrard said under his tobacco breath.

“Yeah, well,” Matthew said, cocking an eyebrow at Evrard’s Brooks Brothers fall weekend ensemble, “at least I don’t dress like one.”

“You’re losin’ it, a corn-fed Indiana boy like you, letting me sneak up on you like this,” Evrard whispered as he elbowed him. “You have a minute?”

Matthew closed the book on the photograph of Laocoön that he’d been studying.

“You have a car?” he said.

“Yeah, but let’s take a walk instead,” Evrard said, gesturing beyond the precarious sea of stacked books, toward the door.

They didn’t talk as they went north up Broadway. Or even when Evrard led him across Union into an old pub a block past the park.

“Ah, if these tin ceilings could talk,” Evrard said when he arrived back at the darkened rear booth with their whiskeys. “Does anything on earth beat one of these when-New-York-was-Irish joints?” They were the only ones there so early, besides the bartender.

Matthew nodded. “What’s up?” he said.

“Good job on the uptown shuffle, Mattie, not to mention your antics under the bridge,” Evrard said as he gently clinked Matthew’s glass. “You said you’d come through, and as ever, you’re a man who does what he says.”

“Yep. That it?”

“Of course not,” Evrard said, slipping him a thick envelope under the sticky table.

It was the same kind of paper as the one for Rafael Arruda. Thick stationery. Scratchy. You could feel the threads in it.

Matthew tried to hide his shock and numbness as he tucked it inside his jacket.

He had thought they were done.

He’d thought wrong.

“So he’s here?” Matthew said.

Evrard took off his glasses and rubbed at his dark doll’s eyes and then put the glasses back on.

“He’s here,” he said.

“The last of the Mohicans,” Matthew mumbled.

“The last,” Evrard said as he turned the thick glass tumbler in his big hand. “And most dangerous.”

Matthew’s eyes went wide as he figured it out.

“Wait, the president thing?” he gasped. “With the MetLife and the chopper and the cop?”

“Yep,” said Evrard, nodding. “He might have had him, too. Rumor is, in the blind there was a big ol’ Barrett zeroed in. Who knows what would have happened if that cop hadn’t got lucky.”

Matthew did the quick calculations in his head. Lex to First Avenue, little over a mile.

“Just mighta had him at that,” Matthew said with a whistle. “How did he get in, though? I thought he was in Dubai.”

Evrard shrugged his grizzly bear shoulders in his prissy coat. Though he looked like an academic, the Chicago native had played defensive tackle at the University of Michigan before he tore his ACL.

“Who knows? Mexico? That barn door is wide,” Evrard said. “It ain’t like before. Everything’s screwed up now, Mattie. Truly, madly, and deeply. Why do you think I’m sitting here with you?”

“And he’s still here?”

“Far as we can tell. But check the paperwork. You have to talk to a guy first. But you know this bastard. He’s just like you, Mattie. He likes to finish a job. You sure you’re down for this? Should Sophie be sitting here with us?”