Altar of Bones (34 page)

Ry grabbed Zoe’s arm and pulled her toward a lamppost, where a red motorcycle was parked with
LUIGI’S PIZZERIA
emblazoned across its fuel-tank cover. The delivery boy was nowhere in sight, but he’d left the bike’s engine running.

Ry jumped on, kicked up the stand, and peeled away, so fast Zoe barely managed to swing up behind him, straddling saddlebags that were stuffed full with boxes of hot pizzas. As she looked back as they careened around the corner and through the downpour of Parisian tap water, she caught sight of the fiery red of Yasmine Poole’s designer suit.

Z
OE WRAPPED HER
arms around Ry’s waist and yelled into his ear, “You said nothing big or deadly!”

He was actually crazy enough to laugh. “The Drano bomb must’ve rolled down into the gas main, and there must’ve been an open flame down there. It lit the hydrogen gas, and
boom
.”

They tore across the river and up the Left Bank, weaving in and out through traffic that seemed to have no concept of lanes or turn signals or even, occasionally, the laws of gravity.

She wanted to ask him where they were going, but it was impossible
with the noise. So she looked at the Paris scenery whizzing by and tried not to think about her not wearing a helmet.

Dusk was falling, the streetlamps coming on, the booksellers along the quays packing up their stands. The damp February cold cut through her leather jacket, chilling her to the bone. Across the river she could see a landmark she recognized—the Louvre, and the point of I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid thrusting through the skeletal trees. A tourist boat floated by, shining a spotlight on the cream, cut stone walls and gray mansard roofs. As they idled at a red light, sandwiched between a diesel-belching bus and a beer truck, Zoe twisted around for another look at the famous museum and saw a flash of red sitting behind the wheel of a silver BWM, a half a long block behind them.

No, it can’t be
.

The Beamer suddenly swerved up onto the sidewalk, shooting around the bumper-to-bumper traffic, squeezing between cars and a mammoth granite building, scattering pedestrians like bowling pins. Its side-view mirror scraped sparks from stone as it bore down on them.

Zoe jabbed Ry in his side with her elbow and bellowed, “Gun it!” in his ear, but his head was already snapping around to see what the commotion was about. The Beamer squealed to a stop, blocked for the moment by a moving van parked in a driveway, but it was close enough now for Zoe to see easily through its window. It was Yasmine Poole, all right, and she looked pissed. She also looked as wet as a sewer rat, and Zoe would’ve smiled if she hadn’t been so scared.

The backseat window rolled down and a hand emerged, holding a semiautomatic. The long, gray muzzle slowly swung around until she was looking right down the bore, big and black as the mouth of hell.

“Gun!” she screamed.

“Gun it where?” Ry shouted back at her. “I got a goddamn red light—”

“
A
gun. Pointing right at—”

A bullet buzzed past Zoe’s ear and pinged into the body of the bus alongside of them. The next one plowed into the bulging saddlebags, killing Luigi’s pizzas.

Then the light changed and Ry finally gunned it. The motorcycle,
small-framed and light, shot forward with such force it leaped off the pavement, and for a few terrifying seconds Zoe was stretched out parallel to the street and only her one-handed grip on Ry’s belt saved her from falling. Even so, her head almost smacked into one of the bus’s giant front tires, coming so close some of her hair got caught up in the fender guard and was pulled out by the roots.

Then another bullet plowed a groove in the asphalt right before her terrified eyes.

She barely managed to haul herself back upright before Ry cut sharply across the front of the bus and a taxi, then jerked the handlebars so hard to the right that their back tire fishtailed, and Zoe nearly went flying again. They jumped the curb up onto the sidewalk, barely dodged a quayside stand loaded with stamps and postcards, then dropped down onto an arched bridge and headed for the other side of the river.

Zoe glanced back over her shoulder in time to the see the silver Beamer U-turn across four lanes. Tires screeched, horns blared, and there was the clanging crunch of metal slamming against metal, but miraculously the BMW emerged unscathed and hot on their tail.

Where were the damn traffic cops? Zoe wondered, then an instant later heard the whoop of a siren.

They hit a green light at the end of the bridge, and for a moment Zoe thought Ry was going to turn up into the three lanes of one-way traffic, but he jumped another sidewalk instead, threading through a row of bollards and cutting into a park.

The pebbled pathway was crowded with people out taking their evening constitutional, but Ry barely slowed down as he plowed through them, leaving a wake of screams and curses and shaking fists, but, thankfully, no dead bodies.

Zoe heard lots of sirens now and saw whirling blue lights, but given the number of traffic laws they’d broken, she wasn’t so sure she wanted the cops anymore.

They flew past rows of plane trees, rosewood hedges, and geometric flowerbeds. They careened around a colonnaded fountain, where a boy was trying to sail his toy boat through a pool choked with miniature icebergs, then shot out of the park and into the biggest square Zoe had ever
seen in her life. Or rather it was an octagon, with an enormous Egyptian obelisk in the center of it.

Eight streets spoked in and out of the square, and they were all jam-packed with rush-hour traffic. Cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, all whirled in seemingly haphazard abandon and dizzying speeds. Ry cut in and out, like a skier slaloming down a mountain, ignoring stoplights and traffic cops—doing things that would have gotten him shot on a L.A. freeway.

Zoe searched through the kaleidoscope of swirling headlights for a silver Beamer and a flash of red hair.
We’ve lost them
, she told herself, and wished she could believe it.

A quarter way around the enormous square, Ry peeled off, taking one of the wider spokes. They were still moving along at a pretty good clip, but he’d stopped breaking all the laws in the good-driver’s manual. It was a miracle they hadn’t been jumped on by every traffic cop in Paris by now.

The street they were on pulsed with neon-lit nightclubs, shops, and cafés. Ry rolled the motorcycle to a stop at a red light. Ahead of them was a square with a church built to look like a Greek temple. It was half-covered with scaffolding, but its doors were open and a man in a business suit sat on its marble steps in spite of the cold, eating a McDonald’s burger and reading a newspaper.

Suddenly a cacophony of car horns blared into life behind them. Zoe twisted around and saw the silver BWM whip out from behind a Japanese tourist bus. The blue-hooded guy with his semiautomatic was leaning far out of the backseat window, making sure that this time he wouldn’t miss.

“They’re back!” Zoe screamed.

R
Y JUMPED
the light, scooting between a truck loaded with terracotta bricks and a yellow Mini Cooper. Brakes squealed behind them, horns shrieked, but Zoe’s horrified eyes were riveted on the bakery van, double-parked and blocking the street ahead of them.

Two men walked toward the van’s open rear doors, carrying a seven-tiered wedding cake between them, their eyes wide at the sight of the pizza cycle hurtling toward them. They stopped short, and the cake swayed dangerously. They sidled two steps backward; the cake swayed even more.

Ry started to pull around them, into the oncoming lane of traffic, but that way was blocked by yet another smoke-belching tourist bus. So he throttled back and aimed right, for the impossibly skinny space between the bakery van and the row of cars parked along the curb. A space that was now filled by the bakers and their cake.

A gun popped behind them, sounding close and loud, like a string of firecrackers going off, and the window of a parked Fiat exploded in a shower of glass.

The bakery men dropped the wedding cake and ran, and Ry plowed right through it. Silver and white frosting sprayed up in sticky globs, splattering their faces. They shot past the van, knocking its side-view mirror askew, and out into the square.

An outdoor flower market, lit up by strings of white twinkling lights, lined the church’s east colonnade. They ducked under a low-hanging orange canopy, and Zoe looked back. Lots of flashing blue police lights, but no big silver BMW, no hooded men with guns.

They rounded the back end of the church and nearly slammed headfirst into the Beamer.

Ry swerved, and they went into a violent, fishtailing U-turn, clipping a cart full of cellophane-wrapped bouquets and snagging a watering can when its spout got caught up in the bike’s spokes. They dragged it behind them, trailing sparks, and it acted as a brake, slowing them down. But then it fell off, and the bike surged with a roar of released speed—aiming right for a shop with a plate-glass window full of fancy chocolates and bonbons.

At the last second Ry jerked the handgrip hard, and the bike popped up over the sidewalk, through an arched art deco doorway, and into a shopping arcade. Hanging globe lanterns, café tables, and startled faces whipped past them in a blur, then they burst back out through another arched doorway and into a narrow, one-way street zipping with traffic.

N
O SIGN OF
the silver BMW, and Zoe started to breathe again. But then, incredibly, she saw it—the Beamer, barreling out of the side street
ahead
of them.

It sent a taxi swerving into a light pole, and within seconds the narrow street was a chaos of locked bumpers, blaring horns, and screaming bystanders. Ry gunned the cycle’s engine and aimed for the narrow gap between the Beamer’s front bumper and a green kiosk plastered with posters.

But the gap was closing fast, too fast. Only five feet wide, and they weren’t going to make it. The Beamer’s headlights flooded the kiosk. The gap narrowed some more, only four feet wide now. Zoe gripped Ry hard around the waist, felt the sweat and tension of him through his clothes.

Three feet.

Two and a half.

They shot through what was left of the gap, shaving it too close. The Beamer slammed into the kiosk. Metal crunched, glass shattered, someone screamed, and a car alarm started shrieking.

They turned the corner at a skid, taking out a newspaper stand, and
barreled right into the oncoming flow of traffic, going so fast the little motorcycle whipped back and forth like a snake.

The street ended in another open square, this one full of buses and taxicabs and a massive stone railway station straight out of the gaslight era. Ry cut through the snarl, ignoring traffic signs and crosswalks, hurtling down the length of the station until they could see the peeked-roofed platforms. And then at least a dozen set of tracks, crisscrossing a wide and open expanse that was latticed with electrical wires and littered with switch boxes and signal poles.

Ry twisted his head around, and she saw his mouth open. She couldn’t hear him over the noise, but she thought he yelled, “Hold on!”