Critical Space (49 page)

"I'm sorry about that, she told me to be careful and there are all sorts of freaks in this city, so I didn't know what to make of you. She's got a schedule here, somewhere, she's got a slew of classes this term, I mean, just so many -- here, here it is! She's in English right now, Renaissance Playwrights, it's in Main."

"I don't know where Main is," I said.

She grabbed her coat off the hook on the back of the door, a blue-and-black overcoat with a fake fur lining. "I'll show you."

Class was in progress when we reached the lecture hall, and while that seemed to deter K.C. from heading on through, I opened the door and walked in, searching the seats for Erika. For a fraction of a second, as the professor went silent and the students all turned their attention on me, I couldn't see her anywhere, and I felt the panic return and redouble. Then she stood from her seat in the middle, gathering her things, and the relief I felt was so strong that I didn't even feel bad about embarrassing her in front of her peers.

She came down the steps to the floor of the hall, head down, books and bag pressed to her chest, and when we were outside and the door was closed behind her, she dumped most of the things into my arms to hold while she replaced them in her book-bag.

"Thank you for that particular mortification," Erika said.

"You're leaving town," I told her.

"I'm leaving town," she told K.C.

"Yeah, looks like," K.C. said. "So I assume this
is
Atticus?"

"Oh, yeah, only Atticus has the capacity to humiliate me like this."

She had her bag packed again, and was putting it back on her shoulder, so I put an arm around her and began guiding her out of the building. I was moving fast, and both Erika and K.C. struggled to keep up.

"Slow down, dammit!" Erika said. "At least tell me where I'm going!"

"I don't know and I don't care, but it's out of town, and K.C. should probably come with you."

"I have class," K.C. remarked.

I caught a portion of Erika's frown, and she pulled out from my grip but didn't slow, just clamped her bag harder against her side to keep it from bouncing. "This is the bad thing you were worried about, isn't it?"

"It is," I said. "Midge is dead."

"Who's Midge?" K.C. asked.

Neither of us answered, and K.C. understood that this wasn't a joke, and she lost some of her color as she followed us out onto University Place. I put a hand out on Erika again as we went north to East Eighth, just to keep track of her, while I tried to find a cab to hail. There weren't any, and I took us west to Fifth Avenue to where more cars were moving along the street, then tried again. Three cabs passed with fares before one slowed along Fifth Avenue. I got to the door first, pulled it open and all but shoved Erika inside. K.C. stopped and looked at me like I'd dropped from a hovering spaceship.

"You're serious?"

"Get in the fucking car now," I told her.

"Erika?"

"I'd do it," Erika said.

K.C. slid in, and I went after her, slamming the door shut and telling the driver the address I wanted in Chelsea.

"We're going to Bridgett's?" Erika asked. "Won't she be at work?"

"It's only nine-sixteen," I said. "She never gets into her office before ten."

"Bridgett's the one who's the private eye, right?" K.C. asked, excited.

"Where will she take us?" Erika asked me.

"I don't care as long as it's out of New York, out of the state."

"I've always wanted to see Machu Picchu."

"Unless you've got a passport with you, that's out," I said.

"New Orleans?" K.C. asked softly. "I've always wanted to visit New Orleans."

"New Orleans would be fine," Erika said. "Just tell me that it won't be another four months before I hear from you saying it's safe to come back."

"You'll hear from me in three days, tops," I promised. "Or you won't hear from me at all."

Bridgett opened the door on the second knock, and when she saw me and Erika and K.C, she greeted us warmly. "Motherfucking hell," she growled.

"I need you to get them out of town," I said. "They want to go to New Orleans."

"It was K.C.'s idea," Erika told Bridgett.

"And that would make you K.C?"

K.C. offered Bridgett a hand, saying, "Yeah, hi, I'm K.C. You're Bridgett."

"This is all very nice," I said. "But we're still standing in the hall."

"They can come in," Bridgett said, and she moved aside to let them pass.

K.C. entered first, followed by Erika, who stopped just past the door and looked back at me. "Say goodbye this time, okay?"

"I will."

She went into the apartment, following K.C. out of sight. From the front room I heard the stereo, Joe Jackson singing on the speakers. It would have made me smile if Bridgett hadn't looked so upset with me and the situation; she'd gotten her appreciation of Joe from me.

I pulled out my wallet and emptied it of cash, then went through my pockets and gathered most of the money scattered in them, as well. All told, it looked to be almost seven thousand dollars. Bridgett took the money.

She didn't ask how bad it was, because she knew the answer already. If there was nothing we agreed upon anymore, Erika still meant the world to both of us. That I had brought her here, now, in this way, told her almost everything she needed to know.

"Who'd he kill?" she asked quietly.

"Midge. Last night or this morning. I don't know anything more."

The upset flickered into sadness, but she stayed silent.

"I'll contact you when it's safe to come back," I said. "If you need more money or anything..."

"I don't need your money. We'll be fine."

"Just get them gone, and fast. He's as liable to come after you as he is to go after Erika."

"You think I don't know that?" she snapped.

"I'm just saying..."

"I know what you're saying. You've lost control of the situation, the way I knew you would, and now you're falling fast, and so are the bodies, or if they aren't they soon will be. I hope you're happy. I hope this is what you wanted. I hope her life is worth it."

I swallowed and took it, and Bridgett stopped speaking and caught her breath.

"I hope yours is, too," she added.

I looked past her, down the hall. Joe was singing "Slow Song." I called out Erika's name, and she came around the corner fast enough that I knew she'd heard everything Bridgett and I had said. She came down the hall, and when she reached me I put my arms around her and pressed my lips to her forehead. She wrapped her hands around my middle and hugged me tight, and then she felt the SIG at the small of my back and let me go.

"It's worth it," she told Bridgett.

"Then he shouldn't squander it," Bridgett shot back.

I waited outside of Bridgett's building until I saw the three of them emerge, and I kept watch on them as they walked to the corner and hailed a cab. A cold rain was drizzling down from the clouds, dripping off the brick buildings all around me, and it soaked the shoulders of my coat and touched my skin. I watched the taxi as it went out of sight, then found a pay phone and called Scott's cellular.

"Where are you?" he asked.

"Chelsea. Bridgett and Erika are going out of town."

"Wise. If it was Oxford and not just some homicidal lunatic, he was definitely sending a message. Gracey said that you'd taken out one of his eyes?"

"Yeah."

"Which one?"

"It would've been the left."

"That fits."

I felt the sickness and the guilt, imagined what Oxford had done to Midge's left eye. I hoped to God that she'd been dead at the time.

"Still there?"

"Yeah."

"We should meet up."

"You're on foot?"

"Yeah. I can be at Madison Square Park in nine minutes."

"See you there."

It took me eight minutes to make it to the park, jogging the whole way, first up Eighth Avenue and then across on Twenty-third. The streets were crowded, as always, fields of umbrellas, mostly black, that had me weaving my way along the sidewalk and occasionally into the street. I put my left foot in a puddle at one point, felt my wet sock chafe as I ran. Pedestrians kept their heads down, either covered with their portable canopies or shielded beneath hoods or raised newspapers. Even though I was running, no less than three homeless people asked me for money as I went past.

I tried to think, tracking the thoughts I'd been ignoring since leaving Times Square. Oxford had to have gone for Midge early, before the meeting with Gracey and Bowles, and I couldn't imagine they'd given their blessing to her death. It meant that Oxford had sprung, that the theft had done what Alena had feared it would do -- had made him either irrational or all the more ruthless, and neither prospect was a comfort. But it also meant that the money would bait him, that he would respond to it, and that still gave me an advantage, tawdry though it now seemed.

I reached the south side of the park and crossed against traffic, getting a face full of grimy mist from a passing delivery van. I stopped at the base of the statue of Seward on the south side of the park, my back to the Flatiron Building. I was only three minutes from the office of my attorney, but the information felt useless as it rattled around in my head, trivial and a waste of time and energy. I started along the path from the subway stop, scanning the park for Scott. In the dog park to my left, a peach-colored standard poodle chased a mutt, each dog wet and barking happily. The dog owners watched while leaning against the rail, chatting together beneath their umbrellas.

About halfway through the park I saw Scott coming in from the northeast side, and he raised a hand to me, and I nodded and stepped around a woman in a wheelchair, getting closer. He stopped just inside the park as a homeless man, shielded from the weather in a navy parka, reached out to him from behind. Scott turned, his hand going into his jacket for his wallet or for change, his back to me, and beneath the hood of the parka I saw a face, a bandage, and I realized who it was and what was happening, but it had already happened by then, and even as I brought my gun out Oxford was turning away from Scott and running across Twenty-sixth, racing up Madison, and I didn't have a shot, and just as it had been with Havel, I didn't have a thing I could do.

Scott was on one knee when I reached him, and I said his name and he looked up at me from where he'd been staring at the handle of the knife in his chest.

"Jesus, this hurts," he said, and then fell back, pitching over.

I got a hand on his shoulder and righted him, shoved the SIG back into my pocket, and he made a horrible noise of pain and fear and his body began to shake. I heard people moving around me on either side, and I caught him in my arms and laid him on the wet asphalt, smelling dog shit and wet grass and spoiled food, seeing the handle of the knife that had pinned his tie to his shirt to his chest. Blood was spreading in an ever-growing oval. The poodle in the run was barking in outrage.

"Son of a bitch asked me for a dollar," Scott said.

Rain was splashing on the lenses of his glasses, smearing his eyes. I put my hands on his shoulders, then his face, feeling the cold of his skin. My head felt like it was going to explode, and I couldn't find my voice anywhere. The damn dog kept barking.

"For a dollar," Scott said.

Then he shook once more, gently this time, and his last air escaped him with a whisper, and he didn't move again.

I left him there, and told myself it was what I had to do. I pushed through the gawkers who had gathered around us and done nothing, and I grabbed the wrist of the one man who tried to stop me from leaving, and I twisted it until he fell to the sidewalk rather than fight me for its possession, and I never broke my stride. I walked, I did not run, to the corner of Broadway, and headed south down the street, then broke track and turned east to Park, where I changed direction again, this time north, up to the subway stop at Thirty-third. A train was loading when I got to the bottom of the stairs and I jumped the turnstile and rode the Six north.

At Grand Central I got off and made it to the base of the stairs before it caught me, and I grabbed the railing for support and threw up on the platform. When I was finished I continued up, and caught the Times Square Shuttle across town, and then another train, this one down to Perm Station. I went back aboveground and walked the block to the PATH train on Thirty-third, and there was one waiting and I took a seat and shoved my hands in my pockets and tried to keep from vomiting a second time. The PATH train stayed motionless for almost three more minutes before the doors shut, and it took me south, and then, ultimately, across the Hudson to Hoboken.

I used a pay phone at the station and called Natalie's cellular. When she answered, I said, "Erika and Bridgett and Erika's roommate K.C. have already left town, but I need you to call Dale and Corry and tell them to go, too, to get their people and go and go now, because I don't know who he's going after next..."

"Atticus," Natalie said. "Slow down. What's happened?"

"He killed Midge this morning. He's just getting started, Nat, and he must have been watching the apartment because that's the only way he could have known where we'd be. He did it on purpose, Natalie, he wanted me to see it..."

"Atticus!"

I stopped talking, got a breath. When I could let it out with control, I said, "He killed Scott, Nat. I was thirty feet from it and I couldn't do anything to stop it."

There was no noise from her end of the phone.

"Couldn't do anything," I said.

"Wh..." and her voice snagged, thick, and she had to clear it. "Where are you?"

"Hoboken. The PATH station."

"Is there a building around, anywhere you can go and sit down?"

"There's a bar," I said. "The Rail Side Bar."

"Go inside. I'll be there as soon as I can."

"You've got to call them, Nat. Dale and Corry..."

"I'll call them from the car. Go inside. I'll be right there."

She hung up and I listened to the dial tone before replacing the handset in its cradle. It was still raining. I looked around and realized that I was only a ten-minute walk from where I'd found Lady Ainsley-Hunter, from where Alena had found me. Construction had begun on what was to be Hoboken's shining new hope, the great towers of Trump and Lefrak. I wondered if there was an irony in that, that I would be here again, and I thought about what had brought me back to New Jersey.