Kill Me If You Can (23 page)

Zach heard the
crying before he reached the platform. He raced down the stairs. It was Katherine. She had her face buried in Ty’s shoulder and was sobbing uncontrollably.

“Ty, am I glad you found Katherine,” Zach said. “Matt would kick my ass if I let anything happen to her. Let’s round everybody up and get the hell out of here.”

“Zach…” Ty hesitated.

“What?” Zach snapped back. “What’s going on?”

“Matt’s dead,” Katherine said.

“Matt and Chukov went head-to-head down on the tracks,” Ty said. “The train took them both out.”

The last three cars of the number 6 train were still inside the tunnel. The doors to the train remained closed. A handful of passengers were pressed against the front window wondering why the motorman was on the ground, his back against a steel column, his legs stretched out in front of him. A transit cop was kneeling beside him.

“Oh, God,” the motorman said, breathing hard. “Oh, God, I can’t believe it.”

“Try to stay calm, Mr. Perez,” the cop said, putting her hand on his arm. “The paramedics are on the way.”

“Paramedics?” he said. “For what? They’re both dead.”

“For you,” she said. “They’ll be here for you. Try to calm down.”

“I had green lights all the way from Thirty-fourth,” Perez said, “so we were moving. But legal. A hundred percent legal.”

Katherine let out a mournful wail.

The cop turned sharply and looked at her. “I’m trying to get a statement here. Can somebody please—”

“Hey!” Ty snapped at the cop.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” she said, “but we got a situation here.”

She turned back to the motorman. “Did they fall, did they jump, what happened?”

“I don’t know. They were already there when I saw them. One guy was on the track and couldn’t get up. It looked like maybe the other guy was helping him. I hit the brakes as soon as I saw them, but the man on the tracks was too close to the rear of the station. He never had a chance.”

He closed his eyes and buried his head in his hands.

“And the second guy?” the cop said.

“He started running. The train had slowed down to four miles an hour. He could have made it, but he fell. It wasn’t my fault.”

Five cops came bounding down the stairs. One was a sergeant.

“Sarge,” the cop said. “We have two civilians under the train. The motorman is in shock. I told the conductor to keep the doors closed until I can get someone here for crowd control.”

“Any witnesses?” the sergeant said.

“That woman,” she said, pointing at Katherine.

By now a dozen passengers had moved forward to the front car. One started pounding on the window and yelling, “Let us off. Let us off.” The others immediately picked it up.

“Keep her on ice,” the sergeant said. “Let me deal with the passengers first.”

“I’ll wait with her,” Adam said and put his arm around Katherine.

“We have to get you out of here,” he said in a whisper. “
Now.
While the cops are still busy.”

“I can’t,” she whimpered. “Matthew’s still down there. His body’s there.”

“Katherine, you don’t want to see him,” Zach said.

“He’s gone,” Adam said. “We can’t do anything for the captain. He wanted us to keep you safe. That’s what we’re going to do.”

He tried to move Katherine toward the stairs.

But she dropped to her knees. “Matthew. I love you so much. I love you,” she said, sobbing. “And I forgive you.”

A faint voice came from under the train. “If you can find someone who can get this train off me, you can tell me in person. I love you, too.”

I was lying
right under the second car, maybe twenty feet from Katherine. I had managed to fall flat into the track bed. Forty-odd tons of the 6 train had passed over me before it finally came to a stop.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious. Between losing blood and whacking my head when I fell, I was out of it for a while probably. But when I came to and heard Katherine saying she loved me and forgave me, I had another reason to get out of there.

Up on the platform, I could hear Katherine crying and my guys laughing and screaming and then orders from someone in charge.

“Don’t move,” the voice said.

“Don’t worry,” I responded. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Matt!” It was Adam. “You okay?”

“No,” I said. “You know how disgusting it is on these tracks? I’ll probably die from being facedown in subway grunge.”

I heard Ty next. “At least we know his sense of humor is still awful.”

It took half an hour before the power to the third rail was turned off so the fire department guys could pull me out. EMTs laid me on a stretcher on the platform. I looked up, and the next person I saw was Katherine. “Nice shot with that trash can,” I said.

She knelt down and pressed against my filthy, foul-smelling, bloody body. She kissed my face a dozen times before the EMT guys pried her off.

“Ma’am, we’ve got to get him to the hospital. You can ride with us.”

Four firefighters and two EMTs lifted the stretcher, and we headed for the stairs.

“Wait. I have to talk to him.
That guy there.
”

It was the motorman. He came forward and stood over me. His face was ashen; he was crying. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t see you till it was too late. I’m so sorry.”

I was the one who should have apologized. It was I who had left Chukov gasping for air on the tracks and made this poor man feel like an executioner.

“Don’t apologize,” I said. “That guy on the tracks—he was evil. He tried to kill this beautiful woman, Katherine. He was on the tracks trying to kill me. You saved both of us. Thank you.”

He nodded, but his expression didn’t change, and I knew his life would never be the same.

He was a killer now, too.

They took me
to Bellevue Hospital, where the ER docs removed the bullet from my shoulder, gave me a blood transfusion, and told me that my broken nose and three cracked ribs would heal on their own in about six weeks.

Then they pumped me full of painkillers and let me sleep. Katherine slept in the chair in my room, and my three buddies spent the night in the hospital, taking turns standing guard at the door.

At four in the afternoon, I had my first visitors. Detectives Steve Garber and Nathan Watt, NYPD.

“We’re trying to piece together what happened last night,” Watt said. “Do you mind if I ask you both a few questions?”

“It’s all a blur,” I said. “This crazy man attacked me and my girlfriend. I tried to fend him off, but the New York subway finished the fight.”

Katherine nodded in total agreement.

“Did either of you know this guy?” Watt said.

“No.”

Watt smiled. “Vadim Chukov. He had a record on two continents. Smuggling, arson, robbery, murder—the list goes on—but this is the first time he ever tried to pick a fight with an innocent young couple waiting for the subway. Are you sure you didn’t know him?”

“I don’t know anyone like that,” I said. “I’m just a struggling art student.”

“A struggling art student and a war-hero Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Garber said.

“My Marine days are over,” I said.

“Were you aware that Chukov and five of his men launched some kind of terrorist attack in Grand Central Terminal earlier last night?” Garber asked.

“It was in the paper this morning,” Katherine said.

“Was anybody hurt?” I asked.

“Counting Chukov, there are six dead. All bad guys. It seems like somebody knew they were coming and cleaned up the mess without any help from the cops.”

“Good Samaritans, I guess,” I said.

“But you weren’t there,” Watt said.

“No,” I said.

“It’s easy enough to check,” Watt said. “They have the whole incident on video.”

Katherine’s eyes opened wide, and she squeezed my hand.

“Oh, crap, I just remembered,” Garber said. “The terminal is not our jurisdiction. That’s MTA—the state cops.”

“Then I guess there’s no sense in looking at the tapes,” Watt said. “We’re just here to ask questions about the incident down in the subway. Does either of you have anything else to add?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Then I think we’ve got it all,” Watt said. “Detective Garber, why don’t we let this young war hero and his girlfriend get some rest.”

They headed to the door. Watt stopped and turned around.

“Mr. Bannon, I have to take issue with just one thing you told us.”

“What’s that?”

“You said your Marine days were over,” Watt said.

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re never over. My partner and I both served in Desert Storm.” He grinned. “Semper fi, bro.”

He threw me a wink and a salute, and the two of them walked out the door and never came back.

We flew to
Paris and rented a funky studio on the fourth floor of an art deco building in the Quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The mattress was too soft and the toilet was temperamental, but the northern light that streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows made it an artist’s dream. My broken nose healed. My cracked ribs healed. And three months after that night in the subway tunnel, my relationship with Katherine was also mending rather nicely. She had told me she loved me in the heat of the moment, but I wanted to make sure that she could forgive me for the life I had led and for dragging her into it.

It was a Sunday morning in September. I woke to the aroma of fresh-brewed french roast, the sounds of Coldplay on the stereo, and the sight of Katherine in jeans and a paint-spattered tank top, sitting on the sofa. There was sunlight on her bare shoulders, and my cat, Hopper, was curled on her lap, purring gratefully.

“Hold that pose,” I said. “I’ll get some coffee and a paintbrush.”

“You don’t do portraits,” she said.

“I do nudes,” I said with a smile. “You know where I can find one?”

“I just happen to have one under here,” she said. Then she peeled off the tank top. She scrambled out of her jeans. Lord, she was good at undressing.

“The coffee can wait,” I said.

Morning sex for us was usually fast, urgent—kind of like
an asteroid is heading for the planet and we only have a few minutes left
fast.

That morning we took the better part of an hour.

“I hate to be practical, especially at a time like this, but we should shower and get dressed,” Katherine finally said.

We were lying in a heap of tangled sheets, skin to skin, soaked in sweat. I was still inside her. More or less.

She put her lips on mine, kissed me gently, and found my tongue with hers. That’s all it took to reboot my libido.

“We need to go, Matthew,” Katherine said. “We have to get up.”

“As you may have noticed, I’m pretty much up,” I said. “Give me two good reasons why we should leave this bed. Ever.”

“Your mother and your father,” she said. “We’re meeting them for brunch at ten o’clock.”

“We’ll be late,” I said. “They’ll understand.”

An hour later
we were sitting at a sidewalk café, eating duck eggs Benedict and buttery
petites brioches,
while my mother, giddy on half a mimosa, extolled the joys of Paris. She was like a Colorado schoolgirl on her first holiday. Even my father was smiling some.

It was our
au revoir
brunch. My folks had spent a week in Paris, and now they were moving on to Rome, Florence, and Venice. They were capping it all off with a two-week Mediterranean cruise. It was outrageously expensive, but it only put a small dent in the seven-figure account I’d opened for them at my Dutch bank.

We drove them to the airport and went back to the apartment, where I painted for six hours straight, breaking only for coffee and a few words of inspiration.

At seven, Katherine and I sat on our tiny terrace, sipping a light white burgundy while watching the steel-gray western sky slowly turn spectacular shades of red, orange, and indigo.

The doorbell rang.

“Poor man,” Katherine said. “I hate to put him through this.”

“It’s good for him,” I said.

We were expecting company, but old habits die hard, so before buzzing our visitor in, I checked the tiny security camera I had installed at the front door.

He tromped noisily up the steps, stopping often to catch his breath or complain.

“My darlings,” Newton gushed as he finally made it to our front door. “You’re coming down in the world.”

“Meaning what?” Katherine said.

“The first time we met, Matthew was a starving artist living on the top floor of a five-story walkup. Today you’re on the fourth floor. I look forward to the day when you are rich and famous, and I can ride the elevator to your penthouse in the sky.”

“You’re full of shit, Newton,” Katherine said. “The day Matthew is rich and famous is the day you’ll go off and find another poor struggling artist with no money and lots of stairs to climb.”

Newton laughed. “She’s right. Now let me see what I came for.”

He stepped in. “Oh, my,” he said as he took in my latest work. “Oh, my, my, my. Genius.”

“Really?” Katherine said. “You think Matthew is a genius?”

“Oh, heavens, no. I’m the genius. I said he’d get better, and he has. The lad has discovered color. And hope. And passion.”

“Keep talking, Newton,” Katherine said. “Every word of praise is going to cost you more money.”

Newton shrugged. It wasn’t his money.

He picked out five paintings.

“Someday these will be worth millions,” he said. “Until then, I’d peg them at ten grand apiece.”

He wrote me a check for fifty thousand dollars. I couldn’t believe it.

“There’s one catch,” he said, waving the check in my face. “You must let me buy you dinner.”

“Shouldn’t I be buying?” I said. “I mean, that check will cover a year’s worth of dinners.”

He laughed. “Not where we’ll be dining, my boy. Have you ever heard of La Tour d’Argent?”

“I have,” Katherine said, gently plucking the check from his hand. “We accept your generous offer.”

“Excellent. I’ll pick you up at eight forty-five.”

As soon as Newton left, Katherine started rummaging through her closet. “I have nothing to wear,” she said. “
Rien.
Nothing.”

“You look fabulous in nothing. It’s my favorite look for you.”

“You’re not helping,” she said. “Hurry up and get dressed.”

“One question,” I said. “Why is he taking us to dinner?”

“Because he loves to eat, he has a big fat expense account, and he wants to be seen in public with a handsome
artiste Américain
and his ugly professor who doesn’t have a thing to wear. Why else would he take us to dinner?”

I didn’t know. And that made me nervous.