Michelangelo's Notebook (8 page)

“Shit,” she whispered. She cleared her throat loudly and then thumped her feet on the floor. The scratching stopped, the gleaming end of the ruler frozen. On tiptoes she slipped into the bathroom and pulled down her jeans and panties. Without letting her bum anywhere near the toilet seat she squatted over the bowl, peed and wiped faster than she’d ever done in her life.

She turned and flushed, pulling up her panties and jeans, watching the condom and the cigarette butt swirl desultorily away along with the two cockroaches who seemed to have moved into the toilet and formed a suicide pact while she was sleeping. She buttoned up her jeans, slipped out of the bathroom and grabbed her pack. Finn stared at the door. The straightedge was still there, not moving. She leaned over the bed and pressed down, making the bedsprings squeak, then heaved a dramatic sigh as though she were settling herself for sleep again. She moved over to the window and waited, her eyes on the door.

A full minute passed and then the sawing motion of the ruler began again. Pushing the pack up onto one shoulder Finn quietly pulled up on the window. She was surprised when it slid easily. She grabbed at the screen insert, easing it to the floor. With the window wide open she stuck her head out to see if there was any way to escape; if not, she’d have to stand by the door and belt the guy with her pack when he finally slipped the lock.

Outside the window there was a fire escape landing and another section of stairs that led to the roof. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. She threw one leg through the opening, ducked her head and stepped out onto the fire escape. It seemed to shiver as she put her weight on it—she could actually see the rusty bolts pulling away from the brick wall. She began to climb as quietly as she could.

There was a curved handle at the top. She grabbed it and pulled herself up and onto the roof. She’d been expecting some kind of doorway leading down to a stairway, but there was nothing—just a rippling, wobbly-looking expanse of tarred roof with puddles here and there.

There were half a dozen toilet standpipes and a curved vent stack, but that was it. She’d gone from the room below into the frying pan up here. There was no fire; things couldn’t get any worse. Then they did. She clearly heard a loud clang as somebody stepped out onto the fire escape. It had to be Raptor Head. Finn figured she had about thirty seconds before he’d be joining her on the roof.

To the left, glittering in the early morning sun she could see the windows of the curving Confucius Tower. To the right was the dirty streak of the East River and the mosaic of rooftops between the river and the Coolidge. She could scream for help, it wasn’t likely to get her any. She was on her own.

Five feet over her head were the lowest girders of the Manhattan Bridge. She ran to the middle of the roof, scrambled up the curving air vent and then reached up with both hands. She grabbed the broad girder, flipped her legs up and gripped the flanges on either side of the girder with her sneakers. Gathering her strength, she pulled herself higher, arching her back and then flipping herself over so that she was lying belly-down on the beam.

Once on the girder, she got up into a crouch and looked across to the fire escape. She could just see the top of the black helmet. She stood and ran, keeping to the center of the girder, drawing in her breath sharply as the Coolidge roof suddenly disappeared and she was four stories above the sidewalk.

Every now and again she ran into a vertical girder and had to stop and edge around it. The farther out over thin air she got the harder her heart beat and the more unsure of herself she became. The empty space under the bridge was mostly a repository for abandoned cars, and if she fell now that’s what she’d hit first. She risked a look back and to her horror saw Raptor Head playing acrobat on the girders as well, except he didn’t seem even remotely nervous as he deftly made his way around the verticals, barely slowing down.

He was gaining, and Finn knew she didn’t have a hope of reaching the far abutment to the bridge where she could finally climb down. It took him five minutes but he was eventually only a dozen yards behind her and moving fast. At the next vertical she’d have to slow down again and she’d lose even more time; they’d wind up being on the same girder. She heard a faint clicking sound from behind her, and terrified, she turned. She’d heard the sound before—last night, just before Peter had died.

Behind her the blank-faced man in the black helmet and skintight bicycle shorts was moving, poised and perfectly balanced along the girder, a long thin knife in his right hand, held between thumb and forefinger like a portrait painter’s sable brush. He moved easily toward the last vertical between them and started to swing around it, one-handed. She heard a giggling, shallow laugh echoing from inside the helmet and something in her snapped. Instead of running from the dark, sinister figure in his obscenely revealing outfit she did the exact opposite, rushing back along the girder, stripping off her pack with one hand, her fiery hair blowing wildly in the wind as she swung the pack as hard as she could, catching Raptor Head right between the legs as he swung around the vertical.

He screamed as the knapsack connected with his groin, losing his balance at the worst possible moment. He lost the knife, the blade twinkling in the sunlight as it twisted and turned its way toward the ground, bouncing off the broken windshield of an old car before flipping off into a thin stand of weeds beside a tire. Raptor Head held on for half a second more before he found himself too overbalanced to pull himself back to the safety of the girder.

He fell, doing a slow half gainer with a twist, screaming all the way down and hitting the same windshield as his knife, going through it instead of bouncing off. The impact cracked the visor on his helmet like a black egg and she saw his face, a young bloody horror, Asian—either Chinese or Vietnamese. He wasn’t moving. Sobbing, half with fear and half with relief, Finn stared down at him, wondering how her life could have changed so quickly and so completely. She slipped the pack on her shoulders again then turned away and headed back along the girder and to the street.

Lieutenant Vincent Delaney stood on the sidewalk with his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking up at the building on the corner. The street in front of him was littered with fire trucks, paramedic units and squad cars. Lights were flashing everywhere. There was crime scene tape all over the place and a lot of people in bathrobes and slippers behind it. Most of them had been there for several hours and they weren’t looking too pleased about it. Sergeant William Boyd, his partner, rolled around the corner, two Styrofoam cups of coffee in his hand and a greasy bag held between his teeth like a St. Bernard. He reached Delaney, handed him one of the coffees, then transferred the paper bag to his free hand. He popped the top off his coffee, shook the bag open and offered it to Delaney.

“Doughnut?”

“Sure.” Delaney peered into the bag, found a chocolate glazed and lifted it out. He took a bite, then washed it down with some coffee. Boyd chose a banana cream. Delaney stared up at the building again. The entire top floor was a charred ruin. “What did you find out?”

“Fire started around four thirty. Apparently you can smell gasoline on the fifth floor landing, so it’s definitely arson.” Boyd finished the cream doughnut and dug into the bag for something else. A maple walnut this time. He chewed and slurped.

“Anyone up there?”

“Old guy in 5B. He gets up early so he smelled it first. Called it in and then got out himself. He doesn’t know about 5A. Says the whole back part of the building was where the fire was.” Boyd washed away the last of the maple walnut with the last of his coffee.

“Firemen been in there yet?”

“Yup.”

“Find anything?”

“Nope.” A cinnamon this time. The bag was now empty so he dropped his coffee cup into it, scrunching the whole thing into a sticky wad.

“Your flair for description is amazing, Billy, as is your appetite.”

“Well, they didn’t find anything. You want me to lie?”

“What about the canvassing?”

“The old guy in 5B says he heard someone go down the stairs at a little after two.”

“He see who it was?”

“No.”

“Anything else.”

“The pay phone at the corner.”

“What about it.”

“I had the LUDs checked just in case,” he said, referring to the local use details. “There was a phone call made about two ten.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, well, what’s more interesting is where it was made to.”

“Don’t be coy, Billy. It doesn’t suit you.”

“The Coolidge.”

“That flophouse by the bridge?”

“That’s the one. I got a uniform to drive over and talk to the night manager about the call. Turns out the night manager’s behind the counter with his throat slit. About ten minutes later some old wino comes in and says a black devil came through the window of his house and got blood over everything.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Some Vietnamese punk in black bike gear got tossed off the bridge or something and came through the window of an old Chevy the wino was sleeping in. Messy. Funny thing is, a switchblade was found just outside the car in some weeds.” Billy looked up at the building. “Think there could be a connection?”

“Yeah, Billy, I think there just might be. Maybe we should get over there and take a look.”

They climbed into Delaney’s unmarked Crown Victoria, Boyd behind the wheel, and drove against traffic up Sixth past the looming Village View project to the corner. Delaney glanced out at the phone booth and Boyd gave a whoop on the siren behind the grill, clearing the way across First Avenue. They continued along Sixth Street, Boyd’s big red nose actually twitching as they went by the half dozen restaurants that made up Little India. Doughnuts or tandoori chicken, Boyd welcomed it all with a totally unprejudiced gullet.

The big unmarked G-car swung south down Second Avenue. They reached the corner of Second and Houston and Boyd was about to turn west when Delaney screamed at him.

“Stop the car! It’s her!”

“Who?”

“Just stop the goddamn car, will ya!?”

Just as they’d gone into their turn Delaney had seen a flash of bright red hair coming up out of the Second Avenue subway station on the south side of Houston Street, the figure resolving itself into Finn Ryan. The tires on the Crown Vic screeched in protest as Boyd jammed on the brakes, and for some reason his hand jabbed out and pushed the siren button. The horn whooped and moaned as Delaney wove through the traffic.

Finn turned at the sound and saw Delaney pounding across the six lanes of Houston Street traffic toward her, dodging taxis and delivery vans like a running back trying to avoid being tackled. She stood for one frozen instant at the top of the subway stairs, then turned and ducked down into the darkness again. By the time Delaney reached the south side of Houston Street she was gone. He stood panting at the subway entrance. She was lost and he didn’t have the slightest idea where she was going.

Finn rode the F train one stop to Broadway-Lafayette, changed for a downtown G train and then changed again for a Brooklyn-bound 4 train, which she rode all the way down to Bowling Green. She stood rigidly, her hand wrapped around the pole, staring at the doors and not really seeing anything at all or anyone around her. Seeing Delaney had been the last straw. The look of the man as he came hurtling across the street wasn’t that of someone willing to offer a helping hand. He already thought she was somehow implicated in Peter’s death and probably had something to do with Crawley’s murder as well. Adding Raptor Head to the body count wasn’t going to make him any less suspicious even if it had obviously been self-defense. She didn’t even know who the Asian kid was, for crying out loud! Suddenly she was a suspect in multiple murders with cops chasing after her up and down New York streets and into the subway.

The train rolled into the Bowling Green station at the southern tip of Manhattan and Finn snapped out of her fugue. According to the map the next stop was Borough Hall in Brooklyn. She’d had a hard enough time learning how to navigate around Manhattan; this was definitely not the time to start on a new borough. When the doors slid open she stepped out along with a couple of dozen bright young things, male and female, out to make their mark on Wall Street, no doubt.

Finn climbed up to the surface, glanced briefly in the direction of where the Twin Towers had stood, then turned away and crossed over into Battery Park. She found a bench down by the jogging path that ran right around Manhattan’s big toe and stared downriver at the Statue of Liberty, a distant ghost in the morning haze. She stripped off her knapsack, put it on the bench then sat down beside it, curling one long leg underneath herself, thinking out her options.

Her name was Fiona Katherine Ryan from Columbus, Ohio, and she was an art history student at NYU. She’d slept with fewer than half a dozen guys, she liked Häagen-Dazs better than Ben and Jerry’s and she didn’t really believe anything she heard on Howard Stern or saw on
Sex and the City
reruns. She’d traveled to Italy, spent a little bit of time in Amsterdam and Paris and she’d been well and truly drunk about three times in her life. She didn’t smoke dope or take drugs except for Extra Strength Tylenol when she had especially bad period cramps. She worried about zits in the winter. The biggest secret she had was the knowledge that she would have sex with Johnny Depp in the middle of Times Square if he asked her to, which wasn’t likely. She knew she was fairly intelligent, maybe a little smarter than average. She knew she was pretty, but not beautiful, which was fine with her. She liked small animals, especially cats. She didn’t much care for spiders or anchovies.

In other words, she was completely normal. So what was she doing being homeless, chased by cops and guys with great big knives? She was caught in the middle of something but she didn’t have the slightest idea what. All she knew right now is that she wished she smoked. She sighed and stared at the ripply patch in front of her where the waters of the East River and the Hudson met. That was kind of how she felt right now—swept along.