Kill Me (24 page)

FORTY-SEVEN

While I was waiting to see if the two guys would return, the phone rang. Not my phone. No
Ob-la-di
.

Her phone. I pulled it out of my pocket as fast as I could. This time the caller ID didn’t read “Pay Phone.” It read “Out of Area.” I flipped the phone open and lifted it to my ear. “Lizzie?”

“Don’t say my name.”

I almost replied
It’s not your name.
Didn’t. I said, “What do they want? Do these guys want to talk to me? Do they want to kill me? What?”

She didn’t answer me.

“What?” I demanded.

She said, “They’re gone for now; but they’ll be back. Look at your watch. What time do you have? Exactly. Be precise.”

“One-twelve.”

“Take the stairs down to the first floor. Wait there, in the fire staircase, and time your entrance into the lobby for exactly one-twenty. Go immediately out the service door, not the front door. Head away from Broadway, which means turn right. Do you have all that?”

“Sure. This stuff? Here in the closet? What the hell is —”

She hung up on me.

Again.

Damn.

FORTY-EIGHT

My exit, timed according to Lizzie’s instructions, was anticlimactic.

At the appointed minute I entered an empty lobby — I could see Gaston outside on the sidewalk arguing with a homeless man who seemed to be protecting a shopping cart full of rusted rebar. The reason someone would be so possessive of a shopping cart of used rebar escaped me. Figuring it was part of some ruse Lizzie had arranged on the fly, I hustled out the service entrance. Within a minute I was in the backseat of a yellow New York taxicab that was pointed uptown.

“Where?” the driver said. He was a gruff, burly guy with about three days’ growth of whiskers and three decades’ growth of ear hair. His voice was accented with the weight of a few generations of eastern European history.

“Just keep going for now, thanks.”

Right after we passed the near corner at 89th Street I told him I’d made up my mind and I wanted to go to Midtown. He responded by making an instantaneous hard right turn from the center lane in the middle of the intersection, cutting a perpendicular swath onto 90th toward Central Park West. During the maneuver, a bus bumper passed about eighteen inches from my nose.

Didn’t even raise my pulse.

“Where we go in Midtown?” he said.

I hadn’t decided where. I said, “I’m thinking.”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror and tapped the meter, letting me know that my cogitation was going to cost me money.

“It’s okay,” I said.

After we’d covered a few blocks, I’d begun feeling the familiar rumblings that told me that the consequences of the pressure from my bulging artery on some nerve were once again taking a toll on my upper GI tract. I asked him if he would please pull over to the curb for a moment.

“Here? Now? Central Park West? No! No stop,” he said, once again finding my face in the mirror, the whole time gesticulating with his right hand. I stared right back at him — he was a man whose face had seen many years in the sun, had endured the ravages of the poisons from tens of thousands of cigarettes, and clearly showed the capillary corrosion of having consumed enough vodka to fill a Jacuzzi. The picture on his taxi license made him look at least ten years older than he appeared in person. And he didn’t appear to be any fountain of youth in person.

The taxi license revealed that his name was Dmitri. His last name was consonant-rich, vowel-light and, to my tongue, unpronounceable.

In as level a tone as I could muster in the circumstances, I said, “Then I’m afraid I will puke in your cab.”

“What ‘puke’? What?” he replied.

I think he thought I was threatening him.

“Vomit,” I said. This time, when I caught his gaze in the rearview mirror, I pantomimed sticking my index finger down my throat. “I think … I am about to … throw up.”

Simply saying it, of course, almost precipitated it.

Dmitri hit the brakes, yanked the wheel to the left, and began to pull over to the curb that was directly opposite the whimsical planetarium on the west side of Central Park. As I swallowed down vomit and waited for the car to come to a stop I found myself staring out the side window at a big sign that read THE FREDERICK PHINEAS AND SANDRA PRIEST ROSE CENTER FOR EARTH AND SPACE.

Even before the cab had come to a complete halt, I threw open the back door, leaned my head out into that space, above that earth, and emptied the entire contents of my stomach into a foul Upper West Side gutter. Behind us a symphony of honking horns and shouted profanities accompanied my energetic retching.

Two teenage girls wearing the white blouses and pleated skirts of some private school were walking past the cab on the sidewalk. Between fierce spasms, I watched their faces as they took a hasty, scornful look at me. One of them said, “That is too gross! Yuck. Look at him. No! Don’t!”

Dmitri leaned out of the window and flipped them off with both hands. He yelled at them, “He puke,” as though that alone should have been enough for the girls to excuse me.

My cabdriver was defending my honor. The act felt kind and generous.

“Okay? We go now?” he said once I was again upright in the backseat. “No more puke?”

“Yes, we go now. Thank you for stopping. I really appreciate it. Thanks. I hope no more puke.” I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about the no-more-puke part, but I would have placed a sizeable bet that anything that came out of my mouth next would come from some organ farther down the alimentary canal than my stomach.

I could feel the disconcerting presence of something grainy lining the inside of my mouth. The textural sensation was of old coffee grounds; the taste was as though I’d just gargled a cocktail of vinegar, puppy pee, gin, and Taster’s Choice.

“Where we go?” Dmitri asked, his voice tinged with compassion for my condition, whatever it was.

“Four Seasons.”

“Restaurant? You eat? You sure? I don’t think good idea.” His tone actually conveyed the reality that he thought it was a psychotic idea.

“No, not the restaurant. The hotel. On 57th. Or 58th. Whatever.”

“You sleep. I think better idea,” Dmitri said.

I sat back against the seat and took a slow deep breath.
What the hell,
I wondered,
is going on?

“You from Russia?” I asked.

“Ukraine,” he said. “Kiev.” He smiled with pride. At being from Kiev, or not being from Russia, I couldn’t tell.

Dmitri picked up Broadway at Columbus Circle in order to head over to the hotel near Park Avenue.

That’s where I realized that I was being rash with my destination decision.

“Pull over again, please, Dmitri.”

“Puke?”

“No. But please, pull over.”

He did, again tapping the meter with his index finger. This tap was a caution for me, not a warning.

I pulled the roll of bills from my pocket and peeled off a fifty that I lofted into the window in the Plexiglas panel between us. The meter read ten dollars and change. “For you,” I said. His thick eyebrows jumped up an inch — the international nonverbal symbol for “No shit?” I assured him, “Yes, for all your kindness.”

Dmitri smiled at me then, and bared his teeth. As he did, I realized he needed a month locked in a room with a talented dentist.

Once the cab was at a full stop in a no-parking zone on the uptown side of 58th Street, I used my cell phone to call the hotel and had the operator connect me with the concierge, a young woman who identified herself as Jennifer Morgan.

“How may I help you?” she asked.

I gave her my name and room number and said that I had a strange request and was hoping she could, indeed, help me.

“I’m happy to do everything within my power to assist you.”

“Could you arrange to have someone pack up my things? Everything in my room?”

“Of course. You’ll be checking out today?”

“Actually, no. I’d like to keep the room for two more nights, just as I had originally planned. I will continue to need access to the room.”

“But you would like us to pack up your things?”

“I said it was a strange request.”

“You did. I should have taken you at your word.” Her tone was pleasant, almost playful. On another day, in another time, I would have been sure to take her temperature to check to see if she was also being flirtatious. “Then you’ll be collecting your luggage at a later date?”

“No. I would like to arrange to have someone come by to pick it up in … ten minutes, if that’s possible. I’ll be sending a taxi to the 58th Street entrance, the driver’s name is Dmitri, the cab number is” — I opened the back door and got out so I could read the number on top of the cab — “2-K-1-7.”

The second I was back on the seat I saw that the same identifier was plastered all over the inside of the cab, too.

“Ten minutes?” Jennifer Morgan said, obviously, and appropriately, dubious about my deadline. “Will we be needing to do much packing? That doesn’t allow a lot of time.”

“No, I travel light and I don’t mind wrinkles. I apologize for the short notice.”

“I will be happy to arrange for your request, but … in order to protect your security, I will need to confirm your identity. I’m sure you understand.”

In response to the questions that followed, I rattled off my home address, the date of check-in, my phone number, and the last four digits of the credit card I’d used to guarantee payment. “Is that sufficient?” I asked.

“Actually,” she said, “do you mind confirming what you had for breakfast this morning?”

From a security point of view it was a very good question. I told her about my room-service meal, emphasizing the silver dish of strawberries. “Did I pass? Do you think you can help me out?” I voluntarily added that I’d asked for two newspapers to be delivered that morning instead of one.

“Indeed. It will be my pleasure. Your things will be at the 58th Street entrance in ten minutes,” she said.

“Ms. Morgan?”

“Sir?”

“Put a fifty-dollar gratuity for yourself on my bill. And twenty each for the bellman and the doorman.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I would like this request to remain our secret, Ms. Morgan. I assume no one else needs to know.”

“I can’t see why that would be a problem,” she said.

“I do appreciate your assistance.”

“It is my pleasure,” she said.

I closed the phone and faced Dmitri, who was waiting with great interest to find out what would happen next. I slid another bill, this one a hundred dollars, into the gap in the Plexiglas. “Would you mind running an errand for me?”

He narrowed his eyes and glanced at the advancing total on the meter. We were north of fifteen dollars by then. “The company,” he said.

“Of course. Absolutely,” I said. “The meter is separate. Keep it running. Keep it running.”

He said something in his native language that had the cadence of a blessing.

I sat in a deli on 58th and sipped at a bottle of sparkling water while Dmitri made his round-trip to the hotel, which was only a couple of blocks down the street. I was tempted to try to eat something bland. Some applesauce. Maybe some crackers. But my upper digestive tract felt raw, and I feared it was again going to erupt like Kilauea if I tried to send any more food its way.

Before I sat down in the deli, I had stepped into the shop next door and bought a cheap, packaged mobile phone with prepaid service. The Death Angels had proven that they were good, they were resourceful, and that they were obviously connected at the hip to the mobile-phone networks. I didn’t want to tempt fate by discovering too late that they were somehow tracking my movements from cell tower to cell tower via my “Ob-la-di” phone.

I pulled Lizzie’s phone from my pocket and placed it on the table in front of me, willing it to ring.

It didn’t.

Dmitri pulled up outside the deli after he’d been gone about fifteen minutes. He honked the horn and waved at me. When he caught my eye, he gave a big thumbs-up.

I left a five on the table, walked outside, and crawled into the backseat. Whatever adrenaline I’d been using for fuel was spent. I was dragging. On the far side of the seat I spotted my carry-on bag and the familiar small, black, beat-up suitcase that had accompanied me around the world a few times.

“Where to now, boss?” Dmitri asked me.

“Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn?”

He shook his head and showed me his rotten teeth again.

He hadn’t been expecting Brooklyn.

Me? I didn’t think that the Death Angels were going to be as easy to surprise as Dmitri was.

While we were stuck in Midtown traffic, I used my I-hoped-still-anonymous new phone to call Mary.

“It’s me,” I said. “I’d like to meet up with you. Near your cousin’s place. That okay with you?”

“Of course.”

“Cross streets?”

She told me, then added, “You don’t want the address?”

“No. I’m not sure that things are as private as I might like. Is there a market or a deli, or somewhere close by her place where we could meet?”

“Place called Julio’s. You can see it from that corner. Red awning. When?”

“Good, I’ll be there within half an hour.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“Wait.” I didn’t like my own plan. “Mary, I just changed my mind. I want you with the plane. Go keep an eye on it — do a real good check. Call your cousin. See if she can meet me at Julio’s. I’ll make it worth her time. Then she can take me to … meet up with you.”

“This is serious, isn’t it? Are you in trouble?”

“Serious? Yes. Trouble? It’s all relative.”

I could tell that Dmitri was sorry to see me go when he finally dropped me off in Brooklyn.

In addition to having learned the meaning of the word “puke,” he probably hadn’t had a more interesting couple of hours or a more lucrative shift since he started driving cabs in New York.

I shook his hand, said my good-bye, and thanked him with another hundred-dollar bill.