Seven Grams of Lead (17 page)

Or to think.

He leaped, arcing outward so as not to strike the building on the way down. Freezing air rushed around him like jets. His stomach rose into his throat.

Feet first, he told himself.

Too late. His already sore rib cage and his left cheek smacked into swollen bags, which gave, swallowing him into blackness. From his vantage point at the bottom of the dumpster, the garbage blocked out the light altogether. Blocked out fresh air, too. Wedging himself between two bags, he groped and kicked his way upward, holding his breath lest the stench overwhelm him. He toed something big that squirmed.

Surfacing, he was ecstatic. A flash blinded him. Using a hand as a visor, he focused on the source. The laboratory window rising. He pointed for Mallery’s benefit. She looked to the window, then gazed to the overcast sky as if seeking divine intervention.

“Now,” Thornton mouthed.

She gazed in his general direction, but nothing more.

As he wondered how he might coax her without giving her presence away, she stepped off the ledge, plummeting feet first, arms gracefully tucked to her sides, yet, from his perspective, like an incoming missile.

He flung trash bags aside to get out of her trajectory. She landed feet first, disappearing into the sea of bags. He threw himself into a prone position, spreading
his legs to maintain stability—this was straight out of his old Red Cross lifeguard manual. He stabbed an arm into the darkness.

“I’ve got you,” he said.

No response.

He hoped she could still hear him.

“Up here,” he tried.

Was she unconscious? Or worse, was she—?

Her hand clasped his wrist, electrifying him. Grabbing her elbow with his free hand, he hauled her to the surface. Her face glistened with what he took for blood, until catching a whiff. Marinara sauce.

A man appeared at the window, the dwindling sunlight relegating him to a silhouette. Pointing a gun.

Thornton instinctively froze. Mallery too.

With a shrug, the man retreated into the lab.

Mallery used a sleeve to wipe the sauce from her face, then started out of the dumpster. The squeaking of her limbs against the damp rubber bags was heard four stories up: the gunman reappeared at the window, silenced gun flashing.

A bullet dinged the far lip of the dumpster, inches from Thornton’s head, pelting his face with bits of paint and stinging his eardrums. Mallery ducked beneath the surface of the bags.

“Lucky shot.” Thornton spat out a rusty flake. “Still, this isn’t such a good place to be.”

Counting on the combination of distance, poor
lighting, and movement to hinder the next shot, he grabbed the dumpster’s lip and swung himself over it, landing on all fours on the street. The giant metal container was now between him and the gunman.

Another flash and a round stung the street, sending asphalt into his shin. Mallery jumped to the street, touching down beside him, and slipping on something wet. He lunged, catching her by the waist. A bullet cleaved the air where his head had been, pinging a parking meter across 120th Street.

With Mallery in tow, Thornton launched himself toward the corner of 120th and Broadway so that the entire science building shielded them from the gunman. A bullet clanked the building’s façade, creating a splash of shrapnel, a shard of which sliced the rubber sole of Thornton’s shoe, slitting his heel. He knocked the shard loose as he jogged down the sidewalk, at the same time releasing his grip on Mallery. She ran with him and soon, with long, catlike strides, outpaced him. Category of desirable problems, he figured.

The bitter evening
limited upper Broadway to a smattering of students and a vendor trying to sell roasted chestnuts. Most everyone else huddled in a bus shelter on the far sidewalk. Thornton and Mallery sprinted down the sidewalk on the other side of Broadway. Suddenly she stopped.

He pulled up beside her. “What is it?” he asked.

“Them.” She indicated the pair of campus guards, on the sidewalk four blocks down, charging toward them on Segways.

“Top speed of eighteen miles per hour. Might be comical if they weren’t after us.”

“You think Officer Logan duped them, too?”

“I don’t want to find out.” Looking across Broadway to his car, Thornton took into account the time
required to unlock both doors—BMW manufactured the model back when power locks were only the stuff of car shows—and start the engine. Or to sit and wait while it failed to crank. “Let’s get a taxi.” He scanned the sparse traffic. Just three cabs, the medallion numbers on the rooftop signs all dark, indicating they already had fares. “Next time,” he added.

With Mallery following, he ran across Broadway as far as the grassy median. He unpocketed his key and scurried the rest of the way to the ’02, whose driver’s side faced him. He unlocked and dove into the car, reaching across and swatting the passenger door open. Mallery dropped into the seat.

“The good news is the guys in the lab weren’t FBI, so we can safely go to the Bureau now,” he said, spinning the key in the ignition, spurring a croak from the engine. “In light traffic like this, we’ll be there in less time than it would take to get a human on the phone.” He tried the ignition again. The engine shook into a splutter that sharpened to a roar. He thrust the gearshift from neutral into first. The ’02 leaped down Broadway, throwing his stomach backward. He liked the feeling. The car blew past the guards on Segways. In the rearview mirror, Thornton saw the men’s faces twist with rage.

“How do you know the guys in the lab weren’t FBI?” Mallery asked.

“The thing one of them said about texting the New York COS for some more warm bodies.” Thornton
plunged the shifter from second to third. “COS is spook for ‘chief of station.’ The FBI doesn’t have stations.”

Streetlamps sputtering to life showed Broadway to be empty but for a few cabs. Home free now, Thornton thought, and he would have said so except for the UPS truck now in the rearview. Like the one that had been parked by the science building. Or maybe the same one. It sped around the corner of 114th and Broadway. The driver was hidden from sight by the windshield, red and orange and blue in the wash of neon bar and restaurant signs flying past. The passenger was visible in part: his right hand out his window, bracing a silenced pistol against his side mirror.

Mallery’s eyes gleamed along with the muzzle flash shown in her side mirror. She threw herself forward, landing in a ball in the passenger foot well. The bullet sparked a street sign a lane over.

“Despite what you may have seen on TV, it’s hard to fire a gun with accuracy,” Thornton said. Every couple of months, he practiced with a Glock 19 or a Sig Sauer P226 at the police firing range in Queens, an effort both to better know his subject matter and to develop NYPD sources—usually over beers afterward at the Parkside Pub or McFadden’s. In the range’s entryway, the department posted the number of bullets expended each year by its 34,500 officers in the line of duty, an average of just 600 bullets, along with the number of misses. “Police officers are accurate
with only thirty percent of their shots. And a ton less accurate from a moving vehicle, especially when the target’s also moving.” The front tire on his side dropped into a pothole, rattling every part of the car. “Especially in Manhattan.”

One of the two taxis ahead of him swung left to pass the other so that both lanes were blocked, with the cab on the right a length in front of the one on the left. Thornton downshifted to second, allowing his car to draw an S around the cabs. They now shielded the ’02 from the gunman. That wouldn’t last long, though.

“If we can get to the West Side Highway, we’ll lose them,” he said. “It’s thirty blocks.”

He ignored everything but his car and the UPS truck. Broadway dropped into soft focus. At the 111th Street intersection, he wrenched the steering wheel counterclockwise. The ’02 executed one of its signature ninety-degree turns. He accelerated down 111th, a block between Broadway and Amsterdam lined with stores and apartment buildings. His mirror showed the UPS truck trying to keep pace while rounding the corner. Its left front wheel caught the curb, sending the vehicle partly onto the sidewalk. The gargantuan grille struck a metal garbage can, causing an eruption of trash and shattering the headlamp. Pedestrians jumped out of the way. The driver tried to return to the street, but the rear of the truck fishtailed. The entire truck tipped to the driver’s side,
booming onto the sidewalk, sliding and hitting the base of a streetlamp with a clank that might have been mistaken throughout the West Side for a head-on collision of speeding trains.

Climbing back onto her seat and regarding the ruined truck, Mallery said, “Shame about that streetlamp.”

Thornton smiled as he shot the ’02 across Amsterdam, which ran uptown. A block later, he shifted into neutral, swinging the car downtown onto Morningside Drive, which, as usual, was quiet. There were no businesses or residences on this stretch, just the vast expanse of concrete forming the back side of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to his right and, to the left, the stone wall protecting vehicles from a precipitous plunge into Morningside Park.

“From here, we can just hop down to 110th and get back—” Thornton cut himself short at the sight of a Big Apple Plumbing van speeding west on 110th. It jumped a red light before grinding to a stop so as to block their way.

“See that?” asked Mallery.

“Yeah,” Thornton said. “I was worried we weren’t going to run into any vans.”

He U-turned, sending the car up a tunnel-like stretch of Morningside, with a canopy of trees extending over the street from the park and no turnoffs for three blocks. He intended to turn at 113th. Then he glimpsed the distinctive kidney-shaped grille of a BMW ahead, a brawny model X5 SUV, driving the
wrong way on 116th before barreling down Morningside. The tall white van from the Connecticut Turnpike—or a van just like it—pulled even with the X5. If Thornton were to continue up Morningside, his car would be blocked, rammed, or worse. Turning back meant contending with the Big Apple Plumbing van.

“Now what?” Mallery asked.

“I have an idea.” Thornton clocked the wheel, sending the car thumping over a curb and onto a patch of grass, heading toward what appeared, in the minimal lighting, to be a rocky ledge dropping straight down.

Builders in Manhattan had steered clear of the thirty acres that became Morningside Park because of the impossibility of laying streets through the rocky valley that resembled the Hindu Kush, to an extent that shocked out-of-towners. No exception, Mallery shouted, “You want to drive off a cliff?”

“There’s a bike path.”

He aimed for the aperture in the stone wall. The car zipped through, bouncing onto a crumbling asphalt bicycle path that wound into the park. At no point was the path as wide as the ’02. Undergrowth raked the bottom of the car. Coarse bushes stabbed and grated its sides.

A throaty rev announced that the BMW X5 had also made it into the park. Thornton picked up the SUV in his rearview mirror, gliding around a hairpin curve, its headlights growing brighter and larger. In seconds it was just three car lengths behind.

The woods thickened, making the ’02’s headlights
almost useless, showing Thornton what he was about to hit too late for him to react. Although better suited to withstand the beating, the bigger BMW faced the same problem. To capitalize, Thornton figured he just needed to find the playground. Somewhere around here, he thought. Sure as hell would help to be able to see ahead.

In the rearview mirror, by the light of the X5’s dash, he made out the form of a man in the passenger seat, his pistol extending from the window. A bullet tore into the top of the ’02’s backseat, filling the interior with a cloud of forty-year-old cushion particles—probably horsehair—before fragmenting the glass face of the instrument panel.

Thornton sent the ’02 hurtling down a hill so steep that the front fender scraped the road, raising sparks. The X5 driver had to crunch his brakes. The SUV went into a shrieking slide. The ’02 opened the gap to the length of a football field.

In her mirror, Mallery regarded the luminous dot that had been the SUV. “Was that your plan?”

“No, that’s coming up.” Thornton focused on the road ahead. A diamond-shaped yellow sign appeared in his headlights. Branches blocked the words on the sign, but not its figures of two children on a seesaw. He slowed down.

“What are you doing?” Mallery said in alarm.

Before Thornton could reply, a thick tree limb hanging like a bent elbow materialized in front of the
windshield. He zigzagged around it. Then he tamped the brake again, slowing. Two more bullets bit into the ’02’s rear panel.

“They’re just trying to shoot out our back tires,” he said, continuing to slow the car.

She slipped beneath her seatbelt and back into a ball in the foot well, her hands covering the back of her head. “You okay?” she asked, as if suspecting he weren’t.

A bullet ricocheted from the trunk into the rearview mirror. She ducked out of the way of the explosion of glass. The X5 was within five car lengths.

“That’s it.” Thornton pointed ahead to what appeared to be an expanse of grass in the faint glow of the yellow dome lamps surrounding it.

Mallery peered over the dashboard. “The field?”

Thornton hit the brakes. The ’02 skidded, turning counterclockwise, the tires squealing, coming to a stop ten feet shy of the green area and facing the X5.

The SUV braked, the driver probably suspecting Thornton was reversing course.

Thornton went nowhere. He watched the X5 slide off the bike path, stopping on what was actually not grass but a green algae film, cracking it, and raising hundreds of gallons of water.

“It’s a pond,” Mallery exclaimed as the SUV sank.

Putting the car into first, Thornton rounded the pond. An upsurge of bubbles was the only trace of the X5. A beautiful view, he thought, taking the bike path
past the playground, exiting the park, and turning down residential Manhattan Avenue.

The battered ’02 drew looks from pedestrians and other motorists, but no one was more astonished than Mallery, who returned to the passenger seat, a jumble of relief and mystification. “Did you at some point drive a getaway car?”