The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (32 page)

Something was wrong. He knew it. He waited another minute for someone to answer the intercom. But nobody did. Nobody did because the only three remaining tenants were Rose, Martin and a stone-deaf old biddy with thirteen cats up on the top floor. All the others had been booted out by their pragmatic landlord, who, having had the foresight to anticipate the inevitable wave of gentrification sweeping the neighborhood, bought up every building on the block, while refusing to renew the leases of every tenant inside them.

After a few more seconds, Owen waved to his partner, Pete, who slowly ambled over. “I think we got some trouble inside,” Owen said, puffing his chest out like he was Kojak or something. “I heard some shouts, and no one’s answering the buzzers.”

Pete glared at Owen like he always did, with a “Who does he think he is…Kojak?” look, then whipped out his pistol and broke the glass of one of the narrow ornamental windows on the side of the door. “Jeez, you’d think we had all day,” Pete scolded him, and reached his hand inside to turn the doorknob.

Martin was watching their every move. As soon as Paul departed, he told Rose to relock the door while he turned on the television. He flicked an A/B switch resting on top of the TV set and suddenly the image changed from the donkey-dumb weatherman promising another sunny, humid day, to a grainy black-and-white image of Owen and Pete standing in the doorway.
Just two of them?
He switched channels to another camera mounted on the building facade and scanned the street in both directions. Except for the lone squad car, the street was eerily vacant.

Martin thought about how easy it would be to kill the new intruders as he followed their progress up the stairs with more hidden cameras he’d installed on every landing. Then he thought of something even better. He grabbed his two-way intercom microphone, held it up to the TV speakers so it would generate plenty of noisy feedback and made a brief announcement:
“Squawk! Crackle! Screech!
Intruders are on the roof! Request immediate back-up! Do you read me?
Squawk! Crackle! Screech!
”

The cops looked frantically in every direction, trying to determine where the sound came from. Then they scrambled up to the roof, where Paul had fled only seconds earlier.

“You have to go now,” Martin told Rose as he watched them on his monitor.

“Go where?” Rose asked fearfully.

Martin handed her a wad of hundreds from a cookie jar on the kitchen counter. “Somewhere nice,” he said.

Rose thought about the backpack full of cash she left upstairs. “I have lots of money left from the gold. I’ll get it.”

“No, you need to leave
now
,” he insisted. “You can come back here when it’s safe.”

“I’m staying here with you,” she said firmly.

“Not a good idea,” Martin argued. He had to settle things with Paul. If that didn’t work out well—an almost certain likelihood—he didn’t want Rose anywhere nearby.

“You’re gonna let me walk around on the street with all of them still out there?” Rose protested, her arms crossed stubbornly across her chest.

Martin thought about it. “No,” he finally said, and walked into his closet.

When he came out, he wasn’t carrying another bag of gold. Instead, he was shoving a little pillow and a stuffed dog into a shopping bag.

“Are you coming then?” Rose asked hopefully.

“Yeah,” he said, handing her the shopping bag.

“Where are we going?”

“What hotel do you like?” Martin asked, putting on a leather jacket, shoving two semi-automatic pistols in his belt and a small silver-engraved Beretta in his pocket.

“I’ve always wanted to stay in The Plaza,” she said, trying not to focus on the guns. “You said someplace nice, right?”

The Dead End was surprisingly crowded. “How many of them are…?” I whispered, but couldn’t finish the question, glancing around nervously at the two-dozen or so patrons.

“Registered users? Only a few. The others…well, I think you have a fairly good idea who the others are by now,” The Striker sneered with his whiplash grin, looking ahead into the gigantic mirror behind the bar where we sat. His eyelids started drooping down as usual, and it made me wonder what else he might be seeing beyond its cool, clear reflections.

“I beg yer pardon, m’Lord,” said a short, thick ogre of a man directly behind us, his brogue even thicker than his lumbering physique. “I’m dreadful sorry to intrude, but I was hopin’ you could introduce me to your guest here. It’d be a real honor for me, sir.”

M’Lord? An honor? To meet me?

“Some other time,” The Striker said dryly. The man rolled away like a warty tumbleweed, leaving The Striker completely undisturbed as he turned his face back to the mirror again, staring so intently that I soon joined his fixed gaze, past the brightly colored bottles, past the reflections of the men seated on either side of us or milling around in the background, past the walls and up to the roof of Martin’s apartment.

When Paul threw open the door to the roof, the first thing he did was look over the edge to the street.
Hhmmph!
The squad car was still there, but he couldn’t see the cops. Then he heard the squawking sounds of a police radio in the stairwell. They were coming.

He jumped ten feet down to the roof of the adjoining building as easily as most people walk off a curb. Michael looked down, horrified. “Jump or die,” Paul instructed. Some option. He climbed over the edge and hung by his arms until the drop was only a few feet. Paul smacked the back of his head and dragged him by the collar to the fire escape on the courtyard side of the building. There was no courtyard below, only a rubble-filled wasteland. He pushed Michael down the staircase ahead of him, looking over his shoulder every few seconds with the Uzi raised in the air. They had gone down two flights of rusted steel steps when he heard a voice from the rooftop above. A loud voice.

“
Officer responding to request for backup!”
Owen shouted with both hands cupped to his mouth. When no one answered, Pete followed up with the much less official-sounding query: “Where the hell
is
everybody?”

Something was wrong. Both cops leaned over the edge to the street below. They looked at the neighboring rooftops, craning their ears for any sound. Nothing but the wind. “We’ve been had,” Owen whispered. “But by whom?”

“Whom?” Pete growled, unable to stifle his contempt another instant.
“Whom?”

While Owen tried to make it sound like he was just goofing when he said it, Paul was sneaking up the fire escape again, motioning with the Uzi for Michael to follow. Michael wanted to scream in frustration. He thought about running the rest of the way down by himself, when he calculated how many bullets were housed in the submachine gun’s ten-inch clip. Way too many.

When Paul reached the top, he peeked his eyes over the curved tile lip of the building. He saw the arguing cops, their faces lit by the nearby street lamp. Paul had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing. This was too perfect. Heckle and Jeckle. Paul raised the Uzi and prepared to fire when Owen let out another loud yell.

“Hey, you down there!” he shouted, pointing to the street below. “Freeze!”

Before Paul could squeeze the trigger, they ducked out of sight, blocked by the ten-foot wall of Martin’s building. Paul ran over to the other side of the building to see what they’d been looking at. Not that he needed to. It was Rose and Martin, limping their way toward Avenue B.
Hhmmph! Could this be possible? Had Martin outwitted him?

There was no time for regrets or recriminations. Now he was faced with a painful choice: scale the wall, kill the cops, and bolt back down the stairwell, or chase Martin and Rose via the most direct route possible: down the sheer front of the building. He looked over the edge, saw Martin and that bitch cruising away and weighed his options. It wasn’t even close.

“Time for a piggyback ride,” he said to Michael, who had shuffled over next to him.

He was looking at Paul with utter confusion. Not having a single second to spare for explanations, Paul holstered the Uzi, grabbed Michael’s arms and wrapped them around his neck. “Hold on tight!” he shouted, looking over the edge to the sidewalk five floors below.

Michael wrapped his arms so tightly around Paul’s neck he would have choked him had he not become weightless in the very next instant. When Paul jumped off the building.

Paul would be great in any action movie. He jumped with his back (and Michael’s) facing the street, his face only six inches from the coarse red bricks. After they dropped twelve feet, their fall was slightly broken by an ancient flower box hanging ten inches out from a window. It ripped off the wall with a
BANG!
that exploded the window and sent thousands of tiny glass shards falling to the street in a jagged rain shower.

As they continued to fall, Paul grabbed the drainpipe with both hands, which also ripped off the wall and sent them hurtling toward a nearby tree like Siamese-twin pole-vaulters. Michael, too frightened to scream, kept his eyes squinched tight the whole time until he heard the loud
ca-ching!
of Paul whipping open his sickle.

He opened his eyes just in time to see them streaking toward the tree at ninety miles an hour. He would have let go right then if he hadn’t also noticed that they were still twenty feet above the pavement. He closed his eyes and braced himself for the worst, praying that Paul’s bulky torso would absorb most of the impact. Too bad Michael closed his eyes again. He missed the best part of the ride.

Paul swung the blade as hard as he could at the thickest oncoming branch.
WHHHHAAAAAAANNNNGGGGHH!
the steel and wood screamed. Then came a louder
creeeeaaakkkkksssnapppp
, as the branch broke and tipped downward, still attached to the trunk by a fat bundle of bark and wood fibers. Paul gripped the falling branch like a raggedy fireman’s pole and slid all the way down to the ground.

Plop. The eagle had landed.