‘Have you got a coat, Sandy?’ asked Connie.
She nodded.
‘Of sorts,’ she said, thinking of the thin grey plastic waterproof she carried with her everywhere, which she had stuffed into a corner of her bag. She fetched it, and her newly acquired burner phone, and her wallet. She left her usual mobile in her bag. In spite of what Ed had said, and her own comments to Connie, she wasn’t quite ready to use it yet. Just in case.
Meanwhile Connie produced an oilskin cape, and helped Marion into it.
‘I don’t want you getting wet through,’ she said solicitously. ‘You know how prone you are to bronchitis. This is my best waterproof, I’m so glad I asked you to get it. When it rains in New York, boy, does it pour. Now fasten the zip to the neck, and pull the hood up before you dare take a step outside.’
Marion obediently zipped up. Then she and Jones made their way down the stairs and into the garage. Marion opened the big door at the front, and the two women peered unenthusiastically out onto the wet grey street. The rain was almost horizontal. New York was in the grip of one of the not-infrequent near-tropical rainstorms which Connie had been referring to.
‘Who’s idea was this anyway?’ Marion asked.
‘Just think about eggs and crispy bacon,’ responded Jones.
Cursing loudly, Marion pulled up the hood of the oilskin, as Connie had directed, and, with one hand, tugged it forwards at the front as far as it would go, while reaching with the other for a big black umbrella leaning against the wall.
She studied the flimsy plastic of Jones’s raincoat without enthusiasm.
‘Well that’s not going to do much to protect you, is it? You’d better cuddle up to me, Sandy, it’s your only hope of keeping dry.’
Jones smiled. She could see why Marion had become Connie’s long-time partner. She put her right arm around Marion’s waist. Marion flipped up the umbrella and they stepped out into the street huddled together. Wind and rain instantly whipped around Jones’s legs, and streams of water began almost at once to run down over the inadequate plastic raincoat further drenching her feet and legs.
‘There’s a diner a couple of blocks away,’ said Marion, raising her voice above the noise of rain and wind. ‘We may have to swim there though.’
Jones found herself laughing easily. She no longer felt so tense. She really was coming around to the notion that Paul’s death and the destruction of the RECAP lab had been nothing more than the tragic accidental consequence of an attack on an unconnected target.
Marion positioned the umbrella in front of them, aiming it at the driving rain, so that it gave their faces and upper bodies at least some protection.
‘I hope you can see where you’re going,’ Jones shouted. ‘Because I can’t see a damned thing.’
‘What about your inner consciousness, Sandy?’ Marion asked. ‘You were a RECAP kid. Can’t you use your extra sensory perception in order to guide us?’
Sandy laughed.
‘I think I prefer to hang on to you,’ she said. ‘You’re the New Yorker.’
‘Princetonian,’ Marion corrected. ‘I’m one of the few who was actually born and bred there.’
They were approaching a road junction and were almost at the curb edge.
‘Be careful,’ Marion warned. ‘We need to cross here.’
Jones looked down at her feet and tried to adjust her step to avoid stumbling. But a small river was running in the gutter, rendering the shiny surface of the cobbles, which still formed many of the Meatpacking District’s roads, quite treacherous. Jones was caught off balance. As her left foot landed in the gutter with a squelch, it almost slipped from under her. She fell backwards, the momentum of her body pulling her arm away from Marion, who was already stepping into the road.
Marion looked back over her shoulder in time to see Jones, whose limbs seemed to have turned to jelly, land on her bottom on the pavement.
‘Are you all right, Sandy?’ she asked.
There was a crazy sense of release about Jones that morning. She started to laugh again.
‘I think only my pride is hurt,’ she said.
Marion beamed at her.
Jones was still laughing when the black Chevy pick-up truck appeared out of nowhere.
First she heard the noise, a powerful engine roaring loud and angry above the sound of the weather. Then she saw the front of the vehicle, its metal radiator grid and fender resembling the mouth and teeth of some terrible monster, stretched into a hideous threatening grin. The truck was heading straight for Marion. At speed. And Marion was looking at Sandy Jones, still smiling, still unaware of any danger.
Jones screamed her name at the top of her voice, whilst struggling to scramble to her feet.
‘Marion! Marion! Look out!’
She pointed towards the fast approaching vehicle. Marion’s smile faded. Her eyes followed the line of Jones’s outstretched arm. She tried to leap out of the way, half throwing herself further into the road.
It was hopeless. Marion didn’t stand a chance. The black truck hammered into her, sending her flying into the air like a rag doll. She was propelled forwards several feet, then crashed to the ground directly beneath the truck’s front wheels. She didn’t utter a sound. At first it seemed that all Jones could hear was a dull sickening thud as a couple of tons of hard metal slammed into the soft compliant flesh of Marion’s body.
It happened so quickly, and yet, to Jones, as if in slow motion. Marion’s arms and legs stretched and curved almost balletically. Her head bounced as it met the road’s unyielding resistance, and then Jones heard the crunching sound of breaking bone.
The black truck had run right over Marion’s lower body. Jones could see that her left leg now protruded at an impossible angle, and blood was seeping through her jeans, trickling into the river of water in the gutter, turning it pink. Jones could hear the screech of the pick-up’s tyres on the wet cobbles as it continued, at speed, in her direction. With what felt like the last vestige of her strength, she hurled herself sideways, rolling across the pavement. The truck roared past, missing her extended feet by a whisker.
Jones turned to look at Marion again. A dreadful realization hit her. Marion’s left leg looked to have been almost completely severed above the knee. She could see bits of white bone sticking through the blue denim of her jeans, those same jeans that had had such neat creases down the front, and the blood oozing from her terrible wounds had turned almost black in colour.
Jones felt perilously nauseous. Yet she was curiously mesmerized. For a moment she lay still on the pavement, staring at the dreadful tableau which had unfolded itself before her.
Meanwhile the red brake lights of the Chevy flashed as the truck squealed to a halt just fifty yards or so up the road, then began to reverse, accelerating towards Jones, each wheel kicking up a fine spray of rain water.
She realized that she was the target now, but she was totally unable to do anything about it. She certainly couldn’t move. Both her brain and her body had ceased to function.
She could smell the truck’s diesel fumes. She fancied she could feel the heat from its engine. She prepared herself for the inevitable.
But the blow, when it came, was not at all what she had expected. Her upper body was lifted off the ground and she was propelled into the air so that she almost completed a somersault, landing face down, sprawled in the doorway of the liquor store on the corner. Her entire being felt like one huge bruise. There was a crushing weight on top of her. But it sure as heck wasn’t a Chevy truck. And she was still alive.
‘Right, let’s get the hell out of here, lady,’ said a low growling voice in her ear. The weight lifted from her body. One strong hand grabbed her under one arm, another slotted itself beneath the other arm. She was hauled to her feet, and found herself looking into the eyes of a man-mountain with a Mohican haircut. It was Dom.