Who was I kidding here? The idea that I could exonerate Harris in a week while keeping the house of cards that was my life from quickly becoming a game of 52 pickup was a tall order even for someone with my extensive creative skills. I’d dodged a bullet at Rockefeller Center, but it was just the beginning, I knew. The deeper I went into this, the more I would be at risk. What the hell was I doing? I had one mother of a skeleton in my closet, and here I was about to put the key in the lock and turn.
My phone text jingled again.
“There’s a snake in my boots,” Em had typed.
There’s a snake in your family, I thought, shaking my head at the phone.
Chapter 66
PETER MOVED SMOOTHLY with the morning rush hour crowd on Fifth Avenue, a half block behind Jeanine.
He couldn’t decide what surprised him more. The fact that Jeanine was actually alive or how incredible she still looked. She was what now? Forty? Yet, look at her—stylish, confident, model thin, regal. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Despite the fact that he’d only glanced at her, Peter knew it was her, didn’t have the slightest doubt. He knew now that he’d seen her at the Yankees game as well.
The unlikeliness of coincidences didn’t matter to him. He paid close attention to things and made it a point to remember everything and everyone. Especially faces. The way he operated, you forgot a face at the peril of your life.
He was fifty, yet his senses and instincts were as sharp as ever. Bravo, Jeanine, he thought, as he trailed her. Not too many people walking around on this earth could brag about putting one over on Peter Fournier.
In fact, Jeanine, Peter reflected, besides you, there’s nobody at all.
He ran to catch up as she turned the next left around a corner. Dead-ending the shadowed side street two blocks to the east was a massive, dirty old building: Grand Central Terminal. He and his family had visited it on their first day up here.
Tunnels, he thought. Darkness, speeding trains, crowds. A place where accidents happened. Or random acts of violence.
He had his small police backup Glock in his ankle holster, but since the station was crawling with antiterror cops, there was no way he could use it. That left the illegal spring-loaded blackjack he kept snug in the small of his back, ever since his days on the Boston PD, or his belt buckle knife. The knife, then. He could have it out and in and back as quick as a coin trick. Open the femoral in her leg and keep going. He began to visualize it. Don’t even make eye contact. Flank her, stab, and saw.
He relished what he had to do now about as much as a carpenter relished using a hammer to hit a nail. There was no glee. There was just brutal necessity, covering his margins, business. He was no animal. He was just one of the rare breed of men who were born unafraid to wield violence as the efficient tool that it was.
A soft, aching warmth filled his chest as he remembered the outrageous romantic times he had shared with Jeanine. The way she looked coming out of the Gulf with the water sluicing off her tan, incredible body. The bullhorn outside the bathroom was a classic. The cut-your-throat creases she used to iron into his uniform shirts.
No question, of all his dead wives, she was by far his favorite.
Heading down the slightly sloping street toward Grand Central, Peter shook his head sadly at his runaway wife.
“Oh, Mermaid, we had ourselves some times, didn’t we?” he whispered, keeping his eyes centered on the back of her fancy ivory spring coat.
What a shame.
Chapter 67
I WAS ONLY MILDLY MELTING DOWN by the time I came off Vanderbilt into Grand Central. I’d managed to stop crying at least by the time I hit the west marble staircase above the main concourse.
It never failed to amaze. Cream-colored marble everywhere, the famous tsunami-sized windows, the constellation mural on the massive green ceiling.
Walking through its old-world elegance in my business clothes, I always felt instantly classy, a true New Yorker. I’d often pretend I was in an old movie, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest.
Thirty seconds later, I was across the massive cathedral-like space in the long corridor that led toward Lexington Avenue. The mall was lined with businesses. I passed a jewelry store, a boutique, a shoeshine stand, a Starbucks.
I dodged all the way to the left as a fresh batch of people started spilling into the corridor and up the stairway that connected to the Lexington Avenue subway lines.
But not far enough, apparently. I winced in pain as some Wall Street jackass in a pinstriped suit rushing past stepped on my right foot.
My toes felt severed. I stopped against the wall in the crowded passageway and slipped off my open-toe pump to count my toenails.
“Excuse you,” I yelled, pissed and in pain.
But I suddenly wasn’t angry anymore. The pain in my foot faded, instantly forgotten.
At the mouth of the swirling corridor was a tall man. He was handsome and had short salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes. He stood like a rock in the stream of the crowd, and he was staring at me.
I ripped my eyes away and stuffed my foot back into my shoe. Hobbled and blind with fear, I pointed myself forward toward the exit and broke into a full-out finish-line sprint.
It couldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.
But it was.
Peter had found me at last.
Chapter 68
SHIT, PETER THOUGHT, flattening himself against the wall next to a pay phone. He’d been following too close. Jeanine had stopped. She’d looked back. Had she seen him? It was hard to tell with the trillion-people march going on in the passageway between them. It was a definite possibility.
He could have whipped himself. The last thing Jeanine would have been expecting after all this time was a visit from him. The element of surprise was critical. But he’d crowded her and blown the whole thing.
What the hell had gotten into him? What happened to that cold patience and reserve he was so proud of?
Too late to cry about it. He needed to move.
He counted to three and then chanced a look back up the wide concourse. He thought she might have headed down the subway entrance on the right, but then he thought he caught a flash of ivory going out through the distant exit door.
What the…? She was leaving? he thought, as he started to run. She’d only cut through the station? So she wasn’t getting on a train?
“Yo, slow down!” someone scolded him.
Peter turned. In the doorway of a camera store was an NYPD cop decked out in full antiterrorist gear, bomb vest, M16. There was a no-nonsense expression on his face as he looked Peter over. He didn’t need that kind of scrutiny. Not now. Instead of giving the cop the finger like he wanted, Peter slowed immediately, nodding to his fellow peace officer with an apologetic wave.
He squinted when he came out onto bright Lexington Avenue. He looked up and down the block, across the wide street clogged with delivery trucks and buses and yellow taxis. He looked up at the Chrysler Building, right in front of him now.
There was no white jacket in either direction. Audrey Hepburn had left the damn building. Nothing. He’d taken his eyes off her for five seconds.
That was the problem with this rat race city! he thought, infuriated. Too many damn holes for the rats to hide in! She must have seen him.