Davey leaped to the sidewalk and collided with two men in expensive coats. They shoved him aside, and he lurched across the Avenue of the Americas in a diagonal, leaving a symphony of screeching tires and enraged horns behind him. He reached West Fiftieth Street, swung by a line of people waiting at the Radio City Music Hall box office, and headed for construction sounds. Steam rose from a new underground furrow and hissed at the cool air. Davey darted by two men with jackhammers, felt cement chips spit into him, and slid between a section of scaffolding reducing his pace only slightly.
He cut across Rockefeller Plaza till it became West Forty-ninth Street and chanced a rush across against a DON’T WALK sign, coming close enough to a few screaming fenders to smell heated metal. He made it across with a last leap to the sidewalk, ignoring the thoughts people nearby turned on him.
Davey looked back long enough to see the big man following almost directly in his wake, zigzagging between cars without slowing. One car skidded to a halt in his path and it looked to Davey as if the big man hurdled over its hood in a single bound, actually hurdled, and landed on the same West Forty-ninth Street sidewalk Davey had crossed just seconds before, hotter on his trail than ever.
Davey slowed. His wind was gone and his legs felt like somebody had wrapped tight tape around them. His new jacket was sweat-glued to his shirt, and he noticed small gray specks marking spots where the cement chips had found their mark.
The big man was still coming, thirty yards away now, tops. Davey turned and faced him, trying for The Chill.
Bane felt as if he had crashed through a glass door placed in his path but he kept going.
Then Davey saw the legless man pushing himself across the sidewalk on a skate-wheel platform. He found his mind, made The Chill, felt the now familiar quiver roll up his spine.
The legless man suddenly altered the route of his platform, picking up speed in an incredibly brief period of time.
Bane thundered forward.
The skate-wheel platform sped into his path too late to be avoided. His legs were pulled from under him and he was airborne, tumbling over on his way to the ground, landing hard.
Bane lifted himself back to his feet with the help of a few surprisingly concerned bystanders. He brushed himself off, shrugged off further assistance, and noted the patches of his flesh that were scraped, raw, or bleeding. He gazed up the street at where he had last seen the boy, where the hot blast had come from an instant before the legless man had sent him sprawling.
The boy was gone.
Chapter Eight
“We got a fix on the boy this morning and traced him to this area,” the COBRA operations chief was saying as Trench closed the door to the car behind him. “It took a few hours but we finally pinned him down to that clothing store across the street.”
The operations chief led Trench across Seventh Avenue to a nest of stores tucked neatly into a single building, their fronts all but obscured by scaffolding which enclosed the entire sidewalk.
“I thought you’d like to talk to the clerk yourself,” the COBRA man continued. “Something strange came up.” The man’s attention shifted back and forth from Trench to a pair of hulking giants who stayed right in his shadow.
Onlookers first thought they were seeing double and then cringed at the sight. Trench had worked with Twin Bears before. Huge, fantastically strong, loyal men who were, in fact, biological twins, each with a shock of flaming red hair which sat atop heads nearly seven feet from the ground. One twin, though, had brown eyes while the other’s were, incredibly, blue. Their names were Pugh and Soam and even Trench couldn’t keep them straight in spite of the eyes. Not that it mattered. One was very much like the other with respect to duties. They seldom spoke and obeyed his every word. Trench had insisted that they accompany him east after Colonel Chilgers had issued his assignment. Having the Twin Bears around heightened his sense of security. He liked moving between two men who could just as easily rip a door from its hinges as pass through it.
The clothing store, featuring leather jackets, was called Looking Good. Trench left the Twin Bears at the front door and followed the COBRA operations chief inside.
“This the guy you told me could straighten things out?” a sales clerk charged, accosting them.
“Say hello to Mr. Trench,” the COBRA man said.
The salesman eyed Trench only briefly before launching into another tirade. “I could lose my job for this you know. I hope you’re gonna put that little bastard where he belongs. The son of a bitch tricked me somehow.”
“Tricked you?”
“Shortchanged me. Played some kind of game with the bills.”
“Tell him everything you told me,” the COBRA man instructed.
“Well,” the salesman began, “the leather jacket the kid bought cost $99.99. So he hands me a hundred-dollar bill to pay for it, right? And I check it like I check all the others and put it under the cash drawer with the rest of the big bills. It was the only hundred I got today so I couldn’t have missed it. But when I lifted the drawer to get the deposit ready for the bank, the hundred was gone and a five was in its place. I figure the kid must’ve been some kind of magician or something. Hey, I’ll bet that’s why you’re looking for him. He’s pulled this stunt before.”
“Something like that,” Trench said.
“Well, do me a favor. When you find the little fucker, nail his ass to a cross. I’ve had my fill of kids like him.”
Trench forced a shrug. “By the way, do you still have the bill?”
“The five the kid left me? Sure. I stuck it right on top. I was just on my way to the bank to make the afternoon deposit when your friends came in.”
The salesman hit a combination of buttons on the electronic cash register and the drawer slid open. He passed a well-worn five dollar bill to Trench.
“The little shit cheated me out of ninety-five bucks,” he lamented.
But Trench didn’t hear him. His eyes swept across the bill and focused on Franklin’s face instead of Lincoln’s. He blinked rapidly and focused on the bill again. Lincoln was back in the center as he must have been the whole time. Except Trench was sure he had seen Franklin, almost like someone was forcing that impression upon him. Just for an instant. The bill trembled in his hand. He shook himself from the spell and handed the salesman a fifty in its place.
“Now you’re only short fifty,” he managed, tucking the mysterious five into his pocket.
“Hey, thanks. You’re a real gentleman. Too bad there aren’t more classy guys like you around. World would be a helluva lot better place.”
Ordinarily Trench would have smiled at such a remark, but today he just wanted to get out. He left Looking Good and moved his still-agile frame between the Twin Bears, allowing them to hover over him like a pair of umbrellas warding off a rainstorm. He had hit fifty longer ago than he admitted to anyone and now left the physical demands of his trade to people like the Twins, men not unlike he had been a generation or so before and men who would be lucky to see their thirtieth birthdays. Trench was still in the Game because his nerve strings frayed evenly instead of just in the center as the Winter Man’s had. The key to maintaining your level of proficiency, he was convinced, lay in not expecting to. In fact, he lived by this credo. Thus, the Twin Bears. They had killed often and well for him. Simple-minded, tight-lipped, and steel-spined, the brothers were his equalizer against any and all threats. Their abilities were seldom wasted. They had been put to good use most recently in disposing of the Del Gennio problem, and now Trench was struck by the distinct feeling they would be seeing more action before this was over.