At the back door Rune pressed her face against the glass, hands shrouding out the light. It was dark inside. She couldn't see much of anything.
Part of her said Pretty Boy could be there at any minute.
The other part of her broke out a small windowpane with her elbow. She reached in and opened the door. She tossed the broken glass into the backyard, which was overgrown with thick bright grass. She stepped inside.
She walked through to the living room. "Like, minimal," she muttered. In the bedroom were one bed, a dresser, a floor lamp. The kitchen had one table and two chairs. Two glasses sat on the retro Formica counter, spattered like a Jackson Pollock painting. A few chipped dishes and silverware. In the living room was a single folding chair. Nothing else.
Rune paused in front of the bathroom. There was a stained glass window in the door. "Oooo, classy poddy," she muttered. Somebody's initials on the door. "W.C." The guy who built the house, she guessed.
She looked through the closets--all of them except the one in the bedroom, which was fastened with a big, new glistening lock. Under the squeaky bed were two suitcases. Heavy, battered leather ones. She pulled them out, starting to sweat in the heat of the close, stale apartment. She stood up and tried to open a window. It was nailed shut. Why? she wondered.
She went back to the suitcases and opened the first one. Clothes. Old, frayed at the cuffs and collar points. The browns going light, the whites going yellow. She closed it and slid it back. In the second suitcase: a razor, an old double-edged Gillette, a tube of shave cream like toothpaste; a Swiss Army knife; keys; a small metal container of cuff links; nail scissors, toothbrush.
She dug down through the layers.
And found a small, battered brown accordion folder with a rubber band around it. It was very heavy. She opened it. She found a letter--from Weissman, Burkow, Stein & Rubin, P.C.--describing how his savings, about fifty-five thousand, had been transferred to an account in the Cayman Islands. A plane ticket, one-way coach, to Georgetown on Grand Cayman. The flight was leaving day after tomorrow.
Next to it, she found his passport. She'd never seen one before. It was old and limp and stained. There were dozens of official-looking stamps in the back.
She didn't even look at the name until she was about to put it back.
Wait. Who the hell was Vincent Spinello?
Oh, shit! At Stein's law firm, when she'd looked through the lawyer's Rolodex, she'd been so nervous she'd misread the name. She'd seen Vincent Spinello and thought Victor Symington. Oh, Christ, she'd gotten it all wrong. And she'd even broken the poor man's window!
All a waste. She couldn't believe it. The danger, the risk, Pretty Boy ... all a waste.
"Goddamn," she whispered harshly.
Only, wait ... The letter.
She opened the letter again. It was addressed to Symington and at this address. So what was he doing with Vincent Spinello's passport?
But as she looked at the passport again, the condensed, grim little picture, there was no doubt. Spinello was the man she'd seen at Robert Kelly's apartment. Who was he?
She dug to the bottom of the folder and found out. What made it so heavy was something that was wrapped in a piece of newspaper--a pistol. With it was a small box of cheap cardboard, flecked brown-green. The box, too, was heavy. On the side was printing in what she thought was German. She could make out only one word. Teflon.
Oh, God ...
Symington--or Spinello--was the man who'd killed Robert Kelly. He and Pretty Boy had found the Union Bank robbery money. They'd stolen it and killed him! And the loot was in the closet!
Rune dropped to her knees and looked at the padlock on the closet. Leaned close, squinting. Pulled it, rattled the solid lock.
Then she froze. At the sound of a door opening then closing.
Was it the front or the back door? She couldn't tell. But she knew one thing. It was either Pretty Boy or Symington. And she knew something else: they both wanted her dead.
Rune gave one last tug at the closet door. It didn't move a millimeter.
Footsteps inside now. Nearby. If he finds me here, he'll kill me! She stuffed the accordion envelope into her bag and slung it over her shoulder.
A creak of floorboards
No, no ...
She thought they were in the front of the apartment. In the living room, which wasn't visible from where she was. She could probably get out the back without being seen. She glanced into the corridor fast, then ducked back into the bedroom. Yep, it was empty.
Rune took a breath and ran from the bedroom.
She slammed right into Victor Symington's chest.
He gasped in terror, stepped back, the ugly hat falling from his head. In reflex he lunged out and slugged her hard in the stomach, doubling her over. "Oh, God," she wheezed. A huge pain shot through her chest and jaw. Rune tried to scream but her voice was only a whisper. She dropped to the floor, unable to breathe.
Symington, furious, grabbed her by the hair and spun her around. Dropped to his knees. His hands smelled of garlic and tobacco. He began to search her roughly.
"Are you with them?" he gasped. "Who the fuck are you?"
She couldn't answer.
"You are, aren't you? You're working for them!" He lifted his fist. Rune lifted an arm over her face.
"Who?" she managed to ask.
He asked, "How did you ..."
He stopped speaking. Struggling to catch her breath, Rune looked up. Symington was staring at the doorway. Someone stood there. Pretty Boy? Rune blinked, rolled to her knees.
No ... Thank you, thank you, thank you ... It was his daughter, Emily.
Rune was so grateful to see the woman that it wasn't until a second later that she wondered: How'd Emily find the place? Had she followed me here?
Wait, something is wrong.
Symington let go of Rune, backed up.
Emily said, "How did we find you, you were going to ask? Haarte has some good contacts."
Haart? Rune wondered. "Who's Heart?" she asked.
"Oh, no, it's Haarte?" Symington whispered. Then he nodded hopelessly. "I should've guessed."
"What's going on?" Rune demanded.
Symington was looking at Emily with an imploring expression on his face. "Please ..."
Emily didn't respond.
He continued. "Would it do any good to say I have a lot of money?"
"The money!" Rune said. "He killed Mr. Kelly and stole his money!"
Both Symington and Emily ignored her.
"Is there anything I can do?" Symington pleaded.
"No," Emily said. And took a pistol from her pocket. She shot him in the chest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The way he fell is what saved Rune.
The gun was small but the impact knocked Symington backward and he slammed into the pole of the floor lamp, which fell against the bathroom door, sending a shower of glass into the hallway.
Emily danced out of the way of the splinters, which gave Rune a chance to sprint into the bedroom. But the woman recovered fast. She fired the gun again and Rune heard a terrible stereo sound of noises: the blasts of the gun behind her, the crash of the bullets slamming into the plaster wall inches from her head.
Then--with another punch of breathtaking pain-- she dove through the bedroom window.
Hands covering her face, shards of glass flying around her, trailing the window shade, she rolled onto more sad evergreens and dropped onto the grass, coming to rest against one of the plaster dwarfs. Panting, she lay on the lawn. The smell of dirt and damp grass enveloped her. She could hear birds squabbling in the trees overhead.
And then the air around her exploded. A dwarf's face disintegrated into white splinters and dust. On the street, fifty feet away, Rune caught a glimpse of a man with shotgun. She couldn't see his face but she knew it was Pretty Boy--Heart probably, the one Symington mentioned. Or Heart's partner. He and Emily were working together.... She didn't know who they were exactly or why they wan
ted to kill Symington but she didn't pause to consider those questions. She rolled under another plant, then scrabbled to her feet. Clutching her purse, she sprinted into the backyard. Then clambered over the chain-link fence.
And then she ran.
Behind her, from Symington's yard, came a shout. A second shotgun blast. She heard the hiss of something over her head. It missed and she turned, down an alley. Kept running.
Running until her vision blurred. Running until her chest ignited and she couldn't breathe another ounce of air.
Finally, miles away it seemed, Rune stopped, gasping. She doubled over. Sure she was going to be sick. But she spit into the grass a few times and remained motionless until the nausea and pain went away. She trotted another block but pulled up with a cramp in her side. She slipped into another backyard--behind a house with boarded-up windows. She crawled into a nest of grass between a smiling Bambi and another set of the Seven Dwarfs, then lay her head on her purse, thinking she'd rest for ten, fifteen minutes.
When she opened her eyes a huge garbage truck was making its mournful, behemoth sounds five feet away from her. And it was dawn.
They'd be watching for her.
Maybe at the Midtown Tunnel, maybe at a subway stop. Emily and Pretty Boy. And not just them. A dozen others. She saw them all now--Them with a capital T. Walking down the streets of Brooklyn on this clear, cool spring morning. Faces glancing at her, knowing that she was a witness. Knowing that she and her friends were about to die--to be laid out like Robert Kelly, like Victor Symington.
They were all after her.
She was hitching her way back to Manhattan, back to the Side. She'd thumbed a ride with a delivery van, the driver a wild-eyed Puerto Rican with a wispy goatee who swore at the traffic with incredible passion and made it to the Brooklyn Bridge, a drive that should have taken three-fourths of an hour at this time of day, in fifteen minutes.
He apologized profusely that he couldn't take her into Manhattan itself.
And then she ran once more.
Over the wooden walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, back into the city, which was just starting to come to life. Traffic hissed beneath her; the muted horns of the taxis sounded like animals lowing. She paused halfway across to rest, leaning against the railing. The young professionals walked past--wearing running shoes with their suits and dresses--on their way to Wall Street from Brooklyn Heights.
What the hell had she been thinking of?
Quests? Adventures?
Knights and wizards and damsels?
No, she thought bitterly. These were the people who lived in the Magic Kingdom: lawyers and secretaries and accountants and deliverymen. It wasn't a magic place at all; it was just a big, teeming city filled with good people and bad people.
That's all. Just a city. Just people.
It's a factory, Rune. There's shit and pollution. It makes a living for people and they pay taxes and give money to charity and buy sneakers for their children. Who grow up to be lawyers or teachers or musicians or people who work in other factories. It's nothing more than that.
Once over the bridge she walked north toward the courthouses, past City Hall, staring up at the twisty gothic building--the north face made of cheap stone, not marble, because no one ever thought the city would spread north of the Wall Street district. Then into Chinatown and up through SoHo to Washington Square Park.
Which, even this early, was a zoo. A medieval carnival. Jugglers, unicyclists, skateboard acrobats, kids slamming on guitars so cheap they were just rhythm instruments. She sat down on a bench, ignoring a tall Senegalese selling knockoff Rolexes, ignoring a beefy white teenager chanting, "Hash, hash, sens, sens, smoke it up, sens." Women in designer jogging outfits rolled their expensive buggies of infant lawyers-to-be past dealers and stoned-out vets. It was Greenwich Village.
Rune sat for an hour. Once, some vague resolve coalesced in her and she stood up. But it vanished swiftly and she sat down again, closed her eyes, and let the hot sun fall on her face.
Who were they? Emily? Pretty Boy?
Where was the money?
She fell asleep again--until a Frisbee skimmed her head and startled her awake. She looked around, in panic, struggling to remember where she was, how she'd gotten there. She asked a woman the time. Noon. It seemed that a dozen people were staring at her suspiciously. She stood and walked quickly through the grass, north through the white, stone arch, a miniature Arc de Triomphe.
They were old films, both of them.
One was She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the John Wayne cavalry flick. It was playing now. Rune didn't notice what the other one was. Maybe The Searcher or Red River. Yellow Ribbon was showing when she sat down. The seats in the old theater on Twelfth Street were stiff--thin padding under crushed fabric upholstery. There were only fifteen or so people in the revival house, which didn't surprise her--the only time this place had ever been crowded was on Saturday night and when they were showing selections from the New York Erotic Film Festival.
Watching the screen.
She knew the old John Ford-directed western cold. She'd seen it six times. But today, it seemed to her to be just a series of disjointed images. Salty old Victor McLaglen, the distinguished graying Wayne, the intensified hues of the forty-year-old Technicolor film, the shoulder-punching innocent humor of the blue-bloused horse soldiers ...
But today the movie made no sense to her. It was disconnected images of men and women walking around on a huge rectangle of white screen, fifty feet in front of her. They spoke funny words, they wore odd clothing, they played into staged climaxes. It was all choreographed and it was all fake.
Her anger built. Anger at the two dimensions of the film. The falsity, the illusion. She felt betrayed. Not only by Emily Symington or whoever she was, not only by what had happened in Brooklyn, but by something else. Something more fundamental about how she lived her life, about how the things she believed in had turned on her.
She stood and left the theater. Outside, she bought a pair of thick-rimmed dark glasses from a street vendor and put them on. She turned the corner and walked down University Place to Washington Square Video.
Tony fired her, of course.
His words weren't cute or sarcastic or obnoxious like she'd thought he'd be. He just glanced up and said, "You missed two shifts and you didn't call. You're fired. This time for real."
But she didn't pay him much attention. She was staring at the newspaper on the counter, lying in front of Tony.
The headline: Mafia Witness Hit.
Which didn't get her attention as quickly as the photo did: a grainy flashlit shot of Victor Symington's town house in Brooklyn, the six surviving dwarfs, the shattered window. Rune grabbed the paper.
"Hey," Tony snapped. "I'm reading that." One look at her eyes, though, and he stopped protesting.
A convicted syndicate money launderer who had been a key witness in a series of Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) trials of midwest crime leaders earlier this year was shot to death yesterday in a gangland-style hit in Brooklyn.
Vincent Spinello, 70, was killed by gunshots to the chest. A witness, who asked not to be identified, reported that a young woman with short hair fled from the scene and is a primary suspect in the case.
Another witness in the same series of cases, Arnold Gittleman, was murdered, along with two U.S. marshals, in a St. Louis hotel last month.
The paper crumpled in her hands. Me! she thought. That's me, the young woman with short hair.
She used me! Emily. The bitch used me. She knew all along where Symington was and got me out there to make it look like I killed him.
And, hell, my fingerprints're all over the place!
Primary suspect...
Tony snatched the newspaper away from her. "You can pick up your check on Monday."
"Please, Tony," she said. "I need money now. Can't I get cash?"
"No fucking way."
"I've got to get out of town."
"Monday,"
he said. Returned to his paper.
"Look, I've got a check for fifteen hundred bucks. Give me a thousand and I'll sign it over to you."
"Yeah, like you've got a check that's going to clear. I'm sure."
"Tony! It's payable to cash. From a law firm."
"Out."
Frankie Greek stuck his head out of the storeroom and said, "Hey, Rune, like, you got a couple calls. This cop, Manelli. And that U.S. marshal guy. Dixon. Oh, and Stephanie too."
Tony barked, "But don't call 'em from here. Use the pay phone outside."
Stephanie! Rune thought. If they'd been following me, they've seen me with her.
Oh, Jesus Mary, she's in danger too.
She ran back to the counter and swept the phone off the cradle. Tony started to say something but then seemed to decide that it wasn't worth fighting the battle; after all, he'd won the war. He turned on his worn heel and retreated to the other counter, carrying the newspaper.
Stephanie's groggy voice finally answered.
"Rune! Where've you been? You missed work last night. Tony's really pissed--"
"Steph, listen to me." Her voice was raw. "They murdered that man I was trying to find, Symington, they're trying to make it look like I did it."
"What?"
"And they tried to kill me!"
"Who?"
"I don't know. They work for the Mafia or something. I think they might've seen you too."
"Rune, are you making this up? Is this one of your fantasies?"
"No! I'm serious."
Several customers glanced at her. She felt a shiver of fear. She cupped her hand over the receiver and lowered her voice. "Look on the front page of the Post. The story's there."
"You have to call the police."
"I can't. My fingerprints're all over the house where Symington got killed. I'm a suspect."
"Jesus, Rune. What a mess."
"I'm going back to Ohio."
"When? Now?"
"As soon as I can get some money. Tony won't pay me."
"Prick," Stephanie spat out. "I can lend you some."
"I can give you a check for fifteen hundred."
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah, it's payable to cash. You can have it. But, listen, you have to come with me!"
"Come with you?" Stephanie asked. "Where?"