Cat & Mouse - James Patterson [43]
I called Christine when I thought I had my head screwed on straight. We talked for almost an hour. Easy, effortless talk. Something was changing between us. I asked her if she wanted to spend some time together that weekend, maybe in New York if I still had to be here. It took some nerve for me to ask. I wondered if she could hear it in my voice.
Christine surprised me again. She wanted to come to New York. She laughed and said she could do some early Christmas shopping in July, but I had to promise to make time for her.
I promised.
I must have slept some finally, because I woke in a strange bed, in a stranger town, wrapped in my bedsheets as if I were trapped in a straitjacket.
I had a strange, discomforting thought. Gary Soneji is tracking me. It’s not the other way round.
CHAPTER 45
HE WAS the Angel of Death. He had known that since he was eleven or twelve years old. He had killed someone back then, just to see if he could do it. The police had never found the body. Not to this day. Only he knew where all the bodies were buried, and he wasn’t telling.
Suddenly, Gary Soneji drifted back to reality, to the present moment in New York City.
Christ, I’m snickering and laughing to myself inside this bar on the East Side. I might have even been talking to myself.
The bartender at Dowd & McGoey’s had already spotted him, talking to himself, nearly in a trance. The sneaky, red-haired Irish prick was pretending to polish beer glasses, but all the time he was watching out of the corner of his eye. When Irish eyes are spying.
Soneji immediately beckoned the barman over with a wave and a shy smile. “Don’t worry, I’m cutting myself off. Starting to get a little out of control here. What do I owe you, Michael?” The name was emblazoned on the barman’s shirt tag.
The phony, apologetic act seemed to work okay, so he settled his bill and left. He walked south for several blocks on First Avenue, then west on East Fiftieth Street.
He saw a crowded spot called Tatou. It looked promising. He remembered his mission: He needed a place to stay the night in New York, someplace safe. The Plaza hadn’t really been such a good idea.
Tatou was filled to the rafters with a lively crowd come to talk, rubberneck, eat and drink. The first floor was a supper club; the second floor was set up for dancing. What was the scene here about? he wondered. He needed to understand. Attitude was the answer he came up with. Stylish businessmen and professional women in their thirties and forties came to Tatou, probably straight from work in midtown. It was a Thursday night. Most of them were trying to set up something interesting for the weekend.
Soneji ordered a white wine and he began to eye the men and women lined up along the bar. They looked so perfectly in tune with the times, so desperately cool. Pick me, choose me, somebody please notice me, they seemed to plead.
He chatted up a pair of lady lawyers who, unfortunately, were joined at the hip. They reminded him of the strange girls in the French movie La Cérémonie. He learned that Theresa and Jessie had been roommates for the past eleven years. Jesus! They were both thirty-six. Their clocks were ticking very loudly. They worked out religiously at the Vertical Club on Sixty-first Street. Summered in Bridgehampton, a mile from the water. They were all wrong for him and, apparently, for everyone else at the bar.
Soneji moved on. He was starting to feel a little pressure. The police knew he was using disguises. Only not what he might look like on a given day. Yesterday, he was a dark-haired Spanish-looking man in his mid-forties. Today, he was blond, bearded, and fit right in at