Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [17]
In a sense, there’d been no need to kill the man. She could have robbed him just as effectively while he slept, and the drug would ensure that he wouldn’t wake up before she was out the door. She’d used the knife in response to an inner need, and the need had been an urgent one; satisfying it had shuttled her right off to sleep.
She had never used a knife, or anything else, in Hawley. She’d considered it, and more than once. But in the end all she did was leave. No final scene, no note, nothing. Out the door and on the first Trailways bus out of there, and that was that.
Maybe everything else would have been different if she’d left her father as peaceful as she was leaving James John O’Rourke. But had that ever been an option? Could she have done it, really?
Probably not.
She let herself out of the apartment, drew the door shut, and made sure it locked behind her. The building was a walk-up, four apartments to the floor, and she walked down three flights and out the door without encountering anyone.
Time to think about moving.
Not that she’d established a pattern. The man last week, in the posh loft near the Javits Center, she had smothered to death. He’d been huge, and built like a wrestler, but the drug rendered him helpless, and all she’d had to do was hold the pillow over his face. He didn’t come close enough to consciousness to struggle. And the man before that, the advertising executive, had shown her why he’d feel safe in any neighborhood, gentrification or no. He kept a loaded handgun in the drawer of the bedside table, and if any burglar was unlucky enough to drop into his place, well—
When she was through with him, she’d retrieved the gun, wrapped his hand around it, put the barrel in his mouth, and squeezed off a shot. They could call it a suicide, just as they could call the wrestler a heart attack, if they didn’t look too closely. Or they could call all three of them murders, without ever suspecting they were all the work of the same person.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt her to move. Find another place to live before people started to notice her on the streets and in the bars. She liked it here, in Clinton, or Hell’s Kitchen, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a nice place to live, whatever it may have been in years past. But, as she and Jim had agreed, the whole of Manhattan was a nice place to live. There weren’t any bad neighborhoods left, not really.
Wherever she went, she was pretty sure she’d feel safe.
RAIN
BY THOMAS H. COOK
Battery Park
Aburst of light releases the million eyes of the rain, glimpsing the Gothic towers in dark mist, falling in glittering streams of briefly reflected light, moving inland, toward the blunt point of the island, an outbound ferry as it loads for the midnight run.
So like I said before, it ain’t like she has long, you know?
Yeah, mon. She just hangin’ on now.
Rain streaks down the ferry’s windows where the night riders sit in yellow haze––Toby McBride only one among them, single, forty-two, the bowling alley in trouble, thinking of his invalid mother on Staten Island, money leaching away, watching her Jamaican nurse, such big black hands, how easy it would be.
I figure you could use twenty grand, right?
Twenty, huh?
The rain falls on intrigue and conspiracy, trap doors, underground escape routes, the crude implements of quick getaways. It collects the daily grime from the face of the Custom House and sends it swirling into the vast underground drains that empty into the sea. Along the sweep of Battery Park it smashes against crumpled cigarette packets, soaks a broken shoelace, flows into a half-used tube of lipstick, drives a young woman beneath a tattered awning, blond hair, shoulder-length, with a stuck umbrella, struggling to open it, a man behind her, sunk in the shadows, his voice a tremble in the air.
You live in this building?
Long, dark fingers still the umbrella, curl around its mahogany handle.
Name’s Rebecca, right?
The rain sees the fickle web of chance meetings, the grid of untimely