Now You See Her - Michael Ledwidge [55]
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 pin-striped 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.
Jeanine had disappeared.
Chapter 69
THAT DIDN’T JUST HAPPEN.
Inside the wall-to-wall-crowded Grand Central Starbucks, I stood at the milk and sugar stand by the window.
Bathed in sweat, I tried to keep myself from hyperventilating.
Peter? Here? Now? How was that possible?
I didn’t know. I was having trouble breathing, let alone thinking.
When I wasn’t looking out over Lexington Avenue, I had my head craned around at the shop’s side window and side door, which opened onto the train station’s corridor. If Peter came in, my plan was to run screaming through the door back into the train station’s main concourse and try to flag down