Run for Your Life - James Patterson [35]
And it wasn’t just the hicks and suburbi-schmucks, by any stretch. Right around the corner on 40th, he’d passed the supposedly très hip, in-the-know New York Times reporters and photographers flocking into the paper’s new office building for another slave shift at the Ministry of Truth. Toe that Democratic party line, comrades, he felt like yelling at them. All hail, Big Brother, and even bigger liberal government.
He slowed his pace as he came to Madame Tussauds wax museum. Crowds of tourists were swarming around a life-sized Spider-Man doll in front of the building. He shook his head in disgust. He was passing through the land of the dead.
“Fifty bucks? For a Rolex?” he heard a southern voice cry out in the crowd. “Goddamn right you got yourself a deal!”
Ten feet ahead, a skinny young man with a shaved head was about to hand over his money to the West African sitting behind a folding table of fake watches.
The Teacher smiled. So many in his old unit had been from the South—good men from small towns who still believed in simple things like patriotism and manners and doing what a man had to do.
The Teacher didn’t intend to stop, but when he spotted the USMC bulldog tat on the kid’s forearm, he couldn’t help himself.
“Whoa there, buddy,” he said to the kid. “You really think you’re going to get a Rolex for fifty bucks?”
The young Marine gawked at him, half-suspicious and half-glad to be getting advice from someone who obviously knew this turf.
The Teacher slipped off his own Rolex Explorer and handed it to the kid, exchanging it for the bogus imitation.
“Feel how heavy that is?” he said. “That’s real. This one”—he flicked the fake into the con man’s chest—“is bullshit.” The heavyset African guy started to rise up angrily, but the Teacher stared him back down into his seat.
A sheepish grin split the young southerner’s face. “Lord, what an idiot I am,” he said. “Just two weeks back from a year in Iraq, you’d think I’d have learned something there.”
He handed back the Teacher’s Rolex. But instead of taking it, the Teacher just stared at it. He remembered buying it for himself when he was twenty-eight.
Screw it, he finally thought. You can’t take it with you.
“It’s yours,” the Teacher said. “Don’t worry, no strings attached.”
“Hu-uh?” the young man stammered. “Well, thanks, mister, but I couldn’t?—”
“Listen, jarhead, I was here when they knocked down the Towers. If everyone in this city wasn’t such a piece of crap, they’d celebrate you and every other soldier who lays his ass on the line in the Middle East, like the American heroes you are. Giving this dirty old town some payback is the least I can do for you.”
Look at him, he thought. Mr. Generous all of a sudden, acting like a Boy Scout.
He was tempted to upend the table of watches into the glowering con man’s lap, but now was the wrong time. Maybe he’d come back this way again, he thought as he strode on.
Chapter 31
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, holding a freshly bought, hundred-seventy-five-dollar bouquet of pink and yellow roses, the Teacher entered the vast lobby of the Platinum Star Hotel on Sixth Avenue.
He almost stopped to genuflect toward the quarry loads of glowing white marble that covered the floors and the thirty-foot walls. The ceiling was graced by a Renaissance-inspired painted canvas, along with sparkling crystal chandeliers the size of tugboats. He shook his head in awe at the crown moldings that looked like they were made of gold.
Once in a while, the assholes got things right.
He hurried to the check-in desk, looking flustered, and placed the flower arrangement on the marble counter right in front of the cute brunette clerk. He could see that she was impressed.
“Please tell me I’m not too late,” he begged her with clasped hands. “They’re for Martine Broussard. She hasn’t checked