Run for Your Life - James Patterson [50]
Maybe a walk, he thought. A little stroll around the block.
He dressed and was twisting the front doorknob open when he realized he’d forgotten something—his guns. He couldn’t believe it! That was a measure of how rattled he was.
He stepped back into the office and reloaded both Colts, then threaded their baffled stainless-steel suppressors— Swiss-made, top-of-the-line Brügger and Thomets—to the barrels. He strapped the weapons around his waist and pulled on a coat.
Dangerous world out there, he thought as he quickly descended the tenement stairwell toward the street.
Never know who you might run into.
Chapter 49
PIERRE LAGUEUX, fashion photographer extraordinaire, felt like a joy-filled bubble as he walked down the back stairs of the West Side Models agency.
Not just any bubble, either. High as he was on some top-grade MDMA, the drug otherwise known as Ecstasy, he felt like a très chic bubble of Cristal champagne.
It was almost unfair how well life was working out for him, he mused. Only twenty-seven and already rich. Handsome, heterosexual, French, and very, very talented at taking pictures. The hardest part about being him was—the thought made him giggle—waking up.
He had a real eye, they said. They, meaning the people in the fashion world who actually counted. In spite of his youth, the word icon was being whispered. His name was dropped in company with Ritts, Newton, Mapplethorpe. Sorry, fellas, move over. There’s a new enfant terrible in town.
And best of all, the parties. Tonight, already a fabulous dream, was just beginning, and how many more would he have? He could practically see them in an endless array stretching out before him. As long, elegant, and dark as the row of designer suits in the gymnasium-sized closet of his loft down on Broome Street.
All around him, the world breathed, Yes.
He stepped out onto the street. The night was young—just the way he preferred his ladies. Like the barely legal, new Ford Nordic blonde he’d just “met” in the back stairwell. He could actually fall in love with her, if only he could remember her name.
“Pierre?” a woman’s voice called.
He craned his neck, raising his stubbled face toward the sound. It was she—his new nameless lovely, as statuesque as the figurehead of a Viking ship, standing on the fire escape above him. Or was she an actual flying Val-kyrie? As high as he was, it was hard to tell.
“Catch!” she said.
Something sailed down toward him, dark and diaphanous, and settled into his outstretched hands—a warm, wispy weight that was barely there. A feather from an angel wing? No, better. Thong panties. What a wonderfully American parting gift! How Girls Gone Wild!
He blew her a kiss, removed the silk handkerchief from the breast of his cashmere Yves Saint Laurent sport coat, and inserted the undergarment in its place. Then he continued on his way to Tenth Avenue to cab to his next soiree.
He was midway up the east side of the block when he spotted a man standing alone on the sidewalk, alongside the train overpass.
A fellow reveler, was Pierre’s first thought. But then he saw the guy’s serious face.
He stared unabashedly. He was always on the lookout for a striking photo image, always honing his eye. That was probably the reason he would be immortal. And this figure—there was something tragic in the way it stood against the dark, otherwise completely empty street. It was the essence of noir. So Hopperesque.
But more still, there was also something about the man’s eyes. A startling, yearning intensity in them.
As mesmerized as he was, it took Pierre a good thirty seconds before he saw the two silenced pistols the man was holding beside his thighs.
What?
Pierre’s drug-addled mind scrambled for comprehension. The girl in the stairwell, was the first thought it grasped. Was this an angry rival?
“Wait!” Pierre said, raising his hands placatingly. “She said she had no boyfriend. Please, monsieur, you must believe me. Or perhaps you are her father? She is young, yes, but very much a woman?—”
The