Run for Your Life - James Patterson [59]
My phone rang again. The readout told me it was McGinnis. I took a deep breath as I flipped it open, guessing I wasn’t going to like what he told me.
I was right.
Chapter 61
RUSH HOUR WAS IN FULL SWING by the time the Teacher got to Hell’s Kitchen. A kind of pity had overtaken him as he’d gazed sympathetically at the clogged, screaming traffic before the Lincoln Tunnel.
The sight was almost too painful to behold. The bovine faces behind the windshields. The glossy billboards that dangled above the congestion like carrots beckoning trapped, witless donkeys. The Honda and Volkswagen horns feebly bleating in the polluted air like sheep being led to slaughter.
Something out of Dante, he thought sadly. Or worse, a Cormac McCarthy novel.
“Don’t you know that you are made for greatness?” he’d wanted to shout at them as he skirted the plastic bumpers and overheating SUV grilles. “Don’t you know you were put here for something more than this?”
He climbed the stairs to his apartment, now wearing the blue Dickies work clothes that he’d changed into before he’d escaped. He knew it was a pretty lame disguise, but the fact of the matter was, it didn’t have to be that great. With its millions of people and exits and entrances and subways and buses and taxis, the city was virtually impossible for the police to cover.
The cops had been actually screeching into the plaza in front of the building entrance as he’d left the stairwell. He had simply walked through the bank attached to the lobby and used its exit to the side street.
He sighed. Even the ease with which he’d gotten away was somehow making him feel blue.
Safely inside his apartment, he pulled his recliner over to the window and sat. He was tired after his walk, but it was the good kind—the manly, righteous exhaustion that came from true work.
The sun was starting to set over the Hudson, its light washing the faded tenements and warehouses with gold. Snatches of memory came to him as he gazed at it.
Scaling chain-link fences. The heat of the concrete through his sneakers. Stickball and basketball. His brother and he playing in one of the rusted playgrounds alongside Rockaway Beach.
Those were from his old life, his real life, the one he’d been ripped out of when his mother kidnapped him and took him to rot on Fifth Avenue.
The irrevocable nature of what had happened to him pierced him like a heated needle. There was no going back, no do-over. His life, so crammed full of all the crap that was supposed to make him happy, had been ultimately and completely worthless.
He cried.
After a while, he wiped his eyes and stood. There was still work to do. In the bathroom, he turned on the tap in the tub. Then he stepped into the spare room and lifted the corpse off the guest bed.
“One more,” he whispered to it lovingly. “We’re almost done.” With a tender, caring smile, he carried it to the bathtub.
Chapter 62
HALF AN HOUR LATER, the Teacher went to the kitchen and took a pint bottle of Canadian Club whisky out of the cabinet above the sink. Carrying it in both hands almost ceremoniously, he stepped into the dining room.
The corpse was now respectfully arrayed on top of the table. He’d washed it in the tub, even shampooed and combed the blood and brain matter out of its hair before carefully dressing it in a navy suit and tie.
The Teacher had also changed into a suit, tasteful black, appropriate funeral attire. He tucked the bottle of whisky into the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss the pale, lifeless forehead.
Back in the kitchen, he took his Colt pistols off the counter and quickly loaded and holstered them. The cops would be here anytime now.
He removed a full red plastic fuel can from beneath the kitchen sink and carried it into the dining room. The strong, faintly sweet smell of gasoline filled the entire apartment as he soaked the body, making the sign of the cross—starting at the forehead, spilling fuel down