The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [4]
The bullet actually ricocheted inside his body, twisting, turning, like an oblong object under water. Then it burst out his side, leaving a huge hole.
Shot in the back.
Stefanovitch was lying facedown. He was half on, half off the gritty, iced sidewalk pavement.
His eyes were watering, so that he seemed to be crying. He wanted to crawl away, to do something, but he couldn’t move an inch.
The hidden gunman finally appeared from the shadows. The gunman walked forward, stopping over the sprawled, spreadeagled body, staring down for a long silent moment.
Stefanovitch could hear the man’s breathing, the inhuman calmness…He could hear exactly what the gunman was doing. Suddenly everything was clear and distinct inside his mind. He was about to witness his own murder.
To hear the killer actually pump a third shell into the chamber. To hear him pause for a long, breathless second, then hear him fire again.
One final shot, point-blank into Stefanovitch’s back.
Then the Grave Dancer walked away from his supposed pursuer.
6
Alexandre St.-Germain; Brooklyn Heights
ALEXANDRE ST.-GERMAIN drove a Porsche Turbo Carrera, sleek and midnight blue. Nothing but black glove leather and dim red control lights were visible inside. The only sound was the racing tires against the pavement, a noise like tape being pulled away from an uneven surface.
Lessons, he thought to himself as he drove. The world needed object lessons, but especially the police detective who had come after him; who had stubbornly trailed him for two years.
The apartment building in front of which St.-Germain finally parked seemed all wrong. It was faded red brick, rising maybe nineteen or twenty stories. It was the kind of place where mothers on the high floors throw change wrapped in tinfoil down to their kids for ice cream.
The Grave Dancer followed a black woman inside the apartment building, some kind of nurse from the look of the white spongies and stockings showing below her cloth coat.
The hallway of the floor where he got off the elevator was like all the others in the building. The night’s stale cooking smells. A clicking in the heating system. Pale blue walls; a worn blue and black hallway runner.
Alexandre St.-Germain rang the bell for 9B. He rang the doorbell insistently, seven times.
Finally, a woman’s voice came from inside, sounding very hollow and distant.
“I’ll be right there. I’m coming. Who is it?”
The dark blue door for 9B swung open. The look on Anna Stefanovitch’s face instantly revealed her lack of comprehension.
“Something happened to Stef,” she said. A statement of fact, not a question.
“Yes. And now something is happening to you.”
There was no pain. Anna definitely heard the hollow, muffled shotgun blast from less than three feet away. She saw the bright streak of light illuminate the hallway, a little like a photographer’s flash camera going off. Anna Stefanovitch was dead before she hit the floor inside the foyer.
Alexandre St.-Germain, the Grave Dancer, left the apartment building as confidently as he had arrived.
PART ONE
The Grave Dancer
7
Isiah Parker; 125th Street, June 1988
THE ORANGE JULIUS stand tucked on the corner of 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard had at least one advantage over many of the other stores in the area—an open, lively view onto the street. A view of the changing, or rather, the decaying neighborhood: the sealed-off and abandoned buildings, like Blumstein’s, Harlem’s last department store, and the Loews Victoria, both shut down now. The Hotel Teresa, where Fidel Castro had once stayed while visiting New York, now an office building. The Apollo—where Basie, and Bessie Smith, Bill Eckstein and Ellington had played—closed, and now opened up again. Who knew for how long?
Isiah Parker stood behind the brightly colored counter of the Orange Julius stand. He was dutifully wiping it down, while he watched the fascinating panorama of 125th Street stretch out before him. He had the thought that squalor and misery had never been so interesting; he had no idea why