The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [77]
“The street gets into your blood, all right.” Parker had to agree. “Outsiders, anybody you talk to, they don’t understand that too much. Only cops understand. Only another cop can listen to a cop and not think he’s crazy.”
Another fifteen minutes slowly passed on the surveillance watch. Then half an hour… Suddenly Stefanovitch pointed through the sedan’s grimy windshield.
“Here we go loop de li. I hope. That’s the car arriving now.”
A long blue limousine was easing into the no-parking zone in front of the canopy at 85 Central Park West. A broadshouldered chauffeur, in a tight black suit, started to climb out of the limo.
“Marco Gualdi,” Stefanovitch said. “An associate of Mr. St.-Germain’s from Sicily. I think they played on the same bocci team or something.”
The heavyset driver stood in front of the Central Park West luxury building, smoking cigarettes and schmoozing with the captain-doorman. Stefanovitch noticed that both of them laughed in the side-of-the-mouth, conspiratorial way high lackies seemed to favor around New York.
His powers of observation were coming back a little. Yes, he did like police work and the streets. Maybe it was an extension of the do-gooder soup kitchen his parents ran? Some kind of quixotic urge to try and do the right thing? He didn’t really know why, but he liked it, maybe he loved the life of a street cop.
“This might even be some fun,” he finally smiled and said to Parker. “Mind if I cover this one myself? Start things off right?”
Isiah Parker pushed his long legs up against the bottom of the steering column and the front dash. He peered over dark sunglasses at Stefanovitch.
“Be my guest. You holler, I’ll come running pretty damn fast.”
Stefanovitch was smiling as he swung open the passenger side door, then the back door of the sedan.
75
IN THE SAME fluid motion, he pulled his lightweight racing chair out of the car, and set it on the sidewalk. Using the racer on the job was something new and different; it was even vaguely exciting.
There was something that got into your blood about police work, about the streets of New York. He was thinking that as he assembled the chair. Maybe the act of wearing a gun did it? Maybe it was having so much raw power in your hands? So much life-and-death responsibility?…Whatever it was, he needed it right now, and he was getting a good dose.
Stefanovitch slowly made his way down Central Park West toward the parked limousine.
He was about to cross West Seventy-seventh Street, another half block to the Grave Dancer’s limo, when Alexandre St.-Germain emerged from the elegant apartment building, Number 85.
Horns were tooting up and down Central Park West. A manhole cover clattered, then was still again.
Alexandre St.-Germain was there on the sidewalk. The Grave Dancer was walking crisply, looking good in a tailored charcoal gray suit. He motioned for his driver to get back inside the car. Two more bodyguards fell in on either side of St.-Germain as he came out from under the apartment building’s canopy.
A faded red gasoline truck turned down Seventy-seventh Street. It was blocking Stefanovitch’s view of the limousine and Alexandre St.-Germain.
“Son of a bitch. Hey. Get the hell out of the way,” he said out loud, to no one in particular.
His heart had really begun to kick in. His forehead felt hot, beaded with sweat already. He was still thirty yards from the limousine and Alexandre St.-Germain.
Suddenly, he realized he wasn’t going to get there in time. There was no way.
“Son of a bitch.” Stefanovitch squared his mouth and cursed.
A matronly woman waiting on the sidewalk glanced over at him. She saw the wheelchair, and tempered her initial reaction. They always did, and it drove him crazy.
Stefanovitch’s hands bored into the hard, black rubber wheel guards of the wheelchair.
The chair was dropping off the curb, moving into the street against the red light, against the traffic making a right turn on Seventy-seventh.
“Hey!” he shouted up the sidewalk, completely ignoring the traffic. He was moving as fast