Morris was breathing through his nose. In and out, in and out, his nostrils flaring with each agitated breath. Then, as suddenly as he’d raised his weapon, he lowered it and looked down at the floor, an admission of defeat. He tucked the gun back into his jacket.
Lewis slowly put his arm down, but kept the gun firmly gripped in his hand.
Even though Morris shooting Lewis might have been in my interest, I breathed a sigh of relief along with everyone else. I looked over at Thomas, expecting him to be a nervous wreck, but he had his eyes closed. I was guessing he’d had them closed through most of this.
“Thomas,” I said. “You can open your eyes.”
He did, looked briefly at Nicole’s body, then at me. He said nothing, but his eyes were pleading. They were asking me to get us out of here. My eyes didn’t have a reassuring answer.
Morris was shaking his head. Lewis and Howard watched him warily, unsure of what he’d do next.
Morris turned, brushed past Howard, threw back the curtain, and started walking toward the front door.
“Morris?” Howard said.
“What the hell’s he going to do?” Lewis said. “Goddamn it.”
Howard went after him. I could see that Lewis wanted to, as well. He gave Thomas and me a quick look, figured we weren’t going anywhere, and followed the two other men.
I heard the door open, but it closed almost immediately, suggesting to me that Morris had tried to leave but one of the other men had slammed the door shut before he could. The three of them began arguing, talking at once. I didn’t know what they were saying, and right now, I didn’t care.
I figured if Thomas and I were ever going to have a chance, this was it.
I leaned forward in the chair so that my feet were planted firmly on the wood floor. They hadn’t taped my legs to the chair so I actually had limited mobility.
“What are you doing?” Thomas asked.
“Shh,” I said.
I waddled myself backward, with the chair attached, so that I was back to back with Thomas. I set the chair down gently, careful not to make any scraping sounds, although it’s unlikely the others would have heard anything with the kind of heated discussion they were having. The curtain had fallen back into place, and they’d have to actually come back in here to see us.
I placed my chair close enough so that my fingers could reach the tape securing Thomas’s wrists to his chair.
“We’re getting out of here,” I said, struggling to get fingers from both my hands onto the tape so I could tear it. There were several layers, and it was going to be tough to rip through them with only the tips of my fingers. If I could just start a small tear…
“Hurry,” Thomas whispered.
“Just hang on.”
“Ray, you should have told me you had me working for a mobster person.”
“It was all bullshit,” I whispered, manipulating the tape with my fingers. “I made it up to buy us some time.”
“Oh,” he said. “That was very smart.”
“—Christ’s sake, no, you wouldn’t dare!” Morris shouted, the first distinct sentence fragment I’d heard since they’d left the room.
I could feel the rip I’d started growing. “It feels looser,” Thomas said.
“When you’re free, you untie me, and we’re out of here.”
“Okay,” he said. “Ray, I don’t even know where we are.”
“Soon as we hit the street I’m sure you’ll know.”
I tore the tape another half an inch, felt it come apart.
“That’s it,” Thomas said. “I can get my wrists free, but there’s still tape around me.”
“Just get out of it as fast as you can.”
I could hear Thomas struggling with the tape. I twisted around, saw him trying to shake off bits of tape from his wrist; then he attacked the strips around his waist.
“Almost done,” I said.
The men weren’t arguing quite as loudly, but they were still talking.
“Faster,” I whispered.
“Okay, okay,” Thomas said, and he stood up from the chair, liberated from it. “Now you.”
Lewis said, clear as a bell: “I’ll go check on them.”
“Go,” I whispered.
“It’ll only take a second,” my brother said, starting to pick at the tape around my wrists.
Lewis’s footsteps were approaching.
“There’s not time!” I whispered urgently. “Go! Run! Get help!”
I could sense Thomas’s panic. He didn’t want to leave me.
“But—”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
So he did. He headed into the short hallway off the side of the room that led to an outside door. He ran, pushed open the door, and was gone.
“Yeah, yeah,” Lewis said, stopping midway to the back room. “Don’t worry.”
Just before he came through the curtain, I glanced down at Nicole and wondered, Why isn’t there any blood under her?
SIXTY-FIVE
THOMAS burst into the narrow alley, the white van right there in front of him, filling the space between buildings. He had to blink a couple of times until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, then looked in both directions, figuring out instantly which was the way to the street. He ran for it.
He came out of the alley, turned right for no other reason than that was what his instinct told him to do, and kept on running, past a bike shop, a tailor’s, other businesses. But he wasn’t paying much attention to them. All he could think was that he had to get away, he had to get away as fast as he could, and he had to get help.
Ordinarily, he would have known instantly where he was, but there were two things working against him. First, he was in a state of panic. And second, it was night. Whirl360’s images of the world were all taken during the day.
The first couple of blocks he was running almost flat out, but for someone who’d spent years and years sitting in his bedroom at the computer without ever going outside for exercise, it was pretty impossible to keep up the pace.
So Thomas eased back from a gallop to a brisk walk. He made a number of random turns along the way. A left turn at this cross street. A right turn at the next.
Get away get away get away.
He reached a point where he had to stop. He leaned over, put his palms on his knees, and caught his breath. He was wheezing and his chest hurt.
He straightened up, wandered around in a couple of wind-down circles, and then, once he had his wind back, looked around. Even though it was dark, there were enough streetlights to focus in on things, see storefronts, read street signs.
On one corner, Stromboli Pizza, with some words written on the wall: “This moment is more precious than you think.” Next to it, some place offering vegetarian food. Across the street, a shoe store with all kinds of different sneakers in the window.
Without looking up at the street signs, Thomas said, “St. Marks Place and First Avenue.”
Then he allowed himself to look at the sign, saw that he was right.
“I know where I am,” he said aloud. “I know where this is.”
A short man with shoulder-length hair was strolling past at the time and said, “Good for you.”
Thomas, too mesmerized by his surroundings, took no notice of the man.
“This is New York,” Thomas said. “This is Manhattan. I know where I am.”
He walked over to the pizza restaurant, went right up to the glass, and touched it with the tips of his fingers.
He could feel it.
Thomas could feel the glass beneath his fingers.
He saw something in that window, something he had never seen before, not in any of the world’s cities that he had explored.
He saw his reflection.
Whirl360 had never been like this. He’d been able to see the homes and storefronts and signs and benches and mailboxes. He could even zero in on them, enlarge them for close examination. But he could only imagine what these items felt like to th
e touch.
He smelled something.
Bread cooking. Dough. Pizza dough. It was too late for the restaurant to be open, but there were lingering aromas.
It smelled so good. So delicious. Thomas realized it had been a long time since he’d had anything to eat. He’d never been able to smell the things he saw when he was on the computer.
Behind him, a truck rumbled past. Thomas spun around, watched it head up First Avenue. Here, the trucks moved, made noises. The people walked. And their faces weren’t blurred.
His Whirl360 world was noiseless. Odorless. Nothing to touch.
Thomas marveled at everything around him. Standing here, at the corner of First and St. Marks Place, was like being inside his computer monitor, but even more real. This was amazing.
For the first time, he thought of all the other places he had been. All around the world. Tokyo. Paris. London. Mumbai. San Francisco. Rio de Janeiro. Sydney. Auckland. Cape Town.
What would it be like to be in those places, to physically be there? To actually feel the streets beneath your feet? To smell these places? To hear their sounds?
It filled him with a sense of wonder.
It was almost enough to make him forget what he had to do. But not quite.
“Ray,” he said under his breath. “I have to help Ray.”
But how was he going to do that?
He didn’t see any police cars around, and he didn’t see any phone booths. And even if he did see one, he had no money on him. No change, no bills, no wallet full of credit cards. Thomas didn’t even own a credit card. Wouldn’t know the first thing about using one.
“Taxi!”
Thomas looked up the street, at a man who’d raised his arm in the air to attract the attention of someone driving one of those yellow cars. The man hopped in and the yellow car took off.
Thomas didn’t have a cell phone, either. If he did, he could call the police, he supposed. But Ray always carried a cell phone, and their father had had one, and Julie had one, so it seemed safe to assume that most people carried them. Any number of these people walking by on the street probably carried them.
Two teenage girls, their arms linked as if to support one another as they teetered along on their high heels, were coming from the south.
“Excuse me,” Thomas said, putting himself directly in their path. “I bet you have cell phones. Could I borrow one to call 911?”
The girls stopped abruptly, blinked. Thomas thought they seemed frightened about something. They unlinked arms and went quickly around him on each side, one muttering, “Creep.”
Thomas guessed they must not have had phones, so he tried stopping two other people. The first was an old man in tattered clothes who was intensely interested in the contents of a trash can. He seemed more interested in the half cup of coffee he’d found than in helping Thomas. The other person was a middle-aged woman who clutched her purse more tightly to her bosom and quickened her step when Thomas asked for her phone.
Maybe no one in New York had cell phones. Thomas wished Julie were here to help him. He liked Julie. Julie would know what to do.
But how could he get in touch with her? Even if he had a phone, he didn’t know her number. So what could—
Wait a second.
Julie had a sister who lived in the city. She had a place that sold cupcakes. What did Julie say her name was? Candace? That was it. And her store was called Candy’s Cupcakes. Julie had said Candace lived above her shop.
On West Eighth.
Thomas closed his eyes for a second. He could see it. The window filled with baked goods. The red-and-white-striped awning. The couple of wrought-iron table and chair sets out front on the sidewalk.
Thomas bet if he could find Candace, she’d know how to get in touch with Julie.
Now he just had to get to West Eighth.
Thomas looked up the street, saw another one of those yellow cars approaching. So he walked out into the street, right into the middle of the lane, put both hands into the air, and shouted, “Taxi!”
The driver hit the brakes and the car screeched to a halt.
“You some kind of fucking nut?” the cabbie shouted.
Thomas walked up to the driver’s window. “Sir, I need you to take me to Candy’s Cupcake shop on West Eighth Street in New York City.”
“Where the hell do you think we are now?”
“We’re at St. Marks Place and First Avenue,” Thomas said, thinking a man who drives a cab should know that kind of thing.
“Get in,” he said.
Thomas ran around the car to get into the front passenger seat. “The back!” the driver shouted, shaking his head. Thomas got into the backseat and, although it had been a long time since he’d seen a movie, said what he thought was the logical thing to say at a time like this. “Step on it.”
The driver stepped on it.
“I have to get help for my brother who’s being held prisoner,” Thomas said.
“Uh-huh,” said the driver.
“That’s why I’m in such a hurry. It’s all because of the woman who was murdered in the window.”
“Listen, pal, we all got problems, you know?”
Thomas, observing street signs as they passed them, said, “I think there’s a better way you could go.”
“Never heard that before,” the cabbie said.
There was so little traffic it wasn’t long before the taxi pulled up in front of the cupcake store. “Looks closed,” the driver said. “If you need a cupcake real bad I know a few all-night diners could help you out.”
Thomas looked at the second-floor windows, figuring that was where Candace lived, but he didn’t know how to get up there. Maybe the apartment entrance was through the shop. If he banged hard enough on the door, maybe she would wake up and come down.
Thomas pulled on the door handle, putting one foot down on the pavement. “Thank you very much.”
“Whoa!” the cabbie said. “There’s five-eighty on the meter.”
“What?”
“You owe me five-eighty.”
“I don’t have any money,” Thomas said. “I don’t need it because I’m home all the time.”
“Five-eighty!”
Thomas said, “My brother has money. When he’s not abducted anymore, he could pay you.”
“Get the fuck out of my cab,” the driver said, and floored it the moment Thomas had closed the door.
He walked to the door of Candy’s Cupcakes and banged on the glass. The shop was dark, but he thought he could see light in the back.
“Hello!” he shouted. “Candace?”
He banged the door continuously, the glass rattling relentlessly. Finally, a small black man came striding through the store, unlocked the door, and opened it a foot.
“Knock it off!” he shouted.
“I need Candace to call Julie,” Thomas said. He could smell baking aromas, and this man had what looked like cake batter splattered on his shirt. Was he working in the middle of the night?
“What?” the man said.
“I have to talk to Julie. It’s about Ray. They’ve got him tied to a chair.”
“Piss off!” the man said, and started to close the door, but Thomas was pushing back.
“I have to talk to Candace!” he shouted. “Does she know Julie’s phone number?”
The man yelled to the back of the store: “Boss! Hey, boss!”
Seconds later a woman in a full white apron, her hair in a net, appeared and came to the door.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“This nut bar’s screaming for you, something about a sister? Julie?”
The woman shunted the man aside and opened the door wider. “Who are you?”
“Thomas.”
“Thomas who?”
“Thomas Kilbride. Are you Julie’s sister?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have to work in the middle of the night?”
“What the hell do you want? What’s this about Julie?
”
“Do you know her cell phone number?”
“Why?”
“I want her to help me save Ray.”
Candace shook her head in exasperation, stuck her hand into her pocket, and pulled out a cell phone. She called up a number, hit the button, and put the phone to her ear.
She looked surprised that someone picked up so quickly.
“Hey, listen, it’s me. I’m really sorry to call you but there’s this crazy guy here, says he has to talk to—uh, Thomas. He says his name is Thomas. Okay.” She handed the phone to him. “She wants to talk to you.”
Thomas took the phone and said, “Hi, Julie, they kidnapped me and Ray and took us here and I got away and they’ve still got Ray and he helped untie me but there wasn’t time for me to untie him and—”
“Are you at the cupcake shop?” Julie asked incredulously.
“Yeah.”
“I can be there in two minutes. Stay there!”
Thomas handed the phone back to Candace. “She’ll be right here.”
Candace, looking perplexed and bewildered, said, “How come, if my sister’s in New York, she doesn’t call me?”
SIXTY-SIX
MORRIS Sawchuck had slipped his gun, the one he’d started carrying back in the days when he was receiving death threats, back into its holster and had his hand on the inside of the front door to Ferber’s Antiques, but before he could open it Howard threw up a hand and slammed it shut.
“What are your intentions, Morris?” Howard said.
“Get out of my way.”
Lewis had caught up to them. “It’s a good question,” he said. “What are you planning to do when you walk out of here?”
“I don’t care what happens,” Morris said. “Nothing’s worth this. I’m going to tell them what I know. They’ll believe me or they won’t.”
Morris felt something cold and hard touching his temple. He shifted his eyes left and saw that Lewis was holding the barrel of his gun to the attorney general’s temple.
“You think that’ll make it easier, Lewis? Blowing my brains out? You think you’re in a mess now? Think that’ll make your problems go away?”