He runs back to me and says, ‘The guys are going to play pool, get some beers. I’m gonna join them. You want me to get you a cab or something?’
‘No,’ I say, and my voice fails me. I squeak, ‘I’ll be OK.’
He’s leaving me by 34th Street to join his friends? Leaving me here alone?
‘It was nice seeing you, Molly,’ he says, leaning in for a kiss. I feel his smooth, hard cheek next to mine. I reach round for a hug and we hold together for perhaps half a second. The smell of his hair. His chest pushing into mine.
‘It was good to see you,’ I say, my breath close to his ear.
He looks down at me and he’s blushing again and he pulls away and runs off to his friends.
I head north up Ninth Avenue. After the initial shock of his leaving I reassure myself, safe in the knowledge that I can see him again if I choose to. I can spend quality time with him again.
I’m not walking, I am gliding. Floating just above the pavement. My skin feels softer than it has ever felt and I am oblivious to all the water towers, cranes and scaffolding around me. I cross ten more blocks, daydreaming. About how his chest would feel against the heels of my hands. How his fingers might push through my hair.
And then I catch sight of someone.
In a shop window.
He’s staring right back at me.
Suddenly, I’m cold.
There he is again, in a car wing mirror.
I cut down a side street and into a Starbucks.
He’s gone.
I step outside.
No sign of him.
I walk to the corner to hail a cab.
And he steps out from a 7-Eleven and walks right up to me.
Chapter 30
I increase my pace and walk with a group of three middle-aged couples, all of them wearing jeans and white sneakers. We cross over to Port Authority and go in.
He is nowhere.
I leave the group to collect their tickets and I walk further inside and buy a grey beanie hat from a chain store.
He’s not here.
I’m sweating.
People drag their bags around, looking for buses, and I scan from left to right, my pulse racing inside my temples. Is this it? Is this the moment when Bogart DeLuca takes me away, silencing me, neutralising a problem on behalf of his boss? Here to end me with a stab to the heart or a suppressed 9mm round to the back of the head? Maybe the plan to meet at the Pierre Hotel tomorrow was merely a ruse? The generous pay-off was a lie? A misdirection? Maybe this had been the true plan all along?
I take cover behind an escalator.
No sign of him.
I see people walking around with wet hair. One of them shakes an umbrella. I buy a disposable plastic poncho and slide it on.
I walk to Seventh Avenue.
Up to Times Square.
Everyone tells me how this was once a dangerous part of Manhattan, full of pimps and crack dealers. But that was then. Now it’s all Disney and Gap stores. I fit in perfectly wearing my poncho. I’m one of a herd.
I cross towards Sixth and he’s right there on the other side of the road.
Mets cap pulled down low, ill-fitting suit, black shoes.
Or is this when Martinez and a crew of his non-uniform colleagues swoop in and arrest me because my research wasn’t quite thorough enough and I missed a crucial detail: a fibre or a fingerprint?
No.
I was obsessively careful in the apartment. Scrupulous in the extreme. There were no fingerprints.
Did I miss something, though? No. I didn’t miss anything. I can’t have.
I walk close to a woman who looks like she can handle herself.
He’s still there. I see him in the reflection of a truck window.
Or maybe he’s another detective? Someone Martinez sent. A colleague on the homicide team. FBI, even. They got to me. They somehow figured it all out with some piece of new technology we don’t know about yet. Is this me getting arrested? Is that what this is?
I dip into an AT&T store and out the other door and then I sprint up to Jimmy’s smoothie cart.
‘Someone’s following me,’ I say, out of breath.
‘Get in,’ he says, clicking a button and letting me into the cart. ‘Stay down, don’t say a word.’
It’s spotlessly clean in here. No discarded fruit peel or old paper napkins on the floor. Just gleaming stainless steel and Jimmy’s Crocs and Jimmy’s white socks.
Up at his hip level I can see a small photograph of his family back in the ’80s or ’90s. A group of four or five children, all smiling, and a woman of thirty or so. On a shelf under the till is a baseball bat. And the emergency go-bag I asked him to store for me.
I stay down for twenty minutes. Jimmy serves seven customers in that time. Then he says, without looking down or gesturing to me, ‘Don’t think nobody’s following you now, Molly. Nobody out here.’