The Hungry Dreaming, page 35
part #3 of Ghosts of Gotham Series
The binder. The Hamilton letters. Rime had murdered her professor and stolen his skin, then fetched them from the safe-deposit box. If she left them behind, they’d end up in Leda’s hands, hidden away forever or destroyed.
She doubled back and snatched the binder off the table, clutching it to her chest. She turned, ready to make a quiet escape—and found him standing in the kitchen doorway. Her old professor had Dieter Rime’s winter-gray eyes now; he casually held a carving knife by its stainless-steel blade. He waggled the knife in his fingertips, considering it, testing its weight.
“Professor Ramis wasn’t very helpful.”
Nell held the binder in a death grip, her anger rising to swallow her fear.
“He was a good man,” she said. “He was innocent. You didn’t have to kill him.”
Rime chuckled. “Innocent? Far from it. The residue of a man’s soul remains with his flesh when he departs this mortal coil. I’m wearing the old man’s sins. I can feel them, like I’m…marinating in his life. All that he was, all that he loved, all that he hated. Residue. He was very fond of you. Did you know that? He wished you would have visited him after you graduated. Too late for regrets now, though. That’s the way of things.”
“You’ll pay for this, you son of a bitch. I’ll make sure of it. If it’s the last thing I ever do.” She squeezed the binder harder, feeling her arms start to shake.
He broke into a grin. “The melodrama! Ms. Bluth, you should have been an actress. I must enlighten you about three important, undeniable facts of life. Are you ready? Here they are. The strong do as they please and are never held to account, the weak exist to be exploited and devoured at our pleasure, and the last thing you will ever do…is die. Now let me prove my thesis.”
His arm whipped down in a blur and the carving knife sliced through the air, flying like a bullet. Nell brought up the binder, fast. The blade punched through its heart, spearing both covers and the priceless letters in between, jutting out the other side as the wooden handle vibrated from the impact. The tip gleamed half an inch from her eye.
Then he came at her.
54.
Nell ripped the carving knife free of the binder and waved it, wild, slashing the air as Rime circled her. Her hip bumped the glass table and a paperback slid from the unruly mountain of books, hitting the floor with a flutter. Rime darted in, grabbed her wrist, and suddenly she was flying. Her spine cracked hard against his shoulder and then the floor, sending her rolling across the stained wooden planks, groaning. The knife was gone, plucked free. He casually tossed it from his left hand to his right.
“Aikido,” he said. “Studied in Tanabe, in the early nineteen hundreds.”
The blade came soaring down. Her eyes were blurry with tears and her back was screaming, but she forced herself to roll, dodging as the spear-tip of the knife carved into the wood. It snapped and broke, leaving the assassin with a twist of jagged steel.
Nell swiveled on her hip, lashed out and kicked his hand. He grunted, falling back. She scrambled onto one knee, high enough to reach up and snatch one of the jar candles from the nearest shelf. Then she reared back like a baseball pitcher and let it fly. The candle hit him in the shoulder and shattered, spraying him with broken glass and a hard fist of wax. The flame caught on his cotton shirt. He gritted his teeth, hammering his chest and patting it out before the fire could spread.
The distraction bought her half a second. He turned just as Nell scooped up one of the professor’s chairs, heaved it high, and swung with all the strength she had left. It smashed across his face, pulping his nose, filling the air with the crack of splintering wood and breaking bone. A spatter of hot blood painted Nell’s blouse. Rime hit the floor, limp as a rag doll.
She let the chair drop. She leaned against it, gasping for breath.
“Fighting dirty,” she panted. “Studied in Brooklyn, most of my life. Asshole.”
He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing and she wasn’t going to feel for a pulse. She wasn’t sure if he needed to breathe. She started to turn away, looking for the binder, then she hesitated.
Back in college, Nell had dated a horror hound who dragged her to every new flick. When it came to slasher movies, one trope always infuriated her. It was the obligatory scene where the heroine knocks the killer down, holds the upper hand, and then runs away or turns her back instead of finishing him off. And he always sprang back to life for one last scare. Always.
She picked the chair up again.
“On one hand,” she said, “this is escalating from justifiable self-defense to criminal manslaughter.”
The chair came whistling down. It broke against his skull, tearing his stolen face and baring the wet-meat muscle and stained jawbone beneath. Rime’s shoulders gave a spasmodic jerk, then fell still.
“On the other hand, I am way past the point of giving a fuck.”
She hit him two more times. Spent, glistening with sweat, she let the chair tumble from her hands and clatter to the blood-smeared floorboards. Now she could turn her back on him. She scooped up the fallen binder and opened it, checking on the treasures inside. The letters had a blade-sized hole in their heart, but they could still change the world.
A groan, squeezing its way from a crushed windpipe, turned her head.
Rime was getting up again.
As he pulled himself to his feet, his body mended itself. A chunk of spongy skull slid back into place, coated in a film of white milky fluid that wormed its way between the cracks. Torn muscle knitted together, tendons twisting, going taut with a rubber-band snap. The only part that didn’t heal wasn’t truly his: the professor’s stolen face drooped like a sagging Halloween mask, one ripped cheek dangling in red ribbons.
“Hades is no country for a soldier of fortune,” he said. “Even if I wished to die, I would be quite incapable of the deed. And I do not wish to die.”
She rushed for the door, breaking left around the glass table. He moved like a cat, liquid fast, blocking her path. He showed his blood-flecked teeth.
“That’s two perfectly good faces you’ve ruined, Ms. Bluth. Such a spiteful little thing you are. No wonder you can’t find a husband.”
She bolted right, circling the table again. He was there to meet her, his open hands flexing at his sides, inviting her to take a swing. Playing with her. The apartment door was six feet away; it could have been six miles for all her hopes of reaching it.
Bad idea. She needed another way out. The layout of the apartment flickered through her mind as the teakettle started to scream. Kitchen dead-ended at a window, no chance she’d get it open fast enough. Kitchen was where all the knives were.
Window. Bathroom.
She snatched a hardcover book from the teetering mountain on the table and threw it at him. His hands rose, reflexive, batting it away, and she was already turning on her heel and sprinting in the other direction. She hurtled across the bathroom threshold, slammed the door behind her, and twisted the flimsy lock.
The bathroom window was built like the room itself: tall and narrow, a rectangle of dirty glass at the end of a cramped aisle between the sink and the tub. Nell lunged for it, hands scrabbling at the twin latches above the windowpane, yanking them back. One fought her, the old metal warped and frozen fast. Her fingers slipped and the steel nub caught under her thumbnail, almost ripping it loose. She gritted her teeth against the pain and tried again, wriggling the latch back and forth until it started to give.
A fist slammed into the bathroom door. The old wood rattled against the hinges.
The second latch tugged open. Nell grabbed the handles at the base of the window and heaved. Tiny flecks of dirt-brown paint shook loose as it jolted a quarter inch upward. Then another, the frame squealing like nails on a blackboard.
Another punch shook the door at her back. The wood cracked and started to buckle.
“Come on, come on—” Nell hissed through clenched teeth. Her arms burned as she hauled on the handles. One wriggled under her fingertips, a mounting screw peeling loose from its socket. The window moved another quarter inch. Just enough.
Nell let go of the handles and curled her fingers through the gap under the window. She turned her shoulder into it, trying to get leverage as she wrenched it upward. The tortured frame shrieked with every heave. She could see the other side now, the neighboring apartment building across the alley, the long drop to the pavement in between.
What is that, fifteen, twenty feet? she thought. There’s no way. I’ll be lucky if I only break my legs.
The sound of splintering wood spun her around. A third frenzied punch tore the door open halfway up the frame, knocking out a rectangular panel and sending it to the bathroom floor, shattered down the middle like a board in a karate school. Rime forced an arm through the door. His stolen skin ripped on a jagged splinter while he fumbled for the knob and the lock.
Nell’s eyes shot toward the clutter on the bathroom sink. A can of deodorant spray stood tall above the mess like a gleaming silver bullet. She snatched up the can, aimed for the broken panel, and blasted Rime in the face. The assassin fell back with a strangled-cat yowl, clawing at his eyes. Nell dropped the can and raced back to the window. She dug deep, strength fueled by a rush of fight-or-flight adrenaline that felt like the dive of a roller coaster, and shoved the window as hard as she could. It jolted upward then caught in the frame at an angle and froze there, jammed up tight. Hot wind gusted in from the alley. The gap was a good three feet, wide enough for Nell to squeeze through to the other side. She slung one of her legs over the windowsill. Then she tossed the binder out the window, its plastic-sheathed pages fluttering, rippling as it fell.
Her gaze followed it down. Then she wished she hadn’t looked. Black asphalt and stray trash below, nothing to break her fall but the battered plastic lid of a dumpster a couple of feet left of the drop. If she grabbed hold of the sill, lowering herself as much as she could, then carefully swung herself toward the trash bin—
The bathroom door blew open under a brutal kick, its knob torn and dangling from the ravaged wood as the door leaned on a twisted hinge. Rime stood in the doorway. He’d collected a new knife from the professor’s kitchen, seven inches of stainless steel, eager to carve. He lunged for her and Nell shoved herself through the window and then she was falling free. The wind whistled in her ears and her stomach dove for half a second before she hit the weathered dumpster lid on her shoulder. The thick plastic buckled beneath her. She bounced, rolled, and the asphalt rushed up to greet her for the last few feet of the drop.
Nell landed hard on the alley floor, one sleeve of her blouse torn open, her forearms skinned raw. She felt blood welling up, and her hip was on fire as she forced herself to her knees and then to her feet. Rime loomed in the window. He glared down at her like a lion who had just been denied its lunch.
She scooped up the fallen binder and hugged it to her chest, tight in her trembling arms. Her treasure. Her future.
“I’m still alive,” she called up to him. “And I’m still standing. What else have you got?”
The Hessian turned and vanished from the window. Nell looked to the alley mouth, the busy street beyond, and forced her aching body to run.
55.
“May I speak to Julio, please?”
“He’s on his lunch break, should be back in twenty.”
It was Tyler’s decision to warn the Culpers about the empty statue they were guarding, but Seelie ended up carrying out the plan. It came down to research: either of them could pore over the public records, hunting for the gravesite, but Seelie was in a better position to sift through the Culper network’s historical archives. She’d had her own brush with the past, up close and personal, and might spot something only she would recognize. The morning found her in Harlem, hustling up from a subway platform with the straight razor in her back pocket and the mission on her mind.
It didn’t take long for that mission to go sour. It started with a creepy-crawly feeling along the back of her neck, skin prickling, telling her the street was wrong. She didn’t see anyone in the crowd looking her way, but she felt it. She ducked out of the flow of traffic, inside an outcropping of sand-yellow brick, and checked her reflection in the plate-glass window of a fried chicken joint. Pretended to, anyway, while she scanned the ghosts in the blurry glass to see if anyone sketchy was rolling up behind her.
She’d read a spy novel where the heroine used that trick. The trick worked fine, but it didn’t show her a tail. Up at the next intersection, a NYPD cruiser prowled past, slower than it needed to. The driver’s partner was working the street with a wolf’s eyes, on the hunt. Seelie ducked into the restaurant and pretended to study the menu for a slow twenty-count. Better safe than sorry. She was walking out again, holding her breath, when Nell called her.
“Are you with Tyler?” she said, breathless. “He isn’t answering his phone.”
“He probably doesn’t have any bars. He went to the library on Fifth. It’s hard to get reception in there. What’s up?”
“Rime.”
Nell got the story out between gulps of air. The prickling sensation at the nape of Seelie’s neck became a skeleton hand, squeezing hard. Down the block, another prowl car—or the same one, working the grid of streets in a slow, methodical sweep—rolled past.
“Let me call you right back,” she said.
She called the rug shop. The voice on the other end answered with a disaffected grunt.
“This is Julio’s sister,” she told him. “There’s been a medical emergency and we really need him to come home right away, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. He hung up on her.
Nell picked up on the first ring. “Culpers?”
“Clearing out, if they know what’s good for them. One thing they’re good at is running.”
So was she. Seelie changed course, turning right at the next corner and rounding the block. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that address, not if Leda’s perfect machine had tracked her down.
“I’m headed for the library,” Nell said. “Going to find Tyler and warn him.”
“Same. I’ll meet you there.”
The squawk of a police car’s siren—a sharp one-note pay attention bleep—injected nitro into her footsteps. The car was at the curb, gliding along, passenger window down. Dark glasses trapped her in their lenses, above the hard tight line of a mouth and a granite jaw.
“You,” the cop said. “C’mere, need to talk to you.”
She bolted. Seelie heard a shout, a car door slamming, as she tore down the sidewalk. She dodged and weaved like a boxer, darting through crowds, soles of her ratty gym shoes pounding the pavement.
“Seelie?” Nell said.
“Cops,” Seelie panted, juking around a mob of tourists. “Leda must have sicced them on me. Don’t know what they think I did, not sticking around to find out.”
The mouth of an alley, ripe with rotting-trash stench from an overflowing dumpster, offered an invitation. She hurdled a stray wooden pallet and raced for freedom, spinning a street map in her head. Next right puts me one block from the closest train station. Get lost in the crowd, hop the first train that rolls in, and ride it to anywhere. Gone.
She burst from the alley and a second squad car swung up to the curb with a screech of tires, cherries flashing, so close her open palm smacked the hood. She tried to go around but rough arms grabbed her from behind, hooking her elbows, swinging her like she was weightless.
“Don’t fight me,” a voice barked in her ear. “Don’t you fucking fight me.”
She didn’t have room to fight. Best she could manage was a panicked squirm as they took her phone, her wallet, her razor, trading them for steel bracelets that ratcheted down tight around her slender wrists.
* * *
“Am I under arrest?” Seelie said.
It was the third time she’d asked. The first two times they just ignored her. She rode in the back seat in stop-and-go traffic, behind a bulletproof shroud, and the vinyl bench seat smelled faintly of the last vagrant who had thrown up there.
“Criminals get arrested,” the cop behind the wheel told her. He had the pedantic tone of a nighttime law-school student. “You are a truant minor who was reported as a runaway in Buffalo. You are thereby being detained, until such time as we sort out the situation to ensure your safety. So no, to answer your inevitable next question, you are not free to go.”
“Know what else you are?” his partner said. “A pain in the ass. So how’s about you sit back, shut up, and enjoy the ride? Think of it like a…courtesy cab, funded by the friendly taxpayers of New York.”
“How’d you find me?” Seelie asked.
“Dispatcher got an anonymous tip,” he said.
Leda. Seelie had landed on the Loom’s radar, and one phone call had taken her off the board. But how long had Leda been tracking her, and how much did she know?
If the Culpers were smart, and lucky, they’d cleared out of their latest safe house and burned it down behind them. If they weren’t, they were already dead.
Tyler. He was at the library, buried in research, and half the building didn’t get phone reception. Had to be a way to warn him. The front desk, she thought. I could call, tell them it’s an emergency, see if someone can page him.
“Can I have my phone?” she asked. “I get a phone call, right?”
“Contrary to popular belief,” the cop behind the wheel said, “the right of the accused to a single phone call is more a product of television shows than an actual tenet of law. Also, as you are not an accused criminal and not under arrest, you have no need to contact an attorney. You’ll notice we haven’t read you your Miranda rights, as you are not in a situation where said rights can be infringed upon. Now, that said, you do have the right to remain silent, and we encourage you to avail yourself of that option.”
His partner shifted in his seat, shooting her a look through the partition.
