Chapter 1

 

Breathe and don’t look back, David Billman  told himself as he ran, staggered, stopped, leaned against a lamp post, then struggled to run again, his fingers covering the spot where the bullet had gone in – he didn’t dare think about where it had come out.

It had missed vital organs on the front side, although his hand could not keep the blood from spilling out near his belt. This left a trail of dots anyone but a blind man could follow – even in the dim light of West 10th Street – and the man behind him was hardly blind.

Behind him, but where?

But don’t look back, he thought, gripping the nine-millimeter hand gun in his other hand, trying to keep it down, out of sight, although a black man running through the streets of lower Manhattan drew attention, gun or no gun, and fulfilling every horror fantasy the holiday tourists ever had about what to expect from New York City, all those mid-American tales of woe coming true, as he forced them out of his way as he ran, staggered, stopped and ran again.

Don’t look back.

 

He could hardly have seen much if had, just the deeper shadows of a dimly lighted street, and a string of well-to-do brownstones with their dim walk way and door way lamps, aka a 19th century Dickens novel, or a sketching of some long forgotten Washington Square artist. A dark street in the midst of one of the most brightly illuminated cities in the world, filled with strolling people even as flecks of snow fluttered down from invisible clouds above, flecks that caught in the café light at the corner, and in the savage flash of uptown traffic along the much more brightly illuminated Avenue of Americas local people still called Sixth Avenue.

Billman stopped again near the café and saw the faces peering over the lids of laptop computers at him, their screens reflecting social networking pages in the glass behind the coffee counter.

“No!” he screamed, raising his bleeding hand to pound on the glass, startling those faces as well as those of the pedestrians waiting at the corner to cross the wide street. The faces inside cringed and drew back from the glass where his fish had left a trail of blood. Those near the corner stepped off the curb, jumping back only a rushing cab blared at them, people caught between what they saw as certain death in either direction. Some searched the street for police.

None seemed to notice how different Billman was from the black street thugs crime drama’s portrayed, creased kaki pants opposed to sagging jeans held up by a belt with brass buckle so polished they could have shaved in its reflection. None noticed a similar shine on his round-toed black shoes, or how straight the tie he wore, or how closely cropped his hair was, brushed up, stiff, or how clean shaven his face was. None looked too closely at him for fear he might look too closely at them. They only saw death in his eyes, their deaths, when what his eyes showed was his own.

 

 

 

Billman had a lean face, with an old scar near the corner of his mouth, an old basketball injury from showing off just how high he could leap, and hit the edge of the backboard with his face. Routine exercise had made his face taunt so that the scar stood out, pale against his darker skin, undisguised by a hood typical of black men of his age. Nothing about him seemed typical, from the polished black shoes and polished brass buckled belt, to the close cropped hair. In any other place, at some other time of day, strangers might have mistaken him for a rookie cop or a soldier.

He running betrayed him. So did the trail of blood. But he had no time to convince strangers of his intentions, surveying instead the seat of warm metal that steamed in front of him, cabs, cars, buses and trucks that gushed by as if out of a broken steam pipe. He looked for an opening, but saw only death, and the forever unblinking face of the “don’t walk” sign he had to wait out with the other pedestrians.

“Don’t look back,” he told himself, and then disobeyed, glancing often over his right shoulder at the shadows, searching for the half illuminated face he had only seen clearly once back at the hotel, behind firing pistol, a dark figure, but not black, wearing a dark cloth coat too light for New York City weather, and wrap around sunglasses too dark for night or indoors, a face not made dark even by sunlamps, but rather extended contact with a bright sun in some climate other than the northeast.

Then, Billman saw the shape – or have saw it – slithering out of the last shadows of the town houses before the brighter lights of Sixth Avenue gave him away, street lamps glittering off each of curve lens of the sunglasses as if the dark figures’ eyes were made of light. Then, out from under the cloth coat the barrel of the pistol emerged – not a nine a semi automatic weapon most people carried these days, but an old fashioned revolved with a long, screw in type silencer at its end, the same pistol, the same silencer, Billman had last seen spitting fire at him.

But the head and sunglasses turned, looked around, then the pistol vanished again, as Billman edged closer to the curb, putting other bodies between him and the other man, who instead advanced again, hobbling slightly, one hand hold his side as well.

“I hit the motherfucker,” Billman thought, clinging to his weapon, thinking how lucky a shot that must have been, a knee-jerk reaction after the other man’s shot hit him, turn and fire, then run. All instinct, all the result of intense training that had taught him to react in certain ways to stay alive. His shot had prevented the other man from taking a second shot and had allowed Billman time to get out of the room, and then after weaving through hallways and stairwells and lobby, out of the hotel.

A lucky shot that has saved his life. He wondered, could he be as lucky as that again?

Not here. Not with so many people. Not with the other man in the shadow. Maybe up the street, maybe if he could get the other man into brighter light and near enough, and if Billman could keep the pain in his side from making his hand shake. Maybe then he could do it.

 

 

The light changed. The last cab slid through, and then several egomaniac bicyclists, the crowd surging into the street, nearly carrying Billman with them – a cork floating along on an irresistible current, saving him the effort of having to propel his own legs.

“Don’t look back,” he told himself again, but could not have managed it during the plunge in any regard, shoulders and shopping bags pinning him into a narrow lane he could not break out of, leaving him like driftwood on the far side where he stumbled over the curb on the north corner of an odd intersection where Christopher Street, Eighth Street, and Greenwich Street collided, and the crowd dispersed in every direction, leaving him to sway in its aftermath.

Then, he did look back. Then he saw with horror the shape he feared to see, exposed by the brighter illumination of the Sixth Avenue, slowly, with deadly determination, stepping off the curb Billman had stepped off of a moment earlier, unconcerned by the pedestrian sign that had gone from steady white to blinking orange, the dark gaze of the dark figure focused completely on Billman. But no pistol appeared. The reflected sunglasses were enough.

Billman staggered back for a step or so, then turned in as a car horn blared, and a car passed within inches of him as he fled into the street and onto the far corner where several gay men stood outside a tavern smoking cigarettes, eyeing him as he hobbled by, perhaps wondering why on such a cold day in December, Billman’s brow was peppered with seat, even as his teeth chattered and his shoulders shook.

He looked like a drunk or a junkie, a rare site these days in this part of Greenwich Village after a series of succeeding mayors had purged the city of poor people, and thus managed to eliminate many of the more desperate characters, making it safe for the upperly-mobile to return from the suburbs.

 

Each time he told himself not to look back, he did, and each time, he saw the man in the sunglasses moving behind him through the crowd, always inches closer than he had been at the prior glance, a figure whose steady step kept pace and advanced on Billman’s staggering, desperate one.

If the crowd noticed the other man, none of the tourists showed it, although the figure loomed over the shadowed sections of Christopher Street like an approaching storm, the thunder and lightning mere rumbling now, but on the verge of breaking at any moment.

Billman, holding his side tighter and feeling the blood oozing out more heavily with each step, stumbled passed Gay Street, a twisted, alley as deviant to the city grid as its name implied, one of the icons of the West Village that tourists offend chuckled about and which local residents ignored.

Here, the park began, the northern most tip of Sheridan Square, where the metal fence and the heavy hedges – even in winter – made this part of these blocks seem darker and more foreboding, a place where Billman could hear the voices of those who occupied the interior, but could only catch glimpses of the people, lighthearted voices talking of politics or arts, but figures locked away inside and no easily accessed gate that allowed Billman to join them. Each indentation, part of the cruel design, proved a cheat, and only continued the fence, and reduced Billman’s lead over the storm in sunglasses behind him – who had also crossed to the side of Christopher Street with the park.

 

 

Sweat stung Billman’s eyes. He wiped it away, leaving a streak of red across his brown cheek. The world blurred before him, and no matter how much he blinked he could not make it turn clear again.

He couldn’t make his legs work either, each step became an unbearable torture, forcing him entire attention on.

“Don’t look back,” he told himself again, but could hear the sharp step of his pursuer closing in on him, and he knew that he could no longer outrun the figure, and knew that if he did not turn and fight, he would die.

So he turned, lifting his pistol up in that direction. But this, too, was a burden, the fire arm dragging his hand down so that he could not make it stay aimed at the approaching figure.

Unlike back at the hotel where all of Billman’s military instincts had kicked in at once, nothing worked right, years of training drained out of him with each drip of blood. Everything looked gray, even the man with the sunglasses, who came towards him as if out of a cloud, an old fashioned, odd looking revolver rising with each step he took, the muzzle of which flashed once, and an instant later Billman’s chest erupted with pain, not like a fist hitting him, but a rocket, dividing him right at his center, and pressing on through him  with a heat he soon lost as the haze faded, and he staggered back against the metal fence, pieces of his spine passing through it to spray onto the still green vegetation beyond, and some of the people seated at the tables beyond that still.

Billman’s pistol clattered on the sidewalk, his grip too weak to keep hold of the heavy metal. Someone inside the park screamed, the last voice Billman heard before the darkness came upon his already numb brain.

The man in the sunglasses came closer, standing above Billman’s twisted, dead shape. The long barrel of the pistol rose again, a steady unerring aim reflected in the dark glasses, this time pointed at Billman’s head. The finger closed slowly on the trigger. The spark came again. The second shot tore off half the face and then half the head on the far side scattering brain and bone onto the sidewalk and fence.

The screaming inside the park continued, but most of those on the inside or the outside said nothing, just stared, looking at the bloody corpse and then at the man who stood above it.

One or two less stunned figures fumbled for cellular phones, their faces aglow with the blue light, ghouls feeding off the scene in their panic, thumbs pumping out 911. Another brave soul even tried to take the killer’s picture, with shaking hands that guaranteed a blurred picture taken in poor light.

The killer took no notice. The eye glassed did not look up, instead, studied the dead figure closely as the man prodded the dead body with the pointed tip of his black polished shoes. Satisfied with Billman’s demise, the killer finally turned, still paying no attention to the bystanders or their telephones, shoving out of his way only those that barred his way back the way he’d come. Even then, he did not hurry, each step in his retreat as calculated at the steps he had taken in pursuit, one steady step after another until the shadows swallowed him.