She found Merrick easily. Melanie followed the trail of his
briefcase and an odd-looking pistol toward a passageway
leading to a Trader Vic's restaurant. Inside the passageway,
near the fire door Merrick had jammed earlier, he had sim
ply been thrown aside. The agent was alive, convulsing, his face in the spilled contents of a cigarette urn. The fire door
was partly open, torn from its lower hinge and hanging at a
slant. Sonnenberg was quite right, Melanie decided. One cannot expect this one to pick up after himself.
Setting her purse on the floor, Melanie Laver grasped the
semiconscious agent by his lapels and dragged him to the
stairway inside the fire door. There, she stripped him of his
identification, his keys, and his handcuffs, manacling him
with the latter to a cast iron radiator. Eyeing his kneecap, she
hefted the dart pistol by its barrel, considering whether to
disable the agent further. No need, she decided. He would not be useful for several days. Surely not by tonight. After
that it would make no difference. Instead, she stripped away
his necktie and gagged him.
Next, Melanie returned to her purse and to the overturned
urn, which she straightened as best she could, leaving Merrick's weapons and the contents of his pockets in the hollow base. Then, pausing to examine a nail she'd broken on Mer-
rick's lapel, she made her way to the nearest exit that Jared
Baker could have taken.
“Who was the woman, Charley?”
Baker was on Fifty-eighth
Street, walking slowly toward the rear entrance of the Park
Lane, a few doors west of the Plaza.
”a friend. ”
“What friend? I have no friends here”
”i don 't know, she said something, she said abel makes
messes and doesn 't clean up. abel says never mind that, abel
says bring him out and leave him out until we're away from
here, abel says you wait too long and we'll all die, even
when you don't want us to all die.”
“Does Abel remember my promise? ”
“abel remembers, i remember, you'll let them kill us all if
abel doesn't let you be you and if you can't have tina. abel says he will be good, but you shouldn 't get us killed not on
purpose and
—” Charley stopped as if he'd been interrupted.
Baker couldn't hear, but he felt Charley's surprise at what
was being said. Charley giggled,
“abel says please,”
Charley told him. Charley giggled again like a schoolchild
at a classmate's humiliation,
“please please please.”
Baker nodded to himself. Abel was right, he knew, about
him taking too long. He'd held Abel right on the edge and
sent him back when the man got on at the eighth floor. The
man kept glancing at him. He almost wasn't ready when the
doors opened to the lobby. If the woman hadn't blocked
Peck's man . . .
“Abel.”
Baker paused by a glass-framed poster near the
marquee of the Park Lane.
“Abel, if I let you out, you must walk very slowly. Do you understand that, Abel?”
“slowly, yes.”
“You must not look at the people you pass. Your eyes will
frighten them. You must look down all the time and you must
keep your hand across your mouth. If someone is in your path, you must walk around him, Abel. If someone bumps
into you, you must say ‘Sorry’ and slowly walk away. You
cannot bump them back or grab their throats or do anything
but walk away slowly. If there is a chair or a table in your way, you cannot kick it aside or step on it. You must walk around things and people. Do you understand that, Abel?”
“slowly, look down, don
y
t grab, don 't kick. yes. call me,
baker, please.”
Baker waited for one cruising cab to pass and then
stepped into the doorway of a clam bar, where he pretended to study the luncheon menu. Two businessmen left the Park
Lane and proceeded at a half-trot toward Fifth Avenue.
Baker listened. Whatever their thoughts were, they were not of him. But farther in that direction he could hear the one
named Biaggi, thinking Baker's name and cursing the woman
who would not stop asking him for the way to the Empire
State Building. The woman again. And through the doors of
the Park Lane and on the side facing Central Park, he could hear the one called Burleson. Baker drew his tinted glasses
from his pocket and fixed them securely over his ears.
“Abel,”
he said aloud.
“Come out now, Abel.”
Scotty McGuire was in his twenty-sixth year as a bellman at the Park Lane. He'd been promoted once, back in 19
89
, for climbing down three elevator shafts to help guests who were
stranded because of the blackout that hit Manhattan that
year
. The promotion didn't last long, not that he cared.
Scotty never wanted to be a bell captain anyway. Boring job. Carrying bags in and out of the storeroom all day and never
talking to no one except to tell them where's the airport
limo. Never alone upstairs with some of the big stars and
ballplayers that stayed here. Never a chance to get auto
graphs because they're coming and going too fast and defi
nitely no chance to pass the time of day with them. Scotty
had over four hundred autographs in his collection. Maybe fifty on photographs. Some with him in them. Orson Welles
wrote practically a speech on his. Hell of a guy.
The guy with the yellow glasses might be someone, he
thought at first. Not that he was familiar. Just that there was
something different about him. Mostly the way he walks.
His eyes down on the carpet like his neck is stuck while the
rest of his body moves in a kind of jerky slow motion like
what you see with fighters when they're moving through
the crowd toward the ring. He could be a fighter. Kind of
old for it, but whatever he is, he's a mean-looking son of a
bitch.
Scotty decided that the guy wasn't anybody. He had just
about dismissed him from his mind when the guy glanced at
him with a look that said he thought Scotty McGuire wasn't
nothing either. And that right there was pissing McGuire off.
Keep moving, buddy. He had an odd thought that the man
could hear him. Just keep moving. You try anything in my hotel, I'll bust a chair over your head.
Abel forced his mind from the little man in the red coat who'd been staring at him. The little man did not matter.
What mattered was the bigger man who stood just inside the
glass doors of the main entrance. No. Two men now. The
one called Peterson was coming in. Frightened. Too
loud
.
Burleson quieted him and brought a metal thing to his lips.
Wait, Abel. Wait and soon there will be three.
Slowly.
”i hear you, baker, slowly”
Abel dropped his hand from his mouth and eased closer,
hugging the wall where he could
do so
, just on the edge of their line of sight. He saw the one called Burleson snap his fin
gers toward a man outside and turn his palm down in a calm
ing gesture. Only twenty feet now, Abel thought. Slowly. Wait for the new man to come in. Wait until they all come together and they lean close and talk about Baker.
Biaggi pushed through the door. Abel knew him. The one
who slinked through wet grass. The one he could have hurt
last night but did not so that Biaggi could tell what he had
seen Abel do. But now he had told and now Abel could hurt
him. He could hurt them all so that they could not use their
darts and guns. He would squeeze their necks with his hands
the same way Biaggi squeezed the neck of Harrigan's friend
with his wire thing. Abel coiled his body.
“Something I can do for you, buddy?” A hand touched
his arm.
“No, please,”
Abel whispered, his wolf eyes locked on
Burleson. He began to move away from the smaller man, McGuire's fingers tapped insolently against his back.
“Don't,”
Abel hissed.
“Thank you, please”
His right
hand reached back against the bellhop's chest and pressed him an arm's length away as he stepped toward Burleson.
”A wise guy, huh?” McGuire stepped inside the out
stretched arm and bent it into a hammerlock against the small of Abel's back. It was a powerful arm, he knew at
once, and he felt a stutter in it much too fast to be a heart
beat. But the arm did not resist him. The arm ignored him.
The man continued to move away, indifferent to McGuire's
grip. McGuire dug in a heel.
“This way, buddy,” he said quietly. “Security officer
wants to talk to you.” He tried steering Abel toward a door to his right.
“don't hurt him, abel. do not attract attention.”
”I can crush his hand, Baker. He'll be in shock. He won 't
scream until I'm gone.”
“no. there's a room there, the luggage room, take him there and see if there's a way to make him stay there.
”
Abel saw the door that Baker must have meant. There
were suitcases there. And a luggage dolly. It was near the
other door that the little man wanted him to enter. Abel
turned in that direction, glancing around the lobby. No one had noticed them.
“What if there's nothing to make him stay
f
Baker? What
if there's another man in there?”
“then hit them in their stomachs, nothing more, that will
give you time.”
“Your way will kill us one day, Baker.”
A
step away from the security officer's door, Abel rotated
the hand that McGuire thought he was holding fast and
swung the small man fully around so that he was tucked
under Abel's arm. “Hey!” the startled bellhop gasped. Abel
squeezed an arm under his rib cage and made him quiet.
McGuire tried to make other sounds but he had no air for
them. In another stride, Abel was through the luggage room
door, snapping the lock as he entered.
They were alone. No one was following. It was a small
room without windows. Wire racks filled with luggage cov
ered three walls. On the near end was a table laid out with
materials for packing.
“the tape, abel. use the tape.”
Abel tore a length of plastic packing tape from its dispenser
and pressed it in a single motion against the mouth of Scotty McGuire. Then, snatching the roll, he pressed McGuire face down upon the table and, like a frenzied spider, began wrap
ping McGuire's chest and arms. McGuire was kicking now,
suddenly terrified by the knowledge that a human being could
do this to him. Abel seized one kicking leg by its knee and
pressed his fingertips at the edges of the floating kneecap,
looking all the while into McGuire's eyes. McGuire saw the look and made himself relax, even under the pain of Abel's
grip. The man's eyes told him that the kneecap would be torn
from its joint if the leg kicked again. Abel quickly wrapped
both legs at the knees and ankles, and then, slowing himself at Baker's order, he stepped once more into the lobby.
The men were gone. A young couple stood saying good
bye in the space they'd filled. Abel growled in disgust.
“go to the oldsmobile, abel now”
”I would have had them all, Baker. They're gone because
you let them go ”
“the oldsmobile, abel. another of them will be there, you
can hurt that one.”
“You pick and choose, Baker. You stay away from fights.
You try not to hurt. But all of these men will hurt you. None
of them would let you go. You let them go and they come
again. It's stupid, Baker.”
“the oldsmobile, abel. then you can look for the others.”
Baker knew where the others were. They were walking,
almost running, toward the Plaza. Their hands were on the
butts of guns that fired bullets. Baker listened for the man in
the Oldsmobile whom he'd heard earlier. There was nothing.
He could still be sitting there, he thought, with a mind gone
blank or even napping, although Baker doubted it. If he'd
left the car and was watching it, he'd still be thinking Baker.
But Baker heard nothing. The man must be far away.