An NYPD blue-and-white squealed to a stop in front of her building. Two cops jumped out and ran to the front door.
The taxi pulled away. “Where to, lady?” an older, dark-haired driver asked.
“East Side. East Sixty-second.”
“Which block?”
“All the way over. The Bentley Hotel.”
“Oh, yeah. I know it.”
Taylor tried to sink into the seat. As the taxi pulled to a stop at a light, her cell phone went off again. She flipped it open, recognized the number as Hank Powell’s, and hit the button to send the call to voice mail.
Right now, she didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Twenty-five minutes later, the cab pulled up in front of the Bentley, a small boutique hotel where Delaney amp; Associates had an account. Inside, she tracked down her contact in the sales department and arranged for a room to be held in Joan Delaney’s name, hinting that some big celebrity author was coming into town and didn’t want to be noticed. Taylor took the key and went upstairs.
They gave her a tenth-floor room looking east. She locked the door and opened the draperies. The room looked out on the Queensboro Bridge, the traffic streaming across it in a continuous line as the afternoon rush hour approached. Taylor lay down on the bed and tried to relax. She mentally calculated how much sleep she’d had since Michael called her Thursday afternoon. An hour here, a couple of hours there …
She felt numb all over, numb and brittle. She felt herself dozing in and out for a while, then suddenly realized she was getting chilled. She kicked off her shoes and pulled back the covers, then eased under the blanket, staring out at the city lights as the sun went slowly down.
Soon, she drifted off.
When her cell phone went off again, she awoke with a start. She felt a sharp spike of panic. Where was she? Outside the window, the brilliant scatter of lights off the bridge and the surrounding buildings looked like gun bursts. She fumbled for the phone, hit the connect button.
“Yes,” she said, trying to sound awake.
“Am I late?” Michael’s voice sounded relaxed, professional, far too calm for the circumstances.
Taylor looked at the clock. “No.”
“So where are you?” he asked.
“Uh-uh,” she said. “No dice. You just tell me where to meet you.”
He sighed. “All right, but you don’t have to be so paranoid.
We have a deal in place. This will all be over within a couple of hours.”
“Let’s skip the small talk, Michael. Just tell me where I need to go.”
Silence punctuated by static was all she heard for a few moments. “Okay,” he finally said, “ever heard of Pier 57?”
Taylor squinted in the dim light. “Down on the West Side?
That abandoned pier where they locked up the protesters?”
“That’s it. Go to West Fifteenth and the West Side Highway. Get out directly in front of the building. Facing the front, you’ll walk to your left. On the left side of the building, you’ll find a place in the chain-link fence where you can peel the fence back. Go through there, then you’ll see a door to your right that’s been yanked off its hinges. It’ll be dark, so be careful. Come through that door and onto the pier. It’ll be like you’re inside this massive garage. Just stand there.
I’ll be waiting.”
“Isn’t it kind of creepy down there at night? Aren’t you afraid of running into security?”
Michael laughed. “What security? It’s an abandoned bus garage on a pier. They check it a couple times a night.
That’s it.”
“It’ll take me a while.”
“I’ll wait. And remember, Taylor. Come alone. I see you with anybody else, then I’m taking out you and as many of them as I can before I go.”
“I know that Michael. I know that.”
“Just remember, and-”
Taylor closed her phone and went to the bathroom to rinse off her face. She needed to be completely awake for this.
Pier 57, Taylor thought with a twinge, was only about ten or twelve blocks away from Brett Silverman’s brownstone.
Obviously, Michael had become familiar with the area.
It had been years since Taylor had been down to this part of the city. Over a decade ago, about the time Taylor moved to Manhattan, developers moved in and began revitalizing an area that had been run-down for decades. Many of the old piers had been restored and were now restaurants, art galleries, even a golf course and bowling alleys. But there were still pockets of the Hudson River waterfront that were empty and desolate.
As the taxi pulled to a halt in front of the massive, multistory pier that had once been a depot for cruise liners from around the world, Taylor realized that Michael had found the perfect place to disappear. A few short blocks away, the sidewalks were filled with people enjoying a night out, even on a cold late-winter night like this. Eight or nine blocks to the north, literally thousands of people might be at the Chelsea Piers complex.
But not here. “Hey, lady,” the driver said, turning around.
“You sure you want out here?”
Taylor nervously stuffed some cash into the cab’s money tray. “Yes,” she answered. “I’m sure.”
She held the canvas bag tightly in her left hand as she exited the taxi, then pulled her purse tighter around her right shoulder. She felt the weight of the pistol as it bumped against her side.
The cab pulled away, its taillights shrinking as it disappeared into the darkness. The streets weren’t totally dark; an orange, sulfurous glow from the streetlights filled the air.
She smelled the dank, organic odor of the river wafting in from a hundred feet or so way. A traffic light at the intersection of West Fifteenth and the West Side Highway blinked a piercing yellow.
She stood in front of a hulking, dilapidated building that had been an MTA bus depot when the cruise liners stopped coming, but had recently gained an infamous reputation as
“Little Guantanamo” during the Republican convention of 2004, when rumor had it that the Republican National Com-mittee leased the structure and then loaned it to the police as a holding facility for arrested protesters. Jutting from the street out more than seven hundred feet into the Hudson River, it was filthy and decrepit, as well as full of toxic chemicals leaked from the buses and asbestos falling from the decayed structures. Pier 57 was no place anyone would want to go.
Which, Taylor surmised, was precisely why Michael had picked it.
She stood there a moment, mustering her will, and then walked to her left, under the broken letters on the building that spelled out DEPARTMENT OF MARINE amp; AVIATION, CITY OF NEW YORK. At the left front corner of the building, a chain-link fence topped by razor wire kept pedestrians from actually going out onto the pier. She stepped close to it, walking into the shadows, squinting hard to see where she was going.
She got to the fence and looked at it closely, then reached out and touched the metal. It was cold and wet, either from condensation or slime; she couldn’t tell which. Her senses seemed heightened, as if she were suddenly aware of every sensation around her. The wind picked up off the river. Behind her, she heard a distant siren. From a window somewhere nearby, loud hip-hop blared.
She tugged at the fence, gently at first, then harder. Near one of the metal fence poles, the chain link peeled up like the edge of a tin of sardines. She felt her heart pounding in her chest. Ahead of her, she heard something splash in the river, then water lapping against the rotting poles jutting up from the river.
Taylor pulled the chain link up from the asphalt as hard as she could, then ducked under it. A few feet down the building, in the dim light she saw the outline of a metal door. She stepped over to it quickly and saw that it had been torn loose from its hinges, then propped loosely back in the doorway.
She reached out, touched the metal doorknob. It, too, felt slimy and cold. She shuddered, wished that she’d worn gloves. Her hands were stiff and cold now, as well as filthy.
She pulled the door away from the door frame with a loud, painful screech of rusty metal on rusty metal.
