12th Street.
“Are you nuts?” Sully shouted.
“You’re going to hit the fire truck!” Jada warned.
Knuckles white on the wheel, Drake drove straight for the closest fire truck. Firefighters shouted and tried to wave him off. Survivors of the burning building scurried out of the way. The two cops on the sidewalk pulled their guns, but not fast enough, as Drake shot the taxi through the gap between fire truck and ambulance and careened down the street toward the police cars waiting there.
Gunfire punched the air, echoing off the buildings, but he didn’t slow down.
“Jada, are they following?” Drake asked.
She spun in the backseat and looked out the rear window. “Yes!”
“Are you kidding?” Sully said. “Who the hell are these guys?”
“We’ll be out of range of the sniper as soon as we turn the corner,” Drake told them.
“What about these nutjobs in the SUV?” Sully barked.
Drake smiled. He gunned the taxi past the two police cars parked diagonally at the curb, grazing a parked Mercedes, tearing off the taxi’s sideview mirror, and then accelerated even more. At the intersection, he hit the brake, turned into the skid, and slung the taxi into a right turn, driving the wrong way up Washington Street. Car horns blared, and a white box truck swerved to avoid a head-on collision.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw one of the two police cars pulling out to block the road. Two officers on the street had their guns drawn and were rushing up to the SUV as it skidded to a halt.
“We’re clear!” Sully said.
“For how long?” Jada asked, leaning forward, looking at Drake in the mirror. “They’ll have cops crawling all over us in a minute.”
Drake hung a quick left on Jane Street, no longer heading into oncoming traffic. He glanced over his shoulder at Sully.
“What do you think? Chelsea Piers?” he asked.
“No choice,” Sully agreed.
“What’s at Chelsea Piers?” Jada said.
Drake smiled, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “Same thing you generally find at piers. Boats.”
5
The High Line elevated park had started its life as a freight train track built above the city to keep the trains away from public streets. The elevated platform that ran through the Meatpacking District all the way to 34th Street had been converted to a long green oasis. Drake had never walked the park, but he had read an article about it in some in-flight magazine or other, describing it as a hidden gem of New York City. Someday he hoped to get a closer look at the High Line, but today he needed it only for cover.
He pulled the taxi to the curb on Little West 12th Street and let it roll into the shadows under the High Line. In the backseat, Jada was still shaking.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “What the hell are we going to do?”
Sully took her hand, forcing her to meet his eyes. “We’re gonna improvise, sweetheart. Don’t worry. If there’s one thing Nate and I know how to do, it’s improvise.”
Drake watched the rearview mirror for cars. The street was one way, so at least they had that going for them. He waited for a red Accord to buzz past them, hoping their shattered windows would earn no more than a quick glance. The Accord slowed and the driver gave him an odd look, but Drake glared at him and the guy accelerated, minding his own business. He might be on his cell phone to the cops in a second, but they had at least a couple of minutes.
He popped his door.
“Get out,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Sully opened the back door and climbed out, with Jada hurrying after him. As Drake stepped from the taxi, she looked at him and then bent to peer through the open driver’s door at the dead cabbie. His blood had started to pool on the seat.
“We can’t just leave him here,” Jada said.
“We sure as hell can’t take him with us,” Sully grumbled.
Drake glanced back at the dead man. “The police will take better care of him than we could. And if we stick around, they might end up burying us right next to him.”
He shut the cab door, then noticed Sully staring at him.
“What?” Drake asked.
Sully pointed at his chest. “There’s blood on your jacket.”
Drake stripped off the coat, but he couldn’t leave it in the cab. There was enough evidence of their presence already. If they were lucky, no one had gotten a good look at their faces and they would never be connected to the gunfire or the dead taxi driver, and so the police would never have a reason to test their DNA against any hair fibers found in the cab. He thought that probably would work out in their favor. His larger concern had to do with the museum. If Gretchen talked about them and helped the police make the connection between Dr. Cheney’s murder and the burning of Luka Hzujak’s apartment building, eventually he and Sully and Jada would get caught in the net.
They had to rely on Gretchen’s discretion, and Drake didn’t like that. Not that he didn’t trust strangers easily. He tended to go with his instincts; it was just that there had been times when his instincts had been dangerously wrong.
Drake turned the jacket inside out and used it to brush broken glass off Sully and Jada’s coats.
“Let’s move,” he said, carrying the coat bunched under his arm in a bundle.
They crossed the street and headed west, and by the time a battered gray Mercedes came growling along the road, they were far enough from the abandoned cab that no one would have made an instant connection between this trio of pedestrians and the damaged taxi. But Drake kept them moving at a swift pace, knowing that the police would not make any presumption of innocence.
They turned north, six short blocks from where the Chelsea Piers complex was situated. It was mostly sports and recreation now, though it still had a private marina. Despite the autumn chill and the lengthening shadows of the fading day, he felt a circle of heat in the center of his back, as if a target had been painted there.
“Jada, where’s the wicked stepmother right now?” Drake asked.
Sully shot him a glance. “You planning to pay her a visit? I’m not sure I like that plan. Or did you forget the guys with the guns and how eager they were to kill us?”
“It’s not a plan,” Drake said. “I have no plan. Well, not much of one, and the one I do have doesn’t involve Jada’s stepmother. I’d just like to know what we’re dealing with here.”
As they turned into a small oval park, cutting diagonally across from Tenth Avenue to Eleventh, Jada pulled out her cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Sully asked.
“Getting an answer to Nate’s question,” she said, punching a couple of buttons before she put the phone to her ear. She listened a moment, and then her eyes narrowed. “Hi, Brenda, it’s Jada Hzujak. Is Olivia there?”
Drake saw a momentary confusion furrow her brow.
“Sorry, Miranda,” Jada said, glancing down at her feet as she walked. “I expected Brenda to pick up, and I’m-well, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Listen, I know you’re just covering the desk, but I didn’t realize this was the week Olivia was going to be out of town, and I was hoping to take her out to lunch. Do you have any idea when she’ll be back?”
Jada smiled thinly, but there was no amusement in it. She thanked Miranda and ended the call, then immediately began placing another.
“What’s going on?” Drake asked.
“If Olivia’s regular assistant hadn’t been at lunch, we probably wouldn’t even know this, but my stepmother’s away on business. Yeah, in her grief, instead of planning her husband’s funeral, she’s skipped town. I gathered from
