Now You See Her

pump to count my toenails.

“Excuse you,” I yelled, pissed and in pain.

But I suddenly wasn’t angry anymore. The pain in my foot faded, instantly forgotten.

At the mouth of the swirling corridor was a tall man. He was handsome and had short salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes. He stood like a rock in the stream of the crowd, and he was staring at me.

I ripped my eyes away and stuffed my foot back into my shoe. Hobbled and blind with fear, I pointed myself forward toward the exit and broke into a full-out finish-line sprint.

It couldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.

But it was.

Peter had found me at last.

Chapter 68

SHIT, PETER THOUGHT, flattening himself against the wall next to a pay phone. He’d been following too close. Jeanine had stopped. She’d looked back. Had she seen him? It was hard to tell with the trillion-people march going on in the passageway between them. It was a definite possibility.

He could have whipped himself. The last thing Jeanine would have been expecting after all this time was a visit from him. The element of surprise was critical. But he’d crowded her and blown the whole thing.

What the hell had gotten into him? What happened to that cold patience and reserve he was so proud of?

Too late to cry about it. He needed to move.

He counted to three and then chanced a look back up the wide concourse. He thought she might have headed down the subway entrance on the right, but then he thought he caught a flash of ivory going out through the distant exit door.

What the…? She was leaving? he thought, as he started to run. She’d only cut through the station? So she wasn’t getting on a train?

“Yo, slow down!” someone scolded him.

Peter turned. In the doorway of a camera store was an NYPD cop decked out in full antiterrorist gear, bomb vest, M16. There was a no-nonsense expression on his face as he looked Peter over. He didn’t need that kind of scrutiny. Not now. Instead of giving the cop the finger like he wanted, Peter slowed immediately, nodding to his fellow peace officer with an apologetic wave.

He squinted when he came out onto bright Lexington Avenue. He looked up and down the block, across the wide street clogged with delivery trucks and buses and yellow taxis. He looked up at the Chrysler Building, right in front of him now.

There was no white jacket in either direction. Audrey Hepburn had left the damn building. Nothing. He’d taken his eyes off her for five seconds.

That was the problem with this rat race city! he thought, infuriated. Too many damn holes for the rats to hide in! She must have seen him.

Jeanine had disappeared.

Chapter 69

THAT DIDN’T JUST HAPPEN.

Inside the wall-to-wall-crowded Grand Central Starbucks, I stood at the milk and sugar stand by the window.

Bathed in sweat, I tried to keep myself from hyperventilating.

Peter? Here? Now? How was that possible?

I didn’t know. I was having trouble breathing, let alone thinking.

When I wasn’t looking out over Lexington Avenue, I had my head craned around at the shop’s side window and side door, which opened onto the train station’s corridor. If Peter came in, my plan was to run screaming through the door back into the train station’s main concourse and try to flag down one of the many antiterror cops. I shivered like a cornered rabbit.

I hadn’t even gotten down to Key West, and already I was playing a game of hide-and-seek, with my life as the prize.

Maybe I was just being paranoid, I thought, scanning the passing faces beyond the plateglass window. Couldn’t it have been somebody who just looked like Peter? I was heading down to Key West now, after all. Peter was certainly at the forefront of my mind, not to mention embedded in my subconscious. Maybe my overstressed brain had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Then again, maybe not!

I needed to act. I looked across Lexington. I could actually see my town car, idling outside my office building. I quickly fumbled open my bag. I took out the card that the driver, a very pleasant West Indian man who called himself Mr. Ken, had given me.

“Hi, um, Mr. Ken?” I said. “This is Nina Bloom. Were you able to get my package from my office?”

“It’s right here in the front seat beside me,” he said.

“Great. Do you see the Starbucks on the west side of Lex in front of you? I’m right here by the window. Would you come over and get me?”

“On my way,” he said.

“Thanks, Mr. Ken,” I said to him in person when I bolted across the sidewalk and dove into the car ten seconds later. And thank God for cell phones, I thought.

I locked the door before I scrunched down low in the seat.

Mr. Ken raised an eyebrow at me in the rearview mirror.

“Did you forget your coffee, Ms. Bloom?” he said in his lilting accent.

“Oh, I already drank it, thanks,” I lied, glancing out the window, panicked. “If we could head out to JFK now, Mr. Ken, that would be really great.”

I scrunched down even farther in the seat. I didn’t breathe again until Mr. Ken hit the gas.

Chapter 70

ON THE CORNER of 42nd Street and Lexington, Peter stood scanning faces. He looked frantically up the unbelievably crowded street in front of Grand Central. Nothing. No ivory jacket. Not across the street or anywhere. He’d screwed up. His rat had found her hole.

What a bust! He’d had her, and then he’d lost her again.

As he stood there fuming, a memory bubbled up. It was of his first and only bow hunting trip with his dad in New Hampshire when he was seven. He was in the forest taking a leak when an enormous black bear appeared ten feet in front of him. Before he could yell out, there was a thwap from his dad’s compound bow, and the shaft of an arrow popped out of one of the bear’s eyes. The animal dropped like a tipped-over piece of furniture.

His father climbed down from the blind and knelt over the fallen monster, inhaling loudly as he wafted the