I could hear him coming toward me. I tried to swing the plank again, but it stopped halfway through the swing and was wrenched out of my hands. I heard it clatter to the ground some distance away. Then a pair of muscular arms wrapped my torso and his forehead crashed into mine. My knees buckled and I felt bile rising in my throat. Only the pressure of his arms around me kept me upright. I could smell his sweat, and his breath. His sandwich—salami, I thought. Onions. Jesus. His head cracked against mine again.
I tasted blood inside my mouth, where I’d bitten myself. I tried to clear my head by moving it side to side, tried to struggle against his grip, but I felt myself lifted off the ground, my feet dangling. All this in nearly total darkness. With Julie it had felt intimate, the brush of her hair and skin against my lips. With this man it felt like a nightmare—buried alive, two to a coffin, fighting to breathe.
He squeezed and I felt one of my ribs snap. I gasped, cried out.
I tried to raise my knee to his groin, but I had no leverage.
I ducked my head forward, felt his chin with mine, his cheek, his nose. I gripped his nose between my teeth and bit down. He howled and let go, dropping me.
I tried to roll away from him, but something drove into my side, hard: a foot. For an instant, I couldn’t even think. All I knew was pain.
Then I heard Julie’s voice, shouting “Hey!” and heard the man take a step toward it. Then a whack, the sound of splintering wood. I heard the man groan, followed by a sound like a heavy bag of laundry dropping.
A cluster of matches flared to life. Julie stood above the man’s still form, half the plank nestled in the crook of her right arm. I saw beads of sweat on her face. She didn’t look well.
“My hand,” she said. “I need a doctor.”
I got to my knees, felt the rib grate in my chest. I didn’t say anything. The matches went out. She lit some more.
“How many of those things do you have?” I said.
“I smoke two packs a day,” she said, wincing.
“Good for you,” I said.
“Fuck you,” she said. “Just get us the hell out of here.”
They took Julie into surgery. We were at St. Vincent’s, where she’d had her original operation; we checked her in under her real name, which surprised me by being Julie, Julie Park. I was used to strippers and sex workers using aliases to keep their personal and professional lives separate. But Julie said, “I’m not ashamed of what I do, John. I won’t say I’m
Her doctor wasn’t there when we arrived, but they paged him and he showed up twenty minutes later. I had a longer wait. The doctor who eventually taped up my chest explained Julie’s situation to me as he circled the roll of bandages around and around and around my torso. Two fractures, only marginally knitted, had apparently broken again and one of the pins had shifted. Bones needed to be re-set and her hand re-immobilized. My doctor went on at length about metacarpals and phalanges, glad to have a captive audience.
When I next saw her it was three hours later and her right hand was completely encased in plaster. She was lying in a hospital bed. She raised her cast in my direction. “This is me giving you the finger,” she said.
“You probably saved my life,” I told her.
“I didn’t do it for you. When he finished with you, he’d have started on me.”
“Well,” I said. “Thank you anyway.”
“How’s your chest?” she said.
“Better than your hand,” I said.
It hadn’t taken us long to find our way out of the tunnels, but it had felt like hours. We finally emerged in the basement of Havemeyer, the chemistry building, just a few hundred yards from Broadway. Julie had cradled her hand while I stood on 116th Street trying to wave down a taxi without raising my arm.
And what of Jorge Ramos, the man on the receiving end of Julie’s home-run swing? His wallet gave us his name; his breathing, though uneven, told us he was alive when we left him. That’s all we knew or cared.
“I should never have agreed to meet you,” Julie said. “Di was right.”
“Look—”
“Not even by phone. When she sent me your e-mail address, I should have deleted it.”
“Ardo’s people might have come after you anyway.”
“They were done with me,” she said.
“Like they were done with Dorrie?”
“You don’t know that they had anything to do with her death.”
“No,” I said. “I also don’t know that they had anything to do with the man who chased us through the tunnels at gunpoint today, but I think it’s a reasonable guess.”
“How’d they even know I was coming to see you? What do they have, some way to read my e-mail?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “More likely just Jorge Ramos watching your building.”
“Why? Why would they follow me?”
“I don’t know, Julie. It’s got to be tied up with what happened to Dorrie. Do you have any idea why they might have gone after her?
“How could she?” Julie said. “She never worked for them. Before I hired her she was working at Spellbound— it’s a place on 51st and Second started by this woman from Brazil, and I know Dorrie didn’t take any clients from her, because she didn’t have any when she started with me.”
“What about when Dorrie left you?” I asked. “What did she do then?”
“You don’t know?” Julie said. “She didn’t tell you?”
I shook my head. She hadn’t told me about any of this. Not about the attack on Julie, nor about quitting her job out of fear of a long-fingered gunman with a sadistic streak. I couldn’t guess why, except maybe a desire not to worry me. Or maybe fear that I’d have insisted on doing something about it—which I would have.
“She went independent,” Julie said. “Complete solo act.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Outcall only. No apartment, no spa, no fixed location. No rent to pay, no agency booking you, no phone girl. Not even a phone number. You run an ad with just an anonymous e-mail address, you answer the e-mail yourself, and if the client sounds okay you meet at his place. Or at a hotel room if that’s what he prefers. I suppose most of them do.”
I had a vision of Dorrie walking alone down a poorly lit hallway in some seedy building toward an assignation with a stranger. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Can be. But not if you do it right. You never have to meet anyone you haven’t vetted first over e-mail, and you can usually tell which ones are the creeps. And you don’t have to accept too many new clients if you start with a base of regulars you already know well.”
“But Dorrie didn’t,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“How could she?” I said. “Didn’t she have to start over from scratch?”
Julie suddenly looked tired. “She got me in a weak moment, John. I was in the hospital, all doped up on Percocet, I was thinking I was probably going to have to shut down Sunset anyway. And she was so desperate to get away. And it was my fault that she had to. And anyway it made me feel good, you know, to show I’m not like that fucker Ardo. So I told her go ahead, any regulars you’ve got, take ‘em. She didn’t have many, maybe three or four, but that’s a start, right? I told her, if you ask them and they want to go with you, they’re yours. Not that big a deal for me, and it meant a lot to her. What? Why are you looking at me that way?”
“The regulars she took,” I said, “were any of them customers you originally took with you from Vivacia?”
“I don’t think so.” She considered the question. I waited. “No. I don’t think so.”
“No or you don’t think so?”
“Jesus, John, I just came from having my hand cut open and put back together like a fucking jigsaw puzzle—‘I
