Songs of Innocence

friend.”

I saw temptation in his eyes. His palm was pressed against my throat, his fingers almost touching at the back of my neck. One hard turn of his wrist and I had no doubt my neck would snap. Then he could deal with my hypothetical friend in my hypothetical car at his leisure.

But what if the car and friend weren’t hypothetical? What if they did make it uptown to Andras and Ardo before he could stop them? What if I really had something on him?

He let go of my throat and switched his grip to my upper arm, which he squeezed tightly enough to cut off circulation. “Move,” he said, and pushed me toward the front.

He marched me into the elevator. The digital readout counted down as we dropped, like the timer on a bomb. I only hoped I’d kept him occupied upstairs long enough.

When ‘2’ ticked over to ‘M,’ the door slid open. He stood behind me, his chest pressed against my back, one hand still holding onto my arm, the other arm wrapped around my waist. He wasn’t letting me get away. Together, we stepped out into the narrow hallway.

At one end, I saw that the fire door was slightly ajar. We turned the other way, toward the street. But there was someone there, standing between us and the door. She had a gun raised in her left hand and a cast on her right. The gun was aimed a good nine inches above my head. I’m rarely glad not to be taller, but I was now.

“Hello, Miklos,” Julie said. In her posh British accent it almost sounded welcoming. But the expression on her face left no doubt about her intentions.

“This is your friend?” he said sneeringly. “This little fucking jap cunt?” He yelled at her: “You should have stayed in the car. I kill you both—”

I felt the point of a knife then, punching into my back.

The blade went in half an inch, an inch—but then it stopped. And through the pain I realized that Miklos’ hands were still both in view—one on my arm and one around my waist.

His hold on me loosened. I staggered forward, out of his grasp.

I turned around. He was standing, gasping, looking down at his belly. The point of a knife was protruding through his shirt. Blood was pouring out around it.

He sank to his knees, then to all fours, and I saw the handle of a camp knife sticking out of his back. Behind him, Kurland Wessels stepped forward. Behind Kurland, the fire door was open wide.

Kurland braced himself against Miklos’ back with one hand and drew the knife out with the other. The blade must have been eleven, twelve inches long. Miklos tried to crawl forward. There was blood coming out of his mouth now.

“What did you do?” I shouted. “I said I wanted him alive!”

“Yeah, well, Julie wanted him dead.”

I dropped to a crouch beside Miklos’ head. He was struggling to talk, spewing wet and bloody curses in Hungarian.

I could feel my own blood soaking into my bandages.

“Talk to me,” I said desperately. “Did you kill Dorrie Burke? Cassandra, from Julie’s place—did you kill her?” I was holding onto his shoulders, pressing him back as he tried to bull his way forward. He was weakening, but he was still stronger than me, and I found myself inching backward as he pressed forward. “Tell me the truth. I can still get you to a hospital—but you’ve got to tell me the truth. Did you do it?”

With an enormous lunge, Miklos raised one arm from the floor and buried it in the fabric of my shirt, pulled me toward him. His teeth were red like a feeding lion’s. “I...kill you...” He spat out a mouthful of blood and saliva, some of it in my face. He swung me, hard, into the wall. I grabbed his wrist between my hands, tried to pry his fingers open.

“Answer me,” I shouted. “Did you kill Dorrie Burke?”

He bellowed his answer: “No!”

It was the last word he ever spoke. A gunshot split the air and a bullet split his skull. The wall behind him was spattered. The three of us were, too.

Miklos toppled over sideways and lay there in a pool of his own blood.

Julie walked up to him, gun still smoking. She was wearing heavy boots and used one of them to kick him viciously in the jaw.

“I’m Korean, asshole,” she said, “not Japanese.”

“Come on,” Kurland said. “Move.” He wiped the long blade of the knife on Miklos’ pants. I saw that he was wearing gloves. My pulse was racing and the little I’d eaten today was threatening to come up, but Kurland looked calm, unaffected. Well, the man was a professional. It’s why I’d asked Julie to bring him along. But now Miklos was dead and anything he might have been able to tell me about Dorrie had died with him.

“I wanted to talk to him,” I said as Kurland hustled Julie and me toward the fire door. We raced down an echoing flight of metal steps and emerged at a basement door.

“You got your answer,” Kurland said. “He said no.”

“He was dying. He didn’t know what he was saying.”

“He knew,” Kurland said.

We were outside, behind the building, surrounded by black plastic garbage bags piled up in heaps. I saw a long tail disappear behind one.

Kurland led us to a staircase that took us back up to street level. We came out on 33rd and starting walking north. You could hear honking and a siren a block away. It sounded like an ambulance, not a police car. Not that either would do Miklos any good now.

I looked over at Kurland and noticed that the knife had vanished somewhere and so had the gloves. He was wearing a dark jacket, so you couldn’t see the blood on it. You could see it on mine.

Julie ran beside us, keeping up with some difficulty. She was still holding the gun. Kurland took it from her, buttoned it up inside his pocket, propelled her ahead of him with a hand at the small of her back. They started down the flight of stairs to the subway station at 34th and I started after them, but Kurland stopped me with a hand on my chest. “Don’t follow us,” he said. “We don’t want to be seen with you.”

I looked around. We were alone on the sidewalk.

“You don’t want to be seen with me? You just killed a man. That’s more than I’ve ever done.”

“First of all, that’s not what I hear on the news.” I started to protest and he threw a hand up. “Doesn’t matter. Second of all, you were in on this one as much as we were, so you’re certainly no virgin now. Think about that before you shoot your mouth off about this to anyone. And third of all— Ah, hell, there is no third of all. Just go. You’re on your own.”

They plunged into the station, leaving me behind. I turned away.

Now what, god damn it? Now what?

Chapter 27

I stripped off my jacket. The back was coated with blood, most of it his, some mine. My back hurt badly, though the tight bandages had contained the worst of it.

I folded the jacket inside out and dropped it in the trash can at the corner. The cops would probably find it and the Post would have a field day with it, but I was past caring.

I turned my cell phone back on. I’d shut it off to conserve the battery, and because they say the phone company can pinpoint your location if you keep it on. Who knows if it’s true. I didn’t want to find out.

I tucked myself into a darkened doorway, faced away from the street, plugged one ear with a finger to deaden the traffic noises. Even after midnight, Herald Square is a roaring intersection. Susan answered after four rings. “Hello? Who...John, is that you?” She must have looked at her caller ID. The cops who were tapping her line were probably doing the same thing.

“Where we met, Susan. Where we met. You understand?”

“John—”

I closed the phone, turned it off, and started walking toward Keegan’s Brown Derby.

Technically, the Sin Factory was the first place Susan and I had seen each other. She’d been pole dancing and