Beautiful Lies

thirty-four

I was clever but not clever enough. We had made it east to Avenue C before we sensed rather than saw that we were being followed. The silent street around us seemed to darken with menace as we passed an abandoned lot filled with garbage, a burned-out car, some junkies huddled in a corner with a pipe glowing between them. I think we felt rather than heard the low rumble of the engine of a car that was following us without headlights. Jake took my hand and we started to run. We ran hard, expecting at any second to hear the sound of gunfire, but there was nothing. The only sound I heard was our footfalls and our breathing. The city seemed to draw a breath and hold it.

On Avenue D we turned the corner. We looked around and there was no one in sight. We ran up the front steps of a condemned apartment building and slipped through the triangle of space where someone had pushed back the piece of plywood that acted as the door. Inside, we peered through the window that was black with soot from some long-ago fire and saw a Lincoln Town Car come to a stop on the avenue. Men wearing ski masks emerged from the vehicle and I swear my heart almost stopped. I felt as if the city was an alien world where all the rules had changed. It was like Escape from New York or something, only there was no escape. Jake put his hand over my mouth against the cry of panic he must have sensed coming.

“Stay with me, Ridley. Stay calm, girl.”

I nodded and together we made our way through a ruined foyer that reeked of smoke. I pulled my shirt up over my nose to keep myself from breathing in the filthy air so I wouldn’t cough or sneeze. We passed a mustard couch that lay on its back beside a rusted file cabinet with no drawers. We started to climb a crumbling staircase that groaned in protest beneath our weight. On the next level, we again looked out the window and saw the men, four of them, walking the street looking for us, climbing front stoops, peering in windows.

The building was only three stories high, and at the top we could see that something from the roof had fallen through all the way to the bottom, leaving a gaping hole in the ceiling above us and in each floor below, so that we could clearly see the ground-floor entrance to the building from our perch on the third. We sat on the floor and Jake took out his gun, lay on his belly, and trained it on the door below us. We sat listening to the men call to one another on the street below us, and then everything went quiet. We waited. Then it started to rain. We were unprotected in the downpour.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered after a few minutes. He looked up at me.

I shook my head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I did this to your life, Ridley.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yes. If I hadn’t left that second note…if I had let this all go away for you, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

I shook my head. There was no point in thinking like this; it was way too late. There was only moving forward now, hoping to survive this night.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “It was my choice to be here with you tonight. I chose.” And that was the truth. He nodded and I leaned in to kiss him. But then he was firing his gun at something behind me. The night fractured in a gale of light and thunder and we were falling.

I fell only one floor, but Jake went all the way down to the ground level. I heard his body hit the floor so hard, I felt it in my own bones. I think I had a split second of unconsciousness before the sound of voices brought me around.

“What the fuck? Where did they go?”

They’d come from the roof of another building, I realized.

“Watch out, you fucking moron, the floor’s not solid.” I heard a heavy thump and watched as more debris fell through the hole. I couldn’t see the men above me and hoped it meant that they couldn’t see me.

“Don’t fire until you see one of them, for Christ’s sake. This building is going to crumble like a pile of shit.”

I looked down to see Jake lying below me. He wasn’t moving and I felt a shock of fear and dread like I’d never felt before. I began to crawl when a white-hot pain in my leg rocketed through me, so intense, I held back vomit. I couldn’t see what was in my leg, only the tear in my pants and the sticky, hot, wet feeling of blood. There was something lodged in there and any movement made me want to scream. But my desire to get to Jake was greater than my physical pain and I dragged myself to the staircase, pulled myself up on the banister, and managed to make it to the bottom before they rained bullets on me again.

I pushed myself against the wall and watched the bullets shred the floor and walls around me. Jake lay still on the floor, unresponsive to the noise and the danger. I heard a heavy thud and a sudden crashing followed by a groan.

“Angelo! Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” a voice with a thick New York accent responded. “I fell through the fucking floor.”

I used this distraction to make it to Jake before the bullets started to rain again.