Cold Hit

33

I ran as fast as I could go, in the direction of the double glass doors that surrounded the Hi-Line Railroad ties and opened out onto the antiquated structure leading downtown, several stories high above the streets of Chelsea. Wrenley had been at the top of the stairs, blocking my way to the patrol car in the rear of the building. I didn’t waste time; he might have reached the gun before I did, which would have been deadly. I knew I had temporarily disarmed him, but I also guessed the wound had not disabled him completely.

The bolt affixed to the exit yielded easily to a twist of my hand. I yanked it back and was met by a blast of the hot August air as I escaped onto the tracks. For once-I prayed silently-don’t let Chapman’s stories be full of their usual exaggeration. I was trusting his brief oral history of the neighborhood to make my dash away from this callous killer, and I needed Chapman’s facts to be right.

The rusted iron frame of the deserted railway rose on thick beams over Twenty-second Street and stretched out ahead, cutting through the center of the buildings opposite me. The track bed was wider across than most small tenements in the city. Looking down at the littered ground, I chose a path directly between the parallel lines that were vestiges of old track, hoping to avoid tripping over pieces of wood and steel that were obscured by weeds and garbage of all sorts.

I screamed for help. I was headed south, and Brannigan and Lazarro were parked on the north side of Caxton Due. I knew they couldn’t see or hear me as I ran, but I was sure I could attract the attention of someone who would call for assistance. “HELP! POLICE!” I yelled as I crossed to the far side of Twenty-second Street, looking down for signs of life amidst the vans that had congested the entire block since before I had arrived at the gallery. I gasped for breath, holding on to the edge of the building adjacent to the tracks, but could see no people on the pavement below. Wrenley was charging at me from the open glass doors of Caxton Due.

I started jogging again, slowing somewhat as I zigzagged around holes in the skeleton of the trail, afraid I would catch my foot and wedge myself in a crevice from which I’d be unable to retreat. There were shards of broken glass and dirty hypodermic needles, discarded sneakers and dead pigeons, and I danced around objects on the obstacle course, wanting none of them to bring me down in flight.

Racing through the valley of warehouses that rose above the tracks on either side of me, I emerged onto Twenty-first Street, stopping to peer down and repeat my cries for help. Kids were playing ball at the far end of the block, near Eleventh Avenue, and they stopped to look as one of them heard and pointed up at me. “POLICE!” I shouted to them, not knowing if they could make out my words. I glanced back to see Wrenley gaining on me, so I ran again.

There was open iron grillwork on the side of the guardrail at the next intersection. I gave a fleeting thought to climbing over and trying to lower myself down from it. I was still too high off the street to jump, but perhaps I could cling to a ledge until police arrived. Then I saw the rolls of barbed-wire fencing directly below me, spitting their jagged edges upward, so I propelled myself on.

Wrenley was getting closer. His route was a more reckless one than mine, straightforward and relentless in pursuit. Taller buildings rose around me as I followed the next strip of tracks, the intense glare of the sun briefly lost to the shade of the brick walls.

I heard a grunt from behind me and ignored my own directive not to look back. Wrenley had tripped on something and fallen to the ground. Taking a deep breath, I surged ahead and ran on past the giant warehouses, onto a long open stretch of track. I must have been below Nineteenth Street by now. In the distance I could hear the faint wail of sirens. I had no idea how remote they were, or any hope that they would reach me in the maze of one-way streets.

Lowering my eyes to the pavement below in search of the blue-and-white patrol cars that might be on their way, I saw only the tall traffic signs on the nearest corner, their bright red flashers urging me on. don’t walk.

The length of the run had not been enough to slow me down, but the dense humidity and August heat were oppressive. I was gasping for air and felt like my body was running on fumes, trying to find oxygen in the stillness of the stale afternoon.

Wrenley was closing in again. I didn’t have to turn my head to see him, but I could hear his labored panting over the noise coming from my own chest. We were somewhere below Seventeenth Street, and the entire structure of the railroad lay out before me, curving slowly around to the east, away from the surrounding buildings.

I felt the tug on the tail of my jacket a split second before Wrenley pushed me down from the rear, landing with me in a tangle of legs and arms. My knees slammed against the metal tracks as I tried hopelessly to break the fall. The palms of my hands stung as they landed on pieces of rusted metal, rocks, and debris I couldn’t identify. I pushed up and kicked one leg out back behind me, smacking it against Wrenley’s chin or chest-I couldn’t see which-drawing a groan as his head snapped back.

As I raised myself up on my feet, I grabbed at one of the empty beer bottles scattered along the path and carried it in my hand as I resumed my gallop, heading to the section of the Hi-Line that crossed out over Tenth Avenue.

I was hugging the left side of the railing as the elevation passed over the piece of sidewalk edging the wide thoroughfare. I knew the danger that slowing down would bring Wrenley closer to me, but I also knew that this main artery running below me, four lanes wide, would be my most obvious chance to get help. I had no idea how much farther the tracks ran before they would corner me at the dead end of a brick wall on some abandoned tenement.

As I looked down I could see the mesh fencing and barbed wire that bordered a parking lot directly below me. Beyond that, for the first time since I began my run from the gallery, I was free of the prickly metal underpass that would have ripped my skin apart had I landed on it.

I was even with the curb of the sidewalk below me as I looked up the broad avenue. Moving against the sparse flow of uptown traffic were two patrol cars coming at us, lights spinning furiously atop them and sirens screaming their appearance.

I stopped at that point and stuck one foot in the iron gridwork of the side rail, lifting my other leg over the top, half dangling above the street, hoping to make it easier for the cops to see me as they approached, and harder for Wrenley to get to me. My right hand was still clutching the bottle, and with my left I tried to balance against the top of a billboard frame that was posted along the rail.

Wrenley was on me now, coming directly at me with his arms outstretched. His right hand looked like a road map, trickles of blood forming streets and highways. As he prepared to lunge at my neck, I shattered the bottle against the steel frame of the Hi-Line and screamed at him to keep back.

His right hand landed on my shoulder. I anchored my foot in the open grille of the banister and pivoted out of his grip, my pants leg ripping as it twisted against the steel trim. He grasped again and caught a hunk of my hair, trying to pull me toward him, back onto the tracks. Gripping the billboard top to stay in place, I swung my right arm at Wrenley’s head, slashing him with the fractured end of the broken brown bottle.

This time his screams were louder than mine, as I opened up a gaping hole between his ear and forehead, with blood erupting from the gash and spilling down into his eye.

He staggered back for a step or two, then vaulted at me like a wild animal that had been mortally wounded in a hunt. His hands still wanted my neck, and as he charged toward me I shifted my weight and swung my leg onto the track, flattening myself against the back of the billboard.

Blinded by the blood, Wrenley hurtled himself over the guardrail headfirst, onto the street below.

I bent over to see his body crumpled against the blacktop like a deer on a dark country road, with cars screeching to a halt to try to avoid him.

With in seconds the two police cars pulled up from the north, directly under the tracks. From above I watched Brigid Brannigan’s ponytail swinging as she yelled to Lazarro to check the body, while she ran in my direction, looking up to see whether I was the woman slumped over the railing, staring down at the corpse of Frank Wrenley.

“Are you hurt?”

I shook my head from side to side, not daring to try to speak. More sirens, and the large square shape of an ambulance lumbered into view. Too late to be of any use for Wrenley. What had Chapman called this street? I thought to myself. Death Avenue.

“Can you stay up there till I get the Fire Department here with a ladder?”

I nodded to her, then turned my back and sat down on the ground. I leaned against the railing, rubbing my calves with my scraped hands and trying to breathe at regular intervals.

Fifteen minutes later, after the body had been removed from the scene, I heard Brannigan calling my name again. I stood and looked down at the long red engine that had been summoned, watching as the ladder was hoisted into place. Two of the firemen climbed up it and over onto the Hi-Line tracks, introducing themselves and shaking my hand.

“Can you make it down?”

“I hate heights.” I gave them as much of a smile as I could muster, not able to explain to them what it had taken for me to be poised on the edge of the railing when Wrenley had come at me just a little while ago.

“Nothing to it. I’ll be one rung below you, guiding you down. Harry’ll stay on top and load you on. Just close your eyes and trust me.”

When I opened them again, I was on the street. The ad on the billboard plastered above my head was visible for the first time. It was a six-foot-tall vodka bottle in the shape of the fuselage of a jet airplane, with words beneath it in bold yellow paint: Absolut Escape.

The cluster of uniforms around me, all meaning to be helpful, was stifling. Police and firemen were having a cordial turf battle over who would take me into their care-cops as first on the scene, or firemen as my rescuers.

I pulled Brigid Brannigan aside. “Tell them I’d like to ride with you.”

“Will you go to Saint Vincent’s so they can check you out?”

“Yes. I think I’d like a tetanus shot.” I wasn’t sure what my knees and hands had been raked against. “But I want to make a stop on the way there.”

She explained to the others that I was going with her. I got in the front seat of the RMP. Someone handed me my bag, which I had dropped in the gallery. The beeper was going off, so I removed it and saw that it was my office number. Brannigan began driving up Tenth Avenue, about to turn east to loop around downtown to the hospital. “Would you just go straight a few blocks, to the corner of Twenty-first Street?”

I called Laura from Brannigan’s cell phone. She sounded concerned. “Mike’s been beeping you. He’s probably through the tunnel now, back in Manhattan. Says he hasn’t been able to find you. Are you okay?”

“I guess I didn’t hear it. Would you call him back and tell him to meet me in Chelsea, the northwest corner of Twenty-first and Tenth, okay? I’ll wait for him till he gets there.” She’d know the rest of the details soon enough.

The car came to a stop just past the traffic light. “Here?”

“Yes.”

Brannigan looked at the small graceful building that I had noticed when we circled the block earlier today. “Want me to come in with you?”

“No thanks. I just want to wait there for Chapman. Think anyone would mind?”

She smiled back at me and simply said, “No.”

I got out and walked up the four steps of the Church of the Guardian Angel. Its lovely Romanesque facade is bordered by two slim columns and a round stained-glass window. I pulled on the wooden door and walked inside, sitting down in the cool silence. I didn’t know where the nearest synagogue was, but I needed to be in a place where I could be alone and pray. Somehow the name of this lovely church lent itself to the circumstances of the day.

Twenty minutes later I heard the door open and close, and the noise of a pair of footsteps walking toward me. I didn’t turn my head.

Mike Chapman slipped into the pew beside me and looked at me, grimacing as he shook his head back and forth. He started to say something.

“Not right now.”

He put his arm around my shoulder instead. I closed my eyes and rested my head against him until I was ready to leave.