Peril

SARA

The line was still busy. She returned the phone to its cradle, glanced toward the window, and reveled in the clear midafternoon air beyond it. She thought of going out, then the dread swept down around her, the fear he might be waiting for her out there, the Old Man or whoever he’d sent to do his work.

But it was a fear she had to put behind her, she decided, and so she lifted her head as if on the shoulder of a bold resolve and headed for the door.

Once outside, she turned right and walked to the corner, where she stopped, peered into the window of a florist shop, and thought of the roses Abe had brought to the apartment, a gesture so sweet, she thought now, that she’d felt herself crumble a little, some of the day’s panic fall away.

“Nice flowers.”

She jumped, then turned to face a small man in a worn suit, his features so dark and gloomy, his voice so oddly cold, she knew absolutely that he was Labriola’s man.

“Nice flowers,” he repeated.

She felt her body stiffen. “Yes.”

“You like flowers?”

She stepped back slightly, her attention entirely focused on the man who peered back at her from beneath the broad brim of a rumpled black hat, his face strikingly melancholy.

“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, I do.”

A thin smile glimmered on the man’s face briefly, then vanished. “Well, have a nice day,” he said.

“Yes, you too,” Sara answered.

The man touched the brim of his hat, then turned and headed in the opposite direction down the street, one shoulder lower than the other, as if bearing an invisible weight.

Sara stood in place until he reached the far corner, then disappeared around it. She wanted to believe that the man was only a Village oddity, a sad figure in his dark suit, but not in the least connected to her or Labriola, just a strange little man, nothing more.

Yes, she told herself, believe that.

She continued on down the street, trying to get the little man in the rumpled hat out of her mind, but his face kept returning to her, superimposed over other faces, Caulfield, Labriola, men she’d fled, men bent on harming her.

At the end of the block she stopped and glanced back down the street, half expecting to see the man in the rumpled hat lurching behind her, or quickly dodging behind a tree to conceal himself.

But she saw no sign of him, no indication that he’d been anything but a sad-faced man who’d commented upon the flowers in the florist’s window. And yet she could not get his image out of her mind, the feeling that he had purposely approached her, as if to get a better look, then lumbered away to call whoever had hired him to find her.

She looked down the street once more, then left and right along the side streets, then up ahead. Again she saw no sign of the man who’d approached her. But again she could not rid her mind of the dark suspicion that she had been found.