Lots of people screamed, Matt amongst them. Amy didn’t have that luxury. She didn’t know where the shot had come from, but she wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Instead, she urged Mabel on, and the horse, more terrified of what was behind it, bolted forward into the next lane, causing the westbound cars to similarly judder to a halt.
Amy tugged Mabel left, allowing them to move between the two flows of traffic. A taxi driver on the west side jumped out of his vehicle to remonstrate with her and then gawped at the bonnet of his car, where a smoking hole had inexplicably appeared. Amy guided Mabel around the open car door in her path before spurring her on again to pick up some speed.
Through a cacophony of car horns, they zoomed across the intersection with Madison and then back onto the sidewalk, sending pedestrians scurrying to get out of their way. As she did so, a bullet fizzed by her ear and an advert that implied the secret to a long and happy life was well-conditioned hair shattered.
“Damn it,” said the voice. “Target has escaped.”
“Eagle One, you are a disgrace!”
“Fuck you, lady.”
“Excuse me, miss,” said Jorge.
The screen went dead.
“Excuse me, you have my hand. Between your legs… Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh – it hurts!”
“Lola?” screeched Miller. “Where are you? And where the fuck is Cole?”
If anything, Bunny was losing worse than the first time. He concentrated his efforts on just trying to tie the big black guy up as he rolled about on the floor. Bunny had gone for a headbutt but the guy had dropped his chin, causing Bunny to ram his own nose into his opponent’s forehead. He’d broken his nose a few times before, but this felt like a messy one. There was a lot of blood on his opponent; unfortunately, none of it was his. Still, at least Bunny had ruined an expensive-looking suit.
Bunny went for an eye gouge and yelped in agony as the middle finger on his right hand was snapped back and broken. The black guy used this distraction to twist himself and get his weight on top of Bunny, pinning him to the ground.
In a fight, if both participants are on the ground, then the most important thing is who ends up on top. On top, you can drive your fist down into your opponent and you can use your weight to pin him. It is an accepted truth amongst self-defence specialists that there is nothing but advantage to being on top in a grapple on the floor. Those experts, however, have not taken into account that being on top of a portly Irishman, your knees pinning his arms to the floor and your fist cocked back, puts your head at the perfect height for a dwarf who has built up a fair bit of momentum to jump and slam his forehead straight into your exposed face. Admittedly, that is not a situation that comes up in most fight scenarios.
Cole fell away as Smithy tumbled over the prone figure of Bunny.
Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Bunny rolled himself over and slammed his left fist into his opponent’s jaw. The blow didn’t have much behind it, but it at least allowed Bunny to turn his body around and get himself on his knees. The first one back to his feet wins.
As Cole, dazed, tried to regain his footing, a roundhouse right with some real feeling behind it caught him on the jaw and sent him sprawling backwards. Bunny screamed as lightning bolts of pain from his shattered finger ripped up his arm. He planted his right foot in preparation for aiming a left-footed kick somewhere memorable.
“Bunny!”
He turned to see Smithy, with Cole’s Glock in his hand.
Bunny took a step away. Cole turned and sat on the ground, looking up at them: a professional dispassionately reading the situation.
“Right,” said Bunny, looking down at him, “Well, I think we can call it one-all now.”
Cole spat out a bloodied tooth. “Bullshit. I had you until…” He pointed towards Smithy.
Smithy shrugged. “He does have a point.”
Bunny looked outraged. “Who’s fecking side are you on?”
“I did headbutt him. Neither of you won the fight.”
“Yeah,” agreed Cole.
“I did,” finished Smithy.
“I wasn’t fighting to win, anyway,” said Bunny. “I was fighting to slow him down, so your lady and the hostage could get away.” Bunny turned back to Cole. “By the way, count yourself lucky that this chauvinistic gobshite insisted his girlfriend got the feck out of here. She’s like a black belt in crack major. She’d have had you on toast. Now, finger and thumb only – slowly – take your wallet out and toss it here.”
Cole did as instructed and the wallet landed on the grass in front of their feet.
Bunny put his left hand out and Smithy handed him the gun.
“So, what’s the move here?” asked Cole.
“Excuse me?” replied Bunny.
“Holy shit,” said Smithy, who had picked up Cole’s wallet and was flipping through it. “This guy is NSA – no, wait… FBI… CIA… Homeland Security!” Smithy looked up. “Who the fuck are you people?”
“I’ll tell you who they are,” said Bunny. “They’re the people who slaughtered a load of innocent civilians for the sake of some dirty fecking money.”
“You say that like we’re the first to think of it. It’s just business.”
“It’s just business,” repeated Bunny. “That’s the ‘I was just following orders’ of the twenty-first century.” Bunny waved the gun between himself and Cole, never taking his eyes off the other man. “Just so we’re clear – if the positions were reversed, I’d have two in the chest and one in the head by now.”
Cole spat out some more blood. “Ain’t too late for that to happen.”
“Bunny?” said Smithy, trepidation in his voice.
Bunny took a step forward.
Cole closed his eyes.
“Bunny!” said Smithy.
For a moment, the world held its breath.
“Well,” said Bunny. “Guess this is just another way I’m better than you.” Cole opened his eyes. “But not that much better.” And Cole screamed as Bunny shot him in the left shin.
“Jesus, Bunny.”
Bunny turned and headed towards the Madison Avenue exit. “C’mon – cops will be here soon.”
As if on cue, sirens began to wail in the distance.
Bunny quickly cleared the bullet from the chamber, unclipped the ammo magazine, wiped the handle clean and then tossed the gun in one direction and the clip in the other. “Let’s see how well that prick does with a bullet hole in him and no ID to help avoid awkward questions.” He grabbed Cole’s wallet from Smithy’s hand and shoved it into his coat pocket. They rushed out onto the sidewalk. Some people were taking cover while other commuters just walked by, headphones in, oblivious.
Bunny noticed people looking at them – specifically at the blood that was running from his shattered nose in a steady stream. “Jesus,” he said, pointing over his shoulder towards the park, “there’s some nutter in there with a gun. Everybody stay back!”
And then they were across the street, the grey granite mass of the Sony building towering over them to the right.
“So, what does God have to say about that?”
“It’s not a… it’s not a running commentary. It’s just an occasional thing.”
“Oh right,” said Bunny. “Did Amy make it?”
“I didn’t see. I was a little busy.”
“Well, fingers crossed. She’s a resourceful girl.”
“What’re we going to do now?” asked Smithy.
“Pint?”
Chapter Forty-Four
The plan had been straightforward. Actually, the plan had been a chaotic mess, but this part of it had been relatively simple. Amy was to pick up Matt at Madison Square Park and bolt up East 23rd Street. Before the opposition knew what was what, they’d be out of there, heading for their salvation up by the NYU Medical Center. Once they reached Channel 8, there were going to be a whole lot of questions, but when you were a wanted murderer who was trying to expose a massive criminal conspiracy, the least
you could expect was questions. Matt had attempted to make conversation, but Amy had been too busy concentrating on getting them to safety for much of it.
“Where are we going?”
“To fix this mess.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Save it.”
They’d made it up to the intersection with Second Avenue without much incident. Well, at least without confrontation. Amy hadn’t noticed in the panic, but when Mabel had reared up, Matt’s tight grip around her had caused the not-really-a-policewoman’s blouse to rip open – which was, after all, what it was designed to do. Amy had tried a couple of times to reattach it, but it didn’t seem to be working so, yes, she was now galloping up the 23rd Street bus lane on horseback with a terrified man riding pillion and her underwear on show. She felt like a rather prudish Lady Godiva. If she got through this, she’d look back on this moment and cringe for the rest of her life, but it was a price she was willing to pay. Still, New Yorkers were a lot of things, but short of an opinion or three wasn’t one of them, so there’d been more than a few things shouted in her direction.
Mabel wasn’t used to keeping up this sustained pace anymore, so Amy had been easing off slightly. They could take a left onto First and then it was a straight line to where they were heading. The good thing about the Friday Manhattan gridlock was that no car could move through it with anything approaching speed, so what a horse lacked with its horsepower of, well, one, was compensated for by the fact that not much else was moving anywhere in a hurry.
Then Amy had heard it: the insistent whine, coupled with a few shouts of outrage. She looked back to see a motorbike ripping its way along the bus lane behind them. The rider had no helmet on, so Amy could see the wide grin on her face as her long hair streamed behind her in the wind.
“Shit!” screamed Matt. “It’s the crazy bitch!”
With an apology uttered only in her head, Amy dug her heels into Mabel’s flanks once again.
Their luck held, as the lights at the intersection had just been changing against them, so traffic going both directions screeched to a halt amidst honking and swearing as Mabel raced through. The motorbike had been maybe half a block behind when she’d seen it. Amy didn’t look back, but she hoped that the renewed chorus of honking and the sound of at least one collision meant the motorbike had hit trouble and bought them more time. Mabel, even at her best, wasn’t going to be able to outrun a motorbike for long.
Just before the junction with First Avenue – “Oh fuck!” screamed Matt. “She’s gaining on us.”
In a split-second decision, Amy didn’t make the left turn to salvation; there was no way they could make it. Instead, she galloped through the intersection and, at the sound of the motorbike getting closer, tugged the reins to the right and brought Mabel over the raised tree-lined partition that divided East 23rd Street and the access road for the Peter Cooper Village apartment complex. Amy glanced left and saw the motorbike running parallel with them in the 23rd Street bus lane. The brunette wore a wide smile as she dipped her right hand under her left armpit, going for a gun.
Amy heaved the reins right again when she saw the split-second break in the fencing, sending Mabel shooting onto the pedestrian pathway to the apartment complex. A loving couple walking arm in arm, enjoying the sunny spring day, disentangled themselves and dived in separate directions to remove themselves from the path of the horse that was thundering towards them.
“What are we going to do?” hollered Matt.
“You’re going to shut up.”
It was a nice complex, well maintained and containing plots of greenery amidst the high-rise apartment blocks; a little village unto itself. Amy had looked into living there once. Randomly, a line from their brochure popped into her head: “The tree-lined paths provide a sense of tranquillity and calm amidst the surrounding city.” Not so much now. One of the flowerbeds took a hit when a pizza delivery guy drove his bike into it in an evasive manoeuvre.
Amy sent Mabel across a lawn, where a two-foot-high hedge blocked their way. It had been a while. She felt the horse surge towards it, enjoying reliving a former life. Once a jumper… Mabel executed the jump with ease. Matt yelped like a little girl, but otherwise remained stoically silent.
Behind them, Amy heard the damned whine of the motorcycle again. The psycho brunette having to go around the hedges would buy them some time, but nowhere near enough.
They reached a road that snaked its way through the complex. A security barrier at the exit was up as a UPS truck dawdled through. Mabel accelerated, beating its descent.
As Amy turned them right, down Avenue C, she risked a glance over her shoulder and saw the bike negotiating its way around the truck.
Avenue C was a big straight road, with the FDR Expressway running parallel on the far side of the street, sixty feet in the air. Behind it, the vast expanse of the East River rolled slowly by.
Amy could feel Mabel breathing harder and harder beneath her, her recent life of slow-walking tourists around Central Park catching up on her. The motorbike would be out now and closing fast; they couldn’t rely on luck for much longer.
Ahead of them, she saw the on-ramp for the FDR and inspiration struck. She urged Mabel on. “C’mon, girl, one more push!”
“Don’t go on the FDR,” yelped Matt. “What are you… that’s a…”
“Shut. Up!”
Long lines of traffic clogged each of the arteries of the intersection, drivers waiting impatiently to get on the expressway, keen to make it home so that their weekend could start. The horse galloping straight across forced the driver of a Dodge coming from the right to slam on her brakes, which was quickly followed by a succession of crunching noises as the cars behind her domino-ed into one another. They reached the on-ramp, leaving another cacophony of honking in their wake. Amy could feel Mabel panting harder beneath her. She gave her a quick pat of encouragement. Above them, a sign showed that Exit 6, the next one, was closed.
“Don’t go on the expressway,” yelled Matt. “We’ll be trapped!”
“That’s the idea.”
As a teenager, Amy’s dad had taken her out to dinner every other Tuesday, to a diner called Roberto’s. He’d really liked the place. He was a man of simple tastes, and the restaurant did what he liked. Amy had been less keen, but even in the worst throes of teenaged ingratitude, had never said so. She never wanted her dad to feel like he wasn’t doing the best for her. They’d had this ancient video game called Frogger, which you sat down to play on a screen in a table. Her dad had loved the damn thing. For such a disciplined man, it was the one time she saw him get giddy. The concept was simple: you were the aforementioned Frogger the frog and, for reasons never fully explained, you had decided to risk life and limb to repeatedly attempt to cross first a road filled with progressively faster traffic and then a river, where you had to hop on logs and the backs of turtles – frogs, of course, being famously afraid of water.
As they reached the top and merged onto the FDR, the memory of trying to play that stupid game came back to her. The traffic wasn’t moving fast by expressway standards, maybe thirty miles per hour, but when you were on a horse, that was plenty fast enough. The traffic in the right lane slowed, as much to stare as anything else, and Amy guided Mabel in.
“She’s coming,” shouted Matt.
“Tell me when she’s close.”
Amy watched the two lanes of traffic beside them, with cars moving past. Nearly. No. Now? No. C’mon! C’mon! C’mon!
“I can see her!” hollered Matt in Amy’s ear, accompanied by the unmistakable whine of the motorbike. “She’s coming fast… Shit, she’s—”
“Yee-haw!” roared Amy, and dug in her heels to urge Mabel forward.
Four feet is not much of a jump for a true jumper. Hell, Amy remembered jumping that back in one of her first competitions as a teenager. There was an increased degree of difficulty, though – an exponentially increased degree of difficulty – if to make that jump you had to firs
t veer wildly across two lanes of traffic.
Amy got a flash of the car in the middle lane swerving sharply into the outer lane to avoid them, then she heard the thudding crunch of bodywork doing its job as whatever was in the outer lane collided with it and the partition.
The partition was four feet of concrete; Amy could feel Mabel pull back. She geed her on, her body tensing. If the horse refused, this was going to be all kinds of ugly.
Mabel faced a four-foot jump with two people on her back after traversing two lanes of traffic, with three lanes of oncoming traffic waiting on the other side. Amy couldn’t even hope to time the landing. It was a leap into the unknown, and God bless Mabel as she raised her front legs and went for it.
Of the many unknowns, Amy hadn’t realised that the FDR on the other side of the partition was considerably lower – so a four-foot jump had an eight-foot landing.
Mabel landed with a juddering stumble but managed to regain her footing. Amy saw a brief flash of whatever vehicle had thankfully been far enough back in the fast lane, and then heard the sound of a car in the middle lane piling into the back of Buick in the slow lane.
Amy wrenched the reins left and Mabel slammed into the side of the Buick with a shattering of glass and crunching of bodywork. Both Amy and Matt howled in pain as their legs were trapped between the horse’s momentum and the Buick’s resistance. Amy felt something shatter around her knee. Mabel screamed but stayed upright and limped away.
Amy, biting back her own tears, patted the horse on the neck as they trotted awkwardly down the off-ramp. “Good girl. I’m so sorry. Good girl.”
It was the one thing a horse could do that a motorbike couldn’t. Somewhere on the far side of the FDR, the smiling brunette probably wasn’t smiling anymore. It’d take her at least fifteen minutes to get off and circle back, by which time they’d be long gone.
Compared to the rest of the journey, the last five blocks to the studios of Channel 8 News were relatively uneventful.
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