Kevin didn’t even wait for Anselm to sit down. Everything was clear to him now, everything was obvious, just as it had been during his first two class periods, and he knew what to do. He marched straight over to where Connor Feeney was sitting, hauled the boy out of his chair by his shirt collar, and then without so much as a word of explanation to his class, he half-walked, half-dragged Connor out the door, down the hall, up the stairs, and straight into Principal Stewart’s office. Not surprisingly, Connor put up a respectable fuss during this process. There were cries of surprise, then anger, and then finally threats concerning the fearsome power and influence of Connor’s father; but Kevin ignored it all. He waited until he had the Feeney boy safely in the principal’s office with the door closed, and then he turned to Ms. Stewart.
“This boy beat up Anselm Billaud,” Kevin declared. “Twice.”
Connor’s eyes grew wide with injustice, and he objected so vigorously that he began hopping up and down. “That is not true!” he shouted.
Kevin rolled his eyes in disbelief. The Feeney boy’s protests were unconscionable. His reputation as a bully was well-known, and only last week he had nearly killed little Elias Worth.
Ms. Steward sighed, and she indicated with a nod to Kevin that his job here was done. He turned and headed back toward his class, leaving Connor there.
“You’re done at this school,” Connor shouted after him.
Kevin wasn’t listening. The door closed, and he hurried back the way he had come.
On his way back he ran into Elias, who was sprinting down the hall without looking where he was going. “Slow down,” Kevin said to him sternly.
“Oh!” Elias said, peering up at Kevin from under his still-enormous head bandages. “I need to go see Ms. Stewart.”
“She’s busy Elias. Come back after class.”
“Well, but – ” Elias seemed to freeze. A direct order from a teacher, yes. But also a very pressing errand to run. Very important information to give to Ms. Stewart. The competing forces held him in place, and he could not move. He looked up again at Kevin. “Can I tell you? And then you can tell her?”
“Of course.”
Elias relaxed. Giving the information to some teacher, any teacher, would be enough. The facts would make their way inexorably back to Ms. Stewart. This was the way of things. The natural order. “I was in the library at the end of last period,” Elias said. He looked expectantly at Kevin, perhaps feeling that this should be enough. Most teachers were essentially clairvoyant, Elias’s expression said. Surely Mr. Brooks already understood.
Kevin nodded encouragingly. “What happened in the library, Elias?”
“Oh. Jimmy Fleiss hurt Anselm. And pretty bad this time, I think.”
Kevin felt the hallway go suddenly out of focus around him. He squatted down on the floor, bringing himself to eye-level with little Elias. “Jimmy?”
Elias nodded eagerly. “Mmm-hmm. He’s an eighth grader. On the football team, you know him? He hates Anselm. I don’t know why.” Elias shrugged placidly, as if to emphasize that the motivation of one’s attacker was best left unexplored. Who could say why someone would choose to put you in a headlock? And who could predict that this headlock would lead to a gash in your skull, a gash so large that it left your own mother barely able to change the bandages without going faint? These things were mysteries to Elias, but so was the chain of events that had led him to be included in Ms. Beck’s afternoon study group. Mysteries of evil, and mysteries of wonder. And now they could add to that the mystery of Jimmy Fleiss’s hatred for Anselm. You could not explain; you could only tell, and now Elias had done that. His task was complete. “I have to go back to class, okay?”
Kevin nodded numbly at him, and the boy turned and ran back the way he had come.
“Walk,” Kevin said, far too quietly to be heard. He stood slowly, then began walking himself. Back toward Principal Stewart’s office.
Heck of a day. Turns out I’m a terrible math teacher, an undesirable date, and, most important, an awful judge of character. Which is why I’m now probably minutes away from losing my job at the hands of some punk and his well-connected father.
He opened the door to the office gently, as though fearing a trap. As though Mr. Feeney might already be there, having arrived by jet-pack at the request of his ill-treated son.
This turned out to be not far from the truth.
Ms. Stewart was on the phone when Kevin came in. She put one hand over the mouth piece and gave him a puzzled look. “I’m on hold for Mr. Feeney,” she said. “You don’t need to be here.”
Kevin nodded miserably. “Yes, I do.”
She didn’t fire him. At least not on the spot. But she told him she needed time to figure out how to handle the situation, and that the best way to create room for negotiations with Mr. Feeney would be to send Kevin home for the day. Immediately.
“Come back first thing in the morning,” she said to him. “We’ll figure it out. You might need to do some serious ass-kissing, but there are worse things.” Her voice was gentle and understanding, and Kevin wanted to pound his head into a wall. He had endured enough sympathetic understanding for one day.
But he also knew she was right, so he simply headed down the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door.
There were three white vans parked on the street this afternoon, but Kevin barely noticed them. There always seemed to be white vans on this street, after all. Lots of painting to be done somewhere.
They Both Had Knives
If Andrew was surprised to see his employer home so soon after lunch time, he didn’t show it. He took his suit jacket from him, folded it over one arm, and followed Kevin into the living room.
“How was your day?”
Kevin grunted.
“Sir?”
“Didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.”
Andrew gave him space. In ten minutes he was back, doing his best to cheer Kevin up by stuffing him with good food and reminding him, with a little nod in the direction of the book case, that he had now officially gone through all the reading material in this room. “You’ll have to start on the bedroom collection now,” he said, sounding impressed.
“Right,” Kevin said, without much enthusiasm. He got up from the table, thanked Andrew for the food, and headed for his bedroom. “I’m going to try to rest all the way until tomorrow morning,” he announced.
Andrew glanced at his watch. “It’s only one in the afternoon.”
“That’s okay.”
“Are you all right?”
Kevin sighed. He turned around to face him. “Hard to say, Andrew. I don’t know what I’m getting ready for.” He shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. “Ready,” he repeated, uttering the word as if it had dark and mystical properties. He was talking to the ceiling now. Talking to the sky. “Ready for what? What am I supposed to be doing?”
Andrew kept quiet.
“Petak tells me the answer is nothing,” Kevin went on. “He says it’s just residual nonsense.”
“Who’s Petak?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “I swear, if someone would just give me a job, something incredibly difficult, I could – ”
He stopped. He didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
“You have a job, don’t you?”
Kevin almost laughed. “For the moment,” he said. “I might get fired tomorrow, though. And even if they keep me around, I seem to be getting worse at teaching every day.”
“That can’t be true.”
Kevin didn’t answer. He turned around and headed back toward his bedroom. He could feel the urge to read – to absorb, to get ready – building in him, and he didn’t want to wait for that pestering voice to start squirming its way into his head. This day had been frustrating enough already.
“Tomorrow will be better,” Andrew called after him.
“I agree,” Kevin called back. “It can’t be much worse.”
Kevin sat up quickly in bed, and h
e took a very deep breath. A book was on his lap, but it was turned to the last page. A blank page. He looked to his right; there was an enormous pile of discarded books there, perhaps half the contents of his bedroom bookcase.
He could barely remember lying down.
What time is it?
He glanced at his windows and saw only darkness at the edges of the pulled shades. Which meant he had made it all the way to Tuesday morning, and that was a relief. He wanted that Monday as far behind him as possible. His cell phone was lying on the dresser, and he got out of bed to check it. As he rose, he was pleased to notice that his legs seemed to be recovering nicely from his ill-advised (and fruitless) sprint after the doorman the day before.
The cellphone’s digital clock showed 3 AM.
Still too early.
He didn’t want to read anymore. Or rest anymore. The need was gone; the urgency had left him, and he could tell that the voice wouldn’t be bothering him for a while now. Instead, he could feel himself wanting to stay up.
To go out and run, of all things.
Again? I’m not supposed to be doing this. Normal people don’t go out and exercise at three in the morning.
But his body didn’t listen to him. Or it simply didn’t want to listen. He could already feel his heart starting to pump faster, as though it had needed only to hear the mention of a run. And now it had simply decided to begin jogging without him.
“Relax,” he whispered. “Hold on a second.”
In ten minutes he was dressed and out on the street, heading for the park. He wasn’t running yet, no matter what his hyped-up heart seemed to want.
Let’s give the hamstrings a second to catch up, he thought.
By the time he had reached the park he felt loose enough, warm enough, and he started jogging slowly. It was okay. His legs didn’t seem to mind. There was almost no one on the loop this time – 3 AM on a Tuesday morning, it seemed, was a witching hour even for New Yorkers – so there was nothing to distract him. Even the homeless guy on the grassy spot behind the Metropolitan was asleep.
Kevin didn’t let himself speed up. He ran steadily once around, a complete loop in a little less than an hour, and everything was feeling good.
I can go again, he thought.
It was closer to 4 AM by now, and a few people had begun emerging onto the roadway with him. The super-early risers. All of them were thin and focused, their eyes fixed on a point before them or hidden under the brims of white exercise hats. They were in their routines. Nothing to see here.
But this was New York, after all. Central Park at night. It was a city – and a place – that favored the unexpected. So as if to reassert this spirit of unpredictability, the park itself seemed to step forward. To shift, and to shatter that routine.
And something happened.
Kevin was on a deserted stretch of road north of 110th street when a pair of men running together on a neighboring path caught his eye. They were quicker than most, but they weren’t wearing the standard little shorts and shirt outfit that was typical of other fast runners Kevin had seen. Their clothes were darker. Heavier-looking. He wondered how they could possibly keep up such a pace while wearing clothes of this kind. Kevin was in a rhythm now, enjoying the slow but steady cadence he had established for himself, and he stared after the two quick men as though he were watching them on television. My God, they were fast. The path they were running on was covered mostly by trees, and in a moment they’d be in the darkness again, out of Kevin’s sight, hidden from the lamps on the main road by the thick foliage. They were running even faster now, as if they were not just running but chasing something. Within seconds they were going to catch up to that small woman ahead of them, and –
Everything came together at once.
They didn’t see me.
They think they’re alone.
Alone with that woman.
They’re not runners.
They’re going to catch her.
They’re going to –
He had been wrong about Connor Feeney, but this time Kevin’s instincts were right on-target. Whatever he had been reading for the last several nights, it had apparently not prepared him for detecting grade-school bullies. When it came to matters of life and death – or rape – however, he could see clearly enough.
Not that it would have been so difficult for anyone to read these men’s intentions.
Kevin bent to scoop up a small orange traffic cone that was guarding a pothole, and then he went darting to the side, through a copse of trees and over a small mound of grass and roots and then he was through, he was over, and now he was running along the path just a few yards behind the men. It was nearly pitch black on this path; light from the lamps on the loop could barely penetrate this far into the trees.
“Right here, guys,” Kevin called.
They were mere feet from the woman in front of them, but when they heard Kevin’s call the two men stopped in their tracks. They turned to face him. In the semi-darkness Kevin couldn’t make out the expression on their faces, but he didn’t need to. He had ruined their evening’s entertainment, and for this there would be consequences.
Had Elias Worth been there, he might have tried to explain to Mr. Brooks that these were men who should not be bothered. Like Jimmy Fleiss and Connor Feeney, these were men to be avoided. They were bad men, and trying to understand why they were bad would have been a waste of time. They were part of the mystery of things. Some days you got your head bashed in by a bully and a lunch table, and some days you got to sit in the library with Ms. Beck. You took the good with the bad; part of this was simply accepting that men such as these existed.
But for the love of God, you didn’t talk to such men. You didn’t interrupt them in the middle of whatever evil mischief they were busy making. If you saw them doing something, you ran and told a teacher. Or any adult.
“You’re about to be in pain, you know?” one of them called out to him. The man’s voice was hard. Agitated. They began walking toward him.
“I’m already in pain,” Kevin replied. “Hey, better watch out,” he added. “I’ve got a cone. See?” He held the orange thing up and waved it back and forth like a flag.
No plan, Kevin thought.
The men hesitated. They could make out something that looked like a traffic cone, but it was too dark to be sure; the announcement Kevin had made was surely a trick of some kind. A traffic cone was not a threat. It had to be something else, or at least it had to be hiding something else.
In any case, they both had knives. And they knew how to use them.
They continued forward, closing the distance.
Kevin felt calm. Peaceful, even. He waited, breathing easily. “I’m ready for you,” he said to them. He sounded almost eager.
This time the men didn’t stop coming. This second strange announcement did not resonate with them; the notion of being ready for a two-on-one knife fight was not realistic. If this man was trying to intimidate them, then he’d have to think of something a lot more convincing.
Anyway, intimidation was out of the question. They were going to fuck this guy up, ready or not.
In the darkness, Kevin Brooks smiled.
He swung the traffic cone at the last second, moving it in a wide arc from low to high. The men saw it coming even in the shadows, and they dodged it easily, one left and one right. They weren’t sure what was hiding in that cone, but it was best to be safe. In that moment of separation Kevin dove between them, and as he rolled past he gave a short, powerful jab straight to the knee of the man on the right.
An observer of this economical little hit might have scoffed, might have said that such tactics would score no points in a real contest, but Kevin was not interested in points. And this was not a contest. The guides on street fighting said that there were very few things you needed to remember for survival; the most important thing was hitting first.
Kevin thought Cristiana’s hard-nosed friends would have agreed.
; The man’s leg buckled as if it were a twig, and he went down hard, wailing in pain. Kevin tried to spin around and bring the other man down with his rear leg, but this man was too quick. He jumped back as if he were a snake and then crouched low to the ground. He could hear his friend crying out as if he had been stuck with something, and he wondered if the orange cone had been concealing a knife of some kind. There was a sudden noise behind him, and the man whirled around –
No, you idiot.
He stood and turned back, realizing his mistake, but it was too late. Now Kevin had no cone to use as a distraction – he had already thrown it over the man’s head – but he didn’t need it. He closed the gap in an instant, pulled the man toward him, and then delivered a sharp blow to his Adam’s apple with an open hand. The knife was already in mid-swing, but it lost all its momentum as the man’s windpipe was crushed, and it poked impotently at the back of Kevin’s shoulder blade as the second man’s strength left him.
Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) Page 27