The frigid air felt like a wall as he climbed out of the Honda. He raised the collar of his peacoat against it, wishing that he’d thought to bring a stocking cap. He hated to embrace the reality of his thinning hair, but there was no denying the fact that breezes were a hell of a lot colder than they used to be.
The Smithsonian Castle loomed red and huge to his right, and as he crossed the street he cast a glance to the dormant and unused carousel, whose galloping horses, draped in shadows, seemed frozen in space and time. What was it about circus icons — clowns chief among them — that felt so very creepy?
He was still in the middle of the street when he tried Deeshy’s phone again. It didn’t make sense to go all the way down the escalator to the station just to come back up again thirty seconds later. He brought the phone to his ear and listened as it rang.
As he listened with his left ear, his right brought the sound of the reggae jingle that David recognized as Deeshy’s ringtone. Rather than coming from the station below, it was from the direction of the carousel. He turned, expecting to see his buddy waving and walking toward him, but instead saw nothing but carousel, naked trees, and the deserted Mall.
He was still squinting into the wind when the ringing in the night stopped, and Deeshy’s voice mail greeting kicked in. “If you don’t know who you’re calling, I’m not leaving a hint. Speak.”
David clicked the phone off.
“Deesh?” he called at a whisper into the night. “Deeshy, you’re creeping me out, dude.”
The night returned only the sound of the wind, and honest to God, it felt as if the temperature dropped another ten degrees.
A little louder, he said, “Come on, Deeshy, I know I was an asshole to be late, but this isn’t funny.” Still nothing.
“Dude, I know you’re there, so step out, or I’m driving away. I’m not playing this game.” He feigned a move back toward his car, but he knew there was no way he could walk away. Deeshy could be over there and be hurt.
Because someone hurt him.
The smart move would be to call the cops, but according to Deeshy himself, the cops couldn’t be trusted. If Deeshy was hurt, and the cops had hurt him, then who the hell could David call for help?
“Oh, this so sucks.” His feet started taking him toward the source of the ringtone before he was aware that his brain had given them permission to do so.
During the spring and summer, full, leafy trees provided shade for the kids and the kids at heart, a respite from the blistering heat of the largely shadeless Mall. In the darkness of the night, the dim illumination from the streetlights transformed the shadows of leafless tree limbs into menacing shadows of bony fingers beckoning him closer. His heart slammed behind his breastbone with so much force that it surely left a bruise.
“Dammit, Deeshy, stop this shit!” There, he’d yelled it, announcing to the world that he was pissed.
Apparently, the world didn’t care. Still, no sign.
He was on the carousel side of Jefferson Drive now, on the outer fringe of the malevolent shadows.
David tried the number again. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing. That wasn’t possible, of course, but maybe if you wanted hard enough for the thing to be true—
The reggae beat launched again, a bit of Bob Marley dancing from the shadows. If David hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn that the noise had moved from last time. He blamed the wind. And his imagination, the curse of being a writer. Honest to God, if it turned out that Deeshy wasn’t dead — or at least seriously hurt — David was going to kill him.
When the phone went to voice mail, David disconnected, waited a few seconds, and then dialed it again. He’d let the sound of the ringtone bring him closer — if not to DeShawn, then at least to his phone.
David was among the trees now, just twenty or thirty yards from the carousel, and when it rang this time, there was absolutely no doubt that it had moved. Whoever was playing this game with him was circling around behind him. The skin on his back felt alive as he spun to confront the threat that was finally visible to him. Actually, it was two threats, and they were both overdressed for the cold. They wore all black, and even though it was hard to see in the dark, David could see enough of their faces to know they looked angry.
“David Kirk,” one of them said in an accent that sounded Eastern European. “We need to have a word with you.” The one who remained silent held something in his hand that reflected the streetlight. Not for long — just a blink — but it was all David needed.
He spun on his heel to bolt away when he saw a third figure emerging from among the dormant horses of the carousel itself. For the space of a heartbeat, David hoped that it might be Deeshy, but from the size of the silhouette alone, he knew that it wasn’t. And if he wasn’t Deeshy, he was trouble.
A second heartbeat later, David sprinted into the wide open spaces of the Mall. The other option would have been to streak toward the Smithsonian Castle with its gardens and shadows, but he rejected that instinctively. What the Mall lacked in cover, it made up for in the ability to maneuver. At least the Mall would allow him to run his fastest, reliving the glory days of his high school years, which had vanished from his rearview mirror nearly seven years ago.
He pumped his arms and legs hard, as if by gripping the air with his fists he could pull himself faster, force his fashionable, slick-bottomed black loafers to dig more dirt with every stride.
They were right behind him. He knew without looking, and he didn’t dare look for fear of freezing when he saw how close they were. Or, more reasonably, for fear of losing a half step of whatever lead he had on them.
The cold air tore at his face and dried out his eyes. His throat burned at the great gulps of breath. David had not run this fast in a long time — not since those days of high school stardom, if even then — yet it still felt like slow motion. He focused on the southwest corner of the Natural History Museum as his first landmark, and even though his muscles screamed and his throat ached, the goal never seemed to get closer.
The shortest distance between two points was a straight line. He remembered that from high school geometry, the last math class he ever took. But a person running in a straight line made the perfect target. He thought he remembered reading something about that.
Zigzag. Wherever he’d read about the danger of the straight line, he remembered that the solution was to run a zigzag course.
Screw it. If they hadn’t taken their shot already, they weren’t going to take it at all — not now, when he was this close to Constitution Avenue with all its official buildings and requisite guard staffs. He was sure of it.
Right.
He was still thirty yards from the sidewalk on the far side of the Mall when the calf muscle in his left leg seized, locking up like a flesh-covered rock and sprawling him face-first into the frozen dirt that pretended to be grass.
He went down hard. “Shit! Help me!”
At first, he thought he’d been shot. The pain was that intense. Clutching his calf with his right hand and pulling up on his toes with his left to ease the spasm, David rolled to his back to confront his attackers. He hadn’t been in a fight since elementary school, but he wasn’t going to die without one.
“Help me!”
Somewhere in the night there had to be a tourist or two. A couple sets of eyes might help to run off the men who would kill him.
Or maybe they’d kill the tourists, too.