“So… you’re here because your account was hijacked?” I asked.
“No. But maybe you can introduce me to whoever did that for you sometime. Neat trick. I’m here because I think you’re the real thing. And I want to know what made you decide to drag half of Manhattan into Central Park tonight with your little ‘come and get me’ post.”
“Maybe I was just bored.”
“Oh? Were you?” She looked me in the eyes. “Just bored? Because it looked a little desperate to me.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Clara.”
“Clara, if I told you that tonight the most dangerous place in this entire city is next to me on a park bench, would you believe me?”
A strange expression passed over her. It was fear, but not exactly fear. Like the prospect of danger was something erotic. “I might,” she said with a grin. “What kind of danger are we talking about?”
“The kind that could be permanent,” I suggested.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Mr. Immortal. Girl doesn’t take a nighttime stroll in Central Park if she’s afraid of a little danger.”
I could see that. Clara was starting to remind me of a repressed French duchess I used to spend time with. She liked being spanked with an ivory hairbrush.
“All right,” I said. “It’s a trap.”
She looked a tad skeptical. “For who?” she asked. “You?”
“No, I set the trap. It’s for someone else.”
“And you’re springing this trap alone? Or are there soldiers hidden in the lake or something? Because you don’t look like all that much, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Sure it is.” Clara took my hand in hers and gave me a flirty smile, and the possibility dawned on me that I was dealing with a groupie. Go figure. “How about we take off before the bad people come?”
Did she think I went through all this trouble just to pick up a woman?
I heard, to the right of the bench and just off the path, a gun cock. “Do not move, sir.” It was a man’s voice with a hint of Mississippi.
I looked at Clara. “Too late,” I said. “They’re here.”
Chapter 15
Iza finally found her way. It’s difficult to piece together from her syntax, but I think there were exhaust fans that were tough to navigate around. It’s a very small, closed system—my cell is technically a stand-alone building—so you’d think it wouldn’t have been all that difficult. There are only so many places to try.
So, her basic message was, “tell me what to do.”
I’ve decided that since Clara went through the trouble to smuggle my tamed pixie into the place that I should trust her. (Although knowing about Iza at all means Clara had to have been eavesdropping on me. Two demerits for that.) Besides, I didn’t have much to lose. It’s not like they can do anything worse to me.
The problem is pixies aren’t good with complex instructions. This is going to take a while.
* * *
The guy with the voice and the gun was still behind me.
“Put your hands on your head,” he ordered.
“I can’t,” I said. “You told me not to move.”
I felt the barrel of the gun up against my head. “Funny man,” he said. Maybe not Mississippi. Georgia? “Go on and do it.”
I did as I was told while still looking into Clara’s eyes. She was looking at the man behind me, and she appeared scared but not out-of-her-mind scared. This I took to mean two things. One, I had a human behind me, and two, maybe she was telling the truth about knowing how to handle herself.
“Miss, you’ll want to run off now,” the man suggested. “This is not your concern.”
“Why don’t you run off instead?” she offered. “I found him first.”
“Please, ma’am. I am not above killing a woman.”
“You would not,” she said a tad less defiantly than I think she was aiming for.
“Do not make me prove it to you,” he barked.
“Clara, listen to him,” I suggested. “He’s not kidding.”
He pressed the barrel deeper into my scalp.
“Quiet,” he whispered. “I know about what happened in Boston. Trust me when I tell you I will not make the same mistake. Now be still for a moment, please.”
I felt a sharp prick in the back of my right hand.
“Owww!” I exclaimed. “Not again with the damn shot.”
“It’s required,” he said simply. “Now sit tight.”
Fifteen seconds later he said, “Good enough. Get to your feet. You too, miss.”
“Hang on… ,” Clara protested.
“Get. Up.”
She got up. So did I, hands still behind my head. “Turn around,” he ordered, to me.
I turned. He was a skinny black man a couple of inches shorter than me. Had a scar running down the right side of his face that made him look a bit more badass, but only just a bit. I figured I could take him if he gave me a chance. Possibly aware of this he stepped back, his gun pointed at my heart. He pulled a pair of plastic handcuffs out of his jacket pocket and tossed them over my shoulder to Clara.
“If you’re going to stick around, darling, I may as well put you to work. Handcuff him.” He looked at me. “Bring your hands down behind your back, sir. I trust you’ll be less lethal once properly trussed.”
“It’s not me you have to worry about,” I said, having taken note of some telltale movement just over my captor’s shoulder.
He smiled, looking very relaxed and unconcerned. “As the lady said, do you have an army of soldiers hidden in the lake?”
“No. But I’d check the trees if I were you.”
A loud ZIP sound echoed through the night. I watched the bounty hunter’s expression change from confidence to the shock that usually transpires when one’s heart unexpectedly explodes. He collapsed forward.
“Sniper,” I said to him, lowering my hands. “Told you to check the trees.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Clara exclaimed, now officially in panic mode. “I should… we have to…”
I spun around. “Don’t move… !” but she had already turned to run. Another loud ZIP and the sod at her feet kicked up into the air. She cried out in surprise and stumbled backward, landing gracelessly on her very pretty backside.
“That’s a marksman up there,” I pointed out to her. “You’re in luck. He only misses if he feels like it, so he must like you.”
“Stay where you are!” a man at the opposite end of the clearing demanded. He emerged from a set of trees nowhere near the sniper. He was dressed in black pajamas and carried what looked like an M-4 in his hands, looking very Delta Force.
“Two of you?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said fairly amicably, as he marched toward us. Suddenly everybody wanted to call me sir. “We’re here to take you into custody, sir. I trust you’ll come quietly.”
Climbing to her feet, Clara backed away from him, hands raised, until she was next to me.
“What’s going on here?” she muttered.
“Told you this was a bad place to be,” I answered.
“You weren’t just being mysterious?”
“Nope.”
“Why are they after you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But your MUD is what helped them track me, which is why I used it. It’s not what it seems.”
“I thought this was a trap.”
“It is, but not for them—for something else. They’re here to help me kill it. They just don’t know it yet. And you don’t want to be here when it arrives.”
“Something worse than them?”
“Oh yes.”
The soldier marching to the bench looked pretty intent on “taking me in” as he put it, except that he kept swatting around his head, like a mosquito was bothering him. It seemed out of character.
“Ma’am, this is a government matter,” he said officiously, drawing up to a stop a few feet from us. Again with the swatting.