It didn’t do any damage, but it stayed on the hood. As I started running again, my lungs nearly screaming, I heard the driver curse through an open window and put the car in reverse, making the can roll off the hood. Within seconds, though, he was in pursuit again.
But it was too late. I was close to the intersection now, and I could see that it was filled with traffic, and there were even a few people up there too, a cluster of hipsters hanging by a bar. And on the far side, there was something that filled me with joy. A police cruiser.
I burst into the intersection and started waving my arms frantically. Behind me I heard the gypsy cab screech to a halt and then do a U-turn, the driver jerking the car forward and backward a few times. I slowed my speed a little, and looked back. The car was totally turned around, ready to take off in the opposite direction. In the dark I could make out only the first part of the license plate—L3. The driver suddenly thrust his head out the window and looked back at me. He screamed something in my direction. It sounded like “Stop. Be a body.” And then he took off like the proverbial banshee down the street.
Relief poured through my body, warm, almost intoxicating. I turned back to the intersection, waited for the light, and started to jog across to the police cruiser. As I moved, fighting a stitch in my side, I dug into my pocket and found my BlackBerry. The 911 operator was still connected.
“I’m okay,” I told her, trying to catch my breath. “I see a cop car.”
“Good. Please let me speak to one of the officers.”
As soon as I approached, the cop in the driver’s seat rolled his window down. He looked like he was twelve years old and might be wearing Spiderman underpants.
“What can we do for you, young lady?” he asked. The cop next to him set down the disposable aluminum dish he was eating from and leaned his head in my direction.
I blurted out that I’d been abducted and then handed him my BlackBerry. He listened intently, signed off, and then handed the BlackBerry back to me.
“Are you okay?” he asked, climbing out of the car. When I assured him I was, he asked for the best description of the car and driver I could give and then called it in on his radio.
I suddenly noticed that despite the cold, the sweater inside my jacket was wet with sweat. I also noticed a weird crashing sensation beginning to build in me, maybe from all the adrenaline that had been briefly pumped through my system and was now in retreat.
“We should cruise around and see if we can find this guy,” the cop told me when he was finished talking on his walkie-talkie. “But we don’t have much to go on. And we also need to make sure you get home somehow.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a yellow taxi head through the intersection, and the light was on.
“Why don’t I grab this taxi,” I told the cop. I shot out my arm and waved. The car screeched to a halt. “Thanks so much for your help.”
“You’ll need to file a police report tomorrow, okay?”
I promised I would and darted toward the cab. I spent the ride home fighting tears. I felt badly shaken.
By the time I let myself into my apartment, I was trembling, as if the fear was now really catching up with me. I stripped off my boots, jeans, and sweater and took a long shower. It felt so good to have the hot water course over me, as if I was washing the terror away too. My leap from the gypsy cab had left another ugly bruise on my left butt cheek but fortunatly that was the only damage. I thought of how reassuring it would be to talk to Beau, but even if things were fine between us, I would have resisted the urge to wake him so late.
When I finally slipped into bed, I felt a little bit better. I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep anyway, so I tried to go back over everything in my mind. I was positive that the driver who picked me up was the same one I’d seen earlier in front of the Living Room. Obviously he’d been trolling for someone to rob or rape. I decided to let the bar know tomorrow so the management could keep an eye out for the guy.
I still had no sense of where he had been taking me or why. One thing seemed odd. If he were going to rob me or rape me, why not just pull over on one of those deserted streets when we first came off the bridge into Brooklyn? Maybe he had wanted to find an even more secluded spot. I was also still baffled by the words he’d hurled at me: Stop. Be a body. He’d had a faint accent, one that I couldn’t place, but I was pretty sure I’d heard him right. Had it been some kind of a sexual threat? I had no clue.
I eventually fell asleep around four and woke at eight the next morning. I felt like shit, but I had my breakfast meeting with Scott and I had no intention of taking a pass on it. I did my best to look presentable—Scott, after all, was a player, and I sensed I’d extract more if I catered to that part of him. I wore my black suede boots, a tight black pencil skirt, and a plum-colored silk blouse. But the circles under my eyes had darkened badly. By the time I was done with my makeup, you could have taken an elevation level on the amount of concealer I’d been forced to apply.
I was the first to arrive at the café-style restaurant, and I grabbed a private table at the back of the room. I asked for coffee but then instantly changed my order to tea. I still felt completely on edge from the night before, and I was afraid anything with too much caffeine might make me jump out of my skin.
Scott was nearly twenty minutes late—and I almost didn’t recognize him. His hair was slicked back and he was wearing a long black cashmere coat. Not the kind of look that went with skeet shooting.
He slid into the chair, shook off his coat, and with a flick of his chin, summoned the waitress to our table pronto. He smelled of expensive, manly cologne.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “What would you like to eat?”
“Uh, I guess I’ll try the asparagus and goat cheese omelet,” I said.
And then I felt dumb because all he ordered was coffee, black.
“How are you doing anyway?” I asked once the waitress was gone. There was something supertense going on in his jawline that made even his face look different today. It was tough to accept that this was the same Scott who had bounded down the stairs to greet Jessie and me with a big, boyish grin on his face.
“Well,” he said, cocking his head to the left, “my hot new recording artist died at my house, and for the next two days most of the world assumed I’d loaded her up with cocaine—but other than that I’m just fine.”
“I appreciate your taking the time to meet in the middle of all this,” I said.
“I’m a little surprised you could make the time,” he said. There was a tiny edge to his voice as he spoke. “I figured things must be crazy for you at work. Though I’m a little confused. I turned on the Today show yesterday morning, and there’s some guy on there from Buzz talking about Devon Barr as if the story was his exclusive. Don’t tell me your boss doesn’t think you’re mediagenic enough to chat with Matt Lauer.”
Scott never took his nearly black eyes off me as he said it, and I could feel a rush of blood headed for my cheeks, like a mob of paparazzi that has just spotted Lady Gaga coming out of a building wearing only a couple of Band-Aids. He’d either somehow heard that I was in the doghouse or he just had brilliant intuition.
“I do media appearances occasionally,” I said, fumbling a little as I spoke. “But if I’m still in the middle of a story, I might hand the press part off to somebody else.” Lame, I knew, but it would put me at a disadvantage to admit the truth to Scott Cohen.