The Manhattan Hunt Club

by John Saul

  Which was really stupid, now that he thought about it. That was one of the main reasons people went to the park, wasn’t it? People-watching? Half the benches in it were filled with people who didn’t seem to have anything better to do than feed the pigeons and the squirrels and watch other people minding their own business. One day a couple of weeks ago his son had asked him who they were.

  “Who are who?” he’d countered, not sure what the boy was talking about.

  “The people on the benches,” the ten-year-old boy had asked. “The ones who are always watching us.”

  The little boy’s sister, two years older than her brother, had rolled her eyes. “They’re not watching us. They’re just feeding the squirrels.”

  Up until that day, he’d never really thought about it at all. Never really noticed it. But after that, it had started to seem like maybe his son was right. It seemed like there was always someone watching whatever he and the kids were doing.

  Some old man in a suit that looked out of date.

  An old lady wearing a hat and gloves no matter what the time or day.

  A nanny letting her eyes drift from her charges for a moment.

  Just the normal people who drifted in and out the park. Sometimes they smiled and nodded, but they seemed to smile and nod at anyone who passed, at anyone who paid them the slightest bit of attention.

  They were just people, spending a few hours sitting in the park and watching life passing them by. Certainly, it was nothing personal.

  But somehow they seemed to be everywhere. He’d told himself it was just that he’d become conscious of them. When he hadn’t thought about them, he’d hardly noticed them at all, but now that his son had pointed them out, he was thinking about them all the time.

  Within a week, it had spread beyond the park. He was starting to see them everywhere he went. When he took his son to the barbershop, or the whole family went out for dinner.

  “You’re imagining things,” his wife had told him just a couple of days ago. “It’s just an old woman eating by herself. Of course she’s going to look around at whoever’s in the restaurant. Don’t you, when you’re eating alone?”

  She was right, and he knew she was right, but it hadn’t done any good. If fact, every day it had gotten worse, until he’d gotten to the point where no matter where he was, or what he was doing, he felt eyes watching him.

  More and more, he’d get that tingly feeling, and know that someone behind him was watching him. He’d try to ignore it, try to resist the urge to look back over his shoulder, but eventually the hair on the back of his neck would stand up, and the tingling would turn into a chill, and finally he’d turn around.

  And nobody would be there.

  Except that of course there would always be someone there; this was the middle of Manhattan, for God’s sake. There was always at least one person there, no matter where he was: on the sidewalk, in the subway, at work, in a restaurant, in the park.

  Then it went beyond the feeling of being watched. A couple of days ago he’d started feeling as if he were being followed.

  He’d stopped trying to resist the urge to turn around, and by today it seemed as if he were glancing over his shoulder every few seconds.

  When he’d walked home from work this afternoon, he’d kept looking into store windows, but it wasn’t the merchandise he was looking at; it was the reflections in the glass.

  The reflections of people swirling around him, some of them almost bumping into him, some of them excusing themselves as they pushed past, some of them just looking annoyed.

  But no one was following him.

  He was sure of it.

  Except that he wasn’t sure of it at all, and when he’d gotten home he’d been so jumpy he’d had a drink, which he practically never did. A glass of wine with dinner was about all he ever allowed himself. Finally he’d decided to go for a run—it wouldn’t be dark for another half hour, and maybe if he got some exercise—some real exercise—he would finally shake the paranoia that seemed to be tightening its grip every day.

  “Now?” his wife had asked. “It’s almost dark!”

  “I’ll be fine,” he’d insisted.

  And he was. He’d entered the park at Seventy-seventh, and headed north until he came to the Bank Rock Bridge. He’d headed east across the bridge, then started jogging through the maze of paths from which the Ramble had gotten its name. The area was all but deserted, and as he started working his way south toward the Bow Bridge he finally began to feel the paranoia lift.

  There was no one watching him.

  No one following him.

  Nothing was going on at all.

  As the tension began draining out of his body, his pace slowed to an easy jog. Late afternoon was turning into dusk, and the benches were empty of people. Even the few runners that were still out were picking up their pace, anxious to get out of the park before darkness overtook them. Behind him, he could hear another runner pounding along the path, and he eased over to the right to make it easy for the other to pass. But then, just when the other runner should have flashed by him, the pounding footsteps suddenly slowed.

  And the feeling of paranoia came rushing back.

  What had happened?

  Why had the other runner slowed?

  Why hadn’t he gone past?

  Something was wrong. He started to twist around to glance back over his shoulder.

  Too late.

  An arm snaked around his neck, an arm covered with some kind of dark material. Before he could even react to it, the arm tightened. His hands came up to pull the arm free, his fingers sinking into the sleeve that covered it, but then he felt a hand on his head.

  A hand that was pushing his head to the left, deep into the crook of his assailant’s elbow.

  The arm tightened; the pressure increased.

  He gathered his strength, raised his arm to jam his elbows back into his attacker’s abdomen and—

  With a quick jerk, the man behind him snapped his neck, and as his spine broke every muscle in his body went limp.

  A second later his wallet and watch—along with his attacker—were gone, and his corpse lay still in the rapidly gathering darkness.

  CHAPTER 1

  Caroline Evans’s dream was not a nightmare, and as it began evaporating into the morning light, she tried to cling to it, wanting nothing more than to retreat into the warm, sweet bliss of sleep where the joy and rapture of the dream and the reality of her life were one and the same.

  Even now she could feel Brad’s arms around her, feel his warm breath on her cheek, feel his gentle fingers caressing her skin. But none of the sensations were as sharp and perfect as they had been a few moments ago, and her moan—a moan that had begun in anticipation of ecstasy but which had already devolved into nothing more than an expression of pain and frustration—drove the last vestiges of the dream from her consciousness.

  The arms that a moment ago had held her in comfort were suddenly a constricting tangle of sheets, and the heat of his breath on her cheek faded into nothing more than the weak warmth of a few rays of sunlight that had managed to penetrate the blinds covering the bedroom window.

  Only the fingers touching her back were real, but they were not those of her husband leading her into a morning of slow lovemaking, but of her eleven-year-old son prodding her to get out of bed.

  “It’s almost nine,” Ryan complained. “I’m gonna’ be late for practice!”

  Caroline rolled over, the image of her husband rising in her memory as she gazed at her son.

  So alike.

  The same soft brown eyes, the same unruly shock of brown hair, the same perfectly chiseled features, though Ryan’s had not yet quite emerged from the softness of boyhood into the perfectly defined angles and planes that always made everyone—men and women alike—look twice whenever Brad entered a room.

  Had the person who killed him looked twice? Had he looked even once? Had he even cared? Probably not—all he’d wanted was Brad’
s wallet and watch, and he’d gone about it in the most efficient method possible, coming up behind Brad, slipping an arm around his neck, and then using his other hand to shove Brad’s head hard to the left, ripping vertebrae apart and crushing his spinal cord.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have gone to the morgue that day, shouldn’t have looked at Brad’s body lying on the cold metal of the drawer, shouldn’t have let herself see death in his face.

  Caroline shuddered at the memory, struggling to banish it. But she could never rid herself of that last image she had of her husband, an image that would remain seared in her memory until the day she died.

  There were plenty of other people who could have identified him at the morgue. Any one of the partners in his law firm could have done it, or any of their friends. But she had insisted on going herself, certain that it was a mistake, that it hadn’t been Brad at all who’d been mugged in the park.

  A terrible cold seized her as the memory of that evening last fall came over her. When Brad had gone out for his run around part of the lake and through the Ramble she’d worried that it was too dark. But he’d insisted that a good run might help him get over the jumpiness that had come over him the last couple of weeks. She’d been helping Laurie with her math homework and barely responded to Brad’s quick kiss before he’d headed out.

  Hardly even nodded an acknowledgment of what turned out to be his last words: “Love you.”

  Love you.

  The words kept echoing through her mind six hours later when she’d gazed numbly down at the face that was so utterly expressionless as to be almost unrecognizable. Love you . . . love you . . . love you . . . “I love you, too,” she’d whispered, her vision mercifully blurred by the tears in her eyes. But in the months that had passed since that night more than half a year ago, her tears had all but dried up. Sometimes they still came, sneaking up on her late at night when she was alone in bed, trying to fall asleep, trying to escape into the dream in which Brad was still alive, and neither the tears nor the anger were a part of her life.

  Caroline wasn’t quite sure when the anger had begun to creep up on her.

  Not at the funeral, where she’d sat with her arms holding her children close. Maybe at the burial, where she’d stood clutching their hands in the fading afternoon light as if they, too, might disappear into the grave that had swallowed up her husband.

  That was when she’d first realized that Brad must have known he’d be alone in total darkness by the time he finished his run around the lake. And both of them knew how dangerous the park was after dark. Why had he gone? Why had he risked it? But she knew the answer to those questions, too. Even if he’d thought about it, he’d have finished his run. That was one of the things she loved about him, that he always finished whatever he started.

  Books he didn’t like, but finished anyway.

  Rocks that looked easy to climb, but turned out to be almost impossible to scale. Almost, but not quite.

  “Well, why couldn’t you have quit just once?” she’d whispered as she peered out into the darkness of that evening four days after he’d died. “Why couldn’t you just once have said ‘This is really stupid,’ and turned around and come home?” But he hadn’t, and she knew that even if the thought had occurred to him, he still would have finished what he set out to do. That was when anger had first begun to temper her grief, and though the anger brought guilt along with it, she also knew that it was the anger rather than the grief that had let her keep functioning during those first terrible weeks after her life had been torn apart. Now, more than half a year later, the anger was finally beginning to give way to something else, something she couldn’t yet quite identify. The first shock of Brad’s death was over. The turmoil of emotions—the first numbness brought on by the shock of his death, followed by the grief, then the anger—was finally starting to settle down. As each day had crept inexorably by, she had slowly begun to deal with the new reality of her life. She was by herself now, with two children to raise, and no matter how much she might sometimes wish she could just disappear into the same grave into which Brad now lay, she also knew she loved her children every bit as much as she had loved their father.

  No matter how she felt, their lives would go on, and so would hers. So she’d gone back to work at the antique shop, and done her best to help her children begin healing from wounds the loss of their father had caused. There had been just enough money in their savings account to keep them afloat for a few months, but last week she had withdrawn the last of it, and next week the rent was due. Her financial resources had sunk even lower than those of her emotions.

  “Mom?” she heard Laurie calling from the kitchen. “Is there any more maple syrup?”

  Sitting up and untangling herself from the sheets—and the turmoil of her own emotions as well—Caroline shooed her son out of the room. “Go tell your sister to look on the second shelf in the pantry. There should be one more bottle. And you’re not going to be late for baseball practice. I promise.”

  As Ryan skittered out of the room, already yelling to his sister, Caroline got out of bed, opened the blinds, and looked out at the day. As the smell of Laurie’s waffles filled her nostrils and the brilliant light of a spring Saturday flooded the room, Caroline shook off the vestiges of last nights dream.

  “We’re going to be all right,” she told herself.

  She only wished she felt as certain as the words sounded.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming hardcover edition of Midnight Voices by John Saul. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2001 by John Saul

  Excerpt from Midnight Voices by John Saul copyright © 2002 by John Saul

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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  eISBN: 978-0-345-45951-0

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