Manhattan Heat

by Alice Orr

  “Come on,” he said. “Look like you’re having a good time. You’re my girl and we’re out on the town, running across the street here like a couple of kids.”

  He was moving as he spoke and pulling her along with him. She had to run to keep up or fall in the street. She stole a frantic glance at the lineup of yellow cabs on their mark to take off the minute the light turned green. All those cabbies cared about was getting down Fifth Avenue as fast as they could. They weren’t even looking at her, and she knew it. She raised her free arm to wave hard at them anyway. No one seemed to notice.

  “Wait,” she called as they neared the other side.

  “They aren’t listening. They’ll just think you might be a fare,” her captor said as he clamped his arm back around her waist and half lifted her up onto the curb. “So, why don’t you shut up while I pick out a good victim over here on this side of the street.”

  Bennett glanced up and down the block. Unfortunately, there were several prospects, from the ragged man on a nearby park bench to the tourist couple with a child between them, all three gawking at the elegant buildings across the avenue. A stone wall bordered this side of the street, with the dark of Central Park beyond the wall. Bennett might have called for help, but she could feel the point of the knife through the silk crepe of her dress. Besides, she had lived in New York City all of her life, and she doubted anyone would leap to her defense against a man the size of this one with a desperate glint in his eyes.

  “I think it’s time for a walk in the park,” he said as he hustled her across the octagonal-cut asphalt of the sidewalk and onto the Belgian block border that lined the wall.

  “We aren’t going into the park!” Bennett resisted as they approached an unoccupied stone bench.

  He yanked hard on her arm, but she held her ground. She had been frightened before, by the body on the floor of the billiard room, by the knife blade at her throat, by being dragged along against her will. But none of that terrified her more than the prospect of entering the dark beyond this wall.

  “We’re going in there,” he growled near her ear, “and we’re doing it right now.”

  “Help me,” Bennett yelled, just as she had in the basement of the Stuyvesant Club. She didn’t care what he did to her as a result.

  People did turn around to look. They may even have surmised that Bennett was being held prisoner. Still no one moved forward. In fact, the couple with the child backed off. A man did call out “What’s going on there?” but he didn’t come any closer.

  “Keep your distance if you know what’s good for you,” Bennett’s captor said forcefully. He moved the knife into view of the people on the street.

  A woman screamed, and the couple who had backed off grabbed their child and ran up the street.

  “See how much help you’re going to get?” he said to Bennett. He didn’t sound triumphant, just matter-of-fact. He climbed onto the bench and pulled her up after him.

  “Let me go,” she said.

  “Not on your life.”

  He lifted her and set her on top of the wall. In a move too quick for her to anticipate, he was on the wall next to her. Then he pushed her over to the other side. She tumbled onto the ground between the wall and a clump of bushes. She felt her stockings tear as her knee hit a rock. Her palm came down on the edge of a metal soda can, discarded there along with other trash. He grabbed her arm.

  “Please, help me,” she shouted.

  Bennett didn’t expect much response. She was on her own now. Maybe help would come from Anson’s alarm at the Stuyvesant Club, but she couldn’t be certain of that. Her hand closed around the soda can as her captor pulled her to her feet. She brought her arm up in an arc that carried all of her strength behind it. She was aiming at his face, hoping to startle him into loosening his grip on her so she could get away. If he hadn’t turned his head just in time, she would have inflicted some real damage. Instead, her blow glanced off his shoulder. He ripped the can out of her hand and threw it into the bushes.

  “You’ve got some fight in you, all right,” he said. “Why don’t I take you over there and leave you?” He pointed toward the darkness beyond the bushes. “I’ve got a feeling you’d need lots of fight against whatever’s in there.”

  “No animal in here could be any worse than you,” Bennett said over the knot of terror in her throat.

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” he said, “especially not when it comes to animals of the human kind. Now, get moving.”

  Bennett could hear the traffic on Fifth Avenue—hansom cabs, taxis, cars, limousines. They were only yards behind her, but they might as well have been a world away as he took off through the bushes with her in tow.

  Chapter Four

  How did I get myself into this one?

  That question had been flashing across the back of Memphis Modine’s mind, or maybe along the side of it, ever since he’d hotfooted it out of those snooty Fifth Avenue digs he’d been glad to leave behind. At least at first, he’d been glad. Now that he was out here, he wasn’t so sure. He seemed to have traded the frying pan for the fire, as they say. He’d been inside places like that Stuyvesant Club before, old buildings with lots of rooms, little cubbyholes off other little cubbyholes where he might have found a spot to tuck himself away till the middle of the night when everybody was gone. Instead, he was in the open now, in this place they call the city that never sleeps because nobody ever knows enough to go home. That meant people everywhere you turned, and people everywhere was exactly what he didn’t need right now.

  The woman stumbled against him, and he jerked her upright again.

  Speaking of things he didn’t need, how had he let himself get saddled with her? If his crew could see him now, they’d laugh till their sides split. Here he was dragging some fancy lady around, worrying one minute whether she’d bring the cops down on him, the next minute whether he was hurting her or not. He’d felt bad about the way she fell off the wall, even though she came up swinging when she did. The crew liked to ride him for thinking that way, called him the Southern Gent, playing off his name and where he was supposed to have been born.

  They also called him Memphis Modine the Tennessee Machine, because when he got riled up, there was no stopping him from whatever he had in mind. He’d gotten the nickname in the first place from being brought up in a Memphis orphanage. His real first name had sounded a bit too fancy for an orphan or for a boy, either. He’d been glad to lose it. As for where he came from before the orphanage, nobody seemed too hot to find out. Memphis figured his mother wished he hadn’t happened in the first place. Maybe she was from some important family, which would explain why nobody pushed too hard to find out his real identity. The South was like that in those days, which was okay with him. He didn’t want a mother who didn’t want him, so he didn’t ask questions about his name or anything else. The question of the moment, however, was not where he might have come from but where in Sam Hill he was going to go.

  He pulled her along faster.

  “Please, slow down,” she said. “I can’t keep up.”

  “You’d better keep up,” he said menacingly.

  He had to stop worrying about how rough he was with her. What he should be worrying about was having her along at all. If he didn’t have her in tow, he could make some real time. Without her to think about, he might have taken a second or two at the club to stop and figure things out better. Once on the street he might have decided it was smarter to take the alleyways than to be out here in this park where he couldn’t see what was ahead for the trees and the dark. Instead, he’d had to keep thinking about her and what she might get herself up to. He’d been doing that almost every minute since he first was unlucky enough to set eyes on her peeking in the door of that room she’d have been better off to keep her nose out of. Now she was holding him back, weighing him down, and doubling or tripling his troubles.

  The police would be after him now for sure, and not just because of what they’d find on the floor of t
he Stuyvesant Club. They’d be after him sure enough for that, but now he’d given them all the more reason to hunt him down like a dog and never stop till they’d driven him to ground and under it if they could. That all-the-more-reason was this woman here. They’d say she was his hostage. Just thinking the word made his stomach twist like it was about to crawl up his backbone. They brought in all their best guys in a hostage situation, all their best guys and all their best firepower, too. They’d have SWAT out there in no time—riot gear, gas canisters, bulletproof body armor, the whole nine yards—ready to do just what the name said, swat him down like he was a flyspeck on somebody’s windshield.

  What did he have going for him up against NYPD’s magnum force? He had this tall society type as a drag-along, and he was stuck with her. Every time she stumbled and he lost another second of getting out of this mess, he thought about letting her go. But he couldn’t do that, for more reasons than he liked to admit. First of all, she’d take off and bring the law down on him before he could make himself scarce enough to have half a chance of getting away. At least, that’s what she’d try to do. She might manage it, too. She’d already shown him she was smart and had nerve. She almost got him caught back there at the Stuyvesant Club. She’d been scared half out of her little black cocktail number when she saw the stiff on the floor and the knife in his hand, but she’d stood up to him anyway. She wasn’t some gutless rich kid, and that made her dangerous to him. He had to keep her close, under his thumb so tight she couldn’t move a muscle or make a peep. Otherwise, she’d do him no good for sure.

  Much as he hated to admit it, there was another reason, too. He wasn’t about to leave any female alone in this place, no matter how much of a drag on his action she might be. He looked around as they picked their way through the trees and bushes. Anybody or anything could be crawling around out here and probably was. He’d been in enough hellholes to know what one felt like, and Central Park, New York City, had that feel. On a normal night, he’d have steered clear of this place even if he was by himself, much less when he had a woman with him. But this sure wasn’t a normal night, so here he was. Even she seemed to have quieted down some, maybe trying not to attract the attention of whatever might be lurking out there in the shadows. Could be she’d recognized the truth when he warned her about there being worse animals in this place than him. Could be she was nervy enough to be stupid and try to take off on her own anyway. He wasn’t going to let her do that for more than just his own sake. They didn’t call him the Southern Gent for nothing.

  There was one other reason for hanging on to her, and that one he really didn’t like to think about, because it scared even him, and he wasn’t the type to scare easy. He’d been up against high seas and bad men, and he just about always knew how to handle himself. This time was different. He always made it a point to keep away from territory he didn’t know. Even when he was out on the ocean, he knew exactly where he was all the time. If the instruments went out, he could dead-reckon his way to port when he had to. He wasn’t the type to get lost, either, on water or dry land. Unfortunately, this place was neither. This place was concrete. Even here in the park with dirt under his feet, he could hardly be farther from anything near the natural world. He was out of his element, and he knew it. Worse than that, he hadn’t a hair’s width of an idea where he was. But this little lady did. That may have been the most convincing reason of all for not letting her go.

  They’d come close to the edge of the wooded area. He could see streetlights through the breaks in the trees. He knew they couldn’t be at the other side of the park by any means yet. He’d looked at a Manhattan street map before coming uptown from South Street Seaport. He remembered Central Park as taking up a sizable chunk of the middle of town. This had to be some kind of service road. He didn’t hear traffic, so maybe it was closed off. He sidled up close enough to see there were benches between the trees and the road. That meant there could be people, too, sitting on those benches, though he couldn’t think for the life of him why anybody would come in here at night if they had a choice in the matter. Unless, of course, their choice was to prey on the poor saps who happened to be in here.

  He’d yanked her up under his arm and clapped his hand over her mouth while he took a peek out between the trees. She’d obviously seen the light, too, and might try to yell or something. A second later, he learned that she’d picked “or something.” She lifted her foot and brought it down hard, heel jutted like a weapon, along his lower leg and ankle. If he hadn’t been wearing boots, she’d have put his right side out of commission for a while for sure, that’s how hard she spiked him. Even with the boot in the way, he felt it, and it didn’t feel good.

  “What the hell?” he cried, louder than he would have done if he’d had time to think about it.

  She twisted in his grip with what he imagined was all her strength. She had more of that than he would have guessed for a woman who showed no hard muscle he could see or feel. Still, she was out of her class when it came to a wrestling match with him. He held her tighter than ever and whipped the knife out to remind her he had it.

  “You’re giving me a hard time,” he growled into her ear. “I told you what I’d do to you if you gave me a hard time.”

  She didn’t stop struggling right away, and he could feel her trying to work her lips open under his grasp, most likely so she could bite his hand. She might be a Stuyvesant Club purebred, but she had some street blood in her, too. He was going to have to tame her and do it fast. He pulled her head back till he knew he had to be just about to snap her neck. He could feel her wrenching for breath under his nearly suffocating hand. His stomach turned to think he was handling a woman this way, but he knew it couldn’t be helped.

  “I already told you the most important truth you’re ever going to know,” he snarled in a tone so mean he didn’t like to believe it was himself speaking. “I told you I’ve got nothing to lose, and you’d be smart to remember that. I could break your neck right this minute and leave you here dead without missing a beat. Do you hear me?”

  She stopped struggling, but her body was still rigid and ready to start plunging against his arm again any second. He clamped his grip tighter and heard her muffled exclamation of what had to be pain. He tried to make himself oblivious to how much of a dirtball that made him feel, but he loosened his grip on her a little all the same.

  “I said, do you hear me?” he snarled again.

  She hesitated a moment, just enough to let him know he had a truly stubborn one on his hands. Then she nodded her head, only once and only enough to let him know he’d won. He felt some of the tension go out of her body, but not all of it. She had plenty of fight left in her. Memphis would have bet a few good dollars on that. He hoped he wouldn’t have to bet his life.

  BENNETT WAS SCARED, but she knew she mustn’t let that fear get the best of her. Instead, she concentrated on getting her bearings. She didn’t spend much time in the park ordinarily, but she had been here. Thank heaven, he’d loosened his grip on her head enough to let her see where they were headed. She still could not turn much to the right or left, especially since every move she made brought the pressure from his beefy arm. She’d thought he might actually kill her there under the tree when he came desperately close to breaking her neck with his bare hands. Surprisingly enough, that had brought her to herself more than the other way around. Not that she wasn’t scared, of course. She would have to be much more naive than was her nature not to know the real danger she was in. This man was strong enough to hurt her badly. Ordinarily she liked strong men and the feeling they gave her that they could jolt the world into line just by taking it in their two broad hands. He had broad hands. Unfortunately, she was the one he intended to jolt into line.

  He also seemed to know where he was going as he dragged her purposefully along, parallel to the tree line that bordered one of the access roads leading into the park from the junction of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. Access road to what? Bennett forced
herself to order her thoughts out of the immediate for a moment. Access to the zoo, that was it. She had been here earlier this spring with a group of children from one of the shelters. She tried to remember details of the zoo layout—whether there was a wall blocking the zoo grounds from the avenue, if a direct route to the avenue would be easy to find. All she could recall for sure was that they were now headed directly toward the spot where the access road met the zoo entrance. Logic told her that gateway might very possibly be barricaded for the night. What did he plan? Was he going to try to make her scale a wall or climb a fence? Were there cages along this side of the zoo periphery? Could they end up dropping down into some wild animal’s lair? If they did, would she in fact be any worse off than she was right now?

  He dragged her behind a tree and clamped her head tight again while he looked out at the road, probably to see if there was anyone around. They had been making so much noise crashing through the underbrush that she hadn’t been able to hear much else. As he held her there still for a moment, she listened. She could hear music. Actually, what she heard was something she had been hesitant to think of as musical till now. Hip-hop they called it, or whatever hip-hop had turned into as fad of the moment. She did enough work with young people to recognize what she was listening to as the hyper-rhythmic sound that came out of those huge boom boxes kids loved to carry when they walked the streets. She might not have liked that sound before tonight, but right now those strains of disjointed melody made her feel almost like dancing.

  She had already concluded that their way would be blocked into the zoo, and that there would be little advantage for him in scaling the fence, so he probably wouldn’t do that. He was going to try to make it across the road. That meant they would be in full view of whoever might be out there. She hoped that was where the music came from. She’d given up any thought of breaking away. He was too strong to break away from. She’d put all she’d had into her attempt a few moments ago and nearly got herself strangled in the bargain. He would, however, have to consider letting loose the gag hold he had on her in order to get across the road without attracting too much attention.