Exit Strategy

by Jen J. Danna

  As they approached the intersection at Elizabeth Street, the outer columns of the colonnade came into view. Boyle’s pace picked up even more and Gemma had to do a half trot every few paces to keep up with him.

  Across Bowery, in the direction of the colonnade, a flash of sunlight off a reflective surface caught Gemma’s eye as they approached the intersection. It took her a moment to identify the source, but when she did, warning bells went off in her head. The lowering angle of the sun bounced its rays off the lens of the shoulder-mounted video camera of a news team. And not any news team, but ABC7’s hotshot investigative team with the infamous Greg Coulter. Even from this distance, she could identify his station polo shirt in ABC blue, his pearly-white teeth, and perfectly coiffed hair. Because God forbid Coulter wasn’t constantly ready for his close-up. The man beside him, with unkempt hair, a scruffy beard, a white T-shirt, and beige cargo shorts, balancing the chunky camera on his shoulder, was clearly the technical half of the team.

  She’d seen Garcia bump up against Coulter in the past when the field reporter kept trying to insert himself into a standoff at a chic and popular restaurant. Coulter was a local hotshot, someone who believed reporters lived their best lives out in the field, and would follow a story aggressively to break it. That day, he’d been corralled to the sidelines, but Gemma had never been able to watch his reporting since then without remembering his aggressive and self-aggrandizing attitude. And his simmering fury at being kept from what he saw as his rightful prize.

  If he’d been watching his own station’s feed during the crisis, then he’d seen her walk both into and out of City Hall.

  Between threat and assistance, this was definitely a threat.

  She slowed, not wanting to stop and attract attention, and hauled on Boyle’s hand. “Wait.”

  He ignored her, continuing his forward motion, half dragging her along.

  “Stop! There’s a reporter in front of us. If he spots us, we’re in trouble.” She stumbled as he pulled her off balance, nearly falling forward. When she looked up, and through the crowds, it was to find Greg Coulter pinning them with a laserlike stare. “Cazzo!”

  With a shout to his partner, Coulter sprinted toward them. The cameraman swung the camera off his shoulder, seated it in one beefy hand by the handle, and bolted after Coulter.

  Boyle took the two men in with a single glance and growled a curse to match hers. Without even looking, he pivoted left and stepped off the curb directly into traffic.

  The car headed for him just barely stopped in time with an earsplitting shriek of brakes and tires on asphalt, but Boyle didn’t even hesitate; he simply ran across the street, dragging Gemma with him.

  “Keep up!” he barked at her. “Or I’m going to shoot him, and I don’t care who gets in my way.”

  “Tell me what you’re doing ahead of time and I’ll keep up,” she snarled back, getting her feet under her.

  Horns blared as they sprinted through traffic. One car came around the corner so fast, Gemma thrust out a hand to stop it—a reflexive motion that would have had no impact whatsoever on its forward motion—and her palm met the engine-warmed hood as it screeched to a halt. She had a flash of startled eyes through the windshield and then they were on the far curb and sprinting up Bowery. Boyle’s legs were longer than hers, but she was a cop in peak physical shape, and she kept up with him easily, stretching her stride to match her pace to his.

  A chorus of horns sounded and Gemma spared a glance behind—Coulter and his guy were about fifty feet back, winding through the stopped cars on Canal Street, heading straight for them.

  Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Coulter was like a dog with a bone, and he would never let them go easily. In fact, he’d see this as his biggest opportunity of the year for a hot story. If he somehow knew Willan was dead, he’d be even more dogged. And if that camera was Internet-ready, and she’d be willing to bet her life savings it was, any footage they shot would be uploaded in real time and every cop in the city would know exactly where they were. They’d be surrounded in no time, and then how many would die? Including, possibly, herself.

  No matter what she did, her goal of getting Boyle alone and taking him down with the least chance of civilian injury or loss of life seemed continually out of reach.

  Unless they shook Coulter, the chances of this all going to hell had just gone up exponentially.

  CHAPTER 23

  A Break in the traffic gave them the chance to cross the street in the middle of the block and round the corner to tear down Hester Street. They eschewed the crowded, slow-moving sidewalks and gained precious seconds running down the narrow separation between the two lanes of cars heading west.

  Luck was with them as they hit the pedestrian crossing at Chrystie Street with the light, and they sprinted past mothers pushing strollers and elderly couples tottering across the street.

  Ahead lay Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, the narrow strip of community green space that ran in a seven-block line from Canal Street up to East Houston Street in connected sections of playgrounds, basketball courts, and gardens. A cold shiver skittered down Gemma’s spine at the thought of the families out for a breath of cooler evening air after a hot August day. Babies, toddlers, school-aged kids, out with their moms, or dads, or both.

  “No.” She tried to turn down Chrystie, to keep a buffer between this man and the people of New York City, but Boyle wasn’t having any of it. He had greater bulk and inertia on his side, and where she would have dragged him toward the sidewalk, separated from the park by a wrought iron fence, he simply ran into her intended track. She had no choice but to allow herself to be driven onto the footpath that led directly into the playground or else she’d have gone down face-first into the interlocking bricks.

  She was breathing hard and her mouth was bone-dry, but she still managed a plea. “Don’t . . . hurt them. Families. . . children.” When he tossed her a look she read as belittling, still angry she hadn’t been able to sway him from this path, she went for the kill shot. “You lost yours. . . . Don’t make them. . . lose theirs.”

  Boyle stumbled and she knew she’d hit home. All she could hope was it was enough. Her life in jeopardy was one thing. The children who were just starting theirs was another. She knew and accepted her risk; they were prepared for nothing more than innocent fun.

  If he tried to take a child or family hostage, or pulled his weapon, she would have no choice but to stand between them. Literally.

  So be it

  He dragged her into a playground full of shrieking and laughing children. Over the textured rubber surface that gave under their pounding feet. Past the bright-roofed platforms, sank into beds of sand and linked by short suspension bridges. Behind the swing set, ducking around parents pushing their children into flight, and ignoring the shouts to slow down. Then they were through the open gate on the far side and racing through the first of two basketball courts. There were pickup games on both of them.

  Boyle didn’t hesitate, but cut directly through the middle of the court, leading with one shoulder, plowing anyone out of the way. A tall African-American teen was just pivoting to catch a pass when Boyle shoulder-checked him, sending him sprawling with a string of invectives. But Boyle didn’t stop, heading for the far corner of the second court, to circle the adjacent handball courts.

  Gemma didn’t look back, but guessed from the cries and shouts coming from behind her that Coulter was keeping up with them and wreaking a similar path of chaos.

  They caught another break with light traffic on Grand Street, allowing them to cross against the light, heading around the green-grassed soccer pitches of Lion’s Gate Field on the Forsyth Street side.

  Gemma did a quick calculation from the city map in her head built on years of living in Manhattan. Their best chance of escape at this point would be to try to lose Coulter at the Delancey Street–Essex Street subway station only a few blocks away, a nexus where four lines converged over two platforms and three sets of tracks go
ing in six eventual directions. It also happened to be at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, so they could escape on foot into Brooklyn.

  But what she wanted to do was counter to what everyone would expect. She wanted to take Boyle back into the city, not out of it. Everyone would be watching the subway lines, and the driving or walking routes out. Fewer would be looking in.

  Which meant they needed to be last seen in that vicinity, but they would have to lose Coulter so he could report it, but not be able to trace them. Then they would go to ground. She needed to figure out where, but first they had to lose their tail.

  She lost a precious second turning to look back, only to find Coulter and his cameraman still behind them. Their lead had widened to about eighty feet, but Coulter was definitely still in the running. And the cameraman had the camera back on his shoulder, one arm wrapped around it. The only reason for that was to film Coulter in action.

  Pompous figlio di puttana. If he spent less time in front of the mirror and more at the gym, he’d be able to keep up.

  They rounded the corner onto Broome Street and Gemma considered the narrow blocks. Another block and a half to the Allen Malls. Then two more should put them at Ludlow Street. If they could gain enough on Ludlow, when they turned east onto Delancey Street, it would only be a block to the subway steps. Then, depending on timing, they could get around the corner, or go down one set of steps into the subway and back out the other, confusing Coulter. It would have to be a snap decision at the time.

  “Ihaveanidea.” Her statement came out as a single multisyllabic word between harsh breaths. “We need to. . . lose him. Without him knowing . . . where we went.”

  “Yeah?” Boyle sounded like he was having difficulty drawing breath. Almost half a year off the force and four months in mourning. He was about to be their biggest liability.

  “Delancey Street Station.” She slowed slightly, allowing her to drag in a ragged breath. “Multiple subway lines . . . Williamsburg Bridge entrance. Lose them . . . they won’t . . . know where we went. Gotta stay . . . in front of . . . them. Then we have . . . options.”

  Boyle didn’t say anything, but he didn’t dismiss the idea. Granted, he was probably trying to save his breath.

  She’d take it.

  They shot through the treed boulevard splitting the center of Allen Malls and continued down Broome. Some of the small shops here had closed for the night—a hardware shop with its blinds drawn, a fish shop that passed in a blur of empty cold cases, and a dry cleaner, with a rainbow of clothes in the window—and the streets were a little quieter.

  At the bodega on the corner, they headed north up Ludlow, against the one-way flow of traffic.

  “Here . . . We need to lose them . . . here.”

  Ludlow was deserted. Towering at least twelve stories above the narrow, two-lane street on their right was the side of one of the new luxury housing towers gentrifying the Lower East Side. Across the street ran a line of closed or abandoned shops, their dented metal roll-down shields spray painted in various colors with initials and graphic. Best of all, there was no traffic and no one in their way to slow them down. They needed to pour on the speed, to clear the corner ahead of Coulter so he wouldn’t be able to track where they’d gone as he rounded the corner to Delancey himself and was confronted with too many escape routes.

  They were about twenty feet from the end of the street when Boyle slowed, starting to drop back. Gemma gripped his hand, pulling him with her. But he shook her off, actually letting go of her for the first time.

  As he stopped completely and turned in place, it hit Gemma full force that she’d made a terrible assumption. He hadn’t objected to her brief plan and she’d taken that silence as agreement. But if she could see he was flagging, he had to know it himself, and that desperation clearly drove him to choose a different method to lose their tail.

  Off to the side and several feet in front, she knew instinctively she was too far away from him, but she made the attempt anyway. Spinning and leaping forward, she aimed her shoulder at his, calculating that where she couldn’t block, she could divert. With their differences in weight, brute force was her only option. But he’d already pulled the SIG from its holster and was braced to take the shot as Coulter arced around the corner, his cameraman only feet behind him.

  “No!”

  The shot exploded in her unprotected ears just before she hit him, hard, driving him off balance.

  Too late.

  Gemma nearly went all the way down, catching herself on one hand on the road as Boyle sidestepped wildly, trying to catch his balance. For a moment, she was disoriented as the world spun, her ears ringing with the explosive gunshot, and the familiar, acrid smell of metallic sulfur clouding the air. She pushed herself upright, finding her center and catching her balance, to see Boyle doing the same. Jerking her head to look down the street, she was horrified to see Coulter slumped against a grimy brick wall, his right hand pressed over his left shoulder. A dark bloom of blood spread out from under his palm. His cameraman had abandoned the chase and was bellowing for help.

  Boyle grabbed her hand again, catching it in a cruel grip as he reholstered his weapon, jerked her around, and dragged her toward Delancey Street.

  “You wanted. . . to stay in front of him. You got your . . . wish. And unless you want to get caught . . . as an accessory . . . to assault with a deadly . . . I suggest you keep up.”

  Gemma tossed one last glance over her shoulder at Coulter, who’d slid down the wall to crumple on the sidewalk, and the cameraman hunched over him. He would be able to get Coulter help. She had to put Coulter out of her mind.

  Boyle obviously hadn’t planned on ratcheting up his body count or he’d have taken Coulter out before now, as well as the cameraman. But he’d clearly been forced to change his plans on the fly, ensuring his safety when his own physical stamina—or lack thereof—became an issue. What she wasn’t sure of was, had he missed a kill shot, or had he meant to simply disable Coulter? Either way, she needed to focus on getting Boyle off the streets and subdued. He had two weapons, and she had none. She could attempt to disarm him, but that had to happen where no one else could get hurt. Or killed.

  She hoped Coulter didn’t fall into that second category.

  She hoped the same for herself.

  CHAPTER 24

  They had gotten away, but only barely.

  The cameraman must have called 911 as they’d rounded the corner, because in less than thirty seconds distant sirens could be heard from north of Delancey.

  Gemma let fury carry her, pushing her forward and driving Boyle along with her. When sirens approached from the north, she went south on Norfolk Street, crossing Grand and over to Essex, then followed it back to Canal Street. Once they again joined the evening pedestrians on Canal, they slowed to a walk to catch their breaths, looking like any other couple out for an evening stroll, albeit a brisk one.

  Gemma was faced again with the task of getting him somewhere private, which was going to be difficult in the middle of Lower Manhattan surrounded by cars, taxis, and civilians on foot. She scanned the area around them, getting her bearings. They were just on the northern edge of Chinatown, with the majority of the Asian markets and restaurants behind them. But with growing hope, she realized that in her rush to get away from arriving first responders, she had them on the edge of Little Italy.

  Little Italy. Where the Capellos had settled in 1885, when her great-great-great-grandparents had come to America as a young married couple. The tenement they’d lived in no longer existed, but her grandparents’ apartment on Elizabeth Street still stood. Though now, instead of being over an Italian deli, an organic butcher shop occupied the ground-floor space, its windows full of signs about grass-fed beef and free-range chicken. She had fond memories of spending weekends with her siblings at her grandparents’. Of sitting out on their fifth-floor fire escape on hot summer evenings, reveling in the cool breeze wafting over her skin while she watched life teeming below. Of the
wonderful smells coming out of the kitchen. Of working with her grandmother in that kitchen, side by side, often with Frankie joining in, learning the family recipes she still made today.

  When her mother died, her grandmother had stepped in to carry the weight of motherhood, as much as she could—on weekends, her grandmother allowed her father time to recharge, and her presence added feminine touches and guidance for the lone daughter. God, she missed her grandmother, now six years gone.

  But one of the things she’d learned from her grandparents was all the secret nooks and crannies and treasures of Little Italy. Sure, it had been twenty-five years, and nothing stood still in New York City, but in many historical neighborhoods, residents were loath to make sweeping changes.

  That could play to her advantage. Step one, then, would be to get him into Little Italy proper.

  In fact, she knew the first place she’d be able to find assistance—La Cassatella. Frankie’s father’s Sicilian bakery stayed open late in the summer months, serving iced coffee and pastries on their charming, seasonal sidewalk patio, its bright red chairs and overflowing planters of flowers a cheerful pop of color in the middle of city life. If she could somehow get Boyle over a couple of blocks from Lafayette and up Mulberry Street, perhaps she could find a way to get a message to Frankie. During the summertime, Frankie’s father, Luca, came in early to start the day’s baking and to open the bakery. Frankie joined him later in the day and would take over, staying until the bakery closed at 9 p.m. She glanced surreptitiously at her watch—8:20 p.m.—so not only would the bakery be open, it would be doing brisk Ferragosto business. The Capellos would not be the only Sicilians celebrating the Feast of the Assumption on such a lovely summer evening.

  Okay, that was step one in the plan. Get Boyle over to La Cassatella. Keep him away from Frankie, because over Gemma’s dead body would she risk her best friend’s life to this man with blood on his hands, hell-bent on vengeance. And then get a message to Frankie. But what message and how?