Central Park by Guillaume Musso (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2021 by Guillaume Musso

Translation copyright © 2021 by Sam Taylor

Cover design by Lauren Harms

Cover photograph by PeskyMonkey / Getty Images

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First North American edition: March 2021

Originally published in France as Central Park by Guillaume Musso

© XO Editions, 2014

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ISBN: 978-0-316-59094-5

LCCN 2020950107

E3-20210121-DA-PC-ORI

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Part One: Handcuffed

1: Alice

2: Gabriel

3: Central Park West

4: Handcuffed

5: Red Hook

6: Chinatown

I remember…

7: Biting the Dust

Part Two: Memory of Pain

8: Memory of Pain

I remember…

9: Riverside

10: Fingerprints

11: Little Egypt

I remember…

12: Free Jazz

13: Hookah Bar

14: Two People

15: Prepare for War

I remember…

Part Three: Blood and Fury

16: Tracking the Killer

17: The Devil’s Tricks

18: Sucker Punch

19: In the Land of the Living

20: Inside the House

21: The Veil

I remember…

22: Vaughn

Part Four: Come Undone

23: Do or Die

I remember…

24: Chapter Zero

25: Just Before

26: The Mirrors

27: White Shadows

28: With One Heart

There Will Be…

Acknowledgments

Discover More

About the Author

Also by Guillaume Musso

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Things that escape you are more important

than the things you own.

—W. Somerset Maugham

Part OneHandcuffed

1Alice

FIRST, A GUST of wind stings her face.

The light rustling of leaves. The distant murmur of a stream. The quiet trill of birdsong. The first rays of sunlight illuminating the tiny blood vessels in her still-closed eyelids.

Then the creak of swaying branches. The smell of moist earth, rotting leaves. The strong, woody odor of gray lichen.

And farther off, an indistinct buzzing, dreamlike and discordant.

Alice Schafer opened her eyes with difficulty. She was blinded by the early-morning sun, her clothes sticky with dew. The frozen sweat on her skin made her shiver. Her throat was dry and her mouth filled with the harsh taste of ashes. Her joints were bruised, her limbs stiff, her mind numb.

When she tried to sit up, she became aware that she was lying on a rough wooden bench. Suddenly, she realized that a large, sturdy man was curled up next to her, his body leaning heavily on hers.

Alice stifled a cry and her pulse raced. Trying to free herself, she toppled over onto the ground and stood up in the same movement. That was when she realized that her right wrist was handcuffed to the left wrist of this stranger. She took a step back, but the man remained motionless.

Shit!

Her heart was pounding in her chest. A glance at her watch—the face of her old Patek was scratched, but the mechanism still worked. According to the watch, it was eight a.m. on Tuesday, October 8.

Jesus Christ! Where the hell am I? she wondered, using a sleeve to wipe the sweat from her face.

She looked around in an attempt to assess the situation. She was in the middle of a forest, the leaves on the trees autumn gold, the undergrowth fresh and dense. A wild, silent clearing surrounded by oaks, thick bushes, and jutting rocks. There was no one else here, which was probably a good thing, considering the circumstances.

Alice looked up. The light was soft, beautiful, almost unreal. Shards of brightness sparkled through the foliage of a huge flame-colored elm tree. Its roots disappeared into a carpet of damp leaves.

Where was she? She hazarded a few guesses: The forest of Rambouillet? Fontainebleau? The bois de Vincennes?

It was like an Impressionist painting on a postcard, the serenity of the image clashing with the surreal weirdness of waking up next to a total stranger.

Cautiously, she leaned forward to get a better view of his face. He was in his late thirties, she thought. Disheveled chestnut hair and the beginnings of a beard.

A corpse?

She knelt down and placed two fingers on his neck, to the right of his Adam’s apple. When she pressed down on the carotid artery, she felt a pulse. Relief. The guy was sleeping but alive. She took a moment to look at him more closely. Did she know him? Some thug she was taking to jail? A childhood friend whose face she’d forgotten? No, his features were completely unfamiliar to her.

Alice pushed back a few stray blond locks that had fallen over her eyes, then examined the pair of metal handcuffs that connected her to the man. It was a standard double-locking model, a type used by police departments and private security firms all over the world. Most likely, this was her own pair. Alice rummaged in her jeans pocket, hoping to find the key.

It wasn’t there. She did, however, find a gun in the inside pocket of her leather jacket. Thinking it must be her service pistol, she sighed with relief as she gripped the butt. But this was not the SIG Sauer used by cops in the Paris Criminal Division. It was a polymer Glock .22, and she had no idea where it had come from. She wanted to check the magazine, but it was difficult