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

Taillandier did not like Alice much, and the feeling was mutual. Since the Erik Vaughn case, Alice had asked several times to be transferred. Up till now, her bosses had refused the request, essentially for political reasons, and Alice knew her position within the division was still fragile.

“No way,” she insisted. “Don’t tell anyone. You need to deal with this on your own. I’ve saved your skin plenty of times, Seymour—you owe me this, at least.”

“All right.” He sighed. “I’ll call you as soon as I have any news.”

“No, I’ll call you. I won’t be able to keep this phone very long, but text me Nikki Nikovski’s address.”

Alice hung up, and a few seconds later, the address of the painter’s studio appeared on the screen. She clicked on the link and a map appeared.

“Red Hook? That’s pretty far,” Gabriel commented, looking over her shoulder.

Alice touched the screen to widen the map. The studio was located in Brooklyn. There was no way they could walk there. And public transit was out of the question.

“We don’t even have cash for bus or subway fare,” Gabriel said as if reading her thoughts.

“So what do you suggest, Einstein?”

“Easy,” he replied. “We steal a car. But this time, you let me do it, okay?”

Near the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-First Street was a little dead-end alley between two apartment buildings.

Gabriel smashed the window of the old Mini with his elbow. He and Alice had spent nearly twenty minutes looking for a car that was parked in a quiet spot and old enough to be started the old-fashioned way.

It was an antique Austin Cooper S with beige bodywork and a white roof, a late 1960s model apparently restored to its original state by a collector.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Gabriel shrugged off the question. “Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes.”

He put his arm through the smashed window and opened the door. Though Hollywood movies suggested otherwise, hot-wiring a car was no easy feat. And it was even more complicated when you were handcuffed to someone.

Gabriel sat in the driver’s seat, then crouched under the aluminum-and-polished-wood steering wheel while Alice pretended to talk to him, leaning into the window.

They worked together instinctively, Alice acting as lookout while he dealt with the mechanics of the theft.

With one hard yank, Gabriel pulled off the plastic panels that slotted together to protect the steering column, exposing the electronics. Three pairs of different-colored wires emerged from a scuffed plastic cylinder.

“Where did you learn to do that?”

“School of hard knocks. Englewood, South Side of Chicago.”

He carefully examined the bundle of wires before identifying the ones that activated the battery. Pointing to the brown wires, he explained: “These supply all the car’s electricity.”

“For God’s sake, you’re not going to give me a mechanics class right now, are you?”

Annoyed, he unclipped two wires from the cylinder, exposed their ends, and twisted them together to turn on the ignition. Instantly, the dashboard lit up.

“Hurry up, damn it! There’s a woman watching us from her balcony.”

“It’s not exactly a piece of cake when you’ve got only one hand, you know. I’d like to see you try!”

“Well, don’t brag about your school of hard knocks, then.”

Under pressure and against every rule of common sense, Gabriel used his teeth to expose the end of the starter wire.

“How about giving me a hand instead of standing there whining? Here, take this wire. Rub it gently against where mine are connected. There you go, that’s it…”

A spark was produced and they heard the engine fire up. A brief smile of complicity sealed this little victory.

“Move over, quick,” she told him, pushing him toward the passenger seat. “I’m driving.”

5Red Hook

A FORD TAURUS POLICE Interceptor sporting the colors of the NYPD was parked at the corner of Broadway and Sixty-Sixth Street.

Hurry up, Mike!

Inside the car, Jodie Costello, twenty-four years old, drummed her fingers impatiently against the steering wheel.

The young woman had finished the police academy earlier that year, and her job was proving a lot less exciting than she’d hoped. This morning, she had been at work for only forty-five minutes and she already had pins and needles in her legs from sitting still. Her patrol district, west of Central Park, was a wealthy area and way too quiet for her taste. Since she’d started this job, all she’d done was give directions to tourists, run after purse-snatchers, ticket speeding motorists, and clear drunks from the street.

To make things worse, her partner was a numbskull named Mike Hernandez who was only six months from retirement and chronically lazy. All he thought about was eating and exerting as little effort as humanly possible. Like some cop caricature, he took regular doughnut, burger, and Coke breaks and would hang around to shoot the shit with storekeepers and tourists at the slightest opportunity—his own version of community policing.

Come on, man, that’s enough! Jodie seethed. How long does it take to buy a bag of doughnuts, for God’s sake?

She got out, slamming the door behind her. She was about to go into the Dunkin’ Donuts to chew out her partner, when she saw the group of six teenagers running toward her.

“¡Ladrón, ladrón!”

In a firm voice, she ordered the Spanish tourists to calm down and then listened to the explanations they gave in broken English. At first, she thought it was just a simple phone-snatching, and she was about to send them off to the twentieth precinct to file a complaint, when a strange detail grabbed her attention.

“Wait, you’re sure the thieves were handcuffed?” she asked the boy in the soccer shirt, who seemed to be at once the ugliest and the least dumb of the group, a chubby-faced kid with thick-lensed glasses and an uneven bowl cut.

“I’m sure! Yes!” the Spaniard replied, noisily backed up by his friends.

Jodie chewed her lower lip. Fugitives? It was hard to believe. This morning, as she did every day, she had listened to the descriptions of wanted suspects on the APB, and none