Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(4)
Noise . . .
Traffic . . .
People . . .
How much more can I take?
Jamie rakes a hand through drenched hair and fights the reckless urge to cross against the light.
That’s what it’s been about lately. Reckless urges. Day in, day out.
For so long, I’ve been restrained by others; now that I’m free, I have to constantly restrain myself? It’s so unfair.
Why can’t I just cross the damned street and go where I need to go?
Why can’t I just do whatever the hell I feel like doing? I’ve earned it, haven’t I?
Jamie steps off the curb and hears someone call, “Hey, look out!” just before a monstrous double city bus blows past, within arm’s reach.
“Geez, close call.”
Jamie doesn’t acknowledge the bystander’s voice; doesn’t move, just stands staring into the streaming gutter.
It would be running red with blood if you got hit.
Or if someone else did.
It would be so easy to turn around, pick out some random stranger, and with a quick, hard shove, end that person’s life. Jamie could do that. It would happen so unexpectedly no one would be able to stop it.
Jamie can feel all those strangers standing there, close enough to touch.
Which of them would you choose?
The prune-faced, disapproving biddy?
One of the splashing kids?
The elderly woman, or her husband?
Just imagine the victim, the chosen one, crying out in surprise, helplessly falling, getting slammed by several tons of speeding steel and dying right there in the gutter.
Yes, blood in the gutter.
Eyes closed, Jamie can see it clearly—so much blood at first, thick and red right here where the accident will happen. But then the gutter water will sweep it along, thin it out as it merges with wide, deep puddles and with falling rain, spread it in rivulets that will reach like fingers down alleys and streets . . .
Imagine all the horror-struck onlookers, the traumatized driver of the death car, the useless medics who will rush to the scene and find that there’s nothing they can do . . .
Nothing anyone can do.
And somewhere, later, phones will ring as family members and friends get the dreaded call.
Just think of all the people who will be touched—tainted—by the blood in the street, by that one simple act.
I can do that.
I can choose someone to die.
I’ve done it before—twice.
Ah, but not really. Technically, Jamie didn’t do the choosing. Both victims—the first ten years ago, the second, maybe ten days ago—had done the choosing; they’d chosen to commit the heinous acts that had sealed their own fates. Jamie merely saw that they got what they deserved.
This time, though, it would have to be different. It would have to be a stranger.
Would it be as satisfying to snuff out a life that has no real meaning in your own?
Would it be even better?
Would it—
Someone jostles Jamie from behind.
The throng is pressing forward. The traffic has stopped moving past; the light has changed.
Jamie crosses the street, hand still clenched into an angry fist.
Chapter One
September 10, 2001
New York City
7:19 P.M.
Allison Taylor has lived in Manhattan for three years now.
That’s long enough to know that the odds are stacked against finding a taxi at the rainy tail end of rush hour—especially here, a stone’s throw from the Bryant Park tents in the midst of Fashion Week.
Yet she perches beneath a soggy umbrella on the curb at the corner of Forty-second and Fifth, searching the sea of oncoming yellow cabs, hoping to find an on-duty/unoccupied dome light.
Unlikely, yes.
But impossible? The word is overused, in her opinion. If she weren’t the kind of woman who stubbornly challenges anything others might deem impossible, then she wouldn’t be here in New York in the first place.
How many people back in her tiny Midwestern hometown told her it would be impossible for a girl like her to merely survive the big, cruel city, let alone succeed in the glamorous, cutthroat fashion publishing industry?
A girl like her . . .
Impoverished, from a broken home with a suicidal drug addict for a mother. A girl who never had a chance—but took one anyway.
And just look at me now.
After putting herself through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and working her way from an unpaid postcollege internship at Condé Nast on up through the editorial ranks at 7th Avenue magazine, Allison finally loves her life—cab shortages, rainy days, and all.
Sometimes, she allows herself to fantasize about going back to Centerfield to show them all how wrong they were. The neighbors, the teachers, the pursed-lipped church ladies, the mean girls at school and their meaner mothers—everyone who ever looked at her with scorn or even pity; everyone who ever whispered behind her back.
They didn’t understand about Mom—about how much she loved Allison, how hard she tried, when she wasn’t high, to be a good mother. Only the one girl Allison considered a true friend, her next-door neighbor Tammy Connolly, seemed to understand. She, too, had a single mom for whom the townspeople had disdain. Tammy’s mother was a brassy blonde whose skirts were too short, whose perfume was too strong, whose voice was too loud.