First Born(79)

My chest’s pounding.

I unzip the go-bag.

I remove the beret and my jacket and fold them and place them on the toilet seat lid. I remove the high quality latex mask I bought in a costume store on my second full day here in New York, and I remove a cheap crumpled old man suit that I bought for cash in a thrift store in Gramercy. I stuff my clothes into the bag and then I listen to the room. There’s nobody out there washing their hands or fixing their make-up.

I step out and it feels terrifying to be in a public place wearing this thing. I look in the mirror and an old man with grey hair and grey stubble stares back. You cannot see that I’m not an old man.

I stuff my bag down into the waste paper basket and cover it with tissues.

As I turn to leave, a woman walks in and gasps. I mumble something apologetic in a deep voice and then I walk out towards the gents’ restroom. She watches me leave: a short man in his eighties wearing an old suit and new black sneakers.

Inside the gents’ there are two men washing their hands and neither one of them notices me.

I wash my own hands and walk out and take a tiny pebble from an ornamental plant. I place it in my right shoe and I call the lift and ride it up to the ground floor. A hotel employee opens the door for me and says, ‘Have a nice day, sir.’

I nod my thanks and limp out of the hotel on to 44th Street.

The third person I see outside is Detective Martinez.

He’s thirty yards ahead of me.

We’re walking towards each other.

He puts his hand inside his jacket.





Chapter 48


I keep on walking.

Martinez pulls out his phone.

I keep going. Hobbling. A retired CIA operative on YouTube explained this method of disguise as onion-like. You layer up and you layer down. I look like any other old man with this cutting-edge mask because my skin appears wrinkled. I have liver spots, thin grey hair, jowls. But I also have a wrinkly neck: the mask extends under my shirt line. You have to inhabit the role. Believe in it. No half-measures. Maybe I would get noticed without this limp. It’s hard to fake a limp – if you try you’ll look like you’re faking it. I’m not faking it, my limp is real and the pebble digging into my foot is causing me genuine pain.

Ten feet from me.

He walks closer.

I limp on.

As we pass I look straight into Martinez’s eyes. I can almost smell his cologne.

He stares straight past me.

I go on.

Fifth Avenue.

This is a significant operation. FBI, possibly. Could be they’re after James Kandee and I’m just a small part. A pawn.

Back up to Central Park. Slowly. The police wouldn’t expect anyone to return to the central location where they were first spotted and that’s exactly why I’m headed back there.

The post-race clean-up operation is in full swing. I have an hour to wait before my extraction.

The park’s getting dark in places but it’s still open. Doesn’t close until one a.m. I checked once why a place like Central Park isn’t well-lit and covered by cameras. The best answer I could find was that if they lit the place then it’d need policing. You light an area and you make it safe and then you need to police it to make sure it continues to stay safe. All 843 acres of it. With an already stretched police department. So they leave it wild. The only truly dark place in Manhattan outside of the waterways.

I pass the lake and head north.

I read somewhere that the Ramble used to be a late-night cruising spot. Back in the time before the internet. I doubt they’d have been keen to see me without my disguise and, looking the way I do in this mask, I doubt they’d have been pleased to see me now that I resemble an septuagenarian man.

The air is cool and I’m alert to every siren, every distant yell.

Past Cleopatra’s Needle and on to the dark water of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. This park is about two and a half miles long. It’s a miracle it still exists here, in one of the densest, most expensive cities in the Western world.

I pass a park policeman and he ignores me completely. Why wouldn’t he?

The only food I have is the marathon granola bar I took out of the bag and hid in my pocket earlier. I’m hungry but I’ll wait a while. I’m not sure how long this night is going to last.

Past the tennis courts and into the thick undergrowth.

I check my surroundings because the last thing I need is some do-gooder mistaking me for a dementia patient and calling me in. When the coast is clear I shuffle down into the bushes and I crouch low and I eat my granola bar.

It is sweet.

DeLuca told me two o’clock and now it’s seven fifty-five so I’m right on time. DeLuca told me we’d be travelling by sea so I know what’s coming next. DeLuca told me to meet him at ‘31st Street usual’ so that’s why I’m squatting in a dead bush beside the 97th Street Transverse, close to the bridge, near the place I was picked up on the day I killed my sister. If you look at a clock face 3 is opposite 9, and 1 is opposite 7.

With thirty seconds to go I scramble to the other side of the bushes. I’m ready, crouching, waiting, on top of a steep-sided concrete bank. It’s forty-five degrees and when the time is right, when there are no vehicles on the road, I scoot down to the pavement below.

Two cars pass me by and then a Volvo appears.

It slows.