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“Coming to you,” he called into his phone to his wife.
He heard the low report of the suppressed rifle off to the left just as he was coming out of the parking lot. He looked ahead to his r
ight, down Division, and saw Yu running flat out in the street beside the parked cars and traffic. He was cradling his left shoulder with his right hand as he ran. He was dripping blood. Some was splattered on the pale sleeve of his jacket. She’d nicked him.
There was another shot, and a hole appeared in the side of the dirty graffiti-covered box truck Yu was passing. The round had landed right beside the Asian version of Usain Bolt’s spiky head.
“Damn it! He’s out of sight and range!” she said into the phone.
“It’s okay. Get out, now! I got this,” he said, seeing the drips and lines of blood splatter on the asphalt as he picked up the pace.
Chapter 31
The assassin reached the end of the block just in time to see Yu dart under the shadowed base of the Manhattan Bridge. When he arrived at the other side, he saw Yu make a right onto Pike, and when he reached Pike, he saw Yu make a left onto Henry.
Damn, the little kid is fast, he thought as he ran down Pike Street. I’ll give him that.
Two surprising things happened almost at once as the assassin turned at a run around the corner of Henry Street.
The first was a funeral procession coming out of a church right there, off the corner beside him. A crowd of mourners dressed in black stood on the corner, respectfully waiting as pallbearers brought a coffin down the steps.
The second and far more interesting thing was that Richard Yu was standing past them at the end of the short block by the subway entrance to the F train, pointing a gun at him.
He dove in front of the hearse as the gun went off. Several mourners in the crowd screamed as one of the elderly pallbearers fell and the coffin clattered down the steps.
He poked his head around the hearse just as Yu fled down into the subway.
“Hey! What you got? What you got?” yelled a jacked cop who appeared suddenly from the park across from the church.
“Ah, an armed robbery. In pursuit of an Asian male!” the assassin said as he took off. “Just went into the subway!”
“Didn’t hear nothing on the radio. You call it in?” the young eager cop said as he ran beside him, matching him step for step.
“Not yet. Just happened. Can you?” the assassin said as he took the subway stairs down two by two, trying to distance himself from the real cop.
Damn it! he thought as he arrived at the bottom of the rancid steps and saw that there was a train in the station. He heard the doors bing bong as he reached the turnstile and hopped it and dove into the car at the last second, through the closing doors.
“Yo, dude! Help!” said the cop, who was now wedged in the doors of the train car.
The assassin looked at him.
Then he lifted his foot and booted him square in the center of his muscular chest, knocking him sprawling onto the filthy East Broadway station platform. The doors rattled closed and the train pulled out.
He ran to his left down the train, through the cars, following the screams.
He ducked—there were more shots and the sound of breaking glass—as he pulled open the door to the last car.
He couldn’t believe it. The window in the door at the end of the train was missing. The punk Asian kid had actually broken it somehow and escaped!
Or maybe not, he thought as he ran the length of the car.
He arrived at the door and saw Yu rapidly disappearing in the distance in the glow of a tunnel bulb, his anime hair casting spiky shadows on the wall.
The assassin calmed himself. He cleared his mind and body with a breath and put the sights of the Glock 23 on the orange Knicks basketball on the back of the kid’s jacket and unloaded.
He watched as Yu took two more steps and fell face-first between the tracks.
The assassin smiled as the train reached the next station and the doors opened.
