Manhattan Is My Beat

on?” Rune demanded.
    Symington was looking at Emily with an imploring expression on his face. “Please …”
    Emily didn’t respond.
    He continued. “Would it do any good to say I have a lot of money?”
    “The money!” Rune said. “He killed Mr. Kelly and stole his money!”
    Both Symington and Emily ignored her.
    “Is there
anything
I can do?” Symington pleaded.
    “No,” Emily said. And took a pistol from her pocket. She shot him in the chest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
     
    The way he fell is what saved Rune.
    The gun was small but the impact knocked Symington backward and he slammed into the pole of the floor lamp, which fell against the bathroom door, sending a shower of glass into the hallway.
    Emily danced out of the way of the splinters, which gave Rune a chance to sprint into the bedroom. But the woman recovered fast. She fired the gun again and Rune heard a terrible stereo sound of noises: the blasts of the gun behind her, the crash of the bullets slamming into the plaster wall inches from her head.
    Then—with another punch of breathtaking pain— she dove through the bedroom window.
    Hands covering her face, shards of glass flying around her, trailing the window shade, she rolled onto more sad evergreens and dropped onto the grass, coming to rest against one of the plaster dwarfs. Panting, she lay on the lawn. The smell of dirt and damp grass enveloped her. She could hear birds squabbling in the trees overhead.
    And then the air around her exploded. A dwarf’s face disintegrated into white splinters and dust. On the street, fifty feet away, Rune caught a glimpse of a man with shotgun. She couldn’t see his face but she knew it was Pretty Boy—Heart probably, the one Symington mentioned. Or Heart’s partner. He and Emily were working together…. She didn’t know who they were exactly or why they wanted to kill Symington but she didn’t pause to consider those questions. She rolled under another plant, then scrabbled to her feet. Clutching her purse, she sprinted into the backyard. Then clambered over the chain-link fence.
    And then she ran.
    Behind her, from Symington’s yard, came a shout. A second shotgun blast. She heard the hiss of something over her head. It missed and she turned, down an alley. Kept running.
    Running until her vision blurred. Running until her chest ignited and she couldn’t breathe another ounce of air.
    Finally, miles away it seemed, Rune stopped, gasping. She doubled over. Sure she was going to be sick. But she spit into the grass a few times and remained motionless until the nausea and pain went away. She trotted another block but pulled up with a cramp in her side. She slipped into another backyard—behind a house with boarded-up windows. She crawled into a nest of grass between a smiling Bambi and another set of the Seven Dwarfs, then lay her head on her purse, thinking she’d rest for ten, fifteen minutes.
    When she opened her eyes a huge garbage truck was making its mournful, behemoth sounds five feet away from her. And it was dawn.

     
    They’d be watching for her.
    Maybe at the Midtown Tunnel, maybe at a subway stop. Emily and Pretty Boy. And not just them. A dozen others. She saw them
all
now—Them with a capital T. Walking down the streets of Brooklyn on this clear, cool spring morning. Faces glancing at her, knowing that she was a witness. Knowing that she and her friends were about to die—to be laid out like Robert Kelly, like Victor Symington.
    They were all after her.
    She was hitching her way back to Manhattan, back to the Side. She’d thumbed a ride with a delivery van, the driver a wild-eyed Puerto Rican with a wispy goatee who swore at the traffic with incredible passion and made it to the Brooklyn Bridge, a drive that should have taken three-fourths of an hour at this time of day, in fifteen minutes.
    He apologized profusely that he couldn’t take her into Manhattan itself.
    And then she ran once more.
    Over the wooden walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, back into the city, which was just starting to come to life. Traffic hissed beneath her; the muted horns of the taxis sounded like animals lowing. She paused halfway across to rest, leaning against the railing. The young professionals walked past—wearing running shoes with their suits and dresses—on their way to Wall Street from Brooklyn Heights.
    What the hell had she been thinking of?
    Quests? Adventures?
    Knights and wizards and damsels?
    No, she thought bitterly.
These
were the