Manhattan Is My Beat

what’s her name? Cathy the Amazon?”
    “Karen.” He held on to the parking meter and spiraled around it slowly. “We’ve only had dinner that once. Don’t worry about her. We’re not going out.”
    “That’s your business. I don’t care.”
    “Don’t act so possessive.”
    “How can I be acting possessive if I tell you I don’t care what you do with Cathy/Karen?”
    “What’s wrong?” He was frowning. Following her eyes to the short, dark-complected man with curly hair standing two doors away. His back was to them.
    Rune inhaled with a frightened hiss. The man turned and walked past them. It wasn’t Pretty Boy.
    She turned back to Richard, trying to focus on him, though what she was seeing was the stupid grin of the plaster statue of Dopey or Sneezy as it disintegrated under the shotgun blast. The gun had been astonishingly loud. Sounded more like a bomb going off.
    Richard took her by the shoulders. “Rune, aren’t you listening to me? What’s wrong?”
    She backed away, eyes narrowing slowly. “Leave me alone.”
    “What?”
    “Stay
away
from me. Do you want to get hurt? I’m poison. Stay away.”
    “What are you talking about?” He reached out and took her hand.
    “No, no!” she shouted. The tears started. She hesitated, then hugged him. “Get away from me! Forget about me! Forget you ever met me!”
    She turned and ran through the crowds of Greenwich Village toward Union Square.
    Waiting under the art-deco steel entrance to the subway, Rune slouched against the cool tile.
    She absently watched a crane, a lopsided T-shaped structure rising above an enormous new housing project on Union Square. It’s just a crane, she told herself. That’s all it was. Not a tool of the gods, not a huge skeleton of a magic animal. What she saw was just a construction crane. Moving slowly, under the control of a faceless union worker, lifting steel reinforcing rods for workmen in dusty jeans and jackets to install.
    Magic … hell.
    She thought again about calling Manelli or Dixon.
    But why should they believe her? There was probably an all-points bulletin out on her already, just like there’d been for Roy the cop after he’d stolen the loot in
Manhattan Is My Beat
. At least she’d had the foresight to get rid of some of the evidence: When she’d stopped by her loft to pick up the check, she’d realized she still had Spinello’s accordion envelope and thrown it into the trash. If the cops found her with
that
, it’d be a sure conviction.
    No, she’d leave town, leave the Side, leave the Magic Kingdom. Go back home. Get a job. Go to school.
    Well, it was damn well about time.
    Time to grow up. Forget quests …
    She saw Stephanie, her reddish hair glowing in the afternoon sun as she walked through the park. They waved at each other. It seemed ridiculously innocent, Rune thought, as if they were girlfriends meeting for drinks after work to complain about bosses and men and mothers.
    Rune looked around, saw no one suspicious—well, no one
more
suspicious than you’d normally see in Union Square Park—then joined Stephanie.
    “You’re hurt.” The woman glanced at her forehead, where Rune had been cut by a piece of glass or plaster.
    “It’s okay.”
    “What happened?”
    Rune told her.
    “God! You have to go to the police. You can talk to them. Tell them what happened.”
    “Yeah, right. They can place me at two different crime scenes. I’m the number one suspect.”
    “But won’t the cops find you in Ohio?”
    She gave a faint smile. “They might—if they knew my real name. Which they don’t.”
    Stephanie smiled back. “True. Oh, here.” She handed Rune a wad of bills. “It’s about three hundred. That enough?”
    Rune hugged her. “I don’t know what to say.” She gave Stephanie the check.
    “No, no, this is too much.”
    “Little Red Hen, remember? I just need enough to get home on. You keep the rest. Tony’ll probably fire you too. Just for helping me.”
    “Come on,” Stephanie told her. “I’ll help you pack and take you to the airport.” They started down into the subway. “You think it’s safe to go back to your loft?”
    “Emily and Pretty Boy don’t know about it. Manelli and that U.S. marshal do, but we can sneak in through the construction site. Nobody’ll see us. We can—”
    A chill like ice down her back. She gasped.
    Ten feet away Pretty Boy stepped out from behind a pillar, holding a black pistol. “Don’t fucking move,” he muttered to