Manhattan Is My Beat

Rune.
    Anger on his face, he moved forward toward Rune, not paying any attention to Stephanie. Apparently he didn’t even think they were together.
    Rune froze. But Stephanie didn’t.
    She stepped past him fast, which caught him completely off guard. Screaming “Rape, rape!” she shoved her palm, fingers stiff and splayed, into his face. His head snapped back and he staggered against the wall, blood pouring from his nose.
    “Fuck,” he cried.
    Her self-defense class …
    Stephanie stepped toward him again. It looked like she was going to kick him this time.
    But Pretty Boy was good too; he knew what he was doing. He didn’t try to fight back. He leapt to the side about three steps, out of range, wiped the blood from his mouth and started to raise the pistol toward her.
    Then the arm closed around his neck.
    A passenger—a huge black man—had heard Stephanie’s cry and had come up behind their attacker and locked his muscular arm around Pretty Boy’s throat. Choking, he dropped the gun and grabbed the man’s forearm, trying futilely to break the grip.
    The big man behind him seemed to be enjoying the whole thing. He said cheerfully to Pretty Boy, “H’okay, asshole, leave th’ladies ‘lone. You hear me?”

     
    They ran.
    Stephanie in the lead.
    She
must
have belonged to a health club—she was moving like a greyhound. If Pretty Boy was there, Rune figured, Emily must be nearby too. Besides, the token seller would’ve called the cops by then; Rune wanted to get as far away from the station as possible.
    Gasping, running. Following Stephanie as best she could.
    They were two blocks from the subway when it happened.
    At Thirteenth and Broadway a taxi jumped a red light just before it changed.
    Which was the exact moment Stephanie ran into the intersection between two double-parked trucks.
    She didn’t have a chance …
    All she could do was roll onto the hood to keep from getting crushed under the wheels. The driver hit the brakes, which gave a low, wild scream, but still the cab hit her hard. Some part of her body—her face, Rune thought in despair—slammed into the windshield, which turned white with fractures. Stephanie cartwheeled onto the concrete, a swirl of floral cloth and red hair and white flesh.
    “No!” Rune screamed.
    Two women ran up and started tending to her. Rune dropped to her knees beside them. She hardly heard the litany of the cabdriver: “She ran through light, it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault.”
    Rune cradled Stephanie’s bloody head in her arms.
    “You’ll be okay,” she whispered. “You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.”
    But Stephanie couldn’t hear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
     
    Rune stood by the window of the hospital, looking out onto the park.
    It was an old city park on First Avenue. More rocks and dirt than grass, most of the boulders painted with graffiti, tinted red and purple. They seemed to be oozing from the underbelly of the city itself like exposed organs.
    She turned away.
    A doctor walked by, not looking at her. None of them had looked at her—the doctors, the orderlies, the nurses, the candy stripers. She’d given up waiting for a kindly old man in a white jacket to come into the hallway, put his arm around her, and say, “About your friend, don’t you worry, she’ll be fine.”
    The way they do in movies.
    But movies’re fake.
    Richard’s words echoed:
They. Aren’t. Real
.
    No one had stopped to talk to her. If she wanted any information she had to ask the nurses. Again.
    And she’d get the same look she’d gotten two dozen times before.
    No news. We’ll let you know
.
    She looked out the window once more. Watching for Pretty Boy. Thinking maybe he’d gotten away from the man in the subway and escaped from the cops. Followed the ambulance here.
    Paranoia again.
    But it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.
    Hoping that Stephanie had hurt Pretty Boy really bad when she’d hit him. A character in one of her fairy stories, a friendly witch, had told someone never to hope for harm to someone else. Hope for all the good you want but never wish harm on anyone. Because, the witch said, harm’s like a wasp in a jar. Once you release it you never know who it’s going to sting.
    But now Rune hoped Stephanie had hurt the bastard real bad.
    She wandered up to the nurses’ station.
    An older woman with a snake of a stethoscope around her neck finally looked up. “Oh. We just heard about your friend.”
    “What? Tell