Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (3 page)

6

Forty-five minutes later we were in the Flatiron District, looking up Twenty-Fifth Street at a row of stretch Expeditions parked outside the towering, two-level club where people lined up inside the red velvet ropes waiting to get in. I'd seen it in magazines, but this was as close as I'd ever been in person.

"They're never going to let us through the door."

"Do not always think—"

"—on the dark side of things, right, I get it."

Gobi gathered her bag, opened her door, and ducked out. "Meet me inside."

"What if—"

She was already gone. I sat there for a moment, looking through the windshield at the lights of downtown while taxis rolled up behind me, blasting their horns. The valet appeared next to my window, a slick ghost.

"May I help you, sir?"

"Park it somewhere safe, please," I said, taking the ticket and climbing out, aware of my rented prom tuxedo like I'd never been before. Nobody else seemed to notice except the bouncer, who flashed me an indifferent look and gestured me forward. He was probably going to tell me there was no way a kid in a rented tuxedo was going to be seen outside this kind of club. I pretended not to notice, keeping my eyes peeled for Gobi and wondering when we could get out of here.

"
Hey!
" the bouncer shouted, waving me up until I couldn't ignore him anymore. People were staring. Blushing, getting ready to be yelled at, I went toward him, and he opened the rope to let me through. "She's in there."

"Excuse me?"

"Your date."

"Oh. Thanks."

"Whoa." His hand fell on my shoulder. "You have ID?"

"Yeah, I..." After digging out my wallet, I fumbled for my license and then waited while he inspected the birth date. He stamped my hand with a big red stamp: UNDERAGE.

"No alcohol. And you can't sit at the bar."

"Okay."

I stepped inside.

Everything was different in here: sounds, smells, lights, music. People who seemed to belong to some exclusive group—adults, sophisticates, citizens of the world—were packed up tight against the bar. I passed underneath a storm of silent images from the sixty-inch plasma screens playing ESPN from the walls. Up ahead, white swing chairs with yolk-yellow interiors dangled from the ceiling, looking like giant hard-boiled eggs, while the most beautiful women I'd ever seen sat inside them swinging their legs and sipping drinks from champagne glasses. Men in suits, tall guys in sunglasses who looked like NBA players, more gorgeous women, singles, hipsters, all lingered around the marble floors and the staircases. After a moment of standing there, I saw Gobi at one of the tables near the back and went over, trying to make sense of her presence here.

"How'd you get us in?"

"Sit down." She pushed a tall glass in my direction without actually seeming to look at me. "I ordered you a Pepsi."

"Thanks."

"I will be right back."

"Gobi, wait a second—"

She was already gone again, angling into the bathroom. I sipped my Pepsi and tried to look as if I were drinking Courvoisier. I didn't know how she'd gotten us in or what we were going to do next, but that feeling of sensory detachment was coming back, making everything feel both too real and not real at all. It was after nine thirty—closer to ten now—but I figured if I paid for my ten-dollar Pepsi and got out of here quickly I could still make it to sound check downtown. As long as nothing stupid happened in the meantime.

Gobi had been gone for what felt like ages. I pulled out my phone and checked the time. Three Wall Street–looking jocks at the door were eyeing me as if they were about to come over and ask if they could have this table. Glancing back in the direction of the women's bathroom, I saw a slender young woman in a little black dress and wraparound sunglasses sauntering directly toward me, arms swinging slightly, hips snapping back and forth like a metronome beneath the stretchy fabric. Her red lipstick seemed to cut through the air. She dropped her bag onto the table next to my drink with a thump.

"I changed my mind," she said. "I want to go."

I stared at her. "
Gobi?
"

"Have them bring the car around."

I was still staring at her, my brain trying to swallow what my eyes had already bitten off. It was Gobi—except it
wasn't.
Gone was the muddled look, the poached and blemished skin, the oily split ends. Everything was focused, clean, and smooth. She'd unleashed her hair, which now tumbled down in easy, effortless, chocolate-colored tumbles and quotation marks around her shoulders and face. The tight, lithe body that she had been hiding under forty-two pounds of eastern European wool was right here in front of me now, stretching the dress in all the right places. I could almost hear the seams creak as she breathed. The only similarity to the girl who had gone into the bathroom was the half-heart pendant that still dangled around her neck.

"What happened to you?"

She lowered the sunglasses, showing me eyes so green, they stung like peroxide. "You are staring."

"Sorry, but
yeah.
"

"I will pay for the drink. Meet me outside." She picked up her bag and glanced over to the front of the club, where several guys in bridge-and-tunnel suits and greasy-looking haircuts were lingering over drinks with girls in barely-there dresses. "Not in front of the window."

I stood up, looking back, almost walking into a table as I watched her cross the room. Outside, I handed the valet my ticket. When he brought the Jag around, Gobi still hadn't come out. I got behind the wheel and nosed up as close to the front of the club as I dared, then pulled out my cell phone and dialed the one person who would most appreciate this, meaning the one guy I was pretty sure would believe me.

It rang three times.

"Yo, Perry?" I could hear the noise and music of the prom in the background.

"Chow."

"What's up, dog? That's whack about what happened at the prom with Whittaker and—"

"Chow, listen. I'm in the city."

"What, what? The
ci-tay?
That's cool."

"No, listen. We're at the 40/40 Club—"

"Fawty-Fawty," Chow said, not exactly hiding that he was an eighteen-year-old Korean kid who spent too much time listening to Young Money and playing World of Warcraft. "Heard
that,
yo. You the man, Perry. You
more
than the man. You the—"

"Chow, will you shut up a second and listen?" I said. "I'm here with Gobi. She just came out of the bathroom, and she's, like, completely transformed into this total epitome of hotness."

"Hold up," Chow said, dropping the hip-hop affection entirely. "We are talking about the same foreign exchange student here? The one that kicked those guys' asses at the prom?"

"Wait," I said, "what?"

"You didn't hear about that? Shep and Dean? That's what I was going to tell you. After Whittaker punched you, she came back and finished it. She put them both in the ER, dude. Ambulance ride on prom night. Where were
you?
"

"I was..." I started, and stopped. I was remembering her telling me that she had to go fix her makeup. Asking me to bring the car around while she—

Suddenly the front window of the club shattered, spraying glass into the street, and something came flying out, the body of a greasy-haired man in a gray suit bouncing across the hood of the Jaguar so that his bloody face pressed against the windshield in front of me, ten inches away. It looked like a flesh-colored candle melting against the glass, eyes open, glazed and lifeless.

I jerked back, screaming, dropped the phone and started fighting to get out of the car when Gobi appeared next to me, gliding down into the passenger seat and yanking me back in.

"I told you not to park in front of the window," she said.

7

Here's me: still screaming.

"There's a dead guy on the car! Oh, man. What the hell?
There's a dead guy on top of my dad's car!
"

Out of the darkness, something pinched my shoulder, hard enough to cut through the fog of panic. Gobi was squeezing me just above the socket of my arm, and when I looked over, the sunglasses were off and her eyes were drilling straight into mine.

"You should put the car in reverse, Perry. That will get the body off your car."

My gaze went down to the bulky bag between her knees, the only remnant of the person she'd been fifteen minutes earlier. The bag was open and I could see a gun resting on top of a bundle of clothes, next to the BlackBerry.

"
You
did that? You shot that guy?"

"Back up the car, Perry." Her voice was totally calm. "Before the police arrive."

I was still grappling with the latch to get the door open, fighting to get out of the car, when Gobi swung one boot-clad leg over the gearshift and stepped on the gas while simultaneously dropping the Jag into reverse. We jolted backwards hard enough that I felt my incisors click together and the dead man's body flopped forward and disappeared completely from the Jag's hood. Gobi whipped the wheel hard so that we swerved around between a stretch Hummer and Lexus waiting for the valet.

"Now," she said, "drive."

I shook my head, thrashing like a fish in a net. "Let me out! You can have the car! Just let me out!" Where was the door handle? I'd only had to get out of the Jag's driver's seat three or four times in my entire life, counting the times that I'd worked up the courage to sneak out to the garage and sit in it, and my fingers were still raking the interior trying to locate the handle when I felt something hard and hot press against my right temple. I could smell heated steel and gunpowder very close by.

"Do you remember when you helped me with that PowerPoint presentation for Mr. Wibberly's economics class?" Gobi said. "You were thinking very clearly then, Perry. You are not thinking clearly now." Her voice became an odd combination of gentle and didactic, as if she were explaining something completely simple to a complete simpleton. "I cannot drive a car. You know this."

"It's New York City! Who needs a car?"

She touched my hand. "I need you."

I looked right and left. Outside the club, people were gathering around the broken window, staring at the body sprawled out on the street, the body that had seconds earlier been on the hood of the car. Some of them were glancing back toward us. I could feel the presence of the gun hovering just outside my peripheral vision like some suicidal thought that I was too terrified to acknowledge. "Who are you? You're a foreign exchange student! You're in high school!"

"I am twenty-four years old."

"
What?
"

"Drive the car." The barrel of the gun pressed harder on my skull. "I will not ask again."

I shifted the Jag into drive and pulled out into the street, every part of my body shaking at different vibrational frequencies. Gobi reached over and hit the windshield wipers, smearing the dead man's blood across the glass in a gruesome double rainbow. She squirted wiper fluid and ran them again. The glass got a little cleaner. Now I could see the lights of Broadway up ahead, shining away in drizzled bloody streaks. In the rearview mirror, the crowd in front of 40/40 was getting bigger by the second. Sirens were rising up in the distance.

"I can't believe this. This isn't happening."

"You can drive a little faster."

"I am!"

"You are driving five miles an hour."

Up ahead, the light was turning red. "Please, okay, just ... put the gun down, okay?"

"Here." She lowered it until the barrel was resting against my side. "Do you prefer this?"

"You shot him. You totally just shot that guy back there. I think I'm gonna throw up."

She didn't say anything.

"Who was he?"

"No one."

"
What?
"

"Keep going. Get in the right lane. We have to go downtown." With the gun still pointed at me, she reached into her purse and brought out the BlackBerry, tapping keys. "Take a right and get on Broadway."

The intersection was crammed with pedestrians and cabs, and two NYPD cruisers parked at the light. We were still close enough to the club that I could see the crowd getting bigger outside, and cops were getting out, fighting their way through traffic. "We're screwed. We're so utterly, hopelessly screwed."

"Just get us away from here and I will explain everything."

"That's a red light!"

"Run it."

"I can't! I'll hit somebody!"

I ran the red light. Behind me, blue and red lights started swirling. Not even thinking, I slammed on the brakes. My heart stopped and everything below my waistline just seemed to disappear—a total eclipse of the balls. I saw two cops get out and start walking up toward the Jaguar on either side. To my right, Gobi reached into her bag and draped a kerchief over the gun she had jammed against my side, pushing it tighter into place.

"If you say anything wrong, I will kill you first."

The cop bent down to my window, glaring straight at me.

"Get out of the car," the cop said.

8

For a second I didn't react. Muscles locked on to tendons; ligaments grabbed hold of bones. It wasn't that I didn't
want
to move; my body just wasn't about to obey, almost as if it thought that if it didn't budge, it could somehow negate that all of this was really happening. Police lights splashed across the Jag's interior, filling it like rising water crackling with lethal electric current.

"Did you hear what I said?" the cop said. "Get out."

"I..." I felt the barrel of Gobi's gun gouging my pelvis. "I can't."

The cop gazed at me with depthless indifference. He looked like the kind of guy that would rather be smashing some crack dealer's face against the pavement or tossing a pedophile off a fire escape but was willing to use me as a little warm-up on a slow Saturday night.

"I can't get out," I said. "My legs won't move."

"What, you're handicapped?" He whipped out a flashlight and shone it down at my feet, one of them hovering over the gas, the other resting above the clutch. "You think that's funny? My brother lost a leg in Fallujah—you think
that's
funny?"

"No, of course not. I'm sorry."

He flipped the bow tie around my neck. "Where did you come from tonight?"

"We were at the prom," Gobi said from beside me.

"The prom?" His tone of voice hadn't changed. "License and registration, now."

I dug for my wallet, handed him my license, and reached for the glove compartment for the registration.

"Wait a second." The flashlight froze on the windshield. "Is that blood?"

"That? Oh, yeah," I said. "I hit a deer."

"You hit a deer."

"Yeah..."

"Where, Madison Square Garden?"

"The Connecticut Turnpike," I said. "It ran out in front of the car."

He looked disgusted. "Get out of the car."

What happened next couldn't have taken more than a second or two, but in my mind it lasted forever. I saw the cop's hand reach through the open window and realized that he was going to drag me out of the car if I didn't comply. Except that Gobi was going to shoot me first. I would die on the sidewalk at the corner of Twenty-Fifth and Broadway with a bullet in my lung, having spent just enough time inside the 40/40 Club to take one sip of Pepsi. My headstone would read
PERRY STORMAIRE: HE DIED A VIRGIN.

Then—

The explosion shattered the air somewhere behind me, a deafening blast that sent the cop ducking for cover. I caught a glimpse of flame in the side-view mirror and saw the exterior of the 40/40 Club plume outward onto the sidewalk in a churning horizontal cloud of smoke and dust. People scurried like rats out into the street, and cars swerved and slammed on their brakes to dodge them. When I looked up again, the cop was running back to his car, shouting something to his partner. Car alarms were yelping up and down Broadway in all directions, the noise rising up through the debris.

"What the hell was that?" I shouted.

Gobi tugged my arm. "The light is green. Go."

Cranking the wheel, I swung out onto Broadway, weaving my way downtown, hardly aware of what I was doing. I kept looking back until I couldn't see the club anymore.

"What happened back there?"

"Semtex. I left it in the alley outside the club."

"What? You did that too?"

"No one was hurt. Just a distraction."

"Just a distraction? That was a bomb!"

"Only a little one."

"Only—" I blasted through a red light, yellow cabs hitting their brakes, blaring their horns and missing our back bumper by centimeters. "I can't believe this."

"Watch the traffic." She was working the BlackBerry again. "We need to get to West Street, Battery Park. Stay on Broadway. It should only take ten minutes."

The delayed shock was hitting me now, the combined effect of everything that had just happened collapsing over me in a blinding, numbing wave. Studying for the SAT was one thing; this was some thing else. My skull was going to blow apart if I let it, but I forced myself through grim determination to keep it together.

Gobi glanced at me. "You are upset?"

"Upset? Am I upset?" Here all I needed was some hack cartoonist to reach down and draw steam shooting out of my ears. "
I never should have taken you to prom!
"

"Perry, listen to me. Tomorrow morning I will fly out."

"I thought it was next week—"

"It is tomorrow morning. Before that I have four more appointments I need to make here in the city. You drive me to these, everything will be all right."

"Four appointments. You mean four more people you have to kill?"

"Please pay attention to your driving."

I shook my head. "You know, it all makes total sense now why you weren't good in math. Every single foreign exchange student I know is good in math. You sucked in math because you're
actually a hired killer.
"

"Red light."

Slamming on the brakes, I stopped just short of getting T-boned by a bus heading east on Fourteenth Street. Gobi was still typing on the BlackBerry. I caught a glimpse of digitized information, photos, a Google map scrolling upward.

"So the whole time you were living with us, that was all a cover?" My mind flicked back to the nights where I'd heard her talking in Lithuanian, the hours she'd spent in front of her laptop. "The last nine months you were just getting the assignment together?"

"It is not an easy process." She lifted the BlackBerry. "The research was extensive."

"Who are they? The people you're killing?"

"Light is green."

That was when my cell phone started ringing. Gobi's eyes flashed down.

"Who is it?"

I picked up the phone, checked the number, and felt a slick dark cloud of nausea swooping down over me, eclipsing all thought.

"It's my dad," I said.