Crueler - (New York Pt.1)

NEW YORK

*

Crueler had been counting the swish of the fan blades. It was a weird fan, he would say, noting the odd structure; he guessed it was only decorative, not really cooling. He certainly couldn’t feel any breeze. He refocused his mind on the spinning wooden slats… twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty- wait, thirty! Thirty-one… or two or three… damn. He’d lost count again.
There was some acid jazz (maybe David Sanborn) pulsing softly at a pianissimo in the corner, where a little purple and gray CD player sat, leashed to the wall by a black cord that was frayed near the plug. There was a thin disk in there somewhere, spinning, spinning, spinning…like the fan, like the five wheels of Crueler’s Corolla, like the eyeballs of a dead man sliding back into their sockets, like the earth on it’s invisible axis. Like Crueler’s mind. Spinning, spinning, spinning, always pondering. His mind drifted to his Corolla out in the parking lot. Actually, it wasn’t a Corolla – it was a Tacoma; he’d just liked the ring of professionalism when “Crueler’s Corolla” rolled off his tongue. And at the moment, he wondered how the non-Corolla was doing outside, if it was being broken into or jacked by some idiot. The notion wasn’t beyond consideration, especially here in New York. Crueler contemplated stepping out to check on his precious Corolla, but decided that if anyone was breaking in, he’d just hunt them down and kill them later.
A door to his left opened partially to allow a large woman with curly hair to waddle in. She scanned a clipboard in her hand, looking uncannily similar to a fat penguin in her nurse’s getup.
“Jacobin Crueler?”
Crueler found himself making one of those spilt-second decisions that he always regretted later. He was divided between going with the nurse, and staying behind to find out exactly what how many revolutions-per-minute that stupid fan was making anyways.
The penguin lady called his name again, which he was tired of hearing. It was always Jacobin this, Jacobin that…Jacobin, won’t you come home with me tonight? He’d never been able to figure out what made him so attractive…but ever since he’d accepted the fact, he’d apparently seemed less attractive, because no-one was asking him home at parties anymore. Or maybe it was just that one thing with the police in Los Angeles. A whole LAPD SWAT team had burst in amidst (what else?) but his very own father’s birthday party. He’d had to convince his parents and all their curious, walker-toting neighbors that he was secretly an operative with the bureau, and that he had been handpicked to lead a SWAT team in a high-profile sting against a weapons-smuggling neo-Nazi at the docks. That had been one hell of a day.
“Mr. Crueler?”
He rose to face a very irritated penguin lady, and followed her through the door. He watched her as she walked/waddled down a vacant hallway. Give her a nose and bird-feet, thought Crueler, and she’d be quite convincing at the zoo. She padded into an empty room with a default scowl on her face, and told him to sit.
He stood.
Maybe coming to the doctor’s office had been a bad idea. He wasn’t really sick. Sure, he’d swallowed a pint of acid irritant to make sure his throat was nice and raw, but other than that he was feeling fine. Without a word, the penguin-lady walked over, velcroed the blood-pressure thing to his arm, and started pumping it full of air. Crueler always thought it would be fun to yank the squeeze out of the nurse’s hand, but he refrained with as much self-control as he could muster, because he had a mission to accomplish here. And he didn’t really enjoy the thought of being attacked by a frighteningly large penguin lady.
She spat out some numbers in quick succession (they meant nothing to Crueler, so he didn’t note them) and then she hobbled out the door, closing it behind her. The room was suddenly very quiet; no noises to speak of, no items of particular interest, none of those awkward posters about testicular cancer doctors always slapped on the walls. Crueler desperately wanted something else to think about, but he settled for the silence because he knew he should be focusing anyway.
He knew no-one in the waiting room had seen the unusual bulge in his jacket pocket, but he wasn’t so sure about the penguin lady. He’d been so distracted by her birdlike qualities that he’d forgotten to analyze her like everyone else. Come to think of it, she had been scowling…that was never a good sign. He sat down noisily on the cot, crinkling the white paper, shifting carefully so the bulge wasn’t so obvious.
There, that was nearly perfect. At least, as perfect as he’d get it anytime soon –
The door swung open, somehow enigmatic in itself. The doctor was a stout little man with a bald head and cloudy, careless eyes. A thin pair of spectacles made him look more scholarly than he probably was in that quaint white lab coat.
“Hello, Mr. Crueler. What seems to be the problem?”
Jacobin cleared his throat, deciding on a Yugoslavian accent. “Vell, you see, I accidentally have some Clorox, and thought I threw it all up, but zis morning my throat is red. It very hurts.”
The doctor nodded, pursing his lips and casting Crueler a strange look. “If you’ll follow me, we’ll get you treated right away.”
“Vell, actually, Doctor, I had something else in mind.”
“Oh? What would that be?”
“You see, I know something zat no-von else knows.” Crueler leaned in close. This was just too much fun. “I know…zat you are really an undercover agent vith zee CIA.” He added a foreign giggle for good measure.
The Doctor was frozen for a moment before stuttering, “I think maybe you, uh, had too much of that bleach. You really need treatment right away.”
“No, no, zere is more to my story! So ven I learned that you are CIA, I zaid to myself in me head, “Jacobin, everyvon has a price,” and so ven I call my old boss in Yugoslavia, he say that you are vanted dead by their intelligence agency! Small vorld, no?”
The Doctor bolted, but Crueler had already pulled the silenced 9mm Taurus out of his jacket pocket and put two slugs in the doctor’s brain.
“Small vorld indeed.”
Crueler stepped over the body to the counter and grabbed an antiseptic wipe. His mind started spinning again, like an old Temptations record, as he wiped the Taurus clean and unscrewed the silencer. He liked this particular silencer, because it was silver – and to him, silver spoke of black BMWs, jazz clubs, the red-eye to Paris, a steak dinner in the city, all of it and more. Silver was somehow more sophisticated than gold, simpler, closer to the essence of beauty.
Crueler dropped the printless gun into the Biohazard receptacle, slipping the silencer back into his jacket pocket. He thought about grabbing that David Sanborn CD on the way out; it sounded like good driving music. Good music for Crueler’s Corolla. But the fact remained; he had already stuffed the glove compartment full of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Coltrane, and the works. Yes, Crueler’s Corolla was fully stocked with the capricious throes of a love supreme, where he could speed for miles with no-one to watch over him, and think, what a wonderful world.
Sort of an ironic notion, considering the violent sight before him: the splash of crimson that slowly deoxygenated on the linoleum, and the dead doctor that rested facedown in gentle sleep. Crueler grimaced, and exited the room, stepping lightly into the hallway with a glance in both directions. No sign of penguin lady.
Crueler decided against the lobby, hurriedly striding further down the monochrome hall. He passed a few open doors – nervous middle-aged men, sniveling toddlers and their parents, working women looking icy with a tissue – but Crueler kept going. He almost stopped at a faded, blinking old soda machine, but realized that he didn’t have change, and there was no Mountain Dew anyway. A few more steps carried him through a pair of swinging double doors, into an outdoor parking lot brimming with hot-orange ambulances.
He placidly resisted the temptation to steal one, and instead opted for the street. By the time he’d jogged the block back to his car, he could already hear police sirens. Which meant that they’d found the body, seen the bullets, maybe even happened across the gun in the trash can. But everything was clean, everything pointed to nothing, and certainly nothing pointed to him.
Satisfied, Jacobin Crueler kicked the Corolla/Tacoma into reverse, squealed out of his parking spot, and hit the road.

*

The coffee he’d ordered hit the table with a clunk, sending a few drops down the side of the cup to stain the napkin brown and make the table sticky. Crueler watched the waitress’s legs as she retreated into the darkness of the dim jazz club. He like those legs, wondered if their owner would ask him home tonight. Probably not, assuming the service was any indication. He sopped coffee off the table with another napkin, and proceeded to deposit four spoons of cane sugar and three plunks of half-n-half into the steaming black substance. A twitchy jazz combo with a stoned bass player shuffled onto a stage flooded with golden lights, as Crueler carefully made a little whirlpool in his coffee with a stirring stick until the liquid turned light brown. He took a sip, let the earthy, sugary taste melt under his tongue and trickle down his throat with its wonderful soothing capacity. This was life; this was the Fifth Avenue Jazz Club.
The piano and bass started the song – an old Charlie Parker piece from the Bop Era – and as the drums jumped in, Crueler found himself wanting something he didn’t have. He took another sip of coffee, let the stimulant fire up his mind, tried to focus and put his finger on the elusive hankerin’. Legs? No, not really. While he wouldn’t mind the waitress’s undivided attention, it wasn’t something he would die for. Or kill for. The secret desire must hide elsewhere. Blood? No, that was stupid. He never really wanted blood, never felt the tinted rage of psychosis that drove people to kill unjustly. When Jacobin Crueler killed, he was just making a buck. Music? Hmm. He already had music, but he didn’t really like the flavor of this particular song. Maybe that was it. He’d never been musically tolerant, never seen the grace in hip-hop or the soul in heavy metal, never found humor in anything but jazz. So maybe it was just that he felt like kicking that stoned bassist off the stage and walking the fretless neck himself. He should try it.
“More coffee?”
The waitress was back in all her depressed glory, yanking Crueler from his profound intellectual crusade in the corner.
He nodded, lifting the cup. “Hit me.”
The succulent vapors of Columbian roast escaped the carafe as she filled his mug again, and asked him if he needed anything else.
“I could do with a little sugar.” He wondered if she’d catch the innuendo.
She smiled icily and pointed to the jar of sweetener as she strode away. Ah, so she had. On stage, the rhythm section fell to a muted pulse, and the saxophone took off into a blazing solo; a squeakless, mind-blowing collage of blurred fingers and creaking brass keys and notes swinging violently up and down the staff, just barely accenting the downbeats – truth sung into a sax. It held none of that ethereal vanity, none of the drug-induced weirdness from the recent Coltrane persuasion; it was honest-to-goodness, down-to-earth jazz – the real deal, the stuff you could get dizzy on, addicted to, fall in love with. That level of quality could only come from interesting people. Crueler knew that all good jazzers were freaks in their own way…just look at Thelonious Monk. What a weirdo.
This particular soloist was a pudgy little kid with a foggy pair of Woody Allen glasses, a clip-on tie, and some khakis with a messed up crease. He broke out of the solo, gasping, dripping buckets of sweat, and shoved his glasses up on his nose and swung to the drums as the song climaxed.
The dark club erupted into soft, appreciative applause as the tune ended. The little combo switched saxes and – thank God – bassists. The pudgy tenor kid and the stoner bowed once or twice until their replacements hopped on stage and politely kicked them off. Crueler procured his coffee, and made his way towards the tenor kid.
He was chugging a tall ice water when Crueler appeared, sitting opposite him at a small table in the corner. The kid was too high on his music to register surprise when he set down the empty glass and saw Crueler there, with his own mug to his lips, grinning smugly.
“Hi, Jacobin.”
“Hello.” Crueler always forgot the kid’s name…usually found a way around the issue, had stopped racking his brain long ago. As far as he was concerned, the kid was just The Kid. “Your solo was good. Had a Michael Brecker thing going on there for a second though. Kinda quirky. But cool.”
“I like Michael Brecker.” The Kid sighed and glanced at his saxophone, still around his neck.
“So do I. Saw him and Herbie Hancock at Carnegie Hall a few years ago.”
“Neat. Were you there on business…or what?”
“Yeah. I got front-row seats next to a whole entourage of Chechen revolutionaries. Part of some coup on Russian soil or something.” He took a drink of coffee. “My plan was to take them out there in the auditorium, but Brecker’s solo was so damned good…I just couldn’t do it.”
“What’d you do?”
“Alleyway. Right after the show.”
“Oh.” The Kid sniffed, and started to pack up his sax. “So what’re you doing here? Don’t you have something better to do?”
“Not really. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot lately…”
“Here it comes.”
“…and I realized…I’m almost out. I mean, just four more jobs, and my Caymans account will hit the roof.” Crueler leaned forward. “The roof. You know how much money that is?”
The Kid paused to think. “Like…twenty million?”
“Fifty.”
“Jesus, that’s a lot of money. Buy me a new sax.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, kid.”
“What did you just call me?”
Crueler hesitated. Racked his mind. “Just…I dunno…Kid?”
The Kid chuckled and resumed his work. “I swear, this is the tenth time in a month. It’s Casey.”
“Whatever, kid. Where was I?”
“Uh. Hit the roof.”
“Right. So anyway, all I’ve got is four more hits before I can finally sit back and relax a little. You know, maybe buy an island and a yacht or two, invite some ladies down, order a couple shipping-crates-worth of margarita supplies. I’ve been needing some good R&R.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“What?”
“As if a private island will actually hold you for more than a year. You know you’d just as soon sell the thing and buy a bunker in Iraq.”
“There aren’t any good girls in Iraq. They’re all married to either corrupt economists or palace-owning insurgent leaders feeding off their own wars. Why would I want to retire there?”
“Jacobin. You kill for a living. Face it.”
Crueler shook his head. “There’s a difference between shallow and unconcerned. I am the latter. I’m not dishonest, I just don’t always tell the truth. And I’m not completely ruthless. I have a hard time killing women.” He thought about that. “Pretty women, anyways.”

*

Ding! Third floor.
The elevator car hummed quietly up the shaft. Inside, Crueler leaned against one wall, studying the floral carpet design, faintly aware of some music playing inside. He recognized it to be Queen.
We are the champions… we are the champions… no time for losers…
Ding! Fourth floor.
Normally, Crueler would have opted for the stairs. Any Joe-off-the-street could kick in a fire alarm, or somehow bypass the elevators, and strand Crueler in this stinking car with Bohemian Rhapsody or something for unbearable, innumerable hours. But he wasn’t feeling particularly stalked today, and for whatever reason, he decided he could afford the luxury of the elevator.
No time for losers… cause we are the champions… of the world!
Ding! Fifth floor. He got off.
The carpet in the halls, he noticed, was the same carpet featured in the elevators. He wondered briefly what sort of person invented these little designs found everywhere – on airplane seats or hotel carpets or any of that. He supposed it was just an example of the commercialization of Navajo rug-weavers. He didn’t really care. Found himself slightly surprised for devoting that much thought towards such a pointless issue.
God, the hall was quiet. He glanced down the vacant rows of doors… 316, 317, 318…on and on forever. He checked his watch.
Huh. It was only nine. Oh well, he thought – perhaps all New Yorkers get themselves off to bed in a timely manner. Which reminded him how comfortable a bed was sounding, at the moment.
He angled for his door drowsily, and fumbled for the keycard in his jeans pocket. When he went to insert the card, the door creaked open. His mind shot to awareness. Someone was inside his room. His hands moved like oiled machines, whipping a pistol out of his shoulder holster, screwing on a silencer with an experienced flip of his wrist. No more fun and games, Jacobin.
He drew back the action and slipped in the door in one motion, entering the suite on his haunches, gun extended in front of him. Nothing appeared to be immediately out of place. The bathroom and kitchenette were dark. He scanned the small living room. No-one; the balcony was also vacant. The master bedroom, then? He moved silently, no audible footfalls…
We are the champions… we are the champions… no time for losers…
Great. Perfect time to get that damned song stuck in his head. He ignored the mini-Queen chanting pretentiously in the back of his mind, moving into the bedroom. There was a note on the bed. He didn’t lower his gun, didn’t read it – instead, he checked the bathroom.
Empty.
He rose to his full height, strode (still cautiously) to the bed, examined the note. The handwriting was hard to make out, apparently the whole thing had been rather rushed. Whoever left the note hadn’t even closed the door. He ignored churning questions and just read the thing.

Port Nassau, Bahamas. Find the yacht “Delilah”.
Be there by noon Tuesday or you’ll feel the pain.
Don’t forget your swimming trunks.

Crueler rolled his eyes and went to bed.

*
David Stenn was his name. Well, almost his name. If his boss was gullible enough to believe he was just a kind-hearted newcomer at one of the world’s most advanced aerodynamics testing facilities, then Stenn knew he was too stupid to pronounce his real name.
Dabir Suhail. The gentle servant.
He was AWOL in London with a married lady-friend (much to the chagrin of his own wife, who was almost definitely aware of his affair) when he had first encountered the idea: he was not bound my his name, nor his ancestry. The Gentle Servant trained long and trained hard to become the Strong Warrior. By the time he left London, he knew his most valuable weapon, his mind, and how to use it. With deadly consequences.
Sometimes, when he was training, these same introspective thoughts infiltrated his mind and distracted him. But now… his first mission. He was determined not to fail.
He retrieved the stolen keycard from his shirt pocket, straightening his tie for the security camera. In the end, it wouldn’t matter if he was caught or not; however, his own reasoning told him it wasn’t wrong to try. He strode passively through the dark corridors, past long, soundproof rooms of cubicles and laboratories. All cloaked in night.
Eighth door.
He let himself in with the keycard, set his briefcase on a desk. Didn’t turn the lights. The room was white, but gray in the night, and full of computers. He seated himself at a desk by the door, removed several electrical components from his briefcase, hooked them up to inputs on the CPU. He booted up the system, and inserted a flash drive from a lanyard around his neck.
In the history books, David Stenn would go down as the man who stole the most important piece of American engineering in a hundred years. But David Stenn would disappear, in jail or wherever, and no-one would hear from him again. And years later, Dabir Suhail would be in London, saying to the recruiter, “Thank you.” And the recruiter would say back, “Well done, good and gentle servant.” His name.
He opened the flash drive, and a white window with code appeared. He had made this thing, it was his baby. One hundred and nineteen pages of thick, rich code, completely indecipherable even to the most advanced hackers – because he had rewritten the common code language, using new syntax, new everything. It was his.
However, for safety reasons, he had left the last four pages incomplete. Now he needed to type two hundred characters from memory in various locations throughout the final segment. But at least it had come to this. He was here, wasn’t he? Yes.
He shook himself free from the distracting mental review, speaking to himself in a guttural whisper the words of the recruiter to his students: “Too much hope is a drug.”
Stenn thought drugs were good, but knew that they did not help you focus, did not help your swirling mind when you needed order and organization. He let his breathing regulate, placed his fingers on the keyboard, and let muscle memory take over.
He typed a line of code. A second line. And three more.
There was a noise behind him.
He jerked, spastically entering a few extra digits in the sequence.
“What was…” That? He turned around, watched the room.
Nothing.
A mouse.
The AC. Nothing.
He focused on the code again, trying to locate the extra characters he had mistakenly entered. There? No. There? Ahh, an extra backslash and an innocuous letter “I”. He took a deep breath, deleting the figures with a double-tap on the backspace key. He typed a new line of code, and another.
There was another noise behind him.
He jerked again, involuntarily.
Turned.
Froze.
A man was sitting in the shadow, legs crossed at a desk, aiming a gun at Stenn. No lights illuminated his face, it was a silhouette. He said quickly: “Finish it, and save it onto the flash drive. Then give it to me.”
Stenn didn’t move. He was too scared. He talked instead. “Who are you?”
“I’m supposed to kill you.”
“Make it look like a suicide?”
“Mhm.”
Stenn swallowed with difficulty. “Who sent you?”
“The competition.”
“What do you mean? I’m doing this for the competition.”
“Oh.” A hint of sarcasm in the man’s voice. “I mean the other competition. You know. Those other guys.”
“Core Engineering?”
“Yes. Please, get to work.”
Stenn tried to focus on the details, the way the recruiter taught him.
Close to six-foot tall. Business suit of some color – probably black, by the way it meshed with the darkness. Glock G22C. Silver silencer.
Stenn swiveled in his chair, started typing. He got through a line. No noises behind him. He got through another line, and another, and time seemed perpetual and strenuous until he finally finished the code. He paused for a moment at the keyboard, wondering what he should do. If he should somehow disable the program with a carefully-placed software bug.
A cold ring touched his temple.
“Dabir. Save it.”
It was strange, hearing an American pronounce his name correctly. “How did you know?”
“I met your recruiter. He was a sicko.”
Sinking disappointment. “Did you kill him also?”
“Yes.”
Stenn hit save. He refreshed the flash drive, did it all. Ejected it. Held it in the air for the man to take. But the man didn’t move. Nothing happened. The cold ring still pressed against his forehead.
“Aren’t you going to take it? It is finished.”
“No. It’s yours.”
It dawned on Stenn. The man wasn’t here to steal the code. He was here to frame a corporation for it’s own downfall. The idiots at Core Engineering wanted Scheister to implode, and they wanted it to look like it was their own fault. What a perfect opportunity. A company employee with a high-access security card and a virus that devastates the company’s business comes along, blows the bomb, and kills himself. Core Engineering stock skyrockets and Scheister goes down as a sob story. And who is David Stenn? Nobody, a wimp. And Dabir Suhail? The man who failed his first mission.
“I will not do this.”
“That’s okay, Dabir. You don’t have to.”
There was only a little pain, for a microsecond. And then Dabir was dead, but he was still angry.

*

Crueler carefully closed Suhail’s dead hand around the Glock. As always, Crueler kept the silencer. He picked up Suhail’s other hand, and hit the ENTER key on his keyboard. The pane of code disappeared and a message replaced it, reading:

Files transferred.
Program successful. Erase trace files?
Y / N

Crueler let Suhail’s body drop naturally. It looked about right. He ran over details quickly, before leaving.
The gun was in Suhail’s right hand.
The bullethole was in Suhail’s right temple.
The flash drive with the completed program was in Suhail’s left hand.
The program was open.
Scheister keycard in Suhail’s shirt pocket.
Good to go.
Crueler knew Suhail was a raw recruit. He would have locked the door. Crueler went to the door and engaged the lock. He removed his gloves and tucked them into his coat pocket, walking to the window, humming We Are the Champions.
Crueler lifted the window with his foot, and slipped outside onto a little brick ledge that circled the whole four-story building complex. The draft was chilly, but there were no streetlights on the campus. He wouldn’t be seen.
He closed the window with his sleeved forearm and worked his way down the side of the building brick-by-brick. It was a new fusion: urban climbing/tampering with evidence. As he moved, he ran over his intentions for the future, by force of habit. That morning, Crueler had decided to do absolutely nothing about the note. It seemed the wisest thing, considering the potential severity of negative consequences, if he actually reacted predictably. So at least until further notice, he would wait things out, try and finish a few more jobs. Get his Caymans account nice and thick. Then he’d launder it all out, put half of it into a beach house and a new identity, and the other into some kind of profitable business investment. He knew the Kid was right – he’d never completely disappear from the killing scene. But he’d try and lead a pleasurable life for as long as he could before it got boring.
He finally got down to the first floor and dropped to his feet.
A short jog got him to the parking lot, which was full of company cars.
He’d already planned it out. A missing company car would be investigated. But the good thing about company cars: Suhail had used them many a time, under the guise of David Stenn, and his prints would be readily available in any of them.
Which meant Crueler could ride Suhail’s Ford Escort out of the parking lot, and no-one would know the better. They’d assume Stenn used a company car to get to work, especially after they found his personal vehicle with two flat tires at his residence (where Crueler had parked his Corolla).
And then Crueler would hit up Fifth Avenue Jazz and life would be swingin’.

*

After he finished demolishing the Escort’s tires with a crowbar from its trunk, Crueler strode a couple blocks in the darkness towards his car. The ghetto equivalent of picket fences, apparently, were imposing messes of barbed wire that faintly reminded Crueler of a military checkpoint he had shot his way through in Baghdad. Back in the day.
He unlocked the Corolla-with-a-truckbed, and hopped in. He really needed to get new seats. His sucked. He flipped on his brights and twisted the key. Nothing. No ignition, just that annoying click that means you need to get your hands greasy and fix something. With a patent sigh, Crueler got out of his car, and opened the hood.
Under the hood in the hood.
He stared at the engine analytically for a moment.
We are the champions…
And then dove into the mess, finding his way through jungles of wire and clots of road gunk. Must’ve put a hundred-thousand miles on this thing since he last went under the hood, aside from the religiously-monotonous oil checkup every month.
… no time for losers…
He found the ignition thing and tapped it with his knuckles, hoping that some fluid or something had just clogged it up a little. Maybe try giving the sockets a little jiggle to make sure everything’s connected. He did that too, and went back to the driver’s seat.
He cranked it but there was still no ignition. Maybe someone had cut his ignition wires, for the heck of it or to send him a message. He got on his back under the chassis and used the light on his cell phone to peer at the wiring. Sure enough. And right next to the frayed wiring – a small charge of C4, un-detonated and poorly placed, but scary enough to send him into counter-intel mode.
He got out from under the hood, and stood up to scan the street. There were plenty of dark cars down the street where a guy with twenty-dollar Wal-Mart binoculars could get a great angle of him. But no direct threat yet.
He got a backup-gun out of his glove compartment; it was a Glock-mini, a perfectly-concealable, comfortable, accurate piece with clean lines and ambitious curves. Crueler really liked it. He also snatched a sweater from the backseat and abandoned the Corolla with the hood open, taking to the streets.
Crueler thought while he walked.
Whoever had placed the charge was a damned idiot. Even if it detonated, it would’ve given Crueler a concussion at most and really just screwed up his engine, but definitely not a lethal job. And he guessed they weren’t electrical engineers. They probably gave themselves a high-voltage shock cutting those ignition wires.
But that really just meant that he was at the mercy of a true professional. Someone with guts enough to plant a car bomb, and balls enough to know that Crueler would get away unscathed. He could only assume it was the same person/people who had left broke into his suite and left the note. God only knew what other pleasant surprises awaited him when he got back to the hotel.
Obnoxiously-loud hydraulic brakes from somewhere he couldn’t see alerted him to the presence of a city bus. He sprinted a block and caught the vehicle closing its doors after dropping off its last passenger.
Crueler shrugged on the gray hoodie from his car and hid the gun in the belly-pocket. The bus driver shook his head when Crueler walked up to the doors, but Crueler shot him a poor, devastated look, and the driver reluctantly opened his doors. Crueler paid a few bucks, gave the man a destination, and shuffled to the back of the bus to wait and plan.

*

Crueler got off at a bus stop a few blocks from The Fifth Avenue Jazz Club. The traffic was thick and it was still dark, but getting early. Maybe two in the morning. He crossed the street at a crosswalk and blended with the few pedestrians, moving towards the club at a slow, precise rate.
Going back to the hotel would have been a mistake. Assuming these stalker-people were more than a haphazard group of failed explosives engineers who enjoying breaking into hotel rooms and leaving prank notes, Crueler guessed they would be watching the hotel from quite a variety of angles. Fifth Avenue Jazz was safer, and the building’s layout was better-suited to waiting. Besides, jazz and innuendo with depressed waitresses sounded like fun at the moment.
He took a corner, and instantly noise and light hit him.
Dozens and dozens of cop cars surrounded the jazz club, blocking the entire road. There were radios and shouting and a strange metallic, smoky scent that wafted through the night air. Cubes of tempered glass where the street-windows had been. White forensics tents.
An ambulance screamed by and skidded to a stop behind a cop car. EMTs rushed out and yelled at local police to “move your damn cars!”, and then rushed three or four bodies out of the building on stretchers. Even from a distance, Crueler could tell they were corpses. Their skin was charred from some sort of fire damage, but two faces stood out to him.
The Kid.
And the one waitress with the legs.
Crueler immediately turned around and headed the other direction. Who knew what sort of evidence had been planted to implicate him… But the immediate thought settled in: they’d firebombed Fifth Avenue Jazz. No more Tuesday-night jams. No more Michael Brecker solos by the Kid. And Crueler wondered what that waitress’s dying thought had been. Probably something depressing and pious.
Anyway, he obviously couldn’t go back to the hotel. They’d probably knocked out a couple stories with demolition charges or something. Nope, he had to buy his way out of New York and get his ass over to the Bahamas.
Nassau.