Free City Of Lies by R.J. Ellory

after five a.m. New York hadn’t woken. John Harper stood at the window of a room on the tenth floor of the American Regent on the corner of Hudson and West Broadway. Room was cold. Raised his hand and pressed his palm against the glass. Spread his fingers, watched the lights from beyond appear in the spaces. Tried to count them. Too many.
    He tried to focus on a single thought; just anything at all. He found something, and then it was gone. Like the past he believed he had. There, then gone. You have no father John Harper . . . oh fuck, yes you do, and by the way, he’s seventy years old and laid up in St Vincent’s ’cause someone shot him. Nothing. Then something. What the fuck was that?
    Harper walked back and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt chill, the hairs raised on his arms, and he reached for his shirt. As he tugged it around his shoulders dollar bills spilled from the breast pocket. Harper gathered them up – fifties, all of them, and in counting them he remembered that Walt had leaned across the restaurant table and tucked them inside. Seven hundred dollars, the better part of half a month’s salary.
    Harper looked at the money, fanned the notes out between his fingers and held his arm up.
    ‘Seven hundred dollars,’ he said to no-one but himself.
    He folded them and set them on the edge of the bedside table. He wondered how much the room would cost – three, four hundred dollars a night, and that was without the mini-bar and the pay-per-view cable movies.
    And then he thought about the old man he’d seen through the window at St Vincent’s Hospital.
    He wanted to call Evelyn and scream at her down the phone.
What the fuck were you thinking, you stupid fucking bitch! Did youthink this didn’t matter? Did you think you could just leave me the whole of my life without telling me the truth
?
    John Harper didn’t call Evelyn Sawyer. He had a shower instead, and then he spoke to room service and asked who was paying the bill.
    ‘The room is booked in the name of a Miss Cathy Hollander, sir,’ the room guy said, and Harper told him
Thank you
and ordered a breakfast trolley sent up.
    While he ate slender crisps of smoked bacon and eggs Benedict, while he sipped fresh-squeezed orange juice and drank coffee that tasted like good Colombian with a hazelnut under-tone, he wondered what he should do. He needed to go back to Evelyn’s and collect his bag, but the impulse to return to the hospital was strong, very strong indeed. His father lay in a bed in the ICU. His own father, seventy years old, and someone had shot him for trying to prevent a liquor store robbery. Harper wondered who the shooter was: how old, what he looked like, whether he actually went away with any money, where he was now . . . was he scared or stoned or drunk, or maybe between the legs of a thirty-dollar hooker in a cheap room in a cheaper hotel somewhere on the Lower East Side . . .?
    Wondered all of these things. Had an answer for none of them.
    Finished eating. Wanted a cigarette real bad. Thought to call room service and have them send some up. They would’ve done that in a hotel like the American Regent. Couldn’t risk it. Smoke one and he’d smoke the whole pack, and then where the hell would he be? Right back where he started. He possessed more willpower than that; he exercised it and didn’t call.
    Thought he should leave New York. Make a call, book the flight, go home. Wasn’t the first time he’d have such a thought. Second time it would be stronger.
    Dressed in the same clothes as the previous day. Everything else he’d brought was in his bag at Evelyn’s. Picked up the money Walt had given him, figured he would give it back; couldn’t accept such an amount from a relative stranger. Sure the man had been there however many years before, but Harper had been a kid, a kid all of seven, eight, nine years old. Hell, he was thirty-six now. He had his own money, not a great deal ure, but he wasn’t one to be accepting