Free Michelangelo's Notebook by Paul Christopher Page B

time Delaney reached the south side of Houston Street she was gone. He stood panting at the subway entrance. She was lost and he didn’t have the slightest idea where she was going.
     
     
     

14
     
     
    Finn rode the F train one stop to Broadway-Lafayette, changed for a downtown G train and then changed again for a Brooklyn-bound 4 train, which she rode all the way down to Bowling Green. She stood rigidly, her hand wrapped around the pole, staring at the doors and not really seeing anything at all or anyone around her. Seeing Delaney had been the last straw. The look of the man as he came hurtling across the street wasn’t that of someone willing to offer a helping hand. He already thought she was somehow implicated in Peter’s death and probably had something to do with Crawley’s murder as well. Adding Raptor Head to the body count wasn’t going to make him any less suspicious even if it had obviously been self-defense. She didn’t even know who the Asian kid was, for crying out loud! Suddenly she was a suspect in multiple murders with cops chasing after her up and down New York streets and into the subway.
    The train rolled into the Bowling Green station at the southern tip of Manhattan and Finn snapped out of her fugue. According to the map the next stop was Borough Hall in Brooklyn. She’d had a hard enough time learning how to navigate around Manhattan; this was definitely not the time to start on a new borough. When the doors slid open she stepped out along with a couple of dozen bright young things, male and female, out to make their mark on Wall Street, no doubt.
    Finn climbed up to the surface, glanced briefly in the direction of where the Twin Towers had stood, then turned away and crossed over into Battery Park. She found a bench down by the jogging path that ran right around Manhattan’s big toe and stared downriver at the Statue of Liberty, a distant ghost in the morning haze. She stripped off her knapsack, put it on the bench then sat down beside it, curling one long leg underneath herself, thinking out her options.
    Her name was Fiona Katherine Ryan from Columbus, Ohio, and she was an art history student at NYU. She’d slept with fewer than half a dozen guys, she liked Häagen-Dazs better than Ben and Jerry’s and she didn’t really believe anything she heard on Howard Stern or saw on
Sex and the City
reruns. She’d traveled to Italy, spent a little bit of time in Amsterdam and Paris and she’d been well and truly drunk about three times in her life. She didn’t smoke dope or take drugs except for Extra Strength Tylenol when she had especially bad period cramps. She worried about zits in the winter. The biggest secret she had was the knowledge that she would have sex with Johnny Depp in the middle of Times Square if he asked her to, which wasn’t likely. She knew she was fairly intelligent, maybe a little smarter than average. She knew she was pretty, but not beautiful, which was fine with her. She liked small animals, especially cats. She didn’t much care for spiders or anchovies.
    In other words, she was completely normal. So what was she doing being homeless, chased by cops and guys with great big knives? She was caught in the middle of something but she didn’t have the slightest idea what. All she knew right now is that she wished she smoked. She sighed and stared at the ripply patch in front of her where the waters of the East River and the Hudson met. That was kind of how she felt right now—swept along.
    She had a twentieth-century English lit prof they called the Bald Bear because he had hair all over his body and none on his head. He was in his forties, wore argyle socks and shorts to school in the middle of February and talked on endlessly about the Ambler theorem. Eric Ambler was an early thriller writer and all of his books followed the same pattern: an ordinary person suddenly finds him- or herself in an extraordinary, and usually dangerous, set of circumstances. The Bald