Oh yes, Rebecca, because you insulted me, you’ll have to pay for it,
big-time.”
She slammed down the receiver. She held it there, hard, as if
trying to stanch the bleeding of a wound, as if holding it down
would keep him from dialing her again, keep him away from
her. Slowly, finally, she backed away from the phone. She heard
a wife on the TV soap plead with her husband not to leave her
for her younger sister. She walked out onto her small balcony
and looked over Central Park, then turned a bit to the right to look
at the Metropolitan Museum. Hordes of people, most in shorts,
most of them tourists, sat on the steps, reading, laughing, talking,
eating hot dogs from the vendor Teodolpho, some of them probably
smoking dope, picking pockets, and there were two cops on
horseback nearby, their horses’ heads pumping up and down, nervous
for some reason. The sun blazed down. It was only mid-June,
yet the unseasonable heat wave continued unabated. Inside the
apartment it was twenty-five degrees cooler. Too cold, at least for
her, but she couldn’t get the thermostat to move either up or
down.
The phone rang again. She heard it clearly through the half-closed
glass door.
She jerked around and nearly fell over the railing. Not that it
was unexpected. No, never that, it was just so incongruous set
against the normalcy of the scene outside.
She forced herself to look back into her mother’s lovely pastel
living room, to the glass table beside the sofa, at the white phone
that sat atop that table, ringing, ringing.
She let it ring six more times. Then she knew she had to answer
it. It might be about her mother, her very sick mother, who might
be dying. But of course she knew it was him. It didn’t matter. Did
he know why she even had the phone turned on in the first place?
He seemed to know everything else, but he hadn’t said anything
about her mother. She knew she had no choice at all. She picked
it up on the tenth ring.
“Rebecca, I want you to go out onto your balcony again. Look
to where those cops are sitting on their horses. Do it now, Rebecca.”
She laid down the receiver and walked back out onto the balcony,
leaving the glass door open behind her. She looked down at
the cops. She kept looking. She knew something horrible was going
to happen, she just knew it, and there was nothing she could do
about it but watch and wait. She waited for three minutes. Just
when she was beginning to convince herself that the man was trying
new and different ways to terrorize her, there was a loud explosion.
She watched both horses rear up wildly. One of the cops went
flying. He landed in a bush as thick smoke billowed up, obscuring
the scene.
When the smoke cleared a bit, she saw an old bag lady lying on
the sidewalk, her market cart in twisted pieces beside her, her few
belongings strewn around her. Pieces of paper fluttered down to
the sidewalk, now rutted with deep pockmarks. A large bottle of
ginger ale was broken, liquid flowing over the old woman’s sneakers.
Time seemed to have stopped, then suddenly there was chaos
as everyone in view exploded into action. Some people who’d
been loitering on the steps of the museum ran toward the old lady.
The cops got there first; the one who’d been thrown from his
horse was limping as he ran. They were yelling, waving their
arms–at the carnage or the onrushing people, Becca didn’t know.
She saw the horses throwing their heads from side to side, their eyes
rolling at the smoke, the smell of the explosive. Becca stood there
frozen, watching. The old woman didn’t move.
Becca knew she was dead. Her stalker had detonated a bomb
and killed that poor old woman. Why? Just to terrorize her more?
She was already so terrified she could hardly function. What did he
want now? She’d left Albany, left the governor’s staff with no warning,
had not even called to check in.
She walked slowly back inside the living room, firmly closing