Atop the concrete subway steps, Ruby stopped and stood still in the massive flow of hurrying people.
She gaped up at the giant TV screen billboards. The cartoons and lingerie ads. The streaming ABC News electronic billboard beside her that said it was twenty-nine degrees.
She checked her watch. It was almost midnight. Her train had arrived in New York City at eleven fifteen, but it took a little while in the chaotic disorienting swirl at Penn Station to figure out which subway she needed to take to get to Times Square.
Disorienting, Ruby thought, looking around.
Yep. Disorienting was the theme of her week all right.
Even after a full minute, she kept standing there, staring. She knew she looked like a tourist, but she didn’t care.
She had one or two other things on her mind right now, she thought.
She found a Starbucks half a block west of the subway and went in and got a tall black. Looking out through the foggy, greasy glass to get her bearings, she could see there was some kind of frantic commotion going on at the corner. People were stopped and staring and some of them were pointing phones at some other people there on the ground.
She thought maybe it was a fight. But then the crowd parted, and she saw it was a smiling Buzz Lightyear and green-painted Lady Liberty break-dancing together on a flattened cardboard box.
“My, my, my,” she said.
On the morning of the day before, she’d left the rental van in the parking lot of a mall near Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport and taken a series of cabs to Yemassee, South Carolina, where she got on the Amtrak to New York.
It was Eric Wheldon’s idea that she ditch the van for the Amtrak. She’d called him the moment after she bought a new prepaid burner phone. The first thing he told her was to take out as much cash as she could from an ATM and not to use her credit card.
She had wanted to call her sister, Lori, to make sure she and the kids were okay, but he said no way. That they would definitely be tapping her line. Which thoroughly sucked, but at least her brother-in-law, Mitch, would be home by now.
She slammed back the last of her coffee and dropped the cup into the trash hole and pulled the door back out to the grim, frigid sidewalk. She was supposed to meet Wheldon on the corner of 44th and Broadway, and when she arrived, there was a crowd on the corner. It was some kind of nightclub opening, and there were photographers standing by a red carpet and a velvet rope.
She looked at people, searching for Wheldon as she passed. In his YouTube videos, he was a neatly dressed reporterish-looking middle-aged white guy.
There was no one who looked like that in front of the red ropes, so she went to the corner and waited on the light. On the opposite side of it, she saw a couple of dog walkers standing there, allowing their dogs to greet each other.
Of course, she thought.
Why not take the dog out for a stroll at midnight in Times Square in the freezing cold? To meet Buzz Lightyear for a break-dancing lesson maybe? Makes sense.
As she arrived at the opposite curb, she realized one of the dog walkers was staring at her. He was a pale, fiftyish man in a long dark overcoat.
Was it Wheldon? Ruby thought. The neat hair and reporterish look were the same, and he seemed to be about the same age. Though he hadn’t mentioned any dog.
Or had the FBI found her? Ruby thought, gnawing on her lip. They looked reporterish, too.
They didn’t break eye contact as she went past him north up Broadway. She was coming to the corner of 45th when she noticed that he was coming up behind her. She stopped short, freaking out a little. He handed her something before he kept going like a shot with the dog around the corner of 45th.
She kept going straight up Broadway and waited until she got across the next side street before she looked at it.
It was a flyer for an Irish pub on 50th Street.
12:30 was written in Sharpie along its bottom.