Instead of answering, the driver knelt and removed Rafael’s wallet, trying not to look at the hot mess that an ounce of lead makes when it’s sent traveling through a human head at the cruising speed of a 747.
“It’s him,” said the driver, calmly pocketing the target’s driver’s license and checking his watch. “Our work is done here. Time to go.”
THEY SCOOPED UP THEIR brass, left the BMW bike out on 141st, and went out at a quick, steady pace through the back of the building, taking a garbage alley that led out onto Riverside Drive.
Three blocks south, parked alongside Riverside Park, was the preplaced getaway vehicle: a beat-up dingy white work van with the baffling and meaningless words THE BOWLES GROUP LLC poorly hand-painted on the door.
Once inside the rear of the van, the driver finally pulled off his helmet. He was a fit-looking white guy in his late thirties with close-cropped blond hair and light-blue eyes that were striking in his otherwise easy-to-forget plain and pale face.
He scrubbed the sweat from his hair with a towel and then put his pale-denim-colored eyes to his stainless steel Rolex. It seemed like it was last week that they were up on Amsterdam, but the assassination had taken eleven minutes from start to finish. Eleven!
He looked over at the rider getting changed beside him. Then he reached around and cupped her perfect left breast. Her right one wasn’t so bad either, he felt. She turned and smiled at him, an improbably gorgeous woman in her early thirties, petite yet athletic, with white-blond hair and large greenish-brown doe eyes. His pet name for her ever since they met was Coppertone Girl.
Coppertone Girl made a quick twisting move and then he was somehow down on his back with something hard digging into his crotch. He looked down. It was her .45!
“I’ll do it. You know I will, you pig,” she said, her green eyes cold behind the white-blond shards of her bangs.
Then she kissed him hard.
And they both started to die laughing.
It never got old, this fired-up feeling afterward. They’d walked the rope with no net, and now they were back on sweet, exhilaratingly solid ground.
They kissed again, and then he pressed in her pouty pink lower lip with his callused thumb. She bit his thumb playfully, and then he was jumping over the front seat and turning the engine over.
An hour later, they’d put all the gear and the van back at the South Bronx safe house and were showered and changed and rolling back into Manhattan in their new Volvo crossover. They actually found a parking spot right in front of their Federal-style brick town house, in SoHo on Wooster Street between Broome and Spring.
They stood holding hands on the sidewalk for a moment. Nothing but the famous chic neighborhood’s incredible beaux arts nineteenth-century cast-iron buildings in every direction. The cobblestones, Corinthian columns, and delicate wrought iron railings dusted in the still-falling snow were like what might appear on the cover of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.
Not bad for an Indiana shit kicker, the man thought, drinking in the billion-dollar view down his block.
Not bad at all, he thought, looking at his exquisite wife, now in a candy-blue Benetton down coat, cream mini-sweaterdress, and black leather leggings.
He knocked the snow off his shoes on their doormat and keyed open their front door.
“Mommy! Daddy! You’re home!” their four-year-old daughter, Victoria, squealed, a blur of pink footie pajamas and strawberry-blond curls as she ran in from the family room, sliding on the gleaming hardwood in her Nana-made wool slippers.
“Yes! We! Are!” said the husband with equal excitement as he pretended to let his giggling daughter tackle him.
“That was a quick movie,” said Jenna, the babysitter, bringing up the rear, holding a sheet of still-raw cookies.
“We arrived late, with all the snow, so we just decided to get some dessert instead,” said the wife.
“Dessert? Wow. You guys just live on the razor’s edge, don’t you?” said their ever-sarcastic NYU film student sitter with an eye roll.
“Oh, that’s us. We’re real wild,” the husband said, laughing as he hung his car coat in the front hall closet and snitched a glob of raw oatmeal cookie dough.
“Yep, we’re complete psychos, all right,” agreed his wife as she lifted Victoria and blew a raspberry on her cheek.