-22-

            Felicity wasted no time getting into her Corvette and moving it into traffic.  She was angry.  Angry with herself for being so trusting.  Angry at an old friend for being untrustworthy.  Angry at a world that twisted people so easily, turning friends into enemies in a heartbeat. 

            Her brain spinning, she drove by reflex.  As she cruised, a growing uneasiness crept into her mind.  She wandered the streets, pursuing an elusive feeling.  It was her usual danger warning, but then again it was not.  She was confident of her own safety, but her senses were never wrong.  Whatever it was, it was driving her crazy, like a hornet trapped in her ear.  And something was drawing her uptown, making her turn.  She wondered if Morgan ever...

            That was it!  Her eyes snapped wide and she squealed her tires taking the next corner.  It was Morgan.  He was in danger, deadly danger.  Perhaps walking into a trap.  She did not know how she knew, nor did she care.  All she was sure about was how she cared about this man.  He had saved her life and by God, she would save his if she could.

            Felicity usually kept a low profile because she hated the idea of entanglement with the police under any circumstances, but this day her need for speed tossed all that out the window.  She turned up the Chieftains blaring from her radio, then pressed her thumb into the button on the side of her Hurst T-shifter, releasing the nitrous oxide kicker to her engine.  Her head snapped back as her car leaped forward and suddenly she was drag racing across town, aiming at the ramp onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. 

            The Henry Hudson, recently rebuilt, was a narrow strip along Manhattan Island’s western edge.  It was two lanes wide each way, with a two-foot high cement wall on either side.  The lanes were wavy lines dotted with potholes.  The traffic flow was fierce, hot and unforgiving.

            At times like this, she did her driving on another mental plane.  The union of driver and machine was nearly meditative.  She flowed among the cars, weaving with the wavy lines at eighty miles per hour.  Pursuit was not a concern.  She knew no policeman would be insane enough to chase her on this madcap road.

            While much of her consciousness focused on guiding her car, another part of her brain considered her reactions, as if she could stand outside herself as an observer.  She wondered if this mad urge she felt was the same as whatever drove Morgan Stark to her, days ago in an obscure Centrral American jungle.  Where had it come from?  What was the bizarre link between their minds that appeared to be functioning right then as a biological homing device? 

            After all, they were barely more than strangers and they could not be less alike.  White and black, sophisticated and earthy, educated and not.  They had nothing whatever in common.  Of course, they both traveled in an underground subculture, but she moved in a world of thieves and confidence men, not professional soldiers and hardened killers like he did.

            She remembered two or three people in the past telling her that she was psychic, usually after a narrow escape.  She had never really accepted it.  A natural skeptic, she had always figured she just had good instincts, or sharp senses.  But now this had happened.  There was no denying this, no explaining it away.  There was no logical, rational way that she could know Morgan’s location.  But she also had not cared about anyone this much since she had left her family.  Now her respect, affection, and perhaps something stronger she felt for this adventurer rogue was leading her right to him.

            Although she was quite familiar with Manhattan’s streets, she had very little experience with the rest of New York City.  She somehow got onto the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive on the east side of the island.  Soon she found herself on something called the Major Deegan Expressway.  Minutes later she was smoothly shifting down through the gears in a slum neighborhood in the South Bronx.  She remembered seeing Dublin after a clash between the IRA and British forces.  The setting was eerily familiar.

            Fear and doubt were eating their way into her mind.  This was insane.  She could cruise around for days looking for Morgan.  She must have been crazy thinking she could find one man in a city of millions.  Oh, God, she would hate to fail.

            She shifted down into first gear to lose more speed just as her ebony Corvette slid past a building surrounded by vacant lots.  At the moment she glanced up at the tenement, she heard the sound of a small explosion come from inside the building.  A bomb?  No.  Too high pitched for a bomb blast, but too loud for a gunshot.  It could have been a shotgun blast.

            In less time than those thoughts took to form, she had pulled the ‘Vette over to the curb, locked the car, engaged the anti-theft device, kicked off her high heels and started her sprint toward the door.  It was Morgan.  Somehow she knew he was in there, and the intermittent gunshots she heard could spell his death.

            Seconds later she stood in the hall, panting as much from anxiety as breathlessness.  She had lunged up the front stairs to the landing before she had time to think.  People were upstairs shooting at each other and here she came to save the day with nothing but her teeth and her nails.  She cast about quickly for a weapon.  In a far corner lay a dirty man, slumped over in a ball.  Next to him lay a broken wooden table leg.  In desperation, she snatched it up.  With a leap she smashed the single naked bulb illuminating the building.  Now the entire hall was midnight dark.

            As silently as a cat creeping through a graveyard, the girl stepped up the stairs, avoiding the broken ones.  She thanked the Lord for blessing her with almost inhuman night vision.  It was an invaluable asset for a burglar.  Now it was her only equalizer against men whose profession was killing.

            Darkness also filled the apartment on the second floor, interrupted only by the intermittent muzzle flashes of pistols and a shotgun.  Morgan could smell rather than see the cloud hanging in the air.  The smell, gunpowder mixed with sweat, stung his nose.  His back against the sofa and gun in hand, Morgan braced to make his move.  His crash into the wall had sprained his left shoulder but, aside from that minor injury, he considered himself pretty lucky so far.  A half dozen bullets had ripped through the couch but none had hit him.  The well-stuffed sofa had also proved solid enough to absorb two follow-up shotgun blasts, mostly because the man firing the shotgun lacked the courage to get any closer to Morgan’s gun.  

            Morgan weighed his options during a brief lull in the firing.  He had a pretty good mental fix on the riot gun user.  He planned to slip around the couch on the end toward the door.  He would pop up and take out the shotgun man with his automatic.  Number two would fire at the bright pistol blast.  He would score or he would not.  If he failed to kill Morgan, Morgan would surely kill him with one shot.  It was a gamble, the only one in town.  

            He poised on his haunches behind the end of the couch, both hands gripping his pistol.  He would make his move now, following three deep breaths.  One.  Two.  What was that?  As he stared in frozen disbelief, he thought he saw two green cat’s eyes enter the room, just inches from the floor.  He knew those eyes.  They disappeared briefly behind the big chair, but reappeared a few seconds later against the middle of the far wall, slowly rising to five and a half feet above the floor.  She was standing straight up.  What was she doing here?

            Silence spread through darkness of the small apartment, and for one brief moment, time froze for Morgan.  When things finally moved again, they seemed to do so in slow motion.  Turning to face the kitchen, Morgan lifted his pistol over the edge of the arm of the couch.  In the kitchen doorway, a riot gun barrel was raised.  A single drop of light splashed off Morgan’s automatic.

            The man lying under the small table shattered the silence.

            “I got you now,” the killer snarled in a strong Spanish accent as he raised his revolver.  He was unaware of the woman straddling his upper body but Morgan could see her eyes above him, blazing with hate.

            “Paco!” Felicity shouted, bringing her makeshift club down between her ankles, and into his face, with all her strength.  Simultaneous with the Mexican’s squeal of pain, Morgan sprang to his feet, firing twice, quickly.  One final shotgun blast exploded into the ceiling and the figure in the kitchen fell backward and crashed to the floor.

            Paco bolted for the door, holding his face with both hands.  Felicity followed, and two quick sets of footsteps clattered down the single flight of stairs.  Morgan followed as best he could.  There was no point in checking the man in the kitchen.  Morgan knew with cold certainly that he was dead.

            Out on the stoop, the Mexican was trying to run with a hellcat on his back.  One of her hands was clenched in his grease-slicked hair.  The other was raking his already bloodied face.

            “I told you I’d get you, you son of a bitch,” Felicity screamed, her voice thick with her native Irish brogue.  Paco was also screaming, while he fought to escape this mad eyed, red headed she devil by moving across the vacant lot.  He stumbled on some broken bricks and she was on him again, clawing and scratching like a maniac.  It was an interesting new side of Felicity to the lone observer.

            Standing at the top of the stoop, Morgan chuckled at how overdressed the woman was for this.  He was not sure what it was the little man had done to deserve this furious attack, but Morgan certainly hoped he never did it himself.  The guy was trying to protect a smashed-in nose by hiding his face in his arms.  Felicity was pounding on him now with clenched fists.  It seemed a comical sight, until Paco reached down and grabbed a broken bottle by its neck.  The smile dropped from Morgan’s face.

            “O’Brian!  Roll clear!”  Morgan’s voice carried piercing authority.  Felicity sprang away from Paco, his broken glass weapon cleaving empty air.  Forty-five meters away, Morgan raised his nine millimeter one handed, at arm’s length, aligned the three dots of the combat sights, and squeezed off a single shot.  Paco had turned toward Morgan when the back of his tee shirt flared, and then blackened.  He was dead before his scream stopped.

            Without a hint of hesitation, Felicity dashed across the lot toward Morgan.  As she approached he considered the picture he must have presented.  His right side was shredded, as if some wild beast had raked his ribs with giant claws.  His left arm hung limp and temporarily useless.  He straightened his posture and forced a small smile onto his face.  He didn’t want his minor injuries to look worse than they were.  Felicity stopped in front of him, with one bare foot on the bottom sandstone step.  He saw a brief flash of worry crease her forehead.

            “I’m thinking we’d best be going,” she said.  “Somebody’s going to want to be asking a lot of questions about that creep.  And I assume there’s a dead body upstairs.”

            “Well, two actually, but who’s counting?”  Morgan replied, wincing his way down the steps.  Looking up, he spotted a deep black Corvette with polished aluminum racing wheels.

“That’s just got to be your ride, right?  Nice wheels, Red.”

Felicity hustled him across the street without a response, thumbing a fob to unlock the doors before they reached he vehicle.  Once inside she reached across to open the door for Morgan.  He hurried to slide into the velour seats that, like the carpet, matched her eyes.  Once under his seat belt, Morgan could do little but hold on while Felicity got them several blocks from the shootings.  When she slowed below thirty he thought something must be wrong.

            “Morgan,” she said, keeping her eyes focused ahead.  “I got here but I’m not quite sure how to get back to my place.  I’m afraid I don’t know The Bronx.”

“Well, lucky for you, I do,” he said, massaging his left shoulder.  “Hang a left here, and don’t be in such a hurry, okay?  This car will draw enough attention without speeding.”

For half of the drive back Morgan watched her drive in silence, except when he gave occasional directions.  He recognized all the signs of a person slowly coming down from an adrenaline rush.  He also noticed her complete lack of nervous habits.  That is, she did not play with her hair or drum her fingers on the steering wheel or anything like that.  She seemed to be just peacefully enjoying that deep calm that comes after a successful mission.  When he thought she was completely relaxed, he broke the silence.

            “So, you had history with the Spanish guy, huh?”

            “You could say that,” Felicity responded.  “He was one of the boys who gave me that Safariland tour.”

            “Well I got to hand it to his boss.  Whoever set up that trap was a real pro.  Of course, I guess that deal in Mexico gave you a good reason to hate these guys.”

            “Damned right,” Felicity said.  “And on top of that, the Mexican made improper advances.  I told him I’d see him off, too.  Of course, I didn’t really expect to watch him die.”

            She lapsed into quiet long enough to draw a deep breath and slowly release it in a long sigh.  He accepted her pensive silence without feeling a need to rush in and fill it with words.  Powering down his window, he leaned his elbow out, inviting the air in.  They had reached Manhattan and were on a wide southward street, moving slowly enough to let an occasional car pass them.  After a moment Felicity looked over at him and smiled.

            “You know, this feels pretty good,” she said.  “I mean, I’ve been on some pretty hairy capers in my time, but I never had anyone to share the letdown period with.”

            Morgan nodded.  “I think I know what you mean.  After a good mission, or even after a shambles like today, it’s nice to get with the guys and tip a couple of brews and just enjoy that relaxation.  And refine the stories you’ll tell.  Man, I can’t believe I walked into a trap like that.  And the poor slob who led me in, he didn’t even know the setup.  They blew him away trying to get at me.  By the way, you were great in there.  Quiet as a pro.”

            “Well, I am a cat burglar,” Felicity said.

            “Yeah, I guess.  Can you really see in the dark?”  He stared into her face.

            “Better than anyone I know,” Felicity said, smiling.  “Born with it.”

            “Pretty handy in your line of work.  By the way, how did you find me?”

            They were in front of Felicity’s building and she let the question pass.  The Corvette purred down the ramp into the parking garage.