“I know, but—”

“Hush.” He cut one of the bonds, freeing her left arm. He saw blood on her skin. “They cut you?”

She glanced at it. “He ripped out my IV. It’s okay. Jack—”

“Cut the rest while I drive,” he said, handing her the knife. “But stay there and don’t touch anything.”

He locked the gurney wheels and hopped back into the front just as the light turned green.

“Jack,” she said, as he turned onto Fifth Avenue, “I heard shots. Who was shooting?”

Change the subject, he thought.

“Who were those men?” he said.

“I don’t know! Thank God you came along. But those shots—the blond man was carrying a gun—I saw it under his jacket when he was taping me up. Did he shoot at you?”

“Um, no.”

“Then how . . . ?”

As Jack turned onto the wide expanse of East 96th and headed for the FDR Drive, he heard a thump from the back. In the rearview mirror he saw Weezy extricating herself from the body bag. A few seconds later, wrapped in a sheet from the gurney, she began wriggling over the back of the seat.

“Stay down.”

“No. I need to be up here with you.”

She landed on the passenger side, then adjusted the sheet around her. She had no street clothes, just the hospital gown and the sheet. She sat there trembling.

“Okay, but don’t touch anything. Don’t leave any prints.”

“They were kidnapping me.” Her voice shook as the words tumbled out. “Really kidnapping me. I thought I was going to x-ray but instead I was wheeled into this little room where another man was waiting with these rolls of tape. A memory came back then. I’d seen him before—yesterday, I guess it was—when he followed me from an Internet café. Before I could say a word they taped my mouth shut and wrapped me up, then put me in that body bag. I could barely move and it was hard to breathe. I’d imagined the possibility, but the reality . . .” She shuddered.

“Easy, easy,” he said. “They failed. That’s the important thing.”

She was shaking her head. “This has gotten way out of control. I—” She fixed her dark gaze on Jack. “They did fail, didn’t they. I heard shots. And then the next thing I know, you’re unzipping the body bag.”

“I just happened along at the right time.”

“No. It’s more than that. Jack, are you carrying a gun? Did you shoot those men?”

“You don’t mince words, do you?”

“And you don’t answer questions. A simple yes or no, please.”

Tell her? She seemed to have a pretty good idea what the answer would be. And later on, when she’d inevitably hear about two men shot to death early this evening at Mount Sinai Medical Center, she’d put it all together anyway.

She must have taken his hesitation as a refusal to answer.

She sighed and said, “In all my surfing I’ve picked up chatter on New York sites here and there over the years about a guy who hires out to fix things. Some people call him ‘the repairman,’ others call him ‘Repairman Jack’—”

“Oh, swell name.”

She smiled. “You still say ‘swell.’ Just like when we were kids. That was out of date even then.” Her eyes unfocused for a second, as if she were detouring down memory lane, then she was back. “Anyway, some just call him ‘Jack.’ But somehow—don’t ask me how or why—out of all the Jacks in the world, I knew it was you.”

“Me? That’s crazy.”

“I heard about this guy fixing situations and I flashed back to Carson Toliver’s locker and all the tricks someone pulled on him, and suddenly I realized you were behind that. Admit that, at least, will you?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, that was me.”

“Why?”

“Because he hurt you.”

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. When he heard a sob he snapped a look at her. A tear squeezed out from behind her closed lids.

“You okay?”

She straightened and wiped her eyes with a corner of the sheet.

“I’m fine. You drove Carson Toliver crazy and made a fool of him . . . for me?”

He reached over and squeezed her hand. “You can’t let someone hurt your friends and get away with it. Especially not your best friend.”

She looked like she was going to cry as her voice teetered on the edge of a sob. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

“Couldn’t tell anybody. That would bring a lot of attention, and I wasn’t looking for any.”

“I found your Web site last year and left you a message. You called me back and I recognized your voice. As soon as I heard it I hung up, but I knew it was you.”

Jack vaguely remembered something like that. He’d just assumed the person had changed her mind. Happened now and then.

“But back to the questions at hand: Are you or are you not carrying a gun, and did you or did you not use it back there?”

There she sat in an open-back hospital gown under a clumsily wrapped sheet, bleeding from an IV site, recent victim of an attempted abduction, yet back in control of herself and trying to control the situation.

He gave a mental shrug: What the hell.

“Yes and yes.”

For a few seconds she seemed taken aback, then, “You shot those two men?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you killed them?”

He’d hit them twice each square in the chest with both a hollowpoint and a hardball. The hollowpoint would do the most damage, expanding upon impact and shredding lungs, major vessels, and the heart.

“Yes.”

“Did they try to shoot you?”

“The blond guy was going for his gun but I already had mine out.”

“What about the other one?”

“I didn’t see a gun on him. But he might have had one.”

“ ‘Might’ have had a gun? You didn’t know?”

“No.”

“But you shot him anyway?”

“If he didn’t have one now, he’d probably have one the next time we met. And he’d probably want to get even for his friend.”

“But you didn’t know if you’d ever see him again.”

He glanced at her. “Whoever’s looking for you, I don’t think they’re going to quit. Do you?”

She looked out the window, then back at him. “No. I guess not.”

“Well, I’m going to do my damnedest to keep them from finding you.”

“You don’t need to be involved.”

“But I do. And anyway, the point is moot: I am involved. So therefore my chances of running into a guy who wants to kill me are kind of high. I try to avoid situations like that. Sometimes you have to be proactive.”

“So . . . you . . . just . . . killed him.”

Truth was, he hadn’t thought twice about it. Hadn’t thought even once, really. He’d seen them wheeling Weezy away and he’d clicked into expediency mode. The last thing he’d wanted was to shoot anyone—too messy, too noisy. He realized now that he’d instinctively positioned himself so that if a hardball round went through one of them, it wouldn’t hit Weezy. They hadn’t left him much choice.

Them or us.

But her choice of words irked him.

“Don’t say ‘just.’ There’s no ‘just’ killing someone. And these weren’t ‘just’ someones. They were someones who were abducting you. I don’t know what their plans were. Maybe they just wanted to question you. Maybe they were going to question you and kill you. I don’t know. I may never know. But I do know one of them was going for his gun. And I also know that neither of those two will be trying that again.”

“You’re not the Jack I knew. You’re scary.”

“I’m nothing of the sort. I would have been perfectly happy to resolve that little problem without fireworks, but I wasn’t given a choice. And once the guns come out, you need to keep firing until no one’s shooting back. It’s not pleasant, but it’s the way it is.” He glanced at her. “My turn at twenty questions: Why are they after you?”

She sighed. “It’s—”

She winced and cupped a hand over the stitches in her scalp.

“What’s wrong?”

She spoke through clenched teeth. “My head. I don’t think I’m supposed to be up and about yet.”

Jack knew she was right. But he couldn’t see taking her to another hospital.