He opened the phone and scanned the message.

NYPD called. Your client could be the Killer! Get out of there!

He heard a strange coughing bark, and the BlackBerry suddenly leaped out of his hand.

Wiping particles of plastic and glass out of his eyes, Gary tried to focus on the client. Mr. Savage was standing now. He tucked a long pistol into his belt, then turned and lifted the travertine coffee table behind him. It must have weighed well over a hundred pounds, but Savage reared back and threw it effortlessly through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. A deafening explosion of shards of flying glass sent Gary to his knees, scrambling to hide behind his desk.

“C’mon, Gary. Don’t tell me you didn’t think it would all come back to haunt you?” the man yelled over the wind that suddenly roared through the office. Paralyzed, Gary watched legal papers fly off his desk in an eddy over Park Avenue.

“Noooo!” he suddenly yelled, making a desperate try to run. He got as far as the edge of his desk before the Teacher shot out both his kneecaps with the silenced.22.

The pain was more incredible than Gary had ever believed possible. He tottered to the edge of the glassless window and almost fell through, just managing to wrap an arm around the metal frame. He clung there for dear life, staring four hundred feet down to the concrete and crowds on Park Avenue.

“Here, let me give you a hand,” the Teacher said, stepping over. “No, hold that thought. Make it a foot.” Viciously, he stomped the heel of his Prada wingtip into the trembling lawyer’s chin.

“Noooooo!” Gary screamed, as his grip tore loose and he plunged downward.

“You said that already, fucker,” the Teacher said with a laugh, watching the body twist and tumble through the last few seconds of its life.

When Cargill finally smacked into the plaza out in front of the building, the impact sounded more like a TV set than a person exploding.

The Teacher strode to the office door and swung it open. In the corridor outside, some people were running in panic, while others sat frozen, shivering like trapped rabbits behind their desks.

He trotted to the rear stairs with the gun held by the side of his leg, wondering if there was anyone stupid enough to get in his way.

Even after a ninety-mile-an-hour ride back into the city, I still couldn’t believe it. Gladstone had actually been in Cargill’s office when I’d called! I’d missed stopping him by seconds.

I screeched up in front of the Park Avenue office building. Behind the crime scene tape lay a lot of glass and one very, very dead lawyer.

“Shot him in the kneecaps first, then must have thrown him,” Terry Lavery said as I walked up. “I’m not the biggest fan of lawyers either, but sheesh.” I followed his gaze up the sheer glass face of the building to the gaping empty rectangle near the top.

“Any idea how he got away?” I said.

“Came down the service stairs. We found some clothes in the stairwell. He had his choice of exits. There’s seven from the basement and four from the lobby. Must have changed and got out before the first radio cars got here. How long can this guy stay so lucky?”

Beth Peters came over to join us. “You hear the latest?” she said. “Dozens of sightings of Gladstone in the last hour. From Queens to Staten Island. Some woman even claimed he was in front of her on line at the Statue of Liberty.”

“I heard on 1010 WINS that a bunch of those clubs over on Twenty-seventh in Chelsea were closed last night because everyone’s too afraid to go out,” Lavery said. “Not to mention the Union Square Cafe waiter who actually stabbed a suspicious customer at lunch because he thought he was the killer.”

Beth Peters shook her head. “This town hasn’t been this jumpy since the Dinkins administration.”

My phone rang again. The readout told me it was McGinnis. I took a deep breath as I flipped it open, guessing I wasn’t going to like what he told me.

I was right.

Rush hour was in full swing by the time the Teacher got to Hell’s Kitchen. A kind of pity had overtaken him as he’d gazed sympathetically at the clogged, screaming traffic before the Lincoln Tunnel.

The sight was almost too painful to behold. The bovine faces behind the windshields. The glossy billboards that dangled above the congestion like carrots beckoning trapped, witless donkeys. The Honda and Volkswagen horns feebly bleating in the polluted air like sheep being led to slaughter.

Something out of Dante, he thought sadly. Or worse, a Cormac McCarthy novel.

“Don’t you know that you are made for greatness?” he’d wanted to shout at them as he skirted the plastic bumpers and overheating SUV grilles. “Don’t you know you were put here for something more than this?”

He climbed the stairs to his apartment, now wearing the blue Dickies work clothes that he’d changed into before he’d escaped. He knew it was a pretty lame disguise, but the fact of the matter was, it didn’t have to be that great. With its millions of people and exits and entrances and subways and buses and taxis, the city was virtually impossible for the police to cover.

The cops had been actually screeching into the plaza in front of the building entrance as he’d left the stairwell. He had simply walked through the bank attached to the lobby and used its exit to the side street.

He sighed. Even the ease with which he’d gotten away was somehow making him feel blue.

Safely inside his apartment, he pulled his recliner over to the window and sat. He was tired after his walk, but it was the good kind – the manly, righteous exhaustion that came from true work.

The sun was starting to set over the Hudson, its light washing the faded tenements and warehouses with gold. Snatches of memory came to him as he gazed at it.

Scaling chain-link fences. The heat of the concrete through his sneakers. Stickball and basketball. His brother and he playing in one of the rusted playgrounds alongside Rockaway Beach.

Those were from his old life, his real life, the one he’d been ripped out of when his mother kidnapped him and took him to rot on Fifth Avenue.

The irrevocable nature of what had happened to him pierced him like a heated needle. There was no going back, no do-over. His life, so crammed full of all the crap that was supposed to make him happy, had been ultimately and completely worthless.

He cried.

After a while, he wiped his eyes and stood. There was still work to do. In the bathroom, he turned on the tap in the tub. Then he stepped into the spare room and lifted the corpse off the guest bed.

“One more,” he whispered to it lovingly. “We’re almost done.” With a tender, caring smile, he carried it to the bathtub.

Half an hour later, the Teacher went to the kitchen and took a pint bottle of Canadian Club whisky out of the cabinet above the sink. Carrying it in both hands almost ceremoniously, he stepped into the dining room.

The corpse was now respectfully arrayed on top of the table. He’d washed it in the tub, even shampooed and combed the blood and brain matter out of its hair before carefully dressing it in a navy suit and tie.

The Teacher had also changed into a suit, tasteful black, appropriate funeral attire. He tucked the bottle of whisky into the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss the pale, lifeless forehead.

Back in the kitchen, he took his Colt pistols off the counter and quickly loaded and holstered them. The cops would be here anytime now.

He removed a full red plastic fuel can from beneath the kitchen sink and carried it into the dining room. The strong, faintly sweet smell of gasoline filled the entire apartment as he soaked the body, making the sign of the cross – starting at the forehead, spilling fuel down to the crotch, then shoulder to shoulder across the chest.