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CHAPTER 1

It was a gorgeous springtime day in Manhattan—one of those magical days that catch you by surprise a few times a year, when a crisp easterly breeze from the Atlantic blows the smog from the sky and cobwebs from human hearts. People imagine that their lives might change overnight, or even in the next few minutes. It was a day when everything seemed possible and anything could happen. And for Andy Baxter, it did.

He’d just finished his last afternoon class at New York University’s downtown Greenwich Village campus and was following a butterfly down Bleecker Street. The butterfly was made of red satin and sewn to the seat of a pair of jeans worn by a tall girl in a scuffed biker jacket strolling half a dozen feet ahead of him. Its wings twitched enticingly with the motion of the girl’s hips as she walked, and Andy wondered where she was headed. If he wasn’t due at his part time job at Pizza Pete’s in a few minutes he might follow her and find out. Maybe she’d step into a coffee shop and he’d have a chance to invite her to the bar where he and his band were playing tomorrow night. Offer to put her on the guest list at the door, maybe even write a song about her and work it up during rehearsal. You never know.

Andy hummed thoughtfully as he walked, trying to come up with lyrics that had something to do with a butterfly. Life was good. He’d submitted his master’s thesis last week and his acceptance into the university’s fall Ph.D. program looked secure. With a little luck, he’d have a shot at a cushy job teaching English Literature at some nice New England girl’s college in a few years. Unless, of course, his band landed a record deal—though there didn’t seem to be much chance of that. So far, not a single record company scout had come to a gig. But anything was possible.

When he reached the entrance of Pizza Pete’s, he paused to watch the butterfly flutter down the sidewalk until it disappeared, then stepped inside the restaurant.

“What’s shakin’, Pete?” he asked.

The tiny cafe was empty except for a gaunt man wearing a tie-dyed shirt and sandals. He smiled as he emptied cash from the register into a bank deposit bag.

“Not much, dude, I’m headed to the bank. Keep an eye on things for a while, okay?”

Andy nodded and walked behind the counter as Pete adjusted the bandana tied around his head and shuffled to the sidewalk. Andy rinsed a dozen dirty aluminum platters left from lunch and was loading the dishwasher when two sharply dressed men walked in, laughing and speaking Spanish. One was thirty or so, the other a few years younger, about Andy’s age. They sat at a front table and ordered grinders and Cokes. Andy scooped ice into plastic tumblers, grabbed two bottles of soda and turned toward their table.

What happened next unfolded in slow motion, and was a little different each time he tried to recall it—like a movie explosion shot from multiple camera angles, then edited into a sequence that lasts longer than the blast itself. In reality, the whole thing was over in less than a minute.

A motorcycle with two black helmeted riders pulled onto the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. The passenger slid off and pulled an HK MP5 machine pistol with a stubby silencer from under his windbreaker. He pointed the gun at the restaurant’s plate glass window and Andy dropped to the floor as the pane shattered. Oddly, he never heard the shots, just the sound of disintegrating glass crashing onto the floor punctuated by the gun’s metallic coughing and thuds that rang like blows from a ball-peen hammer. Bullets pummeled the service counter in front of him and ricocheted off the restaurant’s brick walls. Andy felt a sharp stab of pain behind his ear and reached to pull a bloody chip of masonry from his scalp.

Then it was quiet, except for the sound of Kim, Pete’s Vietnamese cook, running down the hallway and out the back door. Andy’s nostrils itched from the smell of burnt gunpowder and suspended brick dust, and he suppressed a sneeze as he slowly peeked over the counter. The two customers were sprawled on the floor in growing puddles of dark blood. The older one’s legs twitched and a sucking sound accompanied each rise of his chest. The man from the sidewalk stepped through the broken window and kicked the man hard in the balls. The machine pistol in his hand jerked, and the wounded man’s head bounced upward as the back of his skull exploded against the floor tiles. The shooter thumbed a button on his gun and its crescent-shaped clip dropped to his feet. He replaced it with a fresh one from his windbreaker pocket and slowly turned toward Andy as he lifted the smoked visor of his helmet. He was smiling––an ugly Halloween mask of a grin that started at one ear and extended almost all the way across his badly scarred face.

Andy fell behind the counter again, this time slipping and hitting his head hard on the tiles as the gun delivered another round of bullets in a long clanking burst. His leg was knocked sideways, as if it had been smacked with a baseball bat, and he cringed as splinters of Formica and plywood ripped the skin of his exposed arms and neck.

Suddenly, it was quiet again. It occurred to Andy to try to crawl to the back door, but his leg wouldn’t respond to his brain’s commands. His thinking grew fuzzy. For some reason he was soaking wet. The atmosphere disintegrated in a white hot flash that seared his skin and sucked the air from his lungs like the just-opened blast of a furnace. He gripped the edge of the cooler and pulled himself a few inches across the debris-strewn floor before the heat pushed him into a black void.

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