Read Manhattan Mayhem for Free Online Page B

scurrying panel vans with their business names hastily handwritten on their doors. No motorbikes, no Vespa scooters in pastel colors. No deliverymen on bikesfrom restaurants or messenger services. No skateboarders, no rollerbladers.
    No pedestrians.
    It was summer, close to eleven at night, and still warm. Fifth Avenue was crossing Broadway right in front of him. Dead ahead was Chelsea, behind him was Gramercy, to his left was Union Square, and to his right the Empire State Building loomed over the scene like the implacable monolith it was. He should have seen a hundred people. Or a thousand. Or ten thousand. Guys in canvas shoes and T-shirts, girls in short summer dresses, some of them strolling, some of them hustling, heading to clubs about to open their doors, or bars with the latest vodka, or midnight movies.
    There should have been a whole big crowd. There should have been laughter and conversation, and shuffling feet, and the kind of hoots and yelps a happy crowd makes at eleven o’clock on a warm summer’s evening, and sirens and car horns, and the whisper of tires and the roar of engines.
    There was nothing.
    Reacher went back down the stairs and under the tape again. He walked underground, north, to the site of his second attempt, and this time he stepped over the tape because it was slung lower. He went up the stairs just as cautiously, but faster, now right on the street corner, with Madison Square Park ahead of him, fenced in black iron and packed with dark trees. But its gates were still open. Not that anyone was strolling in or strolling out. There was no one around. Not a soul.
    He stepped up to the sidewalk and stayed close to the railing around the subway stair head. A long block to the west he saw flashing lights. Blue and red. A police cruiser was parked sideways across the street. A roadblock. DO NOT ENTER . Reacher turned and looked east. Same situation. Red and blue lights all the way over on Park Avenue. DO NOT ENTER . Twenty-Third Street was closed. As were plenty of other cross streets, no doubt, and Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Madison, too, presumably, at about Thirtieth Street.
    No one around.
    Reacher looked at the Flatiron Building. A narrow triangle, sharp at the front. Like a thin wedge, or a modest slice of cake. But to him it looked most like the prow of a ship. Like an immense ocean liner moving slowly toward him. Not an original thought. He knew many people felt the same way. Even with the cowcatcher glasshouse on the front ground floor, which some said ruined the effect, but which he thought added to it, because it looked like the protruding underwater bulge on the front of a supertanker, visible only when the vessel was lightly loaded.
    Now he saw a person. Through two panes of the cowcatcher’s windows. A woman. She was standing on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, staring north. She was wearing dark pants and a dark short-sleeved shirt. She had something in her right hand. Maybe a phone. Maybe a Glock 19.
    Reacher pushed off the subway railing and crossed the street. Against the light, technically, but there was no traffic. It was like walking through a ghost town. Like being the last human on earth. Apart from the woman on Fifth Avenue. Whom he headed straight for. He aimed at the point of the cowcatcher. His heels were loud in the silence. The cowcatcher had a triangular iron frame, a miniature version of the shape it was backing up against, like a tiny sailboat trying to outrun the liner chasing it. The frame was painted green, like moss, and it had gingerbread curlicues here and there, and what wasn’t metal was glass, whole panels of it, as long as cars, and tall, from above a person’s head to his knees.
    The woman saw him coming.
    She turned in his direction but backed off, as if to draw him toward her. Reacher understood. She wanted to pull him south into the shadows. He rounded the point of the cowcatcher.
    It was a phone in her hand, not a gun.
    She said, “Who are you?”
    He