The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel Read Online Free PDF

had gone from free to thirteen bucks. Plus another eighteen dollars apiece for Harun and Durriyah. Plus half his salary for snacks and drinks and balloons while waiting on line (almost an hour) for the cat house.
    But from the moment they got in, it was worth it: the looks on the boys’ faces, all three of them smiling and laughing.
    The image pushed away the pain of running now. Man, did he love those guys. He’d do anything for them. Running four miles during his lunch break was nothing. All for them. You’d’ve thought pushing a stroller for hours on end to get the babies to fall asleep counted as exercise, but since he and Durriyah had gotten into the baby business, as they called it, he’d somehow put on forty pounds. Now he ran for the boys, so that they’d have an old man who could play football with them, instead of just an old man.
    Before he knew it, twenty-five blocks were behind him and he was on the path through the woods, toward the gatehouse at the bottom of the Jackie O. Reservoir. No other runners around. Which figured. It was 2:15, maybe 2:30. The lunch-hour regulars, the yuppie fitness-nut types, were showered and back at their desks by now, polishing off expensive salads. Good. He liked the solitude, a commodity in this town.
    A dark shadow passed overhead. His first thought was: a bird. One of those falcons the news loves to show nesting at the tops of the buildings surrounding the park. Swooping for someone’s late lunch, maybe.
    He kept on. The shadow appeared again, out of the corner of his eye. Unnaturally round. Seemed to stay on him as he ran. He looked up, through the gap between the tops of two big trees, squinting into a blaze of sunlight. Using a hand as a visor and squinting against theglare, he made out a dark form above the treetops. Christ, a buzzard? Find someone else, vulture. Harun was running to add years to his life.
    It made no noise, or at least nothing he could hear over the din of the city, which, even here, in the depths of the park—
    A boom, as from a cannon. That’s what it sounded like. Shaking him, turning the leaves all around into a shower of green confetti falling behind him.
    Something pinged the path to his side, raising a spark and spraying dirt and gravel into his shins. He glanced down, seeing a few spots of blood.
    What the hell?
    Spooked, he sped up.
    Another blast. This time, it felt like, a firebomb went off in his throat. His legs gave out and he went down hard on his side, coming to rest on his back on the path.
    He was cold all over, except for a newly formed pit between his collarbones. Hot blood welled there, trickling down his shirt, into his left armpit. None of which made any sense.
    No real pain, fortunately. He struggled to get up—and made it as far as his elbows when a dark sheet of blood flooded down his shirtfront. His consciousness flickered.
    Three boys in the cat house, balloons in hand, smiles on faces.

CHAPTER 5
    A rooster’s crow woke Fisk, who didn’t immediately know where he was. So what else was new? Lately he’d become Manhattan’s answer to George Washington, sleeping in one place after another on account of a digital trail that he couldn’t turn off.
    He was growing unhealthily paranoid, and he knew it. The usual cop eyes he brought to the street were becoming prey’s eyes as he watched each face and clocked each passing car. He was becoming squirrelly. In his least healthy moments, he wondered if it was penance for his own misdeeds: a Sartrean punishment for having exacted his revenge upon Magnus Jenssen.
    Flecks of dawn skirting the steel window gates outlined tall bare brick walls against the darkness. The fishy smell of old glue was the tip-off: the building was a onetime book bindery in an old printing house just off Tenth Avenue, two blocks west of Madison Square Garden. The fact that the building was zoned for commercial and not residential use didn’t stop the owner from renting out spaces fitted with crude