The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul Page A

no more than four or five stories, with businesses operating on the sidewalk level and laundry hanging from lines strung between fire escapes on the floors above. Half the shops were grocery stores, though the Chinese fruits and vegetables they displayed were mostly unrecognizable to him. He had to thread his way through a milling throng of people who neither smiled nor nodded, let alone made any move to give way when there wasn’t enough room for two people to pass. Once, a horn blasted as he stepped into the street to avoid a pack of hard-looking teenage boys with rings in their ears, lips, and noses, only to have one of those he was avoiding grab his arm and snatch him back onto the sidewalk an instant before the cab would have run him down.
    “Watch it, man—you wanna get yourself killed?” the kid asked.
    “Thanks,” Keith said, but found himself talking to no one; the kid and his friends were already several yards away, and it was as if he no longer existed. Turning away from them, he bumped into a burly man slinging a barrel of garbage into a truck. As oblivious to him as the kids now were, the garbage man hardly glanced at him, going on with his work as if nothing had happened.
    By the middle of the next block, Keith found himself doing his best to ignore the people around him, concentrating instead on the sidewalk directly ahead. Twice he made the mistake of waiting for a light to turn green at an intersection, and was nearly trampled by the crowd that ignored it. By the third block he discovered the trick everyone else already seemed to know—if you don’t look at the cabs, they won’t hit you. In fact, the cabbies didn’t even bother to honk or curse at him, but let him cross with the same impunity they granted the city’s natives.
    At the corner of Kenmare, he turned right toward Bowery and Delancey—the intersection where the accident had taken place. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but the vague sense of letdown—almost of disappointment—he felt at the corner’s normality told him he must have been expecting something.
    The bustling Asian community of Elizabeth Street suddenly gave way to restaurant equipment stores, except for one restaurant that seemed to be left over from an era when the neighborhood had been mostly Italian. Window after window displayed commercial mixers and kitchen equipment, bar glasses and furniture, and more kinds of lighting fixtures than Keith had even thought existed. It was almost devoid of people on the sidewalk, and there were no apartments above the businesses.
    No windows from which some early rising resident might have seen what had happened yesterday morning.
    It was just another impersonal city intersection, the cars heading east into Delancey and toward the Williamsburg Bridge waiting impatiently as the streams of traffic on Bowery flowed north and south.
    No sign of the accident at all, except for the boarded-up windows of the restaurant supply house the van had careened into after the car struck it.
    No sign that someone had died here only a little more than twenty-four hours ago.
    This morning, with the sun shining incongruously on the spot where the black van had burned, it seemed almost impossible that it could have happened, and he stood for a moment on the southeast corner, trying to picture the scene from early yesterday morning. The van would have been coming from the west, heading toward the bridge. The car that hit it must have been going north on Bowery, and very fast—Keith had a pretty good idea how heavy a Ford van was, but could only guess how much force it would take to smash in the door of a reinforced van and knock it all the way across the street and into the building’s windows. After it hit the van, the car’s momentum would have carried it farther north, though the deflection of the crash should also have sent it skidding eastward.
    He crossed the street, and twenty yards to the north found a wall that looked as if a car