Jump by Mike Lupica Read Free Book Online

character had lived another year he could’ve bought a bigger apartment, but Hannah didn’t see why he would’ve needed anything bigger than what he had, which was two bedrooms, a huge living room with a fireplace, and a lot of sun.
    Hannah had been living up on West End Avenue the last two years, a cute studio with a partial view of the Hudson. She stood in front of Jimmy’s brownstone, wondering if she should go up there,just out of curiosity, to see if “they” really were staking her out already. The hell with it, she decided. If they were staking her out, let them wait until hell freezes over. She could beat the after-work crowd if she went over to the Vertical right now. She could do some bike and some Stairmaster if her legs could take it, then go through her upper-body Nautilus program, sweat, and get out of there.
    She couldn’t hide under the bed forever.
    She walked over to Broadway and up to Seventy-second, hailed a cab. The Vertical Club was on Sixty-first between First and Second. If you ran laps upstairs, you could look out a window and the Queensboro Bridge was right there in front of you. She started working out at the Vertical when it was still trendy, before there were about a hundred clubs just like it. She was walking around with her portfolio during the day, getting nowhere, waitressing nights at Jim McMullen’s. She had a tiny apartment on East Fifty-fifth, this one without a view of anything except Fifty-fifth, and even when she moved to the West Side, she decided to keep her membership. Most of her friends on the West Side had joined the Equinox Club, that was the hot new place, up on Amsterdam, with the sculpture of the girl rock-climbing in the big front window. But Hannah was comfortable at the Vertical.
    She had always been shitty with change.
    Hannah was crossing the street that cuts Sixty-first in half, feeding up into the bridge, when she heard the first shout.
    “There she is!”
    Hannah looked up and saw them coming for her.
    Somebody else said, “It’s her!”
    The light had changed behind her, and there was already some early rush-hour traffic, so there was a steady stream of cars feeding up into the bridge, on their way home to Queens. Hannah couldn’t retreat. She just stood there, seeing the television cameras mostly, the guys pointing them at her like they were guns.
    “Hannah!”
    “Hannah Carey?”
    “Can we get a comment?”
    She made herself move, not knowing what she could do, just knowing she had to do
something.
She couldn’t make it inside theVertical without going right through them, so she crossed the street, nearly getting hit by some blue van, the van having a horn that sounded more like a siren, looking behind her to see some of them cutting in front of cars, so there were more horns now, as she got back to the north side of Sixty-first, and started running now, toward Second.
    Over the horns, some shrill woman’s voice: “Hannah, wait!”
    Then it was just the horns behind her, traffic stopped completely going to the bridge and some kind of black town car limo, nearly coming up onto the sidewalk after her, blowing its horn at her as a guy stuck his head out the back window of the town car and said, “You probably ought to get in. The bad guys are gaining on you.”
    The car stayed on her pace as she ran at a pretty good clip toward Second. Hannah started to tell the guy to get the hell away from her, but there was something about him, casually opening the back door as the crowd closed on her, offering her a way out.
    “Who are you?” she said.
    He smiled at her, holding the door open, still casual, like he did this all the time, played the cavalry. “My name’s DiMaggio,” he said, “I’m the good guys.”

6
    DiMaggio sat across the street from the Vertical Club and waited. He knew how to do it. DiMaggio learned young, all the times he waited for his father, Tony DiMaggio, to come back from the road with Ralph Flanagan’s band, bringing him tacky