During the blizzards of 2010, New York City officials had cancelled school well before the first snowflakes had even fallen from the heavens, sending Gotham scurrying into emergency mode while the behemoth storm systems had barreled their way toward the rotten core of the Big Apple. Six hours later, winds of forty miles an hour had buffeted the city like an earthquake, creating whiteouts and dumping at least two feet of snow on the ground. Stores of every stripe and colour – from Sears to Wal-Mart to JC Penney – had been overrun in the hours leading up to the storms as nervous residents rushed to stock up on such staples as food, water, flashlights and batteries. Five thousand maintenance workers had suffered through backbreaking twelve-hour shifts while operating nearly four hundred salt spreaders and two thousand snowplows. Commuters had been urged to stay off the city streets and instead rely on the subway system for transportation. City buses had been equipped with thick steel chains wrapped around their shiny black tires for traction. Both the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad had experienced lengthy delays. Continental Airlines had announced the cancellation of all four hundred of its flights by ten a.m. Southwest and all the other airlines had quickly followed suit.
In other words: they’d all run around like a bunch of chickens with their goddamn heads chopped off. And among that kind of commotion, who would ever notice one dead woman – even one as famous as the woman Nicholas would be targeting tonight?
***
Penelope Hargrave had been born into a world of wealth, and tonight she’d die in a world of wealth. Nicholas grimaced as he watched the socialite daughter of the most famous real-estate developer in all of New York City exit her long black limousine across the street. Throngs of her fans rushed forward and shouted out her name while two heavily muscled bouncers escorted her past the velvet ropes lining both sides of the sidewalk and directly into the city’s hippest nightclub, shouldering back the crowd and paparazzi as they went.
In the doorway of a shuttered convenience store thirty yards away, Nicholas trained his powerful Nikon binoculars on Penelope Hargrave’s beautiful face and brought the image into sharp focus, feeling a stab of irritation slice hard through his chest. What in the hell was wrong with this country? he wondered. Didn’t anyone have anything better to obsess over? And with the economy stuck in the toilet the way it had been for the past five years now, didn’t it annoy people that this whore actually got paid to get her groove on, actually received money for partying?
Apparently not.
Still, the club’s owners knew Penelope Hargrave’s mere presence boosted the profile of the establishment, so they were willing to part with some serious coin in order to get her to show up. Fifty grand for each appearance, according to a report that Nicholas had read recently on TMZ.com. Penelope Hargrave didn’t even have to dance if she didn’t want to. All she needed to do was sit there with that stupid, doe-eyed look on her face and drink the thousand-bottles that were sent to her table gratis. Maybe giggle every once in a while with her vacuous hangers-on while she basked in the warm light of a fame she hadn’t done a goddamn thing to deserve.
Nicholas shook his head in irritation, remembering the troubling scene to which he’d been subjected just a few hours earlier. Despite his very best efforts, he hadn’t been able to gain access to the exclusive club himself, had instead been turned away cold.
The embarrassing brush-off had wounded Nicholas’s pride, of course – had wounded it a lot, as a matter of fact – but he’d managed to suppress his rage long enough to resist pulling out his trusty knife and slitting open the doorman’s stupid throat right then and there on the snow-covered sidewalk. His mother would have been very upset had Nicholas deviated from the plan at this late stage of the game, and it was never a good idea to upset his mother, now was it?
Of course it wasn’t. Never had been and never would be. That much he’d known since he’d been nine years old.
Plan B wasn’t half bad, either, though. Not too shabby for a backup plan of attack, if Nicholas did say so himself. And that’s exactly what he had prepared for Penelope Hargrave tonight, wasn’t it?