I Am Max Lamm Read Online Free Page B

flashed. A police van.
    The driver’s already made the call? You’re
that
conspicuous?
    At Lancaster Gate the doors opened. Yielding to the same instinct for self-preservation that propelled the bottle into the teenage mugger’s skull, Lamm joined the backpackers disembarking. Twenty sozzled Swedes staggered to their hostels as he scampered over the fence into Hyde Park. Hunted, haunted Lamm! Run through the flowerbed, behind a knobbled birch. Headlights approaching;
stay still!
Crouching in bushes, Lamm allowed himself a piss that, during the past hour’s giddy recollection of not much at all, somehow hadn’t innervated the nerve pathways from his swollen bladder up to his brain. His bewilderment so total, he hadn’t felt the need to urinate. Hadn’t
felt
that he felt the need to urinate.
    Soaking the scrub and probably his sneakers, Lamm saw the police lights on Bayswater Road. Lights that – owing to a suspicious vehicle, a terrorist alert or a constable’s pizza getting cold – might any moment spin 360 degrees, flashing, sirens hollering, thereby reassuring the residents of West London’s best streets (the PM’s newly purchased mansion only a few blocks away in Connaught Square) that they could sleep soundly, if they could get back to sleep. Degenerate, disorientated Lamm! He stared at the blue and white glare atop the police car’s roof, and only then – hollowed by hunger and exhaustion into an unresponsive vessel, seeing blurry lilac dots flashing at the back of his eyelids – did he realize that this piss-soaked shrub, and the knee-high lavender bushes surrounding it, was, in fact, a very foolish place to hide.
    Into bushes sticky, black as tar, running, ducking, until he collapsed beneath a weeping willow.
Keep going?
He got up, paced circles, trying to believe what he knew had happened, was happening, could happen, then sat again, stood again, collapsed, got up, debating where to flee and how and when. The why was unquestionable. Drenched in sweat amid the cold fogging his breath, Lamm staggered into the frigid starlit undergrowth, hearing the whirring rat-a-tat of a helicopter – a police helicopter – not far off, getting louder, that might sweep its floodlight through Hyde Park.
They knew he was here?
How? Could the bus driver really have identified the murder suspect among the throng of passengers?
    Another ten minutes Lamm stumbled left, right, left, left . . . fleeing the German shepherds that might enter the park, might catch his scent . . . run deeper into this labyrinthine dark of necessity! Into this darkness timelessly dark, so unsettlingly natural in the midst of London’s neon plastic playground. Yet after nightfall who gives a shit?
Who’s here?
Only squirrels, foxes, birds at roost, the homeless schizophrenics asleep beneath a tree in summer and occasionally frozen dead in winter, and perhaps a few Tory MPs fucking anonymous men in the shrubbery.
    At the park’s eastern corner, the helicopter hovered down. Two silvery searchlights rupturing its belly, rotors blurring the starless sky.
They’ve seen you?
Into the brush, thorns ripping Lamm’s forearms. Blood.
Faster!
Another path (or the overgrown semblance of a path) marked by a brambleless cleavage through the bushes. Running, swerving as the deathly glare chopped closer. What did your bastard of a tennis coach always say?
Choose the path of least resistance.
    Finally a clump of undergrowth thick enough for a hiding place. Like a fox eluding bloodthirsty toffs, into the bush Lamm crawled, refreshed by the fertile embrace of dew upon his cheeks. Who ventures here but the rats?
Now wait.
For a deafening few seconds, the silhouettes of leaves projected onto the muddy backs of his hands while the blinding searchlight hovered above.
    Darkness. The pitch of the thundering rat-a-tat dropped precipitously as the helicopter veered north.
    Lying in the wet dirt, absurdly Lamm recalled the scientific explanation: as the helicopter hovers