Exo: A Novel (Jumper) Read Free

his impact through the ground. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes, no flailing, no sound, and I wondered if I’d broken his neck when my head hit him.
    I took out my cell phone and used the flashlight app to illuminate his face.
    Olive-skinned, with a light, trimmed beard—the asshole from the train.
    When he got off at Times Square, he must’ve stepped into a different car, then followed me from Columbus Circle.
    I shook my head and turned off the damn music player. He’d never have gotten close if I hadn’t been blocking the ambient noise with earplugs.
    Stupid!
    His eyes were closed and his mouth was open and bleeding slightly, but he was breathing. I didn’t want to go too close, in case he was faking.
    I rubbed the top of my head. There was a serious goose egg forming and it stung. When I examined my fingers with the light I saw a smear of blood on my fingertips.
    I remembered his hand raking across my body and I had to resist the urge to kick him as he lay there.
    He didn’t look poor. As I remembered, he wore gleaming loafers, slacks, a silk shirt under a leather jacket. He was wearing a fancy watch and two gold rings.
    I slipped on my gloves and searched him.
    His wallet held a driver’s license for one Vincent Daidone, four hundred dollars in cash, several credit cards in the same name, and three condoms. There was a baggy of white powder in his jacket pocket and an expensive phone in a silver protective case.
    I looked at the picture and for a moment thought it couldn’t belong to the man on the ground. Something wasn’t right. Then I realized his face was swollen under his ears and his lower jaw was projecting forward, like a bad underbite.
    His jaw’s dislocated , I realized. Or broken. I touched the bump on my head again. Lucky I hadn’t broken my neck.
    I no longer felt like kicking him. I activated his phone. It was locked, but there was a button for calling an emergency number. I dialed 911.
    “What is the nature of your emergency?”
    “I’ve found an unconscious man, unresponsive, Central Park, in the trees behind the Dairy Visitor Center. He has some head trauma, but he is breathing and I’m not seeing any major bleeding. This is his phone. I’ll leave it on.”
    “Who is speaking?”
    I put the phone back in Mr. Daidone’s jacket pocket, careful not to hang up. The battery indicator showed three-quarters charged. I could hear the operator still talking, trying to get me to respond.
    Mr. Daidone didn’t look like he had the financial need to rob, but perhaps that’s how he paid for his nice clothes. Still, I thought that his thing was more likely sexual assault, pure and simple. Not pure. Not simple. I hoped the white powder was drugs, but I wasn’t going to check any closer. I was still mad. I thought about taking the money, but instead I used my phone’s camera to take a close-up of his driver’s license, then put the wallet back in his pocket.
    I walked away, to the Chess and Checkers House, jumping to the roof and crouching by the cupola in the center. It took the park police five minutes to respond, a car coming up East 65th. I watched their flashlights flickering through the trees for three minutes before they found him.
    While I waited, I’d zipped up the coveralls, put on my goggles, and cinched the hood tight around my face. I’d only done this once before, in West Texas, as an experiment, but it had worked just fine.
    I left the rooftop at 130 miles per hour, rising nearly a thousand feet before I slowed, then doing it again before I started changing the vector, adding horizontal velocity toward the northeast. I’d like to say that I shot into the air cleanly but, just like the first time I’d tried this, I tumbled wildly out of control the first few jumps.
    At a 130 mph, the air feels like a wall, a palpable barrier that tears at you as you push your way though. It pulls at your clothes and snaps at your exposed skin. You want your shoes tied tight, and all your