The Death in the Willows

by Forrest, Richard;

  The bus slowed to a gradual halt with its nose just before the wide stripe at the tunnel’s midpoint that divides New York from New Jersey. The driver switched on the emergency flashers and lowered his head across his arms spread on the steering wheel.

  Cars behind them began to ease slowly into the vacant left lane, and then that too ceased, and they were alone in the deserted tunnel. It became apparent to Lyon that Transit Authority police had now sealed both ends of the tunnel. A protective sheath was beginning to enclose them. There would be hurried conferences, a marshaling of forces coordinated on both sides of the river, and then a gradual movement toward them.

  The bus began to move again. Slowly, directed by whispered commands from the hijacker, it backed, turned, and backed again until it slanted across both lanes. The engine died again, and only the center aisle lights illuminated the shadowy, stricken faces of the passengers.

  Lyon realized the hijacker’s strategy. With the bus astride the tunnel, he had a clear view of both the front and rear approaches, while his flanks were protected by the walls of the tunnel.

  Willie gestured to the young man on the floor who clutched his wounded arm. “You! On your feet. You’re the messenger.”

  Hands reached into the aisle and helped him struggle to his feet. “What do you want me to do?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hannon. Robert Hannon.”

  “Okay, Bob, baby. You take the news out of here.” Willie found that he was beginning to enjoy the situation. It had all gone as planned. All the things he had thought of those nights on the bed at East Tenth Street had come to pass. So, he had to shoot the fat one—just as well. Someone had to be made an example of. “Listen, Bobby. You get off the bus and walk back the way we came. Pretty soon you’ll come to cops, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You tell them what’s happened. You tell them that there’s a real mean son of a bitch here who’s already killed once, shot you, and has got a dozen buddies in the Freedom Army helping him. You tell them they got one hour to get a million bucks in hundred-dollar bills back on this bus—carried by you. Got that?”

  “A million in hundreds.”

  “And more. Tell them I want a jet on the runway at Newark Airport with parachutes. And no cops near the plane or my buddies will set off the bombs in the terminal. Got that?”

  “A jet with parachutes. Bombs in the terminal.”

  “And they got one hour. One hour or I start killing people. I kill someone for every five minutes they’re late. Got that?”

  “You start killing people,” Robert Hannon repeated numbly.

  “Get going. Fast—or I get somebody else and leave you dead.”

  The young man, still clutching his wounded arm, stumbled painfully down the aisle. He glanced once at Willie Shep and then went out the door.

  Willie glanced at the nonexistent watch on his wrist and let out a low curse. He had pawned it, and now wouldn’t know when the hour was up, much less the five-minute increments. What the hell. He laughed. There were eighteen passengers including the driver left on the bus, and probably as many watches. Not that he wanted a woman’s watch, but there would be others. He glanced at the driver who was still hunched over the wheel with his arms spread. He wore a large chronometer-type watch with several dials and a sweep second hand. “Gimme the watch.”

  “What?” The driver looked up at Willie with a slow confused movement.

  “You heard me. The watch.”

  “You want my wallet too?” He slipped the band off his wrist and gingerly handed it over.

  “Get to the back of the bus.”

  As the driver made his way down the aisle, Willie turned to peer out the window. A hundred yards in front he could see two police cars, with blinking roof lights, pulled across the roadway. Other cars, ambulances, and tow trucks were behind the automobile barricade. He looked out the other side and saw the scene repeated. He sat down on the floor with his feet stretched forward and the gun held in both hands.

  His planning had been excellent, he thought with satisfaction. The narrow tunnel gave him protection on both sides. Any attempt to storm the bus would have to be either from the front or rear, and he’d take five passengers with him if they tried that. He looked at the watch. It was five. He’d start counting off the five-minute intervals exactly at six. He smiled. It had begun.

  The whispering voice near Lyon’s ear was nearly toneless. The man behind him had leaned forward until his lips were only inches from the narrow aperture between the seats. His droning whisper was far too low for the hijacker at the front of the bus to hear.

  “He’s a nut,” the voice said. “There will be more killing.”

  “The police will do something.” Lyon found himself whispering through clenched teeth.

  “Sure they will. But some of us won’t be here to see it.”

  “They’ve stopped this kind of thing before. They have special teams to handle it.”

  “They’ve been lucky. This time they won’t be. You saw what happened when the kid tried to rush him. This guy’ll kill four, maybe six, more.”

  “There’s nothing we can do.” There was a pronounced edge of fear in Lyon’s voice.

  “Maybe there is.”

  Lyon looked up the aisle to where the hijacker sat on the floor. His profile was well below the window line and protected from police sharpshooters. What did they do in cases like this? Talk the man out? Rush him? Yes, there had been a good deal of that lately. Percussion grenades combined with overpowering firepower and a quick dash by special teams who hoped to move fast enough to save most of the passengers. Most of them …

  He leaned back with the newspaper crushed between his hands, and tilted his head toward the aperture between the seats. “Any ideas?”

  “You ever in the army?”

  “Long time ago. Korea.”

  “Fired a weapon?”

  “Well, yes, but …”

  “You have a newspaper. I saw it. Hold it over the space between the seats.” The voice was low and commanding.

  Lyon held the newspaper over the aperture and felt something metal thrust into his hand. He glanced down to see that he held the barrel of a large revolver. He automatically reversed the weapon until the butt rested in his palm and his finger curled over the trigger guard.

  “Kill him,” the voice behind him whispered.

  “I can’t do that.” His voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “You have to.”

  “Take this back.” He tried to force the gun through the seat opening, but felt unyielding pressure, probably the man’s knees pressed against the opening.

  I was an intelligence officer, he wanted to say. I never fired at the enemy. But he had once.… One quiet night he had gone to the division Ranger Company’s forward position to debrief a patrol that had returned to their lines. He was hunched over in a bunker with a pad on his knees when it started. Loud bugles … noise … so much noise, and then the searchlights reflecting off low-hanging clouds as they all rushed to the parapet. He’d automatically grabbed his M-2 carbine, switched it to full fire, and was on his second clip when a large hand pressed against his shoulder.

  “You’re blowing away our defensive wire, Captain,” Rocco Herbert, the Ranger commanding officer, had said. “Please open your eyes.”

  Again, long ago, he had fired at a man with his eyes open. The vision still haunted him and peopled his dreams with a guilt that no rationalization could remove.

  “I won’t be able to do it,” he said aloud.

  “What’s going on back there?” The hijacker stood in a crouch and aimed his weapon toward the rear of the bus. “You hear me? What’s going on? Answer me!”

  Lyon tensed. His hand holding the large revolver perspired against the cool metal. He pushed back against the cushions.

  “You going to answer me?” Willie Shep’s voice cracked in an adolescent quaver as it reached the top range of its register. “You … second from th
e toilet.” The gun pointed directly at Lyon. “Yes, you, buddy boy. Stand up, motherfucker.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Lyon said in a low voice. He wondered if his words carried to the front of the bus. His hand was moist as it gripped the revolver, his finger refusing to curl around the trigger. He tried to remember long ago days in the army. The gun he held was large, probably a .44 Magnum. Would its characteristics be different from the standard army .45? He remembered days on the pistol range when he had fired the bucking .45 … and his inability to hit anything.

  The humane action would be to shoot the hijacker in a nonfatal part of the body … perhaps the shoulder, the projectile numbing his gun arm and throwing him backward into a position where they could easily overpower him. Realizing his lack of expertise with a handgun, he felt he’d probably miss and possibly even kill one of the other passengers. They must wait. The police would eventually make their move. They’d storm the bus and the passengers could throw themselves to the floor and hope.

  “I hate your kind, motherfucker.” The hijacker’s voice dropped to a lower and more menacing tone as he hunched down the aisle toward Lyon. “I know your kind. You fill your goddamn shopping carts with martini olives and cheese, and when you can’t find something you ask me and never even see me. You make me put your crap in bags, and you never know who I am. Things are different now. I’m the man here, and you better look at me good. Hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Lyon said and was surprised at the evenness of his voice.

  “You’re going to kiss my feet, baby. And if you’re real lucky, I might not blow your head off.” Willie Shep was now one seat away with the gun pointed directly at Lyon’s head. His eyes glinted with odd flaking specks that Lyon had observed once before when a student in one of his classes had inexplicably and without warning thrown a desk chair through a second-story window.

  “On the floor.” The automatic wavered two feet from Lyon.

  All further internal arguments regarding accuracy with weapons were now academic, but he knew if he left his seat to follow the hijacker’s commands that the gun in his lap would be revealed and he would be shot.

  “You got three seconds.”

  Instant calculations: if he propelled himself upward directly at the hijacker … the .32 clenched a few feet from him was a small-caliber gun, and unless it hit a vital organ … his alternatives were tantamount to self-destruction. He had two options, one only slightly more acceptable than the other. “All right,” he murmered and half stood.

  A small smile curled along the edge of Willie Shep’s face at the instant Lyon fired the Magnum through the newspaper.

  The entrance wound of the soft-nosed projectile with an impact of 1,310 foot pounds was upward through the left eye. The bullet exited through the crown of the head and continued through the roof of the bus to ricochet off the tunnel ceiling.

  The screams of the passengers began before the massive reverberation of the shot had ceased echoing.

  2

  The gun fell from Lyon’s limp hand and clattered across the flooring. He stood with stunned shock staring down at the body sprawled obscenely across the aisle. And then, instinctively, he knelt next to the distorted body in a vain attempt to aid, to keep vital forces alive, anything to maintain life’s spark in the man he had just shot.

  It was apparent that the hijacker was dead.

  He heard a short choking cry and at first thought it came from up the aisle, and then knew it was himself. He retreated from the corpse with a backward splaying motion and looked down at his hands and the front of his jacket where blood of the slain man stained in Rorschach splotches. He ripped the coat from his shoulders and threw it in a wadded ball.

  He was alone in the bus and watched with detachment as uniformed men carrying rifles and wearing bulky flack vests rushed from the distant barricades.

  The other passengers had scurried from the bus like flushed quail, and now hovered near the door as if hidden in some safe thicket. The emergency door immediately behind him swung slowly to and fro.

  Peristaltic waves rippled his stomach until they dredged up bile that he vomited on the flooring. It coated the pointed tips of the dead man’s boots, and he turned away to retch and buried his head on his arms across a seat top.

  Wary men, clutching rifles, began silently to enter the bus and move toward him.

  “You the one who shot him.”

  It seemed more a statement than a question. He brushed beads of perspiration from his forehead and tried to focus his eyes and thoughts. “Yes,” he finally managed to say.

  A hand on his shoulder. “Come on, buddy. Outa’ here into some clean air.”

  Other hands … helping him out the emergency door. A knot of passengers ahead, fingers pointed in his direction. Another hand grasped his elbow, propelled him along the tunnel to where a police car waited with open door and flashing roof light.

  Men in mufti broke through the police cordon and ran toward him. Several dropped into a crouch and strobe lights flickered. They began to surround him with shouted questions until the officer holding his arm waved them away.

  A thin black woman passenger, her face still elongated with fear, grasped at him. “You are the One. I saw you in the cards this morning.”

  He was pushed into the rear of the cruiser and the door slammed. Faces pressed against the window, a microphone was stuck against the wire mesh separating the front and rear seats.

  “You shot him?” an insistent voice asked.

  “Blew the fucker’s head off,” a heavy cop said as he pushed the radio interviewer away and sat in the front seat.

  “How does it feel?”

  “Terrible,” he mumbled.

  “Your name … where you from?… what sort of gun?… shot him where?… he fire back?… you a peace officer?” The battery of shouted questions seemed to bounce inside the car’s interior until the whole world became an accusatory thing.

  The door next to Lyon opened and a detective, his badge on the outside of his jacket, swung inside and cocked a finger at the driver. The car moved slowly through the crowd, parting waves of reluctant reporters in its path.

  As the cruiser slowly passed a knot of officers, both in uniform and out, it paused briefly to allow a barricading vehicle to be moved. Lyon looked out the window and found himself staring at a bearded man in a sport coat with a gold badge hanging from his breast pocket. The face was familiar, and then the man turned away and the car continued on.

  Light engulfed them as they moved from the tunnel into midtown Manhattan. The driver flipped on the siren and its wail opened a passage through traffic.

  “You okay?” the detective by his side asked.

  “I was sick back there, but I think I’m all right now. Can we open a window?”

  “Don’t open back here. You’re not hurt or anything?”

  “He didn’t touch me.”

  The detective chuckled. “A few more like you and there won’t be more of that shit. What’d you shoot him with? A cannon?”

  “I don’t know. It was a big gun.”

  The cop looked at him quizzically and then turned away with a shrug. “We’ll talk about it when we get to the office.”

  “I think I’d like to stop for a drink.”

  “Sure, buddy. Just a few formalities and we’ll get you tanked.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Say, what’s your name?”

  “Wentworth. Lyon Wentworth.”

  “Okay, Lyon. You’re the man of the hour. Hell, yes.” He glanced out the rear window at the Daily News radio car to their rear. “We’ll try and keep the reporters away from you until you feel like facing them.”

  They parked in a reserved space in front of an official-looking building where Lyon was bustled up a short set of steps. More photographers snapped pictures and another microphone was thrust in his face. The guiding detective pushed it away and then they were inside.

  More bedlam. Officers crowded around and two repor
ters had managed to reach the inner recess of the building.

  “Hey, Harry. I heard the mayor’s coming down to thank this guy.”

  “After we check things out,” the detective replied as a girdling group of cops took Lyon into the elevator. They left the elevator on the fourth floor and exited into a large squad room where shirt-sleeved detectives looked at Lyon and his escort with open curiosity. A second elevator opened behind them to disgorge more bus passengers and police.

  The thin black woman pressed through the crowd and plucked at Lyon’s sleeve. “You are a hungan. A hungan filled with lao.”

  They tried to propel Lyon forward, but he jerked away and turned to her. “You’re Haitian?”

  “Not for many years, but I do not forget.”

  “What’s she talking about?” the detective called Harry asked.

  “She follows the god of Vodun,” Lyon said and took the woman’s hand in his. “We’re sorry it happened,” he said softly.

  “It had to be.”

  “What in Christ’s name is she talking about?”

  Lyon left the black woman and followed the detectives. “Voodoo.”

  “Jesus H. Christ! That’s all we need in Manhattan West.”

  They went down a short hallway that entered into a large private office with an imitation Persian rug on the floor and functional furnishings. Harry opened an inner door to a small bathroom and gestured. “Case you want to wash off or something.”

  “Thanks.” Lyon shut and latched the door before placing both hands on the sink and bending over the bowl. He remained immobile for several moments trying to assimilate the rush of events that had cracked the veneer of his life. When he looked up, he saw his reflection in the narrow mirror. A small muscle in his lower jaw quivered under his red eyes and drawn facial lines.

  He shook his head and splashed water on his face as the mirror image dissolved to be replaced by one of the hijacker standing in the bus aisle. The gun extended, the cracked smile grimaced, and again Lyon clutched the large gun under the newspaper and watched the hole erupt in the man’s face.

  He turned from the mirror with the after-image still scorching his mind.