by Barry, Mike
“Shit,” Paul said. He was sweating freely. “Godammit it, it’s cops.”
“Slow down,” Mac said, “we can’t outrun the sons of bitches.”
“And what do we show them? License? Registration please? They’ll pull us in.” He floored the accelerator.
“We’ll talk our way out of it,” Mac said.
“We can’t chance it. They could lock us up. We’ve got to get to Boston tomorrow night.”
“Paul,” he said, “Paul you’re crazy, they’re not going to jail us on a simple speeding, even if you haven’t got license and registration. They’ll impound the car and we’ll have to make some bail, that’s all.”
“Make bail?” Paul said. He was fighting the wheel, the car groaning along at eighty, beginning to wobble now on the center line, “You need identification to make bail, godammit.”
“We have identification!”
“They’ll pass it around. You know the cops here, don’t you? We’ll have a welcoming party two blocks from the station house wherever it is.”
He was right. The trouble was that the son of a bitch was right. They were in deep now, deeper than he could have imagined. But there was still just no way that the Impala could outrun a squad car in full cry. He heard the siren, coming at him as if it would shatter the glass and send fibers pierced into his brain. “Pull over!” he said. “For Christ’s sake, whatever happens, you’ve got to pull over!”
“Fuck it,” Paul said. With one hand on the wheel he used the other to fumble for his gun. “Get your gun,” he said, “shoot them.”
“Shoot them? They’re bulletproofed, we’re shooting through glass—”
“Shoot them!” Paul screamed, wrenching at the wheel and he lost control. Almost elegantly, softly, the car tracked to the right, and at eighty-two miles an hour hit the shoulder. Mac felt the suspension sway, had the sensation that the Impala was almost meditating not only on its future course but its history, the ten years that had passed since it had come off the production line, new and with two hundred and eighty-three cubic centimeters, shortly before a President was assassinated. The car rocked, spewed up pebbles and then came back onto the road with hesitancy, then a growing assurance.
“Shoot at the bastards!” Paul screamed again. Holding the wheel with his left hand he turned quickly and pumped through a wild shot with his right. Splinters of glass exploded, Mac could feel them darting into his cheeks. The rear window cascaded open in colors. The siren shifted to a deeper, more insistent tone and the car behind sprang out, shifting lanes. At full acceleration it started to come alongside.
“You’re going to kill us,” Mac said, turning with the angle of the police car’s roll, now seeing it come alongside them. Locked wheel to wheel at eighty-five miles an hour the motion was slow, elegant, it might have been creeping abreast to get into a parking slot behind. For the first time Mac could see the faces of the occupants. Young cops, faces like apples, both of them staring. The could not believe this and for that matter neither could he. “You’ve killed us!” Mac shrieked.
“Shut the fuck up,” Paul said, hunched over the wheel, “don’t tell me what I’m doing, just shoot them. Shoot them!” Mac levelled, aimed and discharged the pistol toward the driver’s window, hoping the catch the passenger-cop in the head. Maybe it would panic them at least, slow the vehicle.
Just as he pressed the trigger the Impala hit a small stone on the road, magnified by speed. It sent rolling layers of concussion through his body, it shook his gun hand and therefore, quite methodically, Mac shot Paul in the head.
A small hole appeared near Paul’s temple. Blood wept out. Paul himself kept on driving for a few seconds, astonishment mingling with confusion in his features. More than anything else it appeared as if he had inherited a terrible itch. He raised a distracted, clawing hand to scratch the itch, the fingers met his hair and only at that connection did he pitch over, sidewise, falling across Mac, falling across his gun, the car now out of control, the steering wheel slack and loose, and the Impala scooted across the lane-separator, hit the police car a rolling blow, rebounded, ducked onto the shoulder and then with the absent grace of a ballet dancer gathering himself for a final leap, the Impala lost all handling whatsoever.
Paul came into his arms with the horrid finality of a lover settling in. Mac embraced him, desperately holding on, his eyes wide. The Impala rolled and rolled, it came off the shoulder at seventy-one miles an hour and onto a little embankment, the embankment grappled with it, the tires split open, the suspension swung, the car heaved to the right, overbalanced and began with lazy grace to roll. Mac felt every bump and hollow as the car took the long dive. He moved between roof and seat, hitting his skull several times, fracturing, hemorrhaging, but consciuosness was absolute. I’m going to make it, he thought joyfully, I’m going to make it. Survival was a great flame ahead of him; it embraced him just as he was embracing the corpse, showered with blood. Nothing, absolutely nothing mattered if he survived. The car rolled down the last yards more slowly, hit a little crevice before the tree-line and it was this which probably unsettled the delicate adjustment which had been made so far. I’m going to make it, Mac thought one last time, and the car exploded.
He felt himself as if gripped by a giant hand, thumb and forefinger constricting, pressing against one another, working his life away and then a plunger hit his heart and took it with enormous force; he could feel his life moving up that plunger. In his last extremity he gripped the dead Paul as if Paul’s body itself could guarantee him passage, but the corpse was heat and stone, death and ice, it was merely a causeway toward death. Mac slid along and along that path as the car went up around him as if with the arcing of tracer fire.
At last it was very quiet.
The police car dragged itself to a halt a few hundred yards up the road. Both of the cops were quite young, one a rookie, the other only with three years in. They looked at one another and then quickly back at the burning car and then the rookie began to vomit.
The driver thought that he would admonish him but felt himself seized with his own retching; he opened the door and managed to lay it outside, on the pebbling, rather than on the mats of the car.
Christ, it was too much. He began to weep. In just a minute he was all right and he would get on the radio to make a full report but Christ, Christ, it was too much. It was just entirely too much for him.
A job like this: getting involved with drivers like the one in the Impala, crazed gunmen seemingly bent on self-destruction, well—
A man could die on this job.
VII
The item on the two punks in the ditched Impala was way, way down on page 27 of the Globe, but the firebombing of Tucci’s house, the twelve injured and eight dead, that was on page one. Sands didn’t even look at it though. He took the paper when it was delivered and chucked it onto the table where Karen could look at it later if she wanted to bother. He had enough trouble already.
He had more than enough trouble; he had a valiseful of junk to feed into channels and no one wanted to touch it. He found that out soon enough. A couple of phone calls into the usual sources not only met at refusals, they were terrified refusals. “Don’t tell me!” one outlet who had been particularly dependable said, “for Christ’s sake, I don’t even want to hear about it!” and hung up on Sands which was doubly impossible because people simply did not hang up on him. They were always eager to hear from Phillip Sands; he brought them their good news.
But no one was going to touch this. Sands got that feeling early on; you were nothing without instincts in his very risky sideline and his instincts from the moment the two men had come into his house had screamed that they were in over their heads and that anyone with the valise was probably heading that way himself. The valise was a curse. It was an absolute curse. If he was right and he was almost never wrong about this, he had been looking at one of the biggest hauls in the history of the Eastern seaboard, all of it tucked away together. And the fact that it wa
sn’t where it was supposed to be meant that there was going to be hell to pay. A man who kept hold of that valise for any period of time could get himself killed. That pair, with all their mumbling and threats, had seemed almost happy to walk out of there and leave Sands with the problem.
He should dump it. He really should; he knew that the right move was to simply wait for the two of them to return which they probably would hours early, throw up his hands and tell them to get it the hell out of his life. But how could he do it? Looking at the valise, feeling his life beginning to shake around him, Phillip Sands came to a reluctant understanding that day. Everything that he had done before had been small time. He had a good, quiet reputation and he could get a job done but he had just been a little man working on the fringes, taking no more risks than an associate professor could afford. He was absolutely, completely out of his depth now.
But he could not give it up. There was a hundred grand for him in that suitcase, maybe more, if only he could move it out. Even after the two punks had been paid off—and he was not entirely sure that he would go the full fifty for them, he might be able to get away with a lot less—there was so much that it might change his life. It was life-changing money. Nothing up until now had been at that level, it had all been nickels and dimes. Now Sands had a decision to make, and that morning, with difficulty, he made it: it was more important of him to dispose of that valise properly than it was to be an associate professor who did a little dealing. When he came right down to it—and he had little choice now in facing what he had become—the valise was more important. That was all. It meant more.
He called the university and reported sick. Upperclass seminar, the hell with it. Teaching, since he had settled into it four years ago, had become increasingly burdensome; now, it was little more than boredom. Part of that had to do with the collapse of a research project to which he had dedicated ten years of his life; when all the curves were skewed there was simply no definite coefficient of correlation between the belligerence of a society and the prevalence of invective. It had been an insight but insights meant nothing, verification was all that had counted. He had been able to fake it through for the doctoral thesis but no further. The work was flimsy, superficial. The Foundation had not renewed. Like it or not, if Phillip Sands ever became rich or important he would not do so in the field of linguistics.
Sitting by the phone, frozen in thought, he calculated his moves. He needed desperately to talk with someone, but he had played a lone hand all his life, never more so since he had begun to move from the casual procurement and resale of marijuana toward the harder stuff a few years ago. There was no one to talk to. Karen was impossible. She might have had a vague idea of what he was doing—she had been in his classes, hadn’t she? He had met her at a campus party for Christ’s sake—but she would not admit it, would not come to terms. He had hinted around it a few times early in their marriage but she had dropped every attempt at discussion. Soon enough Sands had understood. Her background might have prepared her for a joint or two—she could talk glibly about the varieties of drugs and their effects—but the realities of supply were simply not to be acknowledged. She was the same way about fucking. In bed, often enough, she could be quite passionate, come to him with a frankness which was shocking, but it was only under cover of dark. Any reference outside of the bedroom to sex, their sexual life, any expectation of sexual relations could turn her off for days. Once she had shut him off for a week because he had said, stoned at a party, that his wife was a good fuck.
No, he was alone. At noon, Karen came down carrying a small suitcase—the shape and texture of it was shockingly close to that of the valise, for an instant he thought she must have compressed it somehow and was now taking it away from him—and said that she simply couldn’t take it anymore, she was leaving him. Sands looked at her blandly and responded without emotion. This would make the third—no, the fourth time that she had left him within the past six months. It was always for the same reason, the utter collapse of communication, the feeling that he was shutting her out of his life. He could tell her a few things about shutting people off. She always came back. She went to one or another off-campus apartment with one or another of her student girlfriends, and three or five days later she came in, almost contrite, and the sex was better than it had ever been. Her problem, maybe, was dropping out of school when she married him, but that had been her decision, God knows, not his. He had had nothing to do with it. Married to a Ph.D. ten years older, you would have thought that she would have wanted to keep up her education. But her parents, for vague reasons not really having to do with the marriage, had disowned her, and she had not wanted Sands on an associate’s salary to put up himself the ninety a credit to stay at Boston University, which she called fifth-rate anyway. He guessed he couldn’t blame her. There was something about her getting a job and maybe working on an education degree at night, but nothing much had come out of that.
Sands said that he wished her well. At another time he would have tried to have shown more passion but the valise was on his mind. It made for an easier homecoming if he showed passion but it just wasn’t in him. “You don’t care!” she said, standing at the door. “I just realized that last night. You don’t care! You have no feeling! Inside, you’re nothing but a machine.”
“That’s not so, Karen.”
“What do you mean, it’s not so? It’s so clear to me. I don’t even know who you are!”
God, she was pretty. She was never so pretty as when she was leaving him. Desertion gave her passions that she could otherwise find only under the cover of night. Sands said, “Karen, we’ve gone through this too many times before. I just can’t—”
“You take it for granted! You just expect me to come back and fall against you, isn’t that it? Well it won’t happen this time.”
“All right,” he said tiredly, looking at the valise. He had been up all night thinking about it. He had been on the phone all morning. If she had stripped and invited him in he might have reacted the same way. “Anything you say.”
She held the suitcase almost jauntily, then, walked toward the door. “I know what you are,” she said quietly.
“I’m glad you do, Karen, because there are a lot of times that I don’t.”
“I’m no fool. You think I don’t know what those two men were here about last night?”
“We were discussing Whorf’s theory,” he said. “They’re graduate students from Western Reserve who travelled East at their own great expense to see me because they know my reputation. They wanted some ideas for their theses.”
“Fuck you,” she said. It somehow never failed to shock him when she used obscenities so casually; he was thirty-four, she twenty-four, but it was not ten years, it was another condition of life altogether. Whatever he had been and done, he still quailed a little when he heard a woman curse, but they seemed to think nothing of it. Except in bed where he liked to hear her curse and then she bit her lips and wouldn’t say a godamned thing except faster. Perverse. The perversity of them. “You’re a godamned son of a bitch fucking pusher, that’s what you are.”
This was a new element in their desertion discussions. Usually she stopped after telling him that he had nothing inside and went right through the door, swinging that damned little suitcase. But now she was hitting a new key. He wished he had the energy to respond. “That’s not true,” he said.
“That is true! It’s perfectly true! You’re selling drugs all over the campus and everybody knows it and it’s starting to get back to me and what kind of a fool do you think I am? I won’t put up with it!”
“Karen,” he said, “please get out.”
“I know what you are,” she said and this time there was no uncertainty, only a qualified kind of triumph, “that’s exactly what you are, you son of a bitch.”
“It’s time for you to get out, Karen. You should have left two minutes ago. Please don’t change the script.” He concentrated on keeping his voice mild, professorial. Hi
s hands were shaking. “Get out Karen.”
“I’ve checked on you. I know.”
“If you don’t get out now, Karen, I’m going to have to throw you out.”
“I ought to go to the cops on you,” she said. She opened the door. So this had been her planned exit line. “That’s what I ought to do. It’s the only way anyone’s ever going to reach you. To get you good and scared. Maybe they’d send you up for twenty years with your graduate students and your fucking Whorf theory of linguistics.”
Had this been the woman who whispered faster to him in the night? Stone, she was stone, his feelings had congealed to stone against her and he felt the rage beating. “I mean it,” he said, “get out.” All of his life he had sought for control. Without control you were not a human being. He had believed in it, had had faith in discipline. But how far could it take him? “Get out,” he said again.
“I’m going to get out,” she said. She hoisted her valise, little flurries of dissatisfaction moving across her cheeks as if she were still not satisfied that she had found the proper exiting stroke. A painter unwilling to abandon a canvas, still looking for the killing dash of color that would bring it alive. “Junk,” she said, “godamned fucking junkman.”
With a growl, Sands charged her. She dodged toward the door but the valise encumbered her, she could not duck out of the way quickly enough. Her head hit the panelling and she slumped. He grabbed her chin, cupping it as one does a child’s face and hit her in the mouth. She crumpled against him. He straightened her up and hit her again, harder. Color slashed across her cheeks. He raised his arm to hit her on the skull, a ramming blow that would knock the top of her scalp toward her jaw and only then did he stop. Something caught him. What have I become? he thought, what is happening to me? With a gasp, tears in his eyes, he pushed her from him. She slammed into the door. He kicked the dropped valise so hard that he tore a hole in it, saw the glint of underthings.