The Railroad

by Neil Douglas Newton

  “Glen Garioch,” I said, approvingly.

  “I can’t get Laphroaig up here.” He poured two generous drams and took a sip out of his glass. It seemed like it was some kind of ritual, so I followed suit.

  He took another sip and then looked at me with something that seemed like hate. “Fuck you, Mike.”

  “What?”

  “Do you have any idea what position you’ve put me in?”

  I paused. “I’m beginning to realize.”

  “I know you meant well but you’ve fucked everything up. I don’t know what to do now.” He slammed his drink down on the table.

  “I’ll do anything I can. If I leave here no one will know where I’ve been.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he groaned. He took another slug and seemed to take hold of himself. “Okay. Listen to me. We don’t have an awful lot of time. So I have to ask you what you plan to do.”

  “Plan? What does that mean?”

  “It means basically do you want to go back to your life in Manhattan now that you know that Eileen and Megan are safe?”

  I hadn’t thought about it—things had happened so quickly. I thought of Dennis and Barbara and the City View and a hundred other things that made New York what it was to me. Then I thought of Megan, saying that she knew I might go away again. I thought of Dennis and Barbara not having me around. Then I thought of Megan, being brutally disappointed once again. And I thought of Eileen growing old and being lonely.

  And I knew I wanted to be there to make sure that none of that happened. I wanted to be Megan’s father. I wanted to be Eileen’s husband. How could my life be better spent? Nothing else seemed to compare.

  “No,” I said finally.

  He studied my face. “Convince me you’re sure.”

  “Moskowitz. After all this time and what I’ve been through, do you think I’d make an impulsive decision?”

  “I don’t know. But I guess I’m going to have to gamble on you. That really makes me sick because…all this is at stake.”

  “I know.”

  He was silent for a full minute. Then he shook his head like he was trying to shake off some kind of insanity. “Okay. I’m going to have to take a chance, which I hate doing. That means you’re going to have to work with me. What you did has caused problems.”

  “I know that. And if I’d known…”

  His voice rose in intensity. “No time for guilt now. Do you trust me? Do you believe in what I’m doing here?”

  “Steve! What’s wrong with you? After what I saw tonight do you think I don’t trust you?”

  “I can’t read your mind. I need to know what you’re going to do when you leave here. Who you’re going to talk to and what you’re going to tell them. One thing goes wrong and all these people are fucked. Do you understand?”

  I realized he was scared. All of this was on his shoulders and the responsibility had most likely been killing him for years. And now there was something threatening it.

  “I trust you Steve. I admire you. I doubt this has ever been done in the history of the world.”

  “That’s what you’re saying now. But I got the impression you were…wary of me back when I got you out of the police station in Targersville. That makes me wonder.”

  “Of course you got that impression. I saw you take an envelope from Benoit at that party. I thought it was full of money. I know better now.”

  His eyes widened. “Oh shit. Yeah, I bet you did. You thought that Benoit was paying me for some service?”

  “I didn’t know what it was. But…it’s what it looked like.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “What was in that envelope was a report that Benoit had gotten from a private detective. I guess ten pages folded up looks pretty hefty.”

  He took another sip from his glass. “You were right: Benoit took that postcard from your house; the one with 4-5-1 written on it. He recognized Megan’s handwriting. He hired a detective who followed their trail just like you did. Only he was a professional. He didn’t find them. But he did find that the trail ended around here a few towns away; he couldn’t get any more information out of the folks in the towns around here than you did. But they acted suspicious. And that made him suspicious. That’s what he put in his report.”

  He sighed and his eyes went away for a moment, thinking of something. “Benoit was trying to bait me. I’d given him so much trouble in the past that he enjoyed rubbing my nose in it. He told me that he was going to come up here himself with a couple of friends of his. He was calling me every night drunk to remind me of it. Of course he never said anything concrete on the phone, just a lot of innuendo. Then he told me that he’d be going up to Maine in the next couple of days. He loved being able to tell me that.”

  He stopped talking suddenly and the silence seemed significant. After all of the shocks of the evening, I hadn’t really considered the significance of Benoit’s death. My mind went around in a few logical circles until it came to rest right back in the room I was in and the man who sat in front of me.

  I remembered his pain when we’d met at the Chinese restaurant weeks ago. Something had been weighing on his mind. Perhaps it was something he knew he had to do, something that went against the most basic of his ethics.

  I stared at him and his eyes seemed to mist up, just a little. I turned away.

  “There are no Chapter and Verse Killers,” I said softly. “Which means the people who’ve been chasing me since New York were…”

  He smiled for a fleeting moment. “They were friends of mine. I thought we could scare you away. You turned out to be different than I thought.”

  I sipped my drink and he sipped his. The weight of what we both knew made it a little hard to talk. Then he said, “You have to be sure. I’m putting everything in your hands. You decide you don’t want to deal with this and all these people….I can’t risk letting things get bad.”

  “I understand. I think you know me well enough to know what I’ll do.”

  He watched me for a few more seconds; I guess he was trying to be certain. “Do me a favor. Go ask everyone else to come in.”

  I did as he asked. When I came back the two glasses had been refilled. I sat down in front of mine as Moskowitz’s flock filed in. He held up his glass and looked into the amber liquid.

  “Mike, you have a drinking problem. No, wait. Let me finish. These things can get out of hand if you don’t get help. September 11th, leaving New York, losing your new family, all that has taken its toll. Now you’ve started your downward spiral. You’re not rational. You’ve just spent days and driven hundreds of miles looking for people who are gone and you really have no idea where they are. It’s something that crazy people do. It’s what people with delusions do. In the end you just had a psychotic break of some kind and you threatened some men in a bar with a pistol. One of the men had to subdue you. You’ll spend a night or two in the local jail until you’re released.

  “Things don’t get better for you after that. In a few months you’ll start to fall apart completely. You’ll get paranoid. Maybe you’ll start going to the police and accusing people of being involved in the Chapter and Verse murders, just like you did with Benoit. You’ll avoid your friends in New York, telling them you just don’t care about them anymore and you eventually will move back to Bardstown. You’ll go on drinking. Then you’ll start going to the newspapers with your paranoid theories. You’ll make a nuisance of yourself and they won’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  He took a sip. “Then things will get really bad. Because one night you’ll be watching the news and you’ll hear that Eileen’s car was found somewhere in Upstate New York with 4-5-1 written on the windshield in her blood. And you’ll know what that means.

  “I think that you’ll become so irrational that you’ll start doing strange things like confronting people, accusing them of murder. It doesn’t matter who. You’ll go to the police and report all kinds of things. You’ll tell them you’ve found the Chapter and Verse Killers b
ut you’ll be accusing people who have nothing to do with anything. Maybe the old man who runs the hardware store in Bardstown. Maybe a police detective. You’ll become violent, getting yourself arrested, maybe for disturbing the peace, maybe for something else. Who knows? You’ll continue to make noise about the Chapter and Verse Killers. And eventually you’ll announce that you’re offering a $50,000 reward to anyone with information on the killers. And you’ll start making a show of driving around Westchester and Rockland looking for them. You’ll get a little press coverage from that probably.”

  He smiled and for a second I could see that he was proud of himself and what he’d accomplished. “And then one day they’ll find your car on some road. You won’t be in it. And they'll find 4-5-1 written in your own blood on the windshield. Maybe it will be some friends of Robert Benoit’s who get you—you might have killed him after all and they want revenge. Maybe someone just doesn’t like you and the trouble you’ve caused. You’ll never be seen again.”

  He drained his drink and looked first at me and then at Eileen and Megan. None of us said a word. He smiled. “Say good-bye to Mike. He’ll be leaving in a half an hour.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The two men in my cell in Gaston said very little to me. It was something in the way I found them staring at me occasionally that made me think that they might be Book People.

  I spent two nights in that jail. Then I was brought before a judge who seemed like he didn’t care that I was there. He told me I’d have to pay a fine before I left. In a few hours I had the money Dennis sent me and I was a free man. A policeman drove me back to my car which they’d put in a lot in Piedmont. It seemed that the trip was a little longer than it should have been, but I chalked it up to my having been drunk and raving when I’d driven up from Piedmont. It was when the man beside me coughed loudly that I realized what had happened. I looked out the window and saw a barn in the shape of Noah’s Ark. My policeman friend stared out at the road, a faint smile on his face.

  I had been euphoric the first night in jail. After that my mood settled into a soft glow that never seemed to leave me. I knew what I had to do and I was ready for it; certainty is a powerful healer.

  The only part that bothered me was the effect it would have on Dennis. I’d be going off again, acting worse than I had before, and sooner or later I’d be gone. It would hurt him badly.

  I played it well, acting irrationally and making a show of drinking heavily. In reality I paced myself and managed to spill a decent amount on my clothes. I found it was easy enough to act drunk and stink of booze; it gave me the effect I was after.

  It was two weeks before things got so tense between Dennis, Barbara and I, that I decided it was a good time to leave. I did my best not to have a fight with Dennis; I was simply gruff and unresponsive as I packed my stuff and left.

  In the weeks that followed, I did everything that Steve had told me to do. I boozed almost every night but in several bars; that gave me maximum exposure and let me pace my drinking so I wouldn’t have to drink too much. I made regular visits to see Wills, spouting increasingly paranoid theories. Eventually, he came to see me as a drunk and a man

  on the edge of a breakdown. There came a time when I was barred from the station, entirely.

  I hounded the local papers. At first they listened to me, remembering Samuel and the ongoing investigation into the Chapter and Verse murders; that netted me two news stories with my name prominently displayed. But after a while they figured out I had nothing to offer and they stopped taking my calls.

  I watched the news every night and there came the day when the police found Eileen’s car in a small town in Upstate New York. 4-5-1 had been written in her blood on the windshield.

  And then, for all intents and purposes, I went insane. I’d go to bars and drink quietly for hours until something in me would apparently snap. At that point I’d stand up and begin screaming, throwing my drink and anything else that was handy, screaming at other patrons, tossing barstools. I got myself arrested at least once a week and eventually was banned from all the bars in the area.

  After a while, I could be found loitering outside of police stations, newspapers and public officials' offices, always drunk and raving. All the police in Westchester and Rockland counties knew me by sight and would do their best to get me to go home the second they saw me; I got a couple of arrests out of that gambit.

  Finally I staged Steve’s coup; I stood in front of the court building in Targersville and told the people who passed by that I was offering $50,000 for any information on the Chapter and Verse Killers; I even carried a homemade sign. A stringer at the court picked it up and a couple of the newspapers found it newsworthy, despite my reputation. I even bought some time on a local cable station each week to spread the news about my quest.

  I became a walking joke; people actually recognized me in the streets and laughed at me. And all that time I carried with me the knowledge that up north, Eileen and Megan were alive and safe. And that someday I’d be with them.

  It was lonely and sometimes I wondered if Steve would just forget me in the chaos of his double life and leave me to my lonely existence.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A man drives along a deserted road at the edge of a dump. There’s a bottle of scotch beneath the front seat. Despite the fact that both car and man reek of alcohol, the man has consumed very little. A talk show plays on the car’s radio.

  The man is tired. He’s spent several hours in two strip malls, ranting about child abuse and any topic that comes to his mind. In the second mall he’s asked to leave by security. The man is well satisfied with the evening.

  He crosses some train tracks; on the far side is some wooded land that surrounds the road. A few seconds after he crosses the track, an SUV barrels out of the woods to his right barring his way. As his car screeches to a halt, he surveys the road in front of him, his heart beating quickly. He hears another vehicle come to a noisy halt behind him, cutting off his escape.

  A man detaches himself from the shadow of the car ahead of him. The driver tenses. The man comes abreast of his car and stares in. “Turn away and cover your head,” the man tells him. He has just enough time to start turning away when the man outside produces a bat and smashes the driver’s side window. The door is jerked open.

  The man is pulled out of the car with a gentle firmness. For a moment his attacker brushes glass off the man’s back, saying nothing. Then he grabs his hand and, with the skill of a surgeon, he slices into the man’s forefinger. He guides the man along the front of the car and leans forward. Using the man’s blood, he writes 4-5-1 across the windshield.

  “You’ll need a bandage for that,” the attacker says, pointing at the man’s finger and wincing. “We have some in the car. We’ll get you stitched up soon. I want them to see you in one piece.”

  *

  A man leaves the Nine Train after an exhausting day’s work. Though he’s usually tired at the end of the day, this particular afternoon finds him uncharacteristically low on energy and slightly depressed.

  He stands on the corner of Seventh and 23rd, thinking about the possibility of dinner out. Lately he has become somewhat of a recluse, not going out as much as he used to. Like most of his recent nights, he opts to simply go home.

  His lobby is filled with a grim, grayish yellow glow, reflecting the somberness of the winter sky. Shuffling up to his mailbox, he unlocks it and absently sorts through the mail. One letter catches his eye, most notably due to the lack of a stamp and an address. All that’s written on the envelope is the man’s name: Dennis.

  He stares at the envelope for a few moments. Then he takes the elevator up to his apartment, where he fixes himself a drink. The strange letter sits in his hand while he drinks, sipping thoughtfully. Then he finally opens the letter and reads.

  “Sorry for the pain, the letter reads. Just give it ten. Until then.

  Take care,

  Alfalfa”

  The man hol
ds the letter and stares out the window. Then he smiles.

  He finds an old lighter in the breakfront by the dinner table. In the kitchen he finds a cracked saucer that he hasn’t used in years and brings it back to the living room where his drink waits.

  He takes a sip of the drink and makes a ritual of burning the letter in the old saucer, watching intently as the paper is consumed. A few minutes later finds him in the bathroom, dumping ashes into the toilet. In the end the dish goes into his garbage can.

  Still sipping his drink, he stares thoughtfully out into the traffic going south on Seventh Avenue, bathed in the stark winter light. He smiles once again.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Neil Newton was born and raised in New York City and grew up in Bayside.

  He did the liberal arts shuffle in college and graduate school and eventually became a computer programmer to his great surprise. Neil is also a musician who can often be seen indulging his interest in the arcane art of fingerpicking guitar.

  After trying to live the professional life in New York he moved to Knoxville, a small but civilized city. There he was surprised even further to find a wonderful adopted family and a very wonderful wife. He lives there with an endless supply of cats and dogs.

  The Railroad is Neil's first novel.

  To learn more about Neil and his work visit

  www.neildouglasnewton.com

  https://www.facebook.com/AuthorNeilDNewton

  http://www.amazon.com/Neil-Newton/e/B008E7HPLS/