The Four-Night Run

by William Lashner

  But he stopped short of the loft. He put the champagne in the freezer and dropped onto his couch. He was too tired even to take off his raincoat, but he would wait for Dolores as she had asked.

  He just needed to keep his eyes open.

  If he could keep his eyes open, then he would be ready for her when she opened the door with the key he left behind a loose brick, and made her way up the stairs. His smile and a glass of very good champagne would act as salve upon all the slights that had marred the strange thing that had grown between them—an acquaintanceship charged with random bouts of goatish sex but always, at heart, an acquaintanceship. Their relationship was as convenient a thing as he could ever have hoped for, but it left her, he could sense, more than vaguely disappointed. Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe tonight he would kiss her gently without trying to rip off her shirt. Maybe tonight he would ask about her day and listen to what she said and feign real interest in how wonderfully her daughter was doing in school. Maybe tonight he would try to make her a little happy.

  He just needed to keep his eyes open.

  A cigarette. He could use a cigarette. He patted the pockets of his raincoat—nothing. He had foolishly given what he’d had left to the cheerful man sitting next to him at the blackjack table, and now Scrbacek had zilch. He rose and quickly searched the apartment, coming up empty before he dropped down again in his chair. He didn’t need to smoke, he just wanted to. He knew the difference.

  He had quit smoking once, for a girl. Jenny Ling. Everybody has one great failed love, and Jenny Ling was his. She was an earnest, liberal help-thy-fellow-human type who found the stink, the stray litter of ash, the yellowed teeth, the cancerous tumors, found all the by-products of Scrbacek’s habit decidedly uncool. Despite the startling banality of her insights into smoking, he had given it up for her, and had felt decidedly virtuous. It was his virtuous epoch, his time with Jenny Ling, but that love had failed, decidedly so, and he had taken up the practice once again.

  Now, trying to stay awake for a different lover, he could use a cigarette. But Dolores would bring him one, sweet Dolores—she was always good for a spare. He closed his eyes and thought about the way Dolores would purse her pretty lips as she tossed him her pack of Benson & Hedges. He would tap the pack against the arm of his chair, shake out a single slim cigarette, place its smooth surface within his lips, flick to life his lighter, bring the flame close to his face, breathe in the fire, fill his nose and throat with the rich dark pleasure of the smoke, redolent of the burning leaves of autumn, the crackling hearths of winter, the sparks of a campfire spiraling into the summer night. He inhaled deeply, the warm tug of the nicotine suffusing into his blood, the heat of the red glow upon his fingers, filling his lungs and turning his dream into a gorgeous chiaroscuro of smolder and smoke.

  He woke with a cough.

  The smoke of his dream was surrounding him, thick, warm.

  He sat up and coughed again.

  “What the . . .”

  There was only smoke. The lit digital displays on his stove, his cable box, his stereo, all were lost in the haze.

  He stood and coughed, dashed to his window, pushed up the bottom sash. Fresh air washed upon him. He punched out the screen and looked down. The glow of flame within his office on the bottom floor danced upon the darkened street. He yelled for help, but nothing outside moved except the dance of the firelight.

  He took a deep breath and rushed halfway down the spiral stairs. The heat hit his face like a fist. A carpet of flame covered the floor of his office. Fire danced wildly up the stairway. He stepped down farther into the roar as a tongue of flame shot high enough to lick his boot. He wrapped the coat around himself in preparation for a race through the fire to the safety of the street and took a deep breath. It felt like raw flame had leaped into his throat and seared his lungs. The pain buckled his legs. As he gripped the handrail, a cinder burned into his palm. He threw up his hand and collapsed down the circular stairwell, twisting until he lay in a curve, facing the steps. Fire danced about him as if he were the guest of honor on a funeral pyre. He took another breath. The pain was beyond pain. He fell into a fit of coughing as the heat overwhelmed him.

  Slowly, desperately, hand over enfeebled hand, he dragged himself back up the stairway and into his apartment.

  On his knees he crawled to the window, grabbed the sill, pulled himself up, stuck out his head. He gulped at the air. He knew the air he breathed to be cool, delicious, sweet, but still each inhalation burned as if he were again breathing in the hot smoke of the fire. He had to get out, somehow. He thought of jumping; it was only the second floor, but still. There was a drainpipe leading from the roof just a few feet from the window. That could be his ticket. He turned to take a look back into the apartment. What did he need? What must he save? What in his life was absolutely essential? A suit? His flat-screen? The diploma he was awarded by his law school? No, nothing. Nothing worth saving. He leaned back through the window and lunged for the pipe.

  It groaned audibly when he grabbed hold of it. His burned right hand slammed into a brace, and the metal sliced his skin, but even so he whipped his other arm around to grab the drainpipe with both hands. It wasn’t as steady as he had hoped, nothing more than folded sheet metal, but he saw no choice except to hold on tight and swing his body out of the window, away from the fire.

  He steadied his grip, took a painful breath, swung.

  His legs hung loose. He scrabbled at the brick wall with his boots, trying to find purchase, as if to climb up instead of down. Suddenly he stopped moving altogether, as if suspended in time as well as midair. With a groan and the sound of snapping braces, the pipe broke from the building, falling away even as it collapsed in on itself.

  And Scrbacek fell with it, shouting, shouting.

  The bending and collapsing of the metal slowed his fall just enough so that when he hit the asphalt unevenly, his left leg jammed but did not shatter. He lay on the ground, stunned. Slowly he raised his torso so he could stare head-on at the wall of fire inside the plate-glass window of his office. With much effort he stood, took a step forward and then another, and stopped before the flames, watching his entire career incinerate before his eyes. He wondered what he had done to cause the fire, what appliance he had forgotten to turn off, what combustible he had left too close to a source of heat. He wondered why the fire alarm hadn’t gone off, tried to remember when he last changed the batteries. He thought for a moment of the twenty-six years remaining on his mortgage.

  There came a rustling sound from behind him, and then something else.

  “Scrbacek.”

  It was less than a whisper, as soft as a thought. He turned his head, and in that instant the fire before him was linked in his mind with the explosion behind the courthouse and he knew, with all certainty, that the car bomb had been meant for him and the fire had been purposely set and there was someone behind him intent on finishing the job.

  He dived to the left at the same time he heard an insect buzz by his ear. He rolled along the ground and rose, running as fast as his jammed leg and seared lungs would allow, running, gasping for air, running, running for his life.

  He pumped hard with both fists until he felt something like a baseball bat slam into his left arm, knocking him to the ground, and when he rose and started running again, the left arm refused to move, just hung there, lifeless. But he kept running, gasping and running, pumping now with one fist only, the singed tail of his raincoat sweeping behind him as he kept running, kept running.

  He came to a cross street and turned quickly right. He grabbed his left biceps, and his hand came away slick—his arm was bleeding and the blood was coming fast—but he kept running.

  Until he came to another intersection. Where he slowed. And then stopped. Bent over, grabbing again his bloodied biceps, gasping for breath. Gasping. For breath. Gasping. He coughed out a gob of black phlegm and searched desperately around him.

  To the right, the neon glow of Casinoland bec
koned. Within the reach of that light were the police, the hospitals, the Department of Human Services, whole industries designed to track and help a man in trouble. Within the reach of that light were friends, colleagues, Dolores. To the left were the hostile shadows of Crapstown.

  Our brains have evolved over the eons by growing up and out. It is the forebrain, a rather recent addition, that controls all the higher functions: reason, mercy, love. In contrast, the hindbrain is a vestige of the lower-order mammals out of which we rose in the far recesses of the misty past. It sits at the base of our skulls like a rat, with a tail that runs down our spines, and controls our involuntary functions: heartbeat, breathing, vomiting, the release of adrenaline at the scent of danger. Our forebrains wrestle with the grand unanswerable questions of existence—our places in the world, the interconnectedness of all things, the intricacies of the infield fly rule—but when the worst dangers rear their ugly heads, it is that little rat at the base of the skull that takes control.

  Put a rat between light and darkness, give it a shock, it will always, always run to the dark. Always. J.D. Scrbacek was marked for death for no reason he could fathom, his vehicle was gone, his home and office were destroyed, he was leaking blood with every step, and there was no one he could trust. J.D. Scrbacek was in mortal danger, and the rat at the base of his skull knew exactly what to do.

  Scrbacek took off to the left, running as fast as lungs and legs would allow, running away from a killer, away from the light, running dead straight into the heart of darkness that was Crapstown.

  9

  CRAPSTOWN

  He cut into an alley, veered up a wide street, darted into another alley. He ran like an asthmatic kick returner with the legions of hell out to tackle him and the whole of Crapstown as his field.

  The cityscape he ran through was barely lit, the odd streetlight here, the odd porch light there, a wall vaguely illumined by the blue-gray flicker of a television. But even in the shadows, Scrbacek could feel the changes as he made his way farther from the boardwalk. The windows became first barred, then shattered, then boarded up with planks of splintering plywood. The lines of houses were first pitted with the occasional empty lot here and there, then held as much empty rubble as a standing building, then were reduced to swaths where the few standing buildings looked like the tottering teeth of a decrepit old man too poor to afford his daily orange. The stench of decay grew ever stronger, the sounds grew more desperate: the wails of a siren, the clash of a metal can overturning, a moan, a cry, something like the shattering of bones.

  He ran past whores with silvered tops and fishnet stockings, who hooted at him and laughed as if it were they he was running from. He ran past packs of men standing in the shadows on dark corners, men who danced uneasily from foot to foot and called out to him as he ran past. A long-toothed boy spied him and gave maniacal chase before surrendering the pursuit with a shouted expletive. An old woman without any teeth rocked on a porch and stared down as he ran by. Dogs, eyes glowing red, heads bowed menacingly, tracked him as he made his way. And rats, big as small cats, sometimes held their ground as he approached, rearing upon their hind legs, snarling.

  Lungs bursting, muscles screaming, heart failing, Scrbacek ran blindly on, pushed by fear, careering here and there but always heading west, until his jammed leg wobbled and he swerved off course, hitting the wall, literally, smashing his face into brick. He spun until his back was against the rutted surface, and looked behind him. Nothing. No one. He took a long breath, coughed it out, took another. He grabbed his arm, and slid to sitting on the ground.

  He was bleeding too much, he knew. He tried to take his arm out of the raincoat, but it was swollen grotesquely and limp with pain. With his other hand he unbuttoned the front of his shirt, reached for the collar of his tee, and pulled. A sharp pressure at the back of his neck. He pulled again, resisting with his neck, gave it a sharp yank, and suddenly the whole front of his T-shirt ripped free. He tied it into a loop and slipped it over his hand and up his arm on the outside of the coat until it sat above the wound. He looked around the ground and found a thick splinter of wood. He scraped the points off the ends, slipped the stick into the loop of cotton, twisted it, and twisted it again until the loop was brutally tight upon his arm. He packed the stick and knot into his armpit so it wouldn’t spin loose.

  Tourniquet in place, he looked up and down the street. He wondered if maybe he had lost his pursuer, if maybe he wasn’t really being chased at all, wondered if the whole thing was indeed a mistake, despite the explosion and the fire and the bullet wound. But the screech of a cat jolted his bones, and he scrabbled up and staggered forward again. He was reduced by terror to his raw essentials: joints and bones and lungs, the pain in his arm, the stitch in his side, the demented cough, the need to move, to get away, to be someplace else, anyplace else, to run.

  As he made his way past a stack of metal trash cans, a hand reached out and tripped him. When he hit the ground, he saw the hand retract and a large shadow emerge from between the cans. Before the shadow could approach any closer, he pushed himself back to his feet and kept on moving. Along one sidewalk a silhouette lifted up an arm to try to stop him and he put a shoulder into the figure, knocking it aside, so he could continue his run.

  Finally, on a dark narrow street with trash strewn and its buildings reduced to rubble, exhaustion caught him by the scruff of the neck and threw him facedown onto the cracked cement. A stone stoop stood out from the rubbled brick of a ruined house, and he crawled into the dark corner between the stoop and the brick. As he twisted into a sitting position, something scurried away, its claws scraping the cement.

  He grabbed at the air with his lungs, coughed, grabbed for more, and fought to beat back the fear. Calm yourself, he thought. You must have lost the bastard by now. Probably even lost him when you made that first cut off your street. And if the shooter is right there behind the ruined wall ready to take you out here and now, what the hell are you going to do about it anyway? So calm yourself. Make a plan.

  The first plan that came to his mind was to get up and run, but as he tried to stand, a violent vertigo pounced, throwing him back down to the cement. No more running. Calm down. Make a plan.

  He touched his wounded arm. The raincoat was now sticky and stiff with drying blood. He gently felt for the damage, and a pole of pain shot into his shoulder. He probed further and woke another pole of pain, and he shouted out despite himself. There were two wounds, one on either side. The bullet must have gone right through his arm; it wasn’t stuck in there to torture the muscle. Chris at Mount Olympus had been right—it was his lucky night. It was unbelievable how lucky he felt. So damn lucky he wanted to wring a neck. He pressed the wounds again, two poles of pain ripped into his shoulder, and he shouted out:

  “I’m so fucking lucky!”

  Stop, he told himself. Calm down. Make a plan. His arm was still oozing blood despite the tourniquet. He opened his shirt and ripped himself another swath from his T-shirt. He wrapped the white cloth as tightly as he could bear around his bicep, twisting the loose end into itself so it would stay in place.

  Now what? He would need a hospital. But to walk into an emergency room in the city—the bright fluorescents, the nurses rushing back and forth, the other patients watching him, the doctor calling the police to report a bullet wound—to place himself in that much light now seemed impossible. Someone was out to kill him, someone who could blow up his car and burn down his building, someone with the gall to shoot at him in the middle of his own street. Checking himself into a hospital in this city seemed a certain way to give himself over to that someone. No, he needed to get away, far away. But how?

  His hand jerked to his raincoat. He felt for it. Here, no here. He pushed himself up to his knees and patted the pockets. There it was. He pulled out his phone and turned it on. The screen lit, and he let out a great breath of relief as he pressed his finger to the reader.

  Who to call? His first thought was of his mother, but th
at was the reflex of a scared little boy; there was nothing she could do for him from The Villages. And 911 was an impossibility, what with the corruption that riddled the police force like a ruinous case of clap. Some cop had probably already been paid off to issue an APB with his description, all in the hope of leading the killer to his quarry. He thought of Dolores, but how reliable was she, really? He thought of his friends, his colleagues, friendly beat reporters, but could come up with no one in whom he had absolute confidence and who had the wherewithal to help. His secretary talked too much. Ethan Brummel was dead. Jenny Ling had dropped a restraining order on his ass, not that he didn’t have it coming. And then there was Cirilio Vega, friend and fellow member of both the defense bar and Sweeney’s Sunrise Club, where a pack of criminal defense attorneys shared strategies and swapped stories each morning before court. They were as close as rival attorneys could be, but there was something slippery about Cirilio, and his clients all were criminals. Could he trust his fate to a man who spent his entire life working for criminals?

  Thirty years of life, and Scrbacek could come up with no name he absolutely trusted. His frustration rose within him and welled into a sob.

  Calm down. Make a plan. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his raincoat, went through his options one more time, and suddenly he knew. He found the number on the Internet.

  “State Bureau of Investigation,” said the voice.

  “I’m looking for Special Agent Stephanie Dyer,” he said, as softly as he could.

  “I’m sorry,” said the voice, “but I’m showing her not on duty now. Is there a message?”

  “This is an absolute stone-cold emergency. Can you give me her home number?”

  “That’s not allowed, sir, but if it is an emergency, I can page her for you. Would you like me to do that for you, sir?”