Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  And so we end on a cheery note, five happy humans sitting around a table in the underground digs of Fulton’s, a steak house in Old Town. Outside are flickering gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and broad board sidewalks that front the river where miners and gamblers once mingled in the heyday of the gold rush.

  We congregate around a table and toast Laurel and her freedom with after-dinner drinks. She is flanked by Danny on one side and Sarah on the other, and spends much time this evening alternately squeezing and kissing each of them. Julie is on a flight from Michigan, scheduled to arrive at the airport late tonight. I take it as a sign that this, the freedom to hold and love, to bond with the children, is in the end the ultimate reward of liberty, at least for Laurel.

  The kids join in salute with some dark fizzing cola from their glasses. Danny actually proposes a toast ‘to the greatest mother a kid ever had.’ I give Sarah a squeeze as her expression becomes distant and her eyes misty with this, the knowledge that she will never be able to honor Nikki in this way – what would make this night complete.

  Laurel exudes the weariness that comes from victory after great struggle, an emotional release that gives itself up in a kind of quiet and restrained euphoria, as if she might crack like eggshell china if she were to completely let go. After half a bottle of wine and a couple of cocktails the smile seems durably planted on her face, but she is rapidly becoming maudlin. I sense a flood of tears just under the surface. What seven months behind bars and the prospect of death at the hands of the state will do to the normal psyche.

  Except for Danny, who arrived on the little Vespa, Harry called a taxi to bring us all here, to avoid the designated driver, a pack of drunks out on the town. He does me a favor and takes Sarah home. It is late and she needs to get to sleep. He will baby-sit for just a few minutes, as I have things to discuss with Laurel. Then I will head home myself, to the first restful night’s sleep in months.

  Laurel and I do Alfonse and Gaston in front of the waiter, fighting over who will pick up the check. When he finally takes her credit card it is only to return three minutes later to inform her that because payment has not been received in several months it is no longer valid. The final humiliation. Laurel is mortified. She leaves with Danny to wait for me outside by the Vespa while I pick up the check, assurances that she can pay me back when she has the means.

  It takes several minutes, and finally I climb the stairs to the street level and exit onto the plank sidewalk in front of Fulton’s. Second Street in Old Town on a weekend is racing cars and young girls in skirts to the crotch, hitting bars where the boys hang out. But tonight, a Monday, it is largely deserted. A single car, a small van, is parked at the curb in front of the restaurant.

  Across First Street at the corner, maybe seventy-five yards away, Laurel and Danny are talking by the little motor scooter with its wooden box, Danny’s catchall of possessions on the back. He has parked near a bike rack in front of the State Railroad Museum, a two-story brick-and-glass structure that takes up an entire block adjoining the old S.P. railyard. Laurel has her back to me, and seems deep in conversation with Danny as he works the combination on the chain lock to the scooter.

  It is early spring and the Delta breeze has kicked up, putting a chill to the night air. I stop on the corner for a moment to tuck the receipt for dinner into my wallet so Laurel does not see it. She would insist on taking it and somehow paying me back tomorrow.

  A janitor is rolling the tools of his trade in a small cart over the rough pressed concrete sidewalk across the street, unlocking the main entrance to the Railroad Museum for his nightly rounds.

  I hoof it to the corner and step down a long foot onto the cobblestone street and start to walk. Like a firefly in the tropics it alights on the stone surface a few feet ahead of me and just as quickly disappears. I saunter a step or two to the left, and it appears, only this time it seems to dance off the shoulder of my coat before projecting onto the roadway a dozen feet ahead of me, then, just as quickly, is gone again. It is then that it strikes me – the intense narrow beam, the concentrated red dot of laser light. Before I can think, I take three quick steps to the left, and hear the pop of the silenced bullet as it streaks past my right ear and ricochets off the cobblestone street. Caught by the tenor of metal fracturing at the speed of sound, Laurel turns.

  By this time I am in full stride running away from Fulton’s, across the intersection, my arms flailing.

  ‘Run! Go! Get the hell out of here!’ I must look like a rag doll.

  For the moment I get dazed expressions from the two of them, Laurel with a hand on her hip, slimmer and rock-hard as if she’d spent seven months in a health club.

  But Laurel and Danny have an angle on the shooter, looking behind me. I do not hear the bullet that tears the fabric of my coat at the sleeve and singes flesh, a bloody crease that I reach over and feel with one hand.

  By now my feet are flying, as much zigzag as I can do, like a jackrabbit ahead of shotgun pellets, bullets zapping past me. Any moment one will shatter my spine, blast through my chest. The thoughts that race through your mind – Nikki and Sarah.

  On one of these forays of evasion I am actually running lateral to the shooter, and in this instant I can see the silhouette of a figure, standing in the open door of the van parked in front of Fulton’s. To anyone down the street, from behind it would look like this guy is hunched over lighting a cigarette. Instead he is taking careful aim with two hands. I reverse course an instant before a bullet snaps in front of my face. I hear the sound of metal as it clicks on bricks and flattens itself against the wall of the Railroad Museum, now no more than thirty yards away.

  By this time Danny is on his scooter, doing a U-turn and heading out Second Street the other way, under the freeway and toward town.

  ‘Nine-one-one!’ Laurel yelling for him to call for help, as she hobbles down the street in heels, heading for the darkness and the open ground of the railroad yard. Danny looking back like he won’t leave her. He brakes near the end of the street.

  ‘Damn it – get out of here!’ she says.

  I take the shooter in another direction, away from them. At full stride I make it to the entrance of the Museum. I do not know if Lyle Simmons is his real name, or whether like so much of what Dana told me this too was a fiction. But there is no question about who is his quarry here. He is after me. I have now seen him twice, once at the post office and again in Hana. I am one of only two people who can identify him, me and Howard, the guy on the loading dock at the post office the day he delivered the letter bomb. I am wondering if Howard has been dispatched to his maker, the gunman cleaning up all the little loose ends left from Marcie Reed and his botched job on Melanie.

  I huddle in the shadows near the entrance of the museum. The place is deserted except for the janitor’s cart, which is propped against an open glass door a few feet away. I can see the shooter moving toward me, sliding a loaded clip into the handle of what appears to be an immense handgun, something from the arsenal of a starship, a laserscope and the cigar shape of a silencer protruding from this thing.

  This guy has set up his own private shooting gallery, using me as the bouncing metal bunny, at least eight shots that I have counted, on an open public street, and except for Laurel and Danny not a soul has seen this.

  He starts to jog, nonchalant, across the intersection, closing the distance.

  On my haunches, I move to the cart, push it out of the way. It rumbles across the mottled surface of the pressed concrete into the light of the moon, and suddenly takes two bullets that rip through the plastic bag draped in its center and filled with trash.

  He thinks I am using this thing for cover. While he’s distracted I slip through the open door into the lobby of the museum and quietly pull the door closed behind me. But I don’t hear the latch of the lock as it closes. Then I look. It is a dead bolt, requiring a key. I have no way of locking him out.

  The place is shrouded in muted light, and as I watch through the glass
door I see the gunman grab the cart, check the back side of it, and fling it to one side. Process of elimination – he looks to the entrance and the closed door.

  I slink back into the shadows, turn, rise, and run. I’m looking, but the janitor is nowhere in sight.

  I slip around the box office, down a long corridor, and, to my left, another hallway, past the elevator and a stairwell.

  I hear him pulling on doors out front. He’s gotten them all except the one that’s open, making a lot of noise. Last one’s a charm as I hear it rattle in its frame, closing behind him.

  Then a voice. ‘Hey, what are you doing? Building’s closed. You can’t come in here.’

  ‘Lookin’ fa someone.’ It’s an eastern inflection, somewhere north of Boston, heavy with working-class origins. I have heard this voice only once before, when he delivered the letter to Marcie Reed and told her to sign.

  ‘Well, he ain’t in here.’ The janitor again. For a second I think maybe the guy is going to be cowed into leaving.

  ‘What’s that?’ The janitor taking note. Something’s going on.

  I hear a flat percussion, muffled, like a lead sinker bounced one time on a child’s toy drum. It is followed by another in quick succession and then the sickening sound of something hitting ground, like a sack of oranges off a truck.

  The janitor is dead.

  I have been hovering around the corner from the elevator, maybe thirty yards from the lobby, and now I move, past a wall of windows that look out on a dark and deserted street. The moon is breaking through clouds above. Across the way the lights of Fulton’s and the crowded restaurant, sanctuary that I cannot reach.

  Behind me, an ancient steam locomotive, ‘The Empire,’ its name carved in lacquered wood, is mounted on rails embedded in a pedestal of mirrors so that the undercarriage gleams in refracted light. It is too bright here, lit up like an arcade. I pick up the pace and put this behind me. Turning a corner, I pass another locomotive, the name ‘C. P. Huntington’ on the side. Suddenly I am off of carpet, my heels on hard wood. I stop to pull off my loafers and carry them in my hand. In stocking feet I slide as I run.

  Twenty feet and I enter a great curving room with a cavernous ceiling. The floor turns to concrete, rolling stock everywhere, giant steel dinosaurs looming above me in the shadows. There are four gleaming locomotives at the far end of this room, two exhibits with their doors open, a post office car, and sleeping car, all on rails embedded in the concrete.

  It takes me a moment to gain my bearings, and then I realize that I am in the roundhouse, a kind of launching platform for trains. I can see the turntable outside through gleaming glass doors two stories high, under which the rails pass.

  Behind me I hear the sound of shoe leather brushing on thick carpet, slow-moving steps, cautious, uncertain whether I am here.

  I turn, and it is then that I see them, glistening in the dampened light of the overhead canisters, sparkling against the shimmer of waxed hardwood, drops of my own blood, four of them between where I stand and where wood turns to carpet. More stain the carpet to the last corner where I can no longer see.

  The scratch on my shoulder is not serious, but it has bled, little drops, and like bread crumbs in a dark cavern Lyle Simmons is following them.

  No handkerchief. I pull from my pocket the tie which I took off over dinner. I wipe the blood from the back of my hand where it has trickled from under the sleeve of my coat, and using my teeth and my good hand I wrap the tie around the wound on my upper arm and put a knot in it. There is a mild stinging sensation. I take a few steps to separate myself from the last drop of blood. Confident I am no longer leaking, I run at a half-stride past the postal car and a large engine. I negotiate my way around another locomotive and suddenly realize I am running out of building. Beyond this second engine there are two more, then a solid wall.

  One of the engines is parked over an underground concrete bay like those used to change oil in a lube shop, only larger. There are stairs at each end of this so that visitors can step down and walk in a cavern beneath the engine to study the undercarriage.

  A flash of memories from childhood, when I once played in a schoolyard on a rusting locomotive. I remember crawling through the area between the massive wheels and finding a cavern the size of a small house above the axles, just beneath the barreled bottom of the boiler.

  I steer clear of the locomotive parked over the bay. It would be too easy for Simmons to get below me and look up. I would be splayed against a background, a shooting gallery with a metal backstop where he could bounce bullets until one of them hit me. I take the second engine. The numbers 10-10 are stenciled on a plaque leading to a set of wooden stairs that allow visitors to climb up into the cab.

  I go around to the other side and crawl through the open triangle created by two of the locomotive’s immense drive wheels.

  The space is smaller than I remember from childhood, and for an instant sensations of claustrophobia wash over me, thirty tons of steel over my head. My body is halfway into the opening under the wheels. Lying on my back, overhead I can see one of the mammoth drive axles, steel, and the girth of a good-sized tree trunk. I pull myself underneath and do some contortions. I boost myself on top of the axle. I am now lying on top of this like a cat lounging on a branch, with my head toward the wheels on the other side.

  I shimmy along the axle to get closer. There are a few slots cut in the massive drive wheels, near where the steam-driven connecting rods fasten to the outside of the wheel. These give me a limited field of vision, back toward the area where carpet turns to hardwood, the end of my trail, the splotches of blood on the floor. I can feel the pulse throbbing in my temple as I check the sleeve of my coat for dripping blood.

  As I move under the massive canopy of the engine, suddenly there is a flicker of red light through the slots in the wheel, narrow and intense. I freeze. It is the thing about laser light – concentrated, it does not diffuse over distance. I cannot tell if he is fifty feet away or three. I lie with my head pressed against the inside of the giant steel wheel.

  Seconds pass, sweat dripping from my face. I hear footsteps. I look – he is thirty feet away. All I can see are his feet and the bottom of his pant legs, and one other thing – a beam of light. Simmons has some kind of a flashlight and is checking the undercarriage of one of the cars. The man comes prepared. In this instant I know that if I stay here, if the police do not come in time, I am dead.

  I watch as his feet disappear up the steps to the post office car. He is checking the inside. This car is maybe sixty feet long. Then he will reach the other end, exit, and check the locomotive next to it, the only piece of rolling stock between us.

  There are only a few windows in the postal car looking out in this direction, so I take my chance.

  I slide off the axle and drop to the concrete between the wheels. I struggle through the narrow opening on my stomach and emerge from under the engine on the side away from him. There are now two engines between me and the postal car. I move to my right, past the engine with its concrete bay. It is not until I reach the last locomotive, a mammoth diesel, that I realize that this thing has blocked my view of a stairway leading to an overhead gallery, a kind of mezzanine that hangs above the exhibit hall. Quickly, in stocking feet, I move to it, around the corner and up the concrete stairs – two flights. I emerge on an upper level of the museum, bordered by a clear acrylic railing that is transparent, in full view of the floor below.

  For the first forty feet I am able to steer clear of this, until I come to a bridge that passes between the turntable outside and the engines assembled below in the roundhouse. The bridge is only a few feet wide and I must crawl on my stomach to avoid being exposed by the safety-glass railing.

  I can hear his footsteps moving around the engines on the level below, occasionally flickers of light, alternating red and white, laser and flashlight. I stop, still as death, for an instant, anticipating an explosion of plate glass should he see me.

  It
is then that I see it, a sign over the door at the far end of the gallery, red letters against white light: EXIT.

  There is another way out, a set of stairs at the far end, a way down to the lobby that Simmons cannot see, a clear path to the front door and the restaurant beyond.

  I crawl on my knees, keeping away from the railing, until I can stand. I have now worked my way back to the wall of windows. Somewhere directly beneath me is ‘The Empire’ and its mirrored platform. It is then I hear them, not leather this time, but the squeak of sneakers on wood, like two chipmunks in a pissing contest. My first thought is the police TAC squad, part of a SWAT unit.

  Gingerly, so as not get my head blown off, I crawl to the railing and peer through. I cannot see Simmons. Then, below in the shadows, emerging into the moonlight cast from the mirror, I see the moving form. Not some cop in black with a twenty-shot-magazine Heckler & Koch, but Danny Vega, in all of his innocence, whispering my name.

  ‘Uncle Paul…’

  I could spit, but I could not hit him. He is hugging the walls of an exhibit, trying to stay in the shadows, and giving himself away with his mouth.

  ‘Uncle Paul…Are you in here?’ Whispers that can be heard fifty feet away.

  Then it hits me. The kid has followed my trail of blood from outside on the street into this place. With each step he moves closer to Simmons, somewhere in the darkness out by the giant engines. Then I wonder if he has called the cops. With Danny you can never be sure.

  Some way to catch his attention…

  ‘Uncle Paul…’

  For a moment I consider throwing one of my shoes at him, but the clatter would surely give him away. I fumble in my pocket for some change and come up with a few pennies, a nickel, and a quarter.

  I look over at Danny. In a moment he will leave hardwood for concrete. From there it is only a few steps more until he mingles with engines in the roundhouse and stumbles across the fiery red eye of death.

  I aim one of the coins, a penny, and throw it. I watch as it falls, deflected by a small potted shrub. It lands silently on the carpet near one of the exhibits.