Getting Off hcc-69

by Lawrence Block

  “If it’s not too much trouble—”

  “Just tell me.”

  Cigarettes, he said. If she could manage a carton of cigarettes, that would be great. What brand? Well, Marlboro would be ideal.

  “I’ll bring you a carton tomorrow or the next day,” she said.

  “Just as soon as I can.”

  Two days later she presented the requested carton of Marlboros to an attendant, and he gave her a receipt for it; it would be delivered as soon as possible to one Peter Fuhrmann. She went back to her motel and wished she could pack up and leave. Did she really have to turn up the next morning? Couldn’t she wait for her gift to work its magic?

  She watched TV until she was able to sleep, then slept until she woke up. She turned up during visiting hours and was just slightly disappointed when they ushered her into the room with Fuhrmann on the other side of the window.

  “I got the cigarettes,” was the first thing he said to her. “That was really nice of you. Thanks.”

  “I guess you’ve been smoking like crazy ever since.”

  “Oh, I don’t smoke.”

  Her reaction was enough to put a smile on his face. And he went on to explain that cigarettes were the preferred currency inside prison walls, that they were better than money when it came to obtaining favors. “They’re too valuable to smoke,” he said, “and I think if I ever had the habit I’d have to quit while I was here. It’d be like lighting up dollar bills and smoking them.”

  “So these packs of Marlboros just pass from hand to hand like money? Doesn’t anybody ever smoke them?”

  “Oh, the smokers smoke them,” he said. “They’re addicted, so what choice do they have? But I was never a smoker.”

  “And you’ve got an MBA,” she said, “so you know how to game the system.”

  Which was more than she could say for herself.

  Back to the motel. She packed, and found room in her suitcase for the hypodermic needle and the little vial of colorless liquid. There was still some left. She’d only used a few drops on the Marlboros.

  She hadn’t even opened the carton, let alone any of the packs. There’d been no need. The hard part had been getting what she needed from a pharmacist, and she’d worked up an elaborate story which in the end she’d never needed to deliver. Because the guy behind the counter in Glens Falls practically drooled at the sight of her, so the easiest thing was to come back right around closing time and let him coax her into the back room.

  He had a couch there, and she rather doubted she was the first woman he’d shared it with. But she knew she’d be the last. He went down on her first, which was promising, but before she could get anything out of it he sprang up and mounted her, and after a few thrusts he was done. That made him the fourth name on her list, but he didn’t stay on it for long; there was a large all-purpose utility knife at hand, and she came up with a use the manufacturer never thought of. He was dead before he could catch his breath.

  She scooped up close to three hundred dollars from the cash register, plus a pair of fifties and three hundreds in the lower compartment. That was a decent score in the age of credit cards, and she upped it with another two hundred-plus from his wallet. All very welcome, because she could certainly use the money. Cash didn’t seem to last long. She was always on the verge of running out of it.

  But there was a reason she’d picked Washburn Pharmacy instead of Dell Hardware or Pick’n’Pay Market, and she found what she was looking for in a locked cupboard alongside the couch where Gerald Washburn, RPh, had had the last orgasm of his young life. The lock looked formidable enough, but inches from it a key hung from a nail, and voila!

  She took everything that looked interesting, including a syringe. What she didn’t take she scattered, leaving the place as she imagined an impatient junkie might leave it.

  On the way out, she helped herself to a carton of Marlboros. Like, why not?

  In the end, she decided to keep only a bare minimum of the pharmaceuticals she’d taken. She’d had the impulse to hang on to everything, because you never knew what might come in handy. But you also never knew who would go through your possessions and wonder how you’d happened to turn into a walking drugstore, and a trace of these controlled substances would lead straight to Washburn Pharmacy, and wasn’t that where they found poor Washburn with a big old knife in his chest? Say, do you suppose there could be a connection?

  She’d filled the syringe, worked the needle between the edges at the end of the carton, then forced it into a pack and, assuming she’d done it correctly, expelled a few drops of its contents into a cigarette. She repeated the process a couple of times, then did the same at the carton’s other end.

  It was hit or miss, she knew. There were two packs at each end of the carton, six more in the middle. If he started with an end pack, she might get results in a hurry, but if he started in the middle, well, how long could it take? If the man smoked a pack a day, within a week at the outside he’d be into one of the end packs, and sooner or later she’d get lucky even as his luck ran out.

  Yeah, right. Who’d have guessed the bastard didn’t smoke at all?

  Her next visit came a full week later, and the greatest moment of anxiety was at the security check. She hadn’t brought cigarettes this time, and had nothing on her person that might draw the interest of the scanner or the matron, but suppose one of her doctored Marlboros had worked its magic? Suppose an inmate had taken a deep and final drag, and someone had figured it all out?

  Maybe they were looking for her, waiting for her. The possibility had dissuaded her from bringing him a second carton of cigarettes, and had nearly kept her from showing up at all. But no one looked at her twice, and if the matron’s hands were almost invasive enough to earn the woman a place on her list, well, the intrusion was over quickly, and before she knew it she was in the Airstream trailer with Peter Fuhrmann.

  “You’re here,” he said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t show.”

  “I said I would.”

  “You might have had second thoughts. I mean, what are we to each other, Audrey? A few years ago we spent less than ten hours together, and you were unconscious for most of them.”

  “The part I was awake for wasn’t so bad.”

  “I drugged you, and you could have died from it.”

  “But I seem to have survived, haven’t I?”

  “And thank God for that, but the point is you could have died. Another girl did.”

  “That’s why she’s not here, Peter.” She cocked her head. “But I am. And they won’t let us have the trailer forever, and they don’t call it the Talk Truck, do they? So do we really want to spend the whole time talking?”

  “Audrey,” he said. “Audrey, Audrey, Audrey.”

  Well, it wasn’t a horrible name. If he insisted upon saying it over and over, it might as well be a name she could stand.

  They’d gotten past the little game of pretending he was drugged and immobilized, and their lovemaking was more spirited this time around. He’d had a week to think about what he might like to do to and with her, and he turned out to be equipped with both imagination and skill, and she didn’t have to feign her response.

  Oh, it might have been better. It would have heightened her pleasure considerably if there’d been a way to conclude things with his death. As she got close, she imagined him dying in a dozen different ways — shot, stabbed, throttled, hanging from a rope — and that all helped, but it wasn’t the real thing.

  The real thing would have to wait. Forever, apparently.

  “Audrey.”

  She rolled onto her side, laid a hand on his chest. “I like the way you say my name.”

  “I didn’t even know your name. You told me your name was Jennifer, and I’d pretty much forgotten you, false name and all, until you turned up here.” He drew a breath. “And gave me a reason to live.”

  Oh?

  “I hadn’t planned on saying that,” he said, “but I think I’ve got to get past keeping thi
ngs to myself. I wasn’t planning on killing myself, nothing like that. I’ve thought about it and rejected it.”

  Well, think about it some more, why don’t you?

  “But all I was doing was letting my life run its course. My sentence has three more years to run. My lawyer arranged for me to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, and I’ve served two years of a five year sentence. And I figured that gave me three more years to decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I didn’t mind postponing that decision.”

  “And now?”

  “The day before yesterday,” he said, “I filed an application for parole.”

  He’d been eligible since the completion of his first year. But you had to apply, and each month he’d passed up the opportunity to do so. Because all parole would do was force him to figure out what to do with his life, and that had been a decision he was unprepared to make.

  Besides, he felt he deserved to serve his full sentence. He’d killed Maureen, whether or not it had been his intention, and it was only fair that he be deprived of three more years, having himself deprived her of the entire remainder of her life.

  And prison wasn’t so bad. He hadn’t made friends inside the walls, but he hadn’t made enemies, either, and he’d found it easy enough to take the days one at a time and get through them that way. They fed you three times a day, and if the meals weren’t Cordon Bleu, at least they kept you alive. You could find the routine of prison life limiting and confining, or you could do as he had done and adjust to it, embracing it as something that relieved you of the burden of decision. It was, in its way, like being in the army, or working for a corporation. You did what they told you to do, and one day followed another, and you got along.

  “I don’t know how you feel about me,” he said, “or even how I feel about you. Am I in love with you? It certainly feels like it, but I don’t know that I can trust the feeling. I mean, I barely know you.”

  Well, you got that right.

  “And as far as our having a future together, it seems pointless even to speculate. But what you’ve done, Audrey, is show me that I have a future, whatever form it takes. So I put in my application, and in two months I’ll have a hearing, and then, well, I’ll have to see how it goes. I hope I’ll see you between now and then, and I hope I’ll see you when I get out, but for now you’ve given me my life back, and I’ll always be grateful to you for that. I only wish there were something I could give you in return.”

  She stretched out on the bed, parted her thighs. “We’ve got half an hour,” she said. “Maybe you can think of something.”

  Two months until his hearing. Then, if the parole board decided in his favor, a few weeks to run the paperwork and let him out of there.

  All at once it had become manageable. She’d never given a thought to parole, never imagined it might have been available to him all along.

  Of course you couldn’t predict what the parole board might do. Back in Hawley there’d been an inspector at Motor Vehicles who made sure nobody ever passed the road test the first time through. He’d find some way to fail you. So there was always the chance some similar tightass on the Parole Board made everyone apply more than once, just on general principles. But Peter had committed no infractions of penitentiary rules, pulled no time in solitary, and indeed had led an apparently blameless life until the single unfortunate incident that had put him behind bars. It would be hard to find a better candidate for parole, and she could only assume the odds were in his favor.

  So now she had to keep her distance. As soon as he was free, she’d take him to bed in some yet-to-be-determined venue a little more private than the fuck truck. They’d celebrate his freedom, and by the time they were done she’d have her own freedom to celebrate, and one less name on her list.

  Until then, she would have to do what she could to lower her profile. Every time she walked through the metal detector and into the prison, a camera recorded the visit. They wouldn’t keep the tapes forever, but how long would it be before they recycled them? Probably a week, she figured, but it could be as long as a month, so if she wanted to avoid having her features on file somewhere…well, it looked as though the best way to stay out of prison was to stay out of prison.

  She picked up a carton of Marlboros — undoctored, this time — and paid him a last visit to tell him through the pane of glass that he wouldn’t be seeing her for a while. “I’ll be in California,” she said. “In fact I should have been there all along. I have an aunt in Yreka who’s not in good health, and I’ve been splitting caretaker duties with my sister, and I’m long overdue to get out there and take my turn.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “You probably didn’t know about the aunt, either. I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay, and I’m not sure where I’ll be staying.”

  “You can’t stay with your aunt?”

  “Even if I could,” she said, “I wouldn’t.” And she riffed on what a pigpen the aunt’s house was, and then went on to explain that there was someone else she had to see, not in California, because there was a conversation she had to have, and it really ought to be face to face.

  “See, I’ve sort of been in a relationship,” she said. “And, well, I don’t know what the future’s going to hold for us, Peter, but I’d like to make room for us to give it a chance. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I didn’t know you were seeing anybody.”

  “I know, I’m full of surprises. A sister, an aunt, and now a boyfriend. Except he’s not exactly a boyfriend, and I’ve been ready to break it off for a while now, and this is the right time.” She put her palm on the glass, and once he’d matched his palm to hers she said, “Peter, no strings. You’re not under any obligation, and how can we possibly know where this is going? But I want to give it a chance, and I hope you want to, too.”

  “There’s nothing I want more.”

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again,” she said, “but I’ll want to keep in touch, and of course I’ll want to know what happens with your hearing, and how that goes. I suppose I could write to you, but—”

  “I’ll get a cell phone.”

  “They’re allowed in here?”

  He nodded. “I never bothered getting one,” he said. “I never saw the point. Who would I call?”

  SEVENTEEN

  “It’s pronounced Why-reeka,” she said, “and it’s supposed to be a Shasta Indian word meaning white mountain, but I haven’t run into any Shasta Indians who can say one way or the other.”

  “Isn’t there a Eureka as well?”

  “There is,” she said, “and my own theory is that they were trying to call it that and found out there already was one, so they changed how they spelled it. I mean, they were both Gold Rush boomtowns, right? But Mark Twain had another explanation.”

  “Oh?”

  “Something about a sign for a bakery, and it was reverse-printed on glass so it read backwards, Y-R-E-K-A, and the B was worn off. But that seems farfetched to me.”

  “Because the letters would be backwards,” he said. “The R and the K, anyway.”

  “What I think happened,” she said, “is Mark Twain noticed that the town’s name spelled backwards was Akery, and he just made up the story from there. I mean, he made things up, didn’t he?”

  “You mean A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court didn’t really happen? Another illusion shattered. But you’re getting along all right in Yreka? Your aunt’s not driving you around the bend?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “And that’s really great news about the board. That’s a lot more important than how this place got its dumb name.”

  Of course she wasn’t in Yreka, or anywhere in California. She was in Baltimore, in a three-story house on the edge of Fell’s Point, where she’d managed to rent a room. She got a part-time job clerking in a copy shop that doubled as an Internet café. One of her perks was free use of a computer during her off-hours, and she spent a
lot of time free-associating her way from website to website. That was how she’d come by all that information about Yreka, which she’d passed on to Peter the next time she spoke with him.

  And the following day she looked up A Connecticut Yankee. That led her to Bing Crosby, who starred in one of the film adaptations, and that led her somewhere else. The Internet, she thought, was like life itself. One thing kept leading to another.

  There were singles bars nearby, and shops and restaurants that drew out-of-towners. But she kept a low profile and didn’t wander far afield. She worked and surfed the net, she took her meals at a cafeteria around the corner from the copy shop, and she watched TV.

  Now and then she used the phone.

  “A halfway house,” she said. “And it’s in New York City? Oh, in the Bronx? Well, that could be a good thing, Peter. And that’s just where you’ll be living, isn’t it? You can come and go as you please.”

  They talked about it as a way of easing the transition from imprisonment to freedom, but what she liked was the coincidence of the location. All of this had started in the Bronx, in the Riverdale section, and it was fitting that it should end there.

  “I wish I could be there when you walk through the gates,” she said. “But maybe it’s better that you’ll have a week to settle in at the halfway house first.”

  Just a few more weeks now…

  She picked up her phone, keyed in the number she’d looked up earlier. Four rings, and then the machine picked up, and clear across the country in Kirkland, Washington, Rita’s voice invited her to leave a message.

  She broke the connection.

  She found the halfway house on Laconia Avenue at 225th Street, somewhere around the border between two Bronx neighborhoods, Williamsbridge and Edenwald. It was an unprepossessing four-story building, its crumbling brick exterior imperfectly sheathed in aluminum siding. Four men sat on the front stoop, smoking cigarettes, and it wasn’t hard to believe they’d done time upstate.

  The three-story building to the right housed a bodega, its window filled with neon beer signs. There was an empty lot on the other side, rubble-strewn, girded with a cyclone fence. To keep the rubble in? To keep the rabble out?