by Larry Crane
Chapter Twenty-One
Maggie reasoned that a short story in the Atlantic Monthly might finally let her doze off after having driven Jory and Kirk back home from the Trick or Treat excursion all around the neighborhood and beyond. She’d endured the mandatory mother-in-law chatting and then headed home to clean up the boys’ mess: candy wrappers strewn from one end of the house to the other. No matter how much they delighted her with their antics, she only had so much energy. Besides, this wasn’t the first neighborhood they’d harvested door to door. Oliver’s wife, Anne, had taken them out earlier , so Maggie’s turn at tricks or treats was really frosting on the cake. They boys’ costumes were pretty good this year. Of course, if Jory was a hobo then Kirky would be, too. Only the rain kept the door-to-door adventure from being perfect, because it forced their costumes to be concealed beneath little yellow rain coats. It was almost ten thirty when the phone startled her.
“Mrs. Louis B. Christopher?” The voice was deep and officious.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Christopher, this is Officer Tomlin of the Paramus Police Department.”
“Police Department? My God!”
“Nothing happened, Mrs. Christopher. It’s just...well, you do own a silver Lexus, don’t you? New Jersey license number K-K-G 8-3-4?”
“Yes...”
“It’s parked illegally, ma’am. Overnight parking in the Grand Union lot is not allowed. And before I had the vehicle towed, I thought I’d give you a chance to move it.”
“The car? How could that be? Grand Union? Which store is that?”
“Paramus, ma’am. Route 17 and Ridgewood Avenue. If it’s not moved by eleven, I’m going to have to...”
“Oh, I’ll move it, officer. I just... well, I’ll be down there right away.”
What could this possibly mean? Lou had gone in with someone on a ride and had said nothing about it on the telephone? Well, it was just more of the same cock-and-bull story about Arden House. What in the hell was going on?
It was the first time in years that she’d ridden anywhere in a cab other than Manhattan. It was just over to Paramus, not more than ten minutes. The Lexus was parked in the far corner of the parking lot with Officer Tomlin waiting in his patrol car beside it.
The officer got out of his cruiser as her cab pulled up. He looked to be college age: twenty-one, twenty-two maybe. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat and his eyes shone in the lights. A crisp line defined the path from his ear to the tip of his chin. He had good teeth. He was fit. And he took good care of the uniform.
“Mrs. Christopher, I presume.”
“I’m sorry, officer. It was a mix-up. Thank you for not just towing it off somewhere.” The cab slid away in the night.
“Most people will respond if I call them,” Tomlin said, scanning her in a second from head to foot. “You’re very prompt.”
“Oh... yes... well... I just threw something on and...”
“Believe me,” he grinned, teeth gleaming. “This is a welcome break from soap on windows and toilet paper in the trees, Mrs. Christopher.”
“Typical Halloween?”
She wrapped her coat snugly to her waist with one hand and dipped her umbrella with the other. His eyes dropped to her legs. Back up.
“Well, it’s pretty tame this year, except for the stuff up at the bridge, of course.”
“What’s that?” she asked, sliding the back of her hand to her throat.
“Some kooks up on Bear Mountain Bridge lit off some gasoline or something. The whole thing’s burning.”
“Really!” she said, straightening her shoulders.
“It was just now coming across the radio.”
“Well, you’re very nice about this.”
Maggie unlocked the driver-side door of the Lexus. Tomlin held it as she collapsed the umbrella and threw it onto the front passenger side floor, and then pulled the coat around her and slid behind the wheel. She felt his eyes on the bareness of her calf. She settled into the seat, her coat riding up a tiny bit further. Tomlin shut the door and Maggie toggled the switch to lower the window. His hands were on top of the door at the roof line. She looked up, blinked, and widened her eyes.
“Thank you very much, Officer Tomlin,” she said.
For an instant, no, more than an instant, he looked down at her, at her eyes, her neck, her knees. He almost said something; something like his first name, she thought.
“Drive safely, Mrs. Christopher.”
“I will. Thanks again,” she said, absorbing the electricity that arced from the back of her throat to the tip of her nose.
The radio was on when she turned the ignition key. Maggie listened intently as a newscaster reported that the blast on the Bear Mountain Bridge had brought out fire departments from as far away as New Jersey.
Older kids in slickers were still out on the streets as she pulled onto Ridgewood Avenue and drove slowly, very slowly, back to the house. Her mind was all over the place.
Lou, the son of a gun, was lying. That call from Arden House; what had prompted it, if not some kind of guilt? She had been in no mood to be cozy with him, and she hadn’t been; but just the way he talked was strange, to say the least. For one thing, she could tell he was making the call from outdoors from the way he was breathing. There was a little shiver in his voice, but she hadn’t asked him about it because she didn’t want to probe—not too much anyway, not enough to set him to snapping back. He wouldn’t have ordinarily, but they were navigating new terrain these days.
She had chalked up the shiver to nervousness. He didn’t like to be on the wrong side of her. He never had, not even in the very beginning. When his eyes started darting all over the place, as they had that morning, she knew he wasn’t telling the truth. It had to be something awful for him to take such chances with her. Lies had a hard time coming out of his mouth at all, and now they were pouring out everywhere.
Maggie slid down the dark streets, the Lexus’ headlights glaring long tracks on the wet surfaces and briefly illuminating the houses and yards on both sides.
Was he involved with this Buck woman? There was a discordant note whenever he mentioned her. And he always painted her in a comic guise; wasn’t that a clue? He seemed to have nothing at all to say about the woman—at least nothing too negative—was it to throw her off? That was mother’s take on things, anyway. ‘When a man talks about a woman as if she were a clown, it’s a sure sign there’s something going on. At the very least, it means involvement with her; at worst, that he’s diddling her.’
Of course, another thing mother had said was that he probably wouldn’t linger on the subject if he were involved. He’d just lay it out there, short and sweet; in one sense, testing the waters to see if she’d pick up on it; and in the other, to find out if she, or anyone else, had seen him with Buck.
No. It couldn’t be. Lou had suffered so much guilt after the Suzy Chin episode; he’d never risk that again, not in this lifetime.
The affair was still fresh in her mind. “Who was that I saw Lou with in Hackensack, Maggie?” Deirdre Sondberg, her sorting partner down at the thrift shop, had asked.
“What do you mean, Deirdre?”
“It was Lou, I’m sure of it.”
“Deirdre, come out with it.”
“Well, it’s just that I saw Lou with some little Chinese-American.”
“Oh, come now, Deirdre.”
“I don’t want to cause trouble.”
“Oh, I know you don’t. You never do.”
“It’s probably nothing, nothing at all. They, well, they were hurrying to somewhere, that’s all.”
He’d squirmed all over the place when Maggie confronted him and then finally just poured the whole thing out in a torrent, as if he couldn’t stand living a lie for another second. Lots of deep sighs. It was so traumatic. Why did she love him so much at that moment?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lou came back to consciousness with a steady rain drenching his face. He lay in the bed
of the three-quarter ton truck, surrounded by the drums and the wire and the C-4 explosive. A deep ache centered in his left ear. He lifted himself to his hands and knees and moved to the tailgate, then dropped to the ground. He heard nothing. Both trucks still faced each other in the center of the span. The wire trailed out toward the western end. He fumbled for his rifle in the front seat of the three-quarter, and then lurched forward on foot, following the spiraling wire.
He found the blasting machine at the end of the coil. It rested 150 feet from the toll shack and the Mack West semi-trailer truck. He dropped to his knees and checked the wire. The ends weren’t pared back.
Carefully but rapidly, he stripped the coating with his thumbnail and threaded the ends of the wire into the terminals of the machine. He tightened down the screws, shed his jacket, and dropped it over the machine to prevent a short circuit. It lay in a lump on the pavement. He turned and began to run at a slow trot toward Mack West. He flinched when the muzzle flash of a single shot lit up the darkness. Then he saw a blast of fire from at least two weapons around the truck. He sprinted the last fifty feet and then slowed, his rifle up and ready.
Red lay on his back with his head resting against the curb and his feet crossed, as if he were settling in to watch his favorite television program—eyes open, but very dead; relaxed, except for one arm thrown out to the side, fingers clutching air, a large puddle of blood spreading to the gutter.
Under the cab of Mack West, Frawley lay half twisted. Lou moved closer and started to talk to him, but saw that there wasn’t much left of his face. The hostage was gone. Tasha lay at the front tire of the truck, grasping her upper arm and sobbing in shock and pain.
Lou sank to his knees against the truck’s rear tire, and then fell to all fours. The rain came in torrents now. The wind whipped sheets of water against the side of Mack West and pelted Lou’s back and head. The enormous stupidity of the whole thing pounded his head as if each drop of rain were a steel flechette.
Two men lay busted open, their brains on the ground, and there was nothing to show for it. No prize, no victory, nothing. The images of the crushed and scorched bodies in Kontum and Tanh Canh—yanked from the folds of Lou’s subconscious where they’d lain dormant for twenty years—rushed in front of his eyes. The rain gushed from the night and drenched his hair. Rivulets of water streamed along the sides of his face and spilled like a spout off his chin. He could almost feel the beaten down mud of a mountain trail under his hands as he lowered himself to the ground and lay there cringing against the next mortar shard. These were real men: Chester Frawley, an ally he’d just finished talking to; Red, a mortal enemy.
The raindrops spattered against the pavement and plastered his face. He felt a cold freshet streaming between his buttocks. Young men, good and bad, with dreams and loves and lust for adventure. He knew these kinds of men: he’d been one. The rain pasted his shirt to his back and dripped cold into the warmth of his armpits. He heard someone nearby faintly sobbing.
It had all come apart. He’d known back at Stanfield’s briefing that it wasn’t going to work, but he’d gone along. And now this lesson was no different from what he already knew: that nothing was free. It was all turned around now and police were closing in for the kill.
The sobbing continued. Tasha was crouched against the front tire of Mack West, still clutching at her upper arm. Her hair was glued to her scalp. Long tendrils of black hung down in front of her face, dripping water on her lap. Her legs were folded under her. She looked at him but said nothing. He crawled over beside her.
“Let go of your arm and let me see it,” he said. Her white jacket was torn just above the right elbow, but there was no blood. He could see a long, ugly crease on her skin.
“The bullets were coming right at me. Through my hair, through my coat. He wanted to kill me. Red tried to shoot me.” She was sobbing quietly now.
“You’re all right. I see where the bullets went. They missed you. Do you hear me? The bullets missed you.”
“Yes. Yes. They missed,” she said.
The probing beam of a searchlight coming from the direction of the traffic circle split the darkness around the truck. The light penetrated the plane of the truck and bathed the drums in the center of the span in light. Millions of flashing streaks of rain pierced the shaft of light; and then, as if the illumination were a signal, all the cops opened up with their weapons against the side of the truck at once.
Bullets pummeled sheet metal and ricocheted against the stanchion under the trailer. They pierced the thin steel easily and then whistled out the other side, crashing against the bridge’s railings and cables and shattering against the pavement in a shower of concrete splinters.
For a full five minutes (that seemed like an hour), police emptied magazine after magazine of ammunition against the truck, flattening every tire on the far side, exploding every window, and ripping the air with the whine and echo of a hundred impacts of metal on metal. And through all of this, the two of them huddled against the left front tire of the truck, unscathed.
It was no longer a battle of wits; it was survival, instinct, doing what they had to do to stay alive. Lou had to get rid of the searchlight first. He reached down and grabbed the girl’s carbine and jerked a round into the chamber.
He edged up to the bumper at the front of the truck and peered around the corner, down toward the traffic circle and the light. The beam was powerful and narrow, like an air-raid light mounted close to the ground. It pierced the night with a long, probing finger and left the sides of the bridge in darkness. The cops were able to direct the beam to any area of the bridge they desired. If they ever caught him in it, they’d have a hundred rounds in him before he could move an inch.
He called back to the girl: “Look, we’ve got to get out of here! We don’t have time for talk. They’re itching to rush us or to start lobbing some tear gas in here.”
Then he turned and went back to her. “Now I’m going to roll out to the side over there and start blasting away with this thing. That’s going to hold their heads down for a minute or so until they get adjusted and start moving the light around. I want you to get yourself to the back tire of the truck. When I start shooting, you dash for the side rail of the bridge and stay in the shadows. They’ll be looking at where my muzzle flash is coming from. You’ll have about a minute to run for the end of the bridge. Run with all your might, right toward those bastards.”
“When you get to the end of the railing, cut off to the right. Dive into the bush. When you get in the woods, run for all you’re worth until you reach the cut. There’s a deep gorge with a stream running at the bottom of it. That’s where we’re going. Both of us. When you reach the cut, scramble down. It’s steep. Wait for me at the bottom. I’m coming after you.”
She didn’t respond, didn’t lift her head to look at him. She just hunched over against the rain, shaking her head.
He grabbed the front of her jacket just below the chin and jerked her body violently. He stood up and pulled her to her feet. She was limp and heavy. He cracked her hard across the face with the front and back of his hand. She screamed and fought against his grip on her jacket. “You’re going! Do you hear me?” he screamed, pushing his face into hers and glaring into her wide and frightened eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going.”
“Straight ahead to the end of the railing. Down to the right. Don’t stop running until you hit the bottom by the stream. Wait for fifteen minutes. If I don’t come, you get the hell out of there.”
She straightened and stared into his face and nodded. “Okay. Okay.”
“Get over there by the rear wheel,” he shouted, shoving her ruthlessly. She stumbled to the rear wheel of the trailer and crouched down. “When I shoot, you go! Hear?”
She didn’t move. “Hear!?” She nodded.
He leaped with his body parallel to the ground, rolled over once into a firing position at the curb , and immediately squeezed the trigger— once, twice, evenly
, calmly—sending .30 caliber bullets winging toward the police cars and lights, driving the cops down behind their vehicles. Calmly, he pumped well-aimed shots into every shadow he saw in front of him, just high enough, wide enough, not to hit anybody.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the girl dart out to the far side of the bridge. She stumbled and sprawled headlong on the pavement in the darkness. She recovered and dashed forward and disappeared in front of him, into the blinding beam. He kept squeezing the trigger until all rounds were gone. And then he rolled back to the safety of the front tire again, leaving the rifle where he had lain.