by David Black
“Can I give you a lift?” Jack asked.
The Cowboy nodded and got in beside Jack.
Together, facing forward, still in silence, they rode down to 100 Centre Street.
Jack smelled the Cowboy’s very uncowboylike aftershave, a light, almost lemony scent. Expensive. Not something you’d pick up in a drugstore.
Jack checked out the Cowboy’s fingernails, which were manicured.
Why the cowboy outfit?
Why not?
Jack was still studying the Cowboy’s fingernails, when the Cowboy unconsciously flexed his left hand.
Those long tapered manicured fingers were deceptive. Those hands could belong to a strangler.
2
“Docket ending 971,” said the bridgeman standing at the front of the courtroom. “The People versus Fritz Donas on a 230.00, Prostitution, 115.05, Criminal Facilitation in the second degree, 100.10, Criminal Solicitation in the second degree, 220.41, and Criminal sale of a controlled substance in the second degree.”
Jack whispered to a man carrying a briefcase in his left hand and a brown overstuffed expanding file under his right arm—undoubtedly a lawyer—“They told me Paul Guzman’s in this court.”
“Counsel,” the bridgeman was saying, “do you waive the reading of the rights and charges, but not the rights thereunder?”
“Biland,” the man with the briefcase and expanding file said. “Roger Biland. I’m not your guy, Guzman.”
“What I meant,” Jack said, “do you know Guzman?”
“What’s your guy, Guzman, charged with?” Biland asked Jack.
“He’s a lawyer,” Jack said.
“Lawyer?” Biland said. “It’s not good when one of us gets nailed.”
“I’m not a lawyer,” Jack said. “Not anymore.”
“But you’re representing your client,” Biland said. “This guy Guzman.”
“I’m not representing him,” Jack said.
“Who is?” Biland asked.
“Nobody,” Jack said.
“Let me give you my card,” Biland said. “If he needs a lawyer, he could do worse than me. A lot worse.”
“Your Honor,” the defense lawyer was saying, “the bottom charge, criminal sale of a controlled substance in the second degree—”
“Your plea, Counselor,” said the judge.
“Guzman’s not charged with anything,” Jack said.
“Then why are you here, trying to get him representation?” the man asked.
“I’m not,” Jack said. “I’m just trying to find him.”
“Keep the card,” Biland said. “If you ever need a lawyer…”
Tucking the overstuffed expanding file tighter under his arm, Biland continued around to the right aisle of the court and sat in the back bench, where he put his briefcase on one side of him and his file on the other side of him and started taking papers from his pockets.
The bridgeman was calling another case:
“Docket ending 694. The People versus Francisco Franco on a 120.04, Grand Larceny in the fourth degree on the complaint of Officer Leonard Cruz.”
At the back of the courtroom, a man with white hair was jotting something in a reporter’s notebook.
“Francisco Franco…,” the judge said. “You’ve got a notable name.”
Jack figured the white-haired man for a journalist. If the court was his beat, he might know Guzman.
“Los Cuatro Generales, Los Cuatro Generales,” the white-haired man was singing under his breath. “Los Cuatro Generales, Mamita mia, Qué se han alzado, Qué se han alzado…”
“What’s that?” Jack asked as he eased next to the white-haired man, who gave him a side-long glance.
“‘The Four Insurgent Generals,’” the man said. “It’s a song from the Spanish Civil War,” he said.
“I didn’t know the Spanish Civil War was a musical,” Jack said.
The white-haired man held out his hand and introduced himself, “Leo Diamond.”
Jack took his hand and introduced himself, “Jack Slidell. Are you a reporter?”
“I write about the courts,” Leo said.
“Do you know a lawyer named Guzman?” Jack asked. “Paul Guzman?”
“The short, bald guy on the right,” Leo said.
Jack nodded his thanks and started toward Guzman, but Leo touched his arm.
“If you’re looking for a lawyer,” Leo said, “he’s a pit bull.”
The Cowboy watched Jack talk to Leo.
A woman in a tan, tailored suit passing Guzman asked him, “Where’s your client?”
“In LA,” Guzman said, “doing hard time at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“Mr. Guzman,” Jack said, “can I talk to you for a minute?”
It took Guzman a moment to figure out which case Jack was asking about.
“Shapiro,” Guzman said when he placed the case. “Right, the college professor who attacked the guy, what’s his name, Flowers, and got fired.”
3
“Keating got Shapiro fired?” Caroline had said on her end of the phone call as Jack, followed by the Cowboy, walked up Broadway toward the bowling alley.
The wind kicked a discarded cardboard coffee cup down the street. The sky was a sulfurous yellow-green. Clouds boiled, racing up Broadway. An off-duty cab passed, its scram light on. On a construction site, six identical posters advertised an all-female, all-nude production of Waiting for Godot.
“Why would Keating get Shapiro fired?” she asked.
“Find out,” Jack said. “What’s Keating’s connection to the college?”
* * *
The neon sign for Cosmic Bowling was made up of a crescent moon, stars, comets, zigzags indicating extraterrestrial forces.
Inside, the bowling alley was lit like a nightclub. A spinning disco ball sprayed the room with splinters of light. A throbbing bass beat below the eerie 1950s science fiction music of a theremin. Phosphorescent nebulae glowed on the ceiling. Black lights illuminated fluorescent blue-and-pink pictures of colliding galaxies on the walls.
Jack rented a pair of bowling shoes and sat down on an orange plastic chair.
The Cowboy sat in a bright blue chair in the next lane, also tying the laces of rented bowling shoes.
Jack hadn’t bowled for years.
His backswing was jerky. He tended to start the ball behind his back, not straight by his side. He released the ball too far from his body, and his wrist felt loose. He got a couple of bad splits
When the Cowboy held the ball, his thumb was at about twelve o’clock. He had a smooth four-step delivery. When he released the ball, his thumb was at eleven. Perfect.
His loft averaged twelve feet from the foul line.
Jack bowled a 115.
The Cowboy bowled a 137.
Jack left his ball and returned his bowling shoes to the clerk at the counter, a sandy-haired, young-looking middle-aged man who was reading a comic book. When the man looked up to acknowledge Jack’s return of the shoes, Jack thought his eyes looked as galactic as the black-lit spirals on the walls.
The guy’s tripping on something, Jack figured.
The Cowboy left his ball and returned his shoes and followed Jack out of the bowling alley.
When they both had left, Jack’s law school friend, Vincent Tremain, got up from the table in the Cosmic Bowling restaurant, where he’d been nursing a cup of black coffee. As he’d planned with Jack over the phone, he wrapped the Cowboy’s bowling ball in a pillowcase, brought it to the clerk, and asked, “How much to buy this thing?”
“That’s an Ebonite Maxim Captain Midnight,” the clerk said. “New, it’ll run you seventy bucks, something like that.”
Noticing how quickly Tremain pulled out his wallet, the clerk added, “I’ll sell it to you for a hundred,”—which Tremain paid.
An hour later, while Jack was waiting in Penn Station for the Empire Service north to Hudson, Tremain called.
Jack answered his cell.
“I delive
red your friend’s bowling ball to the lab,” Tremain said. “There’s a cop who works there who owes me big. Says there won’t be a problem getting prints off the ball, in the finger holes.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
1
On the train back to Hudson, the Cowboy sat across the aisle and two rows behind Jack.
The car was half full.
Jack’s seatmate was a big, florid man, sixty-something, in relaxed-fit jeans and a blue denim work shirt patched with a piece of duct tape. Yosemite Sam mustache. Hair in a ponytail.
An old hippie, Jack figured.
For the first hour, the hippie didn’t speak.
When the train stopped between stations for fifteen minutes, the hippie said to himself, “In the summer, the heat makes tracks buckle. In the winter, the cold freezes the switches. Too cold. Too hot. Just right. The Goldilocks Line.”
Jack had the inside seat, next to the window, on the river side of the train.
Through the reflection of the old hippie in the glass, Jack watched the moonlit landscape rush past.
Across the Hudson, lights of a town twinkled.
The hippie, looking across Jack, gazed out the window, too.
When the train passed a NYC street vendor’s falafel cart washed up on the shore of the Hudson, the hippie said, “Hudson River’s an estuary. Tidal saltwater runs one hundred fifty-three miles upriver.”
In the window reflection, Jack saw the hippie shake his head sadly at the cart.
Jack wondered how it got there.
The hippie clearly saw it as merely one more example of the struggle to keep the Hudson from pollution.
“Used to freeze over,” the hippie continued. “You could walk across the river from Mycenae to Catskill.”
Jack turned to face the hippie.
“Four hundred years ago,” the hippie said, “when Hendrick Hudson discovered the river, it all looked different. Now, the elms, gone. Chestnut trees, gone. The 1938 hurricane leveled forests.”
At Poughkeepsie, a dozen people got off.
“The storm last week headed out over the Atlantic,” he said. “But this new one, it’s like three systems going to hit us at the same time.”
Jack didn’t respond.
“It’s all the same thing,” the hippie said. “All one system. Global warming, yup.”
Jack checked over his shoulder. The Cowboy sat straight in his seat, military posture.
At Rhinecliff, almost everyone got off the train. Only Jack, the Cowboy, and the hippie were left in the car.
“You know how many people get killed by trains every year?” the hippie asked.
Jack didn’t answer.
“A lot, let me tell you,” the hippie said. “The engineer sees someone on the track, but can’t stop in time. They have kind of a lottery, see who kills the most.”
When Jack gave him a skeptical look, the hippie said, “True. My father was a conductor.” Then: “PCBs in the river,” the hippie said. “Lakes clogged with milfoil. On this trip, look out the window during the day. One pond after another, the surface is so green it looks solid. Some imports, they’re lovely, like the hibiscus. Red blooms. Big as a kid’s head. Globalization brings in new species like Queen Ann’s lace. Snakehead fish in the watershed out-compete the local fish. Zebra mussels, same problem. Predator invasions. Like lionfish. They’re natives of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but are now in the Atlantic. And,” the hippie leaned closer to Jack, “they have no known enemies.”
Jack realized he was being as silent with the hippie as the Cowboy had been with him.
“There are six billion people alive right now,” the hippie said. “To survive, to make the world habitable, we need to lose four billion.”
The hippie snapped his finger as if the gesture could annihilate people the hippie considered dispensable.
“I’m the guy,” the hippie was saying, “who was at Newport when Pete Seeger asked for an axe to cut the cables of Dylan’s electric guitar.…”
The car vibrated with thunder.
“Forty-eight billion text messages in December 2007 alone,” the hippie said. “It’s End Times, I tell you. I’m a Buddhist, but I’m not going to put up with this shit.”
Jack climbed past the hippie’s fat thighs and headed up the aisle to make a cell phone call from the empty café car.
“I’m a good person,” the hippie was saying to himself, “but I’m going to fuck him up so bad.”
As the automatic door hissed closed behind Jack, the hippie was talking in a louder voice about “high-steel Mohican workers” and a shad bake.
Behind Jack, the door hissed open.
The Cowboy entered the space between the cars, and, before Jack could turn, wrapped his forearm around Jack’s neck, choking him, and kneed Jack in the small of the back.
Jack dropped.
The Cowboy put his hands together as if in prayer and hit Jack on the back of the neck.
Jack had always heard about people who’d been hit on the head who saw stars, but he’d assumed it was an exaggeration.
Jack saw stars.
It was like being back in Cosmic Bowling.
He barely felt the Cowboy kick him in the side.
Oddly, he also felt clearheaded as if part of his consciousness had left his body and hovered somewhere in the upper right corner of the space between the cars—a viewpoint from which he saw the Cowboy take from his pocket a large key, which he fit into a keyhole on a panel and turned.
The Cowboy opened the outside door.
Framed in the doorway, woods rushed past.
Jack smelled fresh air and earth.
Everything had happened so fast. Less than a minute.
The Cowboy now held, not a key, but a straight razor.
And was leaning over Jack’s body.
Abruptly, Jack’s consciousness was back in his body—and Jack was gazing into the Cowboy’s impassive face.
The Cowboy flipped open the razor. And was about to slash Jack’s throat—when Jack kicked out, once into air, a second time, hitting something solid, a wall, and pushed himself across the floor.
The Cowboy brought his right hand, his razor hand, across his chest, and leaned closer to Jack. With his left hand he went to push Jack’s face back to raise Jack’s chin, exposing the neck.
Jack slammed the heel of his right hand against the Cowboy’s oncoming fingers.
There was a snap.
The Cowboy’s left eye twitched. Otherwise, he showed no sign of pain.
But it gave Jack enough time to kick out again, harder, scooting himself backward across the floor.
Jack felt nothing but rushing air under the back of his head.
The Cowboy slashed his razor—and would have slit Jack’s throat if Jack hadn’t kicked again, shooting himself through the open train door.
For a moment, Jack felt suspended in space.
He felt as if someone had drawn a piece of ice across his thigh.
Cold.
Then, wet.
He cut me, Jack thought.
A wall of noise was passing as if Jack, suspended in space, calmly watched a hurricane pass.
Or like Moses; hidden in a cleft of rock, watched the Eloheim pass.
Stars winked in the sky. Not as gaudy as the sky at Cosmic Bowling.
Maybe the noise was not the train.
Or not just the train.
Thunder?
The ghosts of Hendrick Hudson’s men bowling?
Jack felt as if he could sleep forever.
He landed in a marsh, cracking his head on something. A log? Twisting his neck.
He couldn’t sort out the pain from the Cowboy’s attack from the pain of falling from the train and hitting mud, rocks, branches.…
He wondered—almost disinterestedly—how badly his thigh had been cut.
The stars receded.
Fast.
Faster.
Streaking away from him. Or toward him as if he were a starship hitting
warp speed in the movies.
And there was no sound.
No sound.
Had the shock made him deaf?
Or had he shocked all the marsh creatures by dropping into nature?
Very near his left ear, he heard a chirp.
That’s when he lost consciousness.
2
The stars were back in place.
The marsh was crazy with noises. Peepers, rustling reeds, an owl—all nature unnaturally loud.
The marsh smelled fetid.
Or maybe it was Jack himself, stinking worse than the hippie on the train.
Jack felt as if he’d slept for hours.
But off to the right he saw the winking lights of the train disappearing around a bend, heading towards Hudson.
He must have been out for less than a minute.
Painfully, Jack pushed himself out of the mud. To any observer, he would have looked like human life emerging from the primordial slime.
His right pant leg flapped.
At first, Jack thought it was his own flesh flapping.
He touched his cut, realized how deep it was, and retched.
Well, Jack thought, if I’m going to vomit, this is the perfect place to do it.
The Cowboy had a key to open the train door.
He had planned to kill Jack on the train home all along. Toss him into the woods. Be gone with the train to Albany? Where he would get off. Anonymous. Vanishing into the city.
If someone had seen him, would he have waited for another opportunity?
How long had he been waiting for this opportunity?
While Jack thought he was playing with the Cowboy, the Cowboy was playing with Jack.
How long would it have taken for Jack’s body to be found?
If it was ever found.
Throat cut, kicked off the train, maybe Jack would have sunk into the marsh, becoming food for the noisy creatures around him.
Jack felt as if he were trying to fit pieces from one jigsaw puzzle into another.
When the Cowboy had attacked, Jack had been holding his cell phone. But he had no idea what had happened to it.
Was Caroline okay?
Jack had to get to Caroline.
He forced himself to move. He stumbled through the woods, roots tripping him, leaves like reptile fins slicing his mouth.…
The razor hadn’t crippled him, Jack figured.