The Danger of Being Me

by Anthony J Fuchs

  I blinked hard, and took another long breath. That scarlet veil receded to the brokedown outlands of my fractured psyche, just enough to let me think. The Dakota idled for a second, then the engine cut out. Another long moment passed. I glanced back down at my Sports Section, to yesterday's boxscores. The Devil Rays had beaten the Tigers, eleven to eight. Rich Butler had hit his first career home run. I heard a door open, and looked up.

  The driver's side door of the Dakota swung out toward the street. Hank climbed out of the truck. He looked one way up Hucknall, then down the other, waited for a gap to open up in the traffic, and jogged across the highway. He looked perfectly ordinary in a black jacket with the collar flipped up, a pair of blue jeans, and engineer boots.

  He wore rimless eyeglasses and an untidy nest of hair that fell across his forehead and a shaggy soul patch under his lower lip. For one ridiculous instant, he reminded me of Professor Chambers who was just Matt to his students. He crossed the street, and I tried to exert my infinite will to force him to turn around and catch my eye. I wanted him to see me, just once, just so that he would know.

  He didn't turn around. Didn't look back. He crested the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and stalked into the bar.

  Twenty seconds later, a long white bus pulled between me and Pete's Pour House.

  The man with the cellphone and the woman with the attaché case and three other people who had joined us filed up the narrow stairs onto the NJTransit vehicle. As they did, I stuffed my newspaper into my bookbag, switched it to my other shoulder, and hiked as quickly as I dared. I crossed Cortland before the bus started down Hucknall again, and chanced one brief glance back in its direction. The Dakota sat at the curb. Hank was still inside.

  I stuffed my hands into my pockets, heading for St. Ursula with my head down. I walked leisurely, forcing myself not to hurry. I had time. Hank would spend a few minutes scanning the interior before figuring out that the person he was looking for wasn't there. He would assume that the Dude had waited ten minutes, maybe less, and then left. He might track down whoever was working the breakfast shift and ask if the Dude had left him a message. He might even leave a message of his own.

  All of this would take him a few minutes. Plenty of time to get back to the Jeep. So I convinced myself that there was no reason to hurry. No reason at all. I reached the mouth of the driveway and angled down the stretch of asphalt that ran along the side of the church.

  When I came to the corner of the building, I looked back toward the intersection. The wooden front door of the tavern swung open, and Hank stomped out of the bar. Even from this distance, I could see his fresh anger.

  Another step took me out of his line of sight, and I broke into a run. I made it to the Wagoneer in half-a-dozen paces and yanked the driver's door open. I hurled my bookbag across the cab, hauled myself into the vehicle, slammed the door. I dug the keys out of my pocket and jammed the car key into the ignition, twisting it.

  I pulled out of the space and made for the highway. At the end of the driveway, I looked through the passenger's window to see the Dakota pulling away from the curb. Hank pulled a wide U-turn from the parking lane of the east-bound side to the outside lane of the west-bound side. I checked for traffic, waited for a Mercedes to pass.

  Then I pulled onto Hucknall and eased into the inside lane. Hank beat me to the intersection by half-a-block and jerked a right turn onto Cortland without braking. I laid on the gas. The Mercedes passed through the intersection as the light flicked from green to yellow. I pushed the Jeep up to forty, reached the light as yellow gave way to red.

  I could only hope that my luck would hold. A Buick Riviera rolled toward me for one terrifying moment, then put on its brakes and stopped at the red light. I yanked the wheel to the left and blew the light, jumping out onto Cortland ahead of a Pontiac Grand Am at the front of the line. I checked my mirrors, looking for the sudden telltale splash of red-and-blue and red-and-blue that would mark the end of this dubious endeavor. Or, perhaps, signal the beginning of an altogether more idiotic adventure. But I saw only ordinary traffic, and that was good.

  Then I peered through the windshield, and spotted the back end of a black Dodge Shelby Dakota about half-a-block up the street from me. I sighed, eased off the gas a bit, and twisted the volume button on the radio.

  Erik Burke roared through the speakers about when I was him and when he was me. I flashed a mad grin.

  Hank led me half-a-mile up Cortland, then made a left.

  We left the business district of downtown Hobbes Landing, such as it were. I kept my distance as he made his rights and his lefts, letting other vehicles into the space between us so that I wouldn't catch his attention.

  I convinced myself that the anger in Hank's posture meant that he still believed that it had been the Dude who had called him. That the Dude had been waiting at Pete's Pour House, but had left before he had arrived.

  For no real reason at all, I didn't think that Hank had considered the possibility that he'd been a set up. I didn't think that he would be looking for anyone following him.

  At least not yet. Not until he got in contact with the Dude to find out what had gone wrong, and found out that the Dude had never called him in the first place. He would start putting the pieces together then, and this precarious game would get a whole lot more complicated.

  That would come later. If my luck held, it would come long after I was out of town, across the Schuylkill and back in the State of Independence. And if my luck broke apart like a meteor entering the atmosphere before my work in Hobbes Landing was done, then I'd play those cards when they were dealt. There was no use worrying now.

  Of course, these were all assumptions. They felt right, and that made them dangerous. Geoff Tate's anticyclonic tenor pealed out of the car stereo, insisting that I keep my distance from the glare behind his stare. Reflecting that this was the way the game was played. I could leave now, but he thought I would stay. I had to laugh at that.

  Because I thought he was probably right. So I followed Hank. I kept my distance from the glare of his taillights, and I knew in the same irrefutable way that all accidental prophets know the future that this mad plan would work. I would make it work. The universe recognized my infinite will and bent in its direction. I generated my own luck.

  I also knew that I could think such dazzling thoughts right up to the moment that Hank smashed my skull in with a tire iron and threw my shattered body into a grimy dumpster behind the Schanne Sweet Shoppe. But the risk felt worth it, and that didn't feel like an assumption.

  It felt like the truth. My truth.

  And that was the only truth that mattered anymore. Reality is all just a matter of interpretation. The sooner I embraced mine, the sooner I recognized it as my own, the sooner I could begin to atone for what an abysmal son I turned out to be, what an abysmal brother I had turned out to be, what an abysmal friend I had turned out to be.

  What an abysmal human being I had turned out to be.

  And if I died in the little borough of Hobbes Landing today, then that was just the price of doing business. What would be would be. I had already died once today.

  Hank drove, and so did I. Derek Sherinian's plaintive piano chords tumbled out of the stereo as James LaBrie spoke of a girl who was holding onto me. I listened.

  There was no way for me to know if his words were true. They were his truth. His reality. But they had the texture of truth. And though the highway to madness is paved with the truths of others, I thought I could borrow his today. Just for a bit. I didn't think he would mind.

  Hank made a left onto Marlton Pike. So did I.

  I gave the Dakota some running room. Hank stuck to the left lane; I spent most of the ride in the right. I drove in silence. I'd lost my taste for progressive rock. We merged onto Kaighns Avenue, and Dr. Charles Brimm Boulevard, and entered a residential suburb of Camden. We pressed on until the Dakota switched into the right lane.

  Hank's turn-signal blinked as he prepared to turn onto
Hucknall Road. I smiled. Because I couldn't help myself. The curve of my life had bent once more, so subtly that I never even noticed, and it had taken me back to a place I had been. Coming back to this road, in this town, was like spotting a friend across a room crowded with strangers.

  Our light turned green. Hank made his turn, and so did I, and we drove on until we passed a redbrick building on the right with a sign reading Carter Medical Center.

  The Dakota rolled to the light, easing into the turning lane and making a left. An Acura Legend in the opposite lane made a right behind the truck, and the light overhead flicked from green to yellow. Opposing traffic stopped.

  I pulled left through the intersection, followed the gentle curve of Carter Plaza until it became Benson Street, the Shelby Dakota comfortably ahead of me with a car to break the space between us. We passed a line of elegant redbrick rowhomes with barred windows and white-bordered porches and short black iron fences trimming a brick-laid sidewalk. The Acura turned onto 6th Street.

  That left just me and Hank now, and of course that was the only way that it could be. From the moment I spotted that payphone at the base of an Exxon sign in Pleasantville, this encounter had been ordained. Inevitable.

  I pushed the gas pedal, gaining ground on the Dakota. But a quarter-block from South Broadway, Hank pulled a right into a short driveway that fed into the massive brick and concrete structure of a parking garage.

  I stepped on the accelerator again, glancing out the passenger window as I passed the driveway. The tailgate of the Dakota disappeared into the entranceway as Hank made a right and rolled into the depths of the building. I rolled to the end of the block, waited for a gap in traffic, and made a left onto Broadway. I drove up one short block, pulled another left onto a narrow cut of asphalt running up between two derelict buildings.

  I steered the Jeep along the length of Auburn Street. A line of cars sat parked back here behind those elegant rowhomes. I spotted several gaps for the cars of residents who had already left for work. Less than halfway up the block, I made one final left turn into a space at the foot of an imposing wooden porch and balcony off the rear of one house. I parked the Jeep and turned off the engine.

  The clock blinked 7:51, then went dark. I sat in silence. No one came out onto the porch or the balcony to yell at me for parking behind their house. I took a breath.

  I decided to wait until 8:15 before I went in.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1.

  At nine minutes past eight, I grabbed my bookbag and climbed out of the Wagoneer.

  I closed the door with a quiet click, rounded the Jeep to the tailgate, opened the latch, and swung down the gate. The accumulated junk of years lay scattered and forgotten. I spotted my batting gloves tucked inside the webbing of my Rawlings infielder's glove, on top of a baseball.

  I hadn't seen that gear in eight months. I would have sworn that I had stuffed it into a bin under the basement stairs, but something must have distracted me. Now it was here with me in this narrow cut of asphalt behind a line of elegant three-story rowhomes with barred windows and white-bordered porches. Because the universe recognized my infinite will, and bent in its direction.

  I couldn't help grinning. It was just my luck.

  I hauled myself halfway into the cargo space, swatting aside a neon green Frisbee and a high heel with a broken stiletto and a yellowed sheet of newspaper announcing the election of Tom Ridge. I gave the Governor a nod. He had been awarded a Bronze Star. I plucked my batting gloves out of their nest and backed out of the Jeep. I reached the lowered tailgate, and my kneecap came down hard on something unseen, driving thorns of pain up my leg.

  I dropped out of the Jeep, rubbing at my knee as I yanked an Archbishop West sweatshirt away from the floor. Underneath it hid a sheet of moldy plastic that had once wrapped a stack of Wenro County Registers, and I swiped that away to find a rusted length of iron with one end bent at a right angle. I leaned back into the cargo space, reached for the object, lifted it off the floor.

  The tire iron had an unexpected heft to it, and nice balance. I took half-a-step back from the car, swung the tire iron in a small, gentle arc, and smiled at the feel of it. It would serve as an excellent one-handed weapon. If it came to that. I thought it might come to that.

  I stuffed my batting gloves into my pants pocket, then picked my bookbag off the tailgate. I opened the main compartment, and found my notebook stacked on top of the pages of Ethan's manuscript. All those orange pages. I considered emptying the bag into the cargo bed of the Jeep, and dismissed the idea. If my scheme went terribly askew, and I thought that the chances were better than fair that it might, then I would have to abandon the car.

  Go off the grid. The thought filled my stomach with ice and made me feel jittery. I could do it I had to. At least I thought I could. But only if I didn't leave Ethan's work behind. So I shuffled the contents of the bag to make a slot down one side, and I jammed the tire iron into the space, and I zippered the compartment shut. It just closed. Even still, the right angle of the iron rod was clear enough. I looked at it for a long moment. Then I shrugged.

  It would have to do. I slung the bag over my shoulder, slipped my other arm through the strap to secure it on my back, and flipped the tailgate shut. I locked the latch, then I locked the doors and pocketed the keys as I started up the buckled sidewalk along Auburn Street.

  Past two cars, I came to a walkway of laid stones that led between two houses toward a wooden gate. Through the gap, I could see the parking garage on the other side of Benson. So I followed the stones between the buildings, walking casually, almost indifferently, almost as if I wasn't carrying a tire iron with every intention of using it.

  I pushed through the gate, closed it, and made it out to the sidewalk before I heard the ambulance coming down Benson from the direction of Hucknall. I glanced up in time to catch a single still-frame image. The driver of the ambulance glanced into the sideview mirror on his door. I saw the rimless eyeglasses and the untidy nest of hair that fell across his forehead and that shaggy soul patch under his lower lip. Hank was driving. Hank the EMT.

  I stood there on the brick-laid sidewalk for a moment, and watched the ambulance race up Benson. It made a left onto Broadway and disappeared around the corner.

  And I smiled. It was just my luck. I trotted across the street, crested the sidewalk and headed down the side of the building to the short driveway.

  Then I slipped into the parking garage.

  I searched for nearly four hours before I managed to track down what I had come here to find.

  Once I turned the corner into the darkness inside the building, I dug my batting gloves out of my pocket and pulled them on. I started along the space between the exterior wall and the line of parked cars. It wasn't difficult, but it was tedious. Each level contained two-hundred cars. I spent more than half-an-hour scouring each floor.

  I spotted several black pickup trucks along the way, and of course none of them were Dodge Dakotas. A black Dodge Ram on the third level came close to a near-death experience shortly before eleven o'clock, but I saw the differences in the bodywork even before I checked for the cornicello. By the time I got through the fourth floor, I had started to think that Hank had taken the Dakota all the way up to the roof deck. That would be just my luck.

  By the time I finished searching the fifth floor, I was sure of it. The heartless bastard had put his pickup out where it would be the most exposed, visible to a thousand windows in the surrounding buildings. Probably visible from some upperfloor cafeteria where he could stop every now and then and check on it. If that was the case, then I hoped he was watching when I found the Shelby. Because he wasn't going to like what he saw when I did.

  But it didn't come to that. Halfway up the fourth row of cars on the sixth floor, I spotted the Dakota's tailgate. I recognized the custom bodywork from across the aisle. As I stepped up to the passenger's door, I saw the thin steel chain dangling from the rearview mirror, and the Italian horn cut fro
m blue jasper hanging above the dashboard.

  A tectonic collision detonated deep inside my brain. The electrostatic aftershock crackled along my veins, made my blood sizzle, collected in the pit of my stomach. My hands trembled at my sides. My lips peeled back into a murderous grin, and I liked the way it felt. Like the grin of a fallen angel. Like a portrait of grinning madness.

  I shrugged the bookbag off my shoulder, knelt to the concrete. I opened the zipper on the main compartment, slipped the tire iron out, gripped the metal with my batting glove. It wasn't a 39-inch piece of lumber, but it would get the job done. I stood again, peered through the Dakota's passenger window, looked across the dashboard until I spotted what I thought I was looking for. A small LED light under the ashtray, almost hidden from view.

  Two seconds lit, four seconds dark. A car alarm. Had to be. I glanced back to the thin steel chain dangling from the mirror, and the Italian horn hanging from it. I scanned the rest of the cab. This would have to be a quick job once the alarm started blaring into the cavern of the garage, but it still had to look like an ordinary break-in.

  I found a bulging CD wallet on the passenger's seat. A Kenwood stereo faceplate in the center of the dashboard. A latched glovebox, contents unknown. That would have to do. None of it was particularly valuable, and that was just fine with me. None of it was of any particular interest to me. None of it but the chain and the horn.

  I glanced around the center partition of the sixth floor of this parking garage in Camden, and I found no one. I was alone. It was just my luck. Because this was between me and Hank. Me and the heartless bastard that had broken something in Amber that might never fully heal. I tasted brimstone and cordite in the back of my throat, felt that sweltering scarlet veil swirling up around me.