Run

by Douglas E. Winter

  Maybes don’t matter. Not anymore. Not with your best friend dead on the ground and a couple new notches on your gun. Not when you’re tired and you’re sore and you’re hot and you’re beating the bush with some badass black dude who’s got a hard-on of his own, and when you’re almost back to your car, you find a Crown Vic parked next to it and a couple suits and shoes with thick soles worn by guys with ten-dollar haircuts who are writing things in little books, talking into radios, and just generally standing around being cops.

  Jinx hauls up short, just like me. Dittoes.

  We back off, huddle behind a thicket.

  Think we been made? he says to me.

  I don’t have to think. Just the chance is good enough for me.

  Let’s book, I tell him, nodding off to my left. Two, three klicks down the road, there’s a truck stop, bar and grill, lots of the big rigs and RVs, lots and lots of noise and confusion.

  So we’re humping through the woods again and it’s all some kind of bad Nam flashback, the kind the movie psychos get just before they start revving their power tools. We’re beating the boonies, taking a track that parallels the trail, even if the trail is two lanes of concrete and the only Charlie at its end is some potbellied guy who pours you gas or serves you suds.

  Sooner or later we ease our way roadside, and there’s base camp, something by the name of Tito’s Truck Stop, and I remember the place, remember the diner, remember the coffee, remember the greasy home fries, remember the layout, and it’s not great but, hey, like the priest told the guy at communion, it’s all we got.

  I give my pal Jinx the thirty-second tour and then: You’re the suspicious-looking minority, I tell him. So you go first. Find a booth in back and sit facing the front. I’ll give you five minutes. You don’t come out, I’m coming in. You got a problem, you call me Jake and I go straight out the back door. And if you know what you’re doing, you go with me.

  Fuck you, he says to me. He takes my duffel bag, shrugs it over his shoulder, sticks his hands in his pockets, and wanders out of the tree line toward the truck stop like he’s some kind of boy scout.

  He doesn’t look back, heads straight into the bar and grill. I check my watch, and give him five. I try to knock the dust off my suit and then I follow him in.

  The place is nothing but what you’d expect: burgers and fries, drumsticks and thighs. No cops. Bartender, a bar, a TV bolted to the ceiling at each end of the bar, and lots of thirsty truckers in between, hanging their wide butts off the stools. Down a long row of booths, most of them empty, there’s a bleached-out stork of a waitress wandering back and forth with plates and mugs and more mugs. In the last booth, there’s my pal Jinx, minding his own business, looking into a menu.

  The waitress gives me a smile, I give her a smile right back, shake my head no, and stroll on back to the booth.

  I sit. The waitress floats by, and I tell her I want some coffee. I take my hand off my Glock and out of my pocket. I unfold a paper napkin. I put it in my lap. I look at the menu. I find what I want. I put the menu down. I rearrange the silverware. Check the labels on the catsup, the mustard, the sugar, the Sweet’n Low.

  I keep waiting for Jinx to look at me and say: Well? But he doesn’t say a goddamn thing, not for a long time. He looks at the menu. He looks at the menu. He looks at the menu.

  Then the coffee comes. The waitress does that waitress magic where she pulls a pencil from behind her ear, sticks her tongue into the side of her mouth, and says: Whattyaboyshavintoday?

  Gimme a minute, Jinx says. He waits until she retreats into the kitchen, and then he looks up out of the menu, not at me, but at the television set at the far end of the bar, and the bartender, who is twisting up the volume, because CNN is wall-to-wall with murder. Synthesized music swells over this tasteful logo with the silhouette of a guy’s head in the crosshairs of a rifle sight, which ushers in a collage of freeze-frame images and computer-generated text and finally some well-permed talking head who announces the up-to-the-minute coverage of the assassination of civil rights leader Gideon Parks. Interviews with a weeping Jesse Jackson and some tight-lipped U.S. senators give way to glimpses of some very pissed-off black folks in front of some government building, which fades into a relentless parade of sound-and-vision bites. There’s the usual statement from the President, something about tragedy, something about healing, something about the criminals who will be pursued and captured and punished, and then comes the on-scene footage, a wet dream of a Zapruder film shot with network cameras from three different angles, in color and in close-up, and the replays are coming on like it’s the fucking Super Bowl, from the first hit, which tears the Reverend’s head apart, to the five other explosions that rive his upper body into a bloody rag of flesh and broken bones.

  Some little man at the bar, six feet two, this little man, starts to laugh and clap his hands and the bartender tells him to shut the fuck up.

  I look at Jinx but he just looks at that TV, and now a shuddering camera swings around and takes in the Hotel Excelsior, the lens shaking and creeping up the building but seeing only smoke and fire. Then, from a different angle, a steadier lens farther down the street, sweeping like a searchlight over the fronts of the hotel and the apartment building next door and it looks like some foreign country, some foreign war, Baghdad, Beirut, Bosnia, and you can’t see a thing but flames and then a huge explosion that tears a couple floors out of the hotel and sends glass and bricks and wood fragments showering down onto the streets.

  It’s not real, it’s someplace else, and I can’t even imagine, right now, being inside that place. Or getting out.

  But I did, and they did. And I know one thing, damn it, I know one thing more. I take the nine-millimeter bullet from my coat pocket. Hold it until he looks at it, at me.

  I know what they asked Renny, I tell Jinx. I know what they wanted to know. They wanted to know if you were dead.

  He stirs the spoon around in his coffee, checks the menu again. He doesn’t get it. Not yet.

  I was supposed to kill you, I tell him.

  He sets the menu down and stirs the spoon around some more.

  I was supposed to take you south and take you out.

  He takes a sip of the coffee like we’re talking about tomorrow’s weather. Then he says to me:

  How’s the scrapple?

  I say: What?

  The scrapple, he says. You been here before, right? So how’s the scrapple?

  Don’t know, I tell him. Never had it.

  And that’s the rest of that conversation, until the waitress comes around and takes our order. I tell her I want dry toast and more coffee, and Jinx tells her he wants a couple eggs, sunny-side up, and the scrapple.

  She goes away, and I try to get things back on track.

  We need to get to Wilmington, I tell him. But he just stares through me and says:

  I got to go see a man about a dog.

  You do that, I tell him, and he gets up and gets gone and I sit there and I try to look at the beer signs. I look at the Bud and I look at the Coors and I look at the Lite and I want more than anything else to drink myself sober.

  I give up trying to look at the beer signs and I watch the TV for a while, and after a quick word from our sponsors—looks like this assassination is being brought to you by Infiniti—the news machine starts to recycle, back to Jesse Jackson, the senators, the President, before bringing in more video from the scene, and time slips back and forth, then and now, the yellow and black blossom of an explosion sprouts from the tenth floor of that hotel, and now comes a series of nervous frames shot from a news helicopter hovering over the burning buildings, with police and fire department choppers weaving back and forth beneath it, flames licking up the sides of the hotel and the apartment building next door, all those people, all those poor, poor people, and the angle shifts to the long ladder trucks below and then to the white and unmarked helicopters that dance at the edge of the smoke, fluttering in to land, lots of guts, those guys, setting down on
the roof of the Hotel Excelsior, and there’s the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, the Federal SWAT, boarding up and being lifted from the roof, geared out like guys who ought to be wearing swastikas in black uniforms, black helmets, black masks, and damn if the guy in command of that unit, the guy waving the other black-uniformed guys into the chopper, watching them load in a couple body bags, isn’t carrying a Smith & Wesson Model 29, a .44 Magnum, in his right hand.

  No way that’s a service piece. No fucking way.

  So now I know how they got out. They didn’t walk, oh, no, they flew out of there. In style. Maybe courtesy of somebody Federal.

  This is way past two plus two. Now it’s like Chinese arithmetic.

  So what happens now? If I was them, I’d scatter. Call it Miller time. Take a sea cruise. Shoot back tequila, watch the hula dance, get my knob polished.

  Then again, if I was them, I would be worried about one little problem and I’m sitting inside him.

  Make that two little problems, because the other one’s back from the toilet, which is probably right next to the pay phone, which is probably why he’s been gone a lot longer than a flip and a zip.

  Have a good talk with your guys? I say, just to remind him who’s on first.

  Oh yeah, he says.

  Well, I tell him. I hope they got some good lawyers. I was them, I’d get the hell out of Dirty City.

  Maybe so, he says. But you ain’t them. Least not yet. And you ain’t there.

  Well, hey, I tell him. I got news for you. This is all about getting there from here.

  He starts to say something, but I tell him: My way. And there’s no room for discussion.

  I think for a second, and it’s a quick one, because the answer is a quick one.

  I get up and go back to the toilets and sure enough, there’s a pay phone next to the men’s room door. I drop some quarters and call Lauren, my friend in Philadelphia. One ring. Wait and hope the answer is someone real. Two rings. Try to make like I’m calm.

  Three rings, then:

  Hello?

  Hey, Lauren.

  Hey, Burdon. What’s going on?

  Not much. Well, a lot, really.

  You coming to Philadelphia? I’m not engaged anymore.

  I could of told you that.

  Now how—

  It’s in your voice, Lauren. And you know what? You were too good for that guy anyway.

  Oh, Burdon, when you gonna just move on up here and marry me?

  I love you too much for that, Lauren.

  Yeah, she says. Well, that’s a new one. Thought I’d heard them all, but hey, Burdon. That’s a new one. So how’s your girl?

  Fiona is doing fine, Lauren. But—

  I know, I know. There’s a point to this call and it isn’t a social one, is it? So what’s up?

  I need a favor, Lauren. A big one. A big pain-in-the-ass one.

  So that’s what it has to be for you to think of me?

  That or dinner, Lauren.

  She pauses but then she says: So tell me about this favor.

  I need you to rent a car. Like right now. I need you to decide that your car needs repairs or something, that you need to rent a car. From somebody solid, like Hertz. Midsize, a Taurus or a Capri maybe, nothing showy. Make sure you get the insurance. I need you to drive the rental car to Wilmington. I need you to park the car at the Amtrak station and I need you to put the keys under the driver’s seat. I need you to put the parking stub and the rental agreement in the glove box. I need you to put the Sports section of today’s Inquirer on top of the dashboard, right up to the windshield, so I know that this car is yours. Then I need you to go do something, have a late lunch, go shopping, I don’t care, but leave the car unlocked, and whatever you do, I don’t want you to come back until eight p.m. If the car’s there, well, hey, it’s yours. But if it’s not, I need you to call the cops, because that’s when you find out your car’s been stolen. Then I need you to take the train back home. You got that?

  Burdon— She starts, stops, sighs, then starts again. Burdon, she says, are you in some kind of trouble?

  Yeah, I tell her, but that’s all I’m going to tell her, and it’s all I have to tell her, since she says:

  Yeah. Same old Burdon. So okay. Sports section of the Inquirer, right?

  Right. And you’re gonna do it right now, okay?

  Okay, Burdon. Consider it done. Just remember one thing.

  What’s that?

  You owe me more than dinner.

  More than you know, I tell the silent phone, hand down on the hook. More than you know.

  I feed in more quarters, try Trey Costa’s mobile, get a robot voice that says the number’s out of service.

  So it’s back to the booth, back to the coffee, back to my pal Jinx, and I say to him: Okay, we need to kill some time, not much but maybe an hour. If we get to Wilmington, we’re home free. But we got to get to Wilmington and that’s, what? Forty-five minutes, tops. You ever steal a car?

  Shit, man. I been jackin cars longer than you been jackin off.

  So?

  So what? he says right back.

  So let’s do it.

  Finish your coffee, he says. It’s been done.

  His left hand comes up from his lap and he’s holding a set of keys.

  Pickup truck out back, he says. Got to be the barman’s or maybe the cook’s. Left his keys in the pocket of his jacket, hangin back there on the hook by the kitchen door. And hey, it’s a busy day, lots goin on. Nobody gonna notice for a long time.

  After a while his food arrives. He pokes out the eyes of those eggs until they run yellow over the slab of scrapple and he cuts the mess into little squares and starts forking it in.

  What is that shit? I ask him.

  Ain’t what you eat, he says. It’s how you chew it.

  Okay, I tell him. But you get the fucking bill.

  And we take our time and finish our coffee, and after Jinx pays the bill, we walk out the front, then circle around to the back, and we’re just a couple guys getting into a pickup truck, he’s still driving and I’m still riding and the duffel bag is right between us, and he backs out, then does a beeline for the exit at the west side and takes a right behind a long line of parked semis and then out of Tito’s Truck Stop, and he makes the left that is going to take us back to the Turnpike and that’s when the siren of the cop car goes bleep bleep, bleep bleep, and I’m grabbing my Glock and Jinx is saying mothafuck and I tell him to slow down, slow down, and he’s telling me to shut up, to shut the fuck up, and to keep the pistol down and to let him do the talking, and now he’s braking and he’s got the blinker blinking and he’s letting the truck float to the side of the road, nice and slow, and he glides that pickup to a gentle stop and he looks in the rearview and he jams the shift stick into park and he turns off the engine and he says to me, Jinx says:

  I got it. Keep the gun down. Keep it down.

  Then I don’t fucking believe what I see. Because he winks at me.

  I look out the back window of the truck and watch the cop—it’s a state trooper, walking that trooper walk—and I’m thinking my day’s been bad enough. I don’t want to have to do this thing, take out a state cop, a real cop, but I lift the Glock to the edge of the seatback and I know I will do what it takes.

  Jinx is out the door of that pickup, he isn’t waiting for the cop, and he’s got his hands up and away from his body like some basketball coach who can’t believe this blind referee, and he’s walking toward the cop and I realize it’s a black cop and the black cop’s got his hands out in front of him, like slow down, boy, slow down, and Jinx slows down and sort of scratches at his head with his right hand and he’s giving the cop some line or the other and he even nods back toward me and the cop looks a little vague and then he snaps to it, gulping some kind of bait as fast as Jinx can throw it and that’s when the cop points at something at the back of the truck and Jinx bends down and the cop bends down with him, checking out something on the fender, the taillight ma
ybe, and I feel my fingers relax on the grip and then Jinx is up and the cop is up and Jinx is reaching toward his pocket, nice and slow, and he’s pulling out a billfold and he’s fumbling around for his driver’s license or something and he’s handing it to the state cop and the state cop vets it and shakes his head like it’s some sorry tale and then he nods once, then again, and he’s handing the stuff back to Jinx and I can’t believe this guy is about to talk a New Jersey state trooper out of a ticket but that’s what he’s doing and the trooper looks at me again like I’m some kind of zoo animal in a cage made by General Motors and then he’s heading back to his car and Jinx is swaggering back to the truck and he’s tossing himself behind the wheel and he’s giving me a grin.

  Works ever time, he says.

  Don’t tell me. Some kind of black thing, right?

  No, he says. Some kind of green thing. Cost me a hundred bucks.

  He yanks the shift back into drive and we’re gone.

  wilmington

  Nobody matters. That’s what the train station at Wilmington is saying to me. It’s what those artist guys call a study, and it’s a study in nothing.

  It’s a busy nothing, though. Noises all around. Automatic doors shuddering apart and shuddering back together. Broken pieces of conversation, always rushed, sometimes sad, other times angry. Odors. Stale smoke and hot dogs and some kind of cleanser. Movement, constant movement. It’s not a train station but a hive of worker bees. People walking, people talking, people standing in lines and lines and more lines. Other people crouched behind barriers, waiting on ticket buyers like they’re visitors to a lockup. Dreary people doing dreary things. That’s all I see when I lamp the lobby of that terminal, look through the people going places, the people going nowhere at all.

  Nobody matters.

  No one.

  I’m waiting for Jinx. At least that’s what I told him, and it better be what he thinks.