Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  Gerald looks at his captor in amazement.

  “‘Your old buddy’? Where in the hell did you come up with that? We weren’t buddies, Jack. I was the class wimp and you were most likely to succeed, remember? I’m the guy who wore the jockstrap on his head, you know? Yeah, shit, I remember you, how you were. You never really instigated anything, but you’d kind of hang back, until I’d been humiliated beyond human endurance, and then you’d come riding in like John Wayne, telling them to let ‘him’ alone, never really moving over to my side, because then you might not be quite as popular, might lose a point or two with the in-crowd. I figured helping lepers like me was part of the Speakeasy goddamn Code. Noblesse oblige.

  “You were never my ‘buddy,’ and believe me, I could have used one.”

  Jack wishes Gerald had had the prescience to keep water or some other liquid in his desk along with the peanuts.

  “Well,” he says, picking at a piece of nut stuck between his teeth, “you brought some of that on yourself, you know. I mean, you never fought back. You wouldn’t have gotten killed if you’d fought back once in a while. We might have respected you a little.”

  Gerald looks across the room, at the only door.

  “I didn’t want to fight. I just wanted to be left alone, just have a nice little high school experience like everyone else, look back fondly in my yearbook, keep up with the ol’ gang.”

  Gerald stops to take in a deep breath, then exhales and turns to stare at Jack Stone.

  “Let me tell you about my senior yearbook, Jack. You know, I threw it away, two days after I got it. That prick Cully Dane, one of your old gang, I asked him to sign mine. I don’t even know why I did it; we were sitting across from each other in Trig, and I just asked him. He said, sure, he’d be glad to, without offering his for me to sign. He kept it for half the period. I had a bad feeling, but what could I do? And when I opened the yearbook in my next class, you know what Cully Dane did? He took up two whole pages, drew around the ads, and there was this nerdy, faggy-looking kid with big thick glasses and a jockstrap over his head. And he wrote,..… ‘To Jerry Prince, the biggest “jock” of them all.’

  “So, that afternoon, on the way home, I dropped my senior yearbook in the trash can at the edge of the school parking lot. I told my mother I lost it.

  “Well,” Jack says, after a short silence, “you’ve done pretty well for yourself. You don’t seem like you’re scarred by all the terrible abuse of your childhood.”

  Gerald Prince has been telling himself the same thing for years. Living well is the best revenge and all that. Show the bastards.

  Now, though, it’s as if Jack Stone’s rude intrusion into his happy life has stripped him of some outer layer—call it Gerald Prince—and for the first time in years he can contemplate the ugly red gash underneath, deprived of air and festering into a new century.

  After a short silence, he says, “Bottom line: You got to stay. I had to leave.”

  Jack looks across the table.

  “Bottom line: You got to leave. I had to stay.”

  Neither of them speaks for a couple of minutes. Lieutenant Lewandowski asks if everything’s OK. Gerald tells him it is.

  “So,” Jack says, when they look back at each other. “What did you think of the book?”

  Gerald laughs. Jack raising the gun and pointing it at him only reduces him to nervous giggles.

  “No,” he says. “No. I’m not laughing because it’s awful. I mean, it isn’t awful. It’s just so ridiculous. The situation, I mean, not the book.”

  Jack waits.

  “OK, here’s what I think. And keep in mind, I only read the first 125 pages before the cavalry showed up outside. I really think it has promise. I think you have the makings of something really good here. If I just had time to read the rest of it …”

  “Fat chance, in here,” Jack says, and he does wonder, briefly, how this is ever going to work out.

  Then, the cell phone rings again.

  Gerald is given permission to answer it. He seems confused at first.

  “Oh, Tara. I’m sorry, I’m a little busy right now. What? How did you know …? Why …? Oh.… Just a second.”

  He hands the phone to Jack, who finally takes it in his left hand, the gun in his right pointing squarely at Gerald.

  Jack answers. The woman on the other end is talking so loudly that he has to hold the phone a couple of inches away from his ear.

  “Jack Stone? Tara Weisbaum. Goodman Publishing.”

  Jack is silent.

  “I’ve been following this whole crazy little drama of yours on TV. I’m riveted. Riveted! Everybody’s riveted.”

  “Riveted.”

  “Yeah. That assistant of Gerald Prince’s says you brought a manuscript in with you for Gerald to read, that this is what it’s all about. What a fucking concept. I love it!”

  Jack keeps one eye toward the inner wall, wondering if this isn’t a trick to soften him up for the storming of the door, wondering if he isn’t going to have to shoot Gerald Prince after all. He wishes it wasn’t so foggy.

  “Yeah,” he says. “That’s about it. I guess he also told you it’s crap, right?”

  “Who knows what’s crap and what’s not?” the voice says. It’s a cigarettes-and-vodka voice with no indecision hanging at the ends of sentences, a voice that moves quickly and smoothly and loudly to the point.

  “What I like,” the voice adds, “is your chutzpah. You’ve got brass balls. You know what you want, know where you’re going.”

  Jack says nothing.

  “Tell you what, Jack Stone—is that your real name, by the way?—I’ve got something for you.”

  “Good. I could use something right now, just not sure what it is.”

  “Tell you what,” she says again, and he starts worrying that “tell you what” might work for her the way “actually” does for David.

  “I want to make you an offer, sight unseen. You give Goodman & Lazar—that’s where I work—give Goodman the rights to the book and rights to the book you’re going to write about all this, you know, the hostage situation, what got you here, and I can guarantee you a mid-six-figure deal.”

  “Mid-six-figure deal,” Jack repeats.

  Gerald is trying to interpret the conversation from the half he can hear. At “mid-six-figure deal,” his eyes widen a little.

  “I can fax over the contract later,” she says, as if the deal has already been consummated, “when you get everything ironed out. Gerald’s office phone doesn’t seem to be working just now. Good thing I had his cell-phone number. All I need from you now is a verbal agreement.”

  “Oral.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oral. It’s oral agreement, not verbal. Jesus. And you call yourself an editor?”

  Tara Weisbaum does not seem taken aback in the least. She laughs so loudly that Gerald can hear her from six feet away.

  “Beautiful! You are a trip. Hey, don’t worry about grammar and syntax and all that shit. We have people here who can dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s to a fare-thee-well. What I can do is make money, for both of us. I do that by spotting people like you. You’re hot right now, my friend. H-O-T.”

  Jack Stone sits silently for a few seconds.

  “Hello?” he hears. “You still there?”

  “I was wondering,” Jack says at last, eyeing Gerald across from him. “If you can get me mid six-figures right now, do you think you could bump it up to a million if I shoot the son of a bitch?”

  “Shoot him? Shoot Gerald?” Tara Weisbaum is laughing again. She is repeating what he said to what must be a gathering of several people. He can hear the laughter echoing in the background.

  “I don’t know, Jack. May I call you Jack? I’d have to talk that over with Mr. Greenlaw.” More laughter in the background.

  Jack disconnects her.

  Gerald Prince looks ill.

  “Somebody named Tara Weisbaum says I’m hot. Apparently, I’ll just g
et hotter if I shoot you.”

  “That bitch,” Gerald mutters.

  No more than a long, silent minute later, the cell phone rings again.

  Again, Gerald listens, then hands the phone over. He looks discouraged.

  The man on the other end identifies introduces himself as Robert Clifton and tells Jack his title and the name of the literary agency for which he works. Then, after a long silence, he explains just how powerful his agency is.

  “I can make it happen,” Robert Clifton says.

  “Make what happen?”

  “What you wanted to happen, when you came up here. Rich and famous, am I right?”

  “Some woman at Goodman and something-or-other Publishing just told me she could get me a mid-six-figure contract,” Jack tells him.

  Robert Clifton laughs.

  “That’s a good starting point,” he says. “Listen, whatever you do, don’t sign anything. Hell, man, we’ll have an auction. Sell it to the highest bidder. And a book about how all this happened will be part of it, too, of course. However it turns out.”

  “Of course.”

  “How’s old Gerald Prince doing, by the way? Give him my regards.”

  Jack wonders how many people there are in Manhattan who need shooting.

  “Look, Mr. Clifton, I think maybe we’d better wait until things get resolved here. I’m not exactly at liberty for any long-term commitments right now. And I don’t have plans to write a book about all this.”

  “Right. Sure. But maybe you ought to rethink that.”

  The agent is still trying to sell him on Robert Clifton when he clicks the “off” button.

  In the next hour, as first the streets and then the sky fade into darkness, highlighting the red, blue and orange sound-and-light show below, Gerald Prince handles two more calls, both for Jack. One is from another editor, from another imprint of the same company for which Gerald works. The other is from a second agent, a woman who seems more intent than the first caller on securing a “verbal agreement.”

  It’s almost six o’clock when the phone on Gerald’s desk rings for the first time since the police arrived. It startles them both. Jack jumps and waves the gun between his hostage and the door. Gerald sits frozen at his desk. On the third ring, Jack picks it up.

  “Jack?”

  He doesn’t answer her for a moment. He wishes briefly that Gerald hadn’t introduced him to Actually David on the way in, but he supposes everyone eventually would have found out who he was. When he looks out the window, the haze is so bad he can hardly see the lights across the street. He shakes his head to clear it.

  “Gina.”

  “Are you all right? Is everything all right?”

  Jack wishes he could tell her it was. He assumes that others are listening, whoever disconnected and then reconnected the phone.

  “Things are great. I saw the Empire State Building last night. Had a nice train trip. I’ve been talking to some interesting people.”

  She sounds as if she’s been crying, maybe still is crying.

  “Please, Jack,” she says. “Please don’t do anything”—she pauses for the right word—“rash.”

  “Rash,” he repeats. “Oh, you know me, Gina. I wouldn’t do anything rash. I’m Mister Even-Keel.”

  “I know you’re never going to forgive me,” she says. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had shot me. But don’t take it out on somebody else. Come on home so we can talk about it. I want you to come home. Please.”

  It’s not all about you, Jack wants to tell her. But he supposes it would be better for her right now if she did think it was about her. How to explain that seeing her naked bottom spread-eagled across Milo Wainwright’s desk was only his second-worst memory from that day?

  “I’ll be home soon,” he tells her, and he can hear her crying now. “I’ve just got a couple of things to take care of.”

  “We want you back here,” she says at last. “Shannon does. I do. We can work this out, Jack.”

  He wants to reassure her, but telling her about agents and editors and mid-six-figure contracts while half the New York City police department waits outside the door for a chance to kill him seems unrealistic.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he says, as tenderly as he can manage. “We can talk.”

  And he hangs up.

  When the phone rings again, Jack picks it up almost immediately. Gerald Prince doesn’t seem to be getting many calls this day.

  “Howyadoin’ in there?” Lieutenant Lewandowski says. “You guys must be getting a little hungry there, a little thirsty.”

  “We’re OK,” Jack says.

  “Gerald too?”

  Jack hands the phone over.

  Gerald assures the lieutenant, in a raspy voice, that he is fine, that he hasn’t been harmed.

  He hands the phone back to Jack.

  “The thing is, Jack,” the lieutenant says, “I’ve got some cowboys, some soldiers of fortune, out here. I’m afraid something bad’s going to happen if we don’t, you know, resolve this thing. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “So, where do we go from here? We just don’t want anybody hurt.”

  “Hurt.” Jack repeats the last word, and then he hangs up.

  “What’d they say?” Gerald asks him.

  “Said they didn’t want anybody hurt.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  “Yeah,” Jack says, “ideally, it is. In an ideal world, where you didn’t have to use a .38 to get people’s attention, it would be a very good idea.”

  He turns to his old classmate.

  “Aren’t you going to make me some kind of offer, too?” he asks. “I mean, half of New York wants to shoot me and the other half wants to give me money. Might as well make an offer. Maybe I’ll give you first dibs.”

  Gerald hangs his head. He is, Jack can see, exhausted. He looks as tired as Jack Stone himself.

  As he waits for an answer, the window behind Gerald Prince’s desk explodes. The glass falls in large and small pieces on the two men. The rush of cold air is met by something else, choking them both and making them run toward the window.

  Just then, the door collapses and what might be Martians, with long snouts and large, serious weapons, come rushing in behind it.

  Jack fires a shot from the .38, then is on the floor, reaching with his left hand to ease the burning in his right shoulder.

  In the midst of the cursing and blinding light and rough handling, he goes under, the fog rolling in and fading to black.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Nothing was the same after that.

  For better or for worse, as the preacher says.

  Really, though, I have very few regrets.

  The sun is setting on the other side of the pond, just behind a slight hill and some trees I can’t name. The flora and fauna out here are still mostly a mystery to me.

  Even the things that appear the same as they were in Virginia aren’t really, when you look a little closer. I’ve been watching this cardinal hector and harass other, duller birds every day in the side yard, making that clicking sound before he dive-bombs them. Back home—no, back there—cardinals were timid birds who came to the feeder at twilight, picky, nervous eaters who kept one eye out for cats or other, pushier birds. Here, they have attitude.

  Of course, attitude is what I’m supposed to have. Maybe, like the cardinals, I’m a different bird up here.

  A breeze comes across the water, and it has a chill in it, even if the calendar says it’s still summer. I wonder what it will be like here when the endless days turn into endless nights.

  The Adirondack chair is so comfortable that I don’t want to move, ever. Just sit here and let the dark overtake me. My glass has been empty for half an hour, and I can’t rouse myself to do anything about it.

  Only the daily attack of the killer mosquitoes finally drives me back through the long back yard to the screen porch. This far north, insects seem to have been selectively weeded out
so that only the meanest of the species survive.

  Lovelady comes with me. I got her from the animal shelter a month ago. She seems to be part Labrador retriever, part German shepherd, with a little “who knows?” thrown in. She barks like hell, but she’s got a soft mouth. I take my hand out of my pocket and swing it alongside, and she reaches up and licks it.

  I check myself for ticks and then settle in the hammock. Lovelady flops down beneath me, sighing as if she has just put in a most wearying day.

  “Well, we’ve both worn ourselves out, haven’t we?” I ask her, and she looks up at me for a moment before lowering her head again, patiently waiting. She knows the next move I make will be to fetch supper for both of us.

  While Lovelady has been defending me from the UPS man and the letter-carrier and anything else that comes up the circular drive, I’ve been spending my days working away at the computer Gerald loaned me. There’s an ocean beach 15 minutes from here and a bay beach just five minutes away. Mostly, though, I’m writing.

  This is Gerald’s place. He’s letting me stay here for the foreseeable future. I’m hoping to be out before the days get too short, but who knows? There’s plenty of room. When he and Caitlin and the kids come out for a week or a weekend, I keep to the guest cottage. The rest of the time, I have the place to myself.

  It was decent of him, all things considered, but like he said, up here, you never know who’s going to be on your side.

  And, it’s worked out pretty well for both of us. Even he admits that.

  The policeman who shot me in the shoulder would have been just as happy to have plugged me in the chest. The shot I fired that struck the wall just over the door missed another of the city’s finest by no more than a couple of feet.

  I spent a few nights in the hospital and a few more in jail, where the other miscreants treated me with an amazing amount of charity and compassion, which was good in that some of them had proved to be much more successful than I was at wreaking havoc on fellow citizens. It seems that making the evening news confers upon you a certain amount of celebrity, gives you at least a temporary free pass.

  Gerald Prince, or Mayfair Publishing, posted my bail. We hadn’t talked since Gerald was rescued from me, and he was just about the last person I expected to see.