These triggered a bout of nauseating anxiety as his claustrophobia raged.
Tyler knocked away the plywood cover and came out of the pool like a dead man out of a grave—paste pale, sweating, and shaking.
One of the cops, much closer than Tyler had expected, spun around, reaching for his weapon. Tyler lunged, grabbed him by his weapon arm, and flung him toward the open pool cover. The cop went over the edge and broke through the ice in the shallow end. Tyler glanced in the direction of the motel and saw Priest standing in the door there, two cops questioning her. He found himself momentarily paralyzed. This woman had wormed her way under his skin. He didn’t want to leave her, didn’t want to strike out on his own. Didn’t want to run like some fugitive. They met eyes, making a connection, and then Tyler took off. He heard the warning shouts: “Stop!” “You, stop!” These patrolmen were at a disadvantage: Tyler knew they wouldn’t shoot unless fired upon. They could chase, but he had a head start. He also knew that their sense of brotherhood would require them first to save the man in the pool. He’d gone in hard, fully dressed. They would probably split up, one staying with the pool, one or two coming after him on foot.
He ran.
At the end of the small parking area he cut left, along a cracked sidewalk bordered by a wood fence.
He heard the sound before he fully identified it: cha-cha-hmmmm, cha-cha-hmmmm. The clatter of a slowly moving freight, traveling toward the north edge of Baltimore’s downtown.
From over his shoulder he saw one of the uniformed cops, still a distance back, running for him but clumsily because of the artillery and hardware on the man’s belt.
Tyler turned left at the end of the fence and ran through the snow parallel to the moving train. Ran hard. Ran fast. Grabbed hold of a handrail on the far end of a car and hung on. Pulled himself up.
By the time the cop rounded the corner, there was no one to see, the train now going fast enough to make the man think twice about jumping.
Tyler, above a coupling, hung on for dear life, marveling at the fine line that now separated him from Alvarez. He had become the man he was after.
Tyler’s fingers felt frozen as he clung to a metal rung of the ladder bolted to the rumbling freight car.
His toes were numb from the steady forty-mile-an-hour windchill of the train’s progress, his ankles were stiff, his neck was sore from craning to watch the passing landscape. He had lost sight of Baltimore an hour earlier, consumed by suburbs and finally engulfed by the starkly barren dark tree trunks of the endless deciduous forest that blanketed western Maryland.
He wanted off this train, needed to be off it before those cops back at the motel made the necessary calls to determine which train it was and went about stopping it. Maybe they wouldn’t care enough about him to go to that kind of trouble, but Tyler couldn’t take any such chances.
His focus had to be the bullet train. He needed to know more about this test run than Nell had mentioned. On or off Rucker’s payroll, it didn’t matter to him now—he had to reach Umberto Alvarez before Alvarez derailed that train. Perhaps the freights, with no passengers aboard, were nothing more than test runs. But the F-A-S-T Track was a media event, a publicity spectacular, including dozens of dignitaries. O’Malley had to know it was the ultimate prize.
Several times he’d been tempted to jump, but the broken and frozen body of Harry Wells reminded him that this was dangerous sport.
However, weighed against the prospect of encountering small-town, trigger-happy police the first time this train stopped, Tyler had to decide not whether to jump but when and where. He knew nothing about jumping from a moving train, only that the one time he had faced such a jump, he had frozen.
He studied his situation: there was a pipe handrail mounted to the side of the freight car, just around the corner. He thought it might be possible to stretch from where he stood, around to this handrail, grab hold, and drop from the train, but timing would be everything.
His cold fingers gripping the steel rung of the ladder, Tyler waited for the train to slow, for the blur of the ballast that formed the railbed to come into better focus. Five minutes passed, ten, twenty, the pain in his fingers and toes excruciating, and yet the image of Harry Wells preventing him from jumping.
Finally, the train slowed significantly as it began ascending a hill, cutting its speed in half. Tyler stuffed his cell phone deep into his front pocket, attempting to protect it. In the middle of nowhere, as he was, if he broke a leg, that phone might be his only way out.
Before he made the move, he thought of Nell, and how he wanted more time with her, he thought of the derailed train outside Terre Haute, and of Harry Wells. Then, he lunged for the pipe rail around the corner, his left foot and hand firmly gripped to the ladder as the rest of him hovered over the blurred railbed below. He missed, swinging like a door from the hinge of his left hand, perpendicular to the train car, suspended out over the blurred railroad ties. He crashed back against the car, his unwilling fingers groping for purchase on that handrail and catching hold. He let go with his left hand, pushed away with his foot, and swung to the outside of the car.
He lifted his knees, scouted up the track, and let go, pushing off the car like a swimmer starting a backstroke.
Cha-cha-hmmm… Cha-cha-hmmmm…
He crashed onto the frozen earth and rolled down the embankment. He rolled, collided with something hard, and tumbled into a bramble patch that tore at his skin.
Finally he came to a stop, every joint aching. After a moment of a prayer or two, he caught his breath and slowly checked his aching joints and bones to see what worked and what didn’t.
Everything responded, and though painful, it all moved.
The train chugged past him, cha-cha-hmmmm, cha-cha-hmmmm….
He had no idea where he was, but he knew where he was going.
CHAPTER 23
“You’re a photographer,” Alvarez said.
“I’m a starving artist. Everybody starts somewhere.”
He had not noticed the appointments of Jillian’s apartment on his first visit. He’d been consumed with fatigue and with this sweating, sensuous woman he’d taken home from a dance club at four in the morning. But the black-and-white photographs of New York’s homeless, of the subways, the cab drivers, and the street vendors, struck him as both gritty and accessible. She had talent. The studio apartment was crammed with paperback books. The sparse furniture, begged and borrowed mostly, was eclectic, pleasant to the eye and revealing of a woman comfortable matching contemporary with Junko Victorian.
Jillian had met his arrival at her door first with shock to see him, then with outward indifference. “You left without a word. I thought—” but she stopped herself, her eyes glassy and unwilling to look at him. She motioned him inside and then locked all four door locks. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admitted, upset with herself. “Your wife and kids … When we first met at the restaurant, I think I felt sorry for you. And then ur night together, I felt something different—much different. But now? I don’t know what to think.”
She collapsed down on the bed, emotionally exhausted. Alvarez stood a few feet from her in the center of the room. He had hoped for a spark, a connection. Instead he got confusion, even despair, and he felt ill equipped to handle it. They met eyes. “I don’t expect you to understand,” he said.
“Understand what? We slept together. It was fun. Right? But if you’re back for more—”
“No!” he interrupted.
“Who are you? What is going on here?”
He glanced toward the door, considering walking out, knowing this was the thing to do. But instead, he stepped forward and sat down close to her.
“They killed my family,” he said. “An accident, they said. Greed and ignorance is what it was. And then they went and blamed my wife.”
“You’ve lied to me.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “About some things,” he added.
A prolonged silence hung between them.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He told her of the accident, that he believed the crossing guard and all its lights had failed, and that he had been sandbagged. “When you lose a child,” he said somberly, “when you lose two, it is not something that you can ever explain to someone. You wake with it, you walk with it, you can die of it. Should I feel ashamed I don’t feel this same grief for my wife? I miss her, yes, but I somehow accept her loss, whereas not with the children.”
“You should leave,” she said firmly.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
“You should have told me,” she said sadly.
He shook his head slightly, finding he couldn’t explain himself, his fantasy of togetherness with her shattered.
“Am I supposed to forgive you?” she asked, grabbing him by the arm and preventing him from standing.
“My lies, not my actions. Whatever hurt I’ve brought you.”
“And?”
He simply stared at her, a wry smile forming on the edges of his mouth. “You asked me to leave.”
“My mistake,” she replied quickly. “Listen, you came along at the right time for me. You know, between men. Bored with my job. Bored with the scene. Even the clubbing—I’m bored. But you? You’re mysterious. Exciting. You got me going. I want more.” She leaned back onto her forearms. “I want you to stay. To be with you, even if it’s just for the night.” He wanted so badly to give in to that urge.
“You want to save me,” he said. “And it isn’t going to happen.”
“Can you be so sure?”
“Yes.”
“I can be persuasive.”
“No argument there,” he said.
“And if it’s no strings attached?” she asked.
“They’re already attached,” he pointed out. “Why do you think I came back?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said.
He handed her a VHS copy of the hotel room video. “If something happens to me, this gets sent to the New York Times. Under no circumstances do you watch it. This, you’ve got to promise.”
“I promise.”
“For real,” he said, “a promise that is for real.”
She sat forward and took his arm again. “I have needs right now.”
He let her pull him down to her, allowed himself the luxury of settling atop that body, into her warmth. He whispered into her hair, “I can’t do this.”
“That’s not the signal I’m getting.”
He was, in fact, aroused. He rolled off her and stared at her ceiling where a single strand of cobweb had collected dust and rocked in an unfelt breeze. “This would be another lie,” he said.
She reached out and turned his head toward hers. “This would be right now. Nothing more. A memory. We make a memory and we leave it at that.”
“A memory,” he repeated. She nodded. “I have too many,” he informed her.
“Then a new one to replace the old,” she suggested. Her eyes smiled at him. It was a willingness, an offer to take her, to have her, to be lost in her, no matter how briefly.
And he took it.
CHAPTER 24
Hiding in the shadows outside Rucker’s R Street brick town house, with black shutters and a red front door, Tyler wasn’t sure if this was the right thing to do. The quiet street, lined with eighteenth-century brick homes, reminded Tyler of all the things he loved about this city: the history, the heritage, the politics and power, the architecture, the arts, the free museums, the summer festivals and celebrations. He felt he’d been driven away. Ostracized. Resentment boiled inside him as indigestion. He smelled the burning wood of a fireplace and longed for even one peaceful moment. Rucker represented everything wrong with the system, the decay that precipitated from the misuse of one’s position.
More to the point, Loren Rucker was careful. Careful to protect himself. Tyler believed that even if Rucker had worked with O’Malley to hide what had happened in Genoa, Illinois, the man would have stashed enough evidence against O’Malley to cut himself a deal with prosecutors, if it ever came to that. The person with the most information won the sweetest deal. Certainly Rucker, as an executive in law enforcement, knew that only too well.
Sounds of traffic whined in Tyler’s ears as he waited, the temperature hovering near freezing. His only reprieve from the cold had been the two bus trips he’d taken after jumping from the freight—the first, a Greyhound back into Baltimore, the second, an express that ran hourly between Baltimore and Washington. Following the payoff for passage aboard the ship, Tyler had just shy of eight hundred dollars in his wallet. He’d bought a turkey sandwich from a to-go shop and had eaten half, the other half wrapped and in his left coat pocket. Two cups of Starbucks coffee had briefly given him an energy boost, but that was starting to fade.
A heated gutter dripped rhythmically. The late-nineteenth-century pseudo-federal spread holiday cheer with electric candles in each of its eight windows, and an evergreen cone-and-berry wreath was wired to the front door’s brass knocker.
A big car parked in a space down the street. Tyler tucked himself deeper into the bushes as he recognized Rucker: the slightly stooped shoulders, the halting walk, the old, brown leather briefcase, overstuffed.
Now it was either the coffee or just adrenaline, but Tyler’s heart pounded in his chest violently. This would have to be a blend of confrontation and accord; Tyler had to play both good cop and bad if he was to win a rapport with Rucker and come away with the evidence.
Tyler climbed out of the bushes. “Hello, Loren,” he said from behind, startling the man.
Rucker turned and stared, dumbfounded. “You’re in a pile of trouble,” Rucker said.
“That makes two of us.”
“Metro wants you for questioning.”
Tyler said nothing.
“What the hell’s going on, Peter?”
“We’re going inside,” Tyler informed him. “I’m half frozen to death.”
“You look like hell.”
“Now you’re getting the picture.”
“And I’m supposed to cooperate? Why?”
“Because you know I didn’t do Stuckey.”
“Do I?” Rucker asked.
Tyler then played the one card he felt could open that door, a card that was no more than an educated guess. He tried to make it sound convincing. “We’re going inside because you oversaw the investigation into the Genoa, Illinois, crossing guard fatalities. And this would not be an opportune time for me to tell the world about that, would it, Loren?” He gave the man a moment to digest this. Then, fearing he had missed, Tyler added, “As I understand it, the final F-A-S-T Track test is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, in the afternoon.” He smiled, though his cold face made it look like something of a snarl. “Maybe Bill Goheen and I could make it a joint press conference.”
Rucker stared at Tyler, seething. Then he turned and walked toward his red front door. “I’ll put some coffee on,” he said.
Tyler followed, sensing that he’d scored a direct hit.
Rucker had won the house in a divorce from a wealthy wife. He’d clearly lost a good deal of the furnishings. Great holes of missing pieces and artwork called attention to themselves in the sitting room and dining room that opposed each other across a hallway painted a lush green.
Rucker switched off the security alarm and set down his briefcase by the door, a man of habit. He turned and hung up his overcoat as Tyler looked on. He’d said nothing, except his offer to put coffee on, since Tyler mentioned Genoa, Illinois.
“We’re friends.” Rucker offered Tyler a look that told him to keep the sarcasm to himself.
Rucker punched the coffeemaker’s switch a little too fiercely. Some water sloshed out of the back. He stepped back, met eyes with Tyler, and said, “You’re suspended, pending an investigation into Stuckey. It’s pro forma in a situation like this. I can still get you your paycheck until it’s resolved.” The coffee machine made beeping sounds. Everything
was computerized.
“You may want to reverse that suspension,” Tyler said. “I can walk out of here now, but it won’t be good for any of us. Especially not you, Loren. Because I’m walking out of here with the Genoa file, and anything else you have stashed away.”
Rucker’s face paled. He seemed to struggle for the appearance of control.
“And if I don’t leave with at least a copy of whatever you have, then everyone involved is in for a long and protracted legal battle.”
“I think you’re misinformed, Peter,” Rucker said, coming to life. “What is it exactly that you think I’ve done?”
“The Genoa, Illinois, crossing fatalities.”
“I know the case,” Rucker confirmed.
“Northern Union tracks.”
“Yes.”
“Keith O’Malley’s turf.”
“Goes without saying.”
Tyler felt dread. Either Rucker was too cool, or Tyler had it wrong. “You did O’Malley a favor,” Tyler suggested.
“I had nothing whatsoever to do with that accident. I recused myself because of my friendship with Keith. You’re in left field, Peter.”
Tyler’s hand shook slightly as he brought the coffee to his lips. He said, “You’ve been involved with all the derailments. You didn’t recuse yourself from those investigations.”
“That’s true enough.”
“So why the difference?”
“I was promoted,” Rucker explained. “At the time of Genoa, I was an investigator. Now, I’m admin. That’s the only difference. I oversee all rail investigations. I’m a train buff, Peter. I love trains.”
Tyler ran through his options. They seemed precious few. “They effected a cover-up,” he stated. “NUR was liable for the Genoa accident, and they covered it up. One Hispanic family weighed against the bullet train, and they opted for the train.”
Parallel Lies Page 23