“All this effort, all this blood,” Sebastian said, his voice hardly above a whisper. “For what? What did you accomplish? Nothing.”
As Sebastian drew breath, Maureen heard a crackling wheeze in his chest. He wasn’t lifting his bad leg as much as dragging it. He was wounded and bleeding hard. Keep bleeding, motherfucker. She looked around, letting Sebastian lead her. They went right by the dark hulk of the Garter. Not in there, then.
To the water, she figured, the slimy old Arthur Kill.
She could hear the tide now, washing into the reeds. In the distance she could see the cattails swaying. Then she saw, off to the left, a dark, raised platform silhouetted against the squat blue gas tanks on the Jersey side of the water. The bar had blocked her view of the other structure, but now she saw it clear in the glow of the incandescent lights from across the Arthur Kill. A train station. The old Atlantic station. The one that got only half torn down a couple of years ago, replaced by another, bigger station somewhere up or down the line. The trains didn’t stop at Atlantic station anymore. They ran right through it at full speed; on quiet nights you could hear them rattling along the island’s spine for miles. That’s where Sebastian was taking her. Not to the water but to the tracks.
Sebastian quickened his steps and then Maureen heard it. A train was coming. A ways off yet, but coming. Coming for her.
Without even trying, Maureen went limp in Sebastian’s arms, her boots dragging. He stumbled, then collected her back to him, growling with the strain. Against every effort, Maureen started to cry. Tears blurred Sebastian’s face and the stars sprinkled over his head in the night sky.
They got closer to the tracks. The train raced closer to them, its rattle now a rumble. Panic wasn’t the enemy now. It was all Maureen had left. She pushed against Sebastian, kicked at him. She screamed, though there couldn’t be anyone to hear her for miles. Sebastian laughed at first, squeezing her tighter to him, but as she kept fighting the laughter became a growl of frustration and pain. He clamped his hand over her face and she bit him. He threw her down, had his gun out and on her in an instant. From her elbows, Maureen stared up at him. He crouched, leaning forward, his free hand supporting his weight on the knee of his good leg.
“Holy Christmas,” Sebastian said, gasping, “I am so gonna fucking kill you.”
“Then do it,” Maureen said. “It’s the only way I’m going on those tracks.”
Sebastian stood and straightened, stretching his back and cracking his neck as if he’d had a long morning mowing the front yard. “You know, there was a time I woulda taken you apart. Just pounded your skinny bird bones into powder with my own two hands.” He smiled, baring his teeth. “Right after I bent you over a garbage can and fucked your insides into jelly.” He turned away and spat into the reeds.
“The cops are all over Dennis’s murder,” Maureen said. “They know it was you. They’ll get you for it, and for Tanya, and for me.”
“These days, my back goes out.” He tapped his gun against his right hip. “This here acts up in the cold from where your sugar daddy shot me. Doctor told me the other day I might have arthritis in my shoulders. I’m not the man I used to be, that’s for sure. Not that I can’t still kill a bitch when I need to.”
Maureen scuttled away from him on her elbows and heels, never taking her eyes from his. If Sebastian had heard or if he cared about what she’d said, she couldn’t tell. His eyes had gone glassy, become distant. “Now I got that other body up there by the car to deal with. I don’t know if he’ll fit in the trunk, I just don’t know. Fucking mess, is what it is. I hate a fucking mess. I should make you help with that. I should.”
Maureen backed up against the gravel embankment of the tracks. She was doing Sebastian’s job for him, but there was nowhere else to go. Over her shoulder, the iron rails hummed like a giant tuning fork.
“Oughtta just burn everything,” Sebastian said, talking to himself as much as he was to Maureen. He dragged the back of his hand under his runny nose. “Light the Garter up, too. Burn everything. Fuck it, right? I’m starting over.” He took a deep breath, coughed, puffed out his chest. “State Senator Francis Jordan Sebastian. Senator Sebastian. Got a lovely fucking ring to it. I’ll get used to it in no time.”
Her hands behind her, Maureen scratched for purchase, trying to get to her feet without turning her back on Sebastian. She would not let him force her onto the tracks. Behind her back, something sharp cut her hand. She swallowed the pain and let her fingers explore. A broken bottle. A weapon. Thank the Lord for loitering teenagers.
She stopped retreating and let her fingers settle across the bottle’s neck.
“At least the train’ll take care of you,” Sebastian said. “Driver won’t even know he hit anything. Nothing left of you, like you never existed.” He jammed the gun in his belt and reached for her. “Dennis, Rico, Tanya, you. The others. Eat or be eaten. It’s the fate of the weak to feed the strong, Maureen.” Grabbing her by the coat, Sebastian smiled. “This isn’t news to you. You’re tiny, Irish, and a woman. You never had a chance.”
He lifted her upright, pulled her close to him, bracing himself to toss her on the tracks. Maureen clutched the broken bottle in her hand, hidden behind her back. She tightened her grip. She was right where she wanted to be, inside the reach of Sebastian’s powerful arms.
She thrust the broken bottle from behind her hip and stabbed it into the side of Sebastian’s neck. His eyes went wide with shock. Spittle sprayed Maureen’s face. She yanked the bottle free, twisting it, leaving jagged shards of brown glass stuck in Sebastian’s flesh. She stabbed again, aiming once more for the throat. Sebastian got a hand up, but not enough to fully deflect the strike. Maureen heard the tinkle of the breaking glass, felt tiny shards sting her cheeks, the bottle collapsing into pieces, most of them lodging in Sebastian’s throat. Warm blood poured over her fingers like sugar syrup.
Sebastian staggered forward and tripped over the rail. Turning, falling, he reached out and grabbed Maureen by the coat, pulling her down on top of him on the tracks. They were nose to nose, close enough to kiss, Sebastian clinging tight to her coat, Maureen pressing her hands against him, straining uselessly to get free, to slide out of her heavy coat, her fingers slipping against his slick, blood-soaked chest. The train roared toward them and Maureen flashed onto a trip to the beach from years ago. With her mom and dad watching from the sand, a big wave caught her by surprise and knocked her under. She didn’t know which way was up, could hear nothing but the roaring surf in her ears. She was drowning, her mouth flooded with water. Then her father, out of nowhere, had yanked her into the air. But now her father was gone.
The train’s headlights hit them. The brakes screamed as the wheels clawed at the rails. Maybe the train, Maureen thought, when it hits, will feel like that wave. That wouldn’t be so bad. Her world went white. Then she was airborne.
Weightless and blind, she soared, her breath left behind on the earth.
Maureen landed hard on her back, her feet higher than her head as she lay sprawled on the embankment. She watched in mindless shock as the huge, roaring train hurtled by over the tops of her toes. Then, in a rush of silver flashes and lighted windows, the train was past her, the brakes screeching and throwing sparks. She watched as it barreled away from her, swaying dangerously. The last car jumped the tracks and derailed, wiping out a hundred yards of chain-link fence. Finally, after a howl of angry metal, white and amber sparks shooting everywhere, the train came to rest, the last car teetering on the embankment, only a few feet short of pitching into the Arthur Kill.
Maureen lay on her back in the dirt and gravel, looking up at the stars and feeling completely, utterly numb. I can’t be dead, she thought, I’m still on Staten Island.
Fear flooded her insides. If I’m not dead, maybe Sebastian isn’t either.
Maureen rolled onto her hands and knees, searching in the darkness for a weapon, another bottle, a large rock, anything. She’d come up with nothing when she spott
ed him, a large man flat on his back a few feet away. Of course he wasn’t dead. Sebastian needed to throw her off to get out of the way of the train himself. Men shouted from the direction of the train wreck. She heard sirens in the distance. Police, fire, ambulance. That was quick. The motorman must’ve warned someone about the impending crash.
Crawling along the embankment toward the dark form, Maureen saw one of its legs kicking out over and over. She looked ahead at the wreck, strangely quiet now, the train like a silver snake with a broken back. The emergency workers would find them soon. All those brave men would save her. And then those brave, dumb bastards would save Sebastian. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. She crawled faster. She hadn’t found a weapon. That’s fine, Maureen thought.
I’ll finish him barehanded.
I’ll tear out his throat with my teeth.
When Maureen reached the man, she flung her body on top of his, wrapped her hands around his throat. But there was no blood under her fingers, no glass. She pushed up on her arms and looked down into the face below her. Sad, terrified eyes stared back at her. Waters. The man underneath her was Detective Waters. Maureen’s hands leaped from his throat to her head. Waters had pulled her from the tracks. She could’ve kissed him, she was so happy to see him. But then Maureen noticed that Waters didn’t seem to see her. The fear in his eyes was total, primal. His fingers clawed at his shirt, at his tie. His breathing made only ragged squeaks. The badge around his neck glinted up at her in the industrial lights from across the water.
Maureen flattened herself on top of Waters, trying to keep her weight off him and on her knees, her hands flying through his pockets. Nothing in his coat, nothing in his suit jacket. In his pants pocket she found his phone. She flipped it open and dialed 9-1-1.
“I’m on the tracks behind the train wreck,” she told the dispatcher. “At the old Atlantic station. I’m with a cop. I think he’s having a heart attack.”
The dispatcher told her to hold the line. “Help is coming,” Maureen told Waters. “Keep fighting. Help is coming.”
Waters had stopped moving. His hands, his chest, his eyes, everything had gone still.
Setting the phone down beside his head, Maureen pinched Waters’s nose closed. Then she leaned forward, covered his mouth with hers, and breathed.
27
Maureen swirled her thumb over the tips of her fingers, massaging the stain of cold and sticky blood. Her own blood. Cigarette lodged in the corner of her mouth, she huddled tighter against the brick wall outside the emergency room doors in a vain attempt to hide from the December wind. She’d abandoned her father’s coat, without even meaning to do it, in the treatment room where the doctors had attended to her wounds. Soaked with blood—hers, Rico’s, Sebastian’s—the coat was gone when she’d returned from X-ray, thankfully concussionless. She had always been hardheaded.
She figured the coat had been shoved into a biohazard bag and locked away somewhere in the hospital, wherever it was they kept thoroughly bloody things. She’d have to remember to ask about getting it back before she left. Or not. The coat would be a bitch to clean, maybe even impossible. Probably best to leave it behind, she thought, and let it find its way to the incinerator. She looked down again at her fingertips, then up at the night sky.
Above the glow of the light poles illuminating the hospital parking lot, high above everything, hung a full moon skirted by clouds, blue and purple at their edges. Watching the clouds glide by through her cigarette smoke, Maureen touched her fingers to her tender, bruised cheek, where Rico had belted her before dumping her in the trunk what felt like a lifetime ago. The ice pack meant for her cheek now cooled the bottom of the nearby trash can. It was too cold outdoors to stand around with ice on her face.
Seagulls she couldn’t see circled overhead, somewhere in the darkness between the parking lot lamps and the moon, laughing in that eerie way that gulls do. Maureen thought of how often she had heard invisible gulls at night; did the birds ever sleep? Pigeons, filthy, bobbing their heads like arguing waitresses, strutted in circles and pecked at empty prospects in the gutter. They scattered, cooing their complaints, when Maureen flicked her cigarette butt into their midst. But in moments they returned, back about their business as if they’d never been disturbed.
Maureen stuck her thumb in her mouth, sucked it clean, then touched her fingertips again to the bandage on her forehead, feeling more, but not much, fresh blood. Underneath the gauze throbbed the thirteen stitches the doctor had used to close the gash the steering wheel had torn open. She could feel the throb of each individual thread. She’d have to forget any plan to cut her bangs. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d show the world her scar. She thought of the ice pack—she might want a new one to take home—and thought of Rico, pretty much an ice pack himself, bagged and shelved as he was in the hospital’s lightless underground cooler.
At least there’d been something left of Rico to bag.
Other than a healthy dent in the lead car of the crashed train, little evidence of Sebastian remained on the tracks. After Waters was rushed away, the other cops set up light towers and searched the tracks for scraps. Maureen sat on the back bumper of an ambulance as the EMTs washed the blood off her hands and bandaged her forehead. She watched the police officers work the tracks and answered a detective’s questions about how she’d arrived where they found her. There were lots of questions, but no one had any answers about the health of Detective Waters.
Just as detectives called Maureen’s story into question, a uniform finally found a bloody black leather shoe, the freshly shorn foot still in it. Several yards away they found a sebastian for senate campaign button, dead grass stuck in the dried blood that covered it. The foot and the button were bagged and tagged and sent along to the morgue in a coroner’s van. Not long after, the police put their lights away and shut down their sirens, and the fire department moved in to wash whatever else was left of Frank Sebastian off the tracks and into the dirt.
Dragging on her cigarette outside the hospital, Maureen thought of the ponytailed orderly she and Waters had stood beside in the elevator on their way to see Tanya. He’d have another foot to put in a tray and scare the girls with. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and swallowed hard against the next image of the orderly that arose in her brain: bobbing his head to his awful music while he tied an ID tag to Waters’s toe. Not gonna happen, Maureen told herself. He’s not gonna die.
Waters had started breathing again in the back of the ambulance. She could swear she’d heard somebody say it. One of the numerous cops, she thought, who had surrounded her in the waiting room when she emerged from getting her stitches. But that had been hours ago. Everyone was still waiting on official word about his condition.
Maureen had spent those hours in the waiting room engulfed in a crowd of anxious cops. She recognized some of them, including the young kid from the Gulf station crime scene. But this time neither he nor any of the others gave her funny looks. No cynical eyes scanned her in an effort to assign a ready, cheap identity. She had one tag and one tag only. Every cop in the room pinned it on her like a medal with his eyes when he asked Maureen if she needed more coffee, or ice water, or a cigarette, or something to eat. When they looked at her, when they talked to her, the cops didn’t see a criminal or a victim or a foundling waif or a damsel in distress. Who they saw was Maureen Coughlin, the woman who had started Detective Nathaniel Waters’s heart after it had stopped dead in his chest.
Were it not for the reason she was at the hospital, Maureen would’ve reveled in the attention and respect. Like several of the cops in the room, she had chewed her nails down to the skin waiting for word of Waters’s fate. All she wanted was to hear that Waters was okay and after that run home as fast as she could and hug her mother.
She had felt somewhat better, but not much, when John and Molly arrived at the hospital, Molly toting a change of clothes for her. Maureen washed up as best she could in the ladies’ room and dressed in Molly’s clothes. The gray and gr
een flannel shirt pretty much fit but the pants, Molly’s tight brown cords—well, they were baggy.
Not long after she emerged from changing, a handsome young lieutenant named Swain took Maureen aside and explained how Waters had found her at the tracks. It had not been a miracle, Swain said with an admiring grin, but simple detective work.
The trail had started with her mom’s wrecked car being discovered by the Jersey State Police while on their way to the motel. One unit had peeled off from the parade and investigated. They found her bag under the passenger seat and in it her ID and Waters’s card. The Staties called him, telling him they had recovered not only the bag at the wreck but a cell phone and a .38. His number had been the most recent call on the phone. The gun had not been fired. The driver of the car and the second vehicle in the accident were nowhere to be found.
It was Maureen who figured out the rest, explaining to Detective Swain the situation with Sebastian and guessing that what Clarence had told Waters about the Black Garter had led the detective there.
“It’s what predators do,” Maureen said. “They bring their prize catches back to their lairs.”
Once arriving at the Garter, Maureen went on to explain, Waters must have followed the sounds of the struggle down to the tracks. There he had called for reinforcements, Swain added, and Maureen realized that the first sirens she’d heard after the wreck were on their way not to the accident but to rescue her.
Swain crossed his arms, bowing his head. He looked up at her, his blue eyes electric under dark brows. “It’s a good thing,” he said, “that you never stopped fighting.”
The Devil She Knows Page 32