by Eoin Colfer
“You ain’t even my first, McEvoy. And I liked that other guy. He was my favorite.”
“Maybe, but he was wounded, immobile, most like. Me, you gotta get all the way from the car to the hole, and I ain’t going easy. Also bigger guys than you shot me just before I killed them. I got more holes in me than 50 Cent.”
I said 50 Cent all wrong. Should be “Fiddy” or some such.
Respect for “In Da Club” though—classic. Jason and me used to play Celebrity Beatdown on the door: 50 Cent was the only guy who we put through to the next round without argument. Fucker’s huge, plus he’s got that smart/crazy glint in his eye.
Shea is getting a little angry, but tries to laugh it off. “Listen to this dope,” he says to Freckles. “Handcuffed on the way to his own execution, and he’s still playing the big man.”
Freckles has his eyes on the road, lotta potholes down here. Homeless guys too. It’s like Thunderdome by the river.
“He’s just yanking your chain, kid. Pay no attention. You can shoot him right in his stupid mouth in about five minutes.”
“That gives you about five minutes to live,” I say.
Shea pulls out his gun and lays it on the partition. “You want to shut the hell up? Maybe I’ll shoot you right here.”
I laugh with a savage glee. Spraying the glass.
“Shoot me in a moving vehicle? You goddamn amateur. You wanna tell him, Benny T?”
“Tell me what?” Shea demands.
Freckles sighs. “Shea-ster. It’s your first day on this side of the fence. You ain’t expected to know everything.”
“So why can’t I shoot this prick now?”
I break the news. “Because you’re in a reinforced vehicle on uneven terrain. Firstly you’d most likely miss, then that bullet is gonna ricochet off all the metal ’round here and most likely kill the wrong person. And even if it don’t, then the noise alone is gonna blow out a couple of eardrums and we’d all end up in the Hudson.”
Shea has a counterargument. “Yeah? But you’re in a sealed compartment, McEvoy, with bulletproof glass all around. All I gotta do is poke my pistol through this hatch and it’s a million to one that a ricochet could come back. Plus the noise is gonna bounce off the glass.”
I try to look stumped by this line of reasoning. The place I go to for this expression is every single conversation I ever had with Sofia.
“Yeah . . . I guess.”
Shea is delighted that his youthful logic has trumped my veteran’s wisdom.
“That’s right, McEvoy. I can shoot you anytime I feel like it. And guess what? I’m feeling like it right now.”
Come on, you little turd. Come on.
Shea slips the catch off the small door in the middle of the glass where real customers would pay their fare. The door opens with the soft hiss/pop of a seal being broken.
“Smile, motherfucker,” says Shea, poking the barrel of his gun through the hole.
Freckles spots this out of the corner of his eye.
“No,” he blurts. “Don’t.”
Freckles may have been about to deliver more specific instructions along the lines of: Don’t give the ex-soldier access to your weapon as he doubtless knows a dozen ways to disarm you.
But it’s too late. As soon as the hatch opens my hands are coming up. Shea ain’t got much of a grip on the handle and so more or less delivers the gun into my waiting fingers.
I spin it around, flick off the safety, which the Shea-ster neglected to do, then stick my hand through the hatch.
Shea is stunned for a moment, then a petulance born of entitlement settles on his face like a crinkled mask.
“No,” he says. “That’s my gun. Give it back.”
Freckles needs a few seconds to come up with a plan so he says, “He’s right, McEvoy. It is his gun.”
I cannot believe these two.
“Get out of the car,” I tell Shea. I need to separate them or they might try to out-bravado each other.
Shea’s bottom lip juts. “I am not going anywhere. Now you turn that gun over, right now, mister.”
I do something that anyone who has ever met Shea, except Freckles, has been praying for. I shoot him. Just in the arm but the scar should draw admiring coo’s at his legendary pot parties. The noise is loud and flat like the snap of a dry branch but most of it stays in the cab so I don’t get disorientated, which is more than I can say for Freckles. Shea is disorientated too, but that’s mainly from shock and pain. The blood drains from his face through the hole in his upper arm. It was harsh, I admit it, shooting the kid and so forth, but some people never learn unless the lesson is public and humiliating.
“Get out,” I tell him again.
Shea’s lip is wobbling and his body is wracked with tension and I don’t blame him; getting shot is about the most painful thing that can happen to a body besides childbirth. The one thing a person learns once they’ve been shot is how little they want to get shot again. Shea nods. “Okay. I’m getting out. Can you slow down a little, Benny?”
Freckles nods more times than are necessary. “Yep,” he says. “Yep, yep. Uhuh.”
I think he’s answering questions in his own head.
“Slow down, Freckles,” I tell him. “Just to thirty or so.”
Freckles does this, fingers drumming a fierce rhythm on the wheel. He probably doesn’t intend it, but I swear he’s tapping out the beat to George Michael’s “Faith.” Normally I would sing along or at least whistle depending on the company, but at the moment I am trying to impress my determined professionalism on these two, so I ignore the rhythm, which is difficult and distracting.
The cab slows and I can see scrub and cracked asphalt in the high beams. The city is on our right, and on the left a series of working piers stretches into the blackness of the Hudson. I bet there are more bodies buried down here than in the average cemetery. Hopefully I won’t become one of them anytime soon.
“Go,” I say to Shea. “I’m gonna count to ten.”
Shea is crying and I don’t blame him.
“Ten?” he says. “Come on, man. Let me work up to it.”
“Three,” I say.
“You’re skipping numbers,” he squeaks.
“Nine,” I say.
Shea hits the central locking button, pops the passenger door and is sucked out; he whips past like a tumbleweed and is lost in our wake, and the wind closes the door behind him.
He’s probably dead, but technically I didn’t kill him. Constructive suicide at worst.
No, no, no, I am not so bad.
Freckles steps on the accelerator as soon as the kid is gone and we both know why. He doesn’t know about my aversion to killing people, so is convinced that I can’t let him live. If Shea survives, he is done in this world of shadows, but Freckles would never stop coming. He’s Irish, like me, and we know all about holding grudges. When it comes to vendettas, the Irish make the Sicilians look Canadian. Freckles would not be happy until both my knees were blown out and he’s feeding me my eyeballs.
Eyeballs if I’m lucky.
Could be ball balls is what I’m trying to say.
I know, I should’ve left it.
So, the recently re-monikered Benny T reckons his number’s up and floors the accelerator, and the only thing preventing me from tumbling backward is my arm hooked through the hatch.
“Freckles, slow down,” I shout. “We can work something out.”
“Fuck you, McEvoy, you fucking prick,” he says. “Fuck all you fucking Dublin bastards.”
According to the doorman rules of swearing, we are now officially in the red zone.
I push my arm further through the hole and screw the barrel into Freckles’s temple.
“Maybe I’m gonna let you off with a warning. You ever think of that?”
Freckles doesn’t even answer; instead his face comes over all grim and he swings the car ninety degrees counterclockwise.
“This is a bad idea,” I say, maybe aloud, maybe to mysel
f.
“You like this one, McEvoy? You think you’re the only one with balls?”
I smack Freckles on the side of the head with the gun but there’s no power in it and I’m at full stretch already. I see the speedometer needle jiggling around ninety.
I could jump, but at this speed I would snap like a dry twig. I should have bailed with the kid. Freckles knows I can’t risk shooting him while his foot in on the gas.
The cab is headed for one of the less sturdy-looking piers, which is protected by a tin sign that says No Access. What kind of preventative is that? A fecking kid with roller skates could circumvent that security.
“I’m ready to go, McEvoy!” shrills Freckles, and I can see in his face that he ain’t backing down.
I gotta shoot him. With him dead, things can’t get worse.
I got no option but to plug this bug-eyed, ginger shit-for-brains right this instant. Actually there should be a comma after ginger, otherwise it might read like Freckles has ginger shit, which would be a weird thing for me to be privy to.
“You ain’t doing it, McEvoy,” shouts the ginger, shit for brains triumphantly. “You ain’t got the nerve.”
If we could freeze this for a moment, I would point out that Freckles is preparing to kill himself in order to avoid being killed by me and surely there is a better way to resolve our issues.
But we can’t freeze this moment, so I gotta pull the trigger or take a bath.
Shoot.
You’ve shot people before. Remember that time you were in the army? The hard bit comes afterward.
Shoot.
“Freckles,” I shout over the rattle of tires on gravel and the blood rushing in my ears. “Don’t make me do this. You’re Irish, surely we can work this out.”
Sure, if we had seven hundred years.
Too late. We’re on the pier now. A drum roll of planks rattles underneath, my jaw rattles and then we are flying.
Freckles let’s go of the wheel like he has time to roll out in midair or some other frankly impossible move unless he’s got bullet time on his cell phone and last time I checked the raciest thing Freckles had on there was Sofia the Dominatrix. He’s got his legs out the door when we touch down and a giant fist of water slams the door on his torso more or less cutting him in half.
We hit hard, the catastrophic deceleration jamming me against the partition, knocking the breath from my body. The windshield bulges inward and then pops out whole, allowing black water to surge forward, claiming the front area and Freckles’s body. The only air pocket is the backseat area, so we go down fast.
I have serious hours logged in life-threatening situations but they are of zero use to me now. All I can do is ride out the crash and hope.
I try to breathe but my lungs won’t oblige and I am seconds away from total panic. I don’t wanna be not found. I don’t want to be forever listed as missing if anyone even bothers to add me to the list. There is something terrifying about the notion that you can be disappeared by circumstance, swallowed by the earth, and by the time the water gives up your corpse, nothing will remain but algae-coated bones.
The car settles on the riverbed and the bump gets my lungs pumping again. And now that my brain has a little oxygen going to it, I start to take stock of my situation.
This whole thing is ridiculous.
Come on. In a death cab on the riverbed looking at a corpse floating in the doors ajar light. Silt floats through the window and a couple of fish that resemble nothing more than be-finned turds swim inside to investigate.
My hand is cold. Why is my hand cold?
Because it’s jammed in the fare hatch, dummy, otherwise you would have drowned by now. I am like that Dutch kid who stuck his arm in a dike, except for it’s a tricked-out cab, not a dike. I ain’t Dutch and it’s been a long time since anybody called me kid.
Freckles’s crimped corpse floats up so we are face-to-face through the glass. He has held onto his expression of manic triumph, which makes me feel like a loser even though he is the dead one.
Something glows in Freckles’s pocket and I am amazed to realize that my phone is still working and I have a call coming through. Luckily Freckles’s pocket is within my grasp, so I drop the gun and wiggle my fingers into his pocket and snag my Hello Kitty handset. Now for the tricky part: I gotta whip my hand through, hoping the water shuts the hatch, and if it doesn’t I gotta get out the side door pretty sharp and pull for the surface.
I tug on my arm until it’s ready to pop loose, then I take a couple of deep breaths, working up to a real lungful. My phone is still warbling in the flooded cab. Someone must really want to get ahold of me.
Okay. Stop wasting time.
I pull my hand through and the water forces the half closed hatch the rest of the way, forming a reasonably tight seal. The water is still coming in, but at a drastically reduced rate.
Finally things are going my way.
Right. Stuck in a subaquatic coffin. My lucky day. I should rush out and do the lottery.
But I ain’t rushing out anywhere. I won’t even be able to open the door until the pressure equalizes. And even if I could open the door the rush of incoming Hudson would pin me to the backseat. So I gotta sit here and take deep breaths until the rear compartment is flooded, which means I will have to pop the little hatch myself, which goes against all my survival instincts.
I answer the phone. Might as well.
“Yep.”
“Where the hell are you?” asks Ronelle Deacon, my cop friend who used to work out of the four-room station in Cloisters (and two of the rooms were restrooms) but recently moved on and up as a lieutenant in the Special Investigations section of the New Jersey State Police.
“Where am I? You wouldn’t believe it, Trooper.”
“You ain’t by any chance wearing a pink thong and beating on some cops?”
“I wish,” I say sincerely. “And it was a red thong, okay?”
“It’s not looking good for you, Dan. My brethren are majorly pissed off.”
“Yeah, well I got the real story if you’re interested.”
“I’m always interested in the truth, McEvoy. I am the last champion of the truth. Can we meet?”
“Maybe we can. I hope so.”
“Where the hell are you, Danny? The reception is crap.”
It is a testament to my phone plan that I still got bars underwater.
“I’m in a bit of a bind here, Ronnie. I’ll met you in Pom Pom’s, down in the Kitchen. You remember it?”
“Sure, we did that thing there with the guy from Cheers.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t Cheers. It was Home Improvement.”
“White guys, bad jokes. Who cares? When?”
“Soon as you can, I’ll be there before you.”
“And if you’re not?”
“If I’m not, dredge the river.”
“Dredge the river? What river? What’s going on, Dan?”
“I can’t explain now, Ronnie, but we’re friends, right? You’d say we were friends, wouldn’t you? You’d stand up and vouch for me at a service or something?”
“Yeah, we’re friends,” says Ronnie, but her tone is wary, like she’s talking a guy off a roof, so I hang up.
She said we were friends and that’s enough for me.
The water is at my ankles now, feels more like sludge than water. No one ever jumped in the Hudson around here to get refreshed, but I can’t go yet, I need to wait.
My phone reminds me that I have an unwatched video message.
Tommy’s video.
I’d rather watch that than Freckles’s floating corpse, so I select it and press play, and what follows might be enough to tip the balance re the Mike Madden situation if I make it out of this underwater coffin alive. The video clip is almost riveting enough to make me forget my predicament, but then the small hatch pops its hinges, and bitter-smelling river water pours through. In seconds my knees are submerged in the icy water and there’s a turd fish swimming Mobius
strips around my feet.
I wait until I gotta tilt my head back to breathe, then I gulp down a lungful of oxygen and put my shoulder to the door. Luckily Freckles did not hit central locking after Shea bailed, so the door swings easily. I slide into the dark block of river and am swallowed like a speck, like nothing. If the Hudson takes me now there will be little more than a ripple to show I was here.
When did I get so morbid? And why am I even thinking about mortality? I’ve been in training pools deeper than this wearing full gear.
I am in dark water, but above me shafts of red sunlight cut through the murk. I release the air slowly like I’ve been taught and kick for the surface, and it occurs to me that the sunrise is pretty special from this perspective.
Considering the twenty-four hours I’ve had, any fecking sunrise is most unexpected and appreciated.
I pull for the surface, feeling muscles that I haven’t used for years protest and stretch. I ain’t exactly dressed for subaquatic speed, but I am loathe to part with my boots that have been with me since the army, and my leather jacket I bought from a guy called Anghel, who was a Romanian mercenary working for the Christian militia in Tibnin. Whenever I bought something from Anghel, he would promise not to shoot at me later that evening. So far as I know, he kept that promise. Unfortunately I couldn’t return the favor and toward the end of my second tour I put a round in his leg when my patrol came across him and two of his buddies breaking into our compound. I didn’t mean to kill him but legs have a lotta veins and one thing led to another. Next thing you know I’ve cut down a guy I’ve known for two years over a couple crates of condensed milk.
Love the jacket though. Soft as butter.
The water runs shallow real quick and my feet touch bottom before I break the surface. I relax then and defer the moment just to kid myself I have a little control over my life.
But I can’t control the shakes that envelop me from head to toe when I break the surface and stagger ashore amid the harbor detritus. Styrofoam and foil wrappers, syringes and soda cans, planks warped and split by years in the water, dark strips of weed with fingertip touches, cereal boxes, bones that I hope are animal and most bizarrely a horse’s head poking through its caul of plastic trash bag.