Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  I got out there early, Buchanan wasn’t supposed to meet me until ten, so I drove around for a while. I saw one of those doc-in-a-box places and went in, had the guy look at my arm. There was no fooling this guy, he laughed when I told him I got it in a car accident. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. What happened, the other driver decide to cap you? Well, there’s no infection, it looks like it’s healing normally.” He walked me back out to the front desk, told me to watch my ass and to finish taking the antibiotics.

  I bought a cup of coffee, took it over to the storage place, and sat waiting for Buchanan. It was a nice little speech he’d given me the day before, but if something bad was going to happen, it would be here, at the transfer point. I had left the pistol I’d taken off the Russian up in Maine, rolled up in my vest, but I knew a guy over in Canarsie who sold guns. I wasn’t going to drive all the way back over into the city to get one, though, and besides, it was too late. And it’s karma, you know, whenever you buy a handgun you are tempting fate. Certain things you do, I think the universe piles up the odds against you, and buying a handgun is definitely one of those things. I always thought that a burglar who carried a gun, particularly if he was a pro and not just some stupid kid, was betting against himself. The idea is that you’re smart enough and good enough to get in and back out again before anyone knows you were there. Some B&E guys that I know, first thing they do when they get into your house, okay, they stop in the kitchen for a nice big knife. I never did that, either. It was right at that point that I realized I wasn’t even a burglar anymore. I missed it a little bit, but nowhere near as much as I missed Nicky.

  Buchanan showed up about a half hour late. This big black stretch limo pulled in and stopped at the gate of the storage place, and I saw the guard point down in my direction. The stall I had rented was near the end of a row of ground-level walk-in closet-sized cubicles, with another row of identical cubicles about twenty feet away. To my back was a chain-link fence, with barbed wire on the top. In other words, I was at the back of an alley, with no place to go. The limo stopped at the front of the alley, blocking the way. I got out of the van and waited. The limo driver got out—the dude actually had white gloves on—and opened a back door. Buchanan got out, looked around, walked down to meet me, leaving the car where it was. He was carrying a thin attaché.

  If Rosario had been here, he would have been carrying. Not only that, he would have put a round or two through the limo windshield just to show them he was serious. My heart was thudding in my chest, I felt like its motion was shaking my whole body. Every instinct I had was yelling at me to run, but I didn’t. I walked over to my stall, unlocked the door, opened it up.

  Buchanan and I stepped inside. I hung back for just a half second, to get another look at the limo, but it stayed where it was, doors closed. I decided I was safe enough for now. Buchanan had no way of knowing whether I was carrying or not, and whoever was in the car couldn’t see what was going on inside the little storeroom. As a matter of fact, Buchanan was as much at risk as I was, and if he was nervous, he didn’t show it.

  A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling of the place. I pulled the string, and Buchanan held up a hand to shield himself from the harsh light. His eyes adjusted after a minute or so, and he looked at the two big green bags lying on the long table that was against one wall. The storage facility was backed up against the Hackensack River. The river is biologically active, they say, regaining life, but it looked and smelled like a fucking sewer.

  Buchanan ripped open both zippers. He counted the bundles first, then took one bundle out of each bag, one fat one and one skinny one, and he counted each bundle. He counted money the way they do at the track, fingers and bills moving faster than I could follow. He seemed happy with the count. He stuffed the bundles back where he’d gotten them, zipped both bags back up. He patted the last one unconsciously, then picked his attaché up, plopped it on the table, and opened it. He had a thin Sony laptop inside. He opened that, too. It was already running.

  “I took the liberty of setting up the transaction,” he said. He was looking at the screen, not at me. He had my brokerage account up. “You made some money on Pfizer,” he said. “Did you know they were buying Pharmacia?”

  “Been in the papers forever.”

  “Well, they got final approval yesterday,” he said. “You got a nice little bounce. Okay, look here. There’s the stock you’re buying, it’s OTC. Here’s how much you’re buying. All you have to do is okay this transaction and you dump everything you’re holding now and buy the new stock with the proceeds.”

  “All I do is hit ‘OK’?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You on-line?”

  He nodded. “Wireless.”

  “How you doing it? You got a cell phone modem?”

  He shook his head. “Too slow, and too unstable. This is called

  Express Network. I got it from Verizon. It runs at about a hundred forty-four K. It’s good as long as I don’t get too far outside of Manhattan, and you know how often I do that.”

  I walked over, looked at the screen, used the cursor to click the ‘OK’ icon. Twenty seconds later, the screen changed, showing my transactions, asking if I wanted to print out verification. Buchanan took a silver pen and a notebook out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket, wrote down the confirmation number, and handed it to me. He looked at me for a couple of seconds.

  “Log in to your service provider,” he said. “Check your account page yourself. You should even get confirmation via e-mail, you can check that, too.” I did both of those things, then called up Playboy’s Web site. I didn’t figure he could fake that, and there was no way he’d know ahead of time that I would look at it. I shrugged.

  “All right,” I said.

  Buchanan stepped out into the alley, held his left hand up in the air, and waggled his fingers. A second later I heard a car door slam. Buchanan stepped back inside the storeroom, closed his laptop, and shut it up inside the attaché. Two ironheads came walking into the storeroom behind Buchanan. If he was setting me up, this was bad; I might have been able to handle one of them, but not both. They weren’t meatballs, though, they didn’t have the look, and one of them had a little gray around his temples. My guess was that they were retired cops. Whatever they were, they didn’t look at me, or at Buchanan, either. They grabbed one bag each, stood up under the weight, walked out. Buchanan did not bother to watch them. He waved his hand to catch my eye.

  “Your funds,” he said, with a small grin, “are now in escrow with me. The FDA will do a press release three days from now. Now, you want my advice, here it is: This company you just bought into is way too small to handle production and distribution of this new drug, never mind sales or promotion. One of two things will happen. Either they’ll partner with one of the bigger pharmaceuticals, or they’ll sell out. What you should do is ride the initial run-up, then sell half your holdings. If they become a takeover target, the stock price will skyrocket. Don’t be too greedy, sell it off gradually. You with me?”

  I was still reeling. I had just watched two jamokes that I had never seen before walk out with about two million bucks. All of the account numbers and balances and Web pages could not compete with that kind of an impact. “Yeah,” I said. “I got you.”

  Buchanan stepped up, put a hand on my shoulder. The unbandaged one. “Mohammed,” he said. “You’ve done well here. In less than a week, you’ll know exactly how well. Now you have the opportunity to go off somewhere and live a nice, quiet, normal life. Don’t blow it.” He picked up his attaché and walked out. I stayed where I was, listened to the limo door slam, and then I heard the crunch of gravel under tires. A quiet, normal life? What would that be like?

  I got back in the minivan, sat there thinking about it. I remembered that lake up in the woods, the place where Nicky and I had gone walking. All the things I had then thought unattainable were now within my reach. It was a frightening thought, I guess because I realized that if I wanted it to wor
k, I would have to turn my back on everything I knew. It’s not so easy, when you’re a survivor, to let go of those tools you have used to stay alive, no matter how dark they are. The thing was, survival was no longer my sole objective. Now I wanted more. I called Bookman’s house while I was sitting there. His wife answered, so we talked for a few minutes. She told me the boys had already had lunch, and that they and the dog had gone off to the stream. “Yoah son is so sweet,” she said to me.

  “I really hope he hasn’t been too much trouble,” I said.

  She laughed at me. “He’s teaching Franklin so much, just by being with him, and by talking all the time. We paid for therapy for years,” she said, “but no one ever got neah the results yoah son has.”

  I told her I was glad to hear that, asked her to tell Nicky I’d see him tomorrow. I started the van up, left my storeroom key with the guard at the gate, and headed north.

  I called Hop from Route 84 in Connecticut. I was surprised when he answered the phone—I had gotten used to his answering machine, getting him in person took me off guard. I didn’t say anything at first.

  “Who is this?” he said. I had a feeling he already knew it was me, either that or he always sounded pissed off on the telephone.

  “Just your friendly local DEA agent. What is your fucking problem, Hoppie? What good did it do to scare Edna Gevier half to death with a bullshit story like that? What did that accomplish?”

  “You should never have come up heah.” He snarled the words into the phone. “Why didn’t you stay where you belonged? You ought to just go on about yoah business and get the hell out of my life. Yoah messing with the wrong man.”

  “I got every intention of doing that, Hop, but I don’t need any trouble from you in the meantime.”

  “You don’t know what trouble is,” he said, and he hung up on me.

  Maybe I should have called Bookman, I don’t know. I didn’t, though. Complaining to Bookman about Hop’s penny-ante antics seemed too petty, and I guess I didn’t want Bookman to think I was a crybaby, and besides, he still seemed to think he could turn Hopkins around. I was surprised to discover how much I cared about what Bookman thought of me. And how much harm had Hop’s story done, anyhow? Scared Eddie a little bit, gave me a minor thrill, though I felt guilty, remembering how she’d looked, standing shirtless in her kitchen.

  The hell with it, I told myself. Let it go. Another day or two and this will all be over.

  I had intended to make it back to Louis Avery’s house that night, but by the time I had gotten done with Buchanan it was almost noon, and it’s a bitch of a drive. I was beat by the time I hit the Mass Pike. I kept pushing until I got over the Maine–New Hampshire border, then stopped at a little motel on Route 1. They had a restaurant attached, with big windows looking out over a saltwater marsh. I went out on the deck behind the restaurant after I ate, stayed there watching until it got dark. There was a tern working the channel that ran up the center of the marsh, I couldn’t tell for sure if he was a royal tern or a common tern, but he would hover in place, then dip down for whatever it was he was eating. A lot of terns have the same coloration as herring gulls, gray wing backs, white body, but they have a little black yarmulke and a long forked white tail. They’re beautiful in the way a painting can be, once in a while you see one, there’s not a thing about it you could change without making it less perfect than it already is.

  I don’t know why, but I felt better being in Maine. They must put something in the air that makes you feel like you need to come back to the fucking place.

  11

  Look at any map of the state of Maine and you will notice that the farther south and east you go, the more crowded the map gets. From Portland on south the place is particularly thick with stuff. Towns, villages, roads, outlet stores, inns, beaches, gas stations, retreats for former presidents, and giant statues of Paul Bunyan standing by the side of the road. This is not really Maine, not anymore, it is more like Massachusetts North. It’s a nice enough place to visit, you can stay in a motel with knotty pine paneling, eat lobster meat on a hot-dog roll, and your kids can play in the surf. You might even get bitten on the ass by a stray blackfly, if you are lucky, just to lend your vacation the tang of authenticity. It’s a nice drive, too, as long as you’re not in a hurry. I was, though, so I stayed on Route 95 all the way up to Bangor.

  It would be tempting to say that Bangor is in the middle of the state, but it is somewhat south of the center. It is the jumping-off spot, though, and there’s a whole lot of very sparsely inhabited space north and west of the place. Route 95 does continue on from Bangor, but not exactly north. It sort of leans over to the right as you go up, and it crosses into Canada at Houlton. Houlton, however, is a long long way from the northern tip of the state. If you want to go up there, you should fly if you can, because it is a long-ass drive. I’m told they grow potatoes up there.

  I left Route 95 at Bangor and took Route 9, which is basically a two-lane road that roughly parallels the coast, but it runs about thirty or forty miles inland. It would be a longer trip to get to Louis’s house that way, but a faster one, because by staying away from the coast, you’re less likely to get stuck behind some fat, slow hulk of a Winnebago. Route 9 takes you through the real deal, too. Thick woods, brown rivers, no outlet stores, and no statues of Paul Bunyan. I did see one guy hitching southbound, he had his T-shirt off and he was waving it around his head energetically to keep the bugs from eating him. I stopped and let him use my bug spray, offered him a ride, but he declined, he wanted to go south. He’d had enough, I guess. Probably headed for Kennebunkport. I saw a lot of “Moose Crossing” signs, and I looked hard, but I did not see a moose.

  I had my phone on the seat beside me. It had been a couple of hours since I’d gotten a signal, but at the top of a big hill about fifteen miles from the northern end of Route 9 I noticed that two of the little signal bars were lit up, so I pulled over and called the hospital in Calais.

  “I’d like to speak to one of your patients,” I told the lady who answered the phone. “First name Rosario. Last name Colón, he was in there with a collapsed lung. Can you ring his room for me?”

  “I know who you mean, sir,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s not in this hospital anymore.”

  That seemed an odd way to say it. “Not in that hospital? What do you mean? He didn’t croak, did he?”

  She cleared her throat. “I’m afraid I don’t have any more information, sir. If you would like to give me your name and phone number, I could have someone get back to you. . . .”

  Yeah, right. I broke the connection, sat there thinking about it. She already had my phone number, or could probably get it easily enough. I didn’t think that mattered too much, it’s not a crime to make a phone call. Plenty of people must have seen the two of us together, anyhow, when they brought us in. The question was, what had Rosey done? He must have pulled something at the hospital, and it had to have been something good, too, because that woman on the phone was not going to tell me about it.

  Fucking Rosario. I should have known that he couldn’t take the waiting. God, all he had to do was lie there. I had figured on him being sick enough, I thought that would override his paranoia and keep him safe in bed. I had left him there with no money and no clothes. What else could I have done? Tie him to the bed? He couldn’t trust me, though, so he had gone looking for an edge. I knew it.

  Bookman would know what had happened, but I didn’t want to talk to him. I tried Louis’s number but there was no answer, not that I’d expected one. Louis was probably down in Machias trying to atone to Eleanor for his sins. She would forgive him, I was sure of that, she loved him too much to do otherwise, but I was also sure that she’d make him work for it. I called Bookman’s house, talked to Mrs. Bookman for a few minutes, but Nicky and Franklin were out somewhere, and so was her husband.

  I got out of the van and stomped around in the weeds for a while, cursing my luck. An eastern mockingbird flew up to the top of a dead tree
and sang to me. He was loud, man, and he was into it. As I stood there watching he spread his wings and jumped straight up in the air, singing, flapping his wings and then settling back down onto his roost without missing a note. Damn, he had nothing to worry about but singing, that and driving the other mockingbirds out of his territory. No wonder he was happy.

  Who the hell could I call? Eastport and Lubec were far away enough from Calais that most people there would probably not have heard about, or paid much attention to, whatever had gone down at the Calais hospital, so it probably wouldn’t do me much good to try Hobart or Roscoe or any of the other people I knew.

  I’d left the motel around seven that morning, and I’d been on the road for about five hours. I still had time, though. It might cost me an hour or so, but I could head west instead of east when I got to the end of Route 9, go up and talk to Mrs. Johnson. Maybe she’d know somebody.

  It wasn’t all that far from the end of Route 9 up to Mrs. Johnson’s house in Grand Lake Stream. At least it didn’t seem so to me. It took me about thirty minutes to drive it, not bad when you compare that to the duration of a subway ride from Park Slope to midtown. You take Route 1 north, and you turn off of that onto a narrow two-lane strip through the woods to get there, and it seems like a longer drive than it is because you don’t pass much of anything besides trees once you’ve made the turn. It’s almost like you’re going back in time, or maybe that’s not it at all, maybe you’re going sideways, somehow, journeying to some separate place that’s only distantly related to the world you came from. The tires on the minivan made a hypnotic thrumming noise that silenced the debating team inside my head. I passed that first sign after a while, the one that says “You Have Just Entered,” and still nothing, just more trees, then a while later I passed a camp back up in the woods, and finally a bridge across a stream, and the tackle store, and not a hell of a lot else, a few scattered buildings that catered to the fishing addicts who fly in periodically for their fix.