The Water's Edge

by Daniel Judson

  Barton, slowing but not yet stopped, decided to do the only thing she could do.

  She took a bad fall.

  Pitching forward, she dove onto the tracks, landing belly first on the hard ties. The leather jacket did little to protect her from the gravel—she felt the sharp stones bite her elbows and knees as she hit, felt, too, her ribs and thighs slam against the unforgiving ties, her body ringing suddenly like a tuning fork. Still, she kept her arms outstretched in front of her, Mancini’s gun firmly in both hands, and took quick aim and fired once, doing so before Mancini could even adjust to her tactic. He was hit, somewhere, Barton wasn’t sure where. He reeled from its impact, staggering back a few steps before stumbling and taking his own awkward fall. Landing in a heap on the edge of the tracks, he rolled over to his side, almost like a man in his sleep, and suddenly, quietly, he was gone from Barton’s sight.

  She got to her feet, ignoring the pain vibrating through her, and hurried to the spot where Mancini had landed and then disappeared. Looking down, she saw that he had slipped between the edge of the tracks and the wrought-iron trestlework, was caught on a steel girder several feet below the tracks, folded over it sideways and teetering. His left hand was empty, and blood spurted from his right. It didn’t take long for Barton to see that two of Mancini’s fingers were missing. His middle and ring fingers. This was, she realized, where he had been hit by her shot.

  Barton got down to her knees, really felt the pain then, and laid Mancini’s gun on the tie. Dropping down to her stomach again, she reached over the edge, straining for Mancini’s empty hand. He reached up with it, and they locked grips. She tried to hang on to him, but his balancing act on the girder was precarious at best, only a stall in his descent. Mancini began to slip, scrambled to grab onto something with his other hand, his wounded hand, but it was useless. Still, he clutched for something, cried out from the pain as what was left of his fingers came in contact with a small support girder. As he was dangling there, held only by the girder wedged under his armpit and Barton’s grip on his wrist, it was very clear to the both of them that neither of those things would be enough. Mancini looked up at Barton, their eyes met. He wasn’t smiling now, wasn’t smirking, wasn’t the cool iceman he had been moments ago, and for every minute of the years she had known him and worked with him. He was frightened now, but more than that, he looked almost bewildered, unable, it seemed, to accept the fact that after a lifetime of winning, he was, simply, about to lose—to lose big, lose everything.

  Barton tried to hang on, but she simply didn’t have the strength, Mancini was too heavy. His hand began to slip through hers, and as it did, he tightened his grip, did so almost viciously, crushing her with his power. She felt herself begin to slide forward, first to the edge and then over it. With her free hand she grabbed for something, but there was nothing for her to grasp, no anchor to hold her steady. As she continued to slide, the pain of Mancini’s desperate grip was nothing compared to the pain in her shoulder, the deep tearing as muscle and tendons strained to keep the bone from being wrenched from its socket. Mancini slid down the girder a few inches, pulling Barton’s shoulder out even farther and dragging her that much farther over the edge. He maintained his eye contact, and it was clear now to Barton that his intent wasn’t so much to save himself as it was to bring her with him. A last-ditch effort to win—or, at least, not be the only one to lose.

  Barton’s torso was hanging over the edge, only her legs remaining on the bridge, was slipping now, about to go over when she felt suddenly someone grab the back of her jeans, a strong hand closing around her belt and holding her fast. Then she sensed that someone was over her, saw a foot on her right and a knee on her left. It was Spadaro. He had Mancini’s gun in his hand, held Barton fast as he aimed point-blank at Mancini’s head. Without hesitation he fired once, the shot like a slap against Barton’s ears. The bullet hit Mancini dead center in the forehead, and he dropped like a hanged man, falling toward the rushing water below and landing with a splash that sounded and then was immediately absorbed by the rumble and hiss of the water and the howling of the rushing air. He went under, was once again gone from Barton’s sight. There, and then not. A life, for better and for worse, ended, just like that. With Spadaro’s hold on her belt anchoring her, Barton pulled herself back from the edge and onto the solid ground of the train tracks. Spadaro let go, and she lay there for a moment, then rolled onto her back and looked up at him and the gun in his hand, a thinning wisp of smoke, like a last strand of fog, rising from its barrel.

  Part Five

  Night

  Eleven

  MILLER SAT ON THE EDGE OF HIS BED, LEANING OVER BARTON and watching her eyes, only barely visible in the darkness of his bedroom, soften as the effects of the painkiller he had given her for her injuries took hold.

  She and Spadaro had arrived around seven, but she hadn’t said much at all, had let Spadaro do all the talking. He was the one who told Miller what had happened at the canal, and how it was Mancini all along, that Roffman was only being set up. Spadaro, too, was the one to first wonder what their next move should be, whether they should come forward with what they knew and what they had done or cover up their presence at the canal and let it all end there. There were, both Miller and Spadaro knew, certain advantages in keeping what they had learned to themselves. And there was the fact that Spadaro and Barton had left the scene of a homicide—a justifiable one, certainly, but a homicide nonetheless. Spadaro was afraid how it would appear if they came forward after having fled like that. But Miller had pointed out that, considering how corrupt the department was, Spadaro’s need to secure crucial evidence first should clear him and Barton of any suspicion of wrongdoing. And anyway, if they came forward, it wouldn’t be to anyone in Roffman’s department, it would be to the FBI.

  It was then that Barton spoke, stating flatly, decisively, that there was simply no way they would cover this up, that doing so would make them just like all the others, and that she’d rather face whatever would need to be faced by coming forward than live the rest of her life like some criminal, like someone with something to hide. She was, as she had said to Miller the night before, done with all that.

  At that point she didn’t say anything more, and it wasn’t, Miller understood, because she was shaken or in shock. She was in fact lucid, present, composed. The strongest person in the room, easily. She simply didn’t want to dwell on what she had done, what had to be done. She was injured, in pain, wanted now only to rest. Whatever happened from here would happen, there was no avoiding that, no point, then, in worrying about it or talking about it over and over.

  While he waited for Spadaro to return with copies of what was on the voice mail system at the station, Miller helped Barton undress and clean up her scrapes. It was as if she had been beaten, her shoulder, despite the painkiller she had taken moments before, aching, growing stiff. Once she was patched up, he helped her into his bed, covered her with blankets and watched over her just as she had no doubt watched over him during the day, before running off to search for his obsession. Barton had done so, Miller knew, for no other reason than to maybe cut him free, once and for all, if she could, from all his various, lingering pasts, give him his new life back. His search for Abby had pulled him back into the world he had worked very hard to put behind him. He was beginning, just as he had done before, to lose himself in it again, in that dark and troubled world. He would never forget, then, what Barton had done for him, and what, in the end, it had cost her. How could he?

  Her breathing was growing more shallow when Barton looked up at Miller with soft eyes. They watched each other for a moment, and then Miller whispered, “Thanks, Kay.”

  She smiled, a drowsy smile, oddly intimate in its own way. Miller smiled back. He hadn’t sat with a woman as she fell asleep in a long time, since that night Abby, with her grandfather’s suitcase, had left him and waited for the late train, took it when it finally came, heading for God knows where, God knows who.

 
; “I wasn’t about to let anything happen to you,” Barton said.

  Miller nodded toward his open bedroom door, and his living room beyond it, where Barton had put to an end to Miller and Spadaro’s confusion over what would be done next. “Thanks, too, for what you said out there.”

  “We save ourselves from ourselves,” she said. “It’s what we do, Tommy. Promise me that we’ll keep on doing that.”

  Miller promised.

  “Try to keep this one, though, okay?” Barton joked.

  Miller laughed. “I’ll do my best.” He looked at her for a moment more, brushed a stray strand of hair from her eyes with the tip of his index finger. “You should rest now, Kay.”

  She took in a breath, let it out, was moments from unconsciousness. Did she feel the blue flame in her chest? Miller wondered. She would sleep deeply, he knew that much. And when she awoke, he would be there, to talk to or not to talk to, whatever she wanted, whatever she needed.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t find her,” she said. “I know how much she means to you.”

  Miller shook his head. “No, you did good, Kay. You did great, actually. And anyway, what matters now is you.”

  She smiled again. The drowsiness was in her eyes now, which glistened in the weak light like polished stones in a river.

  “I do like the sound of that,” she cooed.

  “Rest up.”

  “You know what, I think I like your pills better than mine.”

  “Go to sleep, Kay.”

  He watched her drift into unconsciousness, stayed there on the edge of his bed till he was certain that she was out, then took hold of his cane and got up, making his way through the kitchen and into his unlit front room. He limped badly, and his head, for the most part, was still a little awash from the double dose Barton had given him in the morning. But he managed to remain upright and make his way to the front windows.

  It took Spadaro close to an hour to return. Miller began to worry that maybe something had gone wrong. As he waited, he looked out his window, watched as a black town car with a broken taillight pulled up to the station and waited, Miller assumed, for the 9:10 train. He watched, too, a young couple walk onto the platform and stand face-to-face, embracing, kissing, laughing. As the westbound train pulled up—they were running on time tonight—the driver of the black town car got out and walked his passenger—a tall Latin-looking man in expensive clothes—to the station. They waited, along with the couple, for the train to stop, and then the tall man boarded it as the driver returned to the town car and got back behind the wheel and waited. This didn’t make much sense to Miller, but there was no reason that it should, no reason at all for him to even try to make sense of it.

  He was relieved when the old Bronco turned onto Railroad Plaza from North Main and headed his way. The restaurant below was busy for a Tuesday night—the familiar and comforting murmur of voices rising up through the old floorboards, friends and loved ones gathered for something to eat and something to drink, time spent together. Blessedly oblivious, all of them, Miller thought, to the things he and Barton and Spadaro knew, the things they had done for the sake of this small part of the world they all shared. Oblivious, at least, for now, but soon enough everyone would know.

  With both sides of Elm Street lined with cars, Spadaro drove down Powell Avenue and parked somewhere out of sight, then made his way back on foot. Miller heard him enter through the street door, then climb the steep stairs. Still at his front window and leaning on his cane when Spadaro entered the apartment, Miller took one last look at the train station, gave one last thought to what had been for so long his only consistent thought:Abby. There was no hope of finding her now, he knew this. Maybe another lead would present itself, but he didn’t count on that. Too many maybes last night, so few now. If she didn’t want to be found, by him or by anyone else, then there would be no finding her, of that much Miller was certain. He didn’t realize till now that he had been harboring a kind of wild hope that she had in fact planted his business card in Michaels’s wallet so that it would be found, that this was some grand plan of hers to orchestrate the opportunity for him to rush in and save her, as though she would know that was what he would want, even after all this time, and knowing this, she would want to give this to him. Strange how a hope is sometimes recognized only when it is at last put aside. Strange, too, that he thought of Abby as someone who would be concerned with his salvation enough to go out of her way to gift him with a second chance. What did that, then, in his mind, make her exactly? Just like him? His two years of sitting still and playing landlord, caring nothing about the affairs of others—none of this apparently had changed his obsessive nature that much, had only, it seemed, quelled it for the time being. He had once been driven to prove to those around him that he had become at last a worthy man, had seen helping as many as possible as his way of doing so. A scattershot approach at redemption, at best. Now, yes, his target was more precise, his aim more focused—instead of others, it was one he wanted to help, instead of strangers, it was the last woman he had loved, touched, slept beside—but it was still obsession nonetheless. Maybe this was the last of it, he thought, the final hurrah of who he used to be. He could see this as being that—the final spiking of a fever at last about to break. What would it be like, he wondered, to wake one morning and find it gone, his mind free of it, free of her.

  Still, wild hope or not, Miller would have liked to have at least laid his eyes upon Abby once more, if only to see her off to some place no one would ever find her and know once and for all that she had gotten away clean and was going to be okay. He would have liked that, would have liked, too, to have been able to tell her that he was, more than anything, sorry for having given her reason to leave him in the first place, to have played his part in sending her on such a dark journey as the one she had been on.

  Spadaro closed the door behind him, and Miller reached down and switched on the lamp standing on a table by the window. His view of the train station was replaced suddenly by his own reflection in the dark and distorting glass.

  Nothing left to chance.

  Bechet left Scarcella’s salvage yard at seven and headed in his own sedan toward Southampton. No registration, no insurance, all the serial numbers filed down, the out-of-state plates, taken from some abandoned car, provided by Scarcella. A car for leaving town in, a drive and drop, but nothing more than that. Because it was in every way possible an illegal vehicle, Bechet drove as cautiously as he had on his way to the yard in LeCur’s sedan, the dead body of his old friend wrapped up in a blanket and clear plastic in the trunk. It wasn’t an easy meeting with Scarcella, considering the news the man had received earlier in the day, and considering, too, what Bechet needed Scarcella to do—right now, with LeCur’s sedan and the body in it, and later on as well, if all went right and Castello took the bait. But Scarcella was the kind of man who did what needed to be done, had always been that way, was the man who made Bechet want to be like that as well. Bechet knew that he could count on him. It had helped that Scarcella’s own brother was there; Bechet didn’t have to leave his friend alone with his mourning, and the plan Bechet had proposed would go better with two than it would with just one.

  As he drove away from the yard—his Alice pack, along with the evidence he had collected against Castello’s family, both years ago and recently, on the seat beside him—Bechet told himself that now wasn’t the time for recklessness. He’d told himself that before, not all that long ago, actually, but it was even more so now. To accomplish what he needed to accomplish—for himself and Gabrielle, for Eddie and his wife, for Miller and Barton, and, maybe most of all, Scarcella—he would need all the skills that he possessed.

  He reached his storage unit on Hampton Road, opened the garage door and pulled the sedan inside. Closing and bolting the garage door, he made his way on foot across the village, staying off the main streets as much as possible. It was seven fifteen, he should have called Castello by now, but first things first. In less than ten
minutes he reached the motel in which LeCur had been staying, and after hanging back in a shadow and studying the window of room number nine, getting the sense of the place, Bechet used the key he had taken from LeCur and quickly slipped inside. The room was dark and still, no one there. Bechet looked around, found a leather duffel bag and searched through it. Some clothes and toiletries, nothing that would be useful to him. He opened the drawer of the nightstand by the bed. In it were two ice picks and several packs of French cigarettes. Bechet left them there. The bureau drawers were empty, and there was nothing under the bed. All that was left was the bathroom.

  He found a toothbrush and toothpaste, nothing more. He looked at the toilet tank then, went to it and lifted up its lid.

  There was nothing in the tank, but something was taped to the bottom of the lid. Bechet turned the lid over, rested it on the seat. He had found exactly what he had expected to find—a dark garbage bag, folded over several times and sealed with silver duct tape, the same kind of tape that secured it to the lid. Bechet pulled the bag free, knew by the feel of its contents—bulky but not heavy—exactly what was inside. He didn’t bother to confirm that, just stuffed the bag into his Alice pack and left the key on the desk and got the hell out of there. He headed back toward Hampton Road via the same back streets and empty parking lots, his heart beating a little as he walked. On the edge of the village, from a pay phone outside Sip ’n’ Soda, Bechet dialed Castello’s number.