Run (18 page)

Some little man at the bar, six feet two, this little man, starts to laugh and clap his hands and the bartender tells him to shut the fuck up.

I look at Jinx but he just looks at that TV, and now a shuddering
camera swings around and takes in the Hotel Excelsior, the lens shaking and creeping up the building but seeing only smoke and fire. Then, from a different angle, a steadier lens farther down the street, sweeping like a searchlight over the fronts of the hotel and the apartment building next door and it looks like some foreign country, some foreign war, Baghdad, Beirut, Bosnia, and you can’t see a thing but flames and then a huge explosion that tears a couple floors out of the hotel and sends glass and bricks and wood fragments showering down onto the streets.

It’s not real, it’s someplace else, and I can’t even imagine, right now, being inside that place. Or getting out.

But I did, and they did. And I know one thing, damn it, I know one thing more. I take the nine-millimeter bullet from my coat pocket. Hold it until he looks at it, at me.

I know what they asked Renny, I tell Jinx. I know what they wanted to know. They wanted to know if you were dead.

He stirs the spoon around in his coffee, checks the menu again. He doesn’t get it. Not yet.

I was supposed to kill you, I tell him.

He sets the menu down and stirs the spoon around some more.

I was supposed to take you south and take you out.

He takes a sip of the coffee like we’re talking about tomorrow’s weather. Then he says to me:

How’s the scrapple?

I say: What?

The scrapple, he says. You been here before, right? So how’s the scrapple?

Don’t know, I tell him. Never had it.

And that’s the rest of that conversation, until the waitress comes around and takes our order. I tell her I want dry toast and more coffee, and Jinx tells her he wants a couple eggs, sunny-side up, and the scrapple.

She goes away, and I try to get things back on track.

We need to get to Wilmington, I tell him. But he just stares through me and says:

I got to go see a man about a dog.

You do that, I tell him, and he gets up and gets gone and I sit there
and I try to look at the beer signs. I look at the Bud and I look at the Coors and I look at the Lite and I want more than anything else to drink myself sober.

I give up trying to look at the beer signs and I watch the TV for a while, and after a quick word from our sponsors—looks like this assassination is being brought to you by Infiniti—the news machine starts to recycle, back to Jesse Jackson, the senators, the President, before bringing in more video from the scene, and time slips back and forth, then and now, the yellow and black blossom of an explosion sprouts from the tenth floor of that hotel, and now comes a series of nervous frames shot from a news helicopter hovering over the burning buildings, with police and fire department choppers weaving back and forth beneath it, flames licking up the sides of the hotel and the apartment building next door, all those people, all those poor, poor people, and the angle shifts to the long ladder trucks below and then to the white and unmarked helicopters that dance at the edge of the smoke, fluttering in to land, lots of guts, those guys, setting down on the roof of the Hotel Excelsior, and there’s the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, the Federal SWAT, boarding up and being lifted from the roof, geared out like guys who ought to be wearing swastikas in black uniforms, black helmets, black masks, and damn if the guy in command of that unit, the guy waving the other black-uniformed guys into the chopper, watching them load in a couple body bags, isn’t carrying a Smith & Wesson Model 29, a .44 Magnum, in his right hand.

No way that’s a service piece. No fucking way.

So now I know how they got out. They didn’t walk, oh, no, they flew out of there. In style. Maybe courtesy of somebody Federal.

This is way past two plus two. Now it’s like Chinese arithmetic.

So what happens now? If I was them, I’d scatter. Call it Miller time. Take a sea cruise. Shoot back tequila, watch the hula dance, get my knob polished.

Then again, if I was them, I would be worried about one little problem and I’m sitting inside him.

Make that two little problems, because the other one’s back from the toilet, which is probably right next to the pay phone, which is probably why he’s been gone a lot longer than a flip and a zip.

Have a good talk with your guys? I say, just to remind him who’s on first.

Oh yeah, he says.

Well, I tell him. I hope they got some good lawyers. I was them, I’d get the hell out of Dirty City.

Maybe so, he says. But you ain’t them. Least not yet. And you ain’t there.

Well, hey, I tell him. I got news for you. This is all about getting there from here.

He starts to say something, but I tell him: My way. And there’s no room for discussion.

I think for a second, and it’s a quick one, because the answer is a quick one.

I get up and go back to the toilets and sure enough, there’s a pay phone next to the men’s room door. I drop some quarters and call Lauren, my friend in Philadelphia. One ring. Wait and hope the answer is someone real. Two rings. Try to make like I’m calm.

Three rings, then:

Hello?

Hey, Lauren.

Hey, Burdon. What’s going on?

Not much. Well, a lot, really.

You coming to Philadelphia? I’m not engaged anymore.

I could of told you that.

Now how—

It’s in your voice, Lauren. And you know what? You were too good for that guy anyway.

Oh, Burdon, when you gonna just move on up here and marry me?

I love you too much for that, Lauren.

Yeah, she says. Well, that’s a new one. Thought I’d heard them all, but hey, Burdon. That’s a new one. So how’s your girl?

Fiona is doing fine, Lauren. But—

I know, I know. There’s a point to this call and it isn’t a social one, is it? So what’s up?

I need a favor, Lauren. A big one. A big pain-in-the-ass one.

So that’s what it has to be for you to think of me?

That or dinner, Lauren.

She pauses but then she says: So tell me about this favor.

I need you to rent a car. Like right now. I need you to decide that your car needs repairs or something, that you need to rent a car. From somebody solid, like Hertz. Midsize, a Taurus or a Capri maybe, nothing showy. Make sure you get the insurance. I need you to drive the rental car to Wilmington. I need you to park the car at the Amtrak station and I need you to put the keys under the driver’s seat. I need you to put the parking stub and the rental agreement in the glove box. I need you to put the Sports section of today’s
Inquirer
on top of the dashboard, right up to the windshield, so I know that this car is yours. Then I need you to go do something, have a late lunch, go shopping, I don’t care, but leave the car unlocked, and whatever you do, I don’t want you to come back until eight p.m. If the car’s there, well, hey, it’s yours. But if it’s not, I need you to call the cops, because that’s when you find out your car’s been stolen. Then I need you to take the train back home. You got that?

Burdon— She starts, stops, sighs, then starts again. Burdon, she says, are you in some kind of trouble?

Yeah, I tell her, but that’s all I’m going to tell her, and it’s all I have to tell her, since she says:

Yeah. Same old Burdon. So okay. Sports section of the
Inquirer
, right?

Right. And you’re gonna do it right now, okay?

Okay, Burdon. Consider it done. Just remember one thing.

What’s that?

You owe me more than dinner.

More than you know, I tell the silent phone, hand down on the hook. More than you know.

I feed in more quarters, try Trey Costa’s mobile, get a robot voice that says the number’s out of service.

So it’s back to the booth, back to the coffee, back to my pal Jinx, and I say to him: Okay, we need to kill some time, not much but maybe an hour. If we get to Wilmington, we’re home free. But we got to get to Wilmington and that’s, what? Forty-five minutes, tops. You ever steal a car?

Shit, man. I been jackin cars longer than you been jackin off.

So?

So what? he says right back.

So let’s do it.

Finish your coffee, he says. It’s been done.

His left hand comes up from his lap and he’s holding a set of keys.

Pickup truck out back, he says. Got to be the barman’s or maybe the cook’s. Left his keys in the pocket of his jacket, hangin back there on the hook by the kitchen door. And hey, it’s a busy day, lots goin on. Nobody gonna notice for a long time.

After a while his food arrives. He pokes out the eyes of those eggs until they run yellow over the slab of scrapple and he cuts the mess into little squares and starts forking it in.

What is that shit? I ask him.

Ain’t what you eat, he says. It’s how you chew it.

Okay, I tell him. But you get the fucking bill.

And we take our time and finish our coffee, and after Jinx pays the bill, we walk out the front, then circle around to the back, and we’re just a couple guys getting into a pickup truck, he’s still driving and I’m still riding and the duffel bag is right between us, and he backs out, then does a beeline for the exit at the west side and takes a right behind a long line of parked semis and then out of Tito’s Truck Stop, and he makes the left that is going to take us back to the Turnpike and that’s when the siren of the cop car goes bleep bleep, bleep bleep, and I’m grabbing my Glock and Jinx is saying mothafuck and I tell him to slow down, slow down, and he’s telling me to shut up, to shut the fuck up, and to keep the pistol down and to let him do the talking, and now he’s braking and he’s got the blinker blinking and he’s letting the truck float to the side of the road, nice and slow, and he glides that pickup to a gentle stop and he looks in the rearview and he jams the shift stick into park and he turns off the engine and he says to me, Jinx says:

I got it. Keep the gun down. Keep it down.

Then I don’t fucking believe what I see. Because he winks at me.

I look out the back window of the truck and watch the cop—it’s a state trooper, walking that trooper walk—and I’m thinking my day’s been bad enough. I don’t want to have to do this thing, take out a state cop, a
real cop, but I lift the Glock to the edge of the seatback and I know I will do what it takes.

Jinx is out the door of that pickup, he isn’t waiting for the cop, and he’s got his hands up and away from his body like some basketball coach who can’t believe this blind referee, and he’s walking toward the cop and I realize it’s a black cop and the black cop’s got his hands out in front of him, like slow down, boy, slow down, and Jinx slows down and sort of scratches at his head with his right hand and he’s giving the cop some line or the other and he even nods back toward me and the cop looks a little vague and then he snaps to it, gulping some kind of bait as fast as Jinx can throw it and that’s when the cop points at something at the back of the truck and Jinx bends down and the cop bends down with him, checking out something on the fender, the taillight maybe, and I feel my fingers relax on the grip and then Jinx is up and the cop is up and Jinx is reaching toward his pocket, nice and slow, and he’s pulling out a billfold and he’s fumbling around for his driver’s license or something and he’s handing it to the state cop and the state cop vets it and shakes his head like it’s some sorry tale and then he nods once, then again, and he’s handing the stuff back to Jinx and I can’t believe this guy is about to talk a New Jersey state trooper out of a ticket but that’s what he’s doing and the trooper looks at me again like I’m some kind of zoo animal in a cage made by General Motors and then he’s heading back to his car and Jinx is swaggering back to the truck and he’s tossing himself behind the wheel and he’s giving me a grin.

Works ever time, he says.

Don’t tell me. Some kind of black thing, right?

No, he says. Some kind of green thing. Cost me a hundred bucks.

He yanks the shift back into drive and we’re gone.

Nobody matters. That’s what the train station at Wilmington is saying to me. It’s what those artist guys call a study, and it’s a study in nothing.

It’s a busy nothing, though. Noises all around. Automatic doors shuddering apart and shuddering back together. Broken pieces of conversation, always rushed, sometimes sad, other times angry. Odors. Stale smoke and hot dogs and some kind of cleanser. Movement, constant movement. It’s not a train station but a hive of worker bees. People walking, people talking, people standing in lines and lines and more lines. Other people crouched behind barriers, waiting on ticket buyers like they’re visitors to a lockup. Dreary people doing dreary things. That’s all I see when I lamp the lobby of that terminal, look through the people going places, the people going nowhere at all.

Nobody matters.

No one.

I’m waiting for Jinx. At least that’s what I told him, and it better be what he thinks.

What I think is that I’m waiting for a bullet.

After Jinx did his thing with the state trooper, the drive to Wilmington was a piece of cake. Forty minutes flat. Nothing to tighten my balls but my Jockey shorts till we circled the station and checked out the parking lot. The rental car was an easy mark, Hertz must have a million of
those red Mercury Capris, but this was the one with the
Philadelphia Inquirer
folded up nice and neat in the window and, if I know my Lauren, it’s got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the glove box.

So our new wheels are not a problem. And losing the truck we borrowed was as easy as finding a parking place.

It’s the usual thing that gives me pause: What isn’t there. Like I say to my pal Jinx:

Do you see it?

Naw. But somethin’s wrong. I can feel it, but I can’t see it.

That’s right, I tell him. You can’t see it. Where are they? Where are the watchers?

The watchers? Jinx snorts in air and shoots back his badass laugh. I mean, it’s no big thing to worry, man, but that kind of talk, you might call that crazy talk.