Short Squeeze (8 page)

Sullivan made me lie down on a patch of weedy grass on the side of the road and put my feet on a knapsack he dug out of his car. He took off his jacket and put it over me.

“Don’t start getting chivalrous,” I said through my teeth, which for no reason had started to chatter.

“If you die of shock they’ll fire me. I need the job.”

I didn’t think the problem was physical. It was the thought of somebody going to the trouble of trying to kill me. Intentionally, with malice aforethought. Which it had to be, because random, unprovoked killings are less common than a meteor hitting you on the head. Even if I cut the guy off down on Scuttle Hole Road, and I didn’t, this was an overreaction. Even for City people, and they don’t drive pickups.

I hated that feeling. Nauseating fear.

I looked over at Pete’s pickup, probably a total loss. So there’s a silver lining, I told myself. It made me chuckle, which Sullivan probably thought was shock-induced dementia.

“So, Joe,” I said. “I’m thinking the next ride’s a Volvo, but I can’t decide between station wagon and sedan. I’m always hauling stuff around, but does anyone date a woman who drives a station wagon?”

“Hang in there, Jackie,” said Sullivan, leaning over me next to Danny Izard, concern written on their faces.

On the way to the hospital, the paramedics had a fun time listening to my heart, shooting penlights in my eyes, and squeezing body parts like my mother kneaded bread, all the while studying my face for evidence of pain, which they didn’t have to do. I had no problem yelping if I needed to.

By the time we got there, they were acting as though nothing was hugely wrong, so I relaxed. Relaxed so much that I almost passed out. Which is why I didn’t know Sam was there until I was rolled into an examination room, where I opened my eyes.

“Everything still working?” he asked.

“Haven’t tried everything yet. Sullivan must have called.”

“He told me you were okay, but I’m a bugger for confirmation.”

“You’re a bugger, period,” I said.

“I’ll check off ‘Change in personality’ as a ‘No.’ ”

“This is not good.”

“Markham said you were probably fine.”

Markham as in Dr. Markham Fairchild, Jamaican giant and king of Southampton Hospital’s emergency and trauma unit.

“I’m talking about what happened,” I said.

“Getting run off the road? Been there. No big deal as long as you survive.”

I forced myself up onto my elbows so I could look him in the eye. “I need to find out who did it and have them permanently incarcerated or I won’t be able to sleep, eat, or drive a car ever again in my entire life.”

I like to think I’m good at reading people—interpreting their facial expressions and body language. Good luck trying that with Sam. I guess he has the same muscles in his face the rest of us have, but I’d never seen them in action. I used to play poker when my dad’s friends caught me sneaking a peek at their game in the basement. That’s where I learned
what people meant by a poker face, and the best of them were Marcel Marceau compared to Sam Acquillo. He just sat there and stared at me. Implacable.

“What?” I said.

He stared a little more, then said, “You’re not gonna let down, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Back off from what you’re doing.”

Maybe letting down is not a bad idea, I thought to myself. Better that than dead.

“Can’t do that now. I have to find out,” I said.

“What?”

“Why me? I must’ve done something to bring this on. What the hell did I do?”

He stood up from the visitor’s chair and sat on the edge of my bed. He took my hand in both of his. Hands bigger than a man his size should have. Meaty, knuckly, calloused, and coarse to the touch. But careful and tender.

“Good,” he said. “And don’t worry. If someone kills you, I’ll kill them. Simple.”

I don’t know why acts of kindness make me want to turn the other way and run. Maybe it’s a reverence of self-sufficiency or maybe I don’t work well in team environments or maybe I just can’t stand the intimacy.

Sam was an exception, usually. The ledger with him still had a balance in his favor, though there were plenty of entries in both columns.

So I did the logical thing. I grabbed the poor guy’s sleeve and held on until I fell asleep, a little drugged but mostly on board with his logic:

You’re gonna die eventually anyway. You might as well live the life you have without worrying about who or what is going to end it.

Or how.

Later that night, after surviving some poking and prodding by Markham Fairchild, I got a pat on the head and a ride home in Sam’s old Pontiac Grand Prix. The car, once a total loss after a similar run-in, was now completely restored for no good reason anyone could think of, including him. I told him Potato Pete’s pickup would not enjoy the same resurrection.

Sam offered to stay with me, but I did what he really wanted and told him to get out of there and let me get some sleep. I gave what I thought was a convincing performance because he seemed to leave convinced.

It wasn’t until I was alone in my house, after I’d carefully and dispassionately stripped off my clothes and taken a shower, slathered cream all over my body, and poured myself a glass of wine, that it was safe to sob a little.

I hated myself for it. Not the crying, but the cause. I hated losing control of my emotions. I couldn’t afford it. Not now. Now that people were actually trying to kill me, too, it was time to get serious. I had a dead client to look after—one who might be past looking after—but that was tough.

I wouldn’t have chosen the method, but I had to admit, they had my attention.

The next morning I couldn’t move, predictably enough. Markham had given me a bottle of painkillers. The label said three a day, so I got a head start and took two. I waited another hour, then got out of bed and felt my way to the bathroom.

I pulled up my pajamas to assess the damage in the mirror. Half my left boob had turned purple, with highlights in pink and yellow. Very attractive. It actually looked worse than it felt, and it felt really bad. I checked around the rest of me and found a few more ugly red splotches, though in less intimate places.

I examined my face, calming the irrational fear that somehow the crash had dislodged all that lovely plastic surgery. It hadn’t, of course, but that’s why it’s called an irrational fear.

When I went to get dressed, a bra was out of the question. Just looking at it made me wince. So I went for a tube top, baggy shirt, and loose jacket combo that looked so good I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.

A little concealer from a tube—almost dried into stone for lack of use—was all I needed to dab out the welt on my forehead and be ready for public consumption.

And Harry.

“You did what?” he asked when I called him on my cell phone.

“I didn’t do anything. It was done to me. I’m okay. Just a little banged around. The truck, on the other hand, is a goner.”

There was a moment of silence on the line.

“I need to come over there.”

“No,” I said, before he barely had the words out. “You don’t need to come over here.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Yes, it is. It’s safe if I keep moving,” I said.

“I want to see you.”

“I’m going over to the Volvo dealer to buy a car just like yours. We’ll match.”

He pressed me to describe the accident and my actual condition. I got him off the phone by promising to tell him everything, in person, as soon as I had the chance.

“I’ll pick you up in my new car,” I said.

I’m not sure where I stand on big, strong men. If you pay attention to the words, it makes some sense. Big, strong men. When you’re feeling threatened, there’s just nothing better. This wasn’t the first time I’d attracted murderous attention, so I knew that well enough.

But if I gave in to that now, there’d be no going back. Harry couldn’t follow me around all day, and Sam wouldn’t. Eventually I’d start resenting the constraints on my freedom and get all twisted up in gender angst and be worse off than if the truck had done a proper job running me off the road.

So when the cab arrived, I ran the ten yards and jumped in the rear seat as if a thunderstorm was raging, but I did it on my own.

As it turned out, I picked the right mood to negotiate for a new car. Testy paranoia, seasoned with a feminist rage that would’ve embarrassed Bella Abzug. I got the car I wanted, at the price I wanted, and
likely paved a less condescending path for the next unwed sister who wandered into the dealership.

The Internet has made it impossible to hide anymore, unless you intentionally change your identity, and that isn’t easy. If you’re a regular law-abiding member of society, I’ll find you. The more active you are in the world, the easier it is to pin you down. I’ll know when you were born and your parents’ names and their parents’ and your other ancestors’ as far back as I have time to look. If you go to school, graduate, get married, buy a house, get a job, get a promotion, get divorced, get fired, get foreclosed on, get arrested, sued, or released on parole, I’ll know about it. If you’re famous, or you come from a famous family, I’ll know even more and twice as fast.

Wendy Wolsonowicz would probably find that appalling, given where she’d decided to live. She was the only one of the immediate family I hadn’t talked to, so I picked her as my next stop.

She’d moved to Shelter Island from Arizona about the same time as her adopted brother. Shelter Island is a big landmass wedged between the North and South Forks of the East End. You can only get there by ferry. This is one of the reasons it’s escaped some of the more rapacious development out here, but there’s also not a ton of land you can develop, since a huge hunk of the place is wildlife preserve. Wendy had somehow managed to buy the only piece of private property within the largest preserve, an island itself surrounded by a couple thousand acres of wilderness.

At two million dollars, a two-acre parcel boasting the ultimate in fashionable seclusion might look like a steal. Until you read the fine print, where it says she can’t sell it, transfer ownership, or pass it down to her heirs. The seller was an ornery holdout from the time the Nature Conservancy was buying up contiguous tracts who negotiated
a onetime private sale with the deed forfeited to the preserve upon the death of the buyer.

So this was a girl serious about her privacy.

A few minutes after turning on to County Road in my new car I was reproaching myself for holding on to the rattletrap Toyota for so long. The only similarity between the two vehicles was they had steering wheels and tires and moved over public thoroughfares. The Volvo was so quiet you couldn’t hear the engine when the radio was on. In contrast to the pickup, where you couldn’t hear the radio when the engine was on. I’d have to exercise more to compensate for the reduced effort needed to shift gears, steer, and brake, but on the bright side, my kidneys would probably last a few more years.

I turned up North Sea Road and headed for the ferry to Shelter Island. The decision to go solo was looking better all the time. It was dicey enough barging uninvited into Wendy Wolsonowicz’s costly isolation without bringing along a behemoth like Harry Goodlander.

Alone, I got to pay a little attention to the weather, which was exceedingly lovely and mild and sparkly, as it often gets in the fall. North Sea Road winds all the way to Noyac, where it becomes Noyac Road and goes from there up through North Haven to the South Ferry dock. Most of the trip is in the woods, except for a long, gentle curve along the southeastern shore of Noyac Bay. My heart always picks up a beat or two when I look out over the water, even after a lifetime of looking at the little lakelike bays that fill in the gaps between the forks.

Today it was fairly wavy, but no whitecaps, and bluer than usual. Probably because of the deep blue autumnal sky. This was how water at its best was supposed to look. Not British Racing Green. Not turquoise, like a ’55 T-Bird. But a nice deep blue, like a shiny new Volvo station wagon.

I was halfway around the bay shore when a big pickup came up fast behind me. He flicked on his high beams and blasted his horn. I pulled onto the shoulder and he whooshed by. Then all I had to do was wait for my pulse to fall to normal range and dig my fingernails out of the steering wheel before getting back under way.

“Dickhead,” I whispered into the soft silence of the station wagon.

The guys who load the ferry noticed right away that I had a new car and went out of their way to put me in a safe spot, thereby redeeming the whole class of young men with long sideburns and baseball caps, like the kid in the truck who’d almost run me down. I got out and stood at the side of the boat to look at the water and breathe in a little salt air. The channel was a lot choppier than Noyac Bay, but the stolid, flat-bottomed little ferry wasn’t fazed.

When I got to the other shore I looked at the printout of the Internet map. Wendy’s place was close to the ferry landing, which was at the southwest corner of the big preserve. So within a few minutes I was following a gravel road dotted with signs hysterically warning against messing with the wildlife, as if that’s what people came to wildlife preserves to do.