Deadline (29 page)

But the motion had grooved the pipe. I could feel it. It was a definite groove. I looped the cable around the palm of my hand and started again.

Would they come back and tie me tighter, tie my hands together? I didn't want this to be for nothing, not for them.

I bit the gag so hard that my teeth ached and picked up my speed. Two hundred strokes, then three hundred and four hundred. The blood ran warm and sticky on my palms and between my fingers.

The cable broke through to the hollow core of the pipe at eleven hundred, sixty-one. I could feel myself beginning to cry and fought it off. I thought of slave labor, captives on galleys. If they could do it for years, I could do it for an hour. I thought of strokes of oars, of guys paying thousands of dollars to do something like this in New York health clubs. I thought of Roxanne and the stories I had to write, next week, the week after. I thought about Arthur and Ritano, that smug son of a bitch. He was on my list, that bastard.

When the pipe began to bend, I had long since stopped counting. My shoulders cramped unbearably, like one giant muscle spasm had gripped the upper half of my body.

But it was coming.

Another five hundred, I told myself. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five …

It broke at seven forty-eight, throwing me on my back on the floor, a glorious feeling. As I pulled myself up from the floor, I heard a truck coming. The van. I clutched at the bag over my head. The knot was at the back of my neck and my bloody fingers couldn't loosen it. Finally, I got a grip on the fabric on top of my head and pulled and pulled as hard as I could until it tore and I ripped it in two pieces off my neck.

The room was empty. A summer camp. The pipe was copper, a water pipe bent away from the wall. I slammed through the door, dove to my left, and crashed through the brambles and woods with the cable held in front of me.

It was a race against time as much as flight from Cormier's friends. I had no hat, no gloves, and was wearing cotton corduroy pants that were fine for the office but no protection at all in the woods at night.

Hypothermia would kill me, and I'd be just as dead as if that guy back there had smashed my skull.

I moved in a zigzag trot toward the brightest light. That would be the west, where the sun had already set. I felt like they had stayed on the same side of Route 120, which would put the road between me and the sun. If I was wrong, I was running deeper and deeper into the woods.

The light faded by the minute. I took a winding route around the worst brambles but kept the light ahead of me. Every few minutes, I glanced behind me to make sure it was darker in that direction. In a half-hour it would all be the same. Very dark and very cold.

I tried to pull the cable off but my hands were numb and sore and I couldn't turn the nuts. The loop kept springing out of my hands, snagging around branches and my legs and feet. I fell. Got
up. Stopped to pull the cable from a snarl of branches that felt like blackberry brambles. It got darker.

The ride had been three or four minutes. I tried to remember if he got the van out of second gear. It didn't seem like he had, but I couldn't be sure. If he hadn't, that meant he had stayed on logging roads, and we couldn't have gone more than two or three miles. Did we go south or north? North, I thought. It had felt like we had taken a lot of right turns.

A bramble raked my face. I reached out to grab it and the cable slapped me in the face. I flung it aside and started to run, flat out, plunging through small spruce and birches. Panic. I forced myself to slow down and conserve energy. Counted to ten. Took a deep breath. Gathered up the cable and trotted on.

And then stopped.

It was faint, but it was not my imagination. There, it shifted. Then again. A diesel motor. A truck that had to be on Route 120, on the highway.

I'd gambled and won.

I broke into a lope again, but the road was farther away than I'd hoped. When I pushed through a spruce thicket, there was always another. I couldn't hear the truck, but I kept going in that direction, running, walking, then running again. Then the last wall of spruce broke open and I fell into the ditch beside the road. I scrambled up the embankment and came on to the pavement on my hands and knees. On my feet, I ran along the pavement, my boots pounding. South was to the left, and I wanted to see if I could spot the tote road before it was completely dark.

Headlights appeared up ahead. I slid down into the ditch and lay with my face against the sand and ice until the car passed. A small car. Not a van. But I wasn't taking any chances.

I hit the turnoff in what felt like about ten minutes. It was the tire tracks that I remembered. The truck tracks, wide and deep, and the print of my Michelins in between. The truck had come out, but it didn't look like it had gone back in.

The woods were black. Every few steps I stopped and listened. I could hear the wind. Branches snapping from the cold. Nothing else. When my car came in sight, I felt in my pocket for my keys and clenched them in my fist in relief. With the car fifty feet away, I took out the keys and sprinted. Clattering up to the car, I found the driver's window smashed but the door open. I got in and jammed the key in the ignition and floored it, hitting the lights and second gear at the same time. The car slammed over the ruts all the way back to the highway, and then I raced all the way back to town, the cold air blasting me in the face and the cable coiled in my lap.

My first stop was Waldo Street.

There was a car parked in front of Cormier's building and the lights were on in his apartment. I took the stairs two at a time and saw him with two women on the couch as I flung open the storm door.

The inside door was locked. I took a step back and swung the cable. Glass shattered and there were screams. I yanked the cable back and swung again, taking out more glass. The women ran into the kitchen. I reached a bloody hand through the window and opened the door from the inside. Cormier was standing in front of the table with a beer bottle in his hand.

“You son of a bitch,” I shouted. “You. Your goddamn friends did this. And now you're gonna pay for it. We're going to court big-time. Son of a bitch.”

“Call the cops,” a woman's voice shrieked. “Call the cops.”

“Hey, you're crazy, man,” Cormier said, backing up a step. “I didn't do nothing to you. I swear. I swear it, man. I don't know what you're talking about.”

“From the driveway. Your little friend. Libby or whatever the hell his name was. He was there.”

“I don't know—”

“Hey, I don't care. You're buddies. Gonna keep me out of court. So they smash up my car and put a goddamn bag over my head and tie me to a pipe and that's kidnapping, and that's a Class A felony, and you do time for that. Real time. And you'll go down with them. You think you got problems now, oh, baby, they're just starting.”

I was shouting but I could feel the anger draining from me. A woman, young and blonde with black eye makeup, peeked out from the kitchen. She had a butcher knife in her hand.

“Get a wrench. Pliers,” I told Cormier. “Get 'em now.”

He stood there for a second, weaving on his feet with his bottle in his hand.

“You got it all wrong. I don't know what happened to you, but it didn't have nothing to do—”

“Get 'em.”

He backed into the kitchen and I followed. I held the cable by both hands, down by my side.

“You friggin' nuts?” the blonde snarled.

“Could be,” I said. “Fit right in around here.”

Cormier dug in a toolbox on the floor and came up with a pair of pliers. I took them from him and worked on my left hand first, one eye on the woman with the knife. The other woman was crouched behind the table. I could see dark hair and black sneakers.

The pliers slipped with each turn but the nut finally dropped off. I pulled the clamp off and slid my hand out. The wrist was raw and black with dirt.

I did the other hand and when it came free, I kept the cable ready, doubled once. They watched me.

“The guy in the driveway. Spits a lot,” I said.

“He's just a guy I know,” Cormier said.

“He's just a guy you know who just got you in big trouble.”

“I didn't tell Libby to do nothing. I didn't.”

“We're going for a ride,” I said. “You and me.”

“Like hell.”

“Or I go to the cops right now,” I said.

Cormier looked too big for the Volvo. His knees were drawn up as he told me he hadn't told anybody to do anything to me, that they wouldn't have done anything like this anyway because it wasn't worth going to jail over. He kept saying it, but I told him what had happened, I told him what had been said, I told him about how his pal had enjoyed harassing me, and after a while he stopped saying it wasn't true.

We drove out Route 2 to the west, past McDonald's and the Androscoggin Shopping Center and a couple of tourist motels. I turned around in the parking lot of one of them, and came back toward town. By the time we went over the metal bridge, I had decided I believed him.

Cormier had no reason to rough me up. He had thought he was home-free, until now.

“‘Don't suppose there's any way you'd forget it,” he said. “I'll get your car fixed. Just tell me how much. I'll give you the money tonight.”

I kept driving. He looked out the window. The trucks were lined up to unload at the pulp mill which was across the canal. Arthur's canal.

“I want the window fixed,” I said. “But that's not all I want. I want information. And I want you to get it. You do that for me, maybe you'll stay out of this.”

“What do I look like, friggin' Sherlock Holmes?”

“That's your problem. You don't want to do it, we can go right over to the police station and I'll file a complaint all right. I'll get some nice color pictures taken of my hands all bloody. See what a jury thinks about that.”

Cormier looked at me, then looked out the window.

“Somebody is sending my girlfriend nasty pictures with nasty letters. They called her on the phone. I don't know who; do you?”

He was looking at me now. I watched his face. It was relaxed and blank, as if he didn't know what I was talking about. I relaxed, too, 95 percent sure that he didn't know anything about any of it.

“It could be somebody from the mill,” I said. “You see if you can find out.”

“How the hell am I gonna do that?”

“You know a lot of people. Ask around. Make it a joke. I don't know. Do whatever you want.”

He looked at me as if I'd asked him to find a cure for cancer.

“Your buddies were told to do this tonight. You say it wasn't you. I want to know who it was, and I want to know who's hassling my girlfriend. You can find out.”

“You want all this by tomorrow morning or what?” Cormier said.

“You want to do five years in prison?”

“You're pushing your friggin' luck, you know that?” Cormier said.

“That's just what I was gonna say about you.”

I went past the pulp mill and turned around under the glare of the mill-yard lights.

“That's not all,” I said, driving back toward town. “This guy Arthur Bertin. The guy who died. See what you hear on the street about it. The cops haven't done a thing on it. Like they don't want to get involved. It's weird. See what you hear.”

“How the hell am I gonna do that?”

“You and your buddy, Libby. In the driveway, you acted like you had an in with the cops.”

We crossed the downtown bridge, turned on to Front Street.

“So does he have an in with cops or what?” I asked.

“I don't know what you call an in. His sister is married to a cop, is all.”

“What cop is that?”

“LeMaire. Jimmy LeMaire.”

It all hit me after I dropped Cormier off at a variety store on Waldo Street. I felt sick to my stomach and broke out in a sweat. It was all I could do to shift the car and get home, and when I did, I stood in front of the toilet, head down, feeling like I was going to vomit. I didn't, and finally I ran hot water from the tap and washed my face and hands.

Using a soft wet towel, I dabbed at my wrists until most of the black came off and they were red, stinging raw. My face was chafed on one side and there was a lump on the top of my head that was tender to touch.

Great shape to put out the paper.

I wiped my face and brushed my teeth and dabbed at my hair with a hairbrush. With all that, I still looked like hell.

I went into the kitchen and thought about eating. Instead, I opened a can of beer and took two long swallows. Just like in the movies: Take this. It will calm your nerves.

Numb them was more like it. I stood against the counter and ate a few crackers as I finished the beer. I was numb. My mind was shut down. The only thing I really wanted to do was crawl in bed and go to sleep. Instead, I had to go down and deal with the real world and real problems and turn a pile of junk into a newspaper that people would buy and read. Oh, the bed was inviting, but I didn't accept. After a last cracker, I put on my now-dirty parka and went back to work.

Yes. I was true to my profession and true to the
Androscoggin Review
, and, when it came down to it, true to Cormier. I didn't go to the cops. But they came to me.

The cruiser was parked in front of the paper. I cursed and drove by and swung around the block, parking on Front Street, way down, so that they wouldn't see the car. Then I realized that would make them wonder more, me walking up on foot, all cut to hell, so I circled around onto Main Street again, but parked just around the corner from the office, away from the lights. When I walked up to the front door, Vigue was coming out. When Cindy and Marion saw me, they bustled out onto the sidewalk.

“What happened?” Cindy Melodrama said. “Are you all right? My God, we didn't know what happened. You didn't tell anybody where you were going, and when you were gone so long, on deadline day, I mean, we didn't know what to think.”