Long Way Down (21 page)

T
he cabbie dropped me at the end of the Holland Tunnel where he could loop around and go right back to New Jersey. I walked up Hudson, past the Saatchi building and the main passport office, and over to Varick to catch the Number 1 train. The subway was already packed at that hour. My head was nodding and bobbing the whole way up to 181st Street. Barely two hours’ sleep in the last twenty-four and I still had quite a ways to go. I walked up to the bus terminal at the George Washington Bridge and bought a ticket for the first bus to Fort Lee, where I got out and walked four blocks. It was time for Jason Stafford to resurface briefly and lay down another false trail. Hopefully, the final one.

I have often made the spurious claim that you can get anything in the world in New York at any time. Bored with your local Ethiopian restaurant? There’s a restaurant in Harlem that serves Eritrean dishes. Want to find that sausage you had in Umbria last fall? Ninth Avenue. There’s a place that makes it fresh. Clothes, books, art, tools for any art or craft, fine wines and dive bars, the choices add up to the greatest cornucopia on the planet. But there are limits.
When you want to buy a used camper truck, you have to go to New Jersey.

The smell of fresh-brewed coffee hit me like a slap in the face when the salesman unlocked the door and let me in. I told him that if he poured me a cup, I could guarantee he’d make a sale in the next half hour. He didn’t quite lick his lips in anticipation, but he did manage to get me a restorative cup in record time before showing me what he had on the lot.

“I don’t carry much inventory this time of year. This here is a Roadtrek. It’s basically a Mercedes with a luxury camper on top. AC, microwave, convection oven, flat-screen TV, satellite, GPS with worldwide maps preloaded. Two years old, twelve thousand miles. It’s not cheap, but I’ve got a lot of capital tied up in it, and I’d be willing to cut a very good deal.”

GPS was a deal killer.

“What’s the cheapest, oldest, most basic thing you have? What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a two-tone pastel minibus.

“You’ve got an eye for class. That’s a ’71 VW bus. It’s a classic. Needs some TLC on the interior, but it runs nice. New brakes. You familiar with the old VW?”

“I think I saw one in that movie about Woodstock.”

“The engine is air-cooled, which means the heat works terrific in the cab.”

“Does it have GPS?”

“GPS? You’re kidding, right? It doesn’t even have a radio.”

“Will it get me to Santa Fe?”

“California?” he asked, exhibiting the typical East Coaster’s grasp of geography. “No problem. But it’s slow uphill. Not a lot of torque. They make smaller engines today with a lot more power, but, as I said, this is a classic.”

An antique. Santa Fe was an uphill drive from the Mississippi River on. But I wasn’t really going to need it.

We agreed on a price quickly. I knew I overpaid. I wanted to be remembered.

“I want to drive it away today. Can you make that happen?”

“You came to the right place. My cousin sells insurance. We’ll rush the paperwork. You keep the tags. If you mail them back when you get settled out there, I’ll put a ten-dollar credit on your charge card.”

I was sure that I would also overpay for the insurance, the expedited paperwork, and the tags.

“That’s great.” I put everything on the debit card.

Less than an hour after arriving, I putt-putted out of the parking lot. The bus did run nice. Just not fast. But the brakes worked, and once I’d been driving it for a quarter of an hour, the heat began to warm up my toes.

My next stop was an ATM, where I took out as much cash as the bank would let me have—three thousand dollars. I stopped at a Target and bought two sleeping bags, long underwear, and pairs of thermal socks—one each in my size, one each in a size fit for a small six-year-old. Then I drove around until I found a McDonald’s. I bought a Happy Meal, a cheeseburger, and two drinks and paid again with the debit card. I held on to the Diet Coke and threw everything else into the trash on the way out.

I had done my best to leave a digital trail making it appear that the Kid and I were in a camper van traveling west, headed for our new home in New Mexico. If not perfectly hidden, we were at least in hiding.

Every slight gust of wind threatened to push me out of the right-hand lane on I-80, and the engine shuddered if I tried to push the speed over fifty-five. There was a slight smell of exhaust, but I wasn’t concerned about carbon monoxide vapors because the windows and doors all leaked and there was a constant whistle of wind passing through the van. The view from the driver’s perch took
some getting used to. It felt as though I were out in front of the van, which, with the engine in the rear, was just about the case. If I made too sudden a stop, there was a good chance that I would land in the backseat of the car in front of me.

It was still early in the day, and there were occasional traffic tie-ups, but all in the other direction. Westward traffic flowed easily, and in less than two hours I was traveling through the Delaware Water Gap, smiling for the surveillance cameras at the tollbooth. I took the first exit in Pennsylvania.

The bridge back over the Delaware up at Milford had no tollbooth heading back into New Jersey, no surveillance cameras on that side of the road. It was an hour drive from the Gap by the most direct route through the park, but I took the less scenic route and it was midafternoon and the shadows were already getting long when I finally drove back over the Delaware. I had not yet heard from Pop or Skeli, which had me a bit nervous, but I had been in and out of cell phone zones for hours. I took a break, pulled over, and checked my phone.

Two messages. Both calls had come through from the phone in Santa Fe.

“Hi. Your Pop says you’re all right, but I want confirmation. I want to hear your voice caressing my ear. I want to hear you lie to me and tell me that you’re in no danger. I want to tell you in person that I love you and miss you. I want to hear you call me Skeli.”

The second message was no less touching, though there were considerably fewer words.

“Hello.” A long silence followed. Then there was the sound of encouraging whispers in the background and the Kid spoke again. “I like the beach.” More whispers. “Bye.”

C
reate false trails
. I had done my best. Standard surveillance cameras along the highways—usually set up underneath overpasses or on tollbooths, and good enough to read license plates and even identify faces in the front seat of a vehicle—had picked me up and logged my location all the way to Pennsylvania. There were considerably fewer of those cameras set up on the secondary and tertiary roads I took on the way back to Fort Lee.

Route 23 took me as far as Wayne—bypassing West Milford, which is east of Milford, Pennsylvania, north of Milford, New Jersey, south of Milford, New York, and west only of Milford, Connecticut—more than eighty miles away. After Wayne, I stayed on the back roads through Paterson and Hackensack, and pulled into the tall municipal parking lot well after dark. I was two blocks from where I had started that morning.

I fed cash into the machine, paying for a one-month pass, then drove up to the second-highest level and parked the RV in an empty corner spot. I took another cell phone out of my bag and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. A backup to the phone in Santa Fe might come in handy. The van was clocked on the lot’s CCTVs—I could
see the little clear domes on the ceiling on each floor—but I thought someone would have to know where to look to find it. Whoever, or whatever forces, were after me would be looking a lot farther west.

I took my backpack and the larger of the two sleeping bags—I might have to sleep rough before this was over—and left everything else in the van. I needed to travel light.

The Fort Lee diner makes a great zucchini and tomato omelet. That and three cups of coffee made me believe that I might yet survive the day. I caught the bus across the bridge to Manhattan and took the Number 1 train down to Seventy-ninth Street. I was cold, exhausted, and if I stopped and thought about it, still terrified. The shearling coat was distinctive and I would gladly have ditched it, but the temperature had plunged into the teens and I desperately needed it.

Roger lived in a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up brownstone. There were ten apartments and only four tenants remaining. The landlord had bought out or forced out the other tenants, planning on eventually renovating and converting an empty building to co-ops. The plan had foundered when it was discovered that the outer walls were slowly buckling. The building was being held up by inertia and the two neighboring brownstones. The renovation would have to include a new steel frame erected within the existing structure, and a complete gutting of the shell. It wasn’t going to happen. So the four tenants lived with a creaking staircase, cracks in the walls, intermittent heat, a broken intercom, and a busted lock on the front door. Landlord and tenants spent an inordinate amount of time in court, but neither side could budge. The tenants, all on rent control, wouldn’t be able to find affordable alternatives anywhere in the five boroughs; the landlord could barely afford to pay the property taxes with the rents he was receiving. His only economical solution would have been to have
the building declared uninhabitable and tear it down, but the Upper West Side Landmarks Preservation Commission wouldn’t let him. It was the kind of situation that once would have been taken care of with a few gifts to the right politicians, but Manhattan, unlike some of the outer boroughs, had been suffering too long with a relatively honest and community-responsive local government. Nothing was going to change until the landlord declared bankruptcy or the tenants all died.

“Roger!” I pounded on the apartment door. “Come on, open up.”

“Whaddya want?”

“I’d like for you to invite me in.”

The locks clicked and turned and the door opened. Roger was dressed in a blue plaid flannel bathrobe, which hung open revealing a white wifebeater and bright red boxers with a Hawaiian print. I looked him over. “You look like the American flag on acid.”

He looked at the shearling coat. “Do I call you Tex?”

“It’s a disguise. What are you doing?”

“I’m working. I didn’t know I was going to have company.”

“I’m not company. I’m your friend. Let me in.”

He stood back and held the door. “Where did you disappear to? Nobody’s seen you since last week. Everybody’s asking. Wanda’s voicemail is full. It’s like you guys moved to the suburbs or something.”

I sank onto his couch. “Close the door, would you? Who’s been asking about me? Any strangers?”

“Two guys in tracksuits. They been coming into Hanrahan’s two, three times a day. They order tap beer and don’t drink it. They ask some questions and leave a twenty on a fourteen-dollar tab. They don’t carry badges.”

“Don’t get in their sights.”

“Oh, they know who I am. You want something? I’m drinking tea.”

“Tea?”

“I told ya. I’m working.” He gestured toward the thirty-six-inch round oak table that served as his dining table, desk, and, judging by the mounds of old newspapers, his recycling center. Almost hidden by the piles were a stack of yellow legal pads and a laptop.

“What are you working on?”

“New jokes, working Savannah in better. Wanda’s tall, so I did a lot of short jokes. Savannah’s tall, too, but not as much, and it’s not her height that catches your eye, if you see what I’m saying.” He turned the heat on under the kettle and put a tea bag in a mug.

“I thought all your jokes were old jokes.”

“Anybody ever tell you, you were a rude son of a bitch?”

“Take a number,” I said. “What I mean is, don’t you have, like, card files of jokes?”

He held up his Apple laptop. “This is the twenty-first century, bozo-brain.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So you just go over your files and pull out some boob jokes and—”

“Stop! Please. The depth of your knowledge of my business is like the Black Sea.”

“Explain that.”

“Shrunken, shallow, and it stinks.” The kettle whistled.

“Aral Sea,” I said.

“
Whaaat?
” he asked in an incredulous whine.

“I think you mean the Aral Sea, not the Black.”

He jumped up. “No, no, no! Black is funny. Aral is not funny.” To him, these two statements were as clear, and as absolute, as night and day. He made the tea while he continued. “Look. You can’t just do boob jokes anymore. I’ve got to make Savannah look like the one in charge, the brains of the team, while I act like the Cro-Magnon.”

“I can see why this is such a challenge.”

“Sarcasm is the second-lowest form of humor. Please. Leave the jokes to the professionals.”

“What’s the lowest?”

“Puns,” he said, handing me the mug.

“I thought it was slapstick.”

“Slapstick! Slapstick requires perfect timing, incredible agility, and gobs of creativity, and it’s got to look real, or it’s nothing. Slapstick is art. Only farce is greater. Puns! Please, change the subject before I decide you are too dumb to go on living.”

I took a sip of the tea. It was strong and hot and went down like ambrosia. “I need to crash here for the night.”

“Stay as long as you like.”

The bathroom door opened and a voice I recognized called out. “Roger? Is there somebody here?” Savannah.

“No,” he called back. “Just Jason.”

Savannah came down the hall, wrapped in a white towel with a second turbaned around her hair. “Hi, Jason.” She stopped and looked me over, cataloging my shearling coat, wrinkled suit, Outlaws ball cap, and no-longer-white dress shirt. “Well, look at you. Are you in costume?”

The towel covered her from collarbone to mid-thigh, leaving plenty of room for the imagination. Mine was traveling in so many directions at once that I was knocked speechless.

“Hi,” I said.

She walked across the room and performed a perfect bunny dip, reaching down next to a battered easy chair and coming up with a large purse. “So, where have you been? You’re, like, the big mystery at Hanrahan’s these days.”

“Savannah,” Roger said in a hushing tone.

“Sorry,” she said to him. “I’m not supposed to ask,” she explained to me. She rummaged through the big bag and pulled out a plastic cosmetics container. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked
back to the bathroom. I made a point of not watching her leave the room.

Roger was staring hard at his laptop. I didn’t know what to say. I was more than twenty years older than Savannah, and while I acknowledged that it was impossible to ignore her looks, the idea of any kind of sexual liaison with her made me feel like a pervert. And while a part of me was prepared to salute my friend for his apparent good fortune, another voice in my brain was screaming in outrage—he was more than twenty years older than
me
. I didn’t know whether to shake his hand or have him arrested.

Roger tapped a few keys. “What were you saying?”

I thought back. It appeared that staying the night was going to be very awkward. Maybe I could find a bed in a flophouse somewhere uptown. I had no idea where to start looking.

Roger looked up and gave me a questioning look. “Oh yeah. You want to stay. Sure. Sure. Whatever. As long as you like. How’s the tea?”

I cleared my throat and responded to the least problematic thing first. “The tea’s fine. Thanks.”

He repeated the questioning look. “You all right?”

“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t stay,” I said.

The questioning look morphed into confusion, then alarm, as my friend read my thoughts. “Oh, no. You have got to be shitting me.” He put his head down and covered his face with one hand. It took me a moment to realize that he was laughing. He finally looked up, his eyes wet with tears of laughter. “I guess I oughta be flattered.”

A really useful app would be one where you could dial back time and edit out the really stupid things you have just said.

“It looked . . .” I trailed off.

He continued to laugh, now at my embarrassment. “I told you. We were working.”

“Yeah, but . . .” I did it again.

“Yeah, well, they’re doing work in her building and they’ve got the water turned off.”

“I see.”

Savannah came back down the hall. She was dressed in an off-white turtleneck sweater, black jeans with a silver belt, and tall black boots. Her hair was still wet, but she had combed in a part and applied a minimal amount of makeup.

“What are you laughing about, you dirty old man?” She turned to me. “Was he making boob jokes again?”

Roger laughed harder.

“No,” I said.

She turned back to Roger. “Well?”

Roger grinned. “The great detective here saw you in a towel and did some deducing. He basically added two and two and came up with sixty-nine.”

Savannah looked at me. I did not deny, thereby giving her full confirmation. She looked back at Roger in his boxers, wifebeater, and threadbare robe.

“Eeeuuuw,”
she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

They both laughed. Savannah turned back to Roger. “You’ve got some weird friends, Roger.”

I thought of defending myself—then I thought better. “Please excuse me,” I said. “It was a dumb mistake.”

“It was gross, is what it was.” Savannah tried to look deeply offended, which cracked up Roger again.

“Can I change the subject?” I said.

They both gave another laugh.

“Really. I came here for your help.” Some bit of desperation in my voice must have gotten through.

Roger responded first. “What do you need? You know you can stay here as long as you want.”

Savannah flopped into the big chair and threw one leg over an arm. “What can I do?”

“Thanks, Roger, but I’ve got to keep moving. I’ll be gone in the morning. If I stay, those guys in the tracksuits will eventually find me.”

Roger and Savannah shared a quick look. “Those guys are scary,” she said.

“Someone has been tracking me—all over. They’ve tried to kill me. Three times.”

“Where’s the Kid?” Roger asked.

“The Kid and Wanda are safe. And more than comfortable. I’ve got them hiding out on a beach somewhere warm.”

“I volunteer to watch over them,” Roger said.

I smiled. “Not this time. I’ve gone to a good bit of trouble to make sure they’re far away from any danger.”

“What do you need?” he said.

“I need to leave a phone here—plugged in and charging. It won’t ring, it will just forward calls to me.”

“Fine. Leave it behind the couch.”

“And me?” Savannah swung around and leaned forward.

“The two of you. Tomorrow morning. These guys may already be here and watching the building. They know Roger and I are close. I need a diversion so that I can get away. Can you come back here in the a.m.?”

They shared another look and both nodded. “We’ll work out something,” Roger said. “But where will you be going?”

“If you don’t know, then you don’t have to lie when those guys come around the bar asking.”

I left Roger and Savannah to their planning and stretched out on the couch. I was asleep in seconds.

Roger shook me awake. Savannah was gone, the lights were low, and the television was on softly.

“Sorry, but I thought you might want to see this.”

The ten o’clock local news. A perky Asian-American woman was telling the world that there was late-breaking news in the Selena Haley murder case. Defense team computer analysts had been able to reconstruct the image of the license plate from the “mystery Rolls-Royce” seen leaving the Haley estate the night of the murder.

I sat up, fully awake.

“Philip Haley has maintained his innocence ever since his arrest last week outside of a New York City nightclub. He was released on bail Monday, after paying a five-million-dollar appearance bond and surrendering his passport. He has been in seclusion at his wife’s estate on the North Shore of Long Island for the past two days. Haley’s lawyer spoke to Channel Eight tonight as this new evidence has come to light.”

They cut to the lawyer and another talking head, who took their time repeating the information the woman had relayed much more succinctly. The lawyer refused to speculate on the owner of the vehicle in question. He used the words “digitally enhanced” like he knew what they meant. Then they cut to a clip showing the Rolls leaving the driveway—the same footage that I had watched with Jenkins almost a week ago—only this time the camera zoomed in on an easily readable plate.