Screwed (22 page)

We hit hard, the catastrophic deceleration jamming me against the partition, knocking the breath from my body. The windshield bulges inward and then pops out whole, allowing black water to surge forward, claiming the front area and Freckles’s body. The only air pocket is the backseat area, so we go down fast.

I have serious hours logged in life-threatening situations but they are of zero use to me now. All I can do is ride out the crash and hope.

I try to breathe but my lungs won’t oblige and I am seconds away from total panic. I don’t wanna be not found. I don’t want to be forever listed as missing if anyone even bothers to add me to the list. There is something terrifying about the notion that you can be disappeared by circumstance, swallowed by the earth, and by the time the water gives up your corpse, nothing will remain but algae-coated bones.

The car settles on the riverbed and the bump gets my lungs pumping again. And now that my brain has a little oxygen going to it, I start to take stock of my situation.

This whole thing is ridiculous.

Come on. In a death cab on the riverbed looking at a corpse floating in the doors ajar light. Silt floats through the window and a couple of fish that resemble nothing more than be-finned turds swim inside to investigate.

My hand is cold. Why is my hand cold?

Because it’s jammed in the fare hatch, dummy, otherwise you would have drowned by now. I am like that Dutch kid who stuck his arm in a dike, except for it’s a tricked-out cab, not a dike. I ain’t Dutch and it’s been a long time since anybody called me kid.

Freckles’s crimped corpse floats up so we are face-to-face through the glass. He has held onto his expression of manic triumph, which makes me feel like a loser even though he is the dead one.

Something glows in Freckles’s pocket and I am amazed to realize that my phone is still working and I have a call coming through. Luckily Freckles’s pocket is within my grasp, so I drop the gun and wiggle my fingers into his pocket and snag my Hello Kitty handset. Now for the tricky part: I gotta whip my hand through, hoping the water shuts the hatch, and if it doesn’t I gotta get out the side door pretty sharp and pull for the surface.

I tug on my arm until it’s ready to pop loose, then I take a couple of deep breaths, working up to a real lungful. My phone is still warbling in the flooded cab. Someone must really want to get ahold of me.

Okay. Stop wasting time.

I pull my hand through and the water forces the half closed hatch the rest of the way, forming a reasonably tight seal. The water is still coming in, but at a drastically reduced rate.

Finally things are going my way.

Right. Stuck in a subaquatic coffin. My lucky day. I should rush out and do the lottery.

But I ain’t rushing out anywhere. I won’t even be able to open the door until the pressure equalizes. And even if I could open the door the rush of incoming Hudson would pin me to the backseat. So I gotta sit here and take deep breaths until the rear compartment is flooded, which means I will have to pop the little hatch myself, which goes against all my survival instincts.

I answer the phone. Might as well.

“Yep.”

“Where the hell are you?” asks Ronelle Deacon, my cop friend who used to work out of the four-room station in Cloisters (and two of the rooms were restrooms) but recently moved on and up as a lieutenant in the Special Investigations section of the New Jersey State Police.

“Where am I? You wouldn’t believe it, Trooper.”

“You ain’t by any chance wearing a pink thong and beating on some cops?”

“I wish,” I say sincerely. “And it was a red thong, okay?”

“It’s not looking good for you, Dan. My brethren are majorly pissed off.”

“Yeah, well I got the real story if you’re interested.”

“I’m always interested in the truth, McEvoy. I am the last champion of the truth. Can we meet?”

“Maybe we can. I hope so.”

“Where the hell are you, Danny? The reception is crap.”

It is a testament to my phone plan that I still got bars underwater.

“I’m in a bit of a bind here, Ronnie. I’ll met you in Pom Pom’s, down in the Kitchen. You remember it?”

“Sure, we did that thing there with the guy from Cheers.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t Cheers. It was Home Improvement.”

“White guys, bad jokes. Who cares? When?”

“Soon as you can, I’ll be there before you.”

“And if you’re not?”

“If I’m not, dredge the river.”

“Dredge the river? What river? What’s going on, Dan?”

“I can’t explain now, Ronnie, but we’re friends, right? You’d say we were friends, wouldn’t you? You’d stand up and vouch for me at a service or something?”

“Yeah, we’re friends,” says Ronnie, but her tone is wary, like she’s talking a guy off a roof, so I hang up.

She said we were friends and that’s enough for me.

The water is at my ankles now, feels more like sludge than water. No one ever jumped in the Hudson around here to get refreshed, but I can’t go yet, I need to wait.

My phone reminds me that I have an unwatched video message.

Tommy’s video.

I’d rather watch that than Freckles’s floating corpse, so I select it and press play, and what follows might be enough to tip the balance re the Mike Madden situation if I make it out of this underwater coffin alive. The video clip is almost riveting enough to make me forget my predicament, but then the small hatch pops its hinges, and bitter-smelling river water pours through. In seconds my knees are submerged in the icy water and there’s a turd fish swimming Mobius strips around my feet.

I wait until I gotta tilt my head back to breathe, then I gulp down a lungful of oxygen and put my shoulder to the door. Luckily Freckles did not hit central locking after Shea bailed, so the door swings easily. I slide into the dark block of river and am swallowed like a speck, like nothing. If the Hudson takes me now there will be little more than a ripple to show I was here.

When did I get so morbid? And why am I even thinking about mortality? I’ve been in training pools deeper than this wearing full gear.

I am in dark water, but above me shafts of red sunlight cut through the murk. I release the air slowly like I’ve been taught and kick for the surface, and it occurs to me that the sunrise is pretty special from this perspective.

Considering the twenty-four hours I’ve had, any fecking sunrise is most unexpected and appreciated.

I pull for the surface, feeling muscles that I haven’t used for years protest and stretch. I ain’t exactly dressed for subaquatic speed, but I am loathe to part with my boots that have been with me since the army, and my leather jacket I bought from a guy called Anghel, who was a Romanian mercenary working for the Christian militia in Tibnin. Whenever I bought something from Anghel, he would promise not to shoot at me later that evening. So far as I know, he kept that promise. Unfortunately I couldn’t return the favor and toward the end of my second tour I put a round in his leg when my patrol came across him and two of his buddies breaking into our compound. I didn’t mean to kill him but legs have a lotta veins and one thing led to another. Next thing you know I’ve cut down a guy I’ve known for two years over a couple crates of condensed milk.

Love the jacket though. Soft as butter.

The water runs shallow real quick and my feet touch bottom before I break the surface. I relax then and defer the moment just to kid myself I have a little control over my life.

But I can’t control the shakes that envelop me from head to toe when I break the surface and stagger ashore amid the harbor detritus. Styrofoam and foil wrappers, syringes and soda cans, planks warped and split by years in the water, dark strips of weed with fingertip touches, cereal boxes, bones that I hope are animal and most bizarrely a horse’s head poking through its caul of plastic trash bag.

A horse’s head sleeping with the fishes.

That’s double points in Mafia Monopoly.

I rest my hands on my knees and hawk as much of the river as I can from my lungs. I don’t see how any could have gotten in there, but a pint or so comes out all the same. My limbs seemed poisoned and weak, and my tongue feels chemically dry and scaled.

An old homeless guy is sitting on top of his shopping-cart kingdom smoking an impossibly thin cigarette. He seems pretty jaunty, probably because for once he can compare his situation to someone else’s and not feel too shit on by life.

“Morning, son,” he says. He’s got a voice that sounds like a bear went to elocution classes in Texas.

“Morning,” I return, after all, none of this crap is his fault.

He nods toward the river. “New York cabbies, huh.”

That gets a smile outta me, which I wouldn’t have thought possible, so I give him twenty sopping bucks.

As I stumble up the embankment toward the brightening day, I glance behind me, toward the spot that has become Freckles’s tomb, and I swear I see the glow of a taxi sign shining piss yellow from the depths.

I catch up with Shea pretty quickly, though in actual fact he was disorientated and stumbling toward me. We meet on the shoulder of the highway, two individuals who are not in full control of their emotions, so maybe a reasonable conversation was never in the cards. He looks a fright, doused in his own blood from the bullet wound and a hundred grazes he must have incurred when he face-planted on the asphalt. Stupid dick doesn’t even know how to tuck and roll. In fairness, I probably don’t look much better: dildo whipped and dipped in sludge.

When Shea catches sight of me, he squeaks like that square cartoon guy with the pants, and makes a run for the road. I am too goddamn weary to go after him so I let the kid run. Sadly for him, he slips on the shoulder and rolls practically to my feet.

I feel encouraged by this little favor from lady luck and feel my energy levels rising. I lean down, grab his lapels and hoist him to his tippy-toes. I have no idea what’s gonna come out of my mouth but I start talking anyway.

“You see that pier down there?” I say.

And Shea looks, there are several piers. “Which pier?” he asks, terrified that he doesn’t get to ask questions.

“Which fucking pier. The melted one. The collapsed one.”

“Yeah. I see it. All twisted and shit.”

“Yeah, twisted and shit. That’s the one, Shea-ster. You know what made that pier collapse?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Do you fucking know what made that pier collapse?”

Shea is crying now, he breaks down easily.

“No. I’m sorry, I don’t know. I swear.”

I wait a beat, then: “Pier pressure.”

He looks at me dumbly as he has every right to.

“I . . . I don’t get it.”

“Pier pressure,” I repeat then. “Ha ha ha haaaa.”

I don’t know if I am actually laughing maniacally or just saying ha ha ha haaaa. Either way it scares the bejaysus out of Shea, which is all he had left in him to scare as I already scared the crap out of him back in the taxi.

I hoist the kid a little higher. “Shit, sorry, that joke was for a friend of mine; what I meant to say was: if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you. If anyone takes a shot at me, I’m gonna blame you and come looking. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good, ’cause Freckles was my favorite. You can’t even eat with your mouth closed.”

“I’ll fix that,” promises Shea, and I know he won’t cause me any more trouble for a few months at least. It’s in his eyes. I toss him down the embankment, where a cement bollard breaks his fall and he curls himself around it like it’s his wet nurse and I can hear him sobbing as I walk away. He should get that wound seen to or it might get infected.

I don’t care. I’m gonna have to get this jacket dry-cleaned and it’s his fault.

CHAPTER 8

L
IEUTENANT RONELLE DEACON IS THE ONLY COP I KNOW
who could play herself in a movie, especially if the movie was one of those 1970s blaxploitation flicks. She wears her Afro pulled back tight for the first section, then it blooms out behind her in an explosion of ringlets. Takes some confidence to wear a hairstyle like that, but Ronnie has more than confidence, she has anger hanging over her like a heat shimmer. Anytime Ronelle walks into a room, every guy in there feels like he just got his boner rapped with a spoon. They don’t know if they’re horny or terrified. She’s a one-woman flimflam. A walking conundrum.

Ronnie and me got tossed together last year by one of her cases, which was also one of my problems, and I saved her life a couple of times and she saved my bacon. It all turned out pretty good: she got to be loot and I got to keep breathing free air. Oh, and she tumbled me into the hay one night for a tension screw as she called it. Sometimes that can be awkward between friends, but it ain’t awkward between us because Ronnie doesn’t really do friends the way normal people do, just people that aren’t suspects at the moment.

Lieutenant Deacon keeps me waiting in the diner but that’s okay because I burn out a washroom drier getting the river outta my shirt. I am not even gonna attempt the pants. It’s gonna take more than a wall-mounted Dyson to blast the Hudson from a pair of black jeans. So I’m in a booth working on some eggs and bacon, with a puddle of slime congealing around my nethers, when Ronnie finally breezes in the door like she’s fashionably late for an award gig and slides into the booth opposite me.

“McEvoy,” she says working a toothpick between her strong, white teeth.

“It looks like you’re trying to be a cop,” I say. “The toothpick is too much.”

Ronelle spits the pick onto the tabletop. “Yeah? A pity I couldn’t say the same about your toothpick.”

“Straight to that level, huh? No five-minute truce or nothing?”

Ronelle leans back, shucking the lapels of her long leather coat aside, giving me a good look at the gun and the badge.

“I only got one level, McEvoy. The Deacon level. That’s where shit gets done.”

“You have your movie and tagline right there: The Deacon Level. Where Shit Gets Done.”

“Is that why I’m here, Dan? So you can take a pop?”

These conversations are always tense because Ronnie lives on a hair trigger. She puts out more or less the same vibe whether she wants to kiss me or kill me. And that one night we did have a little tryst you can bet your favorite organ that I kept her pistola out of reach.