What Came After (10 page)

“We’ll take our chances.”

“I guess you will,” he said. And then, as if he’d just woken up to it, “Next stop, Stamford. Everybody into the back.”

*

There was a narrow closet alongside the bunk and they barely fit into it. Shoved their packs into a compartment overhead and squeezed themselves into the little closet at an angle, Weller first and Penny after. Penny acting like it was a game but a serious one. Weller realizing as he pulled the door shut that whatever happened next was going to be up to the driver and the driver alone. Wondering what he’d gotten himself into.

The truck went over some kind of grating and just about shook itself to pieces. The driver turned on the CB radio again and they heard a few stuttering bursts of a voice they couldn’t make out. Just barking. They passed over some more grates and then slowed to a stop and then everything was quiet for the longest time. Only the engine idling and some kind of regular beeping noise coming muffled through the window. Now and then the idle rising and the truck bumping forward and stopping again. Air brakes.

They moved a little and the engine noise got louder without getting faster and Weller figured they’d gone under some kind of portico. Everything sounded closer. He could hear something from under the hood knocking in a metallic way he hadn’t heard before, as if the sound were bouncing off a wall and being clarified. Bouncing off concrete or tile or something else hard. Penny turned and started talking in his ear and he hushed her. Wait. This is where things happen. Bad things maybe if we’re not quiet. The sound of the engine getting louder yet as the driver opened his window and then a short conversation made entirely of shouting. Pleasantries if you could shout pleasantries. Two professionals going back and forth and then they were done and the window went up and the sound died back and the driver began working the gears.

Weller didn’t open the closet door until they were back up to speed. Penny squeezed out and threw herself down on the unmade bed and made angels in the sheets. Weller had her get up. Took her bag down and pushed it through and sent her after it and came himself. Saying it had occurred to him at the last minute that they might get weighed and what then. With these trailers sealed up the way they were somebody must know every load down to the ounce and they could calculate the weight of the diesel fuel and the consumption rate of it and that would mean his own weight would show up. What then. What then, with those flashing red lights and all.

The driver laughed and put the radio back on low. He said there was a time when they used to weigh everything, but not now. Half the scales were broken and the other half didn’t work. It didn’t matter anyway. These trailers were sealed up so tight that you couldn’t get anything in or out if you tried, and as he’d seen they kept the drivers on a short rope. Punching that clock. You’d have to work pretty hard to try anything funny, and there’d have to be a pretty big payoff. Rubbing his fingers together indicating cash money, even though Management didn’t have any legal use for it these days. Everything went onto your brand. That old data stream. Some things died hard, though, and rubbing your fingers together still said money.

Weller had U.S. cash in his pocket from when he’d left home and he sat there now thinking how useless it was here on this road. Pretty much foreign currency anywhere but in the Zone. Not even that. He had half of everything he owned in the whole world folded up right here, and it wasn’t enough to reward this driver for giving them a lift. For keeping his mouth shut instead of handing them over to security back at the Stamford checkpoint. He bet there’d have been a reward in that. Those flashing lights and all. People keeping their eyes open. There’d been a reward and the truck driver had foregone it out of kindness. It was a debt that he could never repay, and he said so.

The driver said oh, don’t worry about that. The reward wasn’t all that much anyhow. Plus it was his pleasure to break the rules every now and then, as long as it was for a good cause. That old cowboy ethic that lived on in the hearts of truck drivers everywhere. He lit up another cigarette and cracked the window. Why, it was practically a tradition.

Weller watched him smoke and got an idea. The tobacco. He dug in his pack and located the bundle and worked it open. Peeled the top couple of leaves free.
Don’t spend it all in one place,
she’d said. Good advice. He pulled those two fragile leaves out and sealed the bundle back up again and closed his pack down tight over it. Caught the driver’s eye with the flash of the aluminum foil but hadn’t meant to. He lifted the tobacco up into the light. “Hey,” he said. “I brought you a little present.”

Even if the driver was a man who’d seen it all, he hadn’t seen this. Not by the look on his face. Shock and fear and greed all mingled together. He shook his head. “I thought it was all about the girl,” he said. “I thought you were doing it for her.”

“I am. Just like I said.”

“Then what’s with this?”

“It was a gift.”

“A gift.”

“That’s right. And now I’m giving it to you.”

“Nobody gives that stuff away.”

“I’m giving it to you.”

The driver checked his mirrors as if somebody might be gaining on him. Reached over and switched off the radio as if somebody might be listening in. “I can’t take it,” he said. “I appreciate it, but I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t.”

“Won’t.”

“They tell me it’s first-rate.” Running the leaves between his thumb and his forefinger. “I wouldn’t know anything about it myself, but that’s what they tell me.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“The real thing. Disengineered. It’s worth a fortune.”

“You’re not kidding about that.” The driver tilted his head to the right. The backpack. “How much you got in there?”

“Some. I didn’t ask. A couple of pounds maybe.” Smoothing the leaves on his knee. “They just gave it to me.”

“How come? How come they gave it to you? How come
who
gave it to you?”

“Some people. Some people I did a little bit of work for.” Thinking maybe he ought to leave it at that.

“Look here,” the driver said. Poking at the red National Motors star on his blue overalls. “If I didn’t work for who I work for, I might think about it. God knows I could use the dough. But they look at us awful close. Blood samples. Urine samples. Those full-body scanners from the airports? Guess who bought them when the FAA shut down.”

Weller was already opening his pack, starting to put the tobacco away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m telling you. My uniform comes in with so much as
smoke
from that stuff on it, the guys in the laundry’ll turn me in. I’ve seen it happen.”

“I had no idea,” Weller said.

“National Motors does a whole lot of business with PharmAgra. And one thing PharmAgra hates is competition.”

“I didn’t mean any harm. I’ve made a mistake.”

“You sure have.” His breath coming hard.

“I’m sorry.”

“Forget it. Just close that up now and forget it. We’ll be all right.”

Weller finished putting the tobacco away and strapped the pack shut again, and the driver took his eyes off the road for a long time to watch it go.

*

Manhattan, the eternal city. As great an astonishment to Weller as it was to his child. Greater, because the details of it were visible. The commercial and residential buildings of Washington Heights finer than anything he had imagined, packed tight against one another and merging together in some places and grander than the grandest of palaces, surely home to a race of kings. The riverside expanse of Highbridge Park, its flood of lush unstoppable green creeping outward and encroaching on entire neighborhoods and consuming them. Highway ramps and overpasses demolished one after another at some point in human memory, their concrete pulverized and their iron beams crumpled, as if some vast power had blockaded the city in preparation for laying siege to it.

And in the distance, off to the south, wonders even greater. The towers of midtown, appearing through low clouds shot through with sun and vanishing again veiled.

Ninety-Five became the George Washington Bridge and leapt skyward, soaring over the Hudson River toward the high wall of the Palisades. Leaving New York without ever penetrating it. The driver said sorry folks, but there was only one way into the city from here and you had to go through Jersey whether you liked it or not. It was a disgrace but there it was.

The traffic picked up. A sign overhead directing it all through a security checkpoint.

Weller pointed. “I thought they were every fifty miles.”

“Every now and then they’ll make an exception. It’s the big city. What do you expect.”

Weller stood up and took their packs and angled Penny through the passageway. Saying, “How far until we get off?”

“Not far. Just as soon as we’re in the clear.” The driver braked and signaled and merged right. Flashing lights hanging down from steel beams and signs saying
Be Prepared to Stop.
“There’s a footpath leads down to a sidewalk under the bridge. People take it over. People who work out here. Hell of a view, they say, if you can stand looking.”

Air horns and air brakes and the shuddering of engines throttling down. They slipped into the narrow closet. It wouldn’t be far now. Not even a mile.

The driver put the radio on, the regular radio since there were still a couple of stations broadcasting in New York. One news station and one oldies. The oldies weren’t old enough to suit him, so he switched over to the news. RealNews, reporting live from their headquarters at the stock exchange. AmeriBank owned RealNews and AmeriBank held Manhattan like an occupying army, from the Hudson to the East River, from Spuyten Duyvil to Battery Park. Right down to the stock exchange proper, barricaded on all sides like the island itself. Ramparts within ramparts.

The smell of diesel exhaust found its way into the cab and penetrated the closet, and the truck slowed to a stop. The wait stretched on and on. Weller didn’t know how many lanes they had, but there weren’t enough. He coughed in the dark and Penny put her little hands over his mouth. He held her closer. Thinking if they started feeling sleepy it would be the exhaust, and wondering which way to die would be the worse of the two. Carbon monoxide or security. He decided security. Getting caught would be worse than just going to sleep. Going to sleep right here just the two of them nice and easy, even though they were this close to the end. Even though they’d come this far.
With your shield or on it,
the way he’d left home against Liz’s will. He thought of her bereft and he told himself that he was being morose and he pushed the image out of his mind. Picturing New York instead. Picturing everything that lay before them. The walk back across the Hudson and the descent into the city streets and the search for Carmichael. Focusing his attention where it needed to be. He let Liz back in again later, but not in the same way. Imagining all three of them at home this time, at home just like before but better. All three of them restored and forgiven.

He heard the driver curse this damned traffic and switch on the CB radio and talk with someone. He felt the truck begin to move. Slow straining motions that skewed both side to side and forward, as if they were leaving this lane for another. Air horns. Then he felt the engine rev and the transmission found a different gear and the truck began pulling steadily forward. He whispered to Penny here we go. This is it.

The familiar sequence of sounds from before. Air brakes. Trucks starting and stopping. Hard echoes of the engine under a portico, and the window going down, and men shouting back and forth. Then a change. Different sounds coming rapidly, one after another. The engine shutting down with a noise like chains falling. A door swinging open on hinges that needed oil. The low voices of men rising up and the scrambling of boots on perforated steel and the abrupt striking of metal on metal. Bodies colliding.

Two rapid bangs at the closet door ended it. Bangs harder than the knocking of any fist and more insistent. Beyond denial and past resistance. A voice saying come out. Hands up and come out. Weller shouldered the door open and would have raised his hands but he had Penny, so she raised hers for both of them. Emerging through the little closet door. Lifted up in the shield of her father’s arms.

*

They already had the driver on the ground. Face down on the pavement with a boot on his neck. National Motors security in dull black serge and shiny black leather, blacks the color of oil and fresh macadam and night. Gleaming helmets with visors that dropped down over their eyes rendering them inscrutable. They stood in a rough circle, with handguns drawn and other guns drawn too and a taser that one of them was making use of. The driver jumping. One of the security men was asking him questions he couldn’t answer but that didn’t stop the one with the taser. The one asking the questions said knock it off and he did and the driver quit jumping but not right away.

Weller kept Penny’s face pressed to his shoulder. Walking past the circle of men. Not exactly walking but shoved. Shoved up against the wall and made to wait and hearing the one who was asking the driver questions ask about exactly where he had picked up the two of them. Which mile marker and how near to that cut in the fence. Saying of course he’d seen it, hadn’t he. Hadn’t he. That hole. He knew all about that hole, didn’t he. Asking about why he’d concealed the man and the girl in Stamford only to turn them in here and asking about how long he’d been in the habit of carrying contraband. Carrying smugglers carrying contraband. Smugglers with children for Christ’s sake. Asking questions for which there was no answer except greed. Saying all right go on hit him with that taser again if you’re so handy with it. Do you both some good.