by Ray Celestin
‘I’ll leave you to talk,’ said the doctor, stepping out of the room.
Cleveland stayed where he was, standing next to the door, fidgety, nervous.
Salzman flashed his badge.
‘Genovese and his men have found out where you are,’ he said. ‘They’re coming here tonight, to kill you. Come with us and we’ll protect you.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Cleveland.
Salzman grunted, turned to look at Ida.
‘Mr Cleveland,’ she said, walking over. ‘My name’s Ida Young, I’m a private investigator. I was hired by your old neighbor’s family to investigate his case.’
‘What neighbor?’
‘After you fled the Palmer Hotel your upstairs neighbor was arrested for the murders. I’m trying to secure his release.’
Cleveland frowned, trying to take in the information.
Ida wondered if he knew what had happened in the aftermath of the murders, if he’d seen the newspapers between the time he ran away to the time he entered the clinic.
‘Shit,’ Cleveland said. ‘I don’t know nothing about no one getting arrested.’
‘He’s been coerced into pleading guilty,’ said Ida. ‘I need a statement from you. Something. Anything. To help free the boy.’
Cleveland shook his head.
‘We don’t have much time,’ said Ida. ‘Faron’s on his way. You’ve seen what he can do.’
‘I ain’t going to jail,’ said Cleveland.
‘Why would you?’ Ida said. ‘No one’s going to pursue you for the blackmail. Or the dope they found in the apartment, the cops have got that down as Bucek’s. All we want is for you to make a statement and help get your neighbor released.’
‘You want me to testify against Genovese?’ said Cleveland, laughing. ‘He was up on that murder charge last year. Remember what happened to that? The witnesses all got bumped off.’
‘We don’t want you to testify against Genovese,’ said Ida. ‘Just tell the truth about what happened that night at the hotel. That Faron was there. Just enough to get your neighbor off the hook. Please, we don’t have much time.’
Cleveland stared at her. Clearly he harbored a deep suspicion of the authorities, too much suspicion to entrust himself to their care.
‘You’ve got no reason to trust us,’ she said. ‘But an innocent boy’s life is at stake. And on top of that, we’re the best option you’ve got. You make a statement and don’t implicate any of the higher-ups, and maybe they’ll let you be. And if not, they’ll relocate you. One way or the other you’re going to be running for the rest of your life. We can give you a better escape than you could ever manage on your own. You think you can outrun Faron without our help? Forever?’
She paused to let the words sink in.
‘But we can talk about this later,’ she said. ‘Please. We need to get you into the precinct before they kill you.’
Cleveland thought about it, stared at her, something softened in him.
‘If I go with you,’ he said, ‘what happens?’
Ida turned to look at Salzman.
‘We’ll take you to the precinct,’ Salzman said. ‘Get a statement. We’ll take that to the DA and the judge first thing tomorrow. You’ll be put in protective custody, till the time of the trial. You’ll be in an apartment, with cops guarding you. You’ll be safe. Then after the trial we’ll help you to move somewhere far away, where they’ll never catch you.’
Cleveland squirmed.
‘If I’m cooped up in an apartment all on my own for weeks, I’ll start using again,’ he said. ‘I know I will.’
‘There’ll be police there,’ Ida said. ‘They’ll keep you from it.’
He thought. Outside, the snow continued to fall through the darkness.
He looked around at the plush surroundings, smiled sadly. ‘I guess all good things come to an end.’
61
Thursday 13th, 10.24 p.m.
They stepped outside into the storm and somehow it had gotten even worse while they were inside. Ida could barely see her hand in front of her face.
They made it down the steps, across the garden, out onto the street. She looked up and down, could hardly make out the police car.
‘We can’t drive,’ Salzman shouted over the roar of the storm.
She nodded.
‘How far’s the precinct?’ she shouted.
‘Six blocks along,’ he said. ‘One north. We could go back in and wait.’
Ida shook her head. ‘We don’t want to be here if they come.’
Salzman nodded.
They turned and headed north. They’d made it half a block when Gallo fell to the ground. Ida thought he’d tripped. It was only seconds later she heard the shot, a dull thud softened by the falling snow.
She grabbed Cleveland and pulled him to the ground, behind the snowbank of parked cars. They hit the sidewalk and she looked up to see a bullet rip through Salzman’s neck, another hit his skull. The power of the shots pushed him backwards, smacked him into the railings of the building behind them, dislodging settled snow. Again the noise of the gunshots came after it should have. More bullets fizzed around them. Into the cars, into the brickwork of the building, pinging off the railings. There was more than one shooter, more than one machine-gun. And they had Ida and Cleveland trapped on the narrow stretch of road, between buildings on one side and the embankment dropping down the cliff-side on the other.
Ida scurried to the edge of the car. Thought about the bullets that had ripped through Salzman’s neck and head, left to right, on a flat trajectory, used that to figure out the location of the shooters. She rose into a crouch and looked over the snow bank, saw a car further down, stopped diagonally across the road. Man-shaped shadows moving closer, hosing the street with orange spurts of machine-gun fire; bullets flying at right-angles to the falling snow.
She lowered herself down again, behind the car.
‘We need to run,’ she said.
Cleveland nodded, gestured to the embankment on the other side of the road; there was an opening, steps, a staircase leading down the cliff-side to the Henry Hudson Parkway.
They made a dash for it, across the road, to the stairs, which were so covered in snow, it was impossible to see where any of the steps were. They made it down the first few by luck, and then they tripped, fell, stumbled, managed to right themselves. Kept on going.
Eventually, the highway below them came into view. Not a car on it, pristine snow, and on its far side, a steep, tree-covered drop leading sharply downwards to the river.
They raced across it, their legs dropping into snow to their knees. They were easy targets for the men above them until they reached the tree-cover on the other side.
When they were halfway across, bullet-sized holes pocked the snow blanket around them. The sound of gunfire rang out once more. They were almost at the tree-line when a bullet caught Cleveland and he fell. Panic spiked through Ida.
She grabbed him, hauled him up, prayed he was still alive. He stumbled to his feet and Ida felt a pang of relief. There was blood all over his arm and shoulder. She pushed him on. They made it into the trees, down the slope a few feet, then they collapsed into the snow.
‘You OK?’ she asked.
He winced. His right hand was clasping his left shoulder. He moved it and Ida saw blood. They’d been shooting from behind. An exit wound.
‘Turn around,’ she said.
He did so, wincing again, and she found the entry point, an inch or so higher up, just above the top of his shoulder blade. No organs hit, but blood was pumping out of him. They needed to get him patched up or he’d bleed to death.
‘Can you walk?’ she asked.
‘Sure, I can walk,’ he said. ‘But where the hell are we going?’
She turned to look back the way they had come. Above them the highway ran along the ridge. In front of them, the bank descended ever so steeply through the trees, all the way to the river. The tree cover wasn’t dense, but the snowstorm mad
e it feel so.
‘We try and lose them in the trees,’ she said.
‘What kind of plan is that?’
‘They’ll be down those steps in a few seconds and they’ll follow our tracks in the snow. It’s the only chance we’ve got. C’mon.’
He grimaced at her. Then he nodded, rose and they picked their way down the bank, then headed parallel to the river, blood dripping off Cleveland’s shoulder, leaving a trail in the white for the men to follow.
Ida kept checking all around for signs of the gunmen and didn’t find any. She was starting to think that maybe they’d lost them when she heard a noise behind her, turned to see a shape coming at them. They started to run, stumbling through the drifts. But Cleveland tripped, fell down the bank, towards the river.
Ida lost sight of him, turned and ran down the bank. Behind her she could hear the men shouting and getting closer. As she ran, she picked up speed, too much to control on the downward slope. She looked ahead and saw the trees petering out, and after them, open sky. The last few yards of the bank was an escarpment of ice-covered stone, and Cleveland was tumbling down it, all the way to the river below. She grabbed onto a tree to stop herself from falling and it took all her strength to hold on and get her footing.
She watched in horror as Cleveland bounced and tumbled towards the great white sheet of the river. He was going to fall into the freezing water and die. But then something strange happened – when he hit the surface of the river, he rolled across it. It took her a moment to realize. The river had frozen over.
Ida turned to look behind her, the shapes approaching. She prayed and let go of the tree, slid down the stone escarpment and, as she landed on the river, she heard the ice crack – fissures appeared all around her. Cleveland was already hobble-running along the edge of the frozen river, disappearing into the blizzard. Ida got up carefully, not knowing how thick the ice was.
She heard a noise and turned to look up the bank behind her, three men with guns standing at the tree-line where she had held on before sliding down. One of them towered over the others. Faron. She jumped over the cracks in the ice and ran. They spotted her. Shots rang out. She turned and saw them scrambling down the escarpment. Then there was a scream – one of the men had fallen on the same spot Ida had, breaking the cracks that she and Cleveland had opened up, falling in.
She looked ahead of her and carried on running, but she couldn’t see Cleveland anymore. She kept on, unsure where she was going, out into the nothingness.
A great gust of wind smacked against her, knocked her off her feet. She fell onto the ice and hit her head. Everything went black. She felt the world spin beneath her. Tilt. Rebalance itself.
She opened her eyes groggily, and looked around. She couldn’t see the riverbank to her side anymore. She couldn’t see any landmarks anywhere. With a sense of panic she realized that in every direction there was nothing but the white sheet of ice, sparkling blackness above, the falling snow. There were no gunshots anymore either. There was nothing but the howling wind.
Then that, too, faded.
The snowflakes above her slowed their descent.
Everything was still.
Timelessness stretched all around. Maybe this was the unknown to come. The nothingness. All her fear and panic evaporated. Was replaced by a grain of something powerful, something that could only be forged in loneliness.
The moment yawned into eternity.
And then she could hear something, faintly at first, but getting louder; her own heartbeat. The sound of her breath. Filling the void. The noise of the storm.
Snow fell through the emptiness once more.
She got to her feet, regained a sense of ground and sky, gravity, time, fear. She heard something in front of her. The gunmen. How could they be in front of her?
Of course. She’d spun around when she’d fallen. She’d lost her bearings. She turned and ran in the opposite direction to the one that her internal compass was telling her to take.
After a few seconds, she saw Cleveland in front of her, hobbling along, and beyond him, further in the distance, a hulking shadow lying across the river – a pier. She looked behind and saw gunfire blooming. Two sets of guns. Firing rapidly. Wildly. They didn’t know where she or Cleveland were. All of them were stranded and lost out on that ice sheet. But Cleveland was still leaving that trail of blood.
She ran, made up the ground between them.
‘You OK?’ she asked when she caught up with him.
‘Sure.’
She looked at his shoulder, his other hand clasped over it, drenched in red, the dried blood sparkling like ice.
He nodded at the shadow in the distance.
‘It’s a pier,’ he said. ‘Boats, cabins, bandages, places to hide. Maybe radios too.’
Ida stared at the pier all that distance away across the ice, studied Cleveland, saw how weak he was. She put her arm under his good shoulder, and taking some of his weight, they ran as best they could across the ice. Every few moments she turned behind her, tense and fearful, to see the shapes emerging from the wall of falling snow.
They kept on. Slowly, painfully, the shadow of the pier grew larger, began to take on details, substance. Eventually, she could see the boats moored along it – tugs, pleasure craft, yachts – all of them rising up with the ice, frozen into off-kilter positions, like a wave had washed across them and stopped halfway through.
Just as they reached the first of the boats, the shots started once more, hissing into the ice behind them. They stumbled around the side of the boat, hiding between it and the pier.
‘You hit?’ Ida asked.
‘No. You?’
She shook her head. She turned and peered round the side of the boat, saw their two pursuers approaching, just yards away now, and for the first time, she got a close view of Faron. Tall and powerful-looking, despite the fact that he was walking with a slight limp. Both he and the other man had automatics in their gloved hands. Ida’s fingers by contrast were so frozen that she doubted she could even hold her gun.
She turned back around.
‘We need to get out of here,’ she said.
Cleveland shook his head. ‘I can’t move,’ he said. ‘I can’t do no more running. Not now. I need a few minutes.’
Ida looked at him and knew it was the truth. But she only had seconds before the men caught up with them.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s just move you a little.’
She walked behind Cleveland, helped him up, settled him down again just a few steps from where he was, propped him up against one of the pier supports. She checked she’d left a blood trail in the snow. She had. Then she ran underneath the pier, hid behind one of the supports on its far side, a sniping position for when the gunmen came around the corner and followed the blood trail to Cleveland. She scrabbled her gun from its holster, and it was as she’d thought, her fingers were so frozen she could barely grip it in her fist.
She looked at the section of snow where she expected the gunmen to appear, trained her gun on it, waited, her heart pounding, racing with dizzying force.
Faron arrived, following the blood trail, looking between the boats and the pier. He saw Cleveland slumped by the support, turned, raised his gun.
Ida tried her hardest to squeeze her finger over the trigger. She fired off two shots that went hugely wide, thudded into one of the supports. Faron turned towards her. Their eyes met and she felt Faron’s stare boring into her, his eyes as blue as battery acid.
She wondered why he wasn’t shooting back at her, then realized she had her gun pointed at him, and he had his gun pointed away, at Cleveland. Maybe he’d mistaken her missed shots for a warning.
‘Drop the gun,’ she shouted over the roar of the storm.
He continued staring at her, shook his head.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Cleveland, scrabbling to his feet, loping away down the underside of the pier.
Just then the second gunman walked into view, mac
hine-gun pointed at Ida.
She dashed behind the support and both men’s guns spat fire, and the ice around her started cracking and she felt the world shake. She crouched down and made herself small as the bullets rained down around her. The fear of death pumped through her; hyperventilating, she tried to gather herself. Tried to think.
She couldn’t run. They’d mow her down. And she couldn’t stay where she was, because the ice would break and she’d fall into the water and freeze. She had three bullets left, and Cleveland had run away. She flexed the muscles in her fingers. Trying to warm them. She waited. The gunfire ceased.
She took a breath and spun about, and it happened all at once. The two men trained their guns on her, and the world slanted from the tilting ice. The second gunman’s face became a red smudge and he fell forwards, and Faron fell too, and all this without Ida firing a shot.
She ran from the cracking ice, to the next pier support along, turned once more to see the body of Faron’s partner, blood pouring out of his head, daubing itself across the whiteness in wind-blown streaks. And there was Faron, crouching behind the keel of the boat near where Cleveland had been hiding.
And there was Gabriel, approaching from the same direction Faron had come, gun raised, scanning the space. But Faron was hiding where Gabriel couldn’t see him.
Ida screamed at Gabriel. Too late. Faron rose and shot Gabriel, and Gabriel went down, landed on a stretch of ice that was breaking off, rapidly becoming an island. He’d been hit on his flank. He rolled, and as he tried to stand, the island slanted. He was going to fall off, slide into the endless, freezing darkness.
Ida watched Faron as he limped towards Gabriel. Then Sarah appeared behind Gabriel, running towards him. She picked up his gun and swung it towards Faron. He halted. He frowned. Ida stopped. Felt a revulsion as she looked on. The girl kneeling next to Gabriel, holding the gun up at Faron. Faron just yards away, on the other side of the cracks.
