IS THAT YOU GUYS
I stared at it a moment, then wrote back.
Is that us what? Still in store
I turned to the kid, who was staring at his phone, which had finally fully rebooted and was buzzing like there was no tomorrow. Somebody had been trying hard to contact him.
He looked at me.
“My grandpa died this morning.”
My heart stopped. I turned back to my phone – another message from Jules.
THEN WHO THE FUCK DO I HEAR
I dropped the basket and ran, and the kid followed suit, even though he didn’t know what was going on. We pushed our way out of the bodega and back into my building. Luckily, the elevator was already sitting on the ground floor, so I jumped right in with the kid, hit the 13 button, then repeatedly hit the button to close the doors.
“What’s going on?” asked the kid.
I didn’t have an answer.
We got to my floor, I punched the button to open the elevator doors repeatedly and we ran out and down the long hallway. As I passed the door of Skip Skipperson, I noticed it quietly closing, but not closing all the way, as if he was avoiding making the sound of that final “click.” And then I noticed my door, which I had left unlocked like a dope, also in the same not-quite-closed position.
I opened it and flew down the stairs, almost killing myself in the process. I yelled Jules’ name, even though she couldn’t yell back.
Then I saw her.
She was down on her stomach on the carpet in the living room, as if she had just taken a few steps away from the sofa when she was hit and fell forward. There was blood coming from the right side of her head, where there was a vicious wound, too big to be caused by a knife. She was unconscious.
I ran to her motionless body, yelling to the kid to call 911 and get an ambulance over here. First aid was a prominent part of my collection of things I did not know anything about, so I had no idea how to proceed. She was breathing, but it seemed a little weak to me, who, again, didn’t know anything. As I heard the kid finish up the call, I ran and got an old towel out of the closet, then I ran back to her and put the towel up against the wound to try and slow the bleeding.
“They said it would take a few extra minutes because of the storm, but they’ll be here soon.”
I nodded and motioned for him to come kneel by her and take my place. When he had, I got up and headed to the kitchen.
“Who the fuck did this?” he yelled over to me.
“Guess,” I said grimly, as I reached into the back of the high shelf where I had stashed the gun. I grabbed a bullet out of the ammo box and put it in the first chamber.
The General was dead. If we had been watching anything else other than The Weather Channel, we might have known that and had some warning. As it was, the moment I had been dreading was here – the moment when I was no longer useful and just a loose end to be tied up.
Which is why I had a new neighbor.
When Skip finally got his marching orders, he most likely took a peek outside his door and saw mine was open, then came in to quietly take care of me with one of Dark Sky’s specialty items, a handsome, handmade tomahawk. Jules heard him coming in – but the only person coming in should have been me and I would have said something, because I always did. That’s when she texted. When she got confirmation that it wasn’t me, she got up to see who was there. And when Skip turned the corner and saw a figure, he let the tomahawk fly. Maybe he saw it was a woman in the moment before he made the throw, maybe that’s why he just missed making a clean kill, who knows? But he quickly knew how badly he had fucked up and he just as quickly got the fuck out of there.
“I’ll be back,” I said as I headed for the stairs.
PMA saw what I was holding. “Max, a gun? Where’d you get that?” he said with extreme surprise.
“Stay with her,” I said quietly as I went up the stairs.
I pushed my front door open – it had never closed all the way. Skip’s door, however, was now shut tight. I gently tried his doorknob. Locked.
I hit the doorbell over and over like the world’s most persistent Jehovah’s Witness and waited.
After a few moments, he pulled the door open, but stayed mostly behind it, firing a couple of shots into the hallway. He was taking a chance I’d be standing there like a human target and that I’d go down fast. But all he got out of that move was mystified, because the shots only knocked a couple of chunks out of the white bricked wall opposite him.
As he stepped into the open doorway and looked up and down the hallway, he didn’t know I was lying on the hallway floor to his left, opposite the door hinge. I was shaking so hard, I was lucky to hit any part of him. What I got with my shot was the right leg, which went out from under him and sent him falling back down the stairs into his apartment. Then I got up as fast as I could with my ancient aching joints to make sure I got to him before he got his equilibrium back.
It was almost a tie. He was on the almost side.
Skip Skipperson lay sprawled on the landing below. But damn if that Dark Sky training didn’t work – he had reflexively moved into a position where he could return fire. So he quickly shot back at me, but a little too quickly, like a shortstop who stretched to make an amazing catch but blew the throw to first because he was off-balance. The shot went into the inside wall beside the stairway as I fired back and got him in the shoulder. He was down again and I put three more bullets into him. Then, not particularly caring where they landed, I quickly backed up and slammed his door shut, locking what was left of him inside.
I fell against the hallway wall, feeling the heat of my discharged pistol on my hand. I had never killed a man, or even come anywhere close to it. I thought I would I have been more upset, but instead I was just fucking relieved. He was a fucking killer so fuck him. Besides, I didn’t have time to dwell on how I was feeling because I suddenly saw, at the other end of the long hallway, the EMTs getting off the elevator. I hid the gun behind my back and yelled to them, so they wouldn’t waste time looking for the right apartment.
While they bandaged Jules and got her ready to move downstairs to the ambulance, I went and got my old raincoat, which was bulky enough to disguise a pistol sitting in its pocket. Then I went into the kitchen and grabbed the ammo box and put it in the opposite raincoat pocket. Mel might stop anybody else from coming after me tonight, but no way was I taking chances.
There was only room for me to ride along in the ambulance with Jules, so I threw the kid an old windbreaker I also had in the closet and told him to meet me down at the hospital at the north end of the island. If the red island bus was still running, he could catch a ride on that and stay relatively dry. Whatever he did, I told him not to stay in the apartment, because some other unwelcome guests might show up.
The good thing about living on a tiny island was that it was only a mile drive to the Coler Hospital, the last building before Lighthouse Park at the very north end. And good thing it was close, because the street was already flooding and the wind and the rain were getting insane. We made it down to the emergency entrance, but it looked like we might be the last vehicle to do it without a struggle. Almost instantly, Jules disappeared down the hall into a treatment room.
I’m not a praying man, although I do on occasion try to talk to whoever’s in charge. And I was doing a lot of yakking in my head at the moment. It was some kind of sick joke to do this to Jules right before she regained her singing voice. As usual, I blamed myself. I never should have let her stay with me with the possibility of this going down, but she was depending on me to take care of her. Not that depending on me was ever really a great idea.
Everybody inside the hospital was scrambling. The basement was already filling up with water and the staffers working that night were worried about the parking lot flooding and their cars getting an inside rinse job, which is exactly what happened during Sandy. Surges of water were crashing over the sea walls along the walkways on both the east and west sides of the islan
d. Mel was going to be a great, big son of a bitch, maybe even a bigger bastard than Sandy. I remembered back then flooding got so bad, it was impossible to get to the northern end of the island, where the hospital was.
Maybe that’s why the kid hadn’t made it here. Maybe the hospital was already cut off from the rest of the island. It had been a couple hours and I was starting to worry as much about him as I was about Jules – I texted him more than once and got nothing.
Finally, a doctor came out and said Julie had suffered blunt trauma, a concussion and a skull fracture. It was touch-and-go at the moment. They’d keep me posted.
A few minutes later, I finally got a text. But it wasn’t from PMA, it was from a number I didn’t recognize.
We found your neighbor.
Skip Skipperson’s friends had arrived. Here we go.
I sat there a moment, taking in those four words, then I finally got up and went to the nurses’ station. I left my cellphone number with the head nurse in case anything happened and told her I was going to take a walk. She naturally looked at me as though I was insane.
But I didn’t care. Every part of my body was tingling. I knew I wasn’t safe and I knew it was better to go find the danger than have it come find me. I had to tap into my own PMA and get us all out of this unholy mess.
As I headed for the hospital exit, I tried calling the Roosevelt Island Public Safety department, which was what they called the island’s police force. I got a busy signal. Either their lines were down or Mel was keeping them tied up. Of course, I wasn’t sure how I would explain what was going on if they did answer. Were they really going to believe that trained killers who might be armed with tomahawks were coming after me?
Then came another text from the same strange number.
Still at the hospital?
I had been afraid they knew where I was and I was right, not that that was anything to pat myself on the back about. Maybe Skip wasn’t all the way dead, maybe a neighbor told them the EMT crew had been in the building, there was no way to know how they figured it out, I just had to deal with the consequences. So I worked my way through the hallways, towards the north side of the building, the parts that were no longer much in use. The back of the building, the side facing the northern end of the island, the side opposite Lighthouse Park, was virtually empty from disuse. I couldn’t make it all the way there, the doors were bolted shut, but I came out the side as far north as I could. As I opened the exit door, a rush of water came in over my feet.
I shut the door behind me and faced Mel like a man. And Mel almost knocked me right back on my ass.
The wind was so strong I had to lean back against the hospital wall to adjust to its power. I had exited the hospital on the western side of the island, and as I looked toward Manhattan, I saw how bad things had gotten. Huge waves were crashing over the fence at the edge of the walkway, which was now under a few feet of water. I imagined the walkway on the east side of the island was in the same condition. That meant I wasn’t getting to Public Safety on foot.
I had to switch to Plan B. Which wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun.
I started heading north, staying on the highest ground possible. The area at the very back of the hospital was already flooded - in the small parking area, I saw an ambulance with water up to the top of its tires. Meanwhile, I was already fucking soaking wet, and the rain was nowhere near over.
I headed north to Lighthouse Park and sloshed up one of its small, grassy, tree-covered hills, where I grabbed a tree for support and scanned the sky. I thought I saw some clearing to the east - a good sign, except, just at that moment, all the streetlights around the park went black.
The power on the island was out.
I turned back to the hospital. The lights flickered, then came back on. The emergency generator was working, which meant they could still take care of Jules.
I kept moving forward across the park, avoiding the mammoth lakes of water that had formed over the low areas of grass and heading for the very the tip of the island and the lighthouse that anchored that tip.
It was slow going. The ground was saturated along with my feet and every once in a while, I sunk down into a pit of mud. The wind was so strong I kept having to stop and grab a tree to keep from blowing away. I probably looked just like one of those idiot television talking heads I loved to make fun of – the Kens and Barbies who stayed outside when the NWS told everyone to stay inside, desperately clutching their hand mikes and hoping their immaculately sprayed-down hair wouldn’t get too mussed.
Except this wasn’t about me making it on YouTube. This was about me making it to tomorrow.
Finally, I made it all the way north to the paved walkway that led directly to the lighthouse. It was under a foot of water, but, as I saw it at the time. I had no choice. Whoever was coming for me was probably already staked out somewhere by the hospital. They had to know I couldn’t make it back to the main part of the island.
If I was going to make a stand, it had to be someplace where I could see everybody before they saw me. Where I could control as much of what was about to happen as I could.
That place was the top of the lighthouse.
The lighthouse wasn’t much – it was just fifty feet tall and maybe fifteen feet across. It had been built out of stone, legend had it, by an inmate of the old asylum about a hundred and fifty years ago.
That was appropriate, because there was a lot of madness coming its way.
I made it to the building’s too-short-by-a-foot entrance, which was padlocked. That meant I finally got to do something I had always wanted to do – bust it off and see what was inside. I took out my gun, stood back a few feet and shot it – just like they do in the movies. Turns out I’m not Tom Cruise. First of all, I don’t buy Scientology and second of all, it took me three shots to shatter the lock. But the important thing here is that I did, in fact, shatter it, and opened the door and ducked inside. It was cold and clammy, but it still felt like paradise after my evening with Mel.
It was also time to make my presence known.
I took out my phone and replied to the last text from a few minutes ago.
Meet me in lighthouse park – north end of island.
And I climbed the narrow rusted iron ladder straight to the top.
There was another too-short door up there that led out to a small octagonal balcony that surrounded the lighthouse crown. I hunched down, opened the door a crack and looked out. It was definitely clearing to the east now and the rain was starting to let up. The worst was over, but I could see the East River was still churning like a million motorboats were racing through it, sending ever-higher waves of water crashing onto the island.
A text came in answer to mine:
Is he with you
“He?”
Did they mean PMA? I didn’t know who they were talking about and I didn’t answer it.
Even though the park lights were dark because the power was out on the island, the lights of the skyscrapers across the river on the Upper East Side were still working, and gave me some visibility to see out over the park. The sky continued to clear in patches and that helped a lot too, because the moon was close to full. I reloaded the gun to replace the bullets I used on the lock and waited.
Then I saw them.
Three figures emerged way back from the side of the hospital and began slowly walking over the grassy park area that I had just passed through. All I could tell at first was that one of the figures was being forcibly held by another – and the remaining person’s silhouette indicated a rifle being held by his side.
Even a mace to the head couldn’t keep a good man like Herman down.
And the sick bastard was wearing a Stetson in a hurricane, holding it down with his free hand. You had to admire the guy - he had a look and he was going to stick to it.
As they came closer, I was able to figure out who the other two figures were. One was the bartender hunk from Branson – and the person he was forcibly holding onto
was, unfortunately, PMA.
This, of course, complicated things.
They stopped on one of the small hills in the park, where the bartender hunk started tying the kid to one of the trees, while Herman furtively looked all around, in all directions, not knowing who was where.
Meanwhile, I was confused. The text asked, “Is he with you?” If they already had the kid, who the hell was “he?”
I wished I had Herman’s rifle, something I could shoot accurately from a distance. They were over a hundred yards away, if I tried a shot with the handgun all I’d do was give away my position. So I stayed hidden inside the crown of the lighthouse, peeking out through the crack in the door, hoping they’d come close enough for my pistol to do some damage.
But it would still be hard to make a decent shot from where I was.
They left the kid tied to the tree and started walking towards the tip of the island - towards the lighthouse. Towards me. I stayed in the darkness behind the door. They paused and the bartender hunk turned his back to Herman – and I saw that he was wearing some kind of backpack. Herman dug into it and pulled out something, which he held up to his eyes and looked through in all directions.
Shit. Probably fucking infrared binoculars.
I reacted like a scared little bitch and too-quickly slammed the door shut. It was too big and too loud a move. I waited a couple of minutes – and sure enough, another text popped up on my phone.
Incoming.
I cracked the door open again, because that’s one word I don’t like to see.
That’s when I saw something else I don’t like to see.
I saw Herman pulling out something else from the bartender hunk’s backpack.
A rocket launcher. And it wasn’t hard to guess where that rocket was going to come calling.
Time for an orderly retreat. I quickly texted back.
Coming out.
Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) Page 22
