Two of the cars, arriving by different routes, got tangled up at the unmarked bridge approach. One of them wheeled sideways into a pile of canvas-covered reinforcing rods, many of which pierced the car and its occupants. The other car bounced high over the wooden curbing of the temporary bridge and dived down into the murky channel. A reinforcing rod, hurled a hundred feet through the air, whanged the side of the trailer a foot from where Benny stood gawking in the doorway.
And still the cars kept coming, pouring it on, tip-tilting, yawing and bouncing, slewing into cars already disabled. Benny had never seen a spectacle to equal it.
Then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, most of the cars were gone, trailing off in the dark downriver, leaving a few wrecks behind to litter his dooryard. Back in the kennels the construction company’s attack dogs were going nuts. A blown engine was vividly on fire. Injured men crawled along the rutted ground and collapsed; victims cried out from the depths of the steel-sided channel.
Benny grabbed a big fire extinguisher and went out to give some assistance.
South along the river, in the direction the cop car and the Camaro had gone, there was a deadly crash, accompanied by an explosion and a fireball. Benny turned and stared at it. The chase had ended.
“No way I can shake them,” Marty announced, calmly enough considering what was howling along behind them. “This old crock is about to come apart. The wheel, no goddamn response anymore!”
They were on a short stretch of pavement puzzle-cut by a length of rusted railroad track. Each ponderous jolt sent death rattles through the frame of the car. The brake linings were almost worn out, and the drums had begun to smoke.
“Marty, see that beacon ahead?”
“Up the hill, you mean?”
“It’s not on the hill, it’s on the roof of a soap factory that’s coming down. A railroad spur line runs straight through the middle of the factory. Okay, we’ll follow the rails inside. Stay as far to the left as you can once we’re in the factory. Watch out for support pillars, any one of them is big enough to pulverize us.”
The red Camaro had gained on them. Half of the back window of the police car blew out in a twinkling frost, showering them with glass and a few spent shotgun pellets.
“Shit!” Dominick yelled.
“Ignore that,” Peter said. “They won’t shoot to kill. We should be picking up the spur line along about here—okay, there it is. Follow it, Marty.”
There was a junkety knocking under the hood.
“Pistons!” Marty groaned. “We won’t get another mile out of this—”
“All we need now is a couple hundred yards. Floor it, Marty! Here comes the factory.”
Directly in front of them a few yellow warning lights blinked in front of the factory shell. Marty steered frantically for the high black oblong into which the rails disappeared.
“Left, left!” Peter screamed.
One of their headlights was out due to the violent uses to which the car had been put; they had only a glimpse of the huge piece of demolition machinery that had been parked inside the ruined factory, the fat ton of rusted teardrop that seemed suspended in dusty space directly in front of them.
Marty hauled the wheel over. They were close enough flashing by the wrecker’s ball to see patches of mortar and brick dust clinging to its pitted surface. Then Marty had his hands full avoiding the pillars and loading dock remnants that cluttered the factory floor.
The wheelman of the Camaro that entered the shed at sixty miles an hour instinctively steered to follow their taillights, but his reaction time was half a second too slow. The impact drove the enormous wrecker’s ball back about eight feet; it quivered on its cable and swung forward once again, just as the second chase car ran inside the shed and vaulted over the top of the squashed-down Camaro, meeting the doomsday ball head on. Simultaneously the gas tank of the Camaro blew up like a land mine and scattered the wreckage of the silver-and-black Grenada throughout the factory. Cables parted at the second impact and the iron teardrop thumped down on what was left of the Camaro and the clumps of burning men inside.
“Jesus God Almighty!” Dominick said as the police car emerged on the far side of the structure. “You set it up! You really had the whole thing worked out, didn’t you?”
“I had it worked out,” Peter said. “Don’t slow down, Marty. We’ve got a couple of jumps on them now, but they never stop coming at you. Understand that. They never stop. So keep driving.”
Gillian had forgotten what it was like to be so cold.
After leaving the hospital she trudged down Broadway against the wind, shuddering deeply, her head bent. Despite the coat and a wool dress she felt unfleshed; her unprotected bones were knocking together. It seemed to Gillian that she had walked a very long way, but when she stopped to get her breath and turned there was the hospital looming up behind her. So she had to be walking in place, it was like one of those dreams. Big slow stepping-stone steps while the sidewalk changed, by dream-magic, into a corridor; soon she would be back inside, but tiny as a bug this time in those hostile, brightly shining spaces.
Two Puerto Rican boys walked slowly by, stopped a few feet away, stared at her. Gillian paid no attention. She was trying to breathe, trying not to be a bug-thing no matter how much she deserved to be. The boys argued about her but the older one shook his head finally; they walked on.
Gillian thought she might make better progress getting out of her dream-entrapment if she took her boots off. Barefoot she’d always been the fastest girl at camp.
She sat on the curb and managed to wrench one boot off, but she hadn’t the strength to tackle the other.
The gutter was rancid. She sat there panting. Someone yelled obscenely at her from a passing car; a thrown bottle splattered glass not far away.
Gillian didn’t look up. She was trying to remember what she was doing out there, alone, late at night, on the street. Running away, yes. But why was she running away? Did it have something to do with the tall stricken woman who had fallen down in the elevator? It had taken Gillian a very long time to pry herself loose from the woman’s steely embrace.
Her eyes funny, bulging out of her head like that. Bloody nose. What was wrong with her anyway?
What’s wrong with me? Gillian thought. Get up from here. Coat all filthy. But—
A car stopped. Headlights as startling as flashguns. Gillian looked up warily.
Someone familiar.
“Oh my God, my God—Gillian?”
“Mrs.—Busk?”
“Yes, yes, oh God how you’re shaking!”
“I am?” Of course she was. It had gone on for so long now it seemed a natural sort of thing. To tremble and not be aware of trembling. “I got out. Couldn’t wait in the hospital. Stinks there.”
“Let me help you up, darling. The car’s right here. I drove by once, saw you, couldn’t believe my—something made me come back and—what’s this?”
“W-what’s what, Mrs. Busk?”
“All down the back of your nice coat. Like blood—”
“Take it off!” Gillian screamed. She was already plucking at the toggles, hands frantic but ineffective. “Off, off, offffff!”
Mrs. Busk helped her. Gillian snatched the coat from her and pitched it in the gutter.
Then she collapsed in the leather hollow of the right-hand seat in her mother’s costly Porsche, her ears ringing from stress. Mrs. Busk made a sweeping U-turn and made most of the lights going down Broadway.
After a couple of miles Gillian stopped gasping. Mrs. Busk looked tearfully at her.
“Oh, Gillian, what’s happened to you?”
“Music,” Gillian demanded.
Mrs. Busk dialed around the FM band. She found Brahms: Third movement, Second Symphony in D Major.
The speakers in the car were exceptionally fine. Little by little the gentleness of the Allegretto grazioso had an effect on Gillian. She sat up straighter, immersed, distracted.
Mrs. Busk drove like an angel,
floating the blue car through the city streets. The city going by was like a waxworks to Gillian. It was a remembered city, and not too well remembered at that. Where had she been, and why could she not get back? Never mind, the music was like food for her, nothing need exist for now beyond the sphere of the delicate, entrancing melody.
The police car stopped on the old railroad pier that jutted ninety feet into the Hudson. The remaining headlight was too weak to illuminate the end of the pier. The river going by out there had a high spoiled sheen. Across the river Manhattan dwelled fabulously, but its lights and spires had melted together in a cold haze, as if the city had been conjured by a sorcerer with a faulty technique. The right front tire of the car was slowly hissing down as the engine idled.
The three men sat silently looking at the river, too whipped after the chase to speak. The car reeked of excretions, of the bitter salts and oils of their bodies.
Peter banged open the sticking door and got out, still holding his gun on them. Tears ran freely down his cheeks. There was a biting west wind, an almost invisible presence of snow in the air.
“What are you going to do now, Peter?” Dom asked.
“Both of you come out here. This door. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
The police officers slid across the seat and climbed wearily from the car. They stood side by side. Marty rubbed his trembling hands together. He looked like he might fall down any second. The river slapped and sucked at the big pilings.
“Get rid of your revolvers,” Peter told them. “In the water.”
They unholstered their service revolvers and threw them away. Two splashes.
“That’s one fifty twice,” Dominick said sullenly. “And you know we have to pay for those .38’s ourselves, Peter.”
“Try not to make me feel like a prick, Dom. Both of you back off now.”
“Peter, look, man, how long can you keep it up? There’s gotta be someone who can help you.”
“BACK OFF!”
For a nasty moment Dom was certain Peter meant to shoot them. He tugged at Marty’s sleeve and the two policemen began to walk, moving sideways, watching for missing or badly rotted planks.
“Peter, you may think there’s no milk of human kindness left, right now I bet it seems to you like the whole world has dried up at the tit. But take it from someone who’s been through a hell of a lot with you, who’s come to know you as a friend: we’re all human, we’ve got our limits, and it looks to me like you’ve reached yours. I honestly don’t think you understand what you’re doing any more.”
Peter waited until they had moved twenty feet from the car. Then he went around to the driver’s side and got in, put the car in gear. Dominick ran toward the car, heedless of the rough footing. “Hey, Peter, now wait!”
The window was rolled down half way. Peter looked back, mania in his eyes, a fatuous smile of satisfaction on his face.
“They’ll have to follow me to the bottom of the river this time!”
With the damaged engine revving to the limit Peter took his foot off the brake. The police car leapt, fishtailed clankingly, released a monster burst of oily smoke and plunged off the end of the pier. Dominick ran, stumbled, went down on his hands and knees, rolled over with his palms full of splinters, trudged the rest of the way. He barely had a glimpse of the streaky dim headlight in the murky water before the electrical system of the car shorted out. The river belched a couple of times, and the last breathy bubble smelled indescribably of the deep-down bed, of the waste and corruption to which Peter had consigned himself.
Dominick walked back to his partner, shuddering, thinking of how cold the river could be in mid-winter. Even the men in the sealed wet suits who specialized in retrieving bodies couldn’t take it for longer than a half hour at a time.
Marty was standing on the pier, head on his folded arms.
“He did it,” Dom said. “He drove right in the fucking river! First I thought he was crazy. Then I decided he wasn’t so crazy after all when those Feds started chasing us. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Just leave me the hell alone,” Marty murmured.
“I’ll see if I can find a phone,” Dom said.
Katharine Bellaver was driven home by a friend at one in the morning. “Good to have our girl home again,” said Patrick, the guard on the gate at Sutton Mews. “And a happy New Year to you, Mrs. Bellaver.”
There was yellow fog along the river. Somewhere a bugle was blown flatly in a parody of celebration. Mrs. Busk met her at the door. Katharine requested strong coffee. She drank it while Mrs. Busk told her all she knew.
Katharine asked only one question. “Do you know for sure there was blood on her coat?”
Mrs. Busk could not be certain.
“Find out where Wally is,” Katharine said grimly, referring to Wallace Mockreed, the family lawyer. “Tell him I want him here, I don’t care if it’s four in the morning.”
Katharine was wearing a heavy floor-length Halston gown she couldn’t walk in very well; she’d already ripped the hem walking up the front steps. She had Mrs. Busk unzip the gown for her and she went upstairs to Gillian’s room wearing a pair of sheer briefs and nothing else.
Gillian’s room was dark and almost cold and Katharine’s teeth began to chatter. She had a nervous headache. Music was playing almost inaudibly. Chopin? Katharine saw Gillian motionless on the bed and thought she was asleep. She looked through one of Gillian’s closets for a robe to put on. Then she started to examine the clothing Gillian had worn home from the hospital to see if there were stains on the underpants.
Gillian sat up stiffly on the bed, leaning on one elbow.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Hello, Gil. How do you feel?”
“I don’t know—just glad to be home.” Her voice was indistinct; she could barely pronounce words. Her head lolled. If Katharine hadn’t been well versed on her daughter’s attitude toward drugs, she would have guessed that Gillian was spaced out. Katharine sat down with her. Probably her imagination, but Gillian seemed to draw cautiously away.
Katharine put a hand to Gillian’s forehead, but Gillian wouldn’t be touched.
“Don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Are you mad at me because I came home?”
“Of course not. We just want to be very careful you don’t get sick all over again. This is the sunniest room in the house, but the coldest at night. I think you ought to have a blanket over you.”
Gillian, who was wearing pajamas, allowed herself to be covered. Obviously she was dead tired, but jumpy and restless.
“Tell me about the party,” she said. Katharine had a few anecdotes on the tip of her tongue. Gillian snuggled down and closed her eyes for a few moments, but then she looked up and around apprehensively. Katharine tried to hold her hand. Gillian ripped the hand away with surprising force.
“I said don’t!” She was throbbing with angst.
“Gillian, why not?”
“You might—”
She couldn’t force herself to complete the thought. Her eyes roved. “Is he still here?”
“Who? There’s no one in the room but us, don’t be silly.”
“Who’s being silly?” Gillian cried, indignant and hurt. “What do you mean? I hear his voice.”
Gillian’s eyes filled with tears. Her head went round and round. Katharine swallowed hard, feeling helpless and afraid, but she couldn’t be specific about her fears.
“Are you sure you’re not mad at me?” Gillian said at last, in a distinctly childish voice.
“Gillian, stop! You’re not six years old anymore. We have a, I hope we have, a more mature relationship than that.”
“Yes. We do. I really love you, Mother, but you’re always putting me down. Why do you do that, it’s so hateful, I don’t want to hurt you.”
Katharine grimaced. “It’s that other way consenting adults pass the time. I never stop to think—. I’m sorry. Gillian, I want you to tell me something. Did
someone come into your room at the hospital? A man who—shouldn’t have been there? And did he—”
“No. No.”
“You don’t want to remember.”
“I don’t remember! Nothing happened at the hospital. I was—tired of being by myself, I wanted to come home. That’s all, do we have to make such a big thing of it?”
Gillian got out of bed and went into her bathroom. Katharine heard her pissing. When she came out she ignored her mother. She went instead to the marionette theatre, a nineteenth-century French antique that was wider than a door and stood about six feet high. Puppets lay in a leggy clutter on the stage. Gillian picked up Mr. Noodle, humming a little tune to herself.
“It was so sweet,” she said. “They played and danced and sang for me when I came home. Skipper sang all the songs we made up a long time ago.”
“Who?” Katherine said, getting up.
“Skipper.”
Gillian reached for another figure at the back of the stage. She turned around holding him fondly in her hands. Skipper was about a foot and a half long, human in his proportions, cleverly articulated. His head was walnut, his body pine. Unlike the other puppets, some of which were turn-of-the-century antiques, Skipper had a freshly carved look. He wasn’t wearing one of the traditional costumes. He had a freckled boyish face, and a thatch of red hair. The room wasn’t well lighted, but Skipper’s hair looked almost real to Katharine. She was stunned to see that the puppet had been provided with realistically carved balls and a man’s cock that hung down between his shapely wooden thighs.
“Where did you—get that?”
“What do you mean? I’ve always had Skipper.” Gillian pulled the string that caused his lower jaw to move up and down in a mime of speech. Then she pensively touched his long cock with a fingertip. “He never had one like this, though. It was tinier, you know, cute and crooked, and sometimes it stuck up, sort of like the end of my little finger.”
She turned Skipper around and around. His eyes winked alternately shut. Gillian winked back. She kissed the brick-top crown of his head and put him back on stage with the others, drew the curtains closed.
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