Chapter 66
I hit the macadam hard, the .45 bouncing out of my hand, and sliding across the entire lower lot.
No pain. Not yet.
I rolled under the Explorer, dodged the shots that blew little chunks of frozen blacktop out of the lot. From down there I could see Barnes and the Bald Man using the soles of their shoes like ice skates, skidding down the length of the overlook parking lot.
When I knew the Bald Man’s clip was empty, I slipped out from under the Explorer and jumped up. I opened the passenger-side door, grabbed the manuscript, ran for the fence, the blood running down the interior of my arm onto my hand.
Flat on my stomach, I slithered under the fence.
Nothing there but three feet of cliff edge. Beyond that, a one-hundred-foot drop down into the river and then another one-hundred-foot ride down the falls.
Two more rounds blasted through the wood fence, one at my feet, one at my head. Not an easy thing, skating and shooting blind through a wood fence. Not even for a pro like the Bald Man.
I got my balance and crawled along the twenty or so feet of rock ledge, using the fence as cover, the roaring water shooting up into my face. Nowhere to go other than straight ahead through the dark, the plastic shopping bag in my left hand. I inched my way toward the hotel with the now visible ladder made from iron rungs embedded in the portion of cliff face that served as the old hotel’s foundation.
It took only a few seconds to make it on my belly to the cliff-side ladder.
Looking down on the ladder, I reached out with my right hand, grabbed onto the first rung as tightly as I could. Then I set my right leg onto another rung farther down. From there I climbed down into the cave where, with a little luck, I could stop the bleeding in my shoulder and maybe wait it out till morning.
But who the hell was I kidding?
I knew Barnes wasn’t going anywhere, not until I was dead.
I knew the only reason they weren’t coming after me from up above was because they’d already started forcing their way into the hotel. I knew they were peeling away the boards and going in through the front door. I knew as certain as the remains of that gigantic old cable car staring me in the face that Barnes and the Bald Man would be coming after me via the Cataract Hotel basement.
It’s exactly what I would have done had I been in their shoes.
Chapter 67
Two choices.
Make a dive into the falls, or fight them off without a gun and with a slug buried in my shoulder.
No choice, either way.
But then, I did have one more choice.
The old cable extended to the other side of the river. The cable was still strong. If it wasn’t still strong, it would have collapsed under its own weight. If I used my legs and my good arm, I could snake my way to the other side.
There was a stack of old tires and chains jammed into a corner of the cave behind the old cable car. I pulled back the first three tires, stuffed the manuscript inside, then covered them back up. You’d never know the book was there unless you were looking in it. I zipped my leather jacket up tight. Then I climbed up onto the roof of the cable car by way of a narrow ladder soldered to the side panel. I grabbed on to the cold, tightly wound cable and wrapped my legs around it. I took a deep breath and started inching my way forward, just as they came out the basement door and started blasting their way through the tunnel.
Hand over hand, foot over foot, over the cliff edge, making the mistake of looking down, the mist blowing up into my face so hard and so cold it took my breath away—and all my strength along with it.
I froze right there.
What the hell was I thinking?
I felt the spray and the razor cold cutting right through me.
I raised my head, tried to spot the cave lit up in the moonlight and now the flashing lights of the cop cruisers and ambulances.
The Bald Man was on his way, no more than twenty feet behind me, crawling with all the strength of a man who had two good arms, two good legs, and a whole lot of hate, closing the gap between us, fast.
I tried to get a full breath.
Impossible with all the mist and all the cold, the falls sucking the oxygen right out of the night.
I raised my head again, looked past my feet.
I saw the Bald Man’s face.
His face, with this wild glow in the moonlight, coming for me so fast you’d swear he was a spider maneuvering upside down along his web.
A second or two later he caught up to me, grabbed on to my right foot, tried to pry it off the cable by twisting it at the ankle.
I pulled my leg away, kicked him in the face, in his mouth and nose.
He smiled at me.
Three separate well placed blows with the heel of my boot against his face and he can still smile. He clung to the cable with his right hand, reached up toward his right ankle, pulled out a bowie knife, the stainless steel glistening in the moonlight. When he stuck the knife into my left calf, I felt the fire shoot up my leg into my head.
But I held on.
I kicked at him again, landed one square between the eyes, jarring his head back, sending his sunglasses down into the mist.
He was bleeding from the mouth.
Me, just holding on, knowing I couldn’t possibly move. With every movement, I felt myself slipping.
And then it happened.
It was like the pain had seeped out of my body and the falls had shut off. It was as if the night had become day, all things suddenly crystal clear. I looked at the bastard, bowie knife poised high in the air, ready to slash at me again.
I took a deep breath and held it.
Just as he came down with the knife, I dropped my legs, held myself to the cable with both my arms.
The knife missed me. It swung completely around and landed in his right thigh.
He never made a noise. He just tried to pull the knife out. But he’d driven the blade too deep.
I swung my legs back up onto the cable, kicked him in the head. He lost his foothold. Now he clung to the cable with only his arms.
But then it was just his hands.
And then only one hand, which is exactly when he looked up at me with wide eyes streaked with blood.
I looked down at him, hovering far above the falls, his fingers straining to hold his weight, his round slick head reflecting the moonlight, thin little mustache glistening in the mist, hoop earring still hooked to his left lobe.
He wasn’t smiling or frowning.
He just looked curious. So this is what it’s like to die, I imagined him thinking.
I stared back at him, hanging there for what seemed forever, feeling no pain, no fear, nothing. Just a nice peaceful climax.
A second later, he was gone.
PART FIVE
NOVELIST BARNES REPORTED MISSING!
ALBANY (AP)-The search began today for best-selling novelist Renata Barnes, who was officially reported missing while on assignment in Mexico. Barnes, the wife of prominent public-relations mogul Richard Barnes, had been researching the dangerous drug wars taking place in and around the desert border lands. It is feared she was abducted by any one of more than a half dozen crime families currently believed to be vying for the majority of the illicit business being conducted in the area. While some have speculated that the famous “method writer” was arrested after having posed as a drug runner, her husband, Richard Barnes, denies all such accusations. Sources close to him report he is doing everything in his power to see to his wife’s safe return.
Chapter 68
So this is what it’s like to die, she thinks. This is all it takes, just a nice peaceful drive in the dark of night to the river’s edge, park Tony Angelino’s Porsche at the cliff-side overlook, and get the hell out. Don’t even pocket the car keys. Leave them in the ignition, keep the engine running, let the radio play, don’t bother to close the door behind you. Like the song says, Just slip out the back, Jack…Set yourself free.
Here’s what sh
e does to be free: She takes a deep breath, begins the long slow march across the parking area. With sharp blue eyes she focuses on the abandoned overlook and the fog that rises up from the waterfalls beyond the hastily constructed wood safety fence, beyond the old Cohoes Cataract Hotel built smack-dab into the one-hundred-foot cliff face, now boarded up with plywood, the windows shattered ages ago, the wood shingles rotted away from the constant mist, long before her birth, before her parents’ births for that matter. Other than the roar of the falls in the darkness, there is no sound. Not the sound of the car engine, not the sound of her soles on the ice-covered blacktop, not her quick but steady breaths, not the beating of her heart. There is only the permanent roar of the waterfall and the persistent voice in her head that tells her, It’s time to go, baby. It’s time to shake the dust of this one-horse world off your boots.…
Oh man, if she could only write about dying the same way she had written so believably about so many things in her thirty-five years of living. She was the method writer, after all. At least, that’s the way people would remember her.
Now if only she could experience death and come back to record all the mind-blowing details. What a story it’d make. What a scoop. Death is a process, she’d write, not a sudden alarming event. Death has nothing to do with initial decay, putrefaction, butyric fermentation, and so on. All that was physical; the result of research. It wasn’t feeling or emotion. Her report would go beyond the physical to the emotional. It would grab the readers by their heartstrings, yank them right out of their chests—blood, guts, and all. From the moment we’re born, she’d attest—from the precise moment we’re forced down that long tunnel toward the warm bright light—we’ve already begun to die. That’s why death is so much like being horny, she’d write. There’s the long dark tunnel with the light at the end. There are the faces and voices of your loved ones. There’s the peace and harmony of the womb and the canal. She’d write about it all if it were possible, because she would have placed herself in the death experience. Death would have happened to her. Not near death, but death. She’d be the only person qualified enough to write about it. So you want to know how it feels to die? she’d pen as an opener. This is what it’s like.
Death has always been her shadow.
Now as she approaches the cliff’s edge she feels no fear. In fact she feels loose, focused, free. She feels the resignation in her soul. Like the Indians used to say, it’s a good day to die. A good frosty night in the city of Cohoes anyway. As she crawls under the fence with a metal sign nailed to it that reads, DANGER: KEEP OUT, she knows she’s doing the right thing, that danger no longer has any meaning for her. Back on her feet, heading for the cliffs edge, the roar of the rushing water drowning her sighs, the mist coating her face and freezing to her skin, she knows she’s beating death and her husband at their own game.
But God almighty, if only she could live to write about it…
Chapter 69
I didn’t feel even an ounce of pain when I died.
Darkness surrounded me. But then there was the sensation of moving slowly upward through a thick cloud of mist toward a brilliant overhead light.
Some people might attribute the experience to my rescue by a helicopter rigged with spotlighting and to the way the safety harness lifted me through the heavy mist of the Cohoes Falls to the safety of the chopper deck.
But it still felt like dying, as though my soul had left my body and was heading upward to heaven.
There’s other evidence.
Nothing hurt.
Nothing at all. And there was an amazing warmth that wrapped itself around my body like a security blanket.
But then, here’s the truth of the matter: From what they tell me now, I’d lost so much blood that I actually died, in clinical terms. As soon as I let go of the cable and hit the river, I died. And I believe it, because I’m a changed man now. Not because of the death, but because of who I saw in that death. As soon as I crossed over into the light, I saw Fran. Just waiting for me like I was coming through the door of the home we shared in Albany only on weekends, a drink in her hand and a smile on her face. She came to me smiling and laughing, her black hair as smooth as her soft voice and as deep as her dark eyes. I asked her why she was laughing and she said that I’d made a mistake. Another “whopper of a blunder.” That it was so typical of me to just go ahead and “get dead” before my time. That missing her was one sorry excuse to cut my life short. She’d always be there waiting for me. Get on with living my life. Stop living in the past. She loved me, she said. Then she reached out her hand to me. And just as I reached out to her, at the very moment I was about to touch the tips of her fingers, I felt myself floating back fast and abruptly. Like going in reverse on a roller coaster. I stood outside my body, and I saw myself as a man and then as a teenager and then as a little boy with a bright smile on my face. I breathed and I was back.
The doctors had a name for it.
NDE.
Near Death Experience.
Also referred to in some circles as the Lazarus Syndrome, for obvious reasons. The symptoms are the same for everybody: the black tunnel, the bright light at the end of it, the warmth, the peace and quiet, the friends and family who await you on the other side, telling you to get back.
“I wouldn’t say this to most people,” the young doctor with horn-rimmed glasses suggested, as he stood over me in my second-floor room of the Albany Medical Center. “But in my opinion NDE is simply the effects of decreased oxygen supply to the brain. Hypoxia. While some fanatics believe they are actually entering the realm of the unknown, what is simply occurring is suffocation of the temporal lobe.”
I tried propping myself up a little on the two pillows the nurse had stuffed behind my head earlier, careful not to disturb the plastic drain that had been inserted into the wound in my left shoulder, the pain now reduced to a constant dull throb.
“There is, of course, another explanation,” the doctor said, turning back to me just as he was about to leave the room. “Some might say that NDE is simply the latent memories of the birth experience come back to us in our final moments in full Technicolor glory. Because being born is an experience we all share. Hands down. No one is exempt. Think about it: the long dark tunnel, the bright light at the end of it, the elation and warmth of your mother’s face.”
“And all this time, doc, I thought I had something to look forward to,” I said.
“What difference does it make what happens to us when it’s all over, Mr. Marconi, so long as it’s unconscious?”
He turned to leave.
I called out to him one last time.
“What is it?” he asked.
“So you don’t believe in the black and whiteness of death, do you?” I said. “Heaven for the good, hell for the bad.”
He shook his head, smiled. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”
“But you brought me back to life,” I said.
“I have that gift,” he said.
“I guess that makes you God,” I said.
“Correction, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “Science is God.”
I was glad he left the room before a thunderbolt exploded and fried us both.
Chapter 70
Two days later they dragged Renata’s body from the Mohawk River, not far from the spot where the Bald Man was supposedly killed when he fell from the cable into the falls. Unlike me his body took the ride over the falls and was never recovered. Having given her testimony to Detective Ryan, she simply drove to the Cohoes Falls overlook, slipped under the fence, and leapt off the side of the cliff.
No explanation, no warning.
Just a nice peaceful water landing.
But she had left something behind.
A letter sealed in a number-ten business envelope with my name written on it in ballpoint pen.
While I lay on my back in the hospital bed, Tony stood against the far wall of the room, beside the small vanity and sink. Val sat on the bed beside me. At my request, she opene
d the letter and began reading.
“Dear Keeper Marconi,” she read aloud, clearing her throat once or twice before continuing. “By the time you read this, I will be dead. I don’t know if you are capable of understanding the way I feel about Charlie or about the love I have for him still or about what I am willing to do in order to make amends for what I have done. I know you don’t have any children, so maybe you’ve never experienced the love for a child like I have. Let me tell you, it is a bond you cannot imagine unless you’ve experienced it. At the risk of sounding sentimental, I feel I must express how happy Charlie’s birth made me. I was simply happy to hold him, play with him, feed him, sleep beside him, be a mom to him in every sense of the word. He was everything to me. So much so that I did not have to write anymore to feel fulfilled. And I must say (even now) it was the same for Richard. We both loved Charlie, which makes it all the more difficult to explain what I’m about to tell you now.
“I’m not exactly sure when it happened or how it happened or what forces were at work, but after a time, the love Richard had for our son began to turn into a kind of fear. It was as if Richard had been possessed one night by something in his sleep. He began to obsess over the baby’s fate. What if something terrible happened to Charlie? Something he had no way of preventing? What if one of us dropped him or left him out in the cold? What if—God forbid—he contracted cancer? There was no end to the possibilities. And because there was no end it began to seem logical, to Richard, that losing Charlie somehow, some way, was inevitable.
“Can you possibly conceive of what I’m trying to tell you, Keeper? For Richard, Charlie’s death had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And in the end Richard felt that the only way fate could be fooled was to take control. If he was powerless to keep Charlie, then he had no choice but to take matters into his own hands.
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