Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘He’ll do it,’ Calvin said. ‘I seen it before, and I wish I hadn’t. The sound is pretty bad, that wet hiss, but the smell, that’s worse. And the screaming, too. It hurts so bad even the toughest guy loses it.’

  ‘He ain’t that tough,’ Al said. ‘He’s too intelligent to be really tough. What it is, he’s stubborn. He believes the mind and the body are separate, that the body can do the suffering while he stays aloof. He believes he can tell us all kinds of shit because we’re just a couple of doofuses who don’t know any better. Well, let me tell you something, my friend,’ he said, holding the cigarette rock-steady a quarter-inch from Stone’s eye. ‘This burns at five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and when I stick it in your eye you’ll fucking well know mind and body are truly one and the same.’

  Stone tried to spit blood in Al’s face, but he was weak and out of breath, and it dribbled down his chin instead.

  Al laughed and took away the cigarette. ‘Jesus. These old-school guys. They’re hard work.’

  Calvin said, ‘What was in the post office box, Adam? That’s all we need to know.’

  ‘I told you. Didn’t I tell you?’

  Al drew on the cigarette until its tip glowed and stuck it on different places on Stone’s scalp.

  Stone bit his tongue.

  Al said, very patiently, ‘Everyone talks,’ and touched the cigarette to the bony ridge behind Stone’s ear. ‘You know that. So talk to us now, and save us all a lot of work.’

  He waited a beat, then ran the cigarette along the rim of Stone’s ear. Stone howled, letting the pain out.

  ‘Jesus,’ Calvin said. ‘We’re going to get a complaint, I know it.’

  The two men sat either side of the end of the bed in their underwear and polished shoes, regarding Stone with the serious and thoughtful manner of actors trying to decide the most satisfying and effective way of winding up an impromptu performance piece.

  Calvin suggested snipping off a couple of fingers, joint by joint. ‘Look at him,’ he said. ‘Grinning at us like an ape.’

  Stone wasn’t aware that he was smiling. He was only half there, was trying to lose himself in a reverie of his foster father working at his bench in the dusty light of the big, hip-roofed barn, cleaning up a tenon joint with small, accurate strokes of a chisel or planing a length of pine, blond fragrant curls falling like angel feathers to the packed-dirt floor. Karl Kerfeld had been a carpenter by trade, making furniture in winter, signing up with contractors in summer to fit out or renovate houses. After he and his wife Hannah had discovered that they couldn’t have children of their own, they’d taken in and raised half a dozen foster children. Adam Stone had been their last. Now he tried to remember the tools fixed to the pegboard behind his foster father’s workbench, each sitting in an outline of red paint so you could see exactly where to put it back when you’d finished with it. A tenon saw, a bow saw, hacksaws, flat-headed screwdrivers, chisels, all kinds of wood-chisels in a row . . .

  Al came off the bed and slapped Stone to get his attention, saying, ‘You found something in that post office box. Where is it? That’s all we want to know. You tell us, we’ll go away.’

  They worked him over again. The gizmo, wet knotted towels. They took their time. They took turns. Stone counted off every tool on the pegboard in his foster father’s vanished workshop, the ball-peen hammer and the drywall hammer and the engineer’s hammer and three sizes of mallet, angle clamps and C-clamps and edge clamps and hand-screw clamps, the lowangle plane and the rabbit plane, all the way down to the wire snips and the set of hex keys, and when he was done there he tried to recreate from memory the greenhouse in winter, remembering how snow covering the glass tent of the roof and heaped up six feet high along the walls had transmuted winter sunlight into a magical blue glow in which bent-backed Karl, wearing bib overalls and a heavy cardigan with the elbows worn through, expertly sifted soil into clay pots. The old man was always growing something. Early tomatoes, sweet peas. Cucumbers, chillies. His broad thumbs tamping loam, crests of dirt under his buckled nails. The rusty unpainted paraffin heater in the corner gave off a fecund warmth. Drops of moisture ran down the algae-stained glass and moss grew where the panes bedded in the cedar framing . . .

  Stone was crawling around the room on his hands and knees, bumping blindly into the wall, into the bed, into the wardrobe, while the TV blared a cheerful children’s cartoon. Grey dawn light leaked around the burgundy drapes. The two men sat on the bed and watched him. Al was out of breath and red in the face. Calvin had sweated through his undershirt and drops of sweat rolled down his face and clung to his chin in a trembling fringe. He was drinking Coke from a can. At some point he must have gone out and bought it from the vending machine in the corridor, but Stone didn’t remember it.

  Stone’s knees gave out and he collapsed on the wet carpet. He was naked, bleeding from the nose and mouth and ears, and as weak and trembling as if he’d just run a marathon. He curled up when Calvin kicked him experimentally in the ribs.

  ‘We still got his attention,’ Calvin said.

  A bell was ringing somewhere. It took Stone a few moments to realise that it wasn’t inside his head, it was a real bell.

  Al said, ‘Jesus. Is that what I think?’

  ‘I’ll take a look,’ Calvin said.

  After the big man stepped out of the room, Stone entertained a brief fantasy of finding a last reserve of superhuman strength and overpowering Al and stuffing the gizmo down his throat and pressing the button until the battery gave out. The bell was still ringing, for a moment as loud as the TV when Calvin came back into the room, slipping through the door with surprising swiftness.

  ‘Can’t see or smell any smoke,’ he said, ‘but this is a big place, could be ten floors below or ten above. People are going outside, using the stairs. I jammed one of the elevators. We can take it down to the service level, slip out that way.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ Al said. ‘We have to stay here because we aren’t finished with this bozo, and we can’t take him with us. If there is a fire, we’ll leave him to roast. If not, we start over on him. He’s almost done, Calvin,’ the small man said, caressing Stone’s face, patting his cheek. ‘He’s getting ready to tell us.’

  ‘You better be right.’

  ‘We got six hours before we have to go check the gate. We—’

  Someone had knocked loudly on the door. Calvin and Al looked at it, looked at each other. A man shouted something about a fire alarm, knocked on the door again.

  Al put his hand over Stone’s mouth while Calvin stepped up and used the peephole, saying, ‘A guy in one of those purple jackets staff wear here.’

  ‘If we stay quiet, he won’t know we’re here,’ Al said.

  There was another rap on the door. The handle jiggled up and down.

  ‘He’ll have a guest list and a master key,’ Calvin said. ‘Let me deal with it.’ He unlocked the door, opened it a crack, grunted in surprise and took a step backward, his hands going up to his face, then fell flat on his back. A black knife-handle protruded from his eye. Al jumped up, Stone kicked out and tangled the small man’s feet in his, and a man in a purple jacket stepped over Calvin’s body and shot Al in the face. The small man flopped forward with a small, sad grunt, kneeling as if in prayer with his head turned sideways, blood trickling from the scorched hole in his cheek. The man in the purple jacket kicked the door shut and bent over Stone and slapped him, quick open-handed slaps left and right.

  Stone looked up at him, trying to focus.

  ‘Do I have your attention?’ Tom Waverly said.

  9

  ‘They were working for Walter Lipscombe,’ Stone said. ‘One of them had a bleeding-heart tattoo, the old gang sign.’

  ‘Walter Lipscombe - now there’s a guy knows how to lead the good life,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘He had his people follow you through the mirror? You’re getting careless.’

  ‘They hid a transponder in that gizmo I told you to leave behind. All they had to do was drive around
until they acquired the signal.’

  ‘Pretty foxy for a couple of goons.’

  ‘Pretty dumb of me not to realise what was going on. Walter must have known all along you were in business with Freddy Layne. He found out from Freddy that you’d stolen something valuable, and he let me lead his guys straight to the prize. Except it turned out there wasn’t any prize. That was a nice joke, by the way, sending us on a mission to track down an empty envelope.’

  Stone and Tom Waverly (if it was Tom Waverly) were riding down in the elevator Calvin had jammed open. Stone leaned in a corner like a prizefighter who’d gone ten rounds too many. His entire body ached, the cigarette burns in his scalp itched like the world’s worst mosquito bites, and he had the distinct sensation that if he moved too quickly he’d topple sideways through some unseen dimension and never stop falling. In this free-floating state anything seemed possible, even talking with a dead man. A man he’d seen stick a gun in his mouth and blow his brains out not three days ago.

  Tom grinned at Stone, saying, ‘Linda told me all about your wild-goose chase. Thing is, I didn’t leave that envelope in the old dead drop.’

  He’d ditched the stolen staff jacket in Stone’s room, was dressed in a white T-shirt under a blue denim jacket, and blue jeans and the tan workboots that Stone remembered from Pottersville. His hair, which in Pottersville had been cut short and dyed black, was long and grey now, pulled back in a loose ponytail tied with red string. He had a couple of inches of untrimmed salt-and-pepper beard and looked pretty healthy for a dead man; definitely much healthier than he’d been a few days ago.

  ‘I guess you didn’t leave the key to the box in your apartment in the American Bund sheaf, either.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I haven’t been in the American Bund sheaf for six months.’

  ‘That’s not what Freddy Layne told me.’

  ‘Freddy isn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a trustworthy source of information, is he?’

  The elevator’s door opened on a shabby corridor in the hotel’s sub-basement. The fire alarm clanged in the distance.

  As Stone hobbled after him, squeezing past a traffic jam of service carts, Tom said, ‘All I know is that I got a phone call about a week ago at a number only one other person besides me should have known about. The man who made the call told me that you’d be checking out our old drop here in New York.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Tom. You set us up with that bogus trail to the drop, and you followed us here from 42nd Street.’

  ‘Matter of fact, I hired private detectives to do that for me. My mystery caller was vague about the date you’d show up; there was no way I could stake out the post office on my own. I gave them your photograph, told them to follow you, and that’s just what they did.’

  ‘You’re right about one thing. I’ve definitely lost my edge. I get jumped by Walter’s guys, I don’t spot that I’m being trailed by a couple of private dicks . . .’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, old buddy. They’re ex-police, good guys.’

  Three firefighters in heavy jackets and yellow helmets slammed through the double doors at the end of the corridor, jogged toward them. One paused, looked Stone up and down, and asked if he needed any help.

  ‘He fell down the stairs,’ Tom said.

  ‘You need to leave this place,’ the firefighter said, and hurried after his companions.

  ‘Never a truer word spoken,’ Tom said.

  The double doors opened onto the platform of a loading bay. Stone limped down the steps, holding on to the handrail, saying doggedly, ‘You told Linda to find your apartment in the American Bund. And you told her to bring me along, because I’d know what to do when we got there. You set us up.’

  ‘I save your life yet again, and all I get is grief. We need to go this way,’ Tom said, leading Stone past a row of Dumpsters into an alleyway squeezed between the flanks of tall buildings.

  ‘You also told Linda that you took something,’ Stone said. ‘She believed it would clear your name, which is why she came here. Those two goons thought I had it, which is why they were working me over. You took it from GYPSY, didn’t you? Or you took it from Dr Barrie, who is working for GYPSY, just like you.’

  ‘I didn’t steal anything from Eileen Barrie.’

  ‘Yeah, and you didn’t kill her doppels either.’

  ‘You know, I did hear something about that. But I’ve been hiding out here all the time it was going down, Adam. It wasn’t anything to do with me.’

  Stone was very familiar with his old friend’s light, sly, amused tone of voice: Tom Waverly was holding all the cards, giving teasing hints, playing with him, making him work hard for every scrap of information.

  ‘I’ve been beaten silly and I’m out of patience. You brought me here for a reason. If you don’t have the decency to explain it, I think I should walk away.’

  ‘I really did get that phone call, Adam. And there’s a plausible explanation for it, too.’

  ‘Tell me you didn’t know Walter’s goons were following me.’

  ‘If I’d known about them, I wouldn’t have spent most of the night talking with Linda. As it was, we had a lot of catching up to do. We talked and talked, and when we were about talked out, we both kind of dozed off. I wake up, I head toward your room, and this big guy I’ve never before seen in my life comes out in his underwear, gets a can of Coke from the machine, and goes back inside. I tippy-toe up to the door, thinking Linda gave me the wrong room number. I press my ear to the wood and hear you talking, hear someone else talking. I hear some unpleasant sounds too, and I figure the big guy I saw isn’t there to look after your health. So I pulled the old fire-alarm stunt. Worked pretty well, didn’t it?’

  They came out of the alley into the middle of a crowd of hotel staff, guests in overcoats or robes over nightwear and rubberneckers penned behind a police barrier. Fire trucks and police cruisers blocked the street in front of the hotel.

  ‘There she is, my brave girl,’ Tom Waverly said, and Stone followed him through the crowd toward the end of the block, where Linda was leaning against the hood of a brown station wagon.

  10

  While Linda drove the station wagon across town toward the Holland Tunnel, her father told her how he had come to Stone’s rescue. When he had finished, she told Stone that she hadn’t known it was going to happen, really and truly she hadn’t, and asked her father, ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Swear to God I didn’t. All I know is what I was told, honey. Just like you.’

  ‘You better be telling the truth,’ Linda said, and glanced in the rearview mirror. ‘You hold on, Mr Stone. We’ll stop somewhere and get you fixed up.’

  Stone was sprawled on the capacious back seat in a litter of old newspapers and fast-food cartons. He coughed, tasted blood, and said, ‘Linda? You think this guy really is your father?’

  ‘Of course he is.’

  ‘Jesus Christ had his Doubting Thomas; I have you. Check it out,’ Tom said, and pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, revealing a pale oval scar just below his right collarbone. ‘Remember when I got this? Want to put your finger on it, reassure yourself it’s real?’

  Stone ignored him and said to Linda, ‘How about before, in Pottersville? Was that your father too?’

  ‘I know it’s hard to take in, Mr Stone,’ Linda said.

  ‘It was me,’ Tom said, ‘but there’s no way I’m going to end up there now. The circle is broken. We’re making a split, right here. I can feel it. I bet you can feel it too, can’t you, Adam?’

  ‘I feel as if I’m tuned to the wrong channel,’ Stone said. ‘As if I shouldn’t really be here.’

  The effort of getting out of the hotel had exhausted him, and he was still coming down from the cocktail of drugs he’d been given. He kept losing focus on the world, drifting into a state of disconnected, not unpleasant lassitude where nothing much seemed to matter.

  ‘You’re here, all right,’ Tom said. ‘And so I am, so you’d better get used t
o it. You and me - and Linda too, of course - we’re going to split history and forge a new universe.’

  ‘We have a long way to go,’ Linda said.

  ‘We’re on the road, honey, that’s the important thing. We’re on the road, and we’re operating under our own free will. So with that general principle in mind, Adam, if you want to go your own way, I won’t stop you.’

  ‘Maybe I will when I’ve rested up,’ Stone said, and zoned out for a little while.

  When he came around, they were driving along an elevated section of turnpike. Across the sun-silvered sweep of the Hudson River, the spiky skyline of Manhattan stood against a clean blue sky.

  When he saw that Stone was awake, Tom said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, old buddy, you look like shit. But you hang in there, we’ll stop soon and get you fixed up.’

  ‘A couple of painkillers might help.’

  ‘Anything you want,’ Tom said, and beat a rhythm on his thighs with his palms, sang a couple of lines about cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, all come to look for America. ‘Everything’s falling into place. We did what we had to do to get to this point, and now we’re free to do what we need to do. Everything’s going to work out.’

  ‘It better,’ Linda said.

  ‘We have to have a little faith in the dead guy,’ Tom said. ‘But right now we’re off the page. We’re free.’ He lowered the window and stuck his head out into the rush of air. ‘Free at last! Great God Almighty, free at last! Man, does it ever feel good!’

  They stopped in a shopping mall and purchased three different brands of painkiller and tubes of burn ointment and liniment. Stone stripped off his suit and shirt in a restroom stall and anointed his wounds, dressed again, and washed down two Tylenol with a palmful of tap water and splashed cold water on his face. Every square inch of his skin hurt, a general ache enlivened by spots of specific pain - the itchy sting of the cigarette burns in his scalp and on his ear, the hot throb of a swollen eyelid that flared every time he blinked, the bone-deep bruise in his thigh where Al had injected his special cocktail. When he limped back to the car, Tom Waverly offered him a bag of White Castle burgers, and the smell of onions and cooked meat almost made him throw up.