Lowland Rider

by Chet Williamson

  "Here, Father. For the church."

  Mulcahy didn't understand. In his fourteen years as a priest, he'd never had anyone come up and give him anything on the subway. "I'm sorry? I . . ."

  "Take it, Father. At least I know you're straight." The man dropped the envelope into the priest's lap, and walked into the next car.

  Father Mulcahy opened the envelope and saw that it was stuffed with twenty dollar bills. The first thing he did was to look about sharply to see who might have noticed the gift; the second was to thank God; the third was to get off at the next stop and take a cab, more expensive but more secure, the rest of the way to his parish house.

  ~*~

  Rennie Russell was blind and old and poor, and sold pencils out of a coffee can in the 50th Street station. When he heard footsteps coming toward him, he called out "Buy a pencil, fifty cents," and heard the sound of one being lifted from the can. He held out his hand, but instead of two quarters he felt someone press a wad of paper into his palm.

  "They're all twenties," a voice said. "Don't let anyone tell you any different."

  "Hey, what—" But the footsteps clicked away. Rennie fingered the paper. It had the limp, raggy feel of money, and was the right size too. He counted it, and found there were twenty-five bills. If the man was telling the truth, that meant there were five hundred dollars here. He'd take it to the bank. They wouldn't cheat him at the bank.

  Five hundred dollars, he thought in amazement. For a pencil. That man must've had a story he wanted to write down real bad…

  ~*~

  Jeanette Lewis's baby was sick. She was riding home from the doctor's office, holding her son in one arm and the doctor's bill with the other, reading it again and again and wondering where she was going to get the money to pay not only for the office call, but for the treatments that had to follow. She had just begun to cry softly when a man sat next to her, said, "You look like you could use this," and handed her an envelope. Thinking it was a religious tract, she shook her head and looked the other way. But when the man said, "It's money," she looked at the envelope again, then at the man's face.

  "What I gotta do for it?" she asked suspiciously.

  "Hold out your hand."

  Her eyes flashed to the envelope, to the man's face, to his other hand, which she saw was empty. "I don't get it."

  "I'm giving you this money, that's all. No strings attached."

  She snorted a little laugh. "They's always strings attached, Mister. I don't think I want your money."

  "Listen to me," the man said intently. "I know you can use it. You don't look like a junkie to me, and that's a medical bill you've got there. I'm giving this to you, if you want it."

  "But. . . why?"

  "No why. No reason. You need it, I've got it. Take it and never see me again."

  "Are you. . . are you tryin' to buy my soul?"

  The man raised his head a bit, as though the suggestion surprised him. Then he smiled. "Maybe I'm trying to buy back my own."

  ~*~

  So Jesse gave away Bob Montcalm's money. He gave the majority of it to priests and nuns, since they were easy to identify. He gave much to people who were crippled or had deformities, and was once cursed soundly by a poorly dressed man on crutches who informed Jesse that he was not a charity case. Jesse took him at his word and apologized.

  It took him seven hours to distribute the nearly fourteen thousand dollars.

  ~*~

  Claudia saw Jesse Gordon sitting on the first bench of the downtown side of the 86th Street station, right where he had said he would be when he called her a half hour before. He was empty-handed and smiling.

  "What's up?" she asked him as she sat down on the bench beside him. Although she was excited she tried to hide it. This was the first time that he had gotten in touch with her for an unscheduled meeting.

  "There's something I want to tell you. Something I want you to write down. A piece of your story."

  He told her about Montcalm, although he didn't mention him by name, about Rodriguez, whose name he did mention, and about breaking into the locker and giving the money to people on the trains.

  When he finished, the first thing she said was, "This should be reported. This man should be turned in, prosecuted."

  "There'd be no point. There's no real proof. Nothing in writing. No witnesses except maybe some skells. They know everything that goes on down here, but who'd put them on the stand? What jury would believe them? No, I've hurt this guy as badly as he can be hurt. He did it all for money, and now that money's gone." Jesse shook his head and looked away. "Besides, he's just a tool of someone else anyway."

  "This Rodriguez?"

  "Somebody a lot worse than Rodriguez."

  "Who's that?"

  He shook his head as if to clear it. "I can't tell you any more now. Maybe some day I will."

  "What about the name of this policeman?"

  "Some day. Not now. Besides, I know you. If you snoop around, you can find out the name on your own." He smiled at her. "You don't want me to make things too easy for you, do you?"

  "You never have," she said petulantly, and his face immediately sobered.

  "Don't pout. It won't work with me."

  "Why did you tell me all this?"

  "So someone would know, that's all. If anything happens to me."

  "When are you coming up, Jesse?"

  "I've got too many things to do down here first.”

  “First? Then you will come up? Eventually?"

  "I don't know. I don't think so… I don't know."

  He stood up, and the strength of the move indicated to her that she had been dismissed.

  "If this policeman… if something was to happen to him, would you be content then? Would you come up then?"

  He looked at her and shook his head sadly. "It's not him," he said, then turned and walked away from her.

  "Who, Jesse?" She called after him, but he did not look back. "Jesse…" she whispered, thinking how strange the name sounded to her.

  CHAPTER 21

  Bob Montcalm had just taken a cup of coffee from the machine and was returning to his desk when he heard several of the men talking loudly in the hall:

  "…but the dumb shit brought it in, Carlin told me. Can you fuckin' beat that? Some guy hands me a thousand bucks on the subway, I sure as shit'll take it, no questions asked."

  "What are you talkin' about, Rocco?" Montcalm asked a short, squat uniformed cop around whom the others were circled.

  "Aw, a report from downtown, Bob," Rocco Petrocelli answered in a voice made rough from smoking. "Some priest walks into a precinct house and tells them some guy in the subway gave him a thousand bucks for the church. Well, the good father smells something fishy here, and thinks maybe the money's been stolen, so he brings it in."

  Montcalm's knees suddenly felt cold. He told himself there was no connection between this incident and Jesse Gordon, but something else told him there was. He forced himself to grin. "No shit. Who was this good Samaritan? Get a description?"

  Petrocelli shrugged. "Not much of one. Guy had a beard, T-shirt and jeans. White guy, that's about it."

  The description could have been of thousands of men other than Jesse Gordon, but Montcalm knew that it wasn't, that only a crazy man would give away a thousand dollars on the subway, and that Jesse Gordon was sure as hell crazy.

  All of which meant that if it was Jesse Gordon, he was either giving away his own money…

  Or somebody else's.

  Either way, it was money in which Montcalm had a claim, and he felt sweat break out on his forehead as he told himself that it had to be Gordon's own money, that there was no way that Gordon could have found Montcalm's locker, and that if he did, there was no way he could have gotten inside it to take Montcalm's money, Jesus, no, there was no way…

  But he didn't believe a word of it.

  Trying not to run, he threw on his blazer over his service revolver and left the office. As the train took him closer and
closer to Penn Station and his locker, the knowledge that Gordon had somehow taken his money beat at him so brutally that it was an anticlimax when he opened the locker. Still, even though he had run through the experience in his mind a dozen times, actually seeing the empty locker and the hole cut through from the other side maddened him. Enraged, he smashed both fists against the metal over and over again, and began to cry, thinking that it wasn't fair, that it wasn't for himself he wanted the money, it was for Gina, and how this son of a bitch had just signed her death warrant by making it impossible for him to get her away from this vile, stinking city where people on every fucking corner were willing to sell you shit that killed you by inches or all at once.

  After the initial fury had swept through him, he reached through the hole and pulled out the metal shears and the chisel. He thought about having them fingerprinted to see if they would match the prints that were taken from Gordon's apartment, but then decided that it would only affirm what he already knew. Besides, he couldn't tell anyone about the break-in, or what was in the locker. Christ, he couldn't even get back that lousy thousand dollars from the priest without spilling the whole thing.

  No, this was a score he had to settle himself. He would get the bastard and whatever money the bastard had left. He had never killed before, but it occurred to him that now was the time to start.

  At headquarters he told his captain that he was going to go below as a shoefly for a few days to check out his men, watch them unawares. The captain, though hesitant, agreed after Montcalm assured him that all his paperwork was caught up. Montcalm returned to his apartment and dressed in khaki slacks, a work shirt, and sunglasses. Over his shoulder holster he wore an old jeans jacket, and tugged a Yankees cap down over his forehead. He grabbed a handful of tokens from the always filled box by his apartment door, went down to the street, down to the tunnels, and began to ride.

  CHAPTER 22

  If you just keep your ears open, Butch Devlin thought, you can learn a lot of things. By keeping his own ears open for a few weeks, Devlin had learned who had the master keys to the storage lockers. However, in those few short weeks, Butch Devlin had also become more heavily addicted to crack. He no longer went to the base house with Mike. He didn't have to. Mike brought him his crack now, Devlin paid him for it, and he smoked it at home alone after work. Maybe it wasn't as social as going to the house uptown, but it was a hell of a lot more convenient. Besides, those uptown dudes were weird, and the place scared him. When that girl who couldn't have been more than fourteen had walked up to the corner of the room where he and Mike were smoking, and told them that she'd blow them both for ten bucks worth, well, that had really freaked Devlin out. It was a scene he didn't want to see again. But he realized that if he didn't either stop doing crack or win the goddam lottery, he might be offering to blow people himself before too long.

  The crack was making a crack in his personal finances, and that crack was widening so that everything was falling into it. He'd sold his stereo and all of his records, and had been eyeing his TV lately, wondering how much Sam down the block would give him on it. But Jesus, with his TV gone, what the hell else would he do? He didn't have the money to go to the movies anymore, didn't have the money to do squat except eat and pay the rent and buy his crack. Butch Devlin netted $36 a day scrubbing tile, and $25 of that went to Mike. It didn't leave much, and he was falling further and further behind.

  And lately he was thinking more and more about that dealer and his locker full of money. Yeah, thinking about it more than ever now that he knew who had the key. Dave Harnett was the guy's name. He worked for the locker company and came around three times a week to empty the coin compartments into a big cloth bank sack that he carried like a club. He carried a little zippered case with some papers in it, and that case was where he kept the key ring. There were about a dozen keys on it, all of them fat and squatty plastic things with the metal key part sticking out the one end. Devlin had hung around the room where the janitors ate their lunch and shot the shit with the guy the week before, asking enough questions to learn some things but not make Harnett too curious himself. But what he'd needed to learn most was something that Harnett had shown him rather than told him.

  After gathering up the hundreds of quarters that filled his huge sack, Harnett then took them somewhere—bank, security office, Devlin didn't know or care. What he cared about was that Harnett left his little zippered case on top of the refrigerator for the twenty minutes it took him to get rid of his quarters.

  Devlin thought twenty minutes would be enough—take the case, walk right to the alcove with locker number 4602, try the keys until he hit the right one, open the locker, take the gym bag, stash it in a nearby locker, and return Harnett's case. If he moved fast, it would take him ten, twelve minutes tops. And then, after work. . .

  Of course there was the possibility that he might not be alone in the lounge when Harnett left, but in that case all he had to do was to grab the case and run out the door a minute after Harnett left, and say something like, "Holy shit, Harnett forgot his stuff—I'll see if I can catch him. . ." and hope to God that nobody else noticed that Harnett always left his case there. Odds were no one did. Then all he had to do was come back after he'd gotten the money, toss the case on the refrigerator, and say that he'd missed him. If a robbery from a locker was reported, maybe someone would remember that he'd taken the case, but drug dealers weren't too likely to report a robbery like that, were they? All in all, it looked to Butch Devlin like a foolproof plan.

  CHAPTER 23

  After two days of living on the subways, Bob Montcalm found Jesse Gordon. He spotted him at 6:30 in the morning in a car on the Lexington Avenue line between the 86th and 96th Street stations.

  Montcalm had been walking through the cars, pausing before he entered each one, looking into it in order to see Gordon before Gordon saw him. The procedure had worked, for now he gazed through two panes of dusty glass at Jesse Gordon sitting with his eyes closed at the end of the next car.

  Montcalm reached inside his jeans jacket and touched the rough checkered butt of the pistol, not because he intended to shoot Gordon immediately, but to make sure the gun was there, and had not magically vanished as had his money through that round hole in the steel. He almost looked on Gordon as a magician, and would not have been surprised to find that his pistol had become useless in the man's presence.

  With an effort, he dismissed such foolish imaginings, and tried to think of Gordon as nothing more than a subject for surveillance, for he could do nothing to him until he found where Gordon kept his money.

  At Grand Central, Gordon transferred to the Crosstown, and from there to the Seventh Avenue—Broadway line, and got off at Penn Station. Montcalm had no difficulty in following him without being seen, for Gordon did not look around once. It seemed to Montcalm that Gordon walked as though he had a mission, a fancy undermined by the fact that the first place the man stopped was the hot dog stand in the main terminal. Montcalm waited impatiently while Gordon ate, thinking that he might have to do a lot more waiting before he went to where he kept his money stashed. But he would have to wait no more than twenty-four hours, for Gordon had to put quarters in the locker every day. And Montcalm would watch him, and follow him, and kill him, out of hatred and revenge and in the certainty that Gordon would never bother him or Gina again. Although he had never killed anyone before, this time he would. This time it was not a bluff. This time he would do it. And he prayed to God to let him, and then he prayed that Gordon would go to his money soon.

  Bob Montcalm didn't believe in God, but something that he prayed to that day was kind. After Jesse Gordon finished his hot dog and coffee, he walked across the terminal and down a flight of stairs. Montcalm followed, and before long he saw Gordon enter an alcove which he knew had lockers in it. His heart began to race, and he looked down the short corridor in which he stood, looked and saw no one. He listened as well, and heard nothing, no footsteps of anyone approaching. There would be time
to kill Gordon, open the locker, and take whatever was inside. Mont-calm took out the gun, held it at his side, and stepped into the doorway.

  Jesse Gordon was standing at his locker, but the first thing Montcalm noticed was a uniformed policeman leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. The officer had his eyes on Gordon, so Montcalm had the time and the presence of mind to put the gun behind his back. When the officer turned and looked at him, Montcalm saw that it was a man he did not recognize. He glanced at Gordon, who was standing at the open locker with his back to him, then turned, keeping his gun hand away from the policeman, and walked out of the alcove and down the corridor.

  He rounded a corner, pushed the pistol into its holster, and waited, remembering where Gordon had been standing, remembering the position of the locker —second one in the top row. That was good, that was fine. When Gordon came out he would follow him, and when they were alone he would kill him and take the key, then go back to the locker and take his own sweet time opening it and cleaning it out.

  Montcalm looked around the corner and saw no one. He waited five minutes before he began to suspect that he missed Gordon, that the man might have come out of the alcove right behind him, or in the time it had taken for him to round the corner, think for a second, and look back. Sweat sprang out on Montcalm's forehead, and his face felt hot as he trotted down the corridor the way he had come.

  This time, there was no one in the alcove. Both Jesse Gordon and the policeman were gone. The locker at which Gordon had been standing was closed and locked. Montcalm clenched his fists until the nails dug tracks in his palms. He had lost him. He had had him with the money and had lost him, and might never find him again. But then he made himself relax and start to reason calmly. The locker, which he saw now was number 4602, was still locked. That meant that Gordon had locked it, and he had locked it because something was in it, something that he would be coming back for sooner or later. And when he did, Montcalm would be ready for him…