by Dick Cluster
What should have been a half hour’s drive at this time of night took Alex twice that long. At last he turned into the driveway leading to his shop. His teeth were clenched; his lips made a sputtering noise like an engine getting under way. He got out, unlocked the garage door, and blew out a long sigh as he drove in. Then he pulled down the big steel door behind him, walked back out through the pedestrian entrance, and padlocked it.
This was not a special precaution, just something he always did when working nights. He didn’t want anybody cruising for likely B&Es to note that here was a garage sometimes left unlocked. But tonight it felt especially spooky being here alone. Inside again, he quickly hit the lights and the forced-air heat.
The sound of the blower was comforting. It promised warmth and drowned out the rapping of the icy rain on steel. Alex walked to the back, past a jumble of engine blocks and heads, spare wheels, and other large and rusty parts. He splashed his face with a sinkful of warm water. Then he waded through the old parts to his stash of miscellaneous auto glass.
He found, as remembered, both a rear windshield and a front one. He lugged them out and began removing the screws that held the fittings in place. For the moment he decided to ignore the sound of someone or something banging on the garage door. That happened often enough when he was working late. Probably a drunk, or kids liking to make noise. The window job was a painstaking one, because if the gaskets were not positioned just right, the windows would leak. Alex did not like rushing it, constitutionally, but this time he used extra silicone sealer to make up for his haste. He had wanted to test Suzanne’s confidence in him, but he didn’t want to strain it for too long. He did not want to commit himself and then find her gone. He tightened the last screw, cut the lights, and stepped cautiously outside.
The driveway looked fine— wet and cold, but empty. There were no cars awaiting repair in the driveway, for a change. A faint light filtered in from the street, and another from the barred storeroom window of Freddy’s Liquors. At a bit after nine, Freddy still had almost two hours to closing. On the street, Alex could see two cars with lights on and wipers going. They would be in a line waiting at the red light; sure enough, they growled off, revealing only the lighted window of the used-furniture place across the street. Alex undid the padlock and backed his car out. He was bending down to snap the lock closed when he heard the screech of wet rubber and the loud racing engine bearing down.
He wasn’t quick enough to slide the door up, or even to stop the motion of snapping the lock. But in the next instant, all in one move, he turned and jumped onto the hood of his car. Brakes squealed. The incoming car bumped against the Saab and banged its front bumper into the garage where his legs had been. Alex perched on the hood, pelted by the icy rain, head down behind the new glass. He felt the Saab’s body shudder on its springs as the pressure was relaxed. The other car had backed away.
In the murk and the headlights’ glare he couldn’t make out much. It was a big American car whose vertical hood ornament made him feel he was in the sight of somebody’s rifle. Then the lights went out, both front doors opened, and from each door stepped a figure in a bulky coat, each wearing a mask.
That was his first thought: each wearing a mask; and then, as they stood there without moving or speaking, details began to seep in. The car was dark, maybe black or dark green. It was a full-sized car, not new, with traditional lines. No light hit the grille or the ornament, but the upright, rectangular shape of the symbol suggested a Ford, a Granada perhaps.
The figures in the bulky coats kept behind the doors, hands down, visible only from the waist up. They wore identical dark hats with brims all around, the kind the army-surplus stores sold for use in sun or rain, with dark handkerchiefs or bandannas hanging down around their ears and the backs of their heads. They might be dressed up to play desert commandos except for their winter coats and their Halloween face masks. It finally dawned on Alex that the faces were supposed to be Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
He wanted to laugh, but the situation was both too dangerous and too surreal. The one in the Reagan mask raised his or her hand, and in the hand was a revolver, silvery and suddenly wet. It glistened in the weak electric light, a poor version of the way shattered glass had glistened in the sun. The figure was of medium height, medium height for a man anyway. The hand that held the revolver was gloved. As the gun came closer, Alex slid more to the center of the Saab’s hood. The hood was getting slick, too slick for his toes and knees. The gun pointed over the edge of his open driver’s-side door. Its owner twisted away to look all around the inside of the car. He or she seemed to study the new down parka as if somebody could just now have been wearing it, somebody who had softly and suddenly melted away.
The Reagan mask emerged from the car and turned toward Alex, seeming to study him in the same way. The gun hand wagged at him, the barrel like an admonishing finger, but without a word. His own words came back to him, legalize drugs and ban handguns instead. Then, suddenly and without a word, both Reagan and Bush retreated into their car, backed out quickly onto the street, and sped away. Alex could now see that the car was green. He’d been able to make out the emblem on the rectangular ornament— a sleek jet plane pointed toward the sky— which, for reasons he’d never understood, meant Oldsmobile. Probably an Olds Cutlass, not a Ford after all, but your basic General Motors family car. Not much of an identification, he thought, as he considered the idea of reporting this. Look, Sergeant, he could say, see this telltale dent in my garage door? And I know the make of the car. As if that mattered. They assembled them out in Framingham, off and on, when the plant wasn’t shut down anyway. There had to be five Cutlasses, of various years, parked every night on Alex’s block alone.
But there was one thing more— one thing he thought but couldn’t be sure of. The driver, the one with the Reagan mask, had bent his or her head to check out Alex’s backseat and the floor between the seats. At that moment the bandanna had ridden up enough to show just a bit of neck. Though the dim light made it hard to tell, Alex thought the skin of the neck had been brown.
Natalie, he thought. Or maybe Harold “Flash” Simms. But that made no sense, and then he thought, Who the fuck knows? In a land of equal opportunity, that might have been anybody’s colored chauffeur or hired hand. It might have been any well-heeled Caucasian, just back from a month in Puerto Vallarta or Honolulu, too. His legs trembled as he eased them to the pavement. His garage door was dented, but not seriously. The Saab’s bumper, not like some, had held its own. He sank into the bucket seat, started the engine, and backed out into the street. When the light turned green, he drove slowly past the muffler place, the Dunkin Donuts, the radiator shops and weather-beaten apartments, checking his rearview mirror and the parked cars. Plenty of full-sized American cars, some of them Oldses, some of them dark green. Near the on-ramp of the Monsignor McGrath Highway sat another of these long dark cars, headlights on and motor running.
A traffic light halted him just before that car. Alex stopped dutifully, shifted into first, held down the clutch, and waited for a small break in the traffic. When he got one, he let up on the clutch and roared through the red light. He ran the next red, too, then swerved in front of a truck laboring at the beginning of the grade that led up the ramp. With the truck’s horn blaring and its bulk filling all his mirrors, Alex couldn’t tell whether the suspicious car had followed or not. He spun sharp right, skidding but regaining control, and took the side street that led away from the ramp at ninety degrees.
Now nobody was in his mirror as he sped past three-decker apartments and corner stores, past the old trade school and the machine shop where he had taken the hubs and valves to be ground. He saw a car three blocks back, but caught a green light at Broadway and soon was climbing the hill and then winding down past the housing projects and the Accurate Speedometer shop, toward the Mystic River once again. Once he hit the Interstate, he gunned the engine and enjoyed the efficient response and the fact that he could now hit sixt
y without a gale in his face. Whoever had been behind the masks, they had apparently come looking for him in hopes of finding Suzanne. Now he had lost them and— assuming Tommy had kept his mouth shut— there was no other way anybody could locate her. He drove north at a steady sixty through the rain. He bit open the plastic surrounding the tape Tommy had sold him, and slipped the cassette into the player. Judging by the cover, Violent Femmes was a trio of young men. The first song on the album, called “Old Mother Reagan,” did not compliment the former President.
Alex grinned, happy with the sentiment of the song. He tried to decide just what it meant that someone would choose to masquerade as Reagan and his successor while pursuing Suzanne Lutrello with a gun. Probably those were just the first dime-store masks that came to hand. Politics could be a deadly business, as far as military murder or economic strangulation was concerned. But killings, individual killings, were much more purposeful and stemmed from different sorts of dark, undersidish things— things like family secrets and family vengeance, business deals and corners cut, women as merchandise, the money in white powder you sped over on skis, the money in white powder you shot into your arm or sniffed up your nose.
Violent Femmes and violent thoughts kept Alex company till he parked his car outside the motel just off the Middlesex Turnpike exit from Route 128. Out here the precipitation had turned to big splats that left a white film on the plowed motel lot. Alex backed into a space in the double row of cars in the middle. He saw a generic temporary living space, a three-story rectangular block with three rows of twenty-five identical picture windows separated by identical strips of brick. Though some rooms were lit up and some were not, none of the picture windows was in use; all the curtains were closed. It was a good place to hide, an unmarked plain brown wrapper of a building.
The builder had tacked a single-story entrance lobby onto one end of the big block. The only exterior door besides that was a glass one in the middle of the first floor. Alex grabbed the new coat, which contained in one pocket the tape recorder he and Bernie had also bought. He hurried through the sloppy weather toward the isolated glass door. He found it locked, an emergency exit, leading from a crossways hallway that had an identical exit door on the back side of the building as well. He jogged around to the lobby, his boots punching their shape into the half-inch of new snowy slush. Caution made him wait a moment in the lobby, leafing through a tray of tourist information. He thumbed a tabloid circular full of coupons, ads, and entertainment listings. He had no interest in any of this, but he was glad he had waited when he saw a long dark green car, not new, circle the lot and come to a stop in front of his Saab. It was the Cutlass, and once again it had boxed him in. He got on the house phone and called room 314.
Suzanne’s hello was tentative, opaque. She might have been peeking out her curtain, but Alex didn’t take the time to guess what she had or hadn’t seen. A plan came to him and he gave orders, that was all.
“It’s Alex,” he barked, “but somebody followed me. I’m in the lobby. There’s a fire exit on the middle of the first floor. There’s a door to the lot and a door out the back. Get out the back way as soon as you can. If I’m not there when you are, see if you can find someplace to hide on the embankment below the highway. Got it? They’re carrying guns. Go.”
Suzanne’s voice showed no terror, only decision. All she said was, “Got it. I’m gone.” He heard her hang up. He watched, but no one got out of the car. He waited a minute more, crossed the entrance lobby, and then sprinted down the long, empty corridor past faceless doors and walls. At the crossway he turned right, ducked, and frog-walked to the emergency door, counting on keeping low and on the backlighting to make him invisible to anyone keeping an eye out from the lot. The green car hadn’t moved. The passenger window was down. He thought, but couldn’t be sure, that the face looking out was masked.
He heard a door slam and turned to see a preteen girl staring at him with an open mouth. He had a flash of Maria, getting off the school bus in front of the drugstore on Huron Avenue, two blocks from Laura’s house. As she ran her tongue between her upper teeth and lips, trying to decide whether to stop in for a candy bar or a comic, this same long green car coasted to a stop. He forced the picture down and then swallowed it, a bitter fear to digest. He told himself right now he had to do one thing at a time. He ignored the girl behind him; she probably knew better, anyway, than to talk to strange men. He checked the window and then waddled back.
Suzanne came running, panting, a one-armed marathoner in the middle of a race that never seemed to end. Alex put his shoulder into the red-painted lever on the rear door, the one that said EMERGENCY USE ONLY, ALARM WILL RING. The alarm did, piercingly. The girl covered her ears and ran the other way. Suzanne and Alex were out the door and across the grounds before lights began going on in half of the darkened rooms.
The embankment was steep, but the old snow was still soft from the sun that had temporarily warmed it this afternoon. Alex kicked steps in it like a mountain climber. Suzanne gripped his wrist and used the footholds after him. At the top there was no cover except for the expressway rail. Crouching on its other side, they were invisible from the motel but exposed to lights and splashes from the onrushing cars. Alex just hoped nobody chose this place and time to hit the brakes and go into a sudden skid.
He helped Suzanne get her free arm into the proper sleeve, and then zippered the new coat closed around her. It was slowly dawning on him how vulnerable you were when you could use only one hand. He hoped you also felt exposed if you were packing a revolver and wearing a mask when fire engines and cop cars came circling about looking for something wrong. He had already heard the first sirens, and soon he saw a flashing blue light make a long curve off the exit ramp. The cruiser disappeared underneath the highway, then reappeared and took a sharp left into the motel lot.
“Five minutes,” he told her. “Pick you up here, and we’re both gone.”
13. WARM MILK
Hurrying back down the hill, Alex fixed his attention on fitting his boots into the snow steps. He tried to hurry forward, yet to balance his weight on his heels. He wanted to get down to the motel without being noticed and without falling on his face. In spite of himself, and despite a dash of guilt, he was impressed at the commotion he had caused.
The emergency door he and Suzanne had used remained open, and so did another one at the end of the building, which he hadn’t seen before. Guests wrapped in yellow motel blankets or their own coats milled busily but randomly about each door. In the emergency spotlights, the fat drops of snow fell faster and thicker out of the dark. The guests’ heads, mostly unprotected, were turning brilliant white.
As he drew closer to the nearest group, Alex could see that some people wore bathrobes underneath the coats and blankets, some wore street clothes, and a few seemed to be wearing nothing at all. Everyone had stopped for shoes or slippers or boots, except perhaps for some children being carried by adults. It was hard to tell about the children’s feet, because the grown-ups had wrapped their coats protectively around the children’s legs.
An excited babble rose as the guests milled and stamped their feet, waiting for flames to leap out of the roof or for someone to tell them they could go back inside. Most of them looked toward the building, not the highway, but Alex knew he had been spotted by a big man at the edge of the crowd. The man’s meaty hand was wrapped around the hand of the girl who had stared at Alex in the hall. His white legs were ghostly between blanket and boots. His face seemed puffed up by fear or anger or cold. “Excuse me,” Alex said, hurrying straight into the crowd. The girl stared again, but this time an injured expression came across her lips, which seemed to Alex to be blue with cold. Her lips started to make words, so Alex said, “I smelled smoke,” as he brushed past. He said, “Excuse me,” again and again, trying to project an air of authority, pushing his way farther into the crowd and then at last out the other side. He hoped there would be no security men or zealous guests blocking reentry to th
e building. His plan wouldn’t turn out very well if it left Suzanne crouching in the breakdown lane of Route 128 while he got lynched down below.
Nobody blocked the door, however, and others besides him were going in. He merged with the flow of guests scampering through the crossway and stepping in triumph into the busier scene on the parking-lot side. Across the snow, in the lot itself, the crowd was bigger but more spread out. Like others wearing boots, Alex tromped around the slow-moving column of guests clogging the plowed path. Some who preceded him were slamming car doors and starting engines, while others were gathering around the two police cruisers or scattering to stay out of the way of the first hook-and-ladder truck, just roaring in. Now he could see that the car that had been blocking his was gone. He made himself walk, not run, and then quickly brushed the snow from the new windshields and drove, slowly, out of the lot. A-plus for imagination, he told himself. Luckily, no one seemed to have gotten trampled in the stampede. Did the Constitution protect you if, to protect a guest, you yelled fire in a crowded motel?
A-plus, but the two pursuers could still be close by. Alex turned left, away from the highway, onto the busy, commercial Middlesex Turnpike. He decided not to risk a fender bent into his wheel— or worse— by cutting suddenly across traffic here. Instead, he turned right into a Burger King, circled it, and looked carefully in all directions for the green Cutlass. When he didn’t spot it, he headed back the other way, toward the highway, crossing under it and then taking the curve of the cloverleaf as fast as he dared. It had been more than five minutes, of course. He kept to the breakdown lane, at thirty, and then slowed as he came opposite the motel. Suzanne materialized in his headlights, a small figure waving one arm, running toward him through swirling snow.
He stopped, swung open the passenger door, gave her a hand, and then pulled the door shut. Her teeth literally chattered. Alex put both hands on the wheel, accelerating and fighting his way onto the road. “Heat’ll be up in a minute,” he reassured her. “I’m getting off at the first exit. I’m gonna wander around north and east until we hit I-93. If anybody’s following, we ought to know it. You don’t know anybody with a green Oldsmobile, maybe five years old?”
