Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  She'd been hiding in the restaurant's shady patio in the back, which this late in the afternoon was almost deserted. Now it was time to move. The latest arrangement—the day had been a series of pleadings and bitter arguments with Tony about the impossibility of getting the papers as fast as he wanted—was to check in with him at 3:30 p.m., at which time he'd tell her where to bring the bill of lading. She hadn't spoken to Charlie in hours. But the electronic transfer of his funds from Citibank had come through without a hitch, so perhaps—well, she didn't know how much faith she had that he was still alive.

  She paid for her meal, correcting the incorrectly figured tax on the check, slipped through the dining room, which featured oil paintings of naked women, and exited out the front. She turned north toward Houston Street, drifted west, then remembered two pay phones she used to pass on the walk home when she worked at the Jim-Jack. Tony had given her a local seven-digit number, not his cell phone, and insisted she had to use that one now. This meant that the call went through all the regular wires. He's going to trace me, she thought, even though I'm using a cell phone. He wants to trace me because he thinks I'm going to run. He thinks I'm going to run and he might be right. He's thinking that I was a little too obvious about his name being on the bill of lading, and he was right about that, too. So he's thinking that I'm thinking what I'm thinking. The pawn is not Charlie anymore. We both know that. Charlie forgot the phone number, and so Tony couldn't find the location of the spot-buyer's office. I'm very sorry about that. I didn't want Charlie to get caught up in it, I didn't expect it. If he hadn't called her mother . . . the one pawn left, her mother. Whom she was not going to sell out. Christina had tried calling her mother all day, but gotten no answer. Which was good. Tony wouldn't be thinking that I could run with the bill of lading if he really had her, Christina thought. That means he figures that I can find out that he doesn't have her. By indicating his fear, he's indicating his vulnerability.

  She dialed her mother one more time, using Rahul the Freak's phone. The low-battery light came on. Nothing. Then the answering machine. That's it, Christina told herself. Maybe Mom talked to Charlie this morning, then left on a trip with one of her old, rusted-tomato-can men. I think I'm free.

  But she was still due to call Tony in four minutes on his funky number. The two pay phones stood at that same corner. She checked the dial tone of each phone, bought a role of tape from the hardware store on the corner, and taped the two pay phones together, mouthpiece to earpiece. I have to keep this straight, she told herself. If I screw up one step, I'll have to start all over. She hoped the cell-phone battery would last. She took the change out of her purse and slipped in two or three dollars' worth into each phone. More than enough for her purposes. She looked at the phones one last time. The cell phone she called A. The pay phone on the left she called B, and the one on the right C. The phone she was going to dial was D.

  "Yo, baby, you doing something illegal?"

  Two black guys from the newsstand half a block away sauntered up. They walked slowly, in order to scare her.

  "You guys are exactly who I need to see," she said.

  "Why?"

  She beckoned them closer. "You want to make a little money and learn a trick you can use in your business activities?"

  "What you mean, our business activities?"

  She smiled.

  "Well, all right."

  She pointed to the phones. "You watch, okay? See, I have a little problem. Some people want me to call them and they gave me a number. Problem is, soon as I call them, they're going to know where I am."

  The two guys liked this. "Police."

  "Right. Some kind of police number. They can get the trace in five or ten seconds. Maybe faster, for all I know. So, with this phone"—she pointed to pay phone C—"I'm going to call the bad number. With the other pay phone, I'm going to call my cell phone." She checked to see that they got it. "I call my cell phone first so that is the existing connection."

  "I get it, smoke them fuckers."

  "Listen, guys," said Christina, "I want you to stand here for five minutes and look like big bad black guys, okay? Because, if you do, then you're going to see something very funny."

  "What?"

  "You're going to see some guys scream up in some kind of car and be looking for—"

  "You."

  "Right."

  He nodded solemnly. "It's cool."

  Now she dialed her cell phone using pay phone B. The low-battery light blinked steadily. The phone rang, and she punched the talk button. She could hear her own voice coming out of the earpiece of the other phone. "Okay, this connection is made. Now I dial the other one." Which she did. "You guys stand here." She positioned them in front of the phone booths. As long as they stood there, no one would mess with the phones taped together.

  "Yeah?" came a voice in her ear.

  "Okay, I'm calling in," she said. The connection worked, but there was a lot of garbage in the sound. She patted one guy on the cheek, winked at the other. "I'm calling, like I said."

  "Where are you?"

  "I'm in midtown, Forty-second and Broadway."

  "Okay."

  She started walking.

  "You said Forty-second and Broadway?"

  "Yeah, what do you want me to do?"

  "I got to check, hang on."

  Stalling. They already knew she was lying, of course. She turned the corner onto Bowery, wondering how long the cell-phone battery would last.

  "Yeah, okay. What we'd like you to do," came the voice, "is set up a way so that we can get this piece of paper."

  "All right," she said.

  "What?"

  "I said all right."

  "Connection's terrible."

  "I'm at a pay phone." They probably had a car on the way. She had to stay on the phone long enough so that they thought she was there.

  "We want you to suggest a way of meeting, a place," came the voice.

  "How about at the top of the Empire State Building?" she said.

  "Well, no . . . maybe. I got to check. What about somewhere near where you are?"

  "That's a good idea," she said.

  Suddenly the phone filled with ripping static.

  "Hey!" a voice called.

  "Hello? Hello?" came another.

  "She fucked us!"

  Christina turned off her phone and kept walking, the bill of lading securely in her bag. I'm free, she told herself. I'm just going to go back to the Pioneer Hotel and think of a way to survive a few more days. But then there was the question of her mother. If her mother answered the phone and was fine, then she wouldn't have to worry. She could figure out what to do next. I'll try one more time, Christina decided. She turned on the phone. The battery light blinked constantly. She punched in the number.

  "Hello?" came her mother's voice, full of fear.

  "Mom?"

  "Please do whatever they say, Tina," her mother cried. "There are three of them here in the living room. They turned this place upside down."

  Christina sagged in dismay. A man came on the phone. "Tony says he's starting to chop up your boyfriend. Go to the corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirteenth Street. Bring the piece of paper." He hung up.

  She collapsed against the wall. I'm so bad, she thought, so bad.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER she stood at the corner of Tenth and Thirteenth. The meatpacking district, the buildings boarded up, gutters filled with glass and garbage. A cab sat at the corner with a flat tire, the driver staring at it in disgust. A door opened on the other side of the street. She walked across.

  "All right, I'm here," she said hatefully. "You have to let my mother go."

  She recognized Peck. He pulled her inside and marched her up the steps into a huge room. The floor was rough, the high windows broken and streaked. She could see Tony in a chair, speaking into a phone, food cartons around his feet. He hung up. "Paul's coming," he announced, looking up. He saw Christina. "You got it?"

  "Yes."

  A man
in a green baseball jacket stood next to Tony. Something was laid out on a table in front of them. "We have your rich boyfriend here," the man called.

  She stopped. "Where?"

  Peck pushed her forward across the wooden floor.

  "Right here. Tough old guy, too." He switched on a bright work light. "Want to see?"

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  Near Thirteenth Street and Tenth Avenue, Manhattan

  September 28, 1999

  THEY PARKED PAUL'S CAR a few blocks away, broken windows and all, and went up to the door, past a cabdriver who had his taxi jacked up and the wheel off. "It's me," Paul said into his phone. "I'll wait for you to open it." Rick stood on the hinged side of the door. They could hear someone coming down the steps inside.

  "Just let me talk the situation through," Paul warned.

  "Fine." He'd let Paul believe whatever he wanted. His shotgun was reloaded now, the Ruger pistol in his right hand.

  "You alone?" came a voice behind the door.

  Rick touched Paul's back with the gun. "Yeah," Paul answered, looking at his good shoes on the pavement.

  The door opened.

  Paul stepped inside. "Hey."

  "We've got her upstairs—" a voice began.

  Rick yanked the door open, then set his finger against the pistol's trigger. The detective, Peck, frowned at him in surprise. Rick fired. The noise was enormous in the dark stairwell. Peck fell backward, his stomach bursting blood. He rolled onto his front and kicked his feet at the stairs, trying to stand. Rick fired into Peck's back. The blood soaked through his clothes, wetting the steps.

  "Oh shit," Paul said.

  Rick glanced out the door. The cabbie was wheeling his spare from the trunk. Otherwise the street was empty. No one had noticed the gunshots. He pulled the door shut. Peck moaned and tried to get up.

  "Let's go," said Rick. He dropped the pistol into his coat pocket.

  Peck lurched onto his side, looking up the stairs.

  "We can't just leave him," Paul protested.

  "Why not?" He pushed Paul up the stairs toward the floor of the large, gloomy factory room. "This is where they cut off my fucking arm, Paul."

  Across the darkness he could see Morris, Tony, and somebody on the same table he'd been on—an older man, shirt off, face down, arm cuffed. He had a couple of hemostats pinching the bloody mess of his lower back. Bloody gauze packs littered the floor. One foot was clearly cut off, the wound clamped with a hemostat. Tony sat in a chair examining a piece of paper with reading glasses on, as if perusing the day's mail. Rick swung the shotgun at the room, keeping a step behind Paul's shoulder. Morris stood with a pistol extended at Rick.

  "Peck!" called Tony. "Peck?"

  "Where is she?" Rick shouted feverishly.

  "Hey, hey, Rick!" said Tony. "She's here. With her boyfriend."

  Morris followed Rick with his gun. "Just tell me and that will be it," he said to Tony.

  Rick saw Christina bound in tape and hunched on the floor, not moving. "Is she alive?" he yelled in terror. The room seemed to tilt.

  "We didn't touch her." Morris switched off the work light, then switched it on again.

  "Christina?" he called, bothered by the changing light.

  She didn't move or respond.

  "Stop fucking with the light!" cried Rick. "What did you do?"

  "We didn't do anything," said Morris. "We taped her up."

  Rick pushed Paul forward and glanced at the man on the table. One hand was twitching, and a long incision ran up the base of his spine. "Who's he?"

  "That's her boyfriend." Tony, fat inside a loose shirt, worked the overbite of his lower jaw. His smile appeared to measure the sum of the world's illusions. "Rick, you can't just walk in and walk out of this."

  "Let her go," Rick ordered Tony.

  "Let her go yourself." Morris flicked the light on, off.

  I want to kill him, thought Rick, I want to do that more than anything ever.

  "Tony," Paul began, trying to mediate between madmen. "Let her go. You have the money, the piece of paper, right? Let them all go. Come on. I've got guys who can clean this up. We can have the problem gone in three hours. Couple of suitcases, whatever." He paused. "You and me go way back, Tony. And we still got a lot of money to make."

  "Who walks with this?" Tony asked, standing now and folding the paper into his shirt pocket.

  "We do," answered Paul.

  "Who? Him?" Tony pointed at Rick.

  "Where are Jones and Tommy?" asked Paul. "You said—"

  "They're still driving around looking for her." Tony considered the cell phone in his hand. "This thing went dead."

  Morris waved his gun. "I don't like this situation."

  Paul pointed at Morris. "Call him off, Tony, he's a hothead."

  Morris kept the gun pointed at Rick, smiled.

  "Christina?" Rick yelled, feeling sick, blinking too much.

  No answer.

  "I'm going to shoot this guy, Tony!" Morris widened his stance and put a second hand on the gun.

  "Call him off!" Paul cried. The room echoed.

  "Why can't I hear her?" asked Rick.

  "Because we got her taped up, you fuck."

  "Tony!" cried Paul, in a crouch. "Tell your guy here to just slow down, right? There's a way out of this, there's—"

  Morris fired.

  Paul staggered. The shot had caught the top of his head. Blood fountained two feet upward out of his skull, then he dropped to the wooden floor, legs quivering. Rick stepped forward, screaming, and shot at Morris awkwardly. Morris grabbed his thigh. I can't shoot this thing, Rick thought, but he hobbled forward and emptied his second barrel. He was off again. Morris grabbed his face and fell to one knee, moaning into his hands, blood dripping down his green baseball jacket. He stood over Morris. Now I kill you, Rick breathed, mouth full of spit. You killed Paulie.

  "My eyes," cried Morris. "My eyes!" Rick clubbed him in the head with his shotgun, once, the same one-armed movement as jamming a shovel into hard earth. Morris fell over, sucking breath. Rick waited. Morris moved. He hit him again, savagely, using his knees, then a third time. Then he waited. A lot of blood from the mouth and ears. Then he hit him three more times, to be sure.

  Rick looked up, chest heaving, his work done. Tony was scurrying into the darkness toward the doorway, moving quickly for an old man. Rick lifted the shotgun, then remembered both barrels were empty. The pistol was deep in his coat pocket. Tony disappeared, a door banged. I can't catch him, he thought, not on this foot.

  Rick walked over to Christina. She was taped heavily.

  "It's me," he said softly. "It's Rick." He was going to have trouble getting the tape off with just one hand. "Wait a minute."

  He trudged over to one of Morris's toolboxes and found a pair of scissors. He returned to her and laid his one hand on her head. "It's fine. Don't worry." He cut the tape carefully so that first she could breathe and then she could see.

  "He's still alive! He's still alive!" she cried. "Oh God, Charlie!"

  "He's your friend?" Rick followed her, kicking at a loose screw on the floor.

  She stood over the man. It looked as if pieces of his backbone had been cut out. Christina put one finger on the man's face, stroking his cheek.

  "My brother's dead," Rick said, voice numb. "They killed him."

  "Tony got the money, the piece of paper?" she asked.

  He looked at her. "Paulie's dead." He was hard and full of hate for everything and everybody, even her. "I missed you so much," he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  She touched the old man one more time. "Is he still alive? He's still . . . warm."

  "Not really. Not with all that blood gone."

  "He's dying because of me."

  "Everybody here did." He walked over to his brother. When he looked up, he saw Christina in the half-light of the doorway across the dark room, watching him. She turned to go, saying nothing, leaving Rick by himself.

  | Go to Contents |<
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  Edwards Air Force Base, California

  Spring 1966

  HE WOULD SURVIVE, oh fucking yes! Just hold. Hold! Hold! Squeeze your legs, Charlie-boy, get the blood back up, you weakling, it's just the G-forces . . . He heard the gurgling rattle of his own breath . . . the men yelling, then gunshots . . . I'm still . . . eyes shut, just tired. The G's on his back were . . . he could take them. I'm still, I am, I'm breathing, I'm here. He tried lifting his head, but the pain jolted through him. Were his eyes open? No, they weren't. Dark inside the visor. Heart felt slow. Did he tell . . . he didn't—no, Ellie, I . . . wanted me to explain, but I didn't, they wanted . . . not about Ben or Julia, either. He lifted his head, fell back as he went into a fifteen-degree roll, the nose of the F-4 scratched rough by a million clouds. I'll go three-sixty, the horizon line rotating clockwise, air-show stuff. Plenty of fuel. No ordnance, just two lieutenant colonels down on the desert looking up with binoculars. Watching you to be sure you checked out. Couple of stiff-assed instructors. He'd be stationed in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in a week, President Johnson getting pissed at Uncle Ho. Stand on your tail, kick the throttle to the afterburner stop, and accelerate vertically, baby, climb at Mach 1.6 for three thousand feet, eyeballs egg-shaped from the G's, then pull back the throttle and slow, slow, slow until . . . until you just hang in space, free, as free as anyone who ever lived, then drop a flap and let the plane fall over in the air and tumble until you reverse the verticality, nose down, no spin, no shimmy, throttling up again, this time toward the earth, death-diving, bright knife falling from heaven, the earth your sky, head pounding badly, need oxygen, he'd adjust his mask, but he could see the boy . . . running across a field . . . Charlie, come back here this—skinny legs, knees pumping . . . seeing it, seeing his children running in a field, the children running in the rice paddies beneath him, the fire from his nose cannon cutting a water buffalo in half, the children sinking into their deaths, but that was later and I was never . . . the number was two hundred and seventy-nine, as he'd figured it, a river ferry one of those times, and a bus, never told the number, Ellie, never told anyone, but I promise I . . . he loved children, he did, he loved when Ben and Julia climbed in bed those mornings, breath full of milk and cereal, play with us, Daddy, play with us . . . I will, I will, I am, I am still conscious, eyes closed, don't tell them, won't let you play the last game of the season if his mother at the kitchen sink, turning, accidentally saw him naked when he was fourteen stopped looking at him, Charlie, please call your father to dinner, Dad, I got into the Air Force one and too much, Manila Telecom sneaking back, jinking and stunting, tearing at him, pulling bloody rags out of his lungs, stock price dropping cold! I want to take a warm bath, Ellie, I'm cold, Charlie, I'm sorry, there's no—but I'm cold, Ellie, I'm very please call the guys downstairs slow heart said they can't fix it, there's no warm I'm cold here Ellie I'm fucking cold we pay eight million from a dead man's and there's no—that, that scared me, Ellie, can't feel my did you tell Ben and Julia? Even Ben? But what will you do Manila Telecom is coming I need to fax the statement to the board of directors, because I can't quite—squeezing, Ellie! standing on my heart! everything cold I'd cash out Teknetrix now before . . . Tower, tower, in a spin you told Ben and Julia you told them spinning dark thirsty because I can't hold it much Ellie I'm thirsty and cold, this girl they tried who is she I don't know yes, please, I am, I am, sweetie, I have my finger in the ring now, ready to pull I will, I am to avoid blackoutspin blood hurricaning in his head one and two pullring duck before ejection—