“Fuck you, McEvoy, you fucking prick,” he says. “Fuck all you fucking Dublin bastards.”
According to the doorman rules of swearing, we are now officially in the red zone.
I push my arm further through the hole and screw the barrel into Freckles’s temple.
“Maybe I’m gonna let you off with a warning. You ever think of that?”
Freckles doesn’t even answer; instead his face comes over all grim and he swings the car ninety degrees counterclockwise.
“This is a bad idea,” I say, maybe aloud, maybe to myself.
“You like this one, McEvoy? You think you’re the only one with balls?”
I smack Freckles on the side of the head with the gun but there’s no power in it and I’m at full stretch already. I see the speedometer needle jiggling around ninety.
I could jump, but at this speed I would snap like a dry twig. I should have bailed with the kid. Freckles knows I can’t risk shooting him while his foot in on the gas.
The cab is headed for one of the less sturdy-looking piers, which is protected by a tin sign that says No Access. What kind of preventative is that? A fecking kid with roller skates could circumvent that security.
“I’m ready to go, McEvoy!” shrills Freckles, and I can see in his face that he ain’t backing down.
I gotta shoot him. With him dead, things can’t get worse.
I got no option but to plug this bug-eyed, ginger shit-for-brains right this instant. Actually there should be a comma after ginger, otherwise it might read like Freckles has ginger shit, which would be a weird thing for me to be privy to.
“You ain’t doing it, McEvoy,” shouts the ginger, shit for brains triumphantly. “You ain’t got the nerve.”
If we could freeze this for a moment, I would point out that Freckles is preparing to kill himself in order to avoid being killed by me and surely there is a better way to resolve our issues.
But we can’t freeze this moment, so I gotta pull the trigger or take a bath.
Shoot.
You’ve shot people before. Remember that time you were in the army? The hard bit comes afterward.
Shoot.
“Freckles,” I shout over the rattle of tires on gravel and the blood rushing in my ears. “Don’t make me do this. You’re Irish, surely we can work this out.”
Sure, if we had seven hundred years.
Too late. We’re on the pier now. A drum roll of planks rattles underneath, my jaw rattles and then we are flying.
Freckles let’s go of the wheel like he has time to roll out in midair or some other frankly impossible move unless he’s got bullet time on his cell phone and last time I checked the raciest thing Freckles had on there was Sofia the Dominatrix. He’s got his legs out the door when we touch down and a giant fist of water slams the door on his torso more or less cutting him in half.
We hit hard, the catastrophic deceleration jamming me against the partition, knocking the breath from my body. The windshield bulges inward and then pops out whole, allowing black water to surge forward, claiming the front area and Freckles’s body. The only air pocket is the backseat area, so we go down fast.
I have serious hours logged in life-threatening situations but they are of zero use to me now. All I can do is ride out the crash and hope.
I try to breathe but my lungs won’t oblige and I am seconds away from total panic. I don’t wanna be not found. I don’t want to be forever listed as missing if anyone even bothers to add me to the list. There is something terrifying about the notion that you can be disappeared by circumstance, swallowed by the earth, and by the time the water gives up your corpse, nothing will remain but algae-coated bones.
The car settles on the riverbed and the bump gets my lungs pumping again. And now that my brain has a little oxygen going to it, I start to take stock of my situation.
This whole thing is ridiculous.
Come on. In a death cab on the riverbed looking at a corpse floating in the doors ajar light. Silt floats through the window and a couple of fish that resemble nothing more than be-finned turds swim inside to investigate.
My hand is cold. Why is my hand cold?
Because it’s jammed in the fare hatch, dummy, otherwise you would have drowned by now. I am like that Dutch kid who stuck his arm in a dike, except for it’s a tricked-out cab, not a dike. I ain’t Dutch and it’s been a long time since anybody called me kid.
Freckles’s crimped corpse floats up so we are face-to-face through the glass. He has held onto his expression of manic triumph, which makes me feel like a loser even though he is the dead one.
Something glows in Freckles’s pocket and I am amazed to realize that my phone is still working and I have a call coming through. Luckily Freckles’s pocket is within my grasp, so I drop the gun and wiggle my fingers into his pocket and snag my Hello Kitty handset. Now for the tricky part: I gotta whip my hand through, hoping the water shuts the hatch, and if it doesn’t I gotta get out the side door pretty sharp and pull for the surface.
I tug on my arm until it’s ready to pop loose, then I take a couple of deep breaths, working up to a real lungful. My phone is still warbling in the flooded cab. Someone must really want to get ahold of me.
Okay. Stop wasting time.
I pull my hand through and the water forces the half closed hatch the rest of the way, forming a reasonably tight seal. The water is still coming in, but at a drastically reduced rate.
Finally things are going my way.
Right. Stuck in a subaquatic coffin. My lucky day. I should rush out and do the lottery.
But I ain’t rushing out anywhere. I won’t even be able to open the door until the pressure equalizes. And even if I could open the door the rush of incoming Hudson would pin me to the backseat. So I gotta sit here and take deep breaths until the rear compartment is flooded, which means I will have to pop the little hatch myself, which goes against all my survival instincts.
I answer the phone. Might as well.
“Yep.”
“Where the hell are you?” asks Ronelle Deacon, my cop friend who used to work out of the four-room station in Cloisters (and two of the rooms were restrooms) but recently moved on and up as a lieutenant in the Special Investigations section of the New Jersey State Police.
“Where am I? You wouldn’t believe it, Trooper.”
“You ain’t by any chance wearing a pink thong and beating on some cops?”
“I wish,” I say sincerely. “And it was a red thong, okay?”
“It’s not looking good for you, Dan. My brethren are majorly pissed off.”
“Yeah, well I got the real story if you’re interested.”
“I’m always interested in the truth, McEvoy. I am the last champion of the truth. Can we meet??
?
“Maybe we can. I hope so.”
“Where the hell are you, Danny? The reception is crap.”
It is a testament to my phone plan that I still got bars underwater.
“I’m in a bit of a bind here, Ronnie. I’ll met you in Pom Pom’s, down in the Kitchen. You remember it?”
“Sure, we did that thing there with the guy from Cheers.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t Cheers. It was Home Improvement.”
“White guys, bad jokes. Who cares? When?”
“Soon as you can, I’ll be there before you.”
“And if you’re not?”
“If I’m not, dredge the river.”
“Dredge the river? What river? What’s going on, Dan?”
“I can’t explain now, Ronnie, but we’re friends, right? You’d say we were friends, wouldn’t you? You’d stand up and vouch for me at a service or something?”
“Yeah, we’re friends,” says Ronnie, but her tone is wary, like she’s talking a guy off a roof, so I hang up.
She said we were friends and that’s enough for me.
The water is at my ankles now, feels more like sludge than water. No one ever jumped in the Hudson around here to get refreshed, but I can’t go yet, I need to wait.
My phone reminds me that I have an unwatched video message.
Tommy’s video.
I’d rather watch that than Freckles’s floating corpse, so I select it and press play, and what follows might be enough to tip the balance re the Mike Madden situation if I make it out of this underwater coffin alive. The video clip is almost riveting enough to make me forget my predicament, but then the small hatch pops its hinges, and bitter-smelling river water pours through. In seconds my knees are submerged in the icy water and there’s a turd fish swimming Mobius strips around my feet.
I wait until I gotta tilt my head back to breathe, then I gulp down a lungful of oxygen and put my shoulder to the door. Luckily Freckles did not hit central locking after Shea bailed, so the door swings easily. I slide into the dark block of river and am swallowed like a speck, like nothing. If the Hudson takes me now there will be little more than a ripple to show I was here.