Short Squeeze (7 page)

I could hear a low rumble of disapproval coming from Harry, but I was done with diplomacy. It can only take you so far.

“What the hell was so bad about Sergey?” I asked. “Or for that matter, your Aunt Betty? You couldn’t tear yourself away from your damn computer long enough to go to her funeral? Why so heartless?”

“You can’t call me names in my own house,” said Fuzzy.

“This isn’t a house, it’s a crypt. And if you don’t like my questions, wait’ll the cops come to call. All I can do is be rude. They can decide you’re a material witness and have you locked up in a place that makes this dump feel like the Waldorf.”

Fuzzy jumped out of his moldy chair and pointed his finger at me. A tiny trace of white foam actually formed at the corner of his mouth, but before he could find the right words, I asked again, “Why didn’t you go to Aunt Betty’s funeral? What did she ever do?”

“Nothing,” he spat out. “That’s what she did. Absolutely nothing.” Then he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, thoroughly hunkered down. “Get out of here,” he said.

I was ready to give it another push, but when I looked over at Harry it was clear he really wanted me to back off and climb out of that creepy basement. So reluctantly, I tore myself away and let the sleazy geek get back to everything you can do with computers, no matter the death and dying going on around him.

“Sorry,” I said when we were back in the car.

“Not a very pleasant fellow,” said Harry.

“You tried to work around that. I probably should have let you.”

I struggled to get my breathing under control. What would have helped was a cigarette or something more intoxicating, but I’d put Harry through enough for the day. So instead I sat quietly, which I was grateful he let me do for about an hour. Then he ventured a conversation.

“At least you learned something, right?”

“I learned Fuzzy was the crud I thought he was. I don’t know what else.”

He let that sit until we were almost back in Southampton, when he said, “So, not a little bit curious?”

“Beg pardon?”

“About the last two years of my life. That’s not like you. I expected to be thoroughly grilled by now.”

He was right. For some reason, I’d shied from asking. Not that I wasn’t aching with curiosity, suspicion, and a few other selfish and illaudable feelings.

“I assumed you were in a coma. Though you look way too good for that,” I said.

“If you don’t want to know, that’s okay,” he said.

“You think I’m that easily manipulated? Okay, so tell me.”

So on the way back to the East End he told me what he’d been doing, which was more or less the same thing he always did—move stuff around the planet. He frequently did big projects for military and government agencies, but he was just as happy moving little things as big things. Such as shipping Fabergé eggs to Mongolia or fresh internal organs for transplant in Tierra del Fuego.

He’d recruited a twenty-member family of Indonesian sailors to run a convoy of barges across the Indian Ocean to South Africa, where they were refused entry and had to continue on to the Mediterranean, where they loaded the freight on lorries in Marseilles and snuck into Rotterdam pretending to be British NGOs brought in by the Dutch government to provide cultural sensitivity training.

That’s the kind of thing he does. And he told the truth when he said computers were now his business. All he needed was a laptop and a cell phone and he could run the whole show. Which meant he could live anywhere they had broadband and decent cell service. Which they have in Southampton.

“So this is where I’ve decided to stay,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I won’t have to travel occasionally, but you won’t find a better home base.”

“I haven’t looked for one,” I told him, “but I believe you. I want to believe you. Because I’m here for good, for better or worse.”

“So we’re both here. Hm.”

“Yeah, hm. Let’s discuss this later on,” I said, and then returned the conversation to his recent adventures, where I wanted it. Not because I wasn’t thinking what he was thinking. I just wasn’t ready to think it.

I don’t like the gym. I find exercise sweaty and uncomfortable. And boring. That’s my biggest problem with physical fitness. I can get bored in the middle of a roller-coaster ride. After a week peddling a bicycle that doesn’t go anywhere, I find my sanity starts to erode.

The only cure is a frequent change in scenery. I’ve been on every machine in the gym, taken every aerobics class, invented some of my own swim strokes, and even signed up for interpretive dance after a week of yoga where all we did was stretch and clear our minds. I’m pretty limber already, and the only way to clear my mind is to do a full lobotomy.

I stuck with the dance class longer than usual. It was the interpretive part that worked for me. It was impossible for the instructor to tell anyone their interpretations stank. Plus, since I don’t mind making an ass out of myself, it turned out to be the right choice.

It was close to ten o’clock when I left the gym. I was sure about that because I liked to catch the start of the ten o’clock cop shows. I’ve
heard people say they hate seeing dramatized versions of their jobs. Too close to home. In my case, there’s nothing about these shows that has anything to do with the actual thing. The shows are so much more interesting and sexy. Everybody looks great, they all live in million-dollar apartments and work out of space-age offices lit by blue fluorescents and courtrooms with carved molding and twelve-foot-high windows. What’s wrong with watching that?

The gym is about fifteen minutes from my house. I usually take the back roads, even off-season, so I don’t have to think about what I’m doing. The truck runs on autopilot.

My route takes me through the potato fields just north of the highway in Southampton. There’s still a lot of open land up there, though it’s being steadily eaten away by development, and there’re no street lamps, so it’s pretty dark.

My route goes due west through Bridgehampton horse country. During the day you get to look at thundering huge mansions, long lines of white fences, and well-bred jumpers trotting around looking cocky and well fed. At night it’s just a long two-lane road.

Then you turn up Brick Kiln Road. My road. It takes you out of the open, rolling fields and up the hill and into the woods. You also go from this nice straight, smooth road surface to a serpentine washboard. This is where my husband found himself too drunk and driving too fast to adjust to the change in circumstances.

That night I was cold sober, and too fast was never a possibility with the old pickup. In fact, I was trying to gain a little ground speed to overcome the hill before the first curve when I saw the truck behind me. A real truck. A big truck going so fast that the headlights went from pinpricks to almost filling the mirror in the time it took me to look away and look back again.

My first thought was, Man, he’s really going to have to hit the brakes. And then I realized he wasn’t going to hit anything but me.

This solved the acceleration problem. I was suddenly going a lot
faster, with the rear end of the Toyota now trying to pass the front end. This put the little truck in a full spin. I stood on the brakes, which might have been a bad idea, but what else was I going to do? The tires sounded like a city of the doomed on their way down to hell.

My father taught me how to cock the wheel to pull out of a spin, so miraculously, I kept control after a single three-sixty. I was so relieved by this that I almost forgot how I got there in the first place. So I didn’t have the Toyota aimed where I should have when the truck hit me again.

I was able to turn to the left as I flew forward, just missing a tree. The move threw me back on the road surface. I shoved the shift knob into second and floored it.

The truck behind me recovered quickly and was bearing down on my tail before I reached the next curve. Something told me trying to race the guy was a losing strategy. So I did the opposite. I yanked the steering wheel to the right and hit the brakes.

This almost worked. He cleared my bumper, but then somehow jammed up on my side. We were now moving at about the same velocity, but he was locked on my right fender, my truck now an insignificant gnat, helpless against overwhelming horsepower superiority.

So there was nothing I could do when the other truck broke free and sent me hurtling toward the big tree except to ponder, in that time-out-of-time moment before you hit something at a high speed, the lovely irony of going out just like Potato Pete. Flying free over Brick Kiln Road. Watching the giant gray column come at me mighty and aloof, and thinking, All that nice work on my face, and now this.

People who suffer massive head injuries usually don’t remember how they happened. I guess that’s nature’s way of shielding you from the horror, letting you heal and get on with your life without having to relive the moment over and over.

That’s how it was with me after getting blown up by the car bomb. I went from being late for lunch with Sam to swimming in a gooey, hallucinogenic stupor. The shock wore off about the same time as the painkillers, which was partly by design. The doctors wanted to ask me how I felt, to get my read on the overall situation.

I said I felt about as shitty as a human being was capable of feeling, and that was before they showed me my face—what was left of it. I’m not the suicidal type, but I have to admit the question of life or death at that point was a coin toss.

If you don’t smash up your head in a terrible accident, you’ll probably remember everything that happened, like a movie in slow motion that lets you take in every exciting moment.

Maybe that’s why I had plenty of time to jerk the steering wheel all the way to the left, which caused the top-heavy little truck to flip on its side and slide about ten feet, so instead of a head-on collision, the top of the bed hit the big tree, absorbing most of the concussion and
spinning the Toyota like a top into a grove of saplings, which absorbed the rest.

That’s when I learned the Toyota had an air bag, which scared me more than the impact when it blew up in my face but kept me safely pinned to my seat as the truck whirligigged through the woods.

And that’s where I stayed frozen, braced for another blow from the assassin truck. When it didn’t come, I discovered my arms and legs were all still working. I wormed my way around impediments, like the shift knob, until I was more or less standing on the passenger’s side door. The seat belt was now half wrapped around my neck, which was better than having it squeeze the part of my chest already blossoming an angry bruise.

I unsnapped the belt, reached over my head, and opened the door far enough to prove I couldn’t open it any farther. I wedged my foot against the side of the passenger seat and pushed up, trying the door again, this time getting halfway out before it closed on top of me like the jaws of a wounded but determined shark.

I was stuck, but at least I had a view of the road, so far clear of murderous pickup trucks. Feeling vulnerable, I frantically wriggled through the door and dropped to the ground, where I looked up at the stars for a while, wondering which were the lucky ones I was supposed to thank.

A car passed. I held my breath and lay as still as a stump. As if that was enough to camouflage an overturned Toyota pickup truck. And to what end?

I stood on shaky legs and leaned back against the dirty underbody. That’s when my cell phone rang, from inside the truck. I wasn’t going to climb back in, stupid as it was to leave it there, so I got to listen to it trill at me for a while.

Then I reconsidered. How sensible was it to be a few humiliating and uncomfortable moments away from contact with the outside world?

After burning my hand on the muffler, I found a better handhold and a place to put my foot, and was about to hoist myself up when
Danny Izard raced up with every light on his patrol car ablaze. I guess if the Town went to the trouble to put all that stuff on your car, you want to use it.

“What did I tell you about pushing turns in that toy truck?” he said, as anyone would do to comfort and reassure an accident victim. “You all right? Bleeding anywhere?” he said, sticking a thousand-watt flashlight in my face.

I reached through the light and took it out of his hand. I shut it off and told him to call an ambulance and then call Joe Sullivan. I wasn’t giving my statement to Danny and then be stuck with him as the reporting officer for the life of the case. I liked him, but he was too much of a dumb kid for this one. I needed a grown-up.

He looked unsure but did as I said.

As I hoped, Joe got there before the ambulance. With one small blue light on his dashboard blinking discreetly. I hoped Izard took note.

By now I was sitting on the ground with my back against a tree. I was drinking a bottle of water Danny had given me and smoking a cigarette, which unlike my cell phone, I had the sense to stuff in my pants pocket when I got dressed at the gym.

“Good, you got a smoke,” said Joe, walking up to me. “The paramedics can skip that part.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “Some big pickup pushed me off the road.”

He reached into the rear pocket of his jeans and pulled out his casebook.

“Really.”

“No idea of year, make, or model, but it had four wheels and a big bumper that he used to ram me.”

“Ram you? Actually physically, intentionally drove into the back of your truck?” he asked, looking skeptical.

For the first time since the crash I felt a little sick.

“We’re not gonna go through that, are we? I tell you what happened and you tell me it was my imagination or lecture me on probative evidence or pat me on the head and tell me condescendingly that you’ll look into it? If that’s what we’re going to do, get me another cop who’ll stop fucking around and take this seriously.”

His face fell halfway to the ground.

“Okay, Jackie, jeez. I’m not doubting you. It’s just a hell of a thing to say happened.”

“It’s what happened. I don’t know what color it was, either, but it was dark. Blue, black, gray. Maybe lighter than that, though definitely not white. Where’s that ambulance? I’m think I’m going to puke.”