Watch Your Back (22 page)

“The cigarette boat?”

“Yeah, that drug boat. Here it is, get in. I don’t lock the damn thing.”

Neither would Preston. The passenger door squeaked loudly when he opened it, and again when he closed it.

“Food, Porfirio,” he reminded him.

“You know,” Porfirio said, as he started the asthmatic engine, “for a man ain’t got shit on him, you bossy as hell.”

“I’m just very hungry. Why did they have you on their boat?”

This was a parking lot of some sort. Driving out of it, the headlights sweeping over the unlovely scrub flora of southern Florida, Porfirio said, “They want to know where I let you off, what you say to me, all kinds a shit. When you’re not in the boat, they got real pissed off.”

So the rotten man
had
tried to sell Preston out, as anticipated. “So you took them to the boat, did you?”

“I had to, man, they were leanin on me. You heard me talking loud, didn’t you? That’s why you got outa the boat.”

“No, Porfirio, I did not hear you talking loud.”

“Well, I did,” Porfirio said, sounding sulky again. “To warn you. Shit, man, it was
me
they was givin kidney punches.”

Good, Preston thought, but didn’t say. In fact, for the moment he decided to say nothing. They had come out onto a serious road and turned right, which would be south. Traffic was thin. They passed stores, marinas, gas stations, all closed, even the gas stations. Then up ahead on the other side, a Burger King appeared, brightly lit and sparsely patronized.

“Burger King! There!”

“I see the damn thing, that’s where I’m headed for.”

They pulled in and Preston said, “I’ll have to wait here. I’ll want a hamburger.”

“You already said that.”

“And a Coke.”

“Is that right? You want dessert, too?”

“No, just a hamburger and french fries and a Coke.”

“Fries. Son of a bitch.”

Porfirio slammed the pickup door on his way out, but he did come back with the burger, the Coke, and the fries, with a similar assortment for himself.

It was the first time in his life Preston had ingested a fast–food hamburger — something else his ex–wives would pay for, someday. Talking around a mouthful of food, he said, “What I need now is a Holiday Inn.”

“A Holiday Inn? How come a Holiday Inn? There’s places around here.”

“I need a chain,” Preston explained. “I need an organization with a computer system large enough to verify me. Where can we find a Holiday Inn?”

“I dunno, man, maybe there’s something like that down in Key West.”

Preston bit off more burger and talked around it. “I better not go to Key West,” he said. “They’ll probably be looking for me down there, looking in cars going by, with streetlights. It’s too small and too brightly lit. Porfirio, there’s got to be a Holiday Inn around here somewhere.”

“I know there’s one up at Key Largo,” Porfirio said, “but that’s gotta be eighty miles from here, way up at the top of the Keys.”

“Perfect,” Preston said, and some time later he and Porfirio stepped into the Key Largo Holiday Inn, where the temperature was fifty degrees Fahrenheit and the jacketed young man behind the desk was not at all startled to see a fat man in a bikini bottom walk in with a bonefisherman.

“Gentlemen?”

“I don’t have any identification on me,” Preston began, “nor money, but I need a room.”

The young man’s smile was pitying. “Sir —”

“Just a moment. Paper and pen, please.”

As usual, the lower orders did Preston’s bidding whether they wanted to or not. Preston took paper and pen, wrote his name in large block letters, and said to the young man, “Image Google me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your computer,” Preston said, and pointed to it in case it had slipped the young man’s mind. “Go to the Google search engine. Go to their image collection. Type in my name. You will find many news and social page photos of me over the years, all more presentably dressed, but all clearly me. Please do that.”

The young man shrugged. “Okay.”

He turned to his computer, and Porfirio gave Preston a grudgingly admiring look. “You’re something else, man,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Okay,” the young man said. “That’s you, all right. But I don’t see —”

“Hush,” Preston said. Surprised, the young man stiffened into silence and Preston said, “The reason I am here, process servers attempted to waylay me. This gentleman Porfirio assisted me, for which I very much thank him —”

“And that ain’t all,” Porfirio said.

“Of course not.” Preston turned back to the young man. “I need a room. I need to phone an associate of mine in the Caribbean and tell him to fly up here in the morning. I will phone collect, of course. He will bring my wallet and clothing and all the rest of it. In the meantime, I have to hide. Those people are still searching for me.”

“They are, man,” Porfirio told the young man. “And they are mean sons a bitches, let me tell you.”

“Check me in,” Preston said, “under my associate’s name. Here, I’ll write it down.” And he wrote
Alan Pinkleton
beneath his own name, then said, “When he gets here tomorrow, all this will be made right.”

“Sir, I don’t think I can —”

“Son,” Preston said, “I happen to know several of the directors on the board of the corporation you are employed by. If you wish to say good–bye to any hope of working for corporate America ever again, just turn me out into the night. I’ll find help elsewhere, but, trust me, you will not.”

“He’s,” Porfirio told the young man, “as tough as those other guys.”

Sounding pained, the young man said, “Sir, you don’t have to threaten me.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“I can see you are who you say you are, and you’ve had some trouble, I guess, so I think I can take a chance on helping you out here. Will you both be staying?”

Preston and Porfirio gave a loud “
No!
” together, and then Preston said, “But before Porfirio goes, we must do something to reward him for his assistance.”

“I been wondering,” Porfirio said, “when we’d get to that part.”

“Including,” Preston said, with a nasty smile into Porfirio’s face, “his
talking loud
while leading those people back to the boat.”

“Saved your bacon, man.”

Directing the smile at the young man, Preston said, “Please give Porfirio one hundred dollars in cash, and put it on my bill.”

Outraged Porfirio cried, “A hundred dollars? I
saved
you from them people, man! I drove you all the way up here! I bought you a burger and french fries
and
a Coke! I pulled you outa the
ocean,
man!”

The young man said to Preston, “Did he do all that?”

“In fact, yes,” Preston said.

Opening his cash drawer, the young man said, “I will add
five
hundred dollars to your bill, sir,” and started counting it on the desk in front of Porfirio.

Who grinned broadly at the money and said, “That’s better. That’s more like it.” Scooping up the cash, he gave Preston back his nasty smile in spades and said, “And thank
you,
my man.”

This was an entire block of row houses, all attached, all alike, two–family, two–story, brick, with an exterior staircase to the second–floor apartment next to a concrete driveway to the one–car garage downstairs. In most of these houses, as in the one owned by Murch’s Mom — he was just a boarder here — the four–and–a–half–room upstairs apartment was rented out for the income, while the owner’s family lived in the three and a half rooms downstairs, plus a basement room that opened onto the backyard. Most owners turned this basement room into what they called a family room or entertainment center, but which Murch called his bedroom. Leaving this, he went upstairs where one night–light glowed in the kitchen, because his Mom, tired from a day of outrage at the wheel of a medallion New York City taxicab, had long since gone to bed.

Quietly, he left the house. This house was on East Ninety–ninth Street, a little off Rockaway Parkway, and very close to the Rockaway Parkway station, the last stop on the Canarsie Line, known to officialdom as the L, which would travel from here to Eighth Avenue and West Fourteenth Street in Manhattan.

Since this was the end of the line, there was usually a train in the station, doors open, waiting for the moment to depart, and there was one such this time. Stan became the fourth person to board that particular car, all seated far from one another. Finding a
Daily News
on a seat, he settled beside it, started to read, and an hour and forty minutes later stepped off another subway car under Lexington Avenue and Sixty–eighth Street.

His only objection to the subway, really, was that you couldn’t choose your own route. On the other hand, when you got where you were going, you didn’t have any parking headaches.

It was a quiet walk over to Fifth Avenue. A few empty cabs looked at him hopefully, and a couple of lone walkers looked at him warily, but otherwise he had the city to himself.

The story was, this garage door was supposed to be unlocked and unarmed at this point; just turn the handle and lift. So he did, and it lifted, but heavily, so that he had to use both hands on it. This was a door meant for the electric motor and remote control, so there wasn’t much thought given to its weight, which was considerable.

However, starting to lift the door meant that a light immediately switched on inside the garage, so he only raised it to waist height and then slid through under it and eased it back down again.

And here it was, a recent BMW 1 Series in banker black, furred all over with pale gray dust. Starting at the rear, which was closest to the door, Stan made a slow eyes–only inspection of the vehicle, approving of its pearl gray leather seats and the key stuck in the ignition and especially approving of its lack of GPS.

And what else did he have in here? On the right side of the garage, facing the front passenger seat, was a metal door with a small rectangular window in it, and beyond that a set of metal shelves, and beyond that, in the corner, a closed upright metal locker.

Stan looked at the door first, and could see nothing but blackness through the little window. Would this be the elevator? Experimentally, he pulled on the door handle, and it opened, and yes, that was the elevator. It was down here, at this level, and as soon as the door opened, a light in there switched on.

A small elevator, but luxurious, with a red cushioned armless wooden chair at the back, soft indirect lighting from above, and flocked wallpaper on the walls. Pretty good.

The shelves were next. They contained cleaning and maintenance supplies for the car, including a chamois cloth, which was good; he’d use that on the car before he took it out. There was also on one shelf a remote control for the garage door, an extra one; Stan tossed it into the BMW, on the front passenger seat.

The locker was unlocked and contained only a chauffeur’s uniform. It had the tired look that every suit gets when it’s been hanging in one place too long.

Stan shut the locker, reached for the chamois, and the light went out.

Oh, on a timer. Fortunately, the elevator light was still on, and gleaming through the window, so by that shine Stan made his way back to the garage door and lifted it just enough to cause the light to come on again.

Okay, enough inspections; let’s get on with it. He took the chamois and briskly rubbed the car down, removing the gray dust, letting it sparkle in the light the way it wanted to. While he was doing that, the elevator light switched off, but that was okay.

He was just finishing with the chamois, at the rear bumper, when the garage light went off again. This time, he pushed the door up all the way, then got behind the wheel of the BMW, twisted the key, and the engine coughed, but then started. The sound was ragged, the car not having been driven for so long, but it was ready to roll.

Stan backed the BMW out to the sidewalk, stopped, got out of the car, and pushed the garage door closed by hand, because the electric motor would be too loud at this quiet time of night.

Also, at this time of night, he figured, the long way home would be quickest — over to the FDR, down to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, through to the Belt, and all around the hem of Brooklyn to Canarsie. No traffic, no delays, home much quicker than doing the Manhattan Bridge and Flatbush Avenue and all that. Too bad that wasn’t true in the daytime.

But it was certainly true now. At the end, getting out of the BMW in front of his house, he unlocked his way in, stepped through the side interior door into the garage, and backed his Mom’s cab out to the street. Then the BMW went in, the garage door was closed, and the cab was placed on the driveway, nose against the garage.

Stan went into his house again, left the cab key on the kitchen table, had a beer, and went to bed. Nice car. Better than Max deserved.