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.
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-
106th Street and Columbus Avenue, Manhattan November 2, 1999
Heavy as a load of bricks, she thought as she trudged along Columbus Avenue, that's how I feel. But she'd finally decided to tell her mother. Why not? She had to tell someone. She'd been living as Bettina Bedford for more than a month now, working a few shifts as a waitress, laying low, living in her little shit room on 106th Street. Mostly she walked, staying hunched inside her secondhand coat against the fall wind, no makeup, not meeting anyone's eyes. Right now she wanted only to buy a few groceries and get back to her room. Maybe sweep a bit to calm herself.
Charlie's body had been discovered a week earlier by a fourteen-year-old boy illegally duck hunting in a cornfield three hundred miles north of the city. A naked body in the earth, as if he'd fallen from the sky. Christina wondered about his wife, his widow. I don't know anything about her at all, she thought, but the woman must have had something special for Charlie to have been with her all those years. The Times had also mentioned a daughter. Not the son, though.
She did not like to think of that, and she did not like to think of what had happened to Rick, either. He'd been found, back in the first week of October, near his rented cottage in Orient Point, Long Island. A fisherman noticed early one morning that an old yellow truck was resting upside down in six feet of water, having been driven off the sea cliff at a high speed. Rick's body was in the cab, along with an empty rum bottle. His death was ruled an accident, according to the brief account that had been scissored from a local Long Island weekly newspaper and sent, quite anonymously, to her mother. Which she had then forwarded to Christina. On the reverse side was an advertisement for children's pajamas.
Since then, the fall had turned colder and rainy, as it always did, and sometimes she thought of the prison. Of Mazy and the others. I don't want to go back, Christina told herself. Could the police connect her with Charlie's death? It didn't seem so. She'd left the hotel with him, but that was many hours before he'd been killed and weeks before the body had been found. He'd been alive and on the phone to his banker after that, too. The tabloids had covered the story extensively, especially one of the columnists, who'd filled his space with the shameless speculation that Charlie had angered the family of some Hong Kong billionaire who had died of a heart attack. The police had tracked the letter of credit from the bank to the spot-buyer. But no one at the bank had seen her, and she'd been in the spot-buyer's office only a minute, anyway. No name, no fingerprints. Of course, she'd also been videotaped walking out of the Pierre in the morning with Charlie. But no one at the hotel knew her name. And who knew that Charlie had been at the hotel? Only his secretary was aware that he'd met someone there named Melissa Williams, and she might have decided to keep that a secret, out of deference to Charlie's widow. The police could check Charlie's credit card records, but the charges for the room that last night were set up through his company, she remembered. What else? she asked herself. What else am I missing? Charlie had confessed that he'd had