“I told you, he and I have come to an understanding.”
“You really think Cole is going to protect
“Mr. Porter, I’m not the one who ought to be scared of Thomas Cole.”
If the scene were playing in a movie, in one of Jay’s boyhood westerns, the timing wouldn’t have been better. Out of the cor ner of his eye, Jay sees the door to the saloon open. Elise slides off her stool, leaving a few dollars on the bar. “I’m sorry,” she says, the very moment Jay makes out the face at the door:
A white male in his forties, with close-cropped hair.
One side of his body looks completely deflated, making his walk an exaggerated swagger. He wears a black glove over what’s left of his right hand.
Jay feels his stomach drop, like a stone down a well.
“If you had asked for more money, I had it all here to give you.” She pats her oversize purse. “I told Thomas I didn’t know a red-blooded American who couldn’t be bought. I begged him not to hurt you,” she says, shaking her head at Jay, the look on her face one of disappointment. “But you seem bent on doing this the hard way.” She turns and looks at the man from the black Ford, who is by now walking directly toward Jay, at the bar. “I’m sorry, Jay,” she whispers.
The man from the black Ford never says a word, but the look in his eyes terrifies. He raises his one good hand, and Jay sees the tiniest flash of light.
The glint off the barrel of a .45.
Jay turns and runs.
Behind the Blue Bayou, he covers the length of an alley, heading in a southerly direction. The gravel beneath his feet cuts through the soles of his cheap dress shoes. He feels every stone, every sharp edge. He never looks back.
The alley spills out on Providence, maybe twenty yards from his car. He’s behind the wheel in a matter of seconds. He starts the engine, peeling the car away from the curb. At the intersec tion of Providence and McKee, he slows, looking to his right. The only two people standing in front of the Blue Bayou are a man and a woman he does not recognize at this distance. They appear to be arguing.
Jay turns left, heading for the bright lights of downtown. He peers into his rearview mirror, taking in the empty street behind him. He feels a sudden stab of relief, hitting him in the chest, thinking, for one grateful moment, that he’s lost the man in the black Ford. But as he crosses a narrow bridge over Buffalo Bayou, heading to the south, a pair of headlights suddenly appears across his windshield, momentarily blinding him. Jay slams on his brakes, shielding his eyes. The driver never stops.
The car is coming straight at him.
Caught in the angry blast of white light, Jay thinks of death, the certainty of it, waiting for him on the pavement ahead, a few precious heartbeats away if he doesn’t act fast. He slams on his brakes, churning up smoke. There’s little room to maneuver on the bridge, so Jay throws his car into reverse. At nearly fifty miles an hour, he drives the Buick backward, weaving all over the street. He drives some two or three hundred yards, forcing other cars to the side of the road, the same bright headlights pursuing him from the front, burning straight through his car. At Provi dence, Jay swings in a wide arc, switching the car into drive. He heads to the west, thinking he can meet up with Main Street.
In his rearview mirror, he sees a black Ford LTD make the same turn onto Providence, picking up speed on his heels. Jay takes it up to sixty, then nearly seventy miles an hour. He almost clips the bumper of a station wagon as he tries to pass it, pulling onto the wrong side of the road and dodging a city cab. The Ford inches up on the Buick’s tail, tapping Jay’s bumper.
Jay gets turned around in a tangle of streets by the railroad tracks and somehow ends up on San Jacinto instead of Main. Driving south, cutting across on Allen Street, he’s fairly certain he hears police sirens in the distance. As he makes a left onto Main, the sirens sound so close they could be coming from his own car radio. He looks in the rearview mirror and sees not the white headlights of the Ford LTD, but the swirling blue and red of a squad car, fifty or sixty yards back. Jay slows to a decent, law-abiding speed, pulling off to the right, hoping that the squad car will pass, on its way to some other emergency. He wonders to himself where and when the Ford fell off.
He slows the car on the bayou overpass, waiting for the cop car to pass, pulling the Buick all the way to the right, under a streetlamp. It’s only then that he sees his gun.
It’s been sitting on his front seat this whole time.
A nickel-plated .22.
His missing gun. His illegal, unregistered, missing gun.
It must have been placed in his car sometime while he was in the bar with Elise, laid across the passenger seat as gently as a sleeping baby.
The blue and red police lights fill his rearview mirror. The squad car pulls in right behind Jay.
So this is the plan, he thinks, the way they intend to shut him up.
He wonders which one made the call to police.
Elise or the man in the Ford.
Behind him, he hears the doors of the squad car open. He quickly pushes the .22 onto the floor, reaching his right foot across the floorboard and kicking the gun under the passenger seat. It disappears into the shadows on the floor.
In his side-view mirror, he sees one of the officers coming up on the driver’s side. The other cop, a flashlight in his hand, is walking on the raised curb to the right, which stretches from the street to the edge of the bridge. Jay can hear the water down below, lapping against the bridge posts beneath them. When the first cop arrives at his door, Jay sees the gun at his waist, the metal cuffs. He wonders what would happen if he laid his foot on the gas, if he just drove away, how long before another squad car picked up his license plate on the radio, how far would he get and what would he have to leave behind.
“Can I see your license and registration, sir?” the cop says.
