Jay holds out his hand. “Give me the keys.”
“I need some assurance that I’ve been heard here,” the man says. “Do we have an agreement, Mr. Porter?”
“Give me the keys now!”
“Relax, Jay. I’m not trying to hurt you. I believe this is a solu tion that benefits you greatly. You could have gone to the police already. But I know for a fact that you haven’t. I’m offering to pay you to stay out of something you don’t want to be involved in anyway. I’m not sure I see what the problem is.”
The train is coming from the northeast, headed right in their direction. Still only a light in the distance. There’s still time. Jay puts his hand on the door handle. He pulls the lever, ready to jump. The man in the passenger seat grabs his arm, twisting the skin, making it burn. “Do we understand each other?”
The light of the train is growing brighter by the second, com ing closer.
Jay tries to reason with the man. “If the cops were to ask me anything—”
“They won’t,” the man says. He doesn’t even flinch at the roar over his shoulder, the vibration on the tracks.
“How can you be so sure?” Jay asks.
“I wouldn’t propose a deal to you, Mr. Porter, if I didn’t have my end of it squared away. Your part is simply to keep your mouth shut.”
She must have told him about the boat, Jay realizes.
She must have told him everything: the late-night rescue, Jay and his wife out on the water. He wonders if the guy posed as a cop . . . and thinks how easy it would have been to get Jay’s name and address from the boat’s captain.
“The captain from the boat?”
“I offered him the same deal,” the man from the black Ford says with unnatural repose. “But I didn’t feel I could trust him . . . not to my satisfaction, at least.” He takes a puff on his smoke. “So we worked out another arrangement.”
“He’s dead.”
The man gives Jay an affable smile, as if he’s only trying to be helpful, considerate even. “Take the money, Mr. Porter, buy your wife something nice.”
Jay goes hot at the mention of his wife. “Leave her out of this.”
“I don’t want to see anyone hurt, I really don’t, Mr. Porter. You and Mrs. Porter are the only two people who know what happened that night . . . and I’d like to keep it that way. You keep your mouth shut and everybody wins.”
“Where’s my gun?” Jay asks, remembering his missing .22.
“I’m going to hold on to that,” the man says. “For a little insurance.”
“Where is it?”
“Don’t worry. I plan to keep it safe. I’d hate to see it get in the wrong hands. I wouldn’t want the police to get the idea that you’ve got something to hide about the shooting or that, God forbid, you were in any way involved.”
The threat lands across Jay’s chest with an unbearable heavi ness. The air in the car is thick with smoke and musk. The light of the locomotive is a perfect circle now, just over the man’s right ear. A few hundred more yards and it’s a bullet or the train. Jay has to decide.
“And if I don’t take the money?”
The man shrugs. “Shame to see it go to waste.”
He looks over his shoulder, as if he’s just noticed the train for the first time. “Either way,” the man says, “if anything goes wrong with our agreement, you can bet I’ll be in touch.” He reaches into his right pocket for Jay’s car keys, dropping them on the dashboard, right on top of the manila envelope.
He opens the car door and is gone in a flash, jumping across the tracks, leaving Jay alone with the train and the money.
The white light of the train’s front car has encircled the Buick, burning across Jay’s face. His arms are leaden with terror, his fingers numb and thick. He fumbles with his car keys, nearly dropping them before he manages to get them in the ignition. The train sounds a horn, a shrill warning. Jay makes a quick decision to dump his car and save only his life. He pushes open the driver-side door, moments from the greatest leap of his life.
But he can’t bring himself to leave the money behind.
He glances back at the envelope on the dashboard and makes a quick grab for the money, pulling the envelope by a corner. It unfolds in the middle, sending the money, stacks of $100 bills, spilling across the floor of his car and rolling underneath his seat. Jay feels along the carpeted floor for the money. He looks up at the coming train and makes an impulsive decision to start the car. The engine coughs and starts on the first try, an unimag inable blessing. Jay throws the Buick in reverse, backing it over the tracks at fifty miles an hour, getting only a few feet to safety before the train rumbles past, shaking Jay’s car like a leaf in a late-summer storm.
He’s halfway home before he stops the car, pulling into the park ing lot of an all-night food mart. There are two brothers sitting on milk crates out front, one of ’em shaking something in his hand that Jay takes for dice. His heart still racing, Jay locks the doors, then bends over to scoop up the money. He stuffs it back into the envelope, fastening the clasp, folding it over again in half.
He knows he can’t keep it. But he can’t bring himself to get rid of it either. In this envelope is Jay’s first
