“Used to be a racetrack. They closed it down a few years back.”
“You mean, like, for racehorses?”
“Yeah. Trotters, not Thoroughbreds.”
“Oh.” He half-yawned. A mugger must have stolen his interest. “Anyway, that’s where your man lives. Surry, New Hampshire.”
“Preston, that’s a common name. You sure you got the—?”
“If he’s the same Jeremy Preston who sold the house in Westchester you told me about, he’s the one you want,” the man said, a little huffy that I could be questioning his skills. He’s a very sensitive guy. I guess writers are like that.
We got up and started walking through the park. He lives on the East Side; we’d part company where the traverse gives you the Fifty-ninth Street option.
A jogger passed us. He was wearing a white bodysuit with orange fluorescent bands around the sleeves and thighs. On his back was embroidered: “Runner Carries No Cash.”
“My mistress says to say hello,” the writer said. I guess this was one of those days when he wasn’t allowed to say her name.
“Back at her.”
We walked some more, watching spring descend all over the park.
“I’m working on a novella now,” he said. “I’m calling it ‘Sub Plot.’ What do you think?”
“Very strong,” I assured him.
I’d be running in the seam—it was too late in the season for the ski crowd, and too early for the foliage freaks. Even at cop-avoidance speeds, probably no more than four hours.
I would have liked company on the drive, but Beryl’s father had known a man with a different face, and I didn’t want to spook him any more than I had to. Or let him think anybody but me knew his business.
Once, I would have taken Pansy with me. She loved to ride, and she was a better conversationalist than she looked.
I walled that one off. Quick, before it took hold. Bad dreams are one thing; somewhere down in that darkness, you
I rolled out at four in the morning. Even at that hour, the city’s never empty, but there was nothing you could call “traffic,” and I cruised all the way to the bridge without stopping for anything but the occasional light.
The Roadrunner was contemptuous of the speed I held her to, the tach loafing at around two grand. I switched between the all-news stations, listening for anything about the investigation into the death of Daniel Parks, but all I heard was the usual putrid stream of packaged press releases, endless sports scores, some breathless celebrity-watch crap, and a lot of commercials.
I switched to talk radio. People were still foaming at the mouth about some woman in Florida who’d been brain-dead for over a dozen years. She was way past a coma—“persistent vegetative state” is what the doctors called it. A feeding tube in her stomach was all that was keeping her body from rotting—to some, a lifeline; to others, a harpoon in dead flesh. Her husband said she had told him if she was ever in that kind of situation she’d want to go. Her parents said that was all a lie.
Her husband had the final say, and that probably would have ended it, except that the anti-abortion crowd decided this was some kind of “right to life” issue, and they lit a fire under their lackeys. The governor of Florida—a passionate believer in capital punishment, because that’s what the Bible told him—stuck his God-fearing nose in, personally passing a law that stopped the husband from disconnecting the feeding tube. When the courts said he couldn’t do that, his brother, Big Christian, took over. Once that happened, the same Congress that hasn’t been able to come up with a national health plan in twenty years took about twenty minutes to pass a law that sent the whole thing back to the courts.
The TV stations had all been running footage of the woman. Her eyes were empty, lips drawn away from her teeth in a permanent rictus her parents said was a smile of grateful love.
One caller said the husband should be on trial for attempted murder. Another screamed he was a “confessed adulterer,” since he was openly living with another woman. Someone else calmly recited that he was going to get “millions” from the lawsuit over what had made his wife brain-dead in the first place.
Fair and balanced.
When she’s finally allowed to go, I figure they’ll fight over the remains. If the parents win, my money’s on cryogenics.
No matter which station I switched to, there was the same topic. One degenerate said the woman was still smarter than his ex-wife had been—probably had worked on that line for days, in between popping Viagra so he could get his money’s worth out of his porno DVDs. Then there was a panel of medical experts, who went on about “loss of upper-cortical function,” and a bunch of other stuff nobody was listening to or cared about.
The only honesty I heard was from a brimstone-voiced woman who warned, “When America finally becomes a Christian country, cases like Terri’s won’t be decided in any court. The Lord will rule.”
I shivered like it was winter inside the car.
When I left the highway, I was only about twenty miles from my target. The Plymouth blended right into a thin stream of mixed vehicles, everything from working-class trucks to luxo-SUVs, with a seasoning of anonymous Japanese sedans and the occasional kid’s jacked-up Camaro.
My ID said I was James Logan, who lived in a building in the Bronx that hadn’t gotten a mail delivery since a drunken squatter kicked over a kerosene heater a few winters back. License, registration, and proof of insurance all matched the plates. Jim Logan had taken early retirement from his job as a manufacturer’s representative, selling restaurant supplies. His hobby was restorations. The Plymouth was a work-in-progress, and now he was looking for an old farmhouse he could bring back to life, too. Friends had told him that southern New Hampshire had a lot of wonderful possibilities, but he preferred to look around on his own first, before dealing with brokers.
There was snow in the fields, but the roads were crisp and clean. A few flakes may be enough to paralyze cities like Charleston or Atlanta, but up here even a major blizzard wouldn’t slow things down for long. It’s always easier handling what you’re used to—that’s why people with my kind of childhood do so well in prison.
The town didn’t have a lot of street signs, and I wasn’t carrying a premarked GPS, so I just meandered around, getting a sense of the place as I searched for the address.
I passed it twice before I pulled over and checked what I had written down. The number matched, but my expectations didn’t. Instead of the semi-mansion and fancy grounds I’d expected—and I’d driven past enough of those to know the little town didn’t lack for upscale housing—it wasn’t a lot more than a cottage, set off to the side of an unpaved driveway.
I drove back, thinking maybe I’d been looking at a guest house, or some kind of artist’s studio, and the real thing was somewhere behind it. But the only other building I could see as I went up the driveway was a small garage, sided the same as the house, with a matching roof. The house itself was bigger than it had looked from the road, but no more than a couple of thousand square feet, I guessed. If you transplanted the whole thing to Westchester, probably cost you three-quarters of a mil. Up here, maybe a third of that? I didn’t know enough to even guess.
I parked the Plymouth at the end of the drive, jockeyed it around until it was facing out the way I’d come, and walked across a patch of ground to the front door. Before I could raise my hand to knock, it opened.
“Yes?” said a gray man. I blinked twice, and the gray man turned into Jeremy Preston. Or whatever was left of him.
“Mr. Preston,” I said, confidently, “my name is Logan. James Logan. I’m here about a matter my brother
