“This will only make certain that what he tells us will be the whole truth. It’s perfectly harmless, I promise you. I believe he might even enjoy the trip.”
“Don’t listen to him, kid! Undo these straps and I’ll take you right over to Michael Cassidy and…and…Law Addison, too!” I said in desperation, falling back on lying since the truth wasn’t setting me free. “Yeh, that’s right, both of them together. Right now.”
Mr. Gower shook his head sadly.
“See what I mean? That’s a lie. We’ll never know the truth unless we do it my way.”
“What do you mean a lie? How the fuck do you know?”
“His sleeve.”
“Stop saying that!”
He stopped saying it, but only because the blond kid was capitulating. He had his hand on my sleeve and was tugging it back, revealing my bare, exposed, naked arm.
“Okay,” Mr. Gower said, extending the needle “this will only take a—”
“Look out, kid!”
I don’t know why I shouted it, reflex I guess, seeing that needle as Gower aimed it at the kid’s upper arm. I had no love for FL!P, but I absolutely hated needles. I didn’t want to get stuck by one and didn’t want anyone else to get stuck either.
Why he believed me, I don’t know. Must’ve heard something in my voice, the urgency, because the kid responded like a whip, flinging himself backwards. He landed on the floor, skidding out of view, screaming up, “What the fuck, old man! You almost stuck that into me!”
“I told you to hold him still,” Mr. Gower tried to explain. “You moved.”
“You tried to stick me! What’s in that?”
“Harmless, I tol—”
“Then stick yourself with it! Sh-uh’ya!”
“Please talk sensibly, just come back here and hold his arm again.”
“Hold this!”
FL!P sprang back up on his feet, holding his skateboard close to his chest like a narrow shield. Then suddenly his arms shot forward with the skateboard jutting straight out. Its edge caught Mr. Gower below the chin in the soft flesh of his throat.
I heard a crunch.
Mr. Gower dropped the syringe. Mr. Gower made hissing noises and scuffled his feet. Mr. Gower sat down on the floor. He didn’t get up again.
The kid was wild-eyed, he was mumbling, murmuring, “Y’see that, y’see that, motherfucker?”
I didn’t want to interrupt, but I urged steadily, “Undo the straps, undo the straps.” He must’ve heard me, because he dropped his board and his fingers began working at the buckles. I heard the wheels of his skateboard freely turning, the steely sound of its ball bearings a familiar one to me, the same sound I heard before something hit me in the basement stairwell.
The kid kept mumbling, “Y’see that, y’see that?”
Yeh, I saw it. And I saw how the wound looked on the old man’s neck, same as the one I’d seen on Luis’ throat.
Unrestrained, I sat up on the table, rubbing my wrists, and asked, “So who is—who was this guy?”
“I never met him before tonight. He came up to me at the party, said he had a way to get you to tell where Michael Cassidy and Law Addison were hidden. He knew all about it, so I thought, what can I lose? All he wanted was help lugging you up here. But he didn’t say nothing about shooting you up with drugs. Or me!”
I stood up, looked around the place as I worked the circulation back into my wrists. It was a mini chemical lab with scales, test tubes, beakers, and Bunsen burners. In addition to equipment were the varied and variegated ingredients for cooking up drugs, including nail polish remover, industrial pesticide, and several household cleansers. There were also piles of tiny glassine envelopes, the sort the post office gives with stamps, and for the same reason: to keep out moisture. The envelopes contained chunks of white powder, the finished product. It was scary what kids will ingest in any white powder form, never stopping to question what made up the substance they snorted, smoked, shot up, or swallowed in a pill, just as long as the longed-for numbness ensued.
Mr. Gower, or whatever his name really was, looked to have been some kind of low-level cook. And judging by how he’d showed up at the hotel this morning, he was probably the person who’d been on the other end of the phone when I’d walked in on Michael Cassidy. He must have been one of her drug suppliers, quite possibly the one who’d concocted the hot bag that took Craig Wales’ life. And he’d been ready to do the same thing to FL!P, and then surely to me, too, once I’d given him whatever information I had. I wouldn’t be shedding any tears over his death.
There was a knock at the door then. A knock that developed into a heavy pounding. BANG BANG BANG.
The kid turned to me, “Who’s that?”
“It’s probably whoever told Gower here to off you and me.”
The knocking got louder, then stopped being a knock. The doorframe trembled. Whoever it was was trying to kick in the door. Three or four more like that and he’d succeed.
I spun around, saw a window with a fire escape outside it.
“That way,” I said.
We flung it open and crawled out onto the rusted fire escape. We were on the third floor of an apartment building. Outside it was full-on night, the streetlamps blazing orange.
The kid scrambled down and I was right on his heels. He didn’t bother releasing the ladder at the bottom, just grabbed onto the last rung and dropped down to the sidewalk below. I did the same, and as soon as my feet touched pavement I started running.
The kid was fast. Ordinarily I never would’ve been able to keep up with him, but I’d heard other feet coming down the fire escape behind us—its whole framework shaking—and it gave me wings.
I wasn’t even sure in what direction we were running until we ran out of island. We were on East Sixth Street and East River Drive when I yelled to the kid to hold up. He was headed for the overpass that traversed the drive and gave access to the athletic fields of East River Park.
He stopped halfway up the walkway ramp and looked back. Not at me. He seemed to be searching in the distance, back the way we’d come.
I needed to get close enough to grab him. If what I now believed was true, he’d not only killed Gower, he’d killed Luis, too. Gower could rot for all I cared—but I was going to see FL!P got nailed for Luis.
But as I got to the foot of the walkway, he saw something that spooked him. He started running again at full tilt, all the way across the cement overpass and into East River Park. I almost lost him in the dark, but as I reached the park I saw furtive movement off to my left. I headed in that direction.
Several years ago, the retaining wall that ran along the edge of the park had eroded and begun to crumble into the East River, and the asphalt promenade that lay over it started caving in, producing potholes which grew into sandy sinkholes. For safety, the city had erected high chain-link fences closing off the worst sections, making them off-limits until they were repaired. But of course they’d never gotten around to repairing it, too many other things needed patching up. It was the same all over the island. This was an old city that suffered too much weight bearing down on its thin shell of civilization. It had started collapsing in on itself like a star on its way to becoming a black hole.
Where I’d glimpsed FL!P moving was inside one of these fenced-off areas of the park. A crescent-shaped section of grass and trees about eighty feet across and thirty feet deep at its widest, that was cut off on the land- side by an eleven foot high chain-link barrier. On the river side was the promenade’s waist-high wrought-iron fence.
The enclosed area was in shadow, but I could just make out the humps of two unoccupied cement benches inside. I saw movement again beside one of them.
I looked around for a way to get in. Far to my right, where the fence started to angle in toward the promenade’s railing, I found a five-foot-high gap someone had clipped in the chain links with wirecutters. Not recently, done some time ago, probably by kids looking for a private place to do drugs or make love, or both. The gap swayed slightly though there wasn’t any breeze. Which suggested FL!P had passed through it moments earlier. I stepped through myself, careful that none of my clothes snagged on the sharp edges.
