than underwear,” he said.
His delivery was sluggish, his eyes were overcast, and his shoulders were stooped. But if Alzheimer’s sufferers retained the finer points of driving a car, Charlie thought, why shouldn’t he remember how to steal one?
Light towers, one at each corner of the parking lot, transformed the area into an illuminated stage to passing motorists, of whom there were two or three per minute. Charlie weighed this against a mental image of transit cops and token booth clerks in all five boroughs currently scrutinizing his photograph. “Okay, why not?” he said.
Scattered around the lot were eleven cars and a van. Drummond pressed his face against the driver’s window of the first car he came to, a late-model Chrysler sedan. With a dismissive nod, he left it behind. Same with the Kia coupe three spots down.
“Something the matter with them?” Charlie asked.
“I would need the ignition keys.”
This disclosure coincided with the subway train’s departure from the station. Charlie’s stomach sank the same way it did when a horse he’d bet heavily fell hopelessly behind right out of the gate.
The subway fled his thoughts at the sight of the police cruiser rounding the corner. He heaved himself behind the driver’s side of the Cherokee that Drummond had moved on to inspect. Drummond made no move to conceal himself; he remained standing by the driver’s door and watched the cruiser. Which was what an innocent man would do, Charlie realized-too late. He was in the process of tackling Drummond.
They became a tangle of limbs on the icy asphalt. At least they were hidden from the cruiser as it zipped past.
“Sorry, I got a little carried away,” Charlie said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Drummond said. “This one’s no good either.” He tapped the Cherokee with the newspaper he’d brought with him from the truck, presumably to read during the ride to Manhattan.
“You remember saying you could hot-wire a car, right?”
“Yes, yes, of course. But if the ignition barrel is encased in the dash, as it is on the newer models, it’s much more difficult.”
Before Charlie could ask what an ignition barrel was, Drummond was on his way to what had to be a suitable candidate, a boxy gray Buick from the days before anyone knew what “mpg” stood for.
Trying and failing to open the doors, Drummond dropped out of sight behind the hood. “An interesting piece of information is that locks with retinal scanners make exponentially fewer errors than iris scanners,” came his voice. “There’s no technology that allows the forgery of a human retina, you see. Also, if you kill a man, you can’t use his retina, because it begins to decay immediately.”
Charlie felt like crying. “So you’re saying the lock on this car has a retinal scanner?”
“No, it’s just an interesting piece of information, that’s all.” Drummond reappeared, having dislodged a softball-sized chunk of cement from the crumbling tire-curb. He flattened his Daily News over the back window on the Buick’s driver’s side, and hammered it with the cement chunk. The newsprint protected him from the spray of glass and blunted the sound-allowing Charlie to hear the yelp of brakes a few blocks away.
Had one of the cops thought twice about the unusual shadow movements he’d seen in the mall parking lot?
Sure enough, Charlie heard the garbled chatter of a police radio. Growing louder. It curdled his blood more than the siren would have.
“We have to go,” he said. “Now!”
“I’m with you,” Drummond said.
Charlie sprang toward the dark delivery alley between the supermarket and the carpet store. A trickle of streetlight at the far end promised a way out.
Hearing only his own footfalls, Charlie spun around. Drummond still stood by the Buick. Reaching into the gap he’d created, he opened the driver’s door.
Charlie rushed back, intent on dragging him to the alley. Drummond dove past him, into the Buick, landing prone on the front seat. He flipped onto his back, snapped off the base of the ignition barrel, plucked two reds from the tangle of wires, touched their ends together, and brought the husky engine to life.
Scrambling into the passenger seat, he said, “Charles, we have to go, remember?”
Charlie shook off his astonishment-he could do nothing about his fright-and hurried into the driver’s seat.
He shot the Buick down the alley, and, at the far end, turned out onto the street just as the police cruiser bounded into the strip mall parking lot. Again, he only heard the cruiser.
Driving away, he said to Drummond, “I’m impressed that you didn’t have to change your underwear every time you changed cars.”
4
“For now, the flooding appears to be under control-”
Charlie switched off the car radio. A water main break in Canarsie was the night’s biggest news. No cabdriver murder story, no mention of the flight of the Clarks, nothing about traffic delays due to police blockades.
Nor was there sign of such blockades. The practically vacant Williamsburg Bridge stood just a block down Driggs Avenue. On the other side blazed Manhattan in all of its immensity and raucousness-a sanctuary, in Charlie’s mind. Still his eyes bounced from mirror to mirror. The rest of him was as tense as rigor mortis in anticipation of police cars or, worse, a teal car.
Slouched in the passenger seat, Drummond registered little response to the radio or much else. His eyelids appeared weighted down.
Suddenly he cried out, “Bridge!” as if warning of an incoming missile. He plunged off the seat and bunched himself up on the rubber mat in the footwell.
It was too late for Charlie to turn back. To brake meant a certain rear-ending. The best he could do was slow the Buick. “What about it?”
Drummond looked over as if through thick fog. “They’ll see us.”
“Who?”
“I don’t…” Drummond’s voice fell off.
Charlie studied the steep on-ramp. A Volkswagen Beetle skipped across the threshold. At the ramp’s peak, a stripe of light swept over a wrecker as it thumped onto the bridge’s main span. Charlie’s eyes jumped to the source of the light, the steel box mounted on the gantry above the span. The box contained a camera intended to photograph vehicles that sped or jumped red lights. Traffic cams had been blooming on gantries all over town recently. The photos were processed later-often months later-by the Department of Transportation. In cases of clear infractions, where both the license plate and the driver’s face were captured, summonses were issued by mail.
“Please don’t tell me that they-whoever they are-can tap into traffic cams,” Charlie said.
“Maybe you should wear this.” Drummond offered up the soiled New York Yankees cap that had been wedged into a pocket on the passenger door.
Charlie pulled on the cap. The bill draped his face in shadows. The cap itself compressed his pile of hair. A devout Mets fan, he’d always maintained he wouldn’t be caught dead in anything with a Yankees logo. He never imagined he actually would have to make the choice.
The drive across the bridge and into lower Manhattan was uneventful-as far, Charlie reflected, as he knew. From Houston Street, he turned the Buick onto quiet Ludlow, intent on the quaint Italianate brownstone halfway down the block.
It was a few minutes to one. Lenore, who tended bar at the Four Leaf Clover, a horseplayer watering hole in Hell’s Kitchen, ought to be home now, hopefully alone. He’d been to her apartment three nights ago. The visit lasted only as long as the nightcap that occasioned it. He left without much sense of whether he wanted to call her or whether she had any interest in hearing from him. They hadn’t spoken since. So his showing up now and asking to stay the night would strike her as peculiar, to say the least. That he’d brought along his father would be off the
