Moonlight Falls (25 page)

No one noticed. Not when I bent down, retrieved the key out of my slipper, slipped it inside my mouth under my tongue; not even when Bobby managed to pull the lighter away from Timmy.

I’m not entirely sure, but maybe we were halfway over the bridge when I reached up and over Bobby’s head with my cuffed hands, wrapped the restraint chain around his fat neck, squeezed the bitch as hard as I could.

It wasn’t like the movies at all.

We didn’t swerve all over the road while a major struggle ensued inside the Chevy.

There was no time for dramatics.

The whole thing took no more than three seconds, tops.

It was all a matter of my squeezing on his neck with the chains and the wheel on the Suburban cutting all the way to the right and then the open-mouthed, petrified expression on Timmy’s gaunt face as we hit the concrete barrier …

Ramming speed!

58

FULLY CONSCIOUS, I LIFTED up my feet, kicked out the side door window. Climbing out head first, I dropped down onto the concrete, managing to break the fall with my cuffed hands. There was no noticeable pain. There was no time to notice it. All around me, cars and trucks were skidding to a halt. Not to avoid the smashed Suburban. But to get a look at me.

I didn’t give them a chance to get a good look.

I hobbled over to the side of the bridge in my shackles and cuffs, climbed up onto the steel railing and jumped.

A fifty-foot drop, feet first into the Hudson.

I gathered up my bearings, bobbed in the slight chop, fought the weight and restriction of the chains, shackles and cuffs. I pumped like a mad dog to keep my head above water. The key still tucked under my tongue, I tried to breathe without swallowing river water.

I thought,
if I hyperventilate now, I’m done. This time, for good.

As the shore approached, I glanced over my right shoulder.

From a distance of two or three hundred feet, I could still make out the Suburban. It was smashed up against the concrete meridian. Bobby and Timmy were nowhere to be found. I wondered if they had taken a dive.

I wondered if they could swim.

Maybe I should have been thinking about more important matters.

To my direct right, the Port of Stormville. A freighter was docked parallel with the port, beside a mooring with a big number 6 painted on its concrete base.

To my direct left, the county lockup with its guard towers and searchlights beaming down upon chain link and razor-wire fencing.

Treading water, there was the ever-persistent current that pulled at my legs and feet. The damp air that surrounded me smelled of rotting fish. A school of black ducks circled overhead. On occasion, two or three would break off from the pack, dive into the water, beak first, only to reemerge seconds later, shooting off into full flight like surface-to-air missiles.

Gazing back at that freighter, I could see that it was getting smaller and smaller. Which told me the undercurrent was pulling me farther and farther away from the port, along with the stunted Stormville skyline behind it. I knew I couldn’t last forever in that chop. I had to make a run for the bank before my body was dragged further south, where the river opened up almost like an inland ocean.

The pain in my head was almost gone.

Without the complete use of my arms, I propelled my body along like a seal. Until I made it to a large culvert that emptied out onto a patch of gravelly riverbank.

But then that’s when I felt it.

As soon as I stuffed myself into the aluminum tube it engulfed me like a wave. Not pain, but exhaustion. The kind of pure tired that starts in your brain, travels along your veins and arteries all the way to your toes. Even now I can’t tell you why it decided to bowl me over like that.

Lying there inside the culvert, my legs still submerged in the water, I felt a lot like the dead and bloated fish that surrounded me on all sides. Probably smelled no better either. I laid my head down for what I thought would be a two-minute catnap.

By the time I woke up, the afternoon was gone.

I crawled out onto the bank, laid there in my blaze-orange jumper, soaking wet from head to toes, hands and feet still bound in shackles and cuffs.

I spit out the key.

Curling my legs into my chest, I reached down with my left hand, started unlocking.

A few moments later, I was free.

I dug a hole in the wet sand, tossed in the chains and cuffs. Then I filled the hole back in. I looked up at the sky. Thick gray black clouds stared back at me.

I judged the time to be about five o’clock, five-thirty. It was hard to tell.

It was hard to believe that nobody had located me by now.

Just up ahead, a concrete dike wall situated maybe ten feet above the shoreline. In the far distance to the north came the mechanical drone of a giant dock-mounted crane that was lifting and setting fifty-gallon drum-filled palettes into the docked freighter’s hold. With the quickly fading cloud-filtered daylight, I knew that the crane would soon be stopping, the workers who manned it heading on home.

Until that time, I would have to crawl back into the culvert, sit tight.

Because of the cloud cover, it didn’t take long for full dark to settle in.

I emerged from out of the culvert once more, made my way up the narrow stretch of river bank towards the dike wall. The port crane had stopped, its mechanical drone giving way to the high-pitched straining and stressing of the freighter’s steel hull bobbing up and down in the river’s wake. Out beyond the docked freighter, I could make out the bright pier-mounted beacons of light shooting out across the wide river.

That’s when I saw the barge coming from out of the north. A flat, brightly illuminated diving barge with maybe half a dozen men and women standing on top of it. From where I stood, I could make out two black rubber-suited divers who were, just then, dropping into the black river, no doubt in search of a possibly drowned fugitive. I knew that when they eventually came up without my body, I would be considered alive and dangerous.

Standing wet and cold on the riverbank, I felt very alone.

But soon I heard a voice and the clap of footsteps coming towards me from the direction of the dike wall. When the narrow cone-shaped light began to strafe the beach, I knew that it had to be the police.

This is what I did: I went down onto my stomach, crawled my way across the beach to the concrete wall. Stuffing my body between the wall and the beach, I tried to make myself invisible. Rather, tried to
will
myself invisible. Facing the river, I saw the bright white flashlight shine upon the very spot I had been standing just a couple of seconds before.

The S.P.D., my one-time brothers and sisters in arms.

Had they not announced themselves with their chest-mounted radios and flashlights, I’d already be back in custody. Instead, I held my breath, laid there perfectly still, until the flashlight moved farther south along the dike wall. When the light had all but disappeared, I got back on my feet and started jogging in the opposite direction towards the port and the longshoreman locker rooms.

The time had come for a change in wardrobe.

- - -

I walked alongside a brick monster of building that stretched the entire length of the main pier—a four-story warehouse with maybe thirty separate docking bays closed off by identical metal overhead doors. As an S.P.D. detective, I knew that the port office was located somewhere in the general vicinity. As anticipated, I found it located at the far north end of the structure.

The solid metal door was padlocked.

There was a window. A reinforced window that had been left slightly ajar.

I pushed in the window, pulled myself up and stuffed my body in through the opening.

I hit the wood plank floor hard. But not hard enough to do any damage. Picking myself up, I made my way through the front office to the back changing and shower rooms. The locker room itself was windowless, with only a large louver for ventilation. There was a bathroom and a gang shower. Out beyond that was a closed-off area designated for the machine shop.

Every available space was filled with lockers.

Eight or nine rows of beat-up metal, coffin-shaped boxes covered in graffiti and Scotch-taped
Penthouse
and
Hustler
nudes. The place reeked of mold.

I stood there sopping wet with only the outside dockside spots to light my way. Quickly, I rummaged through the few lockers that had no locks on them. By the end of my search, I found a pair of workman’s khakis, a white t-shirt and a pair of steel-toed Timberlands that fit well enough.

So far so good.

I was alive; I had new clothes and a destination in mind.

Hotel Wellington … Room 6-5-7 …

They were coming through the machine shop doors when I spotted them.

Two cops.

One man speaking to the other in a slow whisper voice, the narrow beams of light coming from their hand-held sticks bouncing off the block walls and tin lockers like twin Tinker Bells.

I pressed my back up against the lockers, held my breath. I waited until the cops made it past the showers and stepped into the locker room. There were no windows to crawl through. The only way out would be back through the office. Meaning, I would somehow have to get those two uniformed Stormville cops behind me.

I waited until they passed me by. Then I moved on towards the office, taking slow silent steps while the cops went ahead and searched the locker room.

I must have been halfway across the floor when I noticed it. The office door that led out onto the pier was no longer padlocked shut.

The door was wide open.

Somebody had to have opened it. Maybe the same man who, right then, stepped out of the shadows, pointed an old black-plated service revolver in my face. Just this crazy night watchman who, with a shaking left hand, raised a silver whistle to his grimy lips and started to blow.

The high-pitched whistle was piercing.

He was an old man. Maybe somewhere in his mid-seventies. A tall, uniformed, crooked branch of a man with scraggly gray hair, a gaunt stubble-covered face and wide wet eyes.

“Stop,” he spat.

The whistle hung off his neck by an old black shoelace. The pistol trembled in his right hand. Too heavy for his skin and bones. Looking into his bloodshot and blistered eyes, I knew he had to be frightened out of his wits. I looked for the index finger on his right hand. Was it pressed against the pistol trigger? It was impossible to tell in the half-light, even from a distance of only five or six feet.

“Hands,” he insisted. “Raise your goddamned hands.”

Slowly I raised them, shoulder height.

It must have been the cue the two Stormville cops were waiting for. They came up on me from behind. I didn’t require eyes in the back of my head to know where they stood.

One of them shouted, “Down on your knees.”

I knew he could not have been more than three feet away from me. So close I could almost feel his hot breath against the back of my neck.

I hesitated for only a second or two before I started bending my knees, collapsing my body, careful to go slow, not give the old man a reason to shoot me in the face, not give the cops a reason to shoot me in the back.

They had nabbed me fair and square.

As far as they were concerned, I was already on my way back to county lockup, ready to stand trial for the murder of their Captain’s wife and eventually the Captain.

Me, Richard Divine, part-time cop turned cop killer.

But then I was no cop killer. And all semblance of fair-and-squareness had skipped town the deep dark morning that Montana pulled me out of bed, ordered me to head up an independent investigation.

Me, lowering my body.

“Do it,” came a voice from behind.

There was the old man’s pistol barrel following the tip of my nose every inch of the way down. To my right, the flashes of red, white and blue cop cruiser light reflected against the wall. There was the heavy dark river just beyond the macadam-covered pier. There was the giant freighter, bleeding bilge water from rusted holes in its lower hull. There were the intermittent beams of spotlight that shot out across the water.

I knew that it was just a matter of seconds until the empty cop cruiser attracted the attention of any cop who might be in the immediate area. Just a matter of time until these two men and one over-the-hill night watchman turned into an entire squad.

I started lowering my hands.

I didn’t stop lowering them until they were almost level with my knees and the floor. Then I leaned all my body weight onto my left arm and, just like that, extended my right leg, swinging it against the old man’s legs like a battle-axe.

His feet were cut right out from under him.

He dropped like a sack of rags and bones. So hard you could almost hear his hip pop.

The revolver fell out of his hand, bounced off the floor. I rolled over onto my right side, brought the pistol up, pressed the barrel against the old man’s head, cocked the hammer.

I had no choice but to hold a gun to the old-timer’s head.

I’d been screwed from the start.

Ever since those cops had decided to check out the locker room. Christ, ever since I’d washed up on the riverbank; ever since the night watchman decided to play hero.

I got up, told the old man to lay flat on his stomach, not to make a hint of a sound or I’d have to shoot him in the head.

“Don’t test me,” I warned.

The cops just stood there, sidearms in hand.

I told them to toss me the guns, then remove their utility belts, toss me those too.

“Fucking do it.”

Sirens, getting louder.

First they exchanged part confused, part frightened glances. Then together, the two bent down, slid their pieces over to me. Standing once more, they undid their belts, tossed them over at my feet.

I confiscated both of the officer’s 9 mms, stuffed one of the barrels into my pants, while keeping the other on the cops and the old man.

I pulled the extra clips off their utility belts, stuffed them into my pockets.