The Sixth Station (18 page)

“Excuse me, sir?” I called to the driver, who was moving different levers as the asthmatic smoker grunted his way inside.

The driver looked annoyed. “I’m helping people board here, ma’am.”

“Yes, I know, but I, um … need to use the restroom. Right away,” I said, pointing to my stomach. “It’s serious.”

Even more annoyed that I was going to stink up the restroom before we even left the curb, he nonetheless had no choice but to let me step on the wheelchair ramp, cutting in front of a lady waiting to wheel on.

“Come on,” he said. “But I could get in trouble for this.”

I handed him my ticket and raced aboard and straight into the lav. When I heard the bus doors finally close and the hissing sound of the hydraulics signaling we were set to take off, I came out, put my carry-on bag up on the rack, and plopped down hard in an empty row in the back.

I was watching out the window, scanning the area for the German bastard. As the bus began to pull away, I saw him, cigarette dangling out of his mouth, standing, scanning the cars, right on the curb. So close.

As the bus passed him, he instinctively looked up and saw me. For the briefest moment, our eyes met. I turned around to stare out the window, trying to follow my tormentor’s progress or lack thereof. He started heading at a swift pace back toward the parking lot.

As the bus pulled around and passed the row where the Caddy was parked, the German stopped dead in his tracks, close to the car. He saw me again through the glass. Our eyes locked. I pressed my lips against one of the back windows and planted a kiss obscenely on the glass and then waved at him, like a forlorn lover, with a tiny wiggle of my fingers. He was standing there alone—I hoped—at least as far as I could tell with the limited sight range I had out the window.

As the bus swept past him, I reached frantically into my red bag, pulled out the Caddy’s keyless remote, pointed it out the window, and hit “unlock.”

The explosion from Sadowski’s car shook the ground and rocked the bus. Flames shot ten feet in the air.
Damn!
It was nearly as terrific an explosion as the one that had blown out the lobby of my honeymoon hotel.

Auf Wiedersehen, Fritz.

17

The seniors all screamed and ducked as best as they were able to when the Caddy blew. The driver, who had seen it all (or thought he had), didn’t stop the bus to look back. He just immediately sped his bus safely out of harm’s way and then came on the PA to assure the passengers that everything was OK.

“Car fire, folks. Lucky we were far enough away from it.”

The “incident” gave the passengers a full hour to repeat the same things over and over to each other. It was the most exciting event in years.

“If we’d been a few feet closer…” “Did you see those flames? Thirty feet at least!” The morbidly obese guy, however, was still complaining. “Driver! Crank up the air conditioning. I’m dying back here. So damned hot. I need a smoke. My nerves…”

I sat back smugly until the truth sank in. Dear God, had I just killed someone? Technically, I assumed that, yes, I had killed someone, even though it wasn’t really my doing.

Yes. It was. You knew he wired that car the second you saw him inside of it. It’s not murder. It is so. Oh, my God. I just killed a human being. Now I really am a guilty fugitive on the run.

I kept my eyes glued to the TV screen at my seat and tuned it to a local TV station, WKBW. Within minutes, they had a reporter on the scene of the “tremendous car fire and subsequent explosion.” The Caddy was still burning like crazy, and ambulances and fire engines were surrounding the whole area of the parking lot.

“The service area has been closed,” the excited young man was reporting. “No word on when it may reopen. Eyewitnesses in the parking lot tell News Seven that sheets of metal flew as far as twenty feet!”

Then a second, more terrible thought hit me: What if flying sheets of metal had also killed or wounded innocent people? The reporter had no word on deaths or injuries yet.

Then, courtesy of Happy Trails, the TV abruptly went black and the preprogrammed selection of movies began. For the next several hours I would be in a news blackout.

I checked Sadowski’s secure phone for messages from Dona or Donald. There was one. It was from [email protected]. Dona.

“Good work” was the entire message.

How in hell did she know that an obscure car fire in an Upstate rest area had been my work? Of course she didn’t, she was talking about something else. But what?

I didn’t know whether to answer or not. I chose caution and shut the phone down.

When we passed a highway sign indicating that it was seventy miles to the Canadian border and Niagara Falls, my heart started pounding again. This spiky-haired redhead looked nothing like perky brunette Alexandra Zaluckyj on my passport, but I was still nervous.

I had only one ID with that name on it. My credit cards were all in the name of Alessandra Russo, and so was my license.

I pulled down my carry-on from the rack and went into the bus lavatory. I pulled out my expensive scissors and cut up my cards. I stuffed the non-name parts of the cards into the built-in garbage thing on the wall. I opened the window at my seat a bit, and every mile or so discreetly threw out another piece of plastic credit card.

The bus exited onto I-190N and the Robert Moses Parkway and then followed the
CITY TRAFFIC
sign to Rainbow Boulevard. It made a right at Fourth Street and into the casino parking lot. The megalopolis that is the Seneca Niagara Casino was so overwhelmingly large, it could give the MGM Grand in Vegas a run for its money.

Most of the seniors exited the bus, but roughly a quarter of the passengers stayed on while others boarded.

A woman in her eighties sat down next to me.

“Going to the Falls? I try to ride the
Maid of the Mist
at least twice a year,” she said. “I love the slots too and come as often as I can. And you? Vacation?”

“I’m meeting my husband at the Falls,” I lied for no reason whatsoever. “We honeymooned there.”

What? Who are you? Marilyn Monroe in
Niagara
?

“Yes, the honeymoon capital of the world—when my mother was a bride,” she quipped, as the bus pulled away from Upstate’s gambling mecca. Was she eyeing me suspiciously?

“We thought it would be romantic. I mean, anyone can go to Bali, right?”

Oy. Shut up.

The lady—her name was Lexi—then went on and on about her three marriages and how each one was more thrilling than the next. Husband number two was a sex addict.

“How can you not love that?” she said.

I was beginning to like her a lot, when about five miles out from the Canadian border the fat guy, who surprisingly had not gotten off at the casino, started complaining out loud that he needed a cigarette—despite the fact that he was attached to an oxygen supply!

“I don’t know why he didn’t smoke up when we stopped at the casino,” I complained to my new best friend, Lexi.

As I feared, the tub pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

A frightened elderly lady in the seat across the aisle jumped up. “Put that out,” she screamed. “You’re gonna kill us all.”

Tubby just snarled, “Mind your fucking business, you old bat,” and blew smoke in her face.

Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t get mixed up in this.

Lexi jumped out of her seat and rushed Tubby and knocked the cigarette right out of his hands and stamped it out.

This sent him into a rage and he spewed out, “You stupid bitch!”

Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t get mixed up in this.

I got up from my seat and walked over to Lexi’s side. Not that she needed me.

Just then the driver came on the PA to announce, “Everyone back to their seats immediately! The police have been notified.”

Oh, damn. Just what I need.

“Lexi, this isn’t a fight you need to make,” I said to her as she shrugged me off with her elbows, nearly poking my eyes out. She was much taller than me.

“Stupid fat bastard!” she snarled as I wrangled her back to her seat.

At the Canadian border crossing, the driver pulled into the bus checkpoint area and was immediately pointed into the customs office.

Several U.S. Customs officers and an equal number of Royal Canadian Mounted Police boarded the bus, spoke briefly with the driver, and announced that we were to take our luggage and exit the bus. Tubby started yelling again.

“I’m a citizen of the United States of America, and I protest this treatment. What is this? Iran?”

The officers immediately stood beside him and asked who else had been involved, while the rest of the passengers tried in their disabled ways to exit the bus.

Although the bus check-stop at the border crossing normally takes about a half hour, this would, I realized, be considerably longer and would involve more intense scrutiny.

“These two,” he said, pointing to Lexi and me as we were trying to exit.

Goddammit!

“Not true,” said the lady who started all the trouble with the smoker. “This lady,” she said, pointing to me, “tried to break it up. He’s just pissed that she had diarrhea and ran on the bus ahead of him.” Great.

The cop asked for my identification, and I handed him the Alexandra Zaluckyj passport. I cringed as he inspected it, took off his glasses, looked at me more closely.

Which country isn’t a breeding ground for terrorists?

“It’s Polish,” I said, as though he cared. Then, worse, “My family was in the Holocaust.”

What?
I made a face like my stomach was about to erupt again.

As the driver lowered the back ramp, the cop looked at me like I was just another crazy lady with the runs, and he dismissed me with a wave.

To make myself look even more innocent, I ran back to the lavatory, came out with a satisfied look on my face, and began unfolding wheelchairs and walkers and helping whatever passengers we could to get out of the bus, while making idiotic small talk with them. My heart was about to explode.

We had to put our bags and luggage on the ground outside the bus, and the customs agents pointed out several bags to go through, mine of course being one. Forty-two-year-old women with rooster hair are the most likely drug couriers.

As I presented my bag and passport again, the fat guy was being lowered from the bus’s handicapped ramp. How it didn’t crash to the ground, I still can’t fathom. He was still cursing and screaming.

The customs agent was so intent on not missing the action that he briefly glanced at my passport and asked only, “Business or pleasure?”

“Pleasure. I hope,” I joked. “Second honeymoon at the Falls. My husband was on business in Rochester, so we decided to meet up there.”

I could have said I was carrying a nuke for all he cared. The fat guy’s rage escalated when his wheelchair touched the ground. He then also lit up again and started yelling curses at the officers.

Thank you, Jesus
. Or whoever.

The big guy was taken into custody along with Lexi, and the rest of us were allowed to board once more, and just like that the bus cruised across the border right into Canada.

“Stupid fat bastard,” I heard Lexi yelling just before we pulled out.

The Niagara Falls bus depot looked exactly as I’d expected it would and featured, in addition to other depressing features, a TGI Friday’s.

I paid cash for a Greyhound bus ticket (forty dollars) to the Toronto airport—which would involve another hour-and-forty-minute ride, according to the schedule, which left me a little more than five hours until departure. Figuring on at least two hours of travel time—without traffic—would put me at the gate three hours ahead of the flight, which left me roughly an hour to clear check-in.

If only.

Traffic was especially heavy—highway construction—and I arrived at the Delta terminal with only two hours and fifteen minutes to spare. I went to a kiosk, punched in the confirmation number of the prepaid ticket, said a thank-you to Donald somewhere in the world, and watched gratefully as the ticket slid out.

I went to the check-in line, which was very long, and after fifteen minutes, I started to sweat. The security line was as long as at an outlet mall on Black Friday.

I showed my ticket to a Delta agent on the floor, and she further distressed me by saying, “You’re on the wrong line.”

No! How did you screw this one up?

“Oh, my God, I need to go through immigration and everything and I won’t make the plane in time,” I said to her.

“No,” she laughed—laughed! “You should be on the BusinessElite line.”

“The what?”

“Your ticket—it’s for business class.”

“It is?”

“You booked it and you don’t know?” she then said, eyeing me.

Terrorist / wanted killer / baby snatcher trying to board!

“Oh, the band—they booked it for me.”

“The what?”

“My husband, he’s in a rock band. The, um, The Pan. Have you heard of them?”

You are such a fool! The Pan Band? You should be arrested just for that.

The agent looked at me blankly. “No, I don’t think I have. It’s the line right over there,” she said, handing me back my ticket.

First class? Why Donald, I didn’t think you cared!

The line was short—that’s how the rich do it—and the woman at the counter quickly checked me in, surprised that I had no luggage to check. All I had was the terrible fake Vuitton carry-on and my red bag.

“My husband’s in a rock band. They forwarded my stuff to Istanbul.”

“Really? Wow! Do I know them?”

“Pan,” I replied—
again!
—which caused her also to immediately lose interest in my exotic life as the wife of a rock star.

“Just go to the Elite security check-in on the far left.”

That line was nearly empty, and I sailed through immigration in no time, thanks to the help of one of Delta’s Elite agents. Yes, when you’ve got a big-ticket ticket, you are treated like a rock star. Even if your husband is in the Pan Band.