Writing

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

27.

This was how it would happen. This is how it was done.

I sat in Pirelli’s explaining it to Rachel, a cold cup of coffee in front of me, an uneaten hamburger between us. We’d shared not taking a bite. Instead of eating we’d smoked an entire pack of my cigarettes, the ashtray packed full of our butts and the air dense with the heavy blue smoke.

“He timed it,” I said, staring down at the vaguely pink surface of our table. “He must have been watching us, and he called in the bulls just when it would be too late to be booked, so he won’t go in the system until tomorrow morning. So only James and his team know Billy’s on ice.”

This was how it would happen. This is how it was done.

“During the dog watch, only a supervising sergeant on duty, James will just walk on in and flash his badge, and tell everyone Billy’s a witness and he’s got to take him upstate. No paperwork. It’ll be weird, but there’ll be nothing in the system, so no one’s going to argue with a Detective. It’s his badge, his career—if it was really James, he’d worry about that, about getting away with something, because the next morning there’ll be an arrest report entered into the system and no criminal to go with it, and questions will be asked and six months, a year from now Detective Stanley James is charged with something after weeks and weeks of newspaper stories. But what does Alt James care about that? It’s not his job.” I swallowed bile. “Detective James is already dead.”

Rachel was staring at me with red eyes, her arms crossed under her breasts, looking puffy and beautiful. She was maybe thirty now, I wasn’t sure. Some lines had crept onto her face, a gray hair here and there. She was beautiful and always would be, but she’d had some hard years, some traffic. I wanted to reach over and take her hand, but didn’t. She didn’t think I could be gentle. She was probably right. I could be gentle if I concentrated, but we moved in different ways, felt in different ways, and the fucking universe got its cruel jollies by having me show up as her driver all those years ago.

“Please stop,” she said, her voice hoarse, one leg bouncing under the table. “I know. I get it. Billy’s a friend.”

I nodded, but I didn’t stop. “So he’ll walk Billy right out of The Tombs in a few hours and no one will bat an eye, say a word, ask a question. Cops do it all the time. Take someone on a ride, beat the tar out of them, get information, revenge, whatever, then slip him back into his cell, and no one ever asks any questions. Everyone knows, but no one says anything, that’s how it works—the cops are worse than the fucking mafia. Except Billy won’t come back: James’ll take him somewhere and he’ll make a call. He’ll make me an offer: Falken for Billy. He won’t accept Falken’s location because he doesn’t trust me. He’ll want me to bring Falken somewhere physically, make a trade.”

Rachel was shaking her head. “You can’t do that.”

“I can’t?” I felt sick and sludgy, but wanted another cigarette anyway, just to have something to do with my hands. “Billy’s … important to me.”

The words were oversize, and I had trouble speaking, my throat throbbing.

Rachel suddenly leaned forward. “He’ll kill Falken. Falken is—”

I pounded the table with my fist. “Not my friend. Billy’s my friend.”

We stared at each other. She didn’t blink. After a few seconds I leaned back against the vinyl. “All right. Then I have to go get Billy out.” I stretched and fished into my pocket for cash, tossing some on the table without looking at it. “Tonight. Before James fetches him.”

She nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”

We stared at each other again. I put my hands flat on the tabletop and took a deep breath. “You ever been in The Tombs?”

She shook her head. “I never did a bit. Not even overnight.”

I nodded. “We’ll have to hit it before the shift change, before James comes by for him, which means there’ll be more cops to deal with.” I paused and ran through my thoughts, getting them organized. “There’s a cop, a kid, in deep with Frank and I been letting her ride a little, doing her a favor because cops got credit to burn other folks don’t.” I waved a hand. “I don’t collect on Frank’s book any more, but she don’t know that. I can press her and she can get us in without notice.” I closed my eyes. “There’ll be at least eight or ten guards—this is the holding level, not the fucking booking office. We’ll go straight down. So say—a dozen. A dozen fucking armed cops.”

Her stare was steady and dry. “Guns?”

I shook my head.

She blinked, slow and languid. I loved her. I could watch her blink and be entertained. “So, we’re going to sweet-talk them into letting us walk out of there with him?”

“No one said you couldn’t shoot some people, you wanted.”

And there it was: She smiled.

####

The face that appeared between the door and the jamb was old and wrinkled, squinting despite the darkness. “Who the fuck,” he said with a thick accent, a complete declarative sentence, not a question. Then his shrunken pale face puffed out suddenly into a balloon of surprise, and he tried to slam the door. He moved in slow motion, though, and by the time he got his body behind it I’d had my foot in the gap for about six hours.

“Be friendly, Anto,” I advised as he grunted and huffed, trying to shut the door despite my foot. “This, by way of reference, is not friendly.”

“You trying to get me hurt?”

“Anto.”

“You fucked up, you trying to get everyone in your trouble?”

“Anto,” I repeated patiently.

He gave up with a snarl and backed away from the door, throwing up his hands and turning away. “Fine. Come in and get me killed. Frank—”

“I know,” I said, stepping into the hot, dim apartment foyer, followed by Rachel. “Frank put the black spot on me. So I’m a customer, and I’ve got cash.”

The old man was short and stocky, the body of an old dock worker under a bright white button down shirt and a pair of dark trousers held up by fraying leather suspenders. His white hair spurted from his pink scamp in thin, wispy shrubs, like clouds circling his skull. He paused just before the narrow entryway widened into his living room and cocked his head. “Cash, eh,” he said.

I turned my head and nodded at Rachel, who bit her lip and shut the door behind her. We followed the old man into his living room, a large green couch and matching chair facing a huge television that still flickered the news at us, the sound off. It was cozy, the tiny kitchen behind us and another short hall leading to the rest of the apartment—the bedroom, his office, the bathroom. A tidy place, excepting the office, no dust, no mess. No booze. I’d been in Anto’s apartment plenty of times before, picking up packages for Frank in my spare time.

Anto glanced at Rachel as she stepped around me and straightened up. “Forgive me,” he said suddenly, the words mushy. “Welcome to my home. My name is Anto Picinich.”

She smiled a little shyly. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Picinich. My name is Rachel Murray.”

He nodded, smiling, then looked at me and his smile fell away instantly. “Come,” he grunted. “I make tea in the kitchen for the young lady and you tell me why you have killed me.”

“No tea for me?” I asked as we followed his compact frame.

“Ha! You hear how he jokes about my execution. You watch, I will slip away and make a call and some men will come to take him off my hands, give me a reward.”

I shook my head at Rachel. Anto was always like this. You were forever waking him from a nap, or interrupting dinner, or getting him into trouble, or, if you were unfortunate enough to be black or Spanish of some persuasion, you were always stealing things from him.

The kitchen was so small Rachel had to work hard to keep from touching me as we tried to stay out of the old man’s way. I gave him a minute, and as he filled an ancient kettle with tapwater I said “Anto, I need to buy some documents.”

“Running?” He said. “Frank has pushed your button, and you run. Passports? Driver’s license? Birth Certificate? Very expensive. You have brought photos? If I must take your photos myself, it costs extra.” He shut off the water and turned towards the stove. “And when you are found living in Mexico under an assumed name and they bring your documents back to Mr. Frank McKenna, they will say, no one but Anto Picinich does such quality work, and I will be in trouble.”

“Not passports,” I said, ignoring his ranting and glancing at the time on the battery-powered clock on the wall. “Badges. Detective, NYPD. Manhattan precinct, preferably way north – 34th Precinct, maybe.” I held up my hand with fingers splayed. “Two. In an hour.”

The old man turned from the stove and looked at me, then at Rachel, then back at me. “Jesus,” he said. “How much cash did you bring?”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

26.

I spun around and with a surge of glee I leaped onto Chino’s back, both hands on his head, and slammed him down onto the bar, knocking him cold. He slumped under me like an avalanche, and I tried to surf him down and failed, slipping backwards with a tearing sensation slicing along my side and cracking my head on one of the tables, sending it up and over, its former tenants scrambling out of the way. Feeling like a knife had been shoved into my belly all over again, I pulled myself up to my feet and turned myself around, breathing heavy. The Bumble stood over the Dandy, who was crumpled on the floor unconscious next to Chino, his hands spread.

“Cops,” I said, staggering forward. The place had gone quiet and staring as The Bumble and I walked briskly back towards our table, where Falken stood next to Rachel, their drinks untouched. I waved my hand back and forth, indicating the rear of the bar. “Out the back, out the back,” I hissed.

Rachel spun immediately—I’d flushed her out of too many shitholes in our past life for her to ever forget the instincts that kept her alive—but Falken stood there gaping at me until she stopped a few steps away, spun, and took hold of him by the shoulder, giving him a yank that got him into motion. As we caught up with them, The Bumble and I simultaneously paused to kick over our table and the empty one next to it, and a war whoop burst out of me. We crowded into the tight, dark vestibule outside the kitchen and the single toilet while Rachel struggled with the heavy steel door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONELLE ONLY, finally dragging it open with some help from a wide-eyed Falken, who appeared to be experienced the longest sustained elevation in his heart rate ever.

We burst into the alley behind the bar just as a blue and white police cruiser turned the corner, and we took off to our left, towards the pair of slimy green garbage bins set back against a high cinder block wall. I felt ridiculous. Normally when the cops took an interest, I kept my dignity: Let the motherfuckers frisk you, give you a few pokes, maybe even arrest you just to hold you for twenty-four hours and sweat you out a little. Here I was scrambling for a fucking wall climb like I’d just gotten caught tagging some car on the Bowery.

Falken leaped up on top of the dumpsters like an athlete despite his belly, like he was connected to some invisible wire, and was up over the wall in a flash. I didn’t blame him. Billy, no stranger to rushing out of places just ahead of the heat, crashed into the dumpster like he hadn’t seen it, bounced back, then heaved himself up onto it in a messy, awkward scramble that left his suit a stained, greasy mess. I took a little jump, hearing shouts behind us, and put my palms flat on the black plastic lid and vaulted up onto the slick surface, the smell, hot and rotten, enveloping me instantly. I got to my feet and glanced over my shoulder down the alley, where two fat uniforms were running towards us like their shoes were made of glue. I smiled—I knew these guys. In my business you met every cop in the world, eventually. Breathing a little heavily, I looked down; Rachel was still on the ground, looking at the Dumpsters like they were fucking Mount Everest, one hand on her chin like she was doing equations in her head involving the curvature of the earth or some shit as our tiny window of advantage closed up.

I dropped back down next to her. “You fucking midget,” I whispered, smiling at the cops and shooting my cuffs. I started towards them, spreading my arms wide and smiling. “Jesus, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for uniforms, huh? All this for little old me?”

The cop in the lead was named Murray: fat, pale, and hairy, his face covered in a massive graying beard/mustache combination that swirled out into whimsical handlebars. No one ever made fun of his whiskers, though, or if they did they found out that a baton could be worse than a fucking gun in the right hands. His blue shirt was stained with sweat already, and I wondered how long it had been since the academy for him.

“Sorry, pal,” he said, grinning, everyone friends. “The boss says pull him in, we pull you in. You got any complaints, file ’em with James.”

I nodded. “You can let her slide, though, right? I mean, James wants me, right?”

We were a few feet apart by now. Rachel, smart even if she wasn’t tall, remained back by the dumpsters. I hoped she was shedding a tear for me, manfully acknowledging my sacrifice, because I was about to flush a decade of good will between me and the crushers down the fucking toilet. Cops were all just failed hoods, people who wanted to crack heads and walk into rooms and make them go quiet. All your average cop wanted was respect: If you treated them well, shook their hand, and let them run the show, they loved you. Piss them off once and you arrested every Thursday for drunk and disorderly like fucking clockwork.

Murray shook his head but his partner answered. Ruiz was a slimmer version of Murray but with just a porn mustache hanging on his upper lip like a well-fed caterpillar that matched his eyebrows in fucking disturbing ways. “Sorry, word o’ God is, take everyone,” he said.

I shrugged. “All right,” I said, stopping a foot or so away from Murray, who was fishing out his handcuffs. All very gentlemanly, all very civilized. A week ago that’s exactly what would have happened: I’d have let them cuff me, we’d have cracked jokes all the way to The Tombs, and I’d have asked them to order me Chinese food around seven, and they would have been happy to do it.

As it was, I stepped forward and punched Murray in the gut.

There was a lot of gut to try and impress, but I’d compensated for every pastry Murray had absorbed in his career and he doubled over like he was on a spring, letting out a wet moan and suddenly becoming a dead weight hanging on me. I drove him forward and crashed his bulk into his partner, knocking them both to the ground. I sprang back and danced around to the left, aiming a solid kick at Ruiz’s face.

This was fun. This was exercise. Ruiz’s head snapped around and sent a spray of blood onto the greasy pavement, and I was eleven again, breaking Tommy Dukone’s nose, feeling the cartilage break, the gummy gritty feel of it against my knuckles, the sad squeaking noise he made in the gutter. And every time I kicked him, I got a spray of blood and a squeak. I kicked Ruiz and I got a spray of blood and a squeak. I turned to see what I could make Murray do, Murray who probably thought we were fucking friends or something up until ten seconds ago. I took his head by the mustache and gave it a yank, slamming his skull back down onto the uneven pavement.

I kicked Ruiz and got a spurt of blood straight up into the air, beautiful in its way. I could feel every part of me working in concert, every system and vessel clicking in, smooth and strong. It was like dancing, floating, like I weighed nothing, like all my mass and fatigue was transferred to Ruiz with every kick.

Then Rachel’s hand was on my shoulder, weighing me back down until my feet were back on the ground, and I was panting, my chest burning, my suit jacket sweated through, my hip sore and stiff. It had only been thirty seconds.

“Jesus,” she hissed. “Come on, you fucking psychopath.”

She sounded exactly like she had all those years ago, me saving her life, her horrified at the manner in which I was saving it. I wanted to laugh, but I swallowed it and followed her, feeling so good I actually stared at her ass as she hustled ahead of me. I settled my jacket onto my shoulders and felt good, young. We took a left at the mouth of the alley, next to the empty cruiser with its doors open like wings, and walked around the block, circling back around to The Ear on the other side of the street, ducking into a shadowed doorway, our collars popped up and our chins down in our chests. Three cruisers sat at crazy angles in the street, lights flashing, three uniformed cops standing around chatting. As we settled in, an ambulance pulled up to add its own shade of cherry to the lights, the EMTs scurrying out and around the back.

“Psychopath,” she breathed suddenly, but it sounded affectionate, or so I told myself. I smiled, but then we both froze, watching as six cops, looking angry and sweaty, led Billy in handcuffs up the street towards the cruisers.

“Shit,” Rachel breathed.

James emerged from The Ear smoking a cigar. He looked the same: Flash, a beautiful dark green suit and a gold watch you could see from the fucking Moon. He glowed. He stood for a moment, watching as Billy was pushed into one of the cruisers. He scanned the street, his eyes moving right over us, and then flicked his smoke into the street, said something to the cops around him, and climbed into the back of another car. We watched the cops drive off, lights going dead, a small crowd of The Ear’s regulars emerging to gawk on the street.

“They can’t charge him,” Rachel whispered. “They can only hold him for twenty four hours.”

I shook my head. “Hell, Rache,” I said. “He’s the fucking Executioner. In twenty-four hours Billy’ll be dead.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

25.

“You okay?”

Falken nodded without looking at me, eyes fixed on the road, hands tight on the wheel of the clunker. “I’m … great,” he said slowly, licking his lips. “It feels good to be moving, to be doing something other than running.”

He was driving the burner, an orange Chevy with more rust than paint, four tires whitewalls out, blue smoke leaking from the rear. Four hundred bucks as-is and a ripoff at that: its seats more springs than foam, the radio nothing but static, the heater a thing of the past.

I nodded and turned back to look at the street. “You,” I said to the windshield, “should not be here.”

“Too bad,” Rachel said from the back seat, sounding chipper, relaxed. “You should not have walked into my apartment bleeding like a stuck pig. I’m going to help Elias and you can quit worrying about me, because I can handle myself.”

I grimaced, jealousy shooting through me. Elias. She didn’t even use my name. I glanced at Falken and then righted myself, forcing my hands to untense. “I know you can handle yourself, Rache. That’s why you have the shotgun.”

I put my palm against the hard, inflamed slice on my belly. Still red, still angry, leaking yellow pus from time to time, but it looked like I’d been stabbed weeks ago, with something that had been sterilized first.

She snorted. “You didn’t need to take care of me five years ago, and you don’t have to take care of me now.”

I left it at that and watched the traffic. I could see the Lincoln two cars ahead of us; Falken was a quick study and he’d taken my instructions on staying with the car to heart. We were coasting up St. Nicholas Ave, passing the Four Stars, the main drag heavy with people at night, the side streets empty, shadowed.

“Hundred forty-seventh,” I said softly. “Be ready.”

Falken nodded but didn’t say anything.

“Remember, if someone turns in front of you, don’t panic, we’re just gonna go with it.”

He nodded again. “I was there at the meeting, remember?”

I controlled myself. “I don’t know you,” I said simply. “I don’t know what you can and can’t do. So fucking keep your mouth shut and just nod when I ask you if you understand me, okay?”

Behind me, Rachel leaned forward suddenly and flicked my ear with her fingers, a shock of pain cheering me up.

“Be nice.”

At 147th Street, the Lincoln turned left like I knew it would. The street was tight, with double-parked cars lined up along the right side, forming a narrow lane for traffic. We rolled a few doors down the street when the beamer suddenly pulled out of a doubled spot, cutting off the Lincoln. Billy hit the brakes hard, the Lincoln hit the brakes hard, and Falken threw the burner into park, and then we were all on the street.

The driver of the Lincoln was a guy named Bernie Spaz, younger than me, blacker than me, and a much worse dresser than me—he was standing behind the Lincoln’s door wearing a tan turtleneck and a creamy coffee-colored leather trenchcoat, the collar and cuffs of his sweater pillowing out from under the coat like fucking cake icing. His head had been shaved shiny and single gold hoops hung from each ear. His partner, who was probably Leon Hines, a nobody whose only recommendations were that he could give and take a beating, sat in the passenger seat.

“What the fuck is wrong wit’ you?” Bernie shouted as we walked up behind him, Rachel on the right between the cars, shotgun still in its brown wrapping paper and held low, me with Falken trailing on the left. Bernie paused and leaned forward slightly. “Jesus, is that Billy fucking Bumbles?”

“Hullo, Bernie,” I said.

He spun, and I smacked my palm into his nose, feeling oiled up, like I’d been drinking some good stuff, some Glenlivet 40 year so light it floated out of the glass onto your tongue. He staggered back into the car door, and I heard Rachel say Sit—sit down nicely, not shouting it, just saying it.

Blood spurting between one hand clasped over his face, Bernie moved his free hand towards his coat, so I stepped forward and kneed him in the groin as hard as I could. It wasn’t kung fu, it wasn’t a pretty move, but it was effective and we were on a public street. There wasn’t time for pretty.

He doubled over, sneezing blood everywhere, and I knelt down and helped him slide to the street. I pushed him up against the door and slapped his face.

“Bernie, I apologize for this. I do. But listen to me, we’re taking your collection.”

He squinted at me, his eyes already puffy and red, his nose flattened, blood streaming down from it over his lips and chin. His head was an oval on its side, like Charlie fucking Brown. He worked for a consortium of Harlem gangs—some Latin Kings, some just neighborhood clubs—and usually had an easy time of it. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d broken a sweat.

“What?” he said, sounding all sinusey. “Frank McKenna is fucking robbing me?”

The Bumble could be heard going over the car professionally with Falken, grunting instructions, as they searched it thoroughly. In my head I counted down the seconds: Only forty-three of them since we’d hit the brakes.

“I don’t work for Frank,” I said. “I work for Stanley James, and Detective James says anyone owes money in this town, they owe it to him.”

He stared at me for a beat. “That is the fucking most bananas thing I ever heard, man.”

I winked. “I heard worse.”

“Got it, boss,” Billy grunted.

I stood up, keeping my eyes on Bernie. “Sorry about the smack, really,” I said. “Someday we meet in a bar, I’ll give you a free hit.”

He scowled. “Fuck you.”

Falken pushed past me and I followed him towards the Beamer, Billy already hustling into the driver’s seat. I turned in time to see Rachel, tiny, pretty little Rachel, step in front of the Lincoln, brace the shotgun against her hip, and fire once into the Lincoln’s grill, the paper dissolving into fiery embers, the car making an ungodly noise as steam shot up out of the engine. She backed up to the Beamer with the shotgun still braced against her hip, then we all crowded in and Billy hit the gas, screeching down the street.

“Fucking ouch,” Rachel said, panting. “I think I broke something.”

The Ear Inn was almost as old as Charly, the grizzled bartender who greeted us with a snort and a tick of the head at an empty table in the back of the room. It was wobbly, sticky, and meant for no more than three people, but we crowded around it and ordered drinks from the waitress. I knew that in The Ear if I ordered Scotch I’d get Dewars, so I ordered another Wild Turkey instead, neat, warm and flat.

There was a low buzz in the room, no music, just some after work imbibers and a few old codgers shooting everyone nasty looks. There were two small televisions on elevated platforms on either end of the bar, the volume off, both tuned in to the news, which was reporting a revolution somewhere in Africa, everyone terribly concerned.

“Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Rachel said, staring up at the screen.

“Nah,” I said. “We’re all gonna be under one government soon enough, and that’ll be that.” I paused, looking at her, letting my eyes roam, taking in everything I hadn’t been able to lay a hand on for years. “You did good out there.”

She snorted without looking at me. “Ain’t the first time I’ve handled a gun.”

Falken leaned forward, a lit cigarette magically between his fingers. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

I shrugged. “What am I, a fucking criminal mastermind? Fuck if I know if it’ll work.” Leaning forward, I put my hands flat on the table. “We don’t have any muscle. James has the fucking police, for a while, until they figure out he’s not right any more. We’ve got me, and The Bumble, and Rachel and you and the old man. We need muscle.”

He frowned. “And pissing off every criminal in the city helps us?”

I put up a finger. “One, it gets us money, and money makes up for a lot.” Another finger. “Two, Frank thinks I’m working for James, that we screwed him somehow—he can’t even figure out how, but he’s certain of it—so let’s let him think it. Let’s let him think we’re still screwing him over. And let’s invite everyone else to the party. Pretty soon they’re lining up to take on The Executioner.”

Falken nodded slowly. “Muscle. All right. But not working for us.”

I shrugged again. “Working in our interests, though. Ride the lightning, kid.”

As I spoke two more people entered the bar: A distinguished-looking older man with dark, leathery skin and gray hair, a pencil mustache unfortunately cultivated on his face, and Chino, wearing an oversize red polo shirt and tan work boots, looking like some streetcorner runner, this piece of shit handling my collections, giving me and Billy Bumbles a bad name.

Our drinks arrived, conveyed by a broad middle-aged woman with the fiery fake red hair of a much younger if equally classless woman. She stood between us and Chino as she handed the glasses down. I snatched mine and swallowed it in one breath, and stood up, The Bumble popping up and buttoning his jacket, falling in beside me as we crossed over to where Chino and the dandy with the porn star mustache were bellied up to the bar, accepting a thick yellow envelope from Charly.

We crowded in behind them. “Hi Chino.” I shot a hand out and pushed his shoulder as he tried to turn around.

The dandy tried to whirl around, but The Bumble had him pinned close to the bar, and surged forward, slamming the Dandy’s gut into it. He made a whooshing noise and his eyes bugged out of his head, his arms trapped between his own body and the bar.

“Behave your fucking self,” Billy whispered.

Charly was scowling with the complete lack of fear only idiots and really, really old farts possessed. “The fuck,” he muttered. “None o’ this shit in here. I’m payin’ my tab.”

I nodded. “Nothing to do with you, old timer,” I said. “You’re marked off for the week. Isn’t he, Chino?”

I gave the fat man a little shove.

“I marked him off,” he said without trying to turn around. “I marked you off, too, shithead. You step out on Frank? You ain’t gonna have no friends any more.”

I nodded, reaching around and taking the envelope from his chubby hand. “Yeah, I had friends last week and it was fucking great. My apartment got tossed, I got beat on, half-eaten, and insulted. I’m trying out living without friends for a while, see if the number of beatings gets less.”

“Fucking funny,” Chino growled. “You’re hilarious when you get the drop on people, huh? Have them pinned to the wall.”

I stepped back a foot or so, tucking the envelope into my jacket. “Turn around, then,” I said, smiling, blood pouring into my arms, my hands. “No one’s pinning you.”

He didn’t turn. “Fuck you.”

I nodded, and The Bumble released his friend, who I didn’t know. “Tell Frank if he’s got a complaint, he can bring it up with Detective Stanley James,” I said, winking at Rachel and Falken. “Until then, you don’t need to work collections any more, understand?”

“You’re fucking dead.”

I turned for the door and paused. Outside, through the misty, melting windows, blue and red lights flashed, a million of them.

“Cops,” The Bumble whispered, sounding strangely satisfied.

“Shit,” I muttered, and turned back to Chino. “You may be right.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

24.

The Holland Motor Lodge wasn’t the worst motel I’d ever stayed in; the rugs were a horrifying green and yellow pattern that clashed with the drapes and bedspreads, which were tropical in flavor, and the whole place smelled like car exhaust, but it was pretty clean and the furniture was in decent shape. It was right outside the tunnel, five minutes from midtown on a good day, and since Frank’s world ended at the borders of Manhattan it was as safe a spot as any.

My suits didn’t fit right. They didn’t fit badly, but they were off the rack and were snug in the wrong way and loose in the wrong way and I felt like I was eight again, taking my First Communion to make Ma happy and swimming in some cousin’s hand-me-down suit. We’d taken three rooms and everyone but Rusch was in Falken’s, the middle room, filling it with cigarette smoke and half-empty Chinese food boxes, everything mixing with exhaust fumes and honking horns from the cars trying to stuff their way into the tunnel’s tubes, forming a brown haze that obscured everything. Falken was back to his overstuffed self, blooming out of a shiny green suit, his jowly cheeks shaved red and raw, digesting a disturbing amount of sweet and sour pork, forked endlessly and joylessly into his small, greasy mouth with robotic regularity. I didn’t like Falken. My hands itched to slapped him around, but I reminded myself that he had a lifetime pass.

I consoled myself by thinking of Alt James. That bastard had left me in an abandoned world to be eaten for the rest of eternity. My future was a bright golden vision of being able to do whatever I wanted to that son of a bitch without even a flicker of guilt.

Pacing, I pushed my foot down onto the sharp pebble I’d placed in my shoe. Walking around, it dug painfully into my foot, soothing me. Everyone was sitting around the tiny round table that wobbled in every directions, threatening to spill the mess of food, ashtrays, and half-filled glasses of booze everywhere. They watched me pace for a few seconds, patient.

“All right,” I finally said, sending a plume of smoke into the brown air. “We don’t have any muscle. Even if we had the money to hire an army—and my wad will carry us for a while but it isn’t going to buy us an army—no one in this town would touch me now that Frank’s put the kibosh on me. James is playing cop—who knows how long he can pull it off. He looks like Captain Stanley James, he sounds like him, but he’s not a fucking cop and it’s gonna get noticed.”

“He’ll pull it off for a long time,” Falken said flatly. He looked like an overfed pig, his girly little hands steepled under his chin. I owed him my life. I hated that.

I nodded. “Long enough. And while he does pull it off, he’s got the cops. He’s got all the resources of the police department, plus the Feds if he takes the trouble to dream up something big to feed them. Not only the normal cops he would have under his direction for operations, but every fucking dirty cop in the city he can slip an envelope to is his now, too. And we got Frank McKenna standing on my balls, to boot.” I put my cigarette back between my lips. “Thus I am in fucking Jersey.”

“I was born in Jersey,” The Bumble said contemplatively, studying his cigarette.

I blinked. The Bumble, I’d always been sure, had been grown in a lab vat somewhere. The thought of him with a mullet in some suburban Jersey high school disturbed me.

The door opened behind me, and I turned to find Connie Rusch struggling with several overstuffed brown grocery bags. I’d been hesitant to trust the dotty old professor with our food supply, but it had gotten her out of the room and away from the cigarette smoke she deplored.

Ignoring Billy’s sudden moment of introspection, Rachel sat forward fiercely, setting her glass of bourbon on the table. I mashed my foot down onto my hidden pebble and forced myself not to wince.

“So, what, we hide out here, grow old together?” she hissed. “I go get a fucking job as a hostess at some Hoboken dive, get five dollar bills stuffed between my tits all night?”

I shook my head, trying to keep a straight face. Rachel’s rage was endlessly entertaining. She always thought I’d volunteered for all those drives because I wanted to hurt her—my way of hurting her, anyway. But I’d just liked seeing her angry, and she was always angry.

“We’re just here to stay out of the light,” I said. “James no doubt has us on the wire. Frank’s people all know me and Billy on sight. We walk around the city, we’re fucked in an hour, tops. But I have a plan. We’re going on the offensive.”

She shook her head. “What about Elias? How is he getting out of this?”

I frowned, putting all my weight on my one leg, letting the stone really dig in there, maybe even puncture the skin. “We take out James, he—”

“How does he get home? Get back?”

I looked at Falken. Elias. He was staring out the window at the traffic, all noble pain.

“I have an—an idea.”

I blinked, and then we all turned as one to look at Connie Rusch. She was standing by the bathroom, which was doubling as a completely unsanitary kitchen, holding in each hand a jug of milk. She was wearing a floral print dress that hung on her like a sack and had probably cost about thirty cents for two or three South American children to sew from a pattern, no stockings, and sensible black shoes, the kind they put on senile old men who liked to wander the grounds. Her eyes were made ridiculously huge by her thick glasses, which had sunk down to the tip of her nose. The old broad had proven tougher than I’d imagined, but looking at her now I couldn’t believe she was even in the same room.

“I think I can help Mr. Falken with his energy needs.” She hesitated, then rushed on. “This has, after all, been my life’s work. Although seeing the practical application of it so advanced in other, other dimensions is frustrating and demoralizing. I understand the concepts. I have contacts in the scientific community, and the use of such synthetic elements in research is not unheard of. I can make inquiries.”

We stared for another moment, and then Rachel clapped her hands together. “Oh, Connie,” she sighed happily. I grit my teeth.

“We can’t afford it,” I said bluntly. “Elias borrowed enough fucking money to run New York for a week. We can’t buy what he bought.”

Rusch shook her head. her arms were trembling from the weight of the milk but she didn’t seem to notice. “We won’t need to pay for it,” she said in a horrified tone. “These are scientists I’m talking about. We’ll beg, borrow, and trade. Darling, in my field none of us have any money.”

Rachel clapped her hands again. I wanted to slap her. And then throw Falken out the window.

I pushed a smile onto my face for Rusch’s benefit. “All right. How long is that gonna take you?”

She frowned, obviously considering the question for the first time. “A week. Perhaps two. To make inquiries. Another week or two to make arrangements. I may have to do some cross-trading, pull some strings, apologize to certain folks …”

I snapped my fingers at her viciously as she looked down at her feet, doing sums in her head. “A rough idea, Connie,” I said. “Give it to me in a round number in the single digits.”

She looked up at me and blinked. “Perhaps three months.” She did a little wince-shrug. “This stuff is closely tracked, you see.”

A thick silence fell over the room. I turned back to the table. “All right—it’s a time line, at least. It doesn’t change anything. We still need to deal with James.”

Falken didn’t look away from the window as he spoke, softly. “I can’t go back, go home, unless James is gone. He’ll just follow me. And then he’ll be on familiar ground again.”

Rachel sat back again, her hair a delicious mess around her face. “All right. We have no muscle, not enough money, and he has the whole city to hit us over the head with. What do we do?”

We make them hurt, I thought. Swallowing an unformed anger I didn’t want to explore too closely, I pressed the sole of my foot against my pebble and took a breath. “We sic them on each other.”

They stared at me.

“Billy,” I said suddenly, pointing at him. “You know every Collection run in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, right?”

He blinked. “You mean Frank’s? Or everyone’s?”

“Everyone’s,” I said, feeling excited. “Frank’s, The Phin’s, Durby uptown, The Marcos Brothers, Perez and Hildy—all of them.”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah, sure. We gotta stay out of each other’s way, so I know.”

I nodded. “We’re going on a spree. We’re gonna hit them all. Fast, two or three a night, all in one week. We’re gonna clean them out.”

He blinked again. “We’re gonna rob them?” He blinked again, a faint slick of alarm spreading over his rocky face. “All of them?”

I nodded. “Frank already thinks we’re working for James. Let’s make it true. We kick him in the balls, we tell him James told us to. We tell him James is fucking with him, taking over, his worst fucking nightmare: A cop using his badge to run the fucking rackets.” I smiled. “What’s Frank gonna do?”

Billy’s face was comical, a mask of contemplation sitting uneasily on it. “Go after us.”

“After James. All we gotta do is lead him there, let him take the Executioner out.”

Rachel was shaking her head. “He isn’t going after cops,” she said flatly. “He can’t. He’d have every cop in the country on his ass, he did that.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I hissed, my hands balling into fists “Jesus, you don’t know shit about shit here. You don’t know Frank.” I uncurled my hands by force of will. “You go after cops, you have to. He thinks James is going to take everything from him, he’ll go for him.” I nodded. “I know Frank McKenna. You don’t.”

I looked at The Bumble. If he was with me on it, that’s all that mattered. If Falken wanted in, I had to let him, I owed him, but this was about me surviving the week, and I needed Billy.

He smiled. “Well, shit,” he said, reaching for the Wild Turkey. “Let’s make ‘em hurt, boss.”

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23.

The Bumble nodded once and turned for the entrance of my building. It was noon, the sun hidden behind a scum of dark clouds, the air still. He crossed the street and climbed the front steps without hesitation or even a glance back at me; Billy’s greatest flaw and asset was a complete faith in everything he did. I’d told him I’d do my part, so he did his, and it never occurred to him to doubt success. It was going to get him killed someday, and I hoped today wasn’t it.

I spun away and crossed the street, working my way around the corner and up into my apartment via the back yards and fire escape, swinging silently into my old bedroom and setting my feet carefully on the painted floorboards. I could hear voices from the kitchen—The Bumble, right on cue, raising his voice and making a scene, demanding to know who the fuck they were, who’d posted them here, sitting in my apartment like spiders. I listened for a moment, trying to recognize the voices, but these were either out of town talent or not Frank’s guys at all.

Creeping on small feet, I walked over to the closet and stepped into it, feeling better once I was inside its darkened confines, the walls and floor muffled by my own clothes, torn up and dumped. I was showered and I’d bought myself a new suit, off the rack and horrible for all it cost five hundred dollars. The five of us were living down in a motel by the Holland Tunnel on the Jersey side in three rooms, me and The Bumble fulfilling our destiny of platonic marriage. I didn’t feel right, and the sight of all my beautiful suits in rags on the floor made me angry and sad.

I started to sweat. It was close and hot in the apartment.

Crouching down, I worked my fingers under the floorboards, catching splinters. The Bumble was giving it all he had—all I could make out were shouts, but I knew anyone in their right mind would hesitate to do anything more than shout at Billy Bumbles. He’d be able to stretch this out as long as he needed just by throwing around glares and pretending to not understand English, which was a favorite trick of his.

One by one the boards came up. I lay down on my belly, feeling exposed and vulnerable, and reached down into the void. Four canvas bags, heavy and thick, one by one. They came up with a cloud of dust and a musty smell, and I had to huddle for a moment on the floor, hand clamped over my nose, struggling against the strong urge to sneeze. In the kitchen, the voices had become louder, with three or four people shouting simultaneously. When I felt like I had myself under control, I started bringing the bags over to the window, and with a heave I sent them falling down to the overgrown yard one by one, silent. The voices had gotten even louder by then, and I turned, sweating, and crept back to the bedroom door, pulling it inward a half inch.

“—the fuck down, Billy. You think you just fucking disappear for a few days with your fucking pal and Frank ain’t gonna notice? Fucking sit down, Billy. Frank put your name out.”

I recognized Mikey D’s voice now, pictured the white-haired bastard preening there, a jumbo softy, the sort of guy who had a lot of stories about the beatings he’d handed out over the years, but who never seemed to graze a knuckle in real life. I stole back from the door and got back down on the floor, reaching through the shredded clothes and torn-up books under the bed and casting about until I found my trusty aluminum bat. Fucking heresy for the actual game, but metal felt better when smacked across someone’s back. I’d put a few layers of spiraling electrical tape around the grip, a callback to my days playing stickball on the corners at the Four Sewers over on North Street.

Bat in hand, I stepped back to the door and pushed my foot gently into the gap, pushing the door just wide enough for me to slip through. I knew my apartment well, and I knew that if no one was in the living room, I’d be able to slip to the left and approach the kitchen without being seen. I leaned my head out and looked forward: Aside from Mikey D I could see half The Bumble, standing with his hands up lazily, hovering in the air like he might change his mind at any moment. Assholes like Mikey liked guns, because there was no way they would ever take on a slab like Billy Bumbles by hand; Billy would turn Mikey into a memory. I couldn’t see anyone else, but Mikey wasn’t holding the piece, so that meant at least one other guy. And since Mikey liked to play cards while he did shit details like this for Frank, that meant at least one other other guy.

Moving slowly, I crept into the dim living room, bat held low. I looked around, but I was alone in my ruined living room. I kept glancing at the floor, picking my way through the debris, and angled my way left until I couldn’t see Mikey any more.

“You guys think you’re clever,” Mikey was saying. It came out clevah. “You and your colored cop friend. I told Frank—Pinks, didn’t I say it?—I told him when your husband there came in and did his little dance about Falken, I said, bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit. You guys squeeze the tar outta everyone. You collect everything. And this skinny fuck from nowhere puts you off? Naw, ain’t happening. I told Frank—Pinks, right?—I told him you boys were running a scam. And then this cop strolls in and buys the debt. The cop buys the debt. This fucking cop’s been kneeing us in the balls for years, and now he’s buying a huge debt, using his badge as collateral. I said naw, no fucking way. And here you are, Billy, and now the cop’s dropped the debt and told Frank to suck it. So I don’t know if it just fucking fell apart for you and your boyfriend, or if you’re getting skulled on this one, and who gives a shit. So sit down and we’re gonna call Frank and find out where he wants you.”

I pushed myself against the wall just to the left of the doorway and raised the bat up, feeling its weight and balance. Then I stepped around the doorway and swung, connecting solidly with Mikey D’s shoulders.

It felt good. Sharp pain shot up my arms into my shoulders, and Mikey fell to the floor like he’d been held up by wires. I stepped into the kitchen; Billy was already moving, barreling into a stocky old man in a terrible, untucked western-style shirt that hung off his man-boobs like a dress, knocking him back into the sink with a crash that sounded like cracking laminate. I spun to my left and swung the bat without looking, catching a skinny, tatted mope in a wifebeater and a fucking pork pie hat on the shoulder and whipping him around into the stove. I rushed forward and slapped him hard across the back of the knees before he could recover, sending him down to the floor with a moan. I considered hitting him again a few times just because of the fucking hat, but stepped back, searching the floor for the gun. I found it under what was left of the kitchen table, a much-used little thirty-eight that probably had a string of liquor store robberies tied to it.

I glanced at Billy, who was holding up his unconscious victim by the scruff of his flabby neck, then looked down at Mikey, who was crawling towards the front door, making about an inch a year, and pissing and moaning all the way.

“You fucking broke my fucking back,” he wheezed. “You motherfuckers.”

I walked over and put the barrel of the bat into the small of his back, pushing down like I was pinning a bug to a card. He wailed and thrashed his arms and legs.

“Stick around, Mike,” I said. “We can discuss your fucking skill set as one of Frank’s best and brightest.”

He stopped writhing and twisted his head to squint up at me. “I shoulda known you wouldn’t let your lover here out of your sight.”

I pushed down on the bat and he groaned. I liked that, so I lifted the bat up and brought it down hard on the spot right above his bony ass, making him howl. I liked that even more, so I did it again.

“Tell me something, Mike, did you bust out my apartment?”

He didn’t say anything, just lay there breathing hard, sawdust scattering away from his open mouth.

“What the fuck did you have against my suits, you stupid cunt?” I ground the bat down into him, making him squeal, and smiled, sweat dripping down off my chin. “You think I had cash sewn in the fucking linings?”

Mikey made a noise that might have been speech, filtered through the floorboards. Fucking peacock. Put him on his face and he lost all his feathers.

I pulled the bat up and dropped down onto him, knees spread to either side. He groaned again, a drawn-out, rubbery sound. I got comfortable on him. “I got a message for Frank, you listening? Tell him he can stop sitting on my apartment. I’m not coming back again. Okay?”

Mikey made a noise I chose to take as acknowledgment. I have him one last slap on the back of his head and stood up, hefting the bat. “Tell him we don’t work for him anymore, either. If Frank’s got a beef, he’s gonna get a face full of cops.” I smiled at The Bumble, who let the guy he’d been holding up crumple to the floor with a shrug. “Meet you round the side,” I said, and turned for the bedroom.

“You’re fucking dead,” Mikey managed to spit up. “Frank’s gonna push your fucking button.”

I paused and half-turned back, flipping the bat into the air and catching the fat end. “Haven’t you heard, Mikey?” I said cheerfully. “I’m fucking unkillable.”

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22.

“Well, Mr. Falken,” I said slowly. “Looks like you’re my hero.”

He shrugged without turning around to look at me. “No. I knew where he was going to take you.” He looked around, as if he could actually see anything without the flashlight aimed directly at it. “I couldn’t leave anyone in a place like this.”

I could just make out everyone around me as we made our way through this silent, dusty Hoboken. Falken was the same chubby schlub in a suit, his head shaved down to a fine point, his jowls just beginning to blossom. He’d be a fat fuck in a few years if he didn’t cut down on the fruity mixed drinks and the steaks, the double lattes with whipped cream. Right now he just looked abundant. Moist and fertile, the sort of guy who had vast civilizations of bacteria growing in the darkened folds of his skin. He had a pinched expression on his face, very serious and unhappy, and I took it to mean he was really going out of his fucking way for me, breaking his stride to come save me from my own stupidity. I wanted to hit him, but owing my life to him made that seem impolite.

Rachel kept turning her head to glance back at me. In the old warehouse she’d stepped up to me suddenly, oh! You’re bleeding! And reached out a hand, jerking it to a halt just before she actually touched me. Since then we hadn’t spoken a word to each other. She twisted back to look at me and then twisted back around, biting her lip.

Rusch was delighted. Fucking-A delighted. She more or less danced down the street, ogling this alternate world, a place she’d been and not been, recognizable but different, the apparent proof of every theory she had ever floated at a faculty retreat and seen laughed out of the room. I could see her looking out of the corner of her eye at everyone as we walked, trying to catch our attention and start a conversation, like an excited kid.

The Bumble had gone back to his blank-faced expression, walking steadily along with his hands hanging by his sides like shovels, his eyes sleepy. Since he’d just displayed more emotion to me than I’d ever seen in him before, I figured he was exhausted.

Rubbing my torn-up wrist to break the scab a little, the pain cutting through my overloaded nerves and soaking a little more adrenaline into my blood. I was jittery and achy, grinding my teeth, all signs that I was a few moments away from collapsing. I pushed myself to catch up with Falken, who didn’t look at me as I matched his pace.

“What’s he doing now?” I said quietly, not looking at him either. “James. The Executioner.”

“Still looking for me,” he said immediately. “He wouldn’t think of me coming here, but he’s still working me. Won’t give up until I’m dead, either. Don’t worry, he won’t bother to check on you. Keep your head down and you’re fine.”

“Fuck that,” I said, turning to accept a silently proffered cigarette from The Bumble. “That piece of shit put himself on my To-Do list.” I inhaled smoke, letting it leak from my nose at its own pace. “What’s he doing? Where can I find the son of a bitch?”

Falken didn’t turn to look at me as we walked, turning in towards the cliffs at the rear of Hoboken. “He’s playing cop, pretending to be your James,” he said suddenly. “He’s using the cops to look for me. He’s walking around pretending to be him, going through the motions, using the system to track me down.”

I thought about that. I wasn’t a scientist and I didn’t know how to jump between universes. I did know how shit like that worked. “Why don’t you displace?” I asked. “Get out of town. Get out of the fucking world.”

“I can’t, goddamn it!” he snarled, his hands bunching up into fists. He visibly forced himself to relax. “The energy needed for … for traveling between—it’s enormous. In some places it’s easy to come by. Not here. here it’s expensive and difficult.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. “So you borrowed money. As much as you could get.”

“And I managed to scrape together enough material to make two jumps.” I opened my eyes again and forced myself to look at him. He was staring at the ground as we walked. “And I just used half of it.”

I let that ride. I had nothing to say. He looked up and stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched, like he wished he could burn people to death with his eyes. After a second or two I nodded. “Playing cop. Sure. Everyone thinks he’s Detective James, and he gets the whole fucking city to look for you. But it also means we know exactly where the motherfucker is.”

I saw The Bumble nod his head in agreement. We were slowing down, approaching the fucking Beamer, parked right in the middle of the street. It looked scorched, black scars running along the sides, like it had driven through a fire.

“You drove here?” I said, then instantly regretted it, worried that Rusch might take this as an opportunity to give me a lesson in theoretical physics. “Forget it.” The Bumble and Falken stepped forward and opened the front doors, and then we were all getting into the car as if this was a trip to the fucking mall or something. I paused, my hands on the top rim of the door, feeling the heat of the metal.

“How much?” I asked Falken. He stopped, bent awkwardly, half in and half out of the car.

He told me. It was an amount of money I didn’t think you could actually amass in one place.

He sank into the leather seats and I ducked in too, finding myself next to Rachel, Rusch sitting up straight and excited on the other end. There was a good three inches between Rachel and me; it would have been completely natural and easy to lean my leg out and let it touch her thigh, but I didn’t. She might excuse it, she might not. It didn’t matter. I’d promised never to touch her, and until she released me from that promise there was going to be three inches between us.

Falken twisted around in his seat, holding out a pair of what looked like white gumdrops. His face was still stiff and shadowed, his eyes distant. “You’re gonna want these,” he said, dropping them into my palm. “Earplugs.”

I remembered being tied up in Alt James’ trunk, and nodded, stuffing them into my ears along with everyone else. I felt the Beamer fire up, the low rumble in my bones, and settled back, enjoying the near-total silence the earplugs offered. I shut my eyes for a moment, wondering when the last time I’d slept had been.

“Wake up, slugger.”

I opened my eyes and was awake instantly. I felt raw and bruised; every part of me ached. It was bright sunlight outside of the car, making Rachel into a tiny silhouette.

“We’re back?”

“We’re back,” she said, stepping back as I pulled myself, slowly, like an old man, from the car. We were on Hudson Street downtown, crowded with people having lunch and shopping, just strolling in the sunlight. When I got to my feet I wobbled a little, everything going hazy, my joints stiff and my mouth filled with cotton. I felt like I’d been in a coma. When I felt steady enough I climbed onto the sidewalk and leaned back against the door to shut it, sweat pouring down my back. My side burned like someone had injected my wound with acid.

We were parked right outside the White Horse Tavern. I pushed off from the car and staggered over to Falken, The Bumble, and Rusch.

“Jesus Christ, who’s buying me a drink?”

A kid named Carlos was working the bar—slow this time of day, old codgers sopping up domestic beer, mostly—who I knew from a few collections last year. Nothing major, and the kid had cheerfully handed over what he owed, apologizing for making me come out and find him, and I’d let him go with some slaps and shoves. He didn’t exactly smile when Billy and me walked in, but he slapped napkins down onto the bar as the five of us settled in and waited politely to hear what we had to say. I ordered boilermakers for everyone, and an extra one for myself. Rachel made a face, Falken ignored me completely, and Rusch steepled her fingers in front of herself as if expecting a delightful new experience.

When our drinks arrived Billy and I dropped a shot glass each into our pints, clinked glasses, and downed them as fast as we could. We were old pros, and didn’t spill much. Rusch watched us, smiling, her whole face lit up.

I picked up my second shot glass as the alcohol warmed me up, eased my nerves. I felt like I could sleep for days, but there was no time. I stepped out and around Rusch and leaned in to Falken.

“Bygones,” I said slowly. “You and me, we’re even, right? We start fresh. I can’t cover or forgive your debt—Jesus, it’s too much fucking scratch—but I can help you. I know this town, I know the players. I’m on your payroll now.” I popped a finger free from my grip on the shot glass and waggled it at him. “That’s for swinging around to pick me up back … there. Wherever there was. Okay?”

He looked me up and down, then nodded. “Okay.”

I nodded back and swallowed the second shot: Wild Turkey, rough and country, swagger and burn. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it had character, and sometimes that carried you through. “James, The fucking Executioner, is on my list now. I can’t have that fucking doppelganger running amok in my town.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Carlos on the phone behind the bar, his back to us. I twitched my head and focused on Falken. “You got your own troubles, but I could use your help, if only because you’re the only one here who has any fucking idea what’s going on. I’m asking, not telling.”

I’d left my beer by The Bumble, which had been a mistake. I really wanted it before whoever Carlos was calling arrived, and I knew from bitter experience that The Bumble considered abandoned alcohol up for grabs. I’d seen him snag glasses when I was standing a foot away.

Falken stared at me silently for a moment, then nodded. “All right,” he said. I translated helpfully for myself: I’ve got nothing to lose. He was anchored to this world for the time being, he had no more money, and no friends. If I was going to step up to the line with him, why not let me? I might draw some bullets my way. And fuck, I’m supposed to be immortal.

I turned and tapped The Bumble on the shoulder, and he turned around, grinning, and my goddamn beer was in his paw, already half gone. “Billy,” I said, and his grin disappeared. “What I’m planning to do might go against Frank’s wishes, I don’t know,” I said. “At any rate I’m not asking the old man for permission. You still in this with me?”

He shrugged and nodded. “Fuck Frank,” he said. “Asshole hasn’t skinned a knuckle in fucking decades.”

I smiled and looked back at Falken. He looked at The Bumble and back to me. “What do you plan to do?”

“What I get paid to do, Mr. Falken.” I winked, feeling jolly and limp, ready to fall over at any moment. “Make them hurt.”

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21.

I was being eaten alive by an old woman in the dark, one fucking bite at a time.

So far she’d nailed me three times: The first nip in the neck, and once each on my already-bloody hand and arm. She kept creeping up on me in the dark, and her green, muddy teeth were surprisingly sharp, like dogs’ teeth.

The dark: I’d never been in such complete darkness before. The sky had scummed over with clouds, and the moon was hidden away. There were no lights anywhere, and I’d been crushed under a thick, complete blanket of nothing. No noise, no light, my eyes finding the vague, indistinct edges of things and sending me crashing into walls and tripping over every bump. Alt James had cleaned out my pockets; I didn’t even have my lighter.

The skinny bitch, she could fucking see in the dark, the way she moved.

I’d stayed inside the building, figuring that having a wall to back against was better than wandering the streets in pitch dark, where other … people might be lurking. I at least had a vague memory of the layout of the immediate room and hallway, and I’d found something that felt like a rusty metal pole, maybe three feet long and more comforting than effective. I hunkered down in one corner down near the rusty garage doors and stared blindly into the murk, eyes aching with the effort to spot her white hair a second or two before she darted in close, teeth snapping, hands pushing.

I told myself that all I had to do was survive the night without being entirely digested. It didn’t make me feel any better.

I was not a good man. I knew that, but I certainly did not deserve this bullshit, and the fact that the universe—all of them—saw fit to dole this out to me made me want to burn the world down. I’d spent my life seeking rules, ways to do what I wanted, needed to do without being a virus, without being destructive. To find a way for it all to serve a purpose. If this was my reward, I’d wasted my time. I could have been enjoying myself.

I heard her, suddenly, a sniffle across the room, muffled but not before I’d heard her. She was right in my line of sight, up on top of the loading dock, three or four feet higher than me, creeping close to the floor. I got up onto the balls of my feet, balancing, but didn’t try to displace; she’d shown me she could see better in the dark then I could, so there was no point. I had wall to my back and sides where I was; she could only come at me from the front. If I was patient and lucky I might finally clock her in the head, be able to fall asleep before sunrise.

I sat and listened, trying to keep my breathing slow and shallow, kept my hands loose and let one end of the rusty metal rod rest on the floor between my knees. I kept my head turned towards the spot I’d heard her, making her think I was stupid, and waited, tense, holding my breath. I didn’t have much experience with this sort of thing; my gig was to intimidate people with The Bumble crowding them from behind, then making them hurt professionally, expert pressure, sudden violence, and you walked out onto the street to have a smoke and get in the car while your client lay in a pool of their own piss, screaming. Clean and professional, purposeful. Not shivering in the dark forever, fighting off this crazy bitch.

I heard her again, somehow above me, and tried to roll away from the wall. I was too slow, and she was on me, light as air but pushing her snarling, greasy mouth towards me, enveloping me in a cloud of rot and copper. I swung the rod straight up, not managing much force, but connected solidly with her and got a squawk of rage for my trouble. I pushed myself to my feet and swung it again in a descending arc, but I hit the concrete floor and nothing else, a shock slamming up my arms and settling into my lower back in the form of a nice, burning ache.

Spinning slowly, I held the rod out in front of me, trying to see some sign of her. Then I froze, cocking my head, and heard it again: Voices, whispered, inside the building.

It spooked my little cannibal, too; I heard her moving quickly for the first time as she rushed out of the room, a startled stray cat, and for the first time all night I was confident of being alone in the darkness. After a second of triumphant relief, I realized that this hadn’t actually improved things all that much, and started taking slow steps towards the raised platform of the loading dock, where I could use it as a guide to the short flight of steps leading me up towards the exit. I had to move carefully, but I tried to hurry, because I wanted to reach the doorway before anything else did.

It was sweaty work, trying to hold your breath and drag yourself silently through the murk. I didn’t hear anything else by the time I found the lip of the dock and started to my right, one hand on the cold stone to make sure I didn’t go sailing off into the corner, but after a few steps I heard them again: More than one person, hissing at each other, a group of people trying to stay stealthy and quiet and failing almost completely. I wondered if my friend the Cannibal might not reach out to them first, drop in on them for a little snack. I’d know by the sudden and persistent screams of horror and what the fuck.

The steps were pretty much where I expected them to be, making me think I might even get used to being blind, given enough time.

I took them slowly, careful, sweat and blood sizzling on my skin. When I reached the smooth floor of the dock, I inched my way to the right until my outstretched hand found the wall, tracing my fingers along the rough cinder blocks until I found the corner. A few fumblings to the left and I had the open doorway in front of me, the air somehow feeling thinner, less dense than in the rear. I made sure of my grip on the rusty metal rod and hesitated; whoever this was, they probably saw better in the dark than I did, probably knew the layout of the building better—were used to living in this craphole abandoned world. But I couldn’t hide in the loading dock—as the frail old woman who’d been fucking eating me for the last few hours had proven, that was a recipe for getting my ass kicked.

Swallowing bile and fear, I stepped into the chasm that was the hallway, pitch black and endless.

I could hear them again, tense whispers, several voices. Knowing that I could hear them but they had no idea where I was gave me some comfort—if I managed to stay quiet and kept my ears open, I might survive. Then I imagined spending the rest of my life—fuck, the rest of forever like this, being hunted every night, starving until I was hunting the old bitch right back. It got me depressed again.

Creeping along the hallway, I tried to picture it and estimate how far the small elevator lobby was. The yawning, empty shafts might be useful if I had a group who weren’t much better in the dark than I was—get their back to them and menace them, try to make them take that fatal step back, let the building do some work for me.

It wasn’t a very good plan, but it was the best I could do with my available tools: a rusty metal rod, the possible element of surprise, and some open airshafts.

I didn’t have a lot of time; I had to get to the elevator lobby before my new friends did. Fixing my memory of the hallway in my mind, I started forward at a steady pace, swinging the rod in front of me like a blind person to catch any obstacles or fucking vampires or what the hell before I stumbled over them. I felt raw and bloody, festering infections starting to boil under my skin—my new friend did not, I was pretty sure, have the best dental hygiene, and apparently being fucking immortal didn’t do anything for your overall upkeep. I wondered if people broke bones and spent eternity limping.

After ten or twelve steps I felt the space around me change, and figured I’d found the lobby. I changed the rod to my right hand and swung it out horizontally from my hip and kept walking, smacking it into the far wall after a few more steps. I found the wall with my hands and moved in carefully, judging the approximate center of the room by memory. With my back against the wall, I had the hallway to my right and the airshafts directly in front of me. There was no time to double check my memory. I took the metal rod in my hands and banged it hard against the floor. Just once.

The voices, separated from me by a couple of walls, stopped.

I gave it a few seconds more and then let the jagged edge of the pipe drag across the floor a little, the scraping sound loud and clear. Then I hefted it in both hands and stood there, staying still, waiting. I knew the noise might draw my biggest fan back to me for another bite, but I was banking on the Gray Ghost being more afraid of the unknown group than she was hungry—one half-blind asshole was one thing, five assholes who maybe saw just as well as you did in the dark was something else completely.

They were trying to be quiet again, and failing pretty spectacularly, completely unaware how sound traveled in the empty concrete box we were in. I could track them pretty easily just with my ears, but a minute or so later I realized I could see the hallway a little—lights were dancing along the floor and walls, clean blue electric light, bouncing like a handheld flashlight would. I wouldn’t remain hidden against the wall if they were able to fucking put a light on me, so I started creeping towards the hallway. I would just have to let them move past me and try for a lucky shot, knock in some heads, maybe score a flash for my trouble and have a way of getting around that didn’t involve breaking my neck.

There were four of them. They moved past me in a vague group, two flashlights in the front lighting the way, no sense that attacks could come from somewhere other than directly in front of you. I waited until the last two were a few steps past me, then picked a spot that seemed like it might reasonably be someone’s head and rushed forward, taking a swing.

I didn’t hit anything, cutting through air and losing my balance as someone smacked a shoulder into my belly, knocking me over with ease, the rod springing from my hands and clattering away. I tried to kick and roll, but someone had my legs trapped under theirs and then there were hard, confident hands on my wrists, weighing me down.

“Get a light!” Someone yelled from the hallway. I knew the voice, and froze, watching the bouncing light approach and then turn directly on me, burning into my eyes and skin.

“Holy shit!”

I squinted up into the creased, red face of The Bumble. He was grinning down at me, and his grin was horrible, like a mistake, and I loved the sight of it.

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20.

Startling awake, I let out a little cry and flailed my arms and legs, ridiculous. My arms were still numb, my shoulders aching painfully, and breathing had become painful, every inhalation sending a slice of burning red agony up and down my side and in the deep pit of my stomach. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been hanging there, but my stomach also told me I’d been there at least past lunch, past dinner, and probably past midnight snack.

I hung there for a few seconds, smelling the clean air and listening to the lap lap, the plop plop, the creaking of the rope … and slowly realized that the creaking had startled me awake, because it had shifted in tone. Instead of the dry, regular groan I’d come in with, it had transformed into something irregular and higher-pitched. Twisting my head up and around with some painful effort, savoring the tinges of fresh discomfort, I could see that at the edge of the crumbling walkway where the rope went over it had rubbed down to a few stubborn strands.

Just as I pictured myself falling into the river with my hands bound behind my back, the rope snapped and I plummeted.

I sliced into the water and sank, my form perfect, the water freezing, so cold I was amazed it wasn’t just ice. I convulsed, the air exploding from my lungs as I bent this way and that, trying to swim with my hands and ankles tied behind my back, water clawing down my throat. I thrashed and wriggled, sinking, the water like jelly around me, until my lungs started to burn and twitch, the sudden new pain burning through the panic and clearing my head, a rush of euphoria surging through me and making me light; I relaxed and stretched myself out flat, floating on my back, and closed my eyes.

Seconds, minutes, years later, I broke the surface, floating placidly on my back, drifting. I held my breath a few seconds more, savoring the burn, and then opened my eyes and mouth, sucking in the sweet, clean air and staring up at the blue-gray sky.

I floated for a while, trying to give myself little kicks that might steer me slowly towards the shore. I knew my river pretty well, and knew there was a small beach not too upriver where I could climb onto shore even with my hands bound, but I wasn’t sure I could direct enough energy into my thrashings to propel myself there. And I wasn’t sure if this fucking river had the same outline and personality. I took a deep breath and let it out, took another and held it, and curled myself into a ball, sinking slightly under the water but brings my fingers close to my ankles. In the water it was an easier maneuver than in the trunk, and the rope had been stretched out a little, so I managed to get my fingertips onto the knot that held my ankles together.

The rope had swollen, and the water was cold, and I couldn’t see what I was doing, but I got the knot between my thumb and forefinger, paused for a moment to relax again, and began trying to worm one strand out from under the other. After a few seconds of fumbling, I managed it, one fat finger somehow worming its way into the middle of the knot, and a moment later my legs were free.

I rolled over again and popped back to the surface. Taking three deep, coughing breaths again, I oriented myself—surprised by how far from the Jersey side I’d drifted—and started kicking. For a moment I considered kicking towards Manhattan, which loomed on my left silent and massive, but I thought better of it. I knew Hoboken was more or less empty—I didn’t know anything about this Manhattan. And Alt James had brought me in through Hoboken. On the off chance he was still there—car trouble, I thought with a smile—I wanted to be on his trail. A moment later I thought again, and tucked myself into a ball, sinking slightly as I pulled my arms up and over my feet, bending my knees and almost getting stuck in a ridiculous pose for a moment before popping free, my hands still cuffed but now at least in front of me.

I got on my belly and started doing the world’s most awkward and horrible doggy paddle, slapping my bound hands in front of me, angling as best I could against the current towards Jersey. The current wasn’t strong, a peaceful flow I cut through pretty easily, but I was blowing like a beached whale by the time I made it to the scrabbly little shore a few hundred feet from where I’d been trussed up. I crawled through the slimy sandy dirt and flopped onto my back on the rocks, gasping and groaning.

Suddenly, I caught my breath and froze. Someone was singing, not too far away.

It was a song I remembered from when I’d been a kid, though the title and band escaped me: Come on, baby, set me free … you know you ain’t afraid of me. The voice was female, low and smoky, a woman who’d smoked unfiltered cigarettes for years, I thought. A few blocks away. I sat up and stared down at the handcuffs and thought about Rachel. About never touching her again—different, somehow, from simply being forbidden to. At least I’d had the option, the mad option, of breaking the rule.

My wrists were already sore and scabbed from the cuffs, but I started working them anyway, tucking my thumb and pinky in order the other finger and pushing my hand backwards through one loop. The pain felt good, and kept my head clear as I worked the metal back and forth, stealing centimeters of skin back each time. I had nothing better to do but sit and listen to the off-key singing and the water lapping, tearing up my wrist, blood dripping onto the sandy dirt.

Come on baby, set me free … all this talk don’t satisfy me.

After ten minutes or so the pain washed out, everything going numb and senseless. If I’d been doing this just for fun, passing the time, I would have stopped and changed it up—salt in the wounds or a different material. As it was it just made it easier to stare at the blue-gray water and work the cuff up and down, tearing the skin and smearing blood everywhere. I started matching the rhythm of my movements to the lapping of the water, back and forth, push and pull, until suddenly the cuff slipped off my hand and dangled from my other wrist. My whole arm throbbed, my palm slick with my own blood, but I had my arms back.

I realized the singing had stopped, and stood up, blinking, looking around and coming back to myself.

There were signs of erosion and age everywhere. Aside from the crumbling walkway by the river, rust and collapse was every other thing, once you started looking for it. I left my wrist bloody and raw, enjoying it again, and started climbing back up towards the street. I knew which way we’d come; I was going to retrace my steps and see what I found. Probably nothing, but it was a place to start.

I got back on Washington Street and walked right up the middle, weaving around the occasional old rusted-out car or pile of debris. The stillness and quiet was like being in a box at the bottom of a very deep closet, insulated and forgotten.

I heard the steps a few seconds before she appeared and was ready for it, but when she caught up with me all she did was match my stride and walk alongside me for a while. I turned and looked at her, then quickly looked around, checking for an ambush, but it was just her: a middle-aged woman, stick-thin, gaunt, with sunken cheeks and long, stiff-looking white hair. She was wearing a pair of ragged, torn jeans, several layers of torn-up, fraying T-shirts and a pair of Converse Chuck Taylors, blue and looking like they stayed on her feet because they didn’t have any better ideas.

I kept looking around. It was an old mugger trick—you started walking with someone, strike up a friendly chat, and when you turn a corner or pass close to a wall, someone comes from another direction, fast, and jumps you. But I didn’t see anybody else. It was just her, and she was so skinny, her skin so thin and pale, I couldn’t take her seriously.

“I’m so hungry,” she said suddenly, sounding almost cheerful. “You know how long I been here? Four years. You know what there is to eat here? Nothing.”

I kept walking, keeping my eyes moving. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what the Rules of Polite fucking Society said about conversations with ghostlike women in alternate universes, and I figured I could always claim ignorance if it turned out I was being rude.

“Nothing,” she continued. “Not a dog, not a pigeon, not a fucking plant. I’d eat fucking moss if I could find any.”

I turned left at eighth street, and she turned with me like we were a flock of birds or something. I was still braced for an attack, still keeping my eyes open, but she just kept walking, not looking at me.

“There’s not even canned stuff,” she said. “Fucking stores are empty. Wrap your head around that.”

We walked down eighth for a while, chummy.

“I can’t wait to eat you,” she said quietly.

I stopped and watched her take two steps without me. When she spun around, startled, I pointed at her. “Walk some other street,” I suggested. “Or I’m going to have to break your legs.”

She smiled, and I wished she hadn’t. Her teeth were green and moldy, a few missing, her gums a bright red. “I’m going to wait until you fall asleep, and eat you,” she said happily. “I’m going to eat you forever.” She clasped her hands together in front of her chest. “Forever.”

I snapped my arm out and smacked her in the face with the free end of the cuffs, hard enough to make her yelp and stagger back, but not hard enough to even break the skin. “Walk some other street.” I looked around and listened. If this was a distraction, if she was just freaking me out to help some partner sneak up on me, I was going to be ready.

She began backing past me, smiling, her hands clasped in front of her again. “Oh, yes,” she said in a breathy little whisper. “Forever.”

I watched her back away from me, taking her time, her hands clasped, her thin face screwed up into a terrible smile. She just kept backing away until she’d disappeared beyond the rise of the street, and I turned away and started walking again, heart pounding.

By the time I arrived at the beat-up old warehouse on Monroe Street, the sun was sinking and I had the uneasy feeling I’d be spending a pitch black night in an empty world with just the Gray Ghost back there for company, waiting for her to show up with a fucking bib on and a jar of barbecue sauce in one bony hand. I’d emerged from within it some unknowable time ago with Alt James at my back, but I didn’t remember much about how I’d come there in the first place. I stood for a moment in the middle of Monroe Street staring at it: Two buildings, really, squat square lumps of concrete and rebar, connected by a shattered bridge that started off on one side filled with promise and exuberant optimism and ended about four feet later in shards of rock and metal, only to spring up again on the other side as if nothing had happened. The buildings sat on a scrubby patch of gravel and crabgrass, weeds shooting up in odd spots like trees, taller than me, swaying slightly in every weak breeze.

It looked dark inside. I circled around, finding plenty of hollow, sagging doorways leading into complete darkness. My wrist had gone from the searing, clarifying pain I liked to the dull, throbby kind of pain infections heralded, and which I enjoyed less. My head was starting to ache in sympathy, as well as my back, and the idea of stumbling through the darkness inside that building was about as attractive as going to church.

I suddenly wanted a cigarette very, very badly.

Rushing, I stepped through a wide double-doorway and into the greasy shadows. The dimming sunlight illuminated a few feet, and then it was all grays and blues and shadows. A wide, empty lobby led to a narrow hall, then to a small elevator room with two yawning holes where the elevators had once stood. I kept walking down the darkened hall, following my vague, sleepy memories, and found my way to the loading dock. My life had brought me into more loading docks than usual, lately, and I was starting to take it as a bad sign.

When Alt James had pulled me from the trunk, his big black Cadillac had been parked right there on the cracked concrete pad. I jumped down and walked back to the metal garage door that hung by force of habit, heavy and rusted but very much in place. I gave it a good shove and found it difficult to even shake, much less get up off the ground. I didn’t see how Alt James had pulled the car in or out unless he was carrying a fucking generator around in his pocket and could wire the ancient motor up.

I stared at the corrugated metal for a moment, one hand resting on it, handcuffs dangling from my wrist. I’d never felt so fucking alone in my life.

I heard her breathing a moment before she moved, a squeaky kind of low-volume mewling as she crept towards me. I forced myself to wait a moment in the failing light, forced myself to stay still and keep one hand on the garage door despite my screaming nerves: She was there, behind me, swallowed in blackness and creeping, but I knew that it was never the right move to give in to panic, to move the second you wanted to. Your brain was ancient and dumb. You had to be smarter.

When I couldn’t take it any more, I dropped into a squat and fell back onto my hands, sweeping one leg out and catching something. She went down with a yelp and I pushed myself up and tried to spring forward onto her, managing something more reminiscent of falling. She was already scrambling back away from me but I managed to get a hand on her ankle and drag her back to me—she didn’t weigh anything. I gave it all my strength and she flew up towards me like she was made of paper.

I realized too late that she’d let me pull her, and then she was on me, light as a feather, her bony hands pulling at my clothes, and before I could change gears and start pushing instead of pulling, she’d bitten into my neck, hard, pain lancing up into my brain, direct route, no detours, my vision flashing red and every hair on my body suddenly standing up on edge.

I half screamed, half growled and pulled her from me so hard she flew down and away. I heard a crash off in the shadows and felt blood pouring down my neck, soaking into my clothes. Trying to keep on her trail as she melted into the darkness, I staggered forward but caught my foot in something and slammed down onto my knees, panting.

For a moment all I could hear was my own breathing. I couldn’t believe I’d just gotten my ass handed me by an old woman who’s clothes weighed more than her, and was momentarily glad The Bumble had not been here to see it.

Then, faintly, out in the hall, I heard her whispering. At first I couldn’t make out what she was saying, then something clicked in my head.

She was saying: “Delicious.”

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19.

“There’s a couple of ways to deal with cats like you, a Terminus,” Alt James said, encouraging me to shuffle forward with his gun pressed into my back. “This is one of them.”

We were in Hoboken fucking New Jersey, which I knew well enough because Frank did plenty of business with the remnants of the old Italians who still worked out of the town. It was right across the river from Manhattan, it was where Frank Sinatra had been born, and it still had three or four old Social Clubs fronting crews. They’d seen better days, and they didn’t run City Hall like they used to, but they were there, and there was enough old money in suitcases lying around to keep Frank and Phin and the newer boys interested.

We were, I thought, the only people in Hoboken New Jersey.

Walking down the middle of the main drag, Washington Street, I could hear our steps echoing back at us. Most of the store windows had been shattered at some point, but aside from that and the sad state of the cars everything looked normal enough, though details nagged at me. On Fifth street, Sullivans wasn’t there, replaced with a place called Maroon. The cars were all old, too, big iron slabs from old Detroit, tiny little rice burners from Japan, the kind you didn’t see much any more.

The air smelled weird, sweet and thick.

“I could put a bullet in your head,” Alt James continued after a moment. “But it wouldn’t kill you. I could probably put you in a coma, leave you that way, sure, that might work. Coma ain’t dead, the universe might allow that. Except, I could never be sure. You can’t die, man. So let’s say you’re laying there in a coma, and I think I solved this little problem.”

“Let’s say,” I said, earning myself a prod from the gun into my backbone.

“A large caliber bullet in the back still going to hurt, man, okay?”

I nodded, moving my eyes from deserted storefront to rusting car to deserted storefront. “Okay.”

He’d adjusted the knots to give me just enough slack to shuffle along, bent backwards slightly so I felt like I was going to fall over at any moment. It was slow going, and the sun was making me hot and sweaty.

“You might be that way for years, decades. But then, something happens—the power goes out, and the machines breathing for you quit. Or the hospital catches on fire. The universe decides the only way you can survive is to heal, so you wake up, good as new. You’re a Terminus. Any time you might die, you’ll find a way to keep on truckin’.”

I didn’t say anything. I was enjoying myself, a little; my back burned and my legs ached and my hands were numb. I was fucking miserable. I didn’t feel immortal in the least.

“So, the problem is the fucking solution, kid,” Alt James continued, strolling along behind me. “There are infinite universes. There are universes where everything’s fucking different, universes where everything is practically the same. They’re infinite, so good luck cataloging them, but as you come across them you can make notes. Like this one. Empty as a tin can. Completely fucking empty.”

I let that drift for a moment. “How come you’re so sure I’m a—” my tongue tripped over the word. “A Terminus?”

“I can smell ’em. It’s a talent I have.” He jabbed me in the back. “You’re one.”

“How do you know you can even shoot me?” I asked, a pulse of excitement pounding through my chest. “Rusch pointed a gun at me and it misfired.”

He laughed, and it was awesomely strange: It was Detective James’ laugh, the same deep, wet rumble I’d known for years. “Your Rusch is kind of a beginner, man. You get a feel for the odds. You got to know how far you can push the universe, you know? Sure, you put a gun to your forehead, you ain’t giving the universe much choice—coma or death or misfire. Push it too hard, the gun blows up in your hand. Push it even harder, a fucking safe falls out of the sky and crushes you before you can pull the trigger.”

He stopped talking and I huffed and puffed my way through ten feet of street. I squinted my eyes and looked around. It sure felt empty. Everything was covered in a thick layer of white-gray dust, like ash. It swirled around us as we walked. “What happened here?”

“Fuck if I know,” Alt James said, sounding friendly. If I closed my eyes and ignored the misery, it was like me and the Detective were just having a friendly stroll. “Found it this way. No bodies, no bones. No dogs. No cats. No fucking squirrels. It’s as dead as the world can get. It’s perfect: I can’t kill you, but I can leave you here. You can sit here forever, no way off, safe and sound.”

Rotting. The stillness and silence of the place was oppressive. Our voices echoed back at us and then fell dead and flat on the ground. As we disturbed it, the air was getting choked with dust, and I could feel it on my skin, coating me, scratching under my collar and getting into my ears, my nose—I knew if I blew my nose right then it would be dark and muddy, filled with the fine mist. The stores with their empty, smashed windows and dark, shadowed interiors creeped me out. Anything might be hiding in there, watching us move past.

I didn’t like begging, and had to swallow a few times before I could spit out more words. “Listen, this is … this is fucking unnecessary, chief. I’m just looking to collect a debt. A debt you bought from my boss, so I don’t even have to do that any more. I’m ready to walk away from this. Let Falken take his chances.”

There was something about being hogtied and marched through a deserted town that smelled like dust and dry kindling that took all the sass out of you.

“Sorry, hoss,” Alt James said, sounding the exact opposite of sorry. “First of all, I’m aiming to become a Terminus myself someday—a hobby of mine—and you might get in my hair if I do it. Second, I’m a killer. It’s what I do. I can’t kill you, but I can come close. Besides, I didn’t buy your fucking debt. I made a deal with your boss to get information, but he’s gonna be sorely disappointed when next week rolls around and he’s looking for all that money I promised him. Take this left.”

I hobbled in a wide arc to the left, turning down third street. The pavement had cracked and crumbled, weeds poking up atop huge cairns of blacktop, and I had to sweat it to stay upright, my balance all fucked up as I tried to scale each lump in the road. Hobby of mine. It sounded like he’d done this before with other … other assholes like me. I kept my eyes moving, looking for a chance.

I asked myself if I was ready to chance his gun, if I was starting to believe everyone’s sunny belief that I was the Ever Living. I ducked the question, and kept walking.

“What do you get paid?” I asked, instantly curious as I thought about it. “For killing people?”

“I don’t just kill people. I make people immortal. It’s tough work. Long hours. Research. Violence. They pay me whatever I ask. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s something else. It’s worth it, no matter what. I could ask them for their balls, they’d hand them over. Their kids. Their wives, husbands, daughters.” He laughed in a way that was completely different from Detective Stanley James—nasty and cold, no humor at all. “Sometimes I don’t even do it for money. It’s just revenge.”

I thought about that. Erasing someone from not just one universe, but every universe. Methodically hunting down every version of someone. “Jesus fucking Christ, how do you have time?”

“Most of us die young,” he said quietly. “Every other possibility is your fucking death, and then a second later you got another split chance at fucking death. By the time someone seeks me out, there ain’t but a handful of you left.”

As this was quickly becoming the most depressing day of my goddamn life, I thought about that. About me, dying. Me at six months, suffocating in my crib. Me at twelve, chasing a Spalding and getting hit by a car. Me at twenty-two, stabbed to death in the alley behind Rudy’s. Me at thirty, shot in the head by Chino over fifty fucking dollars lost in a card game. All these things could have happened, but hadn’t—except everyone had been telling me for the past few days that they had, just to some other version of me, a version that had been dead since that moment.

The quiet was smothering. Our steps were loud scrapes that rattled everything like earthquakes, and the wind was a constant mutter in the center of my ears. I could hear water, too, lapping, as we got closer and closer to the Hudson, crawling along Third Street. But there was no other noise. No sirens, no shouts. No dogs, no music leaking from fourth-floor windows. No car horns or tire screeches, no distant conversations bubbling out of the bars. It was just me and Alt James, and we weren’t making nearly enough noise.

I could see the river as we headed downhill over the broken pavement. It smelled crisp and clean, not the oily scent I remembered. I could see from a distance that the esplanade had partially collapsed into the river, pavers dripping in after the edges one by one every few weeks. I walked with my hands cuffed in behind me and could feel time running out; I hadn’t seen anything that looked at all useful, and the gun I got jabbed into my back every few steps still felt too fucking real for me to chance turning around and trying anything. The last two blocks floated by—a ruined building on my left, a jumble of bricks and iron that still held the ghostly outline of a building, like it remembered what it had been for so long, and a spectacular crush of bent-up, rusting cars completely blocking the street to me right.

“Head right on to the edge,” Alt James said as we got close to the water.

Across the river was Manhattan, looking more or less like I remembered it—something nagged at me, something missing or different, but I couldn’t place it, and as I shuffled forward I had an uneasy, unhappy feeling of disorientation, like everything had been reversed in a mirror.

I almost lost my footing as the pavers gave way under my feet, and had to shuffle backwards hastily to avoid sliding right down into the dark, steel-colored water. Most of the walkway was already in the river, but a thin line of it still clung to land, the old sidewalks next to it as broken up as the roads, the trees heavy and overgrown around us. The world turning back into one huge forest.

“Stop.”

I felt Alt James doing something behind me, tugging at the rope holding my handcuffs to my ankles, and then the gun was pushed into my back again.

“All right. Step off.”

I blinked. “What?”

The gun became more insistent. “Walk forward until you drop,” he said.

My heart raced, and my hands were shaking behind me. I couldn’t see him, couldn’t see what he was doing, and it got to me. I liked pain. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t like not being able to grab everything in my hands, no matter how deep it bit into my skin, and wrestle it down. I took a step forward, and the fucking pavers let go underneath me without warning, and I slid down over a crumbling edge into the air.

I stopped with a jerk a foot or so above the water, and swayed there, suspended. I hung, panting for a moment, listening to the lap of the waves, the plop of chunks of the pavers hitting the water, and the creak of the rope I was suspended from. My side felt like it had split open while my shirt was made of salt, and I imagined kidneys and liver and lungs oozing out, draining me.

Craning my throbbing neck, I could just make out Alt James’ dark silhouette leaning out over the edge above me.

“Got to be careful,” he said. “If I put you in any kind of mortal danger, fate will fucking intervene. I can fuck with you all I want, just got to toe that line, you know. You’ll work your way free of this soon enough, but by then I’ll be gone, and you’ll be … here.”

He waved. The motherfucker waved goodbye.

“So this is it—you’re just gonna leave me here alone forever?”

He’d disappeared from view, but I heard him laugh. “Shit, I never said you were alone. I done this before.”

I listened to his steps scraping away, greedily. After a while it was just lap lap, creak creak, and my own labored breathing.

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18.

For the third time in as many days, I came to, this time in darkness, jostled gently this way and that. Pain radiated nicely from the wound in my side and filled me, yellow and thick and wonderful. For a split-second I just stretched against it, enjoying the feel of a controlled burn, all my nerves like embers, red and angry and floating inside me.

I was in the trunk of a car, my cuffed wrists pulled down tight behind me, my ankles pulled up, hogtied like a fucking pig. I wasn’t gagged, but the hum of the car was loud, and a thick, bouncing bass line filled the air in-between the thud of tires hitting potholes. I figured screaming would just amuse the alternate Detective James, if he could even hear it.

Alternate. The word flamed red in my mind as I thought it.

The man I’d spied in the doorway, the man who’s stormed in, stepping over the detective’s body, pointing his monstrous gun at me, looked exactly like Stanley James. The face, the haircut, the suit—he could have sat down at a bar and forced me to buy him drinks all night on threat of arrest and I’d have bought it, completely.

I only had that panicked, amazed glimpse; Alt Detective James had stepped over himself, crossed over to me, and cold cocked me with his gun, my last image his white teeth, perfect and straight, the gums bloody red.

We hit a bump, and I leaped inside the trunk, landing on something hard and unyielding, lighting up my belly like a pitchfork three inches deep, making me shiver and salivate. The beat from Alt James’ speakers ate into me, making my pulse skip and my eyes bulge.

I figured, fuck, if I really am immortal, I was probably about to find out soon. In my experience waking up hogtied in the trunk of a car was the beginning of a very bad end.

My eyes adjusted to the gloom, lit by the faint red light bleeding in from the brakes, and I craned my head around, trying to see what I had to work with. I doubted my innate ability to escape from car trunks, but it felt like I was going to have a lot of time on my hands so why not make a study of it, see if I couldn’t do some groundbreaking research on the subject.

The trunk was barren, but roomy, and I found I could roll myself over onto my belly easily, freeing my fingers to at least stretch and strain, their tips brushing against the slick nylon rope he’d used to connect the handcuffs to my ankles. I tried to bend myself backwards, straining to find the knot and maybe, somehow work it open, at least get my legs free. I didn’t know what that was going to get me, but it was better than counting seams in the highway or pretending I could hear the difference between a bridge and a dirt road, map it all out in my head.

I rolled my eyes down and saw I was lying on top of the spare tire well, the piece of carpet that fitted over the space curled up and out of place. I stretched my head down and took the edge of the carpet between my teeth, grit and dust suddenly in my mouth, and rolled myself over, taking the carpet with me. With a jerk of my head I tossed it aside and rolled back onto my belly, peering down into the spare well. There was only an undersized solid rubber donut wheel, bolted down. Sitting next to it, embedded into the soft felt, was the lugnut wrench and the jack.

The thought of having the weight of that wrench in my hands, and sinking it into Alt James’ face, made me happy. My imagination served up the crunch of his delicate facial bones and cartilage, the grunt of pain, the sudden shock up my arm as I bit into real bone, hard and thick, the spray of blood from burst capillaries and torn surface skin.

A pleasant burn had settled into the muscles of my back and arms, the steady strain biting in and holding fast. I bent my attention back to straining my fingers towards the knots, even though I wasn’t at all convinced I’d be able to manipulate them in any way even if I managed to get the very tips of my fingers near them.

The ride suddenly got rough, the car banging over something and everything getting jumpy and filled with vibration, my belly spiking and burning and clearing my head pretty thoroughly. I was bleeding all over his trunk, I was pretty sure, the coppery smell of my own fluids thickening the air. The bouncing action made it even more difficult to make any progress, and sweat began to stream down the sides of my head and neck, tickling me excruciatingly.

At least Alt James hadn’t known Falken was nearby, I didn’t think. For all I knew he’d taken the time to hunt the poor fuck down and put a shell in his ear, but I suspected Falken had bolted the room just in time, and Alt James didn’t know he’d missed him—or maybe he shared his twin’s resistance to running and had just let him go. Either way, I was glad for it. I didn’t want Falken dead—I didn’t want anyone dead. I wanted his fucking money. Though I guessed if Frank had sold the debt, that wasn’t even my problem any more.

The tone of the ride changed again, going smooth and quiet, a low hum the only noise from the wheels, like we were gliding along. After a few seconds of this the car jerked to a stop, tumbling me up against the back seat and then rolling me forward again. Then quiet, the music gone, just the ticking of the engine and my pinched, tight breathing. I heard the car door open, and then nothing. I lay perfectly still, head pounding, side burning, and strained my ears but couldn’t hear anything at all.

And then I heard everything.

The noise was unbelievable—a droning, piercing blare that made the whole trunk—the whole car—vibrate around me. My teeth chattered involuntarily, and I felt like parts of my insides were boiling off, turning to steam and leaking from my pores. One of my shoes began working its way off my foot, vibrating off my heel in tiny little increments. I clenched my jaw shut as hard as I could to stop my teeth from shaking loose and shut my eyes to keep them in my skull, every muscle in my body taut. It was the same as the noise I’d heard in the limo with Alt Rusch, similar to the noise I’d heard just before Falken had disappeared on me in McHales.

And then it got louder.

I pushed my head down into the scratchy, thin carpet of the trunk, trying to block off at least one ear, but the lower pitch of the murderous whine around me bled up through the metal of the car, bouncing into my ear and tunneling into my brain. I couldn’t enjoy it, couldn’t pick out the nuances of the agony, the specific nerve endings being burned out and browned, sizzling away like candle wax. It was just more than my nerves could handle. I opened my mouth to make my own noise, but I couldn’t hear myself, or even feel the vibration in my chest. It was like I’d disappeared into the noise.

And then it stopped.

I lay there with my mouth open, my ears ringing, every muscle taut and painful. I kept myself tight and still for a moment, waiting, and then slowly let myself relax, my muscles twitching. There was a muffled bang I felt more than heard which took me a moment to identify as someone getting back into the car. A moment later we started moving again, and I felt the steady thump of the bass line jumping under me.

Shivering, I lay still for a while, eyes closed. Then I set about relaxing my muscles one by one as the car took on the old familiar rhythm of street driving. When I’d forced my body to unclench, I opened my eyes again, and spared a few seconds to revel in the burning in all my muscles, like an acid stain on my bones, etched in deep. I was back inside a normal trunk, the bloody glow of brake lights seeping in and offering me the only light, my hands still pulled cruelly down towards my ankles, the thumping beat mixing with the rhythm of the road seams into a complex song that seemed kind of familiar, probably entitled Fucked Three Ways from Sunday.

Breathing hard and blinking the sweat from my eyes, I started bending my hands back again, seeking the elusive knots in the rope. I had a goddamn cigarette jingle from the television commercial in my head, running on a doubletime loop, high and squeaky: feeling down need a lift Luckies’ll fix ya in a jiff. I didn’t even smoke Luckies.

My dad had smoked them, I suddenly remembered. I remembered he’d smelled like smoke all the time, a strangely earthy and acidic smell that had fascinated and repelled me at the same time. Nicotine, alcohol, and aftershave, the smell of adults. Dad had shown me once the circular burn marks on his forearms, starting just above the wrist and ending at the elbow, where he’d pressed his cigarette against his skin for as long as he could stand it. It was a standard bar bet he liked to trot out when he’d run out of cash. Sometimes he’d spend the whole night burning himself for shots, and wake up the next day stuck to the sheets, his arm leaking and inflamed. I remembered the feel of pushing the cigarette into his skin, the satisfying way he would suck in his breath and tense up. I remembered smuggling a pack into the hospital, risking our lives to light them up and burn him.

Alt James drove slower this time, the car inching along, and hit a lot of potholes, tumbling me around. I tried to redouble my efforts at the rope, trying anything that came to mind, my wrists burning nicely where the cuffs bit into them, bending myself backwards as far as I could manage. I tried to clear my head and get all zen on the fucking problem, but before I could take some deep breaths and center my thinking, the car stopped, the music cut, and I heard the front door opening and slamming.

Shoes on gravel, a key in the lock, and then the trunk lifting up. Framed against a burningly bright, cloudless blue sky—somehow we’d skipped some hours and arrived at noon—was Alt James, gun held slackly in one massive hand, disturbingly white teeth bared for me.

“All right,” he said cheerfully. “We’re here.”

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