I went after him. He knew something I didn’t. That was one reason. And he’d pissed me off. I hadn’t looked real sharp sneaking up on him, nor had I looked real sharp decorating the back of his XKE while he held a gun to my head. Most of us don’t like to be reminded that we’re less good at our chosen calling than we think we are.
Two blocks away the fog lifted somewhat, and then I really got on his ass. I swooped up behind him on the damp streets at eighty miles an hour. At first he didn’t know what to do, so he did something very stupid. He leaned out the window and took a shot at me. The explosion claimed the left half of my windshield. For a guy who had a vested interest in the police not finding us, this guy was none too bright. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t need or even want to be bright. As a cop I’d met many men who had no brains. But they had cunning and they had hatred, and sometimes those things will take you much farther than brains.
He fishtailed around a corner and I saw then, the wide way he took it, that he wasn’t much of a driver. He must have had the idea that we were in a TV show, maybe “The Rockford Files” with all its car chases, and we were going to make our cars do things they’d never done before. But it wasn’t that way at all. Right now we were very dangerous and stupid citizens endangering the lives of many other citizens by shooting up and down narrow streets that were meant for thirty-mph traffic at best.
His next trick was to jam on the brakes hard enough to make a ninety-degree turn and go down an alley.
There was no way I could stop, and for a time I lost him. At the head of the block I pulled into the curb and killed my lights. I sat there sweating and panting and cursing. I had to piss so bad I had the terrible uncomfortable feeling that I was going to wet my pants, and I was shaking so bad from nerves that even the soles of my feet were wet. He wasn’t worth a shit as a stunt-car man and neither was I, but for some reason we were trying to prove otherwise to each other.
He came back out of the alley a few moments later. He was driving fast but not too fast. He didn’t see me at all until I jerked on my headlights two blocks later. Under the foggy streetlight his blasted-out back window looked obscene. He shot at me again.
I floored my gas pedal. He responded by hitting maybe a hundred miles an hour. This time he was going to get rid of me and for good.
Then we hit the intersection. I saw the semi before he did. Even if he had seen it, it wouldn’t have mattered.
He went under it or tried to — or that’s what it looked like, anyway — and just when he hit it the roof sheered off. Then the car kept going beneath the semi and I didn’t see anything, just heard things: shattering glass and tearing metal and the big semi trying to stop.
I got my own car over to the side of the intersection and reacted without really considering what I was doing.
The intersection ran north-south to an old highway. On all four sides were businesses shut down for the night. In the fog the XKE’s lights shot straight up into the air like a beacon. I got over to the semi and looked up at the driver. He just sat behind his wheel and rubbed his face as if none of this were real. He could have been crying. I couldn’t tell for sure.
I’d brought my flashlight with me. I knew I had to work quickly. I got down on my knees beneath the trailer of the semi and started crawling in. There was a suffocating smell of gas and car oil. Sticking out from where the door had been I saw a hand. I swallowed and kept going. When I was fully under the trailer, I saw that gas was leaking from the tank to the ground. Now I had to worry not only about the arrival of the authorities but an explosion.
I pushed my hands inside the mangled door and pulled him out. His face looked as if somebody had worked it over with razor blades. He was meat and blood and bone and nothing more at all. Cop instinct had me reach over and feel for a pulse. You never knew. But I knew now, of course. He was dead.
I had a minute or two at best. I tried his back pocket first and that was a mistake for two reasons. First, I had to waste time jamming my hand between his body and the car seat. Second, he didn’t carry a billfold. Instead he carried a wallet, and I found it, sweaty and anxious, moments later inside his fancy leather coat. I didn’t take all his ID, but I did take everything but his driver’s license and money.
The gas leak was getting worse. I pulled myself out from the wreckage, drenched in gas, car oil and blood. By the time I struggled to my feet again, lost once more in the fog, I heard a siren nearby and I saw a face even closer.
The truck driver, a tall guy who looked as if he could probably tell you more than you cared to know about the history of the Grand Ole Opry, said, “There somebody else in that car?”
I just started walking away. I’d gotten what I’d come for.
He grabbed me. Spun me around. “Hey, this is serious shit, mister. I asked if there was somebody else in that car.”
I ripped his hand away from me. “He’s dead, and it wasn’t your fault and when the police look at the accident they’ll see that it wasn’t your fault. Okay?” I felt sorry for him. I was being a prick. But I couldn’t help it. I needed to be out of there. Fast.
“Goddammit, he’s fuckin’ dead!” the driver said. He was obviously a good man, and this was all bullshit he didn’t deserve.
“It’ll be all right. You weren’t responsible in any way. All right?”
“He’s fuckin’ dead?”
This is not an uncommon reaction at traffic accidents. Shock and guilt. We’re a lot more fragile than the macho boys let on.
I patted him on the shoulder again. I didn’t know what else to do. The siren was drawing nearer.
Then I broke into a run and got into my car and got out of there.
17
Before I did anything else I took a shower, and then I had a long solitary drink. I stood in clean underwear by the window looking out at the fog rolling beneath the streetlight. A shabby little room for a shabby little life. The fog didn’t make it any better.
I left his wallet on the table and watched a little TV — a rerun of a “Larry Kane Show” — and I let myself doze off. When I woke up four hours later, I was covered with sweat, and at first I wasn’t sure where I was; then I remembered the accident, the noise of it mostly, and then I looked across the room at the table and the guy’s wallet.
Light was in the window now, early morning light, and the sound of birds pressed against the glass, and in the far left corner of my only window, like a perspective detail in a painting, there was the branch of an elm tree, green and blooming and at the moment looking pretty fucking wonderful. It cheered me up idiotically, and I let myself fall back on the couch and have two more — and much less troubled — hours of sleep. The fog world was behind me.
Knocking woke me, and even through my sleep it seemed familiar knocking, something about the cadence of this knuckle rapping this door in just this way.
You would think that in an efficiency apartment this small I’d have had no trouble finding pants or a robe, but I couldn’t find either. So I just wrapped a blanket around myself and went to the door. I opened it only a crack.
“God, are you all right?” Donna Harris said.
Before I could say anything, her eyes narrowed and she looked at me with something like x-ray vision. It was very still there in my ancient dusty hallway, with just the birds for background.
She looked lovely. She was beautiful in a suburban sort of way, and yet exotic, too, thanks to her one slightly straying eye. In her brown corduroy car coat and starched button-down white shirt she managed to be both schoolgirlish and erotic. But then she trembled as tears came to her eyes, and she said, “You did it, didn’t you?”