"Oh, getting out is the easy part. It's staying out that's tough, boy. Hey, when I was inside I was a good boy. Didn't fight unless I had to. Let people spit in my food. Try to kiss me. Oh, yeah. A fun place. When they put me in this minimum-security yard for being a good boy, I threw my shirt up on the razor wire and went over. Never looked back, as they say. When I got here I had a nice resume. Turned out all I needed to get hired was a pulse."
I watched the gun. The gun and his eyes.
"Six years now and it's getting so sometimes, not all the time or anything, I can really forget Reggie Lockman. Hey, he's from somewhere else. Another time. An earlier life. I'm just the mild-mannered sports reporter. Chronicling the trials and tribulations of high-school athletes. Even spell the names right."
"What's with the gun?"
"Residual paranoia," Vern said. "The great equalizer. Best part is, I can even use it on myself, if the need arises."
"Vern, this is crazy. We can-"
"We can't anything, Jack. Because I'm not running anymore. I don't have it in me to run anymore, and you know they'd chase me down. God, I'd be on the dashboard of every cop car within five hundred miles. Killer. Escaped convict. Armed and dangerous. Use caution if approached. I'd have no chance."
I shifted on my feet and the gun jerked up at my face. I swallowed. Wet my lips with a sticky tongue.
"So Arthur knew?"
"Goddamn Arthur. He knew a lot of stuff, the little weasel. He found out stuff because he was always there. You'd look up and there he'd be. Just listening. You know-I don't know why I'm telling you this. I just want you to know that I'm not doing this because I want to. I've got no choice."
"Sure you do."
"Nope. Really. See, I had this arrangement. I'll tell you this because I like you."
"That helps a lot."
"Really. See, I had this arrangement. It was back when I first got here, and I'd had a few beers-yeah, I know. Never learn. Powerful stuff, that demon rum-and I'm driving home and Vigue stops me. I knew him some. He talked basketball a little and made me walk the line. Touch my nose. I'm borderline, maybe. A judgment call. So he puts me in his cruiser and starts asking me about drinking and stuff, and if I've been arrested before and all this, and Jesus, I'm half in the bag, trying to keep everything straight, and the son of a bitch knows something's not kosher. Cops, good ones, just know. They've been lied to so many times they can smell it. So anyway, he has me in the car in the front seat and I'm still not sure how he did it, but he got a print. A good one. The bastard. He gives me a ride home, lecture and all that, and a couple weeks later he comes knocking."
"You came back a hit?"
"NCIC computer. Name and everything. The whole schmear."
"So why didn't he arrest you?"
"I don't know. He put me on what you might call probation. He says he'll think about it. Leaves me turning in the goddamn wind. I didn't sleep for a week. So a month goes by and I don't hear anything, so I send him a couple hundred bucks. Cash. I don't hear anything, so the next month, I send him a couple of hundred more. I've been doing it ever since. It's like a car payment, except the coupon book never gets any thinner. I don't know what he does with it. Maybe he gives it to Mother Teresa, for all I know. But for me it's an investment. The more he's in, the safer I am."
The snow fell. The gun moved slightly. My neck. My chest. Back to my neck.
"How did Arthur find out?"
"Little weasel. Vigue comes in one night. Looking for somebody and nobody is there but me, I think. So he says, just standing there by my desk, 'You know, we could both go down for this, and it's worse for me 'cause I'm a cop.' So I say, 'You want more money or what?' He says he'll get back to me. I told him he couldn't get more blood out of this stone, and he says I might have to squeeze harder, 'cause who are they gonna believe, him or Reggie Lockman, escaped killer. Something like that. He names the name. Lets it sink in. So he leaves and I'm standing there and I hear this little noise out front, and there's Arthur, scrunched down in a chair behind the counter. Sitting there the whole time. Said he came in to wait for a cab. Not a goddamn word, I said. I told Vigue and he made sure. He'd bagged him for the dirty pictures and let him off."
"He held that over him to keep him quiet?"
"You got it. A triumvirate, sort of. Separation of powers. If one talked, we all took a fall."
"So what happened?"
"Who knows. Arthur got jittery. Too much on his little pea brain. He calls me and says he has to see me. I picked him up and we went for a ride and ended up down here. Turns out the little weasel wants to take off. He's got some relative in New York State. Albany or someplace. Says he can't live like this anymore, it's destroying his nerves and all this crap. His stomach is bothering him."
"So you killed him?"
"Jack. That sounds so cold-blooded. We were standing here, not too far from the edge, and it was like my arm decided it wanted to go home. Had enough of this talk. Like it wasn't attached to me, it just reached out and gave him a shove. Then another shove and-"
"It's too late, Vern."
He looked at me, startled.
"When I went home to eat I called Roxanne. I told her about Lockman. I told her and she was gonna call the staties she knows down there. Right then. Detectives. She was gonna have them run the name right then. As a favor. She gives them a smile and a wiggle and those guys are like puppy dogs. So it's too late for all this. Don't you understand? You're just making it worse. Two murders? One set up like this? It's just-"
I broke to my left.
The shot didn't come, didn't come. Zigged once and crouched, running toward a chain-link fence thirty yards away along the canal.
Twenty ... ten ... I jumped.
The top of the fence hit my chin. Neck. Legs. There was a shot. I flipped and the sky spun. My back hit and I was up, running along the wall. I heard another shot and my leg hit something hard and I was sailing and my head hit and there was darkness and cold and my arms churned, clawed at the burning cold water.
26.
The scream caught in my throat. Teeth clenched. Don't exhale. Don't exhale. No! Arms flailed against something.
Ice.
Each blow shoved me deeper. I had to breathe ... had to breathe ... face against ice ... feet coming up ... don't let it out ... don't let it out!
Would the hole be light? Dark? It was darker behind me. Light from the mill. I went past it. It had to be to the right.
Air started to slip between my teeth. I clenched them. Two kicks. My head grazed the ice and the air started to come faster.
I kicked. Broke through.
Ice slashed my neck and air shrieked from my lungs.
I sucked in a breath, started to go under. I kicked. The air was hot. Snowflakes that burned.
The strobe lights were blipping on the mill tower. I turned in the water. When I'd fallen through the ice, I'd made an oval-shaped hole, maybe five feet across. I'd come up on the far side of the hole and broken through with my head. Now the canal wall was about ten feet away, separated from my hole by six feet of unbroken ice, maybe an inch thick.
And God, it was cold.
I tried to pull myself up onto the ice, like a seal out of a breathing hole, but the ice cracked away underneath me and I was back under. I came back up, boots pulling me down. Hoisted myself and broke through. Again.
The water numbed my face. Three times I went through until the ice near the wall held my chest and my hands scraped the granite wall.
Yell, I thought. I tried. My voice came weakly.
"Help me. Help."
My hands burned. I inched along on my chest, one hand on granite, one on the jagged edge of the ice where it had broken on my last heave.
Vern, I thought. Up there.
I moved ten feet along the wall. The ice shattered, and I slid down into the blackness, my arms flailing. I hit something solid. Something down there, two feet under the water.
My feet hit, deeper. I kept paddling, and my hands and feet bumped it until my boot caught and I was thrown forward. I set my foot again and stood up. Slipped. Stood. Up to my knees in the searing water. I groaned at the pain in my hands. My hands were bloody.
I slipped and fell to a crouch, back in the water. Something jabbed my chest and I grabbed it. A metal rod. I was standing on something. A submerged car. The rod was a radio antenna.
My face shook. My limbs were someone else's. The pain was all mine. I put my hands between my legs but there was no warmth there. I rocked in the dark.
I tried to scream. It came out an unearthly, shivering sound.
Something hit the ice.
Close.
Vern. He didn't have to shoot. Just wait.
I looked up. Saw the sky bright at the top of the wall. I measured the distance and let myself fall toward the granite.
My hands hit and I stood, feet on the car in the water, arms outstretched to the wall. I eased myself along. For what? Delay death five minutes. My teeth rattled. I wanted to see Roxanne. I did. We couldn't end on that note. Not fighting.
I felt something above me and looked up.
"Should have let me shoot you. Save you all this trouble."
I looked up. Vern was looking down, a black figure against the sky. I tried to talk, concentrating on each word, but nothing came out.
"You really call Roxanne, or you bullshitting me?" he said. "Really, Jack. 'Cause if you didn't, hey, maybe there's something we can do. Work something out. Come on, buddy. No crap this time, okay?"
I tried to figure it out. I was too cold. Too cold to think.
If I said I did call, it's too late for him. Word was out. If I didn't call her, I was the only one who knew, except for Vigue. The cab driver. But he doesn't know what he knows. If I didn't call, more reason to kill me? No reason?
My teeth were pounding. I put my hand to my face to stop them and my fingers were blue-gray.
"I called," I said. "I did. I ... I didn't know it was you. God. God, Vern. We're friends. I could help ... help you."
"Could nothing. What? Give me an hour head start?"
"Don't. Don't go after her. Get me out ... out of here."
I could see the gun hanging at his side.
"Go after Roxanne? Jackson, you must think I'm some kind of animal or something. I tried to tell you about this so you wouldn't think that. Too late. Right. I think you're right about too late. Too late for me. Too late for you. Too late to stop this friggin' roller coaster."
The gun cracked. I jerked. Waited to feel pain. Blood.
There was a thud on the wall. A clatter. Vern's boots came over the edge. Then his legs, his belly, fell and crashed and ice and water showered over my head.
He floated, the back of his jacket puffed with air.
"Thanks," I said. "Thanks a lot."
I stood in the water and watched him and felt very tired.
Hypothermia. I was, quite simply, freezing to death.
I couldn't feel my feet. My hands were blue. I took one hand off the wall and tried to flex my fingers. They moved. Barely.
Vern was sinking as the air leaked from his jacket. Air pockets, I thought. Guns in his pockets.
The gun.
It had hit the wall but hadn't come down. If I could fire the gun, somebody might hear. Somebody might come. They might come in time. I slid my hands together on the wall and tried to pull my sleeve off. My fingers wouldn't close on the parka. I clasped one hand with the other and squeezed the right hand shut on the left sleeve. The hand slid up and I shook the coat off, one arm and then the other, and let it fall into the water at my feet. It was wet and heavy and I wondered if I could lift it. I pulled it to my waist and water streamed down my legs. I spread them and swung the parka over my shoulder. Then, like a hook shot in basketball, I swung it toward the top of the wall.
It hit a foot short.
Once.
Twice.
Three times. Each time gathering it up from the water became harder.
I was freezing.
I couldn't feel cold. I couldn't feel much of anything.
Time was running out. I needed something longer but there wasn't anything. No branches. No boards floating. Just Vern.
I crouched and reached for his legs, just below the surface. Pieces of ice bobbed around him and his hair moved under the water. I pulled him by the jacket and turned him over, and his eyes stared upward. There was a dark hole in his temple. I grabbed hold of his hand.
The hand was cold and still. The jacket was sodden and it was hard to work the end of the sleeve over his fingers. I alternately tugged and stuffed the fingers up the sleeve until I could pull the arm of the jacket off him. Then I went to work on the other arm, my fingers like little pieces of wood. Finally, the other sleeve slid off, and Vern turned once and sank out of sight.
The jacket was longer than mine. Not waist-length, but heavier. I gathered up the cloth and felt something in the pocket. I dug the folds. My fingers felt something as if it were miles away.
A box of shells.
I pulled them out and heard one plop into the water. The cardboard box came apart and I quickly rammed the whole mess down the front of my pants.
The coat was heavy as lead. I dropped the sleeves into the water and grabbed the end of the hem and swung it around behind me. Water streamed down my back and I could feel the cold.
Freezing.