Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (14 page)

The peelers unloaded nearly a clip each at us. The bullets kicking up fragments of tar and concrete. Echoing horribly off the walls and the condo complexes.

They were yelling at us now, too, but you couldn’t make it out. They started up again. Bloody pigs. The same peelers whose stellar work would be highlighted in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case and the Columbine massacre. They burned off the rest of their clips, bullets tearing down the alley and carrying on for a thousand yards. Then they must have been reloading, since the shooting stopped.

“I’m surrendering,” John said.

“They’ll give you the fucking chair, you asshole.”

“They’re going to kill us.”

“Run, you big shite, they’re reloading, we’ll make it,” I said.

John started running. And the heroin hurt and helped. Crippled my running but eased my mind. Stringing out the ketch from this morning so that I saw myself from way above. Me: calm, in slow motion, fleeing from peeler Pete through wide alleys, in the golden hour, with the sun behind the mountains and the sky crimson and the brilliant white cirrus clouds in lines between the buildings. Almost a moment of transcendence. The two of us running between piles of tires and wooden pallets, cardboard boxes, bins, machinery, car parts, garbage. And shadows across the alley and our reflections back at us off black-glass apartment windows.

“Nearly there,” I said.

One of the cops fired twice more. Bullets flying past us, hitting nothing. Well, hitting many things, but not us. How were they going to explain this in their log? Probably say we were carrying sawed-off shotguns or Armalites or something.

Colfax closer and closer.

And the ketch lets you exist outside of time, outside of place, as if you are a being seeing yourself from above. Can’t get caught up in that. Disembodied. Running.

Hubris, saying they were hitting nothing.

A bullet nicked a soda can, then clattered sideways in front of me, I fell, spun, smashed my shoulder into the ground.

“I’m hit,” I said to John in a panic.

This time it was John who had his shit together. He pulled me up with one arm.

“You’re not hit, you’re ok,” he said.

Quick look at my shoulder. A slice through the sweat-drenched jacket and T-shirt and a nasty cut on my shoulder. But I was ok. I had been lucky. He looked at me for another quarter of a second and then we both gazed back. Only one cop, staring at us, frustrated. We were too near Colfax, he couldn’t risk a shot now. He had that much sense, at least.

“Let’s go,” John said.

We cut down the first alley on our left and dodged back up, running north to Colfax Avenue.

Seven at night. The main strip of Denver, busy, packed. This part of Colfax was like all those main streets in Westerns: wide avenues, big store-fronts, low-rise buildings. But past its peak, run-down, decaying, dirty. Prostitutes everywhere. Scores of them. Same as yesterday. Black and Latina girls in short skirts and tank tops, pimps, men cruising the drag, checking out the talent, looking for regulars. Pushers, users, hangers-on. No cops.

“You ok?” John asked.

I looked at my shoulder, it was bleeding, but not deep.

“I’m ok,” I said.

We caught our breaths. The sidewalks were thronged and it was easy for us to blend into the masses of people.

“Just walk, don’t run, don’t run, I think we’re safe,” I gasped.

My shoulder was stiffening up but already the bleeding was less. No one was looking at us. No one paid us any attention at all.

After about five blocks we juked behind a car and took a check back. Peeler Pete scoping for us, inventive—standing on top of a parked car, looking everywhere, speaking into a radio. We were lost in the sidewalk crowd and backlit against the sunset.

“No chance, peeler,” John said with satisfaction.

“Yeah.”

“What now?” John asked.

“Hotel, get our stuff, leave town,” I said.

“Forget Victoria?”

I looked at him to see if he was fucking insane.

“Of course, forget Victoria,” I barked.

We walked all the way to the state capitol and downtown. We got back to our hotel. Desk clerk watching a game show. Ignoring us.

We entered the room. It hadn’t been cleaned. Our stuff was all still there. The beds hadn’t been slept in. We packed quickly, saying nothing. At one point John went to the bathroom and threw up.

“Ok, now, John, listen to me and listen good, you’re going to cut your hair short, just do the best you can, and I’m going to shave my beard off, ok?” I said gently.

He nodded.

I got my razor and clippers and trimmed the beard and then shaved the bastard. I had a quick shower and looked for something to use as a bandage on my shoulder. There wasn’t anything, so instead I stuck on four or five Band-Aids. When I came out, John had done a reasonable job on his hair. It didn’t look crazy, at least.

“John, you got any aspirin or anything?”

“No. How’s your shoulder?”

“Ok.”

“You took a spill.”

“I know.”

“I killed a man, Jesus Christ, Alex, I fucking killed somebody. Oh my God, oh my God, I can’t believe it.”

John put his head in his hands. He sat on the edge of the bed and started to cry. I let him get on with it for a minute or two. Good thing. Let him cry it out.

“Listen, John, he went for you, it was an accident. It was like a car accident. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. He wasn’t Mother Teresa, either. Remember, he was a bad man, he was an accessory after the fact to a murder, withholding evidence,” I said softly.

It wasn’t true, Klimmer was just scared and we really might have talked him into going to the peelers. John had fucked up big time.

“Yeah, I suppose,” John said.

“Ok, we have to get out of town.”

“How?”

“Greyhound bus, anywhere, now.”

We went downstairs and left the desk clerk our keys.

“Checking out?” he asked.

“Aye.”

“Ok.”

He didn’t seem a bit interested, so I didn’t spin him any kind of story. We walked out onto Broadway. Dark now. We asked the way to the bus station and someone told us it was downtown, but there was a free shuttle bus that took you there.

The outdoor Sixteenth Street Mall was stuffed with people. The Colorado Rockies were playing a baseball game. People kept bumping into our luggage on the free mall bus, giving us dirty looks. Final stop. Two coppers standing outside the bus station. Could have been there because of the baseball game, they could have always been stationed there. But we couldn’t take the chance that they had our descriptions. It had been well over an hour since Klimmer’s fall, plenty of time to get the word out.

“Fuck,” John muttered. “What now?”

We were concealed by the crowds going to the game but we couldn’t wait out here forever.

“Walk with the crowd,” I said, “follow them away from the cops.”

A lucky break. We walked nearly all the way to Coors Field and when we were close we saw a train waiting in Union Station.

“The train, John, we’ll get the train,” I said.

“Aye.”

We tried to cross the street with our backpacks, but traffic was again heavy because of the baseball game.

A loud air horn, a pause, and the massive train began to move.

“Holy shit, it’s leaving,” I said. When I’d come to America before, I’d traveled on Amtrak. I knew that the east-west trains were very infrequent. This might be the only train leaving Denver’s Union Station that day.

“John, we gotta get this train,” I said.

John nodded.

We ran across the street, dodging the traffic. Brakes squealing, people honking, swearing. We sprinted up the wheelchair ramp and onto the platform. The train was moving very slowly, but it’s hard to get onto any kind of moving thing with a backpack on your back and your shoulder hurting and exhaustion and jet lag eating at your coordination.

A really little guy in front of us hopped on one carriage down. John found an open door and jumped in. He put out his hand and pulled me on too.

* * *

Darkness. The train shunting out of Denver in big curves. It took me a while to realize we were heading west. I went to the bathroom and looked at my shoulder. There was a nasty scrape where the bone met the skin, the whole area an ugly scab of blood. The Band-Aids had fallen off. It didn’t hurt much, but there was always the possibility of infection. I stripped, scooped water from the sink, and bathed it. I cleaned the wound with soap and water and bandaged it with paper towels. Changed my T-shirt, put my jacket back on. We found a couple of seats in the bar car and ordered beers and a sandwich. We asked the barman what train it was and he was used to dealing with stupid questions and said it was the California Zephyr going to San Francisco—which suited us just fine. California was ok. We could fly from San Francisco to London or Frankfurt or anywhere, really, just as long as it was bloody miles from here.

The train climbed up into the mountains and the track went through tunnels and curved back on itself. On those big bends you could see the whole of Denver in lights all the way up to Boulder and down to Castle Rock. We had just finished our beer when the ticket lady came up to us. An Afro stood eight inches from her short frame and thick neck. Long lacquered nails—painted with the stars and stripes—were pointing at us.

“Where you sitting?” she asked.

“Here,” John said, not trying to be funny.

She took it the wrong way.

“Where are you sitting on the train?” she asked a little more sharply.

“We just got on, we’re not sitting anywhere.”

“Let me see your tickets,” she said, glaring at John.

“We don’t have any tickets,” John said.

“The train was just pulling out and they told us we could buy tickets on board, we’re tourists,” I said quickly and gave her a big smile.

“Who told you that?” she asked me.

“Uh, the man at the station,” I said.

“What man?”

“I don’t know, just the man, he was in a uniform, I don’t know,” I said placatingly.

“Well, I don’t know why he told you that because no one is allowed on the train without a ticket, this isn’t a commuter train, this is a transcontinental Amtrak, you’re going to have to get off at the next stop and buy a ticket at the station and then get back on again.”

“Ok,” I said.

“Ok,” John said.

“The next stop is Fraser, Colorado, get off there and buy your ticket,” the woman said curtly.

“Ok,” we both said again, smiling.

She wandered off down the car.

“Fucking bitch,” John muttered. “Bet she could have sold us a ticket if she’d wanted.”

“Aye, but it won’t make any difference,” I said. “We’ll just get it at the station.”

“Yes,” John agreed.

“No difference,” I said again, and we drank our beers in agreement. Two people who couldn’t have been more wrong, since getting off the train at Fraser, Colorado, was to make all the difference in the world. Our fates weren’t taking us to California, to the Golden Gate Park, to Chinatown, to the airport and a ten-hour flight to Europe. No, the center of gravity in our story, the one dragging us like a black hole, was the one who had cast the first stone, the one who had killed Victoria Patawasti. We were going back to Denver, but we didn’t know it yet.

* * *

When Vishnu came to the Earth as a midget, he called himself Vamana. He stopped the demon Bali from destroying the planet. He tricked Bali with his diminutive size and sent him to the Underworld, telling him that appearances can be deceiving and that you should always watch out for the little guy.

I thought of this as John and I stared angrily at the midget. We weren’t upset at him. It wasn’t his fault that the ticket office had been closed, that a sign said “Buy rail tickets at the Continental Divide Saloon,” that the saloon was a quarter of a mile into the town of Fraser, that the Amtrak train was late leaving Denver and had to make up time by departing Fraser earlier than planned, that we had heard the air horn too late, and that the train had left without us.

The next westbound train was coming this time tomorrow but there was a train going to Chicago in half an hour, the man selling the tickets had explained. John and I had decided Chicago would do just fine without, of course, considering that the Chicago train would have to go back through Denver.

The midget had gotten off the train at Fraser too, but he hadn’t gone to the ticket office. Instead, he’d gone to a bar for a while and now he was standing a little down the platform from us. It made me a bit nervous.

Especially since the Chicago train was late.

It hadn’t come in half an hour. It hadn’t come in an hour.

It hadn’t come by midnight.

When you called up Amtrak’s toll-free number, an undead voice told you that the train was just arriving in Fraser. The voice had been claiming this for several hours….

Birds. The air. The moon so bright you could see vapor trails. The cold. Snow on the mountains circling the little half-assed ski town. The steel train tracks going nineteenth-century straight into the mountain.

John waxing philosophical:

“Waiting’s good for you. You notice things. You slow time down into its components. Too often we put our consciousness on cruise control. You autopilot your way through the day, the week, your existence in this world….”

Pop psychology from that motorcycle book, I imagined, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. It was very cold. You wouldn’t have thought it was the summer. Much chillier than those mountains behind Boulder.

I looked up the long platform. The midget was smoking. We had no smokes, I considered going up and asking him for one to keep out the cold.

“Look at all those stars,” John said.

He was annoying me and I purposely did not look up.

“I should have done astronomy. I should have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I didn’t have the A levels. You had, Alex, you should have gone. But I suppose you needed to be near your ma.”

I gave him a look that he didn’t see.

“Terrible business, your ma. I was very close to her too, you know. You know, I agreed with their decision. Your da and ma,” John said.