Lowland Rider (21 page)

"I've been riding," he told her, and looked out the window again.

"What you said before about . . . helping people? Have you been doing any more of that?"

He didn't answer for a long time, then said softly, "What can I do for anyone?"

"But what you told me before—"

"Forget that."

"I can't."

He looked at her. "I mean, what you told me—I've been thinking about it. I think it's good."

Jesse looked away. "Thanks."

She watched him, but he did not look back at her. The train slowed to a stop at a station. She didn't know what station it was. She didn't care. "You won't tell me about it?"

"Why should I?"

"Because you might want to talk about it. Do you talk to Rags about it?"

"Rags doesn't want to hear about it. It frightens Rags. It should frighten you too."

"It doesn't though."

"It did before. You told me I should stop, come back up."

"I'm still frightened for you. But you don't have to stop, not if you're doing good." She took a deep breath, wishing that he would look at her when he spoke. "But I think you should come back up."

"Why? To clear my name?" His tone was dull, far away, as if he were talking only to himself, arguing with an inner voice rather than with Claudia.

"Maybe. If you want to."

"No one up there can clear my name. No one there can change what I did. Besides," he went on dreamily, "what would I do up there? What good could I do? Down here I can. More than up there. Down here I can…" He was quiet for a while, and the train started up again. She barely heard his next words—"… keep the balance."

"The balance?" she repeated, not sure whether he heard her or not. But he nodded.

"Sometimes I think that's why I came. I can't believe, I've tried but I can't, that it was all for nothing, that they died for no reason. Maybe it was to bring me down here. I don't know."

Now his voice was full of pain, of hard thoughts only now spoken, not as much to her as to himself, and she hesitated to do anything for fear of breaking the spell that let him speak, though she wanted with all her heart to touch him, to ease his agony.

He turned to her, and a smile came over his face. It was not a light smile. It was a smile that scared her, the smile on a skull.

"Are you getting enough now?" he said.

It caught her. "Enough? I… I don't know what you—"

"You know just what I mean. I've figured it out, haven't I? Why you wanted to come on this line, where nothing happens. You don't want to talk to skells anymore, do you? You want to talk to me. I'm your story."

"No I…"

"You're lying, Claudia. I can catch lies now, I'm a lot better at it than I used to be. This whole place is full of lies. You see them on every face. I see one on yours now."

She saw no point in continuing the masquerade. "All right, Jesse, it's true. I
am
more interested in you than in these others—how can you expect me not to be? You may be the only good man to have come down here, to do what you're doing. There's a story in that."

"I could keep you from telling it, you know."

Despite his words, she did not feel afraid of him. "How?"

"I could kill you. Unsolved murders down here every day."

"You wouldn't do that. I know you too well to believe that."

"I've killed people. Down here."

"And I believe that too. But you wouldn't kill me."

He glared at her for a long time, but finally it was he who turned away. "No," he said. "You're right. I wouldn't do that."

"Who have you killed, Jesse?" she asked quietly.

"I've killed killers," he answered. "And I've stolen from thieves."

"Why?"

"Why?" he echoed. "Because someone has to. Because if I don't kill them, they'll kill other people."

"Do you mean that you stop them—kill them—while they're in the act?"

"Of course!" He sounded furious that she should consider any other possibility. "Do you think I just go looking for people who
look
like criminals? You think I examine bumps on their heads? Hell, no! You see it down here, you see it all the time. Most people look away, walk away. I don't anymore."

"But I still don't see why—"

"Because it's why I'm
here
! Why what happened
happened
!" The older man woke up and looked dully at Jesse. The couple stirred, but kept their eyes closed. The young man in the jogging suit kept his cool, and didn't allow himself to look at Jesse and Claudia. "I'm not saying it was divine guidance," Jesse went on. "How the hell can I believe in a God who'd kill my wife and child just to drag me down here to play cops and robbers? But it was me who guided myself down here, because there has to be a
goddammed
, fucking
reason
for it, don't you see that?"

Claudia thought before she answered, and in the time it took Jesse slumped back again, his eyes staring at the ceiling. "I think maybe I do," she said, and when she looked at him again, his eyes were filled with tears.

"There has to be a
reason
," he said again.

"Don't send me away," she asked him, and heard her own voice breaking.

"You can't ride with me. Not all the time."

"Just sometimes," she said. "But talk to me. Tell me things."

"Not everything. I don't
know
everything.”

“All right."

"And don't write it," he told her, his expression suddenly firm again, "until I'm dead."

"You won't die. You'll come back up."

"I don't know." She thought he looked now like a little boy afraid to close his eyes in the dark. "I don't know."

"I love you, Jesse." She didn't plan to say it. It slipped out as naturally and truthfully as her hand slipped over his.

When he looked at her, she saw horror in his eyes. He spoke a single word that made her draw her hand away, a word as heavy as lead, as cold as iron.

"Don't."

She never saw him cry again.

The cottage was everything that New York City was not. It was open, it was clean, it was full of sunshine and fresh air, surrounded by flowers and trees, and there was nothing, thought Bob Montcalm, that could not happen there. He could be happy, Gina could be free, they could love each other again.

He passed the sheaf of photographs back across the desktop to the realtor, a prissy man in his fifties, who took them with a flourish. "A beautiful property, isn't it?"

"It's very nice," Montcalm agreed. "How long's it been on the market?"

"Oh, that's the amazing part. Nearly a year now. I didn't expect that, not at all. I thought it would go very quickly."

"So what's the problem, the price?"

"Not to
my
way of thinking. Seven acres of land, state forest all around, three bedrooms, for only a hundred and ten thousand."

A hundred and ten thousand, Montcalm thought. Jesus. "So what is it then?"

"The location apparently. It's just a bit further out than most people seem to like. It was originally built as a hunting lodge, but when the owner retired he had it remodeled to live in year-round, and he did until his death."

"Far away from town then?"

"My, yes. Of a town of any size, at least." The realtor took a road atlas from the shelf behind him and opened it to a map of eastern Pennsylvania. "Now here's the Delaware State Forest and here's Peck's Pond, which apparently is tiny-tiny. The cottage is three miles away from the village, so it is
very
isolated. A wonderful retirement home, but I don't believe there are many job possibilities there. What, uh,
is
your line of work, Mr. Montcalm?"

"Transit police."

"Oh my, well, there certainly wouldn't be much opportunity for professional growth at Peck's Pond, would there?"

"I'm thinking of taking an early retirement."

"Ah, well, that would be all right then. You're not very old, are you?"

"Old enough. I've been with the city twenty-five years."

"And you can retire then, eh? Well, that's very nice. Would you like to see the property?"

"I can't get away just now. Maybe in a few weeks.”

“Of course I can't guarantee that it will be available much longer."

"I'll have to take the risk. One thing though . . .”

“Yes?"

"Is there any chance that the property would be available as a rental?"

"Oh no, Mr. Montcalm. In fact, if you're looking for someplace isolated and rural, you'd have a very difficult time finding a rental property. We don't handle rentals at all, you see. Besides, with mortgage rates what they are right now, it's the perfect time to buy, isn't it?"

Montcalm knew nothing about real estate, and was tired of pretending he did. "What kind of down payment would a place like this take?"

"Well, with a place like this you wouldn't want to go into it with less than twenty percent—twenty-two thousand dollars. And then you've got brokerage fees, and insurance, of course—homeowners and mortgage . . ."

The list droned on of things that Montcalm had never thought about. It occurred to him that he would need a car as well, something he'd never owned in his life. He'd never had the need for one. The tunnels had taken him everywhere he'd needed to go.

The cost of everything was overwhelming, and he tried to figure it out as he headed uptown—twenty-two for the down payment, figure two more for insurance, another two grand for the broker's fee, at least five for a car, another two for appliances, a grand to move the shit out of his apartment, and probably a whole lot more for stuff he'd never even thought of. That was thirty-four thousand all told.

He had twelve thousand in his various savings accounts and CD's, and another fourteen from Rodriguez in the locker at Penn Station. That was twenty-six grand. Christ, he was already eight thousand in the hole. Even if he was able to borrow it, that meant he'd have to pay it back plus the monthly mortgage payment which sure as hell wouldn't be tiny-tiny, in the fag realtor's words. There was no way he could do it on his pension.

There were several alternatives. The first was to find a cheaper place to buy, which was not too likely without going into the area himself and beating the bushes, if he could find the time. The second was to hold off for a while and pray to God that Gina wouldn't OD before he was able to rack up a larger pile from his dealings with Rodriguez. Maybe, if he handled it right, he could move from protection into distribution. After all, that was where the real money was. And he hadn't been caught yet, not even suspected by anyone who really mattered. But the only way to expand was to resolve this problem with Rodriguez right away. And the only way to do that was to find out who the hell this prick on the trains was and stop him from fucking up anything else.

The mug books were a long shot, but he figured the best way to deal with this bastard was to find out who he was. So he went to the transit police headquarters on Gold Street in Brooklyn and started running the man's description through the computer.

It took only seventeen minutes for Jesse Gordon's face to come up on the terminal.

The photograph had obviously been cropped from a family portrait. Montcalm could see the edge of someone's shoulder to the man's left. He read the report quickly. The man, Jesse Gordon, was wanted for questioning in the deaths of his wife and child, a state assessor named Peter Rhoads, and a young man named, Carlos Alvarez. From the description of the case, Montcalm came to the same conclusion that the police had—that a gang had done most of the dirty work, that Gordon might or might not have killed Alvarez, and that afterward he'd suffered a kind of temporary insanity that had driven him into hiding, a withdrawal from reality, as the police psychologist on the case had put it.

Into hiding. But not out of the city, as the psychologist suspected in her report. No, that was where Montcalm and the psychologist differed. Not out. Down.

And something else—the temporary insanity thing? How crazy could a guy be to go to the bank and take out all his money before "withdrawing from reality"? Crazy like a fox, maybe. Fifty thousand dollars could buy you a lot of years as a
skell
. No rent to pay, no utilities, hell, the city would take care of that. How much of that fifty thousand dollars, Montcalm wondered, had Jesse Gordon already spent? And how much was left?

A lot. One
helluva
let. So if there was some way of getting not only Jesse Gordon, but his money as well…

It would be enough. He'd have to struggle, have to get some dummy job out in the boonies to give them enough money to live on. But even if Gordon had only half of it left, it would be enough. He could do it for Gina, for the two of them.

But first he had to find Gordon again, and that would be a problem if Montcalm had succeeded in scaring him out of the city. Then Montcalm remembered Gordon's eyes, and knew that he would still be on the lines. There was something about Gordon that wasn't going to scare. He would stay, and so would his money.