Lowland Rider (29 page)

The man he thought was Rooney said no more.

Good old Rooney. He could always count on Rooney. Rooney knew what Montcalm would want to do.

"Okay. Thanks." Montcalm hung up the phone and sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, thinking. Things had ripped. The whole fucking thing had fallen apart on him, the stuffing coming out all over the streets, all over the
goddam
corruption task force or whoever the hell it was that had gotten Sinclair to shit his pants. It had ripped wide open.

It was all over.

If he had said to hell with the money, if he had just followed that
goddam
Jesse Gordon to some lonely station somewhere and blown out his
goddam
brains —
forget
the money—then it would have been all right. His money would have been gone, but so would Gordon.

But he couldn't have done it. He couldn't have killed anyone, not even Gordon, who he hated more than death, more than hell, more than that
chickenshit
Duke Sinclair who he hoped would be sliced open with a homemade knife the first prison he walked into. No, he couldn't have killed him. Even now, if he'd had Gordon in front of him and a gun in his hands, he couldn't have done it. He'd gotten Sinclair to do it because he couldn't, wasn't man enough, and Sinclair had fucked up, fucked up everything.

Montcalm stood up, pulled on a pair of slacks over the underwear he slept in, and walked into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and looked into it, then closed it. He went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, shaved with an electric razor, and splashed on after-shave lotion when he was done. Back in his bedroom, he finished dressing, loaded a .38 caliber police special with six cartridges, cocked the hammer, and very carefully wedged it into the small of his back, making as certain as possible that nothing would bump the trigger. Then he put on a light jacket and walked out of his apartment, leaving his keys behind.

A soft summer drizzle was falling on the early morning streets, and Montcalm stood in it as he waited for a cab to drive past. He put his hand up to his head, touched the mist that had settled on his hair, and looked at his damp palm as though it were a mirror in which he could see his face. A cab came, and he gave the driver the address of Gina's apartment house. As it pulled away from the curb, Montcalm saw a police car round the corner and come to a stop, double-parked, in front of his building. They wouldn't even give him the grace to come in on his own. Or to go out.

When the cabby let Montcalm off in front of Gina's building ten minutes later, Montcalm gave him seventy dollars, the total amount that was in his wallet. "You serious?" the cabby asked. Montcalm only nodded and walked away, barely hearing the driver's thanks, or the cab as it pulled back into the light traffic.

Without hesitating, he walked into the lobby and pushed the button next to Gina's name.
Gina Montcalm
, he read. There was the heart of it: Gina Montcalm, and the events that had created Gina Montcalm. How did he think he could change her?

Could even the house in Pennsylvania have done it? His love hadn't changed her, never could.

Finally he heard her voice, distorted in the tinny speaker. "Who's that?"

"It's me. Bob."

"Bob?"

"Let me in, Gina." There was a brief pause, and then the buzzer sounded at the lock. He pushed the door open and walked in. The Out of Order sign was no longer on the elevator, but he took the stairs, trudging up them slowly, as if he wore heavy weights on his feet. She had the door of her apartment open when he reached the fifth floor, and he smiled when he saw her. Her hair was tousled with sleep, but her eyes were clear. She looked young and innocent, and he loved her.

"What is it, Bob?"

"I had to see you, Gina, that's all. I just had to see you."

"Well . . . come in. You want some coffee?"

"No," he told her, following her in and walking to the couch. The room was a mess, as usual, but it didn't matter to him, and he picked up the magazines on the couch and set them on the coffee table, then fell back onto the cushions with a sigh. It was a nice apartment, he thought.

"Can I . . . can I get you anything?"

He shook his head. "Have you been all right?"

"Yeah. Yeah. The stuff you brought me last time was good, so I cut it a lot. I've still got some left."

"Good. That's good. Come here. Sit down with me." She moved to the couch and sat beside him. He put an arm around her. "You won't need any more.”

“Any more . . . heroin?"

"No. We're going away. Finally. You're going to get clean."

"Bob, I . . . I don't think I can."

"Yes, you can. Where we're going. It's a beautiful place, Gina. A little house back in the woods. Not a city for miles and miles. Just clean air and trees and animals. And you and me together."

"Bob . . ."

He hugged her more tightly, and she put her head on his shoulder. "Do you know, Gina, that you're my first?"

It was early, and she was still sleepy. She closed her eyes and listened to his voice, soft and comforting. "Your first?" she whispered.

"
Mmm
-hmm. It's love that lets you do it, you know. I can do it now, for you. I love you, Gina.”

“I know, Bob. I love you."

He shifted slightly, pushing his hips forward so that he could reach the pistol behind his back with his left hand. He removed it quietly and brought it around, holding it down over the side of the couch so that she would not see it. He did not want her to see it, did not want her to know.

"Turn around," he said. "Turn around and put your head in my lap." She sat up, turned, put her legs over the right arm of the couch, and he aimed at the nape of her neck, at the place where the round hardness of the skull ends, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet snapped her head forward for a second, and he saw the hole it made in the wispy tendrils that covered her neck. An instant later, she fell back with her head on his lap, and he felt the warm blood run from her body, dampening his groin. Her eyes were still open, but he knew they saw nothing.

"You are my first," he told her, in case she could still hear him. "You were always the first, the only thing with me. This is the only way I can get you loose from it now, the only way we can be together."

He thought for a moment that he saw her eyes move, that somehow, somewhere in death she heard him, and was even now waiting for him. A sound came from out in the hall. It might have been a door slamming, but he wasn't sure. He only knew that he didn't have much time left. The sound of shots kept people away in this city, but not forever. Sooner or later someone would come, and he had to leave before then, or the fate he had wished on Sinclair would be his as well—there were too many people in the jails of the state who hated him for him to live longer than a few days, even if he had wanted to. He didn't.

Finally, he thought, he had killed someone. And it made so much sense. She was the only person other than himself that he
could
kill. You had to love someone to kill them, he didn't know why he'd never realized that before. He hoped he could love himself, poor, foolish man that he was, enough to pull the trigger again.

He looked into Gina's wet eyes, and put the barrel of the pistol into his mouth.

Love. It's all because of love
.

He pulled the trigger and entered darkness.

And in the darkness, a hundred feet directly beneath where Bob and Gina Montcalm lay, Enoch stood within a tunnel, gazing upward, the only light around him the pale glow which radiated from his perfect face, a face suffused with love.

Rags had been looking for Jesse for hours, ever since he had run from the spur where he had seen Baggie and Enoch together. As he ran, he expected to hear footsteps behind him, growing ever nearer until he was dragged to the stones and. . .

And what? Torn? Devoured? Or something worse? But nothing had happened. He had heard no sound behind him, no laughter, no shrieks of fury. It was as though Enoch had wanted him to see, had wanted him to run and tell someone, to spread the gospel. . .

Now what had brought that idea into his mind, he wondered uncomfortably. Connecting the gospel to the hideous thing he had seen done was the worst kind of blasphemy, and he struggled to get the word out of his mind.

He finally found Jesse at the Times Square station, standing beneath a clock, looking up at it as if he expected it to tell him something more than the time, for of what use was time to skells? "Jesse," Rags panted as he scuttled up to the man, then stopped.

Jesse's eyes were more intense than Rags had ever seen them. There was something else too. If he could have put this Jesse Gordon beside the Jesse Gordon he first met down here months ago, he doubted if he could have told that they were the same man. It was not so much a matter of physical appearance as it was of attitude. The man who stood before him now was a creature of the tunnels, but not a
skell
. There was none of the secretiveness, the shabbiness, the sense of subservience, of being something less than human, about Jesse Gordon. Rather there was a sense of place, there was purpose, there was mission in the lines of his face, in the set of his shoulders. This was a man who was home, who was where he was always meant to be.

Jesse was no longer wearing a white T-shirt. Instead he had on his black turtleneck. But despite the heat of the station, there were no signs of perspiration on his face. He looked cool and ready and unafraid. He looked, thought Rags, like a Deliverer.

"Jesse," Rags said again.

"What is it, Rags? Is it Enoch?"

How did he know? "Yeah, oh sweet Jesus, it sure is. I seen Baggie, that old woman, she had a baby, Jesse. She took somebody's
baby
, and she
killed
it, she killed it right in front of Enoch, like they done for Baal in the Bible."

"What did you do, Rags?" Jesse's voice was quiet and still.

"What did I
do
?"

"Did you try and stop her?"

"I… I didn't know for sure till it was too late. I seen her on the train and she . . . she had a knife, Jesse."

"Find her, Rags. Take her knife. Stop her.”

“Stop her? I can't . . . she got a knife, Jesse.”

“This is your chance, Rags. The chance to make up for what you did, why you came down here. Children, Rags. To save children."

"Jesse, I…"

"You think she'll stop now? You think Enoch will stop, will say that's enough, that's fine, go and kill no more?"

"Jesse…"

"Find her, Rags. Stop her."

"You're telling me to kill her."

"Yes."

"But . . . but even if I do, that won't stop Enoch. Somebody
else'll
do for him, bring him babies.”

“I'll stop Enoch."

"You?"

"I'll stop Enoch," Jesse said again.

Rags looked into Jesse's face for a long time before he spoke again. "You been sent, Jesse? That it? You been sent?"

For the first time, Jesse looked down, and a touch of humanity in the form of confusion and uncertainty crossed his face. "Something sent me. Something . . ." He paused, then said, "Walk with me."

It seemed to Rags that they walked hundreds of yards through a honeycomb of tunnels before Jesse spoke again. When he did, his words were slow and measured, as if he had never before dared to think the words, let alone speak them.

"I think I
was
sent, Rags. By what I don't know. Maybe it was by God." He smiled bitterly. "After it happened, I thought there was no God, that there could be no purpose in it, that a god wouldn't let such things happen. But I think I was wrong. There was a purpose. Sit with me."

They sat together on a bench at the end of an uptown platform. Jesse leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs. His eyes looked at the edge of the platform, but Rags knew he was seeing far more. "Random violence. That's what I couldn't accept, what nobody can really accept. It means an unstructured universe, Rags. It means that there's no reason for anything. Why go on living and struggling when a random act can kill us in an instant? What's the point? But the longer I've been down here, the more I've seen. And the more I've thought about it, the more I see patterns. Reasons. Reasons for everything. And there are reasons we
can't
see, and those are the ones that drive us mad, that make us think the world is a madhouse."

Rags shook his head wearily. "I see what you mean, Jesse, but I don't know what difference it makes. It's just a way of looking at things."

Jesse put a hand on
Rags's
shoulder. "All life is a way of looking at things. And how we look at things makes us who we are, makes us do what we do."

"But what's the reason for your wife? And for your little girl? For the boy you killed?"

"To bring me down here. Nothing less would have brought me here. But that chain of events—their deaths leading to my killing the boy who tried to help me—that was enough. They were sacrifices, Rags. As horrible as that seems, they were necessary sacrifices to the final purpose."