Great, now I’ll smell like a barroom on Saturday night.
He struggled to his feet in time to see the car—it was a Mercedes, all right, a big sedan as gray as this foggy morning—plowing into the crowd, spinning bodies out of its way as it came, describing a drunken arc. Blood dripped from the grille. A woman went skidding and rolling across the hood with her hands out and her shoes gone. She slapped at the glass, grabbed at one of the windshield wipers, missed, and tumbled off to one side. Yellow DO NOT CROSS tapes snapped. A post clanged against the side of the big sedan, which did not slow its roll in the slightest. Tom saw the front wheels pass over the sleeping bag and the burly man, who had been crouched protectively over it with one hand raised.
Now it was coming right at him.
“Todd!” he shouted. “Todd, get up!”
He grabbed at Todd’s hands, got one of them, and pulled. Someone slammed into him and he was driven back to his knees. He could hear the rogue car’s motor, revving full-out. Very close now. He tried to crawl, and a foot clobbered him in the temple. He saw stars.
“Tom?” Todd was behind him now. How had that happened? “Tom, what the fuck?”
A body landed on top of him, and then something else was on top of him, a huge weight that pressed down, threatening to turn him to jelly. His hips snapped. They sounded like dry turkey bones. Then the weight was gone. Pain with its own kind of weight rushed in to replace it.
Tom tried to raise his head and managed to get it off the pavement just long enough to see taillights dwindling into the fog. He saw glittering shards of glass from the busted pint. He saw Todd sprawled on his back with blood coming out of his head and pooling on the pavement. Crimson tire-tracks ran away into the foggy half-light.
He thought, Linda was right. I should have stayed home.
He thought, I’m going to die, and maybe that’s for the best. Because, unlike Todd Paine, I never got around to cashing in my insurance.
He thought, Although I probably would have, in time.
Then, blackness.
???
When Tom Saubers woke up in the hospital forty-eight hours later, Linda was sitting beside him. She was holding his hand. He asked her if he was going to live. She smiled, squeezed his hand, and said you bet your patootie.
“Am I paralyzed? Tell me the truth.”
“No, honey, but you’ve got a lot of broken bones.”
“What about Todd?”
She looked away, biting her lips. “He’s in a coma, but they think he’s going to come out of it eventually. They can tell by his brainwaves, or something.”
“There was a car. I couldn’t get out of the way.”
“I know. You weren’t the only one. It was some madman. He got away with it, at least so far.”
Tom could have cared less about the man driving the Mercedes-Benz. Not paralyzed was good, but—
“How bad did I get it? No bullshit—be honest.”
She met his eyes but couldn’t hold them. Once more looking at the get-well cards on his bureau, she said, “You . . . well. It’s going to be awhile before you can walk again.”
“How long?”
She raised his hand, which was badly scraped, and kissed it. “They don’t know.”
Tom Saubers closed his eyes and began to cry. Linda listened to that awhile, and when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she leaned forward and began to punch the button on the morphine pump. She kept doing it until the machine stopped giving. By then he was asleep.
1978
Morris grabbed a blanket from the top shelf of the bedroom closet and used it to cover Rothstein, who now sprawled askew in the easy chair with the top of his head gone. The brains that had conceived Jimmy Gold, Jimmy’s sister Emma, and Jimmy’s self-involved, semi-alcoholic parents—so much like Morris’s own—were now drying on the wallpaper. Morris wasn’t shocked, exactly, but he was certainly amazed. He had expected some blood, and a hole between the eyes, but not this gaudy expectoration of gristle and bone. It was a failure of imagination, he supposed, the reason why he could read the giants of modern American literature—read them and appreciate them—but never be one.
Freddy Dow came out of the study with a loaded duffel bag over each shoulder. Curtis followed, head down and carrying nothing at all. All at once he sped up, hooked around Freddy, and bolted into the kitchen. The door to the backyard banged against the side of the house as the wind took it. Then came the sound of retching.
“He’s feelin kinda sick,” Freddy said. He had a talent for stating the obvious.
“You all right?” Morris asked.
“Yuh.” Freddy went out through the front door without looking back, pausing to pick up the crowbar leaning against the porch glider. They had come prepared to break in, but the front door had been unlocked. The kitchen door, as well. Rothstein had put all his confidence in the Gardall safe, it seemed. Talk about failures of the imagination.
Morris went into the study, looked at Rothstein’s neat desk and covered typewriter. Looked at the pictures on the wall. Both ex-wives hung there, laughing and young and beautiful in their fifties clothes and hairdos. It was sort of interesting that Rothstein would keep those discarded women where they could look at him while he was writing, but Morris had no time to consider this, or to investigate the contents of the writer’s desk, which he would dearly have loved to do. But was such investigation even necessary? He had the notebooks, after all. He had the contents of the writer’s mind. Everything he’d written since he stopped publishing eighteen years ago.
Freddy had taken the stacks of cash envelopes in the first load (of course; cash was what Freddy and Curtis understood), but there were still plenty of notebooks on the shelves of the safe. They were Moleskines, the kind Hemingway had used, the kind Morris had dreamed of while in the reformatory, where he had also dreamed of becoming a writer himself. But in Riverview Youth Detention he had been rationed to five sheets of pulpy Blue Horse paper each week, hardly enough to begin writing the Great American Novel. Begging for more did no good. The one time he’d offered Elkins, the commissary trustee, a blowjob for a dozen extra sheets, Elkins had punched him in the face. Sort of funny, when you considered all the non-consensual sex he had been forced to participate in during his nine-month stretch, usually on his knees and on more than one occasion with his own dirty undershorts stuffed in his mouth.