The Nervous System (22 page)

The Mac bobs his head.

“Hey, for real though, you're a peach, thanks a million, Dos.”

I'm legging it toward the basement door. Dos calls after me: “Yo, Librarian. You're gonna die young, soldier. But just in general, you know I give you an A for effort.”

_______________

Aware of the deep need for speed, I resecure the jabbering senator, who almost manages to bite me in the process, and bundle her into the trunk of the Chinese car. Woman yammering about a migraine.

Guess the Rohypnol (Dos very casually mentioned he had “a couple lying around somewhere”) hasn't kicked in yet.

Praise Jah for duct tape, which is a gift directly from the gods.

Milky, foul-smelling rain falling … hard to tell what's airborne toxin, floating industrial silt, etc., and what's oldfashioned cloud-cover anymore. I suppose there's no difference anyhoo, as it's all rolled up into one big discolored mass.

The light is a dirty yellow and the air pressure feels thick and headache heavy. Leg giving me grief which generally means a coming electrical storm, but who knows?

Trust the System to keep and guide me. Stick to the rules, this is the word.

Despite the shower of piss, a group of older folks are out, conducting tai chi practice. As I hump the bodyshaped bag into the vehicle, they pause to watch my efforts, expressionless. Other sets of headlights eye-fuck me from windows. A Mao-jacketed man floats past, ignoring me. And I blank them all. They don't matter.

Limp around to the driver's side, thinking left, left, left, heave my corpse in. Check under the passenger's seat: the senator's file in place. Stupid of me to leave the shit in the car, and relieved to see it untouched. Sloppy work, Decimal. Like I told Dos, I got stress.

Fire up the vehicle in that unsatisfying, hushed manner of these electric jobs, and jump on it.

Now, as the dashboard clock is reporting 9:37 a.m., I will adhere to System dogma with respect to navigation. On foot, we simply stay mindful about those left turns, but via car there are more advanced guidelines if you really want to get some extra credit, having nothing to do with direction, but rather the name of the street or avenue itself. These are the rules behind the routing I take: When in a vehicle and traveling on lettered streets, it's essential to move in ascending alphabetical order. Likewise, we ascend on the numbered streets. This reminds us we can never go backward in time and must live in the present, always moving toward the future.

So: Hester Street to Ludlow, traveling north across Delancey and straight across Houston to 1st Street, taking it west to Second Avenue, whereupon I swing north (in theory against traffic), exiting Chinatown at about 6th Street, passing the Ukrainian Social Hall on my right side, which gives me an Iveta-jolt, hanging a right on 14th Street and east to the FDR, whereupon I swing north, clipping a concrete barrier as I climb the ramp to the drive.

I slow-up close to the Midtown Tunnel (flooded and impassable), anticipating a detour, but recall the bombedout area near the UN has been repaired … bounce across the wooden bridge (wood!) that's been thrown together, the black hole in the concrete yawning below, and from here allow myself to floor it.

“Flooring it” is a frustrating action in an e6, but I work with what Allah provides.

Exhaust the FDR, take the Harlem River Drive to the Willis Avenue Bridge, hop on the 87 … it's always been lucky exit 13 off the Major Deegan, and that, people, is Gun Hill Road. In the much maligned borough of the Bronx.

See, I got a little hideaway up here in the broken jungle gym of my youth. A pied-à-terre, if you will.

Do a half donut into the dilapidated parking area when I reach the Gun Hill Houses. By “Houses” what they meant was “Nasty-Ass American Housing Project.” A rose is a rose is a rose.

I note an old fossil-fuel Honda, stripped of its tires. A NYPD Dodge Challenger, looking relatively untouched. Maybe three other vehicles. Otherwise the parking lot is all but empty. This emptiness is palpable, huge, a crushing gravitational force.

The rain has picked up again, and I pop the trunk. Lean over and get that file, stuff it down the back of my trousers as I exit the Chinese piece of crap.

Move move move. I'm playing it like I'm unobserved and unaccounted for, but with Cyna-corp that can't last …

Nobody lives here anymore. Amendment: nobody
ever
lived here. You can't call what folks did here living. Folks maintained. Folks slept and ate and survived to get up and do it again the next day.

The Honorable Kathleen Koch is noodle-limp, playing possum or genuinely unconscious, seems like the drug has taken effect. Toss her over my shoulder like a bag of cement and head for the huge, hateful building. There's a reason some described this as “Brutalist” architecture. It's brutal. And yet it's my home away from home. Once my home, period.

Quick stagger across the cracked concrete of a playground, sad white plastic-swing akimbo, the usual urban tumbleweeds, yellowed with age now, the chicken bones, the forty-ouncers, the empty Newport boxes, yada, yada … future archeological material, describing how we as a tribe numbed ourselves to our fucked-up reality.

Bang through the doors and into the foyer. Depress the elevator call button … the electrics intermittent up in this spot.

I wait. I listen at the metal door. Zilcho.

Gonna have to hump it. That's a bitch, but I'm spared the unpleasant ride up, more stress I don't need. Very short on time here. I lower my mask, spit, replace it, and head for the stairs.

Another dark stairwell. I'm either headed up or down, but there's always another stairwell.

Winded is hardly the word as I gain the ninth floor. I'm quite sure my knee is forever fucked, and my gut has moved to my throat in preparation for me to puke it out.

But there's no time. Shakily I make my way down the hallway, shifting Kathleen to my right shoulder. Hands quivering as I dive for the key in my new pants pocket … withdraw it, key wavering hither and tither, and finally inserting itself into the lock, which I turn without a problem.

An apartment with no identity or furnishings, save the futon on the floor of the bedroom. The air is musty and stagnant, but with a quick peep around the joint I'm shocked at the halfway decent state within which it's kept itself.

The windows are shut tight, as if they can't bear to look. The only light I have to work with pokes anemically from between the broken slats in the crappy venetian blinds.

I dump Senator Kathleen Koch, who remains slack, on the mattress. Time is falling away but I prod at her with a new shoe (happy to report they're breaking in nicely). I am sweating, y'all. Take a second.

“Kath,” I rasp, panting. “Hope you don't mind the sheets, they've only been used a couple times.”

KK gives a muted cough. Eases my mind a smidge. She seems to have given up entirely.

Almost out of tape, but I truss her up once more.

Mummified, one female eye rotates around the apartment.

“Hang tough, okay, Kathleen? I'm back in a jiffy.”

No response. Fair enough. I drop a couple jerky sticks and a bottle of water on the floor near her head. Think again; lean over and cut one hand and her mouth free cause I'm basically a decent guy.

On my way out: see the square-foot dark patch on the floor. I squat, put a hand on the carpet. Run my fingers over the crusted fibers. Always imagine somebody's gonna scrub this down, but then I'm the only one with a key. I think.

In the bathroom I step up on the nonworking toilet to remove the vent cover. Slide the senator's paperwork into the shaft, replace the grill. Do it quiet.

Check the windows: painted shut. Shake out a pill and swallow, take a second to disinfect with Purell
^TM
, swap out my gloves.

Getting realer by the moment.

Make sure the door is securely locked from the outside as I've rigged it, and I ghost.

_______________

Ditch the bullshit BYD in a particularly overgrown area of Battery Park and lurch forth, doing my lopsided version of a jog. 11:24, I'm good for right turns. Rain coming down pretty steadily now, dismayed to be planting my nice brogues in the mud and tall grass. Good thing they had a brownish tinge to them from the jump. Happy as well to have snagged that overcoat as it's serving a brother well now.

Run a quick inventory check: in hand I have my CZ-99. My pockets are stuffed with rubber gloves, a pill bottle, Purell
^TM
, my key, one stick of jerky, and the box cutter. Strapped around my ankle rides the Sig Sauer P290, and I dig the comfort of its weight.

As I come out of the park onto State Street just near Pearl, I kneel behind a rusted-out moped chained to a telephone pole. Beneath my coat, the thrown-together “bomb” wrapped around my midsection pinches the skin near my rib cage, causing me to wince.

Peep south at the Whitehall Terminal, the words
Staten Island Ferry
quite clear from my vantage.

I'm ahead of schedule up in this piece, dirty early-bird looking for the worm, but do I pause? No sir, it's all move move move.

Lean into a stiff jog, let's go. Here, straight ahead and due south. What am I looking at now? There's a cluster of dead-looking yellow taxicabs further down State, describing crazy angles, blocking my view of the street-level entrance to the terminal. Maybe twelve, fourteen cars in all.

Check the CZ-99 and make sure a bullet is in the chamber. I motor south. What up with the taxis? No choice but to dip in and out of the dead vehicles, serving me well as cover. Chassis like sleeping kittens, all piled up together for warmth. Some of these cars, the only way to explain the manner in which they overlap is to imagine them dropped from overhead. Which I wouldn't rule out. Crop-circle shit.

Note Port Authority cops drifting around, not saying much. Sanitation workers, other uniforms I don't recognize, a couple civilians. Not shit they can do about this pileup, it'd take a crane or three to clear this clot. Two or three folks grit on me as I slip by, but if they clock my weapon they don't intend to do anything about it. Worn-out men and women, threadbare clothing tatty and mismatched.

The vehicular tableaux is disconcerting, but just one of thousands of such inexplicable phenomena one trips over every other block in this town. You don't ask how or why anymore. You take what you can use, and ramble on.

Which is what I do now. Stomach flipping, anticipating Nic Deluccia. How am I gonna react when face-on with the man himself? Why do I prevent myself from looking directly at our past relationship? I know not to try to answer that question. Keep my hustle on, face cameras wide open. Move.

My nose is adjusting to the stench of the river. Like the broiled plastic of our everyday environment, I suppose in time one would get used to it, but I find myself gagging slightly. Odd, though, this odor is way more evil farther north on the West Side, less so on the East.

Park myself about fifty yards out from the tall, handsome entryway, on my haunches. Always liked the new terminal, not big on modern structures but this one was well done. This and the New Museum on the Bowery, I groove on both buildings. February 14 left it untouched, so it sits, ready for a massive wave of commuters and tourists that will never come, rendered useless.

A few Transit Authority cop cars and a smallish bulldozer out front of the terminal, otherwise nothing catches my eye. The spot is like one big crystal decanter so there's no viable way to creep on it. I don't bother trying.

Pocket the CZ, commence my signature lope across the plaza toward the main doors. Gust of nasty wind comes off the water, I have to hold my hat and turn my collar up against it, gut churning, feeling as wired-up as I've felt in a long while.

My plan is extremely simple, people.

Dig: I secure Rose, and then kill everybody else, most especially and most thoroughly Mr. Nic Deluccia, and the senator if he pokes his head in.

Get this whole episode behind me as quick as possible. Make a return to what I suspect will be a long rebuilding process with respect to my books. Start over from null. Whatever.

Maybe Rose wants to hang around. That I wouldn't mind. But whatever, yo. I mean, we just freakin met. But you know how that goes. You catch a vibe off people …

But all that would be icing. Getting ahead of the moment, and the System doesn't respond well to daydreams and flights of fucking fancy.

The primary goal: gotta sort out these various folks who believe they have a line on my past movements. That is a vibration I cannot have in play. Seems like the moment I take care of one situation, another joker pops up alleging foreknowledge of yours truly, with accompanying documentation.

It's a nightmare. And I won't have it.

Move. The double doors that line the face of the terminal, the whole wall's worth of them, are standing open … this in itself is a bit freaky but I don't see how it could make the scene any more charged than it is.

You might call my plan elegant in its simplicity, were it not for the fact that I don't really have a proper motherfucking plan.

I slide inside the entry hall, which retains most of its former grandeur, the eighty-or-so-foot-high ceiling now sporting enough holes to allow in the rain, creating opaque, whitish pools here and there on the stone floor. A massive American flag hangs heavy over the wide stairs and frozen escalator banks, waterlogged and beat. It's a nice metaphor but I don't linger. Move.

Take the double-wide stairs in pairs up to the mezzanine … halfway up I glance over my shoulder through the soaring wall of glass and get a load of the monumental waste that is the Freedom Tower, partially obscured by clouds. Hate that fucking structure.

Make the second level, squat up against one of huge columns, and have a gander at the old waiting area, let my lungs catch up with me. The open-plan design is such that I can pretty much see everything going on in the building from this spot.