Turn Signal (24 page)

He motions for his old classmate to resume reading.

Everything is quiet for the next 20 minutes.

Then, there's a knock on his door.

“Mr. Prince?” It's David. “Are you all right?”

Jack can hear the door handle being worked.

“I'm fine,” Gerald answers. “Just fine. We'll be another hour or so. Hold my calls.”

“You know, you have that meeting at 11.”

Gerald looks at Jack, who shakes his head.

“Cancel it,” he tells his assistant.

“Cancel it? Are you sure?”

“Yes, dammit. Cancel it. And don't disturb us again.”

“Keep reading,” Jack tells him when David goes away.

Gerald Prince thinks to himself that it just never ends. He feels like crying. He has worked his whole life to be rid of the likes of Jack Fucking Stone, and here he is, almost 48 years old, being bullied into reading a moron's manuscript. An armed and dangerous moron.

He'll admit that Jack Stone wasn't as bad as some of them. He even saved little Jerry Prince from the crueler elements on a couple of occasions. But he always did it the way you'd stop a bully from picking on a cripple, out of pity rather than anything like friendship. The lion pulling the thorn out of the mouse's paw.

Gerald reads with half a mind toward the pages in front of him. He is careful not to flip them too quickly.

By 11:15, he has torn through 80 pages. His mouth is dry, and he wishes he could call David and have him bring some coffee or bottled water. It occurs to him, dimly, because most of his conscious thoughts are about staying alive, that the manuscript really isn't that bad, once it gets going. He is sure he can find something soothing to say about it, although he's not sure it will do any good.

He looks across the desk at Jack Stone, who doesn't seem to have blinked since they sat down more than two hours ago.

“Pretty good,” he says.

“Yeah, it is.”

“You know,” Gerald continues, clearing his throat, “it's a different world up here. People say and write some pretty cruel things sometimes without really meaning them.”

“So I understand. Read.”

Gerald has been reading for another 20 minutes when there's another knock on the door.

“What?”

“Mr. Prince? Ah, actually, I've brought you some lunch. I thought you and your guest might want something to eat. I got a couple of Reubens and pasta salads from that stand just down the street. Can I come in?”

He is so anxious, so transparent. Gerald can't believe David thought at one time of becoming an actor. He can almost smell the cops. It has become very quiet out there. Gerald is wondering whether he should duck under the desk before somebody kicks the door in and all hell breaks loose.

Before he has time to make a move, though, Jack Stone has jumped to his feet with amazing quickness and come around to Gerald's side of the desk. The gun is now firmly planted in the back of his neck. His kidnapper pulls the chair Gerald is sitting in away from the window.

“David,” Jack says, “I want you to take those Reubens and stick them up your ass, if that wouldn't actually be too much trouble. If you or anybody else tries to come in here before I'm ready for you to come in, I'm going to use this .38 on the back of Mr. Prince's head, and you'll have to spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the desk and walls and carpet.

“David? You understand? Everybody out there understand? This might end OK, if you'll give us a few hours here. Or it might not. But if you come charging in here right now, I can assure you the worst possible outcome.”

There is dead silence for a minute or more, and then another voice, soothing and practiced, comes through the door.

“Mr. Stone? Howyadoin'? I'm Lieutenant Lewandowski. We just want to make sure everybody gets out of this safe and sound. My job is to keep anybody from doing anything they might regret.”

“Stay away from the door, and the chances of that get a lot better. And stop disturbing us. Mr. Prince is trying to read in here.”

Jack Stone leans forward.

“Keep reading, Gerald,” he whispers.

Gerald picks up the next page and does as he's told. Outside the window, he can hear helicopters and sirens. He thinks of himself as the mean-joke headline in the next day's
Daily News:
“DELETED. Spurned writer to editor—Drop dead, really.”

When Jack Stone realizes there are police right outside Gerald Prince's door, he almost panics, almost just starts firing into the wood, hoping for luck. He gets a grip, though, the way Bobby Witt used to tell them when they were coming down to the last 30 seconds, two points behind. Nothing bad is going to happen, he keeps assuring himself. The old man won't let it happen. Just ride it out, Jack. From the look on Gerald's face, he realizes that he is talking to himself again. Gerald seems to understand that logical persuasion might not carry the day.

As Jack looks across the room, he sees that the fog that followed him up all the way from Virginia has managed to seep into Gerald Prince's office. He shakes his head and some of it goes away.

He asks Gerald if he has anything to eat. He can smell food through the door. David, the twit, really did go out and get lunch for them.

Gerald starts to say no, very apologetically, when he remembers the peanuts. He'd bought a can of them from one of the secretaries, who was helping raise money for her daughter's school class, then put them away in his desk drawer yesterday, completely forgotten.

“Peanuts?” Jack Stone asks.

“Yeah. Virginia's finest, the label said. My day for reminders of home.”

Jack smiles.

“Where?”

“This drawer right here.”

“You know what'll happen if your hand comes out of there holding anything but peanuts.”

“I know.”

Jack nods. Gerald reaches in, as carefully as if he were retrieving a cobra. When he slowly produces the peanuts. Jack has him open the can and pass it to him.

“Bon appetit,” he says, pouring out a handful and passing the peanuts back.

Gerald takes a handful for himself and puts the can between them. He finds that, in spite of everything, he does have an appetite for peanuts. Given a choice, he might have picked foie gras and Sauternes for his last meal, but this might have to do.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It soon becomes impossible for Gerald to read anything or concentrate on anything much beyond staying alive.

The street outside has been blocked off. When he dares to peek, he can see blue and red lights reflecting off the building across from Mayfair Publishing. Most of the windows in that building seem to be filled with the faces of the morbidly curious, who ignore bullhorn voices telling them to stay back lest they get shot. Gerald can imagine them all doing play-by-play on their cell phones for those not lucky enough for a ringside seat.

Lieutenant Lewandowski calls through the door every 30 minutes or so. Jack refuses to talk to him, other than to warn him to stand back. The lieutenant knows his name now, alternates calling him Jack and Mr. Stone, trying to find some finger-hold.

At 2:15, Gerald's cell phone rings, and Jack lets him answer. The phone on Gerald's desk seems to have been disconnected.

“Caitlin,” he says.

Gerald Prince starts half a dozen sentences before he is able to finish one.

“Listen. Listen!” he says, finally. “It's going to be OK. Jack just wants me to read the rest of his very good book here, and then he's going to let me go.”

Jack only stares at him.

Gerald's wife seems a little calmer, from the end of the conversation Jack can hear. He tells her to definitely not come down to the scene and to absolutely not call his mother in Virginia, and to pick up the kids from school so she can tell them what's happening to Daddy before anyone else can.

After five minutes, Jack motions for Gerald to get off the phone.

“I love you, too,” Gerald says as he's about to hang up. He assures her again that everything soon will be all right.

“The kids,” he says when he hangs up. “The kids are in school. Caleb'll handle it pretty well. Rosa, though. Damn, Jack, she's only 9 years old.”

Jack thinks for a brief moment that Gerald Prince is going to attack him, force him to shoot. Then Gerald falls back in his chair, tears welling in his eyes.

Jack Stone shrugs.

“You know, Gerald,” he says, “I really don't know quite how this is going to turn out. I've been thinking about it, and it's still a mystery to me. I might just give in to my urges and shoot you, or the guys behind that door might decide to bust the door down and take their chances, in which case I'll probably shoot you anyhow.

“Or—who knows?—the whole thing might work itself out.

“But however it goes, you shouldn't be too hard on me. I'm not the one that jerked his old buddy around for months. I'm not the one that sat up here in his Manhattan office laughing at the poor, dumb son of a bitch down there just trying to do one damn thing right. I must have been good for a lot of laughs. ‘I've got this asshole truck driver down in Virginia that thinks he can write, won't leave me alone. Keeps sending me crap. Can't get rid of him.' What a hoot.”

Gerald looks at his captor in amazement.

“‘Your old buddy'? Where in the hell did you come up with that? We weren't buddies, Jack. I was the class wimp and you were most likely to succeed, remember? I'm the guy who wore the jockstrap on his head, you know? Yeah, shit, I remember you, how you were. You never really instigated anything, but you'd kind of hang back, until I'd been humiliated beyond human endurance, and then you'd come riding in like John Wayne, telling them to let ‘him' alone, never really moving over to my side, because then you might not be quite as popular, might lose a point or two with the in-crowd. I figured helping lepers like me was part of the Speakeasy goddamn Code.
Noblesse oblige
.

“You were never my ‘buddy,' and believe me, I could have used one.”

Jack wishes Gerald had had the prescience to keep water or some other liquid in his desk along with the peanuts.

“Well,” he says, picking at a piece of nut stuck between his teeth, “you brought some of that on yourself, you know. I mean, you never fought back. You wouldn't have gotten killed if you'd fought back once in a while. We might have respected you a little.”

Gerald looks across the room, at the only door.

“I didn't want to fight. I just wanted to be left alone, just have a nice little high school experience like everyone else, look back fondly in my yearbook, keep up with the ol' gang.”

Gerald stops to take in a deep breath, then exhales and turns to stare at Jack Stone.

“Let me tell you about my senior yearbook, Jack. You know, I threw it away, two days after I got it. That prick Cully Dane, one of your old gang, I asked him to sign mine. I don't even know why I did it; we were sitting across from each other in Trig, and I just asked him. He said, sure, he'd be glad to, without offering his for me to sign. He kept it for half the period. I had a bad feeling, but what could I do? And when I opened the yearbook in my next class, you know what Cully Dane did? He took up two whole pages, drew around the ads, and there was this nerdy, faggy-looking kid with big thick glasses and a jockstrap over his head. And he wrote,..… ‘To Jerry Prince, the biggest “jock” of them all.'

“So, that afternoon, on the way home, I dropped my senior yearbook in the trash can at the edge of the school parking lot. I told my mother I lost it.

“Well,” Jack says, after a short silence, “you've done pretty well for yourself. You don't seem like you're scarred by all the terrible abuse of your childhood.”

Gerald Prince has been telling himself the same thing for years. Living well is the best revenge and all that. Show the bastards.

Now, though, it's as if Jack Stone's rude intrusion into his happy life has stripped him of some outer layer—call it Gerald Prince—and for the first time in years he can contemplate the ugly red gash underneath, deprived of air and festering into a new century.

After a short silence, he says, “Bottom line: You got to stay. I had to leave.”

Jack looks across the table.

“Bottom line: You got to leave. I had to stay.”

Neither of them speaks for a couple of minutes. Lieutenant Lewandowski asks if everything's OK. Gerald tells him it is.

“So,” Jack says, when they look back at each other. “What did you think of the book?”

Gerald laughs. Jack raising the gun and pointing it at him only reduces him to nervous giggles.

“No,” he says. “No. I'm not laughing because it's awful. I mean, it isn't awful. It's just so ridiculous. The situation, I mean, not the book.”

Jack waits.

“OK, here's what I think. And keep in mind, I only read the first 125 pages before the cavalry showed up outside. I really think it has promise. I think you have the makings of something really good here. If I just had time to read the rest of it …”

“Fat chance, in here,” Jack says, and he does wonder, briefly, how this is ever going to work out.

Then, the cell phone rings again.

Gerald is given permission to answer it. He seems confused at first.

“Oh, Tara. I'm sorry, I'm a little busy right now. What? How did you know …? Why …? Oh.… Just a second.”

He hands the phone to Jack, who finally takes it in his left hand, the gun in his right pointing squarely at Gerald.

Jack answers. The woman on the other end is talking so loudly that he has to hold the phone a couple of inches away from his ear.

“Jack Stone? Tara Weisbaum. Goodman Publishing.”

Jack is silent.

“I've been following this whole crazy little drama of yours on TV. I'm riveted. Riveted! Everybody's riveted.”

“Riveted.”