Authors: Peter Leonard
Unknown Remains (9 page)
Jack opened his eyes and coughed smoke from burning jet fuel. He could feel the heavy weight of wallboard and a section of ceiling on his chest. Jack turned on his side, got on his hands and knees, and climbed out from under the rubble. The sprinklers were on. Everything was wet.
He looked up to where the ceiling had been and saw flames and smoke engulfing several floors, and pieces of the airplane, a row of seats with dead passengers still strapped in place. The executive offices of Sterns & Morrison, including Stu Raskin's, were in the impact zone. It didn't look good for anyone up that high.
Jack went through the trading room, a bullpen of cubicles on the other side of the building that had been badly damaged by the blast. “Anyone in here?” he yelled. No answer. There were charred bodies on the floor. Then he saw a leg in black pants sticking out of a pile of debris, pieces of the aircraft: a five-foot rectangle of sheet metal and a fiberglass inner cabin wall with the oval window still intact. He uncovered the body. It was Chuck Bellmore, a good friend, whose skull had been crushed. Jack crouched over the body, felt for a pulse and got nothing. He took Chuck's wallet and keys. Jack would call Chuck's folks in Denver, tell them what happened and help any way he could.
Jack stood up and looked south, saw the top half of Tower Two engulfed in smoke. It was a terrorist attack, had to be. He could see people standing at the gaping opening in the building, and then they were jumping, choosing the way they were going to die.
He ran to the lobby, no sign of Bonnie. The floor and walls were cracked, a twisted metal frame hanging where the ceiling had been. He
ran to the hall; the bank of elevators had been blown out. The smoke was thick, it was difficult to breathe, difficult to see. His eyes were burning. Jack ripped off his shirt and tore it into strips, tied a sleeve over his nose and mouth, climbed over a pile of debris, and moved to the stairwell on the northwest side of the building.
He raced down twelve flights before he caught up with people on the seventy-seventh floor. He'd seen some of them before: in the mezzanine and in the mall, riding the elevators up or down, but didn't know anyone by name. The stairwell was packed now, people moving slowly but calmly, friends joking, no one seemed to have an idea what had happened. One guy said it was an earthquake. Another guy thought a gas main had exploded. No one, including Jack, thought the building was in any danger of collapsing. Jack moved shoulder-to-shoulder with a guy in a suit carrying a briefcase. They went quickly down a few floors and then had to stop for a few minutes before they could move again.
On the fiftieth floor, a big man in a wheelchair was blocking part of the landing and people had to squeeze by him. Jack offered to help. The man said an emergency rescue team was coming to get him. On the forty-third floor, a scared woman was sitting on the stairs crying as people pressed past her. Jack stopped. “Let me help you.”
“I can't move, I'm too afraid.”
“Just relax. You're going to be okay. What's your name?”
“Kimberly.”
“That's a nice name.” The woman stood up. She was a load. “Lean on me,” Jack said, hoping she didn't take them both down. Kimberly took tiny frightened steps, stopping and waiting for the line to move, people entering the stairwell on almost every floor, firefighters in full gear, passing them, going up.
It took forty-eight minutes to reach the lobby, which looked like it had been hit by a bomb. The elevator doors had been blown out, the frames around them scorched black. A transit cop and two med techs met him and put the woman in a wheelchair, and that was the last time he saw her.
It was raining. The fire sprinklers were on, and he was soaked. He was walking in several inches of water, shoes crunching on broken glass, the air thick with smoke and dust. Above him, it sounded like the building was cracking, falling apart. He tried to walk out to the plaza, but a cop told him all the exits were closed because of falling debris and people jumping. Through the windows, he could see crumpled, flattened bodies and pieces of the aircraft: a row of empty seats, a section of the fuselage, luggage and shoes strewn around, and a snowstorm of burning paper floating down from the towers.
Jack was escorted by police down a broken escalator to the mall. He was moving through the concourse past storefronts when he heard what sounded like sticks breaking and then a deafening rumble, a train approaching at high speed. The ground shook, and he felt an enormous concussion. He was thrown off his feet, and everything went black.
He awoke in darkness. People were moaning, some were screaming, but he couldn't see anything. Jack moved with his arms out in front of him, feeling his way, no idea what direction he was going. Even with the shirt sleeve over his nose and mouth, it was hard to breathe, everything engulfed in the smoke.
In the gloom ahead, he saw a flashing light, a medical emergency vehicle that had been destroyed by falling debris, its light bar still intact. A voice said, “Come this way. You have to evacuate the building.” And then he saw lights coming at him, firefighters and cops with flashlights, and he was escorted along a maze of corridors and through a door. He was outside now, disoriented and short of breath, walking into a tidal wave of dust, the sun blotted out, eyes stinging, watering. It smelled like burning plastic, burning jet fuel, and odd things he couldn't identify.
Jack was on a street, walking past abandoned cars, the sound of sirens coming from every direction. He looked back at the towers, but only one was still standing. He headed north, moved past a police barrier, two cars with their lights flashing and barricades set up blocking the street.
A cop said, “Sir, are you hurt? Do you need medical attention?”
Jack shook his head and kept going. A few blocks further, he walked out of the cloud, squinting in the bright sun. He was covered in white dust and ash. He pulled the shirtsleeve off his mouth and sucked in fresh air, felt the heat of the sun on his back, and heard the sounds of the city around him. A woman handed him a bottle of water and said, “Are you okay?”
Jack nodded. He didn't want to be recognized. He broke the seal on the cap, unscrewed it, rinsed the dust out of his eyes and mouth, and guzzled the rest of the water. The streets were lined with people, and everyone was looking south at the Trade Center. Jack turned as Tower One started to collapse, the people around him screaming, yelling, feeling the tragic effects. It took about eleven seconds for the 1,368-foot building to crumble in an explosion of dust and debris.
Jack glanced at the street signs: W. Broadway and Murray. He kept going north and cut over through Tribeca. Chuck Bellmore, the friend and co-worker he had found dead in the office an hour and a half earlier, lived alone in a loft on Hudson Street. Jack had been there a couple times for parties. He used Chuck's key to open the front door, crossed the lobby, no one around, to the elevators and rode to the fifth floor.
There was a big floor-to-ceiling mirror in the main room. Jack stood in front of it, but didn't recognize himself. Except for the flesh-colored circles around his eyes, he looked like a ghost.
In the bathroom, he turned on the shower and stood under the hot water in his clothes, rinsing off the white coating that swirled around the tile floor and went down the drain. Jack took off his clothes, threw them in a pile on the shower floor, and saw cuts on his arms, shoulders, and head, and felt shards of glass and fibers that were still embedded in him. He coughed dust and spit it out, washed his mouth out with warm water. He washed his hair twice and turned off the shower, opened the glass door, and stepped out, looking through the window where the twin towers used to be and felt sick to his stomach.
On his knees in front of the toilet, Jack coughed, heaved, and puked up water and bile, took a couple breaths, wiped his mouth with a wet towel, and flushed the toilet. He found tweezers and a tube of Neosporin in the medicine cabinet and a metal bowl in the kitchen. He took everything into the living room and sat naked on a towel in front of the giant mirror. The incredible thing, he had shards of glass all over his body and hadn't felt anything until now. Using the tweezers, he pulled eight jagged pieces out of his forearms and shoulders and dropped them into the metal bowl. Jack leaned close to the glass and studied his face. It looked like he had little patches of light brown hair high on his cheeks. He touched the bristles. They felt like plastic fibers.
With the tweezers, he pinched one and pulled out a two-inch strand. What the hell was it? There were twenty-two in all. He pulled them out and rubbed Neosporin on the pin-dot holes. The wet clothes in the shower, he stuffed into a plastic trash bag along with the shards and fibers he pulled out of his body.
Now he had to find something to wear. He went into Chuck's bedroom, opened the top drawer, and grabbed a pair of boxers. He got them on but felt like they were cutting off his circulation, so he snipped the elastic waistband with scissors. This wasn't a surprise; Chuck weighed about 160, and Jack was 195. He found a pair of warm-up pants with a drawstring waist that fit okay and a polo shirt that was skintight but fine for now.
At the kitchen table, he dumped out the contents of his own wallet and cut up his driver's license and credit cards and slid the pieces off the table into a sandwich bag.
Now he turned on the TV, watching the continuous 9/11 coverage, seeing the plane he saw, American Airlines Flight 11, smash into the north tower at 8:46
AM
and explode between floors ninety-three and ninety-nine. No way his co-workers, Stu Raskin included, could've survived.
He watched United Airlines Flight 175, coming from the opposite direction seventeen minutes later, crash into the south tower, floors seventy-five through eighty-five. The accompanying explosion blew out three sides of the building.
At 9:37
AM
, hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the western facade of the Pentagon. And at 10:07, United Flight 93 crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Jack watched the Trade Center towers collapse in great clouds of dust, people on the street staring in disbelief, and turned off the TV. He'd seen enough. The events were difficult to comprehend. It seemed impossible. How could it have happened? He was wound up, angry, didn't know what to do with himself. He went into the bedroom and lay on Chuck's bed, staring at the ceiling.
After what had happened today, his problems seemed insignificant, but it didn't change what he was going to do. He wanted to call Diane, tell her the whole story, tell her he was sorry, tell her to move on, but he knew that wasn't possible.
Jack fell asleep and woke up at 5:00
AM
. The loft was dark. He got dressed in clothes that were too small and a Yankees cap he adjusted to fit his head, took the elevator down to the lobby, which was again deserted, and went outside. He walked down the empty street, discarding pieces of his driver's license and credit cards in the sewer drain. Jack McCann no longer existed.
He walked for a while, a faint smell of burning chemicals in the air. He stopped in an all-night diner, sat at the counter, ordered scrambled eggs and sausage links, and read the
New York Times
. The headline on the front page read
U
.
S
.
ATTACKED
.
HIJACKED JETS DESTROY TWIN TOWERS AND HIT PENTAGON IN DAY OF TERROR
.
Jack read the article. Everyone thought Al-Qaeda was behind the attacks. Osama bin Laden denied involvement. He finished eating and went back to the loft.
For the next ten days, Jack kept a low profile, stayed inside until after midnight, trying to recover. His lungs were filled with smoke and dust, and he was weak and lethargic and slept a lot.
He felt safe in the apartmentâat least for the time beingâknowing that Chuck's only relative was an elderly aunt who lived in Denver. She had left a message on day one: “Charley, honey, it's Aunt Mary. I am worried sick about you. Please call and tell me you're okay.”
Occasionally the girl across the hall would come over and stand at the door, knocking lightly. Jack would stare at her through the peephole. She always looked sad, and he wondered if Chuck had had something going with her.
And one morning, a balding, energetic, dark-haired man who identified himself as Dick Marcey, the super, showed up and pounded on the door. But other than that, it had been quiet.
On the morning of the twenty-second, he went to a pay phone down the street and called Sculley, his best friend since grade school.
“Sculley, it's Jack.”
Sculley was silent for several beats. “Tell me what the hell's going on, will you? Tell me you're in the hospital, you've been dazed or unconscious, but now you're okay.”
“I wish I could go back, change things, do it over, but I can't.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.” Sculley paused. “I had breakfast with your wife this morning.”
“How is she?” He pictured Diane making coffee before he left for the train station, hair pulled back, wearing her horn rims.
“She wanted to know if you were seeing someone before you were killed.”
“Where did that come from?”
“Vicki showed up at your funeral and the reception at the club. Vicki walks into a room, she gets noticed, you may recall. Diane didn't know her, so she thought you must have. Diane saw me talking to her.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her Vicki was probably somebody's wife or girlfriend.”
“She believe you?”
“Are you kidding? Diane asked me her name, and how long you'd been seeing her.”
“I said, âWhy do you want to think anything bad about Jack?' I told Diane you loved her.” Sculley paused again. “But somehow she knew about Vicki. Maybe Diane smelled her on you when you came home one night. Maybe she followed you.”
“She wouldn't do that.”
“Diane wanted to know how you met. I told her Vicki was a waitress, and of course, Diane wanted to know where she worked.” Sculley took a breath. “She's pissed off. Diane had a lofty opinion of you that's been seriously compromised. You cheated on her and cleaned out your savings. She wants to know why. Can you blame her?”
“She's got the house, and she'll get the life insurance,” Jack said, trying to make himself feel better. “Diane's tough; she'll get through it.”
“That's all you have to say?” Sculley paused. “Diane said someone was in the house when she got back from your funeral, a scary-looking guy waiting for her. The guy said you had borrowed a lot of money from some company called San Marino Equity. The guy showed her a contract with your signature and hers.”
Jack pictured Ruben Diaz, surprised, didn't think they'd go after Diane. He had never heard of San Marino and had never signed a contract. Neither, of course, had she. It was all bullshit, and they were going for what they could get.
“You still there?” Sculley said.
“I'm thinking.”
“I hope so.”
“Did he threaten her?”
“I don't know. What if he did? What are you going to do about it?”
Jack felt helpless and stupid. It wasn't supposed to go this way. He'd disappear, start his new life, and Frankie Cheech would have to eat the debt.
“You see what's going on here?” Sculley said. “You left Diane in a tough position. You didn't pay whatever you owe, so they're going to get it from her.”
“Once they realize she doesn't have any money, they'll leave her alone.”
“So you do owe money?”
“Tell her to call the police.”
“That gets you off the hook, huh? Now you can put it out of your mind, wipe your hands clean, is that it?”
“I'm in trouble.”
“Tell me you got hit on the head. You're not thinking clearly.”
Jack didn't say anything.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I don't want to go into it right now. I'll tell you this: you're the only one I can trust.”
“Jack, this doesn't sound like you.” Sculley paused. “You want help, tell me what the hell's going on. Who's after you?”
“I'll tell you when I see you.”
“What about Diane? She's in bad shapeâcan you imagine?”
“She'll be better off, believe me.” Jack took a breath. “There's no other way out of this.”
A woman walked up to the phone booth, stood close, and tapped on the plastic door panel. “I have an emergency. I have to use the phone.”
This was the last thing Jack wanted to do, call attention to himself. He put his hand over the phone. “Just a minute.”
Sculley, breathing through his nose, said, “What do you need?”
“Nothing.”
The woman banged on the phone booth door and gave him the finger. “I have an emergency. Get off the fucking phone.”
“What was that?”
“Some angry woman. I've got to go. I'll get back to you.”
He hung up and stepped out of the phone booth as the woman brushed past him and said, “Asshole.”
At a J. Crew on West Broadway, he bought a new wardrobe: shirts, khakis, a jacket, and paid for everything with Chuck Bellmore's Visa. On the street with two shopping bags, he hailed a cab and had the driver go by Vicki's apartment. Cobb and Ruben were sitting in a dark sedan parked on her street.
Jack directed the cab driver to Tribeca and took his new purchases back to Chuck's loft, keeping the brim of the cap low over his eyes, carrying the shopping bags as he passed people in the lobby, getting in the elevator.
He rode up to the top floor with a girl in a fedora. She had a silver ring pierced through one of her nostrils and wore a skirt with black tights and high-top tennis shoes. Jack could see her looking at him.
“You didn't work at the Trade Center, did you?”
He glanced at the floor and said no.
“You believe that? Wasn't it the worst thing that's ever happened?”
Jack nodded, holding the shopping bags.
“At first I thought you were Charlie. He wears a cap like that.” She paused. “You're new here, aren't you? I haven't seen you around.”
“Just visiting.” He was hoping she wouldn't ask who, and she didn't.
“My neighbor worked in Tower One. I don't know what happened to him.”
The bell rang, the elevator stopped and the doors opened. Jack waited for the girl to step out and watched her walk down the hall, hanging back, taking his time. She slowed down and fumbled with
her hand in her purse, found the key and opened the door to the loft across the hall from Chuck's.
Jack went in the apartment, put his bags on the kitchen table, opened a beer, and guzzled a third of it. He sat and cut the tags off his new clothes. There was a knock on the door. He crossed the main room and looked through the peephole. It was the girl from the elevator, her face without the hat, distorted in the wide-angle opening, purple hair tied in a ponytail. She knocked again and then turned and went back across the hall.
At ten the next morning, there was a knock on the door. Jack assumed it was the girl. He looked through the peephole at the super and an elderly woman who looked vaguely familiar.
“Mr. Bellmore, it's Dick Marcey. Your aunt's here from Denver.”
It now occurred to Jack, the woman looked familiar 'cause there were photos of her on a bookcase in Chuck's living room.
“Charlie, it's Aunt Mary. Are you in there? Open the door.”
The super knocked again. “Mr. Bellmore, can you hear me? Your family's worried about you.” He heard a key slide in the lock and saw the handle turn. But there were deadbolts top and bottom, and the door held fast. Now he could hear them walking down the hall to the elevators.
He opened the door and looked toward the elevators. The hall was empty. He grabbed his gear and stepped out.
“Where's Charlie?” The girl was standing in her doorway.
“He died when the first plane hit. The ceiling came down on him.”
“Who're you?”
“A friend. I worked with him.”
“Charlie and I were lovers. I miss him.” The girl glanced toward the elevators. “You're in trouble, aren't you?”
Jack looked at her but didn't say anything.
“They're coming back with a locksmith. Thought you'd want to know.”
Jack took the stairs down to the lobby, pulled the Yankees cap lower over his eyes, and stepped outside. A cab took him to the hotel. Jack checked in with Chuck Bellmore's American Express card and went to his room. He figured he could use Chuck's credit cards a while longer. What he really needed was a new identity. He sat on the bed and phoned Sculley at his office. “I need an ID. Know anyone does that kind of thing, passport, driver's license?”
“I'm a tax attorney. Why would I know someone that does that?”
“Call your friend the prosecutor, find out, will you?”
“What's the charge for helping someone fake their own death?”
“You can ask him that too.”
“Where are you going to go?”
He hadn't figured that out yet.
