The Long Fall

51

I once read a monograph, written by a man named Harlan Victorious Lowe, called Creativity and Quirks of the Mind. The author claimed, among other things, that creative thought often happens in the mind’s peripheral vision, when that metaphorical sight is jogged by obvious mainstream thinking. In other words—when one thing comes to light, the illumination often floods the dark corners with brightness.

Bunny was a blazing sun in the rabbit warren of my mind.

I jumped into a taxi two blocks from the Hull mansion and sat in the backseat, almost catatonic from the realizations as they bombarded me.

On the street in front of the Tesla Building I called Tiny the Bug.

“Yes, LT?”

“I want you to create me a website in somebody else’s name,” I said. “How many minutes will that take?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“That’s money, not minutes.”

“Thousand dollars an hour starting twenty seconds ago.”

“Sold.”

I gave him the details. He grunted twice, asked four questions, and then disconnected the line.

ONE OF MY REALIZATIONS was that I had no choice but to give Tony the Suit A Mann’s address.

Back at my desk I placed the call.

“Yeah,” a man, not Tony, answered.

“Lucas?”

“Who’s this?”

“Leonid McGill.”

“Oh,”ž€"1e he said. The circumspection evinced by that single syllable told me that Tony was out of the loop as far as Vartan was concerned.

“What do you want?” Lucas asked softly.

“Peace in the Middle East and a brown-skinned president in the Oval Office. And, oh yeah, to talk to your boss about A Mann.”

“What man?”

Somebody asked a question in the background and Lucas, the leg-breaker, covered the mouthpiece to answer.

Various muffled sounds ensured, and then Tony was on the line.

“This job is just between us, LT,” were his first words, then, “What you got for me?”

“A man’s neck size and address.”

“Where do we meet?”

“You got my money?”

“You know I’m good for it.”

“And you know how I work, Tony. After the job is done I get paid. Job is done and you haven’t given me a dime. We haven’t even agreed on a price.”

“I thought you’d do it for a favor.”

“No.”

“You don’t want to mess with me, McGill.”

“Mess with you? I don’t even wanna talk to you. But if we do talk I expect to get paid. Fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Are you crazy?”

I broke the connection with my middle finger.

Sitting there, staring out the window at New Jersey, I wondered how many times I could get away with a move like that without getting myself killed. That brought a smile to my heart. I was alive, damn it, and that felt very, very good.

A colony of monkeys gibbered in my breast pocket.

“Yeah, Tone?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good. I’m real busy right at the moment. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you where you can give me the cash.”

“Today.”

“Tomorrow I’ll call with a time and place. You bring the cash and I’ll give you what you need.”

I pressed the red button before he cou£€€ yold complain.

INTUITION GUIDED MY next call.

The first number I called put me directly into voice mail telling me that that particular cell phone had been turned off.

Then I dialed the oldest number I know.

“Hello?” a tremulous voice answered.

“Mardi?”

“Hi, Mr. McGill.”

“Let me speak to Twill, honey.”

“Um . . .”

“It’s important.”

“He’s not, he’s not here.”

“Not there? Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” she stammered.

I didn’t need any peripheral creativity to worry about where he might be.

“Listen closely to me, Mardi,” I said. “I know about your father, what he’s done to you, and that you’re worried about your sister. I know what Twill plans to do to him. But you don’t have to worry about any of that anymore. I can take him down without you and my son going to prison. But you have to tell me where Twill is right now.”

Silence.

“Mardi,” I said. “Twill will spend the next twenty years in prison. You will, too. Who’s going to take care of your sister if that happens?”

“He’s . . .”

“Yes?”

“There’s a street fair on our block this afternoon.”

“I thought that was next week.”

“Daddy got it wrong. He has to rush down to the Village to get the photographs he’s selling. He should be back by now . . .”

I RACED DOWN to the street and caught a cab on Sixth. I gave the Pakistani driver a fifty-dollar bill and promised him another hundred if he could get me to the Bitterman block in under ten minutes.

We were maybe four minutes into the drive when I realized that I’d left my gun at the office. I considered turning around to get it but I couldn’t see any reason for going after my son armed.

Hyenas yipped in my hand as we were crossing S£€€y seventy-ninth Street.

“Where are you?” I asked Carson Kitteridge.

“Downtown,” he answered. “Why?”

“I gotta call you back.”

“Sanderson’s escaped,” he said before I could switch him off.

“How could a man with a fractured skull stand up, much less escape?”

“Desperation.”

We were nearing the Bitterman block.

“I gotta go, Carson,” I said. I don’t ever remember calling him by his first name before.

The street was blocked off, so I threw the hundred in the front seat and bolted from the cab. My foot hit the curb at an awkward angle and I went down, twisting my left ankle badly. But I got up and walked through the pain, just like Gordo taught me when I was a kid.

It was a bright sunny day and there were a thousand people milling and meandering down the center of the blocked-off street. I limped along, looking this way and that for my son.

My son.

I looked for him through racks of cheap jewelry, past the steam rising from a sausage vendor’s kiosk, and across a cell-phone seller’s cart. I bobbed up and down, moving in an erratic line past stacks of old Life magazines and piles of vintage vinyl albums.

I was bumping into people because of my awkward gait, handing out “Excuse me’s” like a politician pressing palms and saying, “Glad to meet ya.” I didn’t want to call out Twill’s name, just in case he shot the child molester before I got to him.

“Hey, watch out!” a man shouted. I think I might have stepped on his foot.

He pushed me as I was bringing weight down on my sore ankle and I fell. But that wasn’t punishment enough for whatever insult I had inflicted. He reached down to grab me by my lapels. I concentrated on him for the moment. He was a white guy, in his early forties, with various tattoos on his muscular forearms and that part of his chest that was exposed by an open dark-blue shirt. I remember seeing a skull with a serpent coming out of its eye socket.

I clamped onto his decorated forearms and pushed with my good foot. When I was standing again, and he was understanding the strength of the hands crushing his arms, I saw a slender figure in a dark-green hoodie off to my left.

“Motherfucker!” my tattooed antagonist hissed.

I swiveled my hips, throwing him to the ground as I lunged toward the overdressed figure sporting the form and grace of my son.

“Twill, stop!”

When he swiveled his head to look at me the hood fell away. He had on a fabric skullcap, which threw me for an instant. Also, I had never seen that look on Twill’s face—but I recognized it. He was a man but seconds away from a desperate and final act. I looked a little farther to the left and saw, behind a large flat folding table, the man I had heretofore only seen buggering little Mardi Bitterman on a computer monitor. Behind him was a canvas screen hung with colorful photographs of panda bears, zebras, and other creatures reminiscent of childish wonder.

Adrenaline is a miracle compound. It ramped through my system like Popeye’s spinach or Captain Marvel’s “Shazam!” This internal elixir reached my ankle, temporarily curing me and setting my feet in motion. I reached Twill in an impossibly short span, grabbing him by both arms because, among other gifts, my son is ambidextrous. He tried to pull away but one thing I had on him was strength.

“It’s over, boy,” I said.

A familiar smile twitched across Twilliam’s lips.

“Hey, Pops,” he said.

“Are you Twill McGill?” a man asked. Not just a man, but Leslie Bitterman. “Where’s my daughter? I know that she’s with you.”

I don’t know what he planned to do next but it didn’t matter because I let go of my son and slapped Leslie hard enough to knock him on his ass. He was sitting on the curb, shaking his head to clear out the stars and cobwebs.

“Hey!” the white man who had pushed me down said.

He was coming right at me.

With my slap-hand I brought together his dark-blue shirt collar and pulled his face close to mine.

“I got a gun in my pocket and nothing to keep me from shooting you dead right here, right now.”

I don’t know if it was the words or the tone of my voice that convinced the guy but he fell back and melted away into the mass of unsuspecting humanity.

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