Underground Airlines(62)

Poor Bridge was assuming that I was a couple of steps behind him, trying to keep up. But I was way out ahead. I was so far out ahead that he could barely see me.

“Quiet, man,” I said finally. “Hush up a minute.”

“What?”

“I said hush. Listen. Okay? Because you’re a dead man.”

“Are you—” A silence I hadn’t heard before: genuine shock. “Was that a threat?”

“Nope. It was a statement of fact. True fact. I’m not telling you nothing you don’t already know. You’re f*cked, but I’m gonna help you. We’re gonna help each other out. Okay?”

“I…”

Mr. Bridge let the word dissolve into silence. A silence that was easy to read. Slow and thick, gummy with fear.

“Here’s what’s next,” I told him, and he didn’t even bother with another stammering interruption: he just listened. I told him to hang up, leave his office, and call me back from the pay phone just inside the baggage claim area, door 7, at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The pay phones, I told him, were across from the bank of courtesy phones that got you a rental car or a motel room.

“Write this down,” I told him, and I gave him the number of a new phone, a disposable phone I had purchased for this purpose, at a place on 38th Street, on my way from Saint Anselm’s. “Forty-five minutes.”

There was one more silence while he considered whether to lodge a fresh objection, but then he clicked off.

I stood in the stillness of the balcony, watching spotty Sunday evening traffic go down 86th: first one car, then two, then one more. If I had misread Bridge’s last silence, if he had been grinning cruelly in that last instant, relishing the last time he’d ever have to take bullshit from this smartass nigger, then the vans would be screeching up any minute.

They did not. He was reading the situation correctly: he was in a bad spot, and if anyone could get him out of it, I could.

I pictured him, middle-aged Bridge, hustling down the stairs of the Marshals Service building to the parking garage, pushing the speed limit in whatever poky American four-door he could afford on his government pay, all the way to BWI.

This, for me, at the end of a long and difficult twenty-four hours, should have been a moment to relish. Cherish, even. Slowly showing Bridge what was going to happen. After so many years in his power, forcing him inch by inch to do what I wanted. Clawing out from under Bridge. Lifting him up, shaking him upside down.

But the moment of Kevin’s death kept on ricocheting through my body. Over and over again. Flying backwards, and he flying backwards on top of me. The blood from my shoulder mingling with the blood of his chest. That had changed everything—a bell that rang in me. A crack in the firmament of the world.

I should have felt good, but I only felt weary. I only felt sad. My shot shoulder sang with a low hurt, the bullet in there burning, a smoldering fire buried inside a pit.

Like moving through the tunnel—you only keep going. Whatever happened next, it was going to happen quickly, and it was either going to work or it wasn’t.

Thirty-four minutes later the phone rang.

“Hang up,” I said.

“What?”

“Go upstairs,” I said. “Call me back from the phone between gate B13 and gate B14. By the men’s restroom.”

“If you want me to call you from a gate area, then I’m going to have to buy a ticket.”

“Well, then, you better buy a ticket.”



Mr. Bridge called back right on time, from the phone between gates B27 and B28. I didn’t say hello. I just started talking.

“This boy Jackdaw, this slave we been following, he was a mule. When he—”

“Where did you get this information?”

“Don’t interrupt. When he left GGSI he took something with him. An envelope.”

I didn’t tell Bridge what was in that padded envelope, because I didn’t know if he knew what it was. I didn’t say to Bridge that Jackdaw the slave was actually Kevin the college boy. I didn’t know if he knew that, and if he did know, I didn’t know if he knew that I knew, and anyway, f*ck him. I wasn’t handing Bridge any piece of information he didn’t already have unless it would be beneficial to me.

I skipped to the meat of it. The pivot point of my discourse. The wedge that I was going to drive between him and me.

“This material the boy is carrying, you all are mixed up in it. Right? I mean the marshals. If this comes to light, what he’s got, your agency is implicated. Is that right?”

I waited. There was a strange quality to the silence, and I realized it was because I was holding my breath, keeping myself totally still. I exhaled.

“Bridge?”

“Yes?”

“Are you not answering because you don’t know the details, either, or because I told you not to interrupt?”

A thread of silence, then: “Both.”

I was making him sweat—that was good; I needed him nervous—but in truth it didn’t matter how the marshals were implicated, it only mattered that they were. Maybe the marshals were acting as facilitators or as muscle, or maybe they were just looking the other way at some crucial juncture in the customs approval process. It was one of the above. It was all of the above. What mattered to me was that Bridge’s ass was in the fire, and so were the asses of whoever was further up the chain of command.