Firestarter(2)

"Hey, man-"

"For Christ" sake, fella!"

"Please, mister, you're stepping on my dog-"

"Excuse me... excuse me..." Andy said desperately. He searched for a cab. There were none. At any other time the street would have been stuffed with them. He could feel the men from the green car coming for them, wanting to lay hands on him and Charlie, to take them with them God knew where, the Shop, some damn place, or do something even worse-

Charlie laid her head on his shoulder and yawned.

Andy saw a vacant cab.

"Taxi! Taxi!" he yelled, flagging madly with his free hand.

Behind him, the two man dropped all pretense and ran.

The taxi pulled over.

"Hold it!" one of the men yelled. "Police! Police!"

A woman near the back of the crowd at the corner screamed, and then they all began to scatter. Andy opened the cab's back door and handed Charlie in. He dived in after her. "La Guardia, step on it," he said.

"Hold it, cabby. Police!"

The cab driver turned his head toward the voice and Andy pushed-very gently. A dagger of pain was planted squarely in the center of Andy's forehead and then quickly withdrawn, leaving a vague locus of pain, like a morning headache-the kind you get from sleeping on your neck.

"They're after that black guy in the checkered cap, I think," he said to the cabby.

"Right," the driver said, and pulled serenely away from the curb. They moved down East Seventieth.

Andy looked back. The two men were standing alone at the curb. The rest of the pedestrians wanted nothing to do with them. One of the men took a walkie-talkie from his belt and began to speak into it. Then they were gone.

"That black buy," the driver said, "whadde do? Rob a liquor store or somethin, you think?"

"I don't know," Andy said, trying to think how to go on with this, how to get the most out of this cab driver for the least push. Had they got the cab's plate number? He would have to assume they had. But they wouldn't want to go to the city or state cops, and they would be surprised and scrambling, for a while at least.

"They're all a bunch of junkies, the blacks in this city," the driver said. "Don't tell me, I'll tell you."

Charlie was going to sleep. Andy took off his corduroy jacket, folded it, and slipped it under her head. He had begun to feel a thin hope. If he could play this right, it might work. Lady Luck had sent him what Andy thought of (with no prejudice at all) as a pushover. He was the sort that seemed the easiest to push, right down the line: he was white (Orientals were the toughest, for some reason); he was quite young (old people were nearly impossible) and of medium intelligence (bright people were the easiest pushes, stupid ones harder, and with the mentally retarded it was impossible).

"I've changed my mind," Andy said. "Take us to Albany, please."

"Where?" The driver stared at him in the rearview mirror. "Man, I can't take a fare to Albany, you out of your mind?"

Andy pulled his wallet, which contained a single dollar bill. He thanked God that this was not one of those cabs with a bulletproof partition and no way to contact the driver except through a money slot. Open contact always made it easier to push. He had been unable to figure out if that was a psychological thing or not, and right now it was immaterial.

"I'm going to give you a five-hundred-dollar bill," Andy said quietly, "to take me and my daughter to Albany. Okay?" "Jeee-sus, mister-"Andy stuck the bill into the cabby's hand, and as the cabby looked down at it, Andy pushed... and pushed hard. For a terrible second he was afraid it wasn't going to work, that there was simply nothing left, that he had scraped the bottom of the barrel when he had made the driver see the non existent black man in the checkered cap.

Then the feeling came-as always accompanied by that steel dagger of pain. At the same moment, his stomach seemed to take on weight and his bowels locked in sick, griping agony. He put an unsteady hand to his face and wondered if he was going to throw up... or die. For that one moment he wanted to die, as he always did when he overused it-use it, don't abuse it, the sign-off slogan of some long ago disc jockey echoing sickly in his mind whatever "it" was. If at that very moment someone had slipped a gun into his hand-

Then he looked sideways at Charlie, Charlie sleeping, Charlie trusting him to get them out of this mess as he had all the others, Charlie confident he would be there when she woke up. Yes, all the messes, except it was all the same mess, the same f**king mess, and all they were doing was running again. Black despair pressed behind his eyes.

The feeling passed... but not the headache. The headache would get worse and worse until it was a smashing weight, sending red pain through his head and neck with every pulsebeat. Bright lights would make his eyes water helplessly and send darts of agony into the flesh just behind his eyes. His sinuses would close and he would have to breathe through his mouth. Drill bits in his temples. Small noises magnified, ordinary noises as loud as jackhammers, loud noises insupportable. The headache would worsen until it felt as if his head were being crushed inside an inquisitor's lovecap. Then it would even off at that level for six hours, or eight, or, maybe ten. This time he didn't know. He had never pushed it so far when he was so close to drained. For whatever length of time he was in the grip of the headache, he would be next to helpless. Charlie would have to take care of him. God knew she had done it before... but they had been lucky. How many times could you be lucky?