A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror Page 23

  Lou kept the carbine close to his leg. If the man started running, there was no way Lou would be able to catch him, no matter how fat he was. The man waited patiently by the side of his battered Plymouth while Lou struggled up to him, limping badly. As he came up to within ten feet of the man, Lou leveled his carbine.

  “I’ll blow you to hell if you move.”

  “Be careful with that thing, man! I’m not going anywhere. I’ll give you any damned thing you want.”

  “Okay, listen. I don’t want anything from you except cooperation. If you do what I say, you’ll get out of this with no problem at all. But you cross me, and there’s going to be big trouble for both of us. I don’t think you’d like that.”

  “I only have a couple of bucks.”

  “Keep it. Now come around here and open up your trunk.” Giving Lou a wide berth, the man hurried to the rear of the car, his eyes on the weapon.

  “All right. Now, I want you to climb in and lie down. I’m going to close the door on you. It’s only to keep you locked up for a couple of minutes. I’m going to have to get into your trailer for a little while. I’ll be right back to let you out. Understand?”

  “Geez, I don’t want to get in there. I won’t have any air.”

  “Do what I tell you. You’ll have plenty of air. I told you I’d come right back out. I don’t intend to kill anyone.”

  The guy struggled into the trunk. Lou waited for him to move into a semi-comfortable position, and then slammed the metal door. He had the keys to the trailer. He hobbled to the porch; heard no commotion from the car; saw no lights in any of the other trailers.

  Inside, he wasted no time. It was two o’clock. Maybe four hours tops to get out of the area before daylight. He found the bathroom; flicked on the light; hop-hobbled to the toilet; sat and stripped.

  The wound was easier to look at than the blood. The back of his left leg was caked black and stiff, the sock gleaming ruby. The bullet had burrowed through an inch or two of tissue at the very back of his thigh, shattering capillaries and veins. Leaving the muscle swollen and discolored, it had bored clean entry and exit holes.

  The hot shower coursed down his face and chest. The water at his feet flowed red at first, then finally clear. He was lucky. The bullet hadn’t tumbled, hadn’t found a bone. He cleaned the wound thoroughly; applied the whole bottle of iodine he found in the medicine chest.

  He found a pair of pants. They were short in the leg and huge at the waist, yet better than wearing torn and bloody ones. He cinched them like a gunnysack with his belt. In the small kitchen, he poked around in the refrigerator and wolfed down a couple of salami slices he found there.

  He was clean now, but the soap and water had taken the edge off his wariness. He had to fight against the urge to close his eyes. He sat at the tiny table in the dining area, eating an apple. The trailer was immaculate. The guy’s shoes were lined up neatly in a built-in cabinet down the hallway.

  In an overhead cupboard, Lou found a half-full quart of White Horse. He poured a finger into a water glass and downed it in two swigs, burning all the way. He sat again at the back window of the dining area and rested his head in his hands, eyes closed, just to clear the bleariness. His thigh throbbed continuously. Five minutes to rest up. Maybe ten. His head dropped.

  * * *

  He shook his eyes open. It was three o’clock.

  * * *

  “I don’t want you turning around to look at me, understand? It’s better for both of us that you never get a look at me. Now, make a right when you get out to Mine Torne Road. I want you to do exactly what I say under all circumstances. Understand?”

  “I hear you,” the guy said, keeping his eyes and head straight to the front.

  “What do you want me to call you?” Lou asked.

  “My name’s Titus. That’s what you can call me.”

  “Okay, Titus. Drive the speed limit, no slower, no faster. We’re going to go up to Newburgh and across the river. On the other side we’re going to swing on down to the city. That’s where you’re going to drop me off. How are you fixed for gas?”

  “I got a full tank. Can I say something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m going to do everything you tell me to do. Do you believe that?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I ain’t seen your face. Do you believe that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you got no reason to shoot my black ass, right?”

  “Right, Titus. Now just shut up and drive.”

  “Just one more thing.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What are you going to do when we come to the roadblock?”

  “I’m going to lie on the floor back here with this blanket over me and you’re going to get waved through.”

  “They stop all cars. You have to get out. They open the trunk. Everything. I just came through two of them coming home from work. Hey, I don’t want to get caught in the middle of a gunfight.”

  “All right. Stop the car. Give me your wallet”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I need your license. Get out of the car.”

  “Listen. I just want to keep breathing. I can help you. You can barely walk let alone drive a car. And you sure as hell ain’t gonna pass for me.”

  Lou drummed his fingers on the back of the seat ahead of him. “Right,” he muttered.

  “Lay up at my trailer until the pressure’s off,” Titus said.

  For what seemed a long time, Lou pondered this offer. “Titus. If I get it, you get it. I’m desperate.”

  “I want to live.”

  “Drive exactly as I tell you to,” Lou said. “We’re going to take some back roads.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It was too dark to tell where they were on Mine Torne. Titus was driving by the car’s parking lights and the light of a quarter moon. Judging from the time they’d been on the road, they had already gotten well clear of the turnoff to Borrow Pit and the police there. As they came up beside a body of water on the left, Lou spoke sharply: “Take this dirt cutaway on the right.”

  A military “No Trespassing” sign warned that this was “Saratoga Range— POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE.” Titus swung the car neatly around the metal gate and chain. Driving slowly with the edges of the dirt road barely detectable, he steered up a steep incline and then leveled off on a bare area the size of a football field.

  Through all of it, Lou never had less control than now. Titus had no idea that the weapon was empty; and even if Lou did have ammunition, the barrel was clogged with dirt. Brazen was one thing; this was another. This man could go anywhere he pleased and there would be nothing Lou could do about it. But to Titus, the gun was locked and loaded, and that’s all he needed to know.

  “There’s another range up here around the next hill.” Lou groused from the back seat.

  “You been up here before?” Titus asked.

  “Let’s say it’s not completely new to me. This is the military reservation. Too big to patrol effectively. They don’t even try. I’ve been all over these roads.”

  “Where we coming out?”

  “If I have it right, we’ll come out somewhere above Michie Stadium.”

  Lou flicked on the overhead light and consulted his map. The West Point Military Reservation extended ten or fifteen miles north of Mine Torne Road. They stayed in the blackness of the woods for at least ten minutes before another large open area loomed out the right window: Normandy Range.

  “We’ll be coming out onto a road in a couple of minutes. Watch for passing cars. I don’t want anyone to see us coming out of here,” Lou barked.

  “There’s nothing moving this time of night.”

  “Except military police.”

  Titus swung around the chain strung across the gravel road and swerved onto the pavement.

  “Okay, let’s have some headlights. This is Stony Lonesome. Officer housing. West Point,” Lou said.

  “Hey.
Cool. Went right around the roadblocks. Now, how do we get out of here?”

  “I’d rather try to fool the MPs at the gate than at a road block. I’m betting they’ll accept us as dishwashers in the cadet mess hall. Your black face helps. Sorry about that.”

  There were no other cars on the road. The time was 4:00 A.M. Lou sat back in the seat and kept his eyes on Titus up front. The slight illumination from the dashboard silhouetted his frame, highlighting the close-cut shape of his head and his enormous ears. Stop it. Stay sharp. Stay focused.

  Titus drove slowly as ordered. They came down off the top of the ridge above Michie Stadium and slid past it, the grandstand rising over them. They swung around Lusk Reservoir and down a long, steep hill past the cadet chapel; cut beside the gymnasium and the superintendent’s quarters; and stopped on level ground. It was quiet and dark except for the hall lights in the gray stone, fortress-like barracks standing west and south of the expanse of grass before them.

  “Lee Gate’s out that way,” Lou said, pointing to the left. Titus started to make the turn. “Hold it,” he said. “Pull out that way. Over there, beside that grandstand. Doubleday Stadium.”

  Titus pulled into a parking lot beside the practice football field.

  “What now?” Titus asked nervously.

  “Give me the keys and come with me,” Lou said.

  He dragged his bad leg as they moved slowly along the gravel walkway bordering the natural amphitheater that looked out onto the sweep of the Hudson as it narrowed and turned at Constitution Island. They slid between the cannons that lined the walk, drifting shadows in the midst of trees, invisible to anyone further than fifty or so feet away. Lou sat on the lowest step at the base of Trophy Point with Titus at his side and looked out and above the spectator stands at the edge of the plain to the hills on the dark horizon.

  “Don’t seem like a place a guy oughta smoke,” Titus said, finally. “Names in stone. Cannons and chains. Ghosts out walking.”

  “I just want to sit here awhile,” Lou breathed.

  “You been here a lot?” Titus asked, staring straight ahead. He hadn’t once looked at Lou’s face. “None of my business.”

  “I was here way back. Hardly anybody knows that. Except you, now.”

  “Is that trouble?” Titus asked.

  “You’re not the only one who knows. But they didn’t. They knew everything, but not that,” Lou said. He stood and hobbled out to the street, and then looked back and up to the top of the tall, circular obelisk. He moved around the base of it, and then sat again with Titus looking out at the faint moonlight on the Hudson.

  “I knew there had to be a place where everything was all very clear. Right is right; wrong is wrong. No lying, no cheating, no quibbling, no nothing.” He watched as Titus, beside him, pulled his hands into the sleeves of his jacket. “I’d like to get back to that,” Lou went on. “To where the only thing gray is the uniform. I had it here. Endured people screaming in my face, pushups, pull ups, Integral Calculus six times a week. Church services at dawn, right down there, with sun coming over the hills and the river rolling on forever. It was beautiful. It was perfect. I had it. Then I quit.”

  Titus stood and moved ten feet away onto the gravel path. Then he came back to sit beside Lou again.

  “I don’t want to hear it, man, if it means that somewhere down the line, it’s gonna be: ‘You know too much.’”

  “You stand at the blackboard six times a week and work the math. You work at your board with your chalk and you don’t look right, you don’t look left, where someone else is working the same problem,” Lou said, staring straight ahead down the river.

  “Somebody, I still don’t know who, said he saw me copying his board. I don’t blame him. Not reporting a violation was as bad as the violation itself. I don’t deny I thought about doing it, but I never did. The Honor Committee agreed with me. Only, I could see the difference from then on. I could see that nobody, not even my roommates, would look me straight in the eyes anymore.”

  Lou stood and hobbled down the path toward Flirtation Walk. Titus followed. When Lou stopped, Titus came up beside him.

  “Up there on the high road, ain’t ya?” Titus said, quietly. “I can see it’s important to a man like you.”

  “It was,” Lou said.

  “Losing respect is hard.” A pause, then: “Getting it, man; that’s even harder.”

  “Let’s go, Titus.”

  Lou turned and looked back at Titus staring straight ahead in the darkness. He limped to the car with Titus at his side and then climbed into the back seat. Titus pulled away from Trophy Point, headed for Lee Gate at the north end of the post.

  “When we get to the gate, go slow and roll down the window, but keep moving and act like you’ve done this a million times before. With any luck...” Lou twisted and looked out the back window where five thousand young men and women kept the shallow sleep that comes just before dawn. Soon these barracks would come alive with the bugles and drums of reveille. Soon his own young men, Pete and Oliver, would wake to a picture of their father that he wished he could burn.

  “Mind if I smoke?” Titus asked.

  “Be my guest,” Lou said. He turned to face the front. Survival was no longer enough. In the end, he had to bring them—Buck, Stanfield, Copeland, and the rest—down with him.

  They crept through Lee Gate without incident, the MP merely waving them through, and they turned left onto Route 293. They snaked past the gold depository, the ski run, and the West Point golf course. The highway wound back and forth, climbing the side of the Crow’s Nest. The lights of the river and the towns alongside disappeared behind them. He allowed a deep breath.

  “Any more roadblocks?” he asked.

  “We went around the only two I know about.”

  “Good, just keep driving.”

  “You’re the guy, ain’t ya?”

  “Which?”

  “The cops came through all the trailers, night before last. Said there was a woman.”

  “A woman? Well, then it isn’t me they’re talking about, is it?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  He fought to stay alert. There could be more roadblocks, but that likelihood diminished with the number of miles they put between them and the Bear Mountain Bridge.

  “If we hit a road block, we go back to the original plan. You better be a good bluffer. Let me have one of your cigarettes.”

  Titus flipped the pack into the back seat. “You got a light?” he asked.

  “Yeah, a light I got.”

  A narrow, twisting road wound around the edge of the mountain. There was a three-foot stone wall to keep cars from tumbling over a five hundred foot drop to the river below. They met no cars coming from the other direction. Titus negotiated all of the curves like the expert he was.

  “You drive this road a lot?”

  “I work in Cornwall up here. There’s a little military school.”

  “No more roadblocks. I sure as hell hope you’re right, Titus. You know what I mean?”

  “I know,” Titus said.

  They went through Cornwall and kept climbing up and into Newburgh. They got across the river without having to stop at so much as a red light. On the other side, he directed Titus to take Route 84 to the Taconic Parkway and south toward the city. Once on the parkway, he knew it would be a long drive to Manhattan. He sat back in the corner of the car, propped his swollen thigh across the seat, and looked out the window.

  He dared to breathe deeply. He was free of the whole area around the bridge and all the danger of being trapped. Now he was going to get into the city where it would be next to impossible for the authorities to find him among all those people. Once there, he’d be able to think about his next move. There would be food and water; maybe even a room where he could catch some real sleep.

  Through the windshield, road signs seemed to loom slowly at the side of the highway up ahead, float steadily toward the car, and grow progressively whiter and clearer un
til they darted past and disappeared in darkness. The headlights illuminated the center stripe, but it was total blackness ahead. Past a certain distance, beyond the beams, it could be the end of the world.

  “What’s your speed, Titus?” he asked.

  “Fifty-five.”

  They picked up the Saw Mill River Parkway at White Plains, then upper Broadway, right by the Cross Bronx Expressway. They were in the middle of the city. No other cars on the road. Dawn was almost upon them. They tooled south on Broadway between the low shop fronts on either side of the street. The traffic lights were with them as they continued down toward lower Manhattan, cutting by the corner of Central Park West, and then slicing diagonally on the island through Times Square to 34th Street.