Kirby knew death was on its way and bucked powerfully.
Jasmine was straddling him now, staring at a pulsing blue artery in his neck. She fixed her eyes on it, knowing the knife would go directly to its target. Drew her knife hand back and gripped it hard.
Too hard.
The blood from her torn nails had made the smooth knife handle even smoother, and too slippery to hold.
Jasmine felt it slide out from between her fingers like a watermelon seed. She made a futile grab for the knife, praying even that she could catch it by the blade.
But Kirby had worked his pinned arm free and grabbed at the knife while it was suspended in midair. He couldn’t get a grip on it but he knocked it away. It went skittering across the boxcar floor, out of everyone’s reach.
Kirby used his free arm to punch Jordan in the side of his head, then shoved him away along with Jasmine. He started to crawl toward the knife. Jordan was only half conscious, and Jasmine was winded
“I’ll show you little pissants somethin’ now!” Kirby wheezed.
Jasmine was terrified that he was right. He was closest to the knife, and could move faster and was stronger than either of them. She and Jordan were as good as dead.
Until her hand closed on a sock full of gravel.
She started crawling faster toward Kirby, not toward the knife itself. That puzzled him for a few seconds.
A few seconds were enough.
The first blow with the makeshift sap dazed Kirby.
Then Jasmine mounted him like a horse and hit him again and again and again . . .
The train was on the flat now, and in vast darkness. It speeded along, making time, toward the bright mystery of its wavering light far ahead. The train wouldn’t go anywhere but straight for miles, and the source of the light was unseen, a wavering unsteady glow up ahead and off to the sides.
Jordan and Jasmine were still breathing hard, in concert with the rhythms of the train rattling through the fields.
Jasmine said, “Let’s get rid of him.”
Jordan, leaning with his back against the swaying boxcar wall, looked over at Kirby stretched out motionless on the floor. It was too dark to see for sure, but there seemed to be a lot of blood around Kirby’s head. Kirby’s mouth was open. His eyes looked to be only half closed. His expression was that of a man slyly planning, except for the fact that he was so still. The dead didn’t plan.
Jasmine got up, her body swaying with the boxcar so she could maintain her balance. Jordan used the boxcar wall as a support helping him to get to his feet. Fighting off dizziness, he almost fell.
They made their way to where Kirby lay.
“He gone?” Jasmine asked.
“Far as we’re concerned,” Jordan said. “Time for Mister Kirby to get off the train.”
Together, they gripped Kirby by his shirt and leather belt and inched him toward the open steel door. He’d left a large bloodstain, glistening black in the darkness.
Jasmine sat down on the floor and shoved Kirby along with both feet. Jordan, with a wide stance, stood over Kirby and used Kirby’s belt to lift him slightly and shove him toward the black rectangle of the door.
They pushed together, using all their might. Kirby’s arm jammed in the door, as if he didn’t want to leave.
Then the arm came loose, and he was out in the black night, as if plucked from the train by someone or something that had been waiting for him all along. Jordan leaned out the door and looked toward the back of the train. There was Kirby, his momentum still tumbling him along near the steel wheels. Then he bounced into invisibility and the night had him.
“Dead or alive,” Jordan said, “nobody’s gonna find him for a while. And if he’s dead, or even just unconscious, it’ll take a while to figure he fell off a train.”
Jasmine knew the rails would be all the clue the police would need to tell them where the body had come from, but she didn’t mention it to Jordan. He was still shaken up and not thinking straight.
He leaned back against the swaying boxcar wall and closed his eyes.
The train rattled on through the night.
44
New York, the present
It was a surprisingly cool morning. Quinn and Pearl were walking along Broadway toward Zabar’s to have breakfast and then buy some pastry for the rest of the Q&A personnel.
It had rained slightly during the night, but now the sky was cloudless. The colorful lines of traffic-stalled cars were punctuated by the occasional yellow cab. Sunlight glancing off concrete, steel, and glass made everything look recently washed, which in a way was the case. Here and there, glitters of dew still clung to weeds or grass that had inched their way up between edges and cracks in the pavement.
Pearl’s cell phone chimed and she walked slower and fished it out of her purse. She was afraid the caller was her mother, whom she deliberately and shamelessly saw too little of. But when she squinted down at the phone she saw the caller was her daughter, Jody.
Pearl and Quinn slowed to a near stop. A passerby bounced off Quinn, glared at him, and then looked closer and sweetened up.
“What’s up?” Pearl asked her daughter. It was a question she never asked without some trepidation.
“I went out to see Gramma at Assisted Living. She says she misses you, told me to let you know you should give her a call at the nursing home.”
“Nursing home” was what Pearl’s mother called Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey, where she had a well-furnished one-bedroom apartment. The kind of place that would have cost a million and a half dollars in Manhattan.
“That all?” It was a short message to be coming from Pearl’s mother.
“No,” Jody said. “She wants us to buy her something here in the city.”
“You know about real estate prices in Manhattan. She’s better off—”
“No, no, Mom. She doesn’t want a better apartment—at least not now. She needs one of those folding contraptions with metal claws on the end of a long pole. For picking up objects she can’t reach.”
“What kind of objects?” Pearl asked.
“I suspect desserts, snacks, wrapped candies. She uses a walker now and doesn’t like it.”
“So she wants to use her walker and a grabber on a pole?”
“No, no. Just the pole contraption, like a lot of the other patients have here.”
“Tenants.”
“And maybe a new wheelchair.”
“Good God! Are they going to joust?”
“She’s your mother and my grandmother. Don’t make a joke of it.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“The longest pole they make, she said.”
“Sure. But with her walker she’s standing up.”
“It’s getting to things,” Jody said. “Her walker isn’t fast enough. Some of the other women are always ahead of her. She gets the last or the smallest or what’s broken.”
“She has tennis balls on her walker,” Pearl said. “If she puts oil on them she’ll have the fastest walker. Oil on the tennis wheels, and those walkers will blow your hat off.”
Jody giggled.
“What’s that I hear?” Pearl asked. “You’re an attorney. You’re supposed to be serious.”
“Oil your tennis balls,” Jody said, through her giggling. Pearl started to giggle. She couldn’t help herself. More giggling. Quinn looked at her as if she were insane. But then, that could happen, talking to Jody.
“For God’s sake,” Quinn said. “You’re a cop.”
Pearl looked over at Quinn and opened her mouth to explain.
That was when they heard the three loud explosions.
Quinn put his hand on Pearl’s shoulder, while she told Jody she had to go.
“Business?” Jody asked.
“Business.”
“Be careful, Mom.”
“I’m a cop.”