The car approached, slowed. A police cruiser, its flasher bar off. It turned in a slow circle, lights catching Jay's truck, then stopped. If they found a cardboard box with two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars in it, then things would get interesting. A handheld flashlight beam shot directly at the driver's window, illuminating the falling snow, moved to the passenger side, found nothing, rubbed over the ground, rested on the license plate. I expected a figure to emerge and inspect the vehicle, but instead the police car crunched forward in its turn, wheels biting the road again, and disappeared the way it had come, red lights getting smaller.
I stood up anxiously, wanting to escape. Where were Poppy and Jay? Maybe the police car had encountered them along the road. I considered stumbling my way down the sea cliff then walking along the shore. But it was bitter cold, the wind from the sound whipping upward behind me. Jay's truck would be warmer, and maybe he'd left the keys in it. I ran over the frozen ground to the driver's door and threw myself inside. Drag your ass out of here, Billy-boy. The keys weren't in the ignition. I checked under the seat. Nothing. In the glove compartment I found an owner's manual, another heavily scuffed baseball, an insurance document (which showed that Jay's coverage had lapsed), an empty ammunition box, and, strangely, a schedule of winter sporting events at one of Manhattan's private schools, with every Thursday night girls' basketball game circled. Random, useless things. I put them all back and huddled miserably in my seat.
Then a figure emerged out of the darkness. Jay in his long coat. I opened the driver's door.
"You see the car?" he asked.
"Yeah, Jay, it was the police."
He sat down in the driver's seat, his face pinched by the cold.
"Why would the police roll up, Jay?"
Instead of answering he closed his eyes and seemed to be pulling deep breaths into himself. "Okay… just a second here."
"You all right?"
He nodded and pulled the keys from his pocket.
"Should I drive?"
"I'll be fine."
"You need more of those pills?" I suggested.
"Let me just-" He got out of the truck, opened the rear door, then lay down.
"Jay?"
"I'm fine," he said. "I got this under control… Do me a favor and don't tell Allison."
I reached back and grabbed the keys from him. "I'm taking us out of here."
I guided the truck back the way we'd come, away from the water. The snow had already started to obscure the police car's tracks, and was piling in drifts on the westerly side of the road in fragile crests and valleys. As we passed the large barns, I noticed something I'd missed before, a modest farmhouse set back from the road, a snowy mirage almost, windows unlit, front porch drifted with snow. Someone had lived there once.
At the gate to the main road, the police car was waiting for us, parked craftily so that any escape attempt would land the truck in the drainage ditch. I pulled to a stop and cut the engine, keeping the lights on.
Colin Harrison
The Havana Room
"What's happening?" asked Jay.
"Cops."
He groaned and fell back into the seat.
The policemen opened their doors and walked toward the car, hands on guns, flashlights held up like spears.
"Who's that?" demanded one.
I lowered the window. "Hi guys," I said, worrying about the box of cash behind my seat.
"You taking a little drive?" One of the cops shined the light into the backseat. "Who you got there?"
"This is my friend," I said.
"This ain't lovers' lane, buddy," the cop said. "This is private property."
"It's not like that."
He smiled with a happy sadism. "What's it like, then? I always wanted to know."
"Hey, hey, is that Dougie?" Jay called from the darkness of the rear seat.
"Who you got in there?"
"Dougie," bellowed Jay, "you married that girl yet?"
"Who's that? Jay? Jay Rainey?"
Jay sat up and opened his door, and practically fell into the snow. "Who do you think?"
The cop shook his head, laughing. "Jay, we thought you was the big-city boy now." He shook hands with Jay, then motioned at me. "Who's this?"
"This?" Jay answered sloppily. "This is my lawyer, boys."
"Lawyer?"
"Up town, man. The best money can buy."
The cop shoved his light at my face, making me blink. "You been drinking, too?"
I shook my head. Snow was blowing into the truck.
"You don't mind if I check you?"
"Nope."
He came over, gave me a perfunctory sniff. "You were drinking but it was hours ago, and you had dinner and somebody was smoking cigars or something."
"That's right," I said. "Pretty good."
The other cop laughed. "He can fucking smell pussy in a swimming pool."
"I gotta get back in the car," Jay announced.
Dougie helped him and closed the door. Then he held out his hand. "You got some ID?"
I showed him my license.
"You got something that tells me who you are, I mean?"
I fumbled with my wallet. "This is my old business card."
The cop pinched it from my fingers. "Hey, I even heard of this law firm. You don't work there no more?"
"Uh, no."
"Disbarred?"
"What?"
"Only joking."
"I wasn't disbarred."
"Just want to make sure that you're giving Jay here proper representation, Mr. William Wyeth." He nodded at his partner. "Okay, since the car is not stolen, and since you are not drinking and since the owner of the property is with you, although apparently rather incapacitated, then I don't think we have a problem." He slipped my card into his pocket, however. "We saw lights from the main road, thought people was messing around." He looked at me. "What you guys doing out here this late, anyway?"
"He was showing me the land," I said. "He had kind of a big night and wanted me to see it."
"I heard Jay was selling it." He bent and addressed the backseat of the truck. "Jay, you come back here before the city eats you up, hear?"
No answer came. "Get the local boy home safe, okay?" he said softly to me. "Jay and I go way back. Played some ball together before-" He stopped.
"Before-?" I prompted.
But he'd turned away. "Just take care of him, okay?"
"You got it," I said, eager to get going.
The cop car backed over the snow, then pulled away in front of us. I let the truck roll forward. "Jay?"
He didn't say anything.
"Jay," I announced anyway, "you need another lawyer." I waited for an answer. I remembered to hang the chain back up behind us and close the lock. I turned the truck onto the main road and watched for on-coming traffic. Ninety minutes back to the city. "I mean, this is not what I do, not what I used to do, not what I want to be doing." I looked over to see his response.
He had none. He was gone, curled asleep against the seat likewell, like a boy.
It was late now, past 4 a.m. The evening seemed impossible, scenes in a strange, cold dream. From the moment I'd stepped into the Havana Room five hours earlier, nothing had made sense. I drove west, toward the lights of Manhattan, running the heater and wishing the cop hadn't kept my business card. He hadn't needed it, right? I glanced back over the seat. Jay was completely gone, his breath entering and leaving his nostrils noisily, coughing thickly now and then. From time to time he muttered in his sleep. I didn't like what had happened, I didn't like my complicity. Certainly Jay had enjoyed the right to move the bulldozer up over the sea cliff because it constituted a danger to anyone below. That much was justifiable. The rights of the living trump the rights of the dead. And my own assistance in this discrete action seemed more or less defensible. But moving the body farther from its absolute point of true death was loaded with problems. Of course, Herschel, being deceased, never knew that his body was being transported over the frozen farmland a few hundred yards away. But his very unknowingness constituted part of my objection. Surely the dead have the right to be properly discovered by the living- that is, to be preserved in the circumstances of death so that their families may reckon with death, may complete the narrative, compose an ending. The principle of the undisturbed body derives from the basic needs of society and tribe. Moreover, I'd not told the policemen what we'd done. I'd lied to his face, despite the fact that policemen are often quite interested in lies, especially as they pertain to bodies moved in the night.