Blvd. of Blood
Book 5, chapters 3–5
(TOMORROW! July 15, 6–7:30, author talk, Old Stone Church, 251 Main St., East Haven CT)
Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.
(The story so far: It’s the morning of April 11. Nothing bad has happened yet. Colin (aka Agent Anderson) and Bernie are getting ready to change that, while Mickey (aka Sp!der) tries to use his cousin to ferret out the prospective shooter’s identity.)
3.
Officer Oberman slept through his alarm, but his girlfriend rolled him out of bed. He was running late. He stumbled through a shower and a perfunctory shave. He drove to pick up Campbell.
“I see you managed to defuse that bomb, eh?” Campbell said.
“Har har.”
“Get used to it. You’re going to hear that about a million times today.”
By the end of roll call he’d heard it fifteen.
4.
The phone by the bed rang at 6:30, and caller ID said it was Mickey’s cell phone. Ronnie shoved her husband until he woke up and agreed to answer it. Ronnie had put off calling her cousin back all yesterday, and had hoped she could put it off for another day or two, but this constant hounding was wearing her down. She’d have to give him the name, Bernard Feldstein, sometime today. She just hoped it was the right Nardo. She didn’t know what she’d say if she was supposed to call the pizza place back.
Nevertheless, if she had to talk to Mickey today, she was not going to do it at 6:30 in the morning, and she certainly was not going to do it from home. At work there was the opportunity to be busy and get off the phone fast.
She could hear the conversation, Mickey’s frantic, overloud begging for her, her husband’s groggy and implausible excuse that she was already at work.
“Well, where does she work?” she heard her cousin shout.
“I can’t believe you don’t know what your own cousin does,” Liam said
“I know what she does, of course, obviously,” Mickey’s voice bellowed through the phone, “I just don’t know the number.”
“She’s not supposed to take calls at work,” Liam told him and hung up. “Jesus, Ronnie,” he said, “are you sure this is your cousin? He acts like a desperate ex.”
“I don’t even understand why I had to lie and get this Nardo guy’s name in the first place,” she said, “I’m half tempted to just tell him his name is Smith.”
5.
The jumpsuit Agent Anderson was wearing, and which he wanted Bernie to put on now, was not cool. It was black, which was fine, but it was also canvas or something. Two zippers ran from the shoulders all the way down along the legs. To put it on you had to slide your arms through the sleeves, pull the dangling loincloth part around in front of you and attach it with a zipper at the legs. This was the whole inseam and the “bib” part of the top. You zipped both zippers up while holding the bib with your chin, connecting the inner leg and the outer leg and then going up to your shoulders. It was ridiculously hard, and once Bernie had (after much negotiation, instruction, false starts, failures) done it he had no idea how he was going to go to the bathroom.
The whole point (Anderson explained) was that you could strip the jumpsuit off without removing your shoes. If they took as long to remove as they did to put on then you might as well just take your shoes off! But Anderson pointed out that he might end up standing on broken glass, or an electrified floor and would need to keep his shoes on. Bernie dug out his winter boots from the back of the closet so at least he would have something large to unzip them around.
The Colonel was packing things into a trash bag: the windbreaker, the plastic squeezers with magazines in them. Extra boxes of ammo went in too. From another trash bag; he extracted the nose putty and cotton from the night before; then he tossed in a banana peel and a grocery circular.
Two magazines remained out, and he selected one, one with a black X on it. He loaded it in the rifle.
“Are you almost ready?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” The coveralls were far too large on Bernie, but it didn’t seem the time to mention it.
“Any last trips to the bathroom? Anything at all?”
“Um. What should I bring?”
“Keys. Your mask. That’s it.”
“Wallet?” Bernie asked.
“It doesn’t matter. If a cop wants to pull you over, follow my lead, and we’ll either shoot him or drive like hell.”
“Follow your lead?”
“Do what I say.”
“I knew that.”
Bernie was having a hard time believing all of this was real. It had been, for so long, a fantasy. It was easier to imagine that it was still a fantasy, that every part of this was an elaborate game. He only wished it was more fun.
“Because when you’re ready, I need you to practice shooting.”
Bingo! Bernie had shot paintball guns, and once, when he was about thirteen, Stone’s stepfather’s borrowed pistol at some squirrels. This rifle was so much larger and deadlier!
“Did you register my prints?”
But of course he did!
“As soon as you’re done with the magazine, we’re going to leave, walk quickly to the car. In fact, go out and open the car’s two front doors right now and leave them open.”
“It’s a two door.”
“Right. Both doors, then.”
Bernie did this. “I can shoot it now?” he said as he reentered the house. Anderson had taken the moment to put his wig back on. He was trying to straighten out the nose putty.
“Hang on. After you shoot, we’re going to hurry to the car. Don’t lock the house, in case we need to come back in. Start the car up and drive away quickly. Peel out, and don’t slow down till you’re off this street. Follow my directions to Blande—”
“I know the way—”
“We have something to do on the way. Follow my directions to Blande Boulevard. I’ll be hunkered down in the car so it only looks like there’s one person in it. That’s you. It gives us the element of surprise.”
“Makes sense.” Bernie was trying to act cool. He even had an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
“Drive exactly five miles over the speed limit the whole way. Once we get to Blande you can drive fast if there are no cars in front of us, but slow down if you see one. We don’t want to get close to anyone in front of us. It’s best if we never see anyone in front of us, but it would be nice if we didn’t see anyone behind us, either. If you can pace it that way. That’d be just luck, but the most important thing is not to catch up with anyone.”
Bernie must have looked confused. It was a lot to take in, and he had already decided that Col. Anderson was the brooding, silent type. Too tough for words! Yet here he was talking.
“Just drive a little over the speed limit till we get to Blande Boulevard, then drive so you don’t see anyone in front of you. Okay?” The man put his baseball cap on and pulled it low, over the bangs of the wig.
“Okay.”
“When we get—aw, I’ll explain the rest in the car. Here. What were you trying to shoot last night? The television?”
Bernie could only nod silently. He was too in awe of the rifle he was holding. It looked complicated. It wasn’t like the toy Davy Crockett rifle he’d had as a kid. “I probably shouldn’t shoot the TV, though.”
“I don’t have to tell you that you’ll be able to afford a much better one when this is all done.”
Bernie cradled the rifle, if not like a lover then perhaps like a baby calf. He started to set it in position, when the Colonel reached in quickly and flipped a switch on the rifle’s side.
“Okay, now,” Col. Anderson said.
And Bernie lifted the rifle to his shoulder.
