Max Collins - True Detective

“Heller, how are you doin’?”

“Better than Dipper Cooney,” I said. “He died last night.”

“So I hear.”

“I was with him.”

“That I didn’t hear.”

“Are you on the level with me, Frank? I did you a favor once, you know.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Cooney. You want me to find out who did?”

“That, I’d appreciate.”

“Let’s talk. Meet me at my office tomorrow afternoon. Two o’clock. I want to know about this punk you’re trying to find.”

“Jimmy Beame?” So he’d heard about that.

“Right. Who knows, I might even be able to help you out on that score.”

“I’d appreciate that, Frank.”

“See ya tomorrow, Heller.”

And the phone had clicked dead.

I sat staring at it, wondering if I was being set up; I had the clammy sort of feeling you get waiting in a doctor’s office for the results of your tests.

So I took my gun with me to the fair, and now I was trying to get Mary Ann to leave with me, since being at the fairgrounds with all these people was making me nervous.

“Nervous? What about? Nathan, don’t be a grouch. Look. I’ll let you take me to see Sally Rand some other night. But it’s about time you took me up on the Sky Ride.”

“We went on the Sky Ride last week.”

“Not the observation deck.”

“I’m not crazy about heights, okay?”

“Tough guy! Come on.” And she tugged on my arm.

We were almost there, anyway; I glanced behind me, half-expecting to be followed. But I couldn’t see anybody suspicious. Nobody that seemed inconsistent with his surroundings. And there were pith-helmeted guards with sidearms all around who knew me, and I could call on, if trouble turned up. So what the hell.

The Sky Ride towers were like twin Eiffels, and why not? That tower had been the hit of the Paris Exposition of ’89, and these towers loomed over the Century of Progress in much the same way. The steel-web frameworks rose over six hundred feet, higher than any of Chicago’s skyscrapers, the tallest towers this side of the Atlantic coast. A third of the way up, the silver, red-striped “rocket” cars, carrying thirty or forty passengers, crossed the lagoon on overhanging cable tracks. Last week, when we’d taken that trip, I felt we were up plenty high enough; now, as we entered the pennant-flapping sky ride entryway, getting into one of the two elevators that went to the top (two others went to the rocket-car platform), we’d be going up another four hundred feet, to the observation deck.

It took a whole minute to get there, and we looked first from the windows of the enclosed observation room, the fair spread out before us like a colorful electric map. One of the fair’s pith-helmeted security guards was on-duty in the observation room; not too many people up here tonight — maybe a dozen, mostly couples. I said hello to the guard, a florid-faced guy of about forty who used to be a traffic cop; he said hello back, and whispered he’d got a pickpocket earlier that day, seeming proud of himself. I patted him on the arm and told him atta boy.

Mary Ann was still looking out the window, breathless; she loved looking down on the lights of the fair and, beyond that, of the city. But I was ready to go, and said so.

“Oh, Nathan! We haven’t even been up on the observation deck.”

“This is as far as I go.”

She hugged one of my arms with both of hers. “Don’t be a wet blanket. It’s a beautiful night; there’ll be a nice breeze.”

“Freeze our butts off, is more like it,” I said, but then we were walking the final flight up, and Mary Ann dragged me to the highest exhibit at the fair — the Otis Elevator exhibit, which showed the machinery that operated the Sky Ride’s high-speed elevators — also the dullest exhibit, I might add — which was in a building that covered all but the outer walkway area of the unenclosed observation deck.

Outside, on the deck, there weren’t many people; the wind was blowing a bit too much for standing on top of a tower six-hundred-some feet off the ground. We found a place around one side of the building, where the deck jutted out like a porch so you could get a better look at the fair, and stood by the rail, having a gander, enjoying some privacy.

And seeing the fair stretched out before you, not through a window, but right before you, leaning against a rail and looking out at it, well, damnit if it didn’t take my breath away. Searchlights cut across the sky, from the very tower we stood upon, intersecting with the arc lights of the fair below; the fair’s geometric buildings turned into abstract shapes and colors as if on the canvas of some Tower Town modern artist.

I turned to Mary Ann to comment on this, to leave cynicism behind for a moment and be frankly impressed, and Mary Ann’s eyes were wide and she was intaking breath, and not because of the view.

Somebody was coming up behind me.

Fast.

The outstretched hands hit me just as I was turning, my right hand reaching toward the automatic under my coat, but not quite getting there, and it was a guy in a straw hat and pale yellow suit and just as I was going over the rail, backward, I saw Mary Ann slapping at him with both hands and his hat flew off, got caught by the breeze and went flapping by me as I fell, and I recognized him, and the sole thought in my panic-stricken brain was, the son of a bitch is blond again .

I hit a steel support beam, hard, on my back, and it knocked the wind out of me, but somehow my mind or instinct or some goddamn thing overrode, and I grabbed at the beam, catching it in the crook of one arm, and I clung to it, hugged it, wrapped both arms, both legs around it. The support connected the platform to the tower structure at a 45-degree angle, and thank God I hadn’t got to my gun, because I needed both hands. The support was about as big around as a man’s leg, and had rough sharp edges all ’round, digging into my flesh as I hung there in the breeze, my tie, my suit, flapping.

I was on the underside of the beam, like some animal clinging to a tree limb. I didn’t look down; I knew what was down there — my fucking stomach, for one thing.

So I looked up, back up, toward where I’d fallen from, and Mary Ann was leaning over the side, reaching her hand out to me, but she was far away, ten feet, ten miles, ten years, and the guy was behind her, and I had to swallow before I could yell, “Look out!”

And she was struggling with him, he had her halfway over the side, and I let go with one arm, clutching with the other, legs hooked ’round the slanted support, and got my automatic out from under my arm, Christ knows how, and the guy just about had her over the side when he saw the eye of my automatic looking at him, and, before I could fire it at him, he disappeared from view.

Mary Ann, thankfully, did not; the blond gone, she leaned over and reached out again and I said, “No! Too far!” and she began to cry. I think she was trying to scream, but couldn’t find the sound. Or maybe she was screaming and the wind in my ears was keeping me from hearing as I clumsily tucked the automatic back under my arm.

I yelled at her: “Go down to the observation booth!”

She nodded, and disappeared.

The support I called home angled under the platform, connecting underneath it; I’d fallen past the windows of the observation booth, but apparently nobody had seen me, and I was at a position that prevented them from noticing me, hanging here like Harold Lloyd. The support below me paralleled this one but connected right to the corner under the observation booth and its windows. If I could drop down to the next support, I might crawl up it and get in view of the people in the booth, besides which Mary Ann would by now have alerted them to my situation anyway, and I might with somebody’s help make it in through a window.