Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“Have you got your passport?”

“I do.”

“Your tickets?”

“Aye.”

“Your gun?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to toss the rest of your stuff?”

“Yes.”

He sat for a minute, swallowed. Now even his hair was graying. I went and sat beside him.

“Alex, there’s nothing I can say to stop you?”

“No, Pat.”

“Ok, then, give me a hug.”

We hugged, Pat kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m worried about you, Pat,” I said.

“Fuck that, mate, worry about yourself, I’m not dead yet,” he said.

“If the police come for you, Pat?”

“I’ll handle it, Alex, I’ll be ok,” he said, his face in a fixed grin that neither of us believed. I nodded, stood, and looked at him, I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I didn’t want Pat to convince me of anything, but I needed something. I needed some word.

“Pat, you don’t have to tell me I’m doing the right thing, I know you don’t think I am doing the right thing, but at least tell me you understand. You knew John, you saw what Mulholland did to him. And Victoria and maybe another girl. You know that. Tell me at least that you understand.”

Pat looked at me, smiled weakly.

“I understand,” he said softly, tears streaming down his cheeks.

I picked up my backpack and left the apartment for the last time. I never saw him again….

I rode the bike along Colfax and up to Comanche Street. At the ball-bearing factory, I dismounted. It was darker now, and with no streetlights I would have been practically invisible, apart from the white shirt, white tie, white seventies suit, and white pimp hat. And I still hadn’t figured out a way of getting into the CAW party.

I locked the bike. Hid my bag with my change of clothes and passport.

I walked to the Eastman Ballroom. A lot of activity at the front of the building. Town cars, limos, taxis. Rich white people getting out, the women wearing too much jewelry, the men paunchy, older.

I walked around the back, waited, tried to think. Maybe get in one of the fire exits. I skulked in the shadows of the derelict factory, my mouth dry.

An hour went by. I didn’t even have smokes.

Getting tense. Sooner or later, I’d have to go around the front and try to bluff my way in. I didn’t want to, I figured it wouldn’t work, but soon I’d have no choice.

I counted a final fifteen minutes on the watch. I could hear a band playing inside.

I started making my way to the front of the building and just then I got a break. An emergency exit opened and a man in a dinner jacket came out for a smoke. He left the exit open, lit his cigarette, and then decided to take a leak up against the dimly lit ball-bearing factory wall. I crossed the street out of the shadow.

“Hi,” he said.

I nodded.

I went in the open emergency exit, walked down a concrete corridor, pulled a door, was in the ballroom.

A large floor, a closed balcony, a band up on the stage, a chandelier, tables ringing the ballroom with waiters in dinner jackets bringing hors d’oeuvres and booze. About two hundred and fifty people. Half of them dancing whitey fashion to light jazz and Muzak versions of Rat Pack standards. The rest sitting at tables or standing to the sides, chatting, flirting. White dresses, white suits, a couple of people in more creative white lab coats, white boiler suits. Dull as dishwater. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect at a fund-raiser for an organization like the Campaign for the American Wilderness: middle-aged, wealthy, satisfied, not a person of color who wasn’t carrying a tray. Trophy wives and girlfriends. Grizzled men in their forties and fifties who had dodged the draft, made money in real estate, swung from left to right, and whose dream was to someday make the cover of Cigar Aficionado .

I zeroed in on a group of tables near the stage. Charles, sitting there in a white morning suit, Amber in a dazzling cream dress. Everyone in orbit about her. God, I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. I couldn’t see Robert or the retiring Congressman Wegener, though there was a fat man in a white vest, flanked by goons, so that was a possibility. The congressman had been getting death threats for his antigay stance. The guys with him might be armed. It wouldn’t matter, I’d be quick. Amber was talking to a man who looked so like her, aged thirty-five or forty years, that I knew instantly it was her father. He and a couple of hoods with him were wearing black jackets with a white buttonhole. It made them look like the wait staff. I smiled. I might have been right about my assessment. Maybe I’d brought them together. Having had to find men to kill me had been the great family rapprochement. Touching. The taller of the two goons looked like one of the shooters from Fort Morgan a few weeks ago.

A waiter came by with caviar on a piece of Melba toast.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Thanks,” I said, and forced myself to relax. I unclenched my fists and pretended to be looking at a large 1930s WPA mural of people dancing in various eras of history. I saw that the best route to Charles would be to avoid the dance floor and make my way clockwise through the crowd along the ballroom’s circumference.

Ok, no more dicking around, I told myself.

Now or never. I checked in my pocket for the gun and the smoke bombs from Pat’s apartment. I pulled down my pimp hat and walked completely into the room….

Time slows. The world blurs. Movement. People. The disco lights come on. Snatches of conversation:

“Oh, he did it, O. J. killed her first and then the waiter…. Winter Park is so over….” “Not Heston, not Sinatra, the worst wig in television is Jack Horkheimer, he’s this astrology dude….” “Clinton will win for certain….” “Norm McDonald plays a great Bob Dole….”

Couples dancing. Perfume on the women. The band onstage. The lights. The people. But I can see only one. Charles, talking to a man who is doing something to a microphone stand. There are to be speeches later.

Well, I can safely say the audience isn’t going to have to suffer through that.

I ease my way through the crowd.

No one pays me the slightest bit of attention.

Closer.

Closer.

I get bumped by a flapper.

“Sorry,” she says, gives me a winning smile.

“Not at all.”

Twenty feet from his table.

I feel for the gun again. Swallow. I feel sick.

Time slows further.

My legs begin to tremble. Can I do this? Can I kill another person? Didn’t I kill that guy in the cemetery? I had the hate. I had it. Victoria alone would have been sufficient. But John and possibly that girl Maggie too? So close.

Fifteen feet. No dancers between me and him. I can see his eyes, his confident sneer. A direct line, a clear shot. He’s standing next to Amber. He scratches his ear, takes a drink of champagne. His last. My veins are throbbing, I can count my heartbeats. One, two, three, four…

I blink. Loosen my fingers. Sweat in beads rolling down my palms. My knee hurts. I have stopped breathing.

Ten feet.

I touch the.38. I cock it in my pocket. I force my legs to stop shaking. The metal of the gun is warm, the grip drenched with sweat. Did I load it? Of course I did. I pull it out.

Time stops.

I grin.

I’m really here. This is really happening. This is it. It’s too late now. You can do what you like, Charles. Grab your rosary. Sing your songs. Your existence is hereby erased.

People are moving behind me, talking. The music plays. A drum solo. The room sways slightly.

My throat is dry. I try to swallow, but when you’re not breathing, you can’t swallow.

Charles leans forward to hear something, I begin to lift the gun.