Steve Martini - Undue Influence

On one of these forays of evasion I am actually running lateral to the shooter, and in this instant I can see the silhouette of a figure, standing in the open door of the van parked in front of Fulton’s. To anyone down the street, from behind it would look like this guy is hunched over lighting a cigarette. Instead he is taking careful aim with two hands. I reverse course an instant before a bullet snaps in front of my face. I hear the sound of metal as it clicks on bricks and flattens itself against the wall of the Railroad Museum, now no more than thirty yards away.

By this time Danny is on his scooter, doing a U-turn and heading out Second Street the other way, under the freeway and toward town.

‘Nine-one-one!’ Laurel yelling for him to call for help, as she hobbles down the street in heels, heading for the darkness and the open ground of the railroad yard. Danny looking back like he won’t leave her. He brakes near the end of the street.

‘Damn it — get out of here!’ she says.

I take the shooter in another direction, away from them. At full stride I make it to the entrance of the Museum. I do not know if Lyle Simmons is his real name, or whether like so much of what Dana told me this too was a fiction. But there is no question about who is his quarry here. He is after me. I have now seen him twice, once at the post office and again in Hana. I am one of only two people who can identify him, me and Howard, the guy on the loading dock at the post office the day he delivered the letter bomb. I am wondering if Howard has been dispatched to his maker, the gunman cleaning up all the little loose ends left from Marcie Reed and his botched job on Melanie.

I huddle in the shadows near the entrance of the museum. The place is deserted except for the janitor’s cart, which is propped against an open glass door a few feet away. I can see the shooter moving toward me, sliding a loaded clip into the handle of what appears to be an immense handgun, something from the arsenal of a starship, a laserscope and the cigar shape of a silencer protruding from this thing.

This guy has set up his own private shooting gallery, using me as the bouncing metal bunny, at least eight shots that I have counted, on an open public street, and except for Laurel and Danny not a soul has seen this.

He starts to jog, nonchalant, across the intersection, closing the distance.

On my haunches, I move to the cart, push it out of the way. It rumbles across the mottled surface of the pressed concrete into the light of the moon, and suddenly takes two bullets that rip through the plastic bag draped in its center and filled with trash.

He thinks I am using this thing for cover. While he’s distracted I slip through the open door into the lobby of the museum and quietly pull the door closed behind me. But I don’t hear the latch of the lock as it closes. Then I look. It is a dead bolt, requiring a key. I have no way of locking him out.

The place is shrouded in muted light, and as I watch through the glass door I see the gunman grab the cart, check the back side of it, and fling it to one side. Process of elimination — he looks to the entrance and the closed door.

I slink back into the shadows, turn, rise, and run. I’m looking, but the janitor is nowhere in sight.

I slip around the box office, down a long corridor, and, to my left, another hallway, past the elevator and a stairwell.

I hear him pulling on doors out front. He’s gotten them all except the one that’s open, making a lot of noise. Last one’s a charm as I hear it rattle in its frame, closing behind him.

Then a voice. ‘Hey, what are you doing? Building’s closed. You can’t come in here.’

‘Lookin’ fa someone.’ It’s an eastern inflection, somewhere north of Boston, heavy with working-class origins. I have heard this voice only once before, when he delivered the letter to Marcie Reed and told her to sign.

‘Well, he ain’t in here.’ The janitor again. For a second I think maybe the guy is going to be cowed into leaving.

‘What’s that?’ The janitor taking note. Something’s going on.

I hear a flat percussion, muffled, like a lead sinker bounced one time on a child’s toy drum. It is followed by another in quick succession and then the sickening sound of something hitting ground, like a sack of oranges off a truck.

The janitor is dead.

I have been hovering around the corner from the elevator, maybe thirty yards from the lobby, and now I move, past a wall of windows that look out on a dark and deserted street. The moon is breaking through clouds above. Across the way the lights of Fulton’s and the crowded restaurant, sanctuary that I cannot reach.

Behind me, an ancient steam locomotive, ‘The Empire,’ its name carved in lacquered wood, is mounted on rails embedded in a pedestal of mirrors so that the undercarriage gleams in refracted light. It is too bright here, lit up like an arcade. I pick up the pace and put this behind me. Turning a corner, I pass another locomotive, the name ‘C. P. Huntington’ on the side. Suddenly I am off of carpet, my heels on hard wood. I stop to pull off my loafers and carry them in my hand. In stocking feet I slide as I run.

Twenty feet and I enter a great curving room with a cavernous ceiling. The floor turns to concrete, rolling stock everywhere, giant steel dinosaurs looming above me in the shadows. There are four gleaming locomotives at the far end of this room, two exhibits with their doors open, a post office car, and sleeping car, all on rails embedded in the concrete.

It takes me a moment to gain my bearings, and then I realize that I am in the roundhouse, a kind of launching platform for trains. I can see the turntable outside through gleaming glass doors two stories high, under which the rails pass.

Behind me I hear the sound of shoe leather brushing on thick carpet, slow-moving steps, cautious, uncertain whether I am here.

I turn, and it is then that I see them, glistening in the dampened light of the overhead canisters, sparkling against the shimmer of waxed hardwood, drops of my own blood, four of them between where I stand and where wood turns to carpet. More stain the carpet to the last corner where I can no longer see.

The scratch on my shoulder is not serious, but it has bled, little drops, and like bread crumbs in a dark cavern Lyle Simmons is following them.

No handkerchief. I pull from my pocket the tie which I took off over dinner. I wipe the blood from the back of my hand where it has trickled from under the sleeve of my coat, and using my teeth and my good hand I wrap the tie around the wound on my upper arm and put a knot in it. There is a mild stinging sensation. I take a few steps to separate myself from the last drop of blood. Confident I am no longer leaking, I run at a half-stride past the postal car and a large engine. I negotiate my way around another locomotive and suddenly realize I am running out of building. Beyond this second engine there are two more, then a solid wall.

One of the engines is parked over an underground concrete bay like those used to change oil in a lube shop, only larger. There are stairs at each end of this so that visitors can step down and walk in a cavern beneath the engine to study the undercarriage.

A flash of memories from childhood, when I once played in a schoolyard on a rusting locomotive. I remember crawling through the area between the massive wheels and finding a cavern the size of a small house above the axles, just beneath the barreled bottom of the boiler.

I steer clear of the locomotive parked over the bay. It would be too easy for Simmons to get below me and look up. I would be splayed against a background, a shooting gallery with a metal backstop where he could bounce bullets until one of them hit me. I take the second engine. The numbers 10–10 are stenciled on a plaque leading to a set of wooden stairs that allow visitors to climb up into the cab.