Patrick Quinlan - The Hit

And spotted Foerster.

Thirty yards back, Foerster slid between people up a flight of stairs. Jonah had gone right by without noticing the stairs or Foerster. Now there was a thick knot of people, a crazy New York stew-pot of races, colors and creeds between Jonah and those stairs, between he and Foerster. The people were all trying to follow Jonah into the next compartment, but Jonah wasn’t going that way anymore. He was swimming against the tide.

He pushed a small Asian man out of his way.

The man pushed Jonah back with both hands, getting his body into it. He shouted something into Jonah’s face. Jonah shoved him hard, knocking him towards the window. The man fell into a woman’s lap. But the two men behind him were also Asians. They were together. All three started yelling now. One of them punched Jonah in the chest.

Jonah had no time for this.

‘Gang way!’ he shouted. ‘Police!’

He blasted through the two remaining Asians, and the rest of the crowd parted in front of him. He burst up the stairs, went through some doors, and came to an outdoor deck. Foerster waited out there. His head swiveled, surveying the whole deck, but there was nowhere left for him to run. He stood and gaped at Jonah.

‘Let’s do this the easy way,’ Jonah said.

But Foerster didn’t do anything the easy way. He moved toward the edge of the deck. Suddenly he vaulted up onto the safety railing. A woman nearby gasped. Foerster squatted on top of the railing like an insect, watching Jonah carefully.

The railing was to Jonah’s left. He looked over it, down to the water. The boat was really moving now. It had to be a three-story jump to the harbor. The water was foaming down there as they motored along. The whole scene gave Jonah vertigo, but it didn’t seem to bother Foerster. When he was young, Foerster should have run away and become a circus freak. It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.

A breeze had kicked up. Jonah took a couple steps toward his quarry.

Foerster grinned. His face was sweaty and pale.

‘Don’t come any closer. Take one more step and I’m out of here.’

Foerster would jump. Jonah knew he would. And there was no way Jonah was going after him. Not from this height. Not into that water. He glanced down at the microphone in his hand, and an idea struck. Foerster was less than ten feet from him. Jonah brandished the microphone like a gun. He moved into a two-fisted crouch. He hoped Foerster didn’t watch much football.

‘Freeze, Foerster!’

‘Get away from me!’ Foerster shouted.

A crowd had gathered around them.

‘You climb down off there or I’ll let you have it with this.’

‘I’m gonna jump. I swear it, I’m gonna jump if you don’t get the fuck away.’

‘This is a stun gun, motherfucker. I give you a pop, you’ll be useless. You ever get a blast from one of these? This is a new one. It’ll put you in shock. You don’t want to go in the water like that. I promise you’ll drown. You want to drown over this? Is that what you want?’

Foerster gazed down at the water below him, then back at Jonah’s stun gun.

‘Climb down RIGHT NOW. Let’s go. Climb down. On the deck.’

Foerster eyed the stun gun.

He eyed the water.

The light went out of his face. His jaw sagged.

‘That’s not a gun,’ somebody said. It was a man’s voice, coming from just a few feet behind Jonah.

‘What?’ Foerster said. His eyes focused on a point just over Jonah’s left shoulder.

‘It’s not a gun. It’s a microphone. You never seen one of those before?’

Jonah glanced in the direction of the voice. Mr Know-It-All was chubby, maybe thirty years old, with a heavy beard and wearing a Yankees windbreaker jacket. Jonah heard his own voice, coming as if from someplace else. ‘Foerster, you’re gonna die, understand? This guy has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. In another second, I’m going to shoot you and you’re going to die in that water.’

‘Then I’ll see you in hell.’

Foerster dove off the railing. Someone in the crowd – a man or a woman, Jonah couldn’t tell – screamed as Foerster’s skinny body carved a graceless, tumbling arc through the air, then splashed into the water below. Jonah rushed to the railing and saw Foerster disappear beneath the surging foam.

Jonah closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

He looked again.

Foerster’s body appeared, bobbing off to the right and already well behind the boat. Jonah watched it closely, looking for signs of life. An arm moved. Then the other arm moved. A moment later Foerster was swimming, pulling hard, growing smaller and smaller in the distance. Soon he was a speck, then maybe he was there and maybe he wasn’t – a tiny spark on the water, a ray of sunlight reflecting off a discarded beer can.

The S.I. Newhouse motored along, passing the Statue of Liberty.

Up ahead, the tall buildings of lower Manhattan drew nearer. They seemed to launch themselves heavenward, like bamboo shoots springing up out of the ground.

‘Shit,’ Jonah said. ‘That’s twice now.’

He turned and faced the guy who knew what a microphone looked like. Five feet away, the guy stared at him blandly.

‘Was that any of your goddamn business?’ Jonah said.

The guy shrugged. The beard looked like it came from a costume store and was just glued right on there. ‘I made it my business. You have a problem with that?’

Jonah stepped into the punch, landing it solidly across the guy’s chin. The guy’s head swiveled to the right and he took two stumble-steps backward before falling on his ass. His head bounced off the ironwork of the floor. He was down and his eyes said he would stay down. A woman from the crowd kneeled by him and glared up at Jonah, not saying anything. All around them, people murmured.

Jonah could feel it already – the dull ache in his hand and in his wrist that by tonight would travel the length of his arm up to his shoulder. Instant karma – you paid a price for hitting people in this world. Still, punching that loudmouth felt good. It felt right. It felt like something Gordo would do.

‘I don’t know how it happened,’ Foerster’s mother said between heavy gasps for air. She had sobbed for a time and had only stopped a few minutes before.

‘I don’t know how Davey got so bad. I can’t tell you how smart he was as a boy. He was the smartest boy in his whole school. Everybody said so. He won big prizes for science and math.’ She shook her head. ‘And now this. In and out of jail. Beat up by the police. Always on the run.’ A long, world-weary sigh escaped her. ‘You know, his poor father must be rolling over in his grave.’

Gordo put his big hands on top of hers and let them rest there a moment. They sat at her kitchen table. Jonah had come in a few minutes before and shook his head – missed him again. Now he hovered around, not saying anything, and in general making Gordo nervous. Gordo was working here.

He glanced around the kitchen, really noticing it for the first time. The wallpaper was peeling away in several places. The ancient cabinets were half-falling out of the wall. There was almost no counter space. The linoleum on the floor was scuffed and ripped. The plastic tablecloth was sticky with age. Through a doorway he could see into the living room. The furniture was old – old, and not in a good way – and covered in plastic. Hell, back here in the kitchen the refrigerator was five feet tall. Gordo hadn’t seen one of those in ages. If he opened the icebox, he knew what he would find. Caked ice, five inches thick on every side, with a few frozen dinners stuffed into the dim tunnel remaining.

In the aftermath of the raid, he had managed to charm her. Even after bursting into her home, even after accidentally knocking her over – thankfully, she was a sturdy woman and hadn’t broken a hip or some vertebrae when she went down – he had managed to win her over to his way of thinking. With a maniac like Foerster for a son, she must have been halfway there already.