Boot Tracks Page 2

  Or maybe just waiting on a bus.

  Back here, this far from the terminal, he’s waiting on one?

  Even if the guy is staking out a locker, Rankin told himself, he ain’t staking out number one-oh-two because he’d only know to if he got it from the Buddha and the Buddha’s interests were flat against him giving out that information. Unless the Buddha’s interests had changed. Or unless Rankin had been misinformed by the Buddha as to the Buddha’s actual interests (Rankin recalled how a woman’s voice had answered Maynard Cass’s phone). Or unless Sloppy Joe-against-the-Coke machine had gotten his information not from the Buddha but from somebody (now he thought of Ornay Corale asking him if he’d found everything he needed) the Buddha had been forced to rely on.

  Rankin stood up.

  He walked down the corridor, past the line of vending machines. He ducked into an alcove leading to a storage room, out of Sloppy Joe’s sight but from where he could still see the soda machine and lockers. Heading to or from a small plaza of shops at the corridor’s end farthest from the terminal, people trickled by him. Rankin eyed them for a certain type. A stringy-haired guy in Army pants, a tattered plaid blazer, and red high-tops approached him in a few minutes from the plaza. Rankin reached out of the alcove and touched the guy’s sleeve. “Say, Capt’n.”

  The guy stopped and peered in at him. Rankin made him for half-to-three-quarters blitzed. “How’s a fiver sound to ya?”

  The guy swayed like he was standing in a brisk wind. “What I have a do for one?”

  Rankin dangled the key out toward him. “Go over them lockers, open number 102, get out what’s in it, and walk this way with her.”

  “What’ll I be walking with?”

  “A red-white gymbag.”

  “With what inside it?”

  “Junk. Personal stuff. Pictures my kids.”

  “Why’n’t you go get her?”

  “Fella there at the soda machine’s waiting on me to show so’s to hit me with back support papers from my ex.”

  The Captain’s eyes rolled sluggishly at the machine against which Sloppy Joe, making still to read the newspaper, was onehandedly lighting a cigarette. The Captain looked back to Rankin. “Nobody gone shoot me?”

  “Nobody gone do nothing to ya.”

  The Captain appeared doubtful.

  Rankin got out his wallet and slipped from it a ten-spot. “You ain’t probably got change, do ya?”

  The Captain shook his head.

  Rankin folded the bill. “I’ll have to give ya this here then.” The Captain reached greedily for the cash; pulling it back, Rankin pressed the key into the guy’s palm. “Ya get the bag walk right past me like I ain’t here. I’ll come up behind ya, grab it from you ‘fore you make the plaza.” He pushed the ten into the soiled blazer’s side pocket. “What number’d I say, Capt’n?”

  The Captain closed his fingers around the key. “One-oh-two.

  “I’m a onetime track star ain’t lost a step, Capt’n, understand?”

  “I ain’t going rabbit on you.”

  “I know you ain’t.”

  Rankin to get him started lightly shoved the Captain in the back. He thought, better safe than sorry. A black kid in a yellow do-rag came full-throttle through the concession area, past the Captain, pursued by two Hispanic kids in orange do-rags being chased by a white security guard. Rankin watched the four of them roar by him toward the plaza, their respective eyes betraying terror, a want of blood, a who-gives-a-shit look. When he gave his attention back to the wall, the Captain was standing perplexedly before it between two men and a girl putting things into or taking things out of three separate lockers. Exhaling smoke around his mouthed cigarette Sloppy Joe had the hand he’d lit up with back in his coat pocket. Rankin thought, maybe not Sloppy Joe; maybe pizza-face with the sailor’s bag between his feet and, in his lap, a folded crossword puzzle Rankin had yet to see him add to; or Amazon woman, if it was in fact a woman, in a cheap, spaghetti mop wig; or Mr. lame-looking, over-the-hill hippie in headphones drumming his fingers on his thighs.

  The Captain inserted his key into a locker not even close to oneoh-two. He kept trying to make it work as if he was sure he had the right one. Jesus, thought Rankin. He wondered if the guy couldn’t read; was too pickled to; had forgotten the Goddamn number. Finally he glanced at the alcove as if Rankin would yell the number at him. Rankin pulled his head back out of sight. He’d of done better, he thought, getting the thing himself. He peered out again to see the Captain showing his key to the girl, who was standing a little left of him. The girl said something to the Captain, in response to which the Captain, incredibly, handed her the key. The girl closed her locker. She walked, a blonde in a wool turtleneck dress, ahead of the Captain, for the wall’s other end. Rankin remembered why he’d long ago determined to rely in his life on as few people besides himself as possible.

  The girl stopped on the near-side of the two men, just as the older of them lit out with a box he’d retrieved toward the terminal. A shriek sounded in the woman’s can; boom-box music blared from up the hallway. The girl slid the Captain’s key into the locker facing her, as Rankin detected movement near the Coke machine. Diverting his eyes to the machine Rankin saw Sloppy Joe’s backside, in front of a trail of cigarette smoke, disappearing into the men’s room. Feeling pulled in too many directions at once he returned his gaze to the girl; she was tugging a gymbag from the locker she’d now gotten open for the Captain. The Captain reached to take the bag from her; the girl instead of giving it to him handed it to the man on her other side or the man, with or without her consent, grabbed it from her. The man took off half-running for the plaza.

  Rankin heard the Captain call out a weak, “Hey!” He’s got no clue I’m in the building or he knows I am but not where, realized Rankin in the seconds before the thief reached him. He stuck out his foot; the guy, in mid-trot, tripped over it and went down, still clutching the gymbag. In a millisecond, Rankin was on him, his right arm around the guy’s throat, his left one pinning the guy’s arms to his sides. The guy had muscle, but knew squat about using it. Rankin dragged him, the guy making whispery squeals through his traumatized windpipe, to the back of the alcove. Rankin glanced at the corridor. Passersby, acting deaf, dumb, and blind, tried hard not to look in at them. “You get one chance”—he eased up on the thief’s larynx—”to say how you come by the number.”

  The guy’s voice came out squeaky. “Come by what?”

  Rankin grabbed the guy’s right arm and pushed it up between his shoulder blades. The guy started to scream; Rankin stifled the scream with his other forearm.. “In ten seconds I’m out a here, but you might never be.” He gave the guy enough air to whisper with.

  “I knew what you wanted to hear, Mister, I’d tell you it. I swear.”

  “You rip off some bum’s bag for what, dirty sneakers?”

  “You never know who’s got what in ‘em.”

  Rankin pushed the arm higher.

  “Don’t do that, Jesus”—the guy gasped—”I heard him, okay, the bum? tell the girl it weren’t his locker, somebody’d hired him. I figured whoever did had to have something in there worth enough to pay a guy to get it.” Rankin spun the thief around; pressing his right hand into the guy’s neck, he pushed him up against the back wall. In reality or in his imagination the din behind him increased. Any moment someone would raise an alarm. This pretty-boy—thirty or so, dressed all right, stinking of bargain Brut instead of his own sweat—didn’t fit Rankin’s profile of a bus station grab-and-run man, but then it was a profile he was putting together standing there. A solid object—a gun, a knife, a wallet maybe—made a bulge inside the guy’s jacket. Rankin reached for whatever it was and the guy used his freed-up arm to hurl an amateur’s roundhouse at Rankin. Ducking the punch, Rankin brought a knee hard up into the guy’s groin, finishing him, as somebody out in the hallway started yelling for a cop. Rankin grabbed the bag and split.

  He headed at a fast walk back toward the terminal,
seeing, as he passed the lockers, the Captain, holding his head in his hands, slouched on the bench next to the lame-looking hippy. A cop hotfooted by him in the other direction. He saw no sign of the girl. Outside it was dark and the precipitation had changed from sleet to a light drizzle.

  * * *

  Hawaiian-print shirts and sunglasses for sale at a sidewalk booth coated in ice: a shirtless muscle-head doing one-armed dumbbell curls in a canopied doorway; a guy licking his wet reflection in an optometrist’s window; a hunch-backed, grandmotherly type to everyone she encountered melodically screaming “motherfucker.”

  Toting the bag through the rush-hour crowd, sensing that in taking it he’d passed an invisible line which, like a bird flying in front of a gale, he could only move farther away from. After nearly being mowed down in a crosswalk by a Cadillac convertible with its top down, whose snowsuit-clad driver, next to his snowsuit-clad date, blew a red light, he veered into a McDonald’s.

  Snot-nosed kids screaming. Slick floors. A greasy stench. Young punks fueling up. Old geezers escaping the weather. Coffee drinkers a million miles gone. He waited behind the front door a couple of minutes to see if anyone would follow him in. No one did. He told himself he was being paranoid; he answered himself that his paranoia to now had kept him alive.

  He entered the men’s room, joining a guy, wearing Jockey briefs over dancer’s tights, examining the inside of a Big Mac with his fingers as he pissed into a urinal. “Yours have meat in it?”

  Rankin ignored him.

  “Ain’t nothing in mine but a little transformer.”

  “Go show ‘em,” said Rankin.

  “Don’t think they don’t know.” The guy turned to Rankin. He pointed to the roll’s contents. “Any more than they ain’t listening to us this very second.”

  Rankin walked past him into a stall. After bolting the door, he lay his Payless bag on the floor and the gymbag on the toilet’s plumbing. He unzipped and pulled apart the gymbag, revealing inside it, atop a paper sack, a nickel-plated .38 revolver with a silencer screwed to its barrel. He picked up the gun, confirmed it was loaded and lacked a serial number. He placed it back in the bag, under the sack. He heard the guy wearing his underpants outside of his clothes talking to himself or to Rankin or to somebody the guy thought was listening to him through his hamburger. Rankin opened the sack; from a glance he knew it held, in fifty and one-hundred dollar packets, more money than he’d ever seen in one place. He didn’t count it; he no more doubted its amount to the penny than he doubted the course he’d obligated himself to. He felt around beneath the sack until he grasped a letter-sized envelope. He pulled out the envelope and removed from it a black-and-white photograph of a good-looking white guy in a nice suit. The guy looked to be in his mid-thirties, had dark hair, a mustache, a fighter’s nose, a rangy, health club build. Rankin flipped over the picture; on its back was a hand-printed address. Rankin envisioned himself pushing one of his black men into the Buddha’s back row; he saw the Buddha, as he kinged it, nod in his equivocal way.

  The bathroom door opened. He heard at least two people come into the room. He slipped the photograph into his shirt pocket, took from the gymbag and put in his inner coat pocket a packet of fifties, then picked up and shoved the Payless bag into the gymbag. He zipped the gymbag. A wiseassey voice past the partition said, “Let me help you eat that, retard.”

  He didn’t feel safe returning to the terminal to leave the money overnight in another locker as he’d originally planned to do; not with that earlier business and with him unsure of who’d orchestrated it. Nor did he care for the idea of stashing it in his room at the Sinclair. He wasn’t even sure, thinking of Ornay Corale, he favored going back to the Sinclair at all. He decided to keep the cash on him until he could find a secure place for it while accelerating his schedule so that his obligation and this Godforsaken city would be behind him by sunup. Squealing came from the outer room. Harsh laughter. Rankin opened the stall door to see a tattoo-covered skin head holding the guy in the underpants from behind while another hairless dirtbag, this one’s lips, nose, and eyebrows pierced by a dozen or so tiny, metal studs, force-fed his Big Mac to the underpants guy, who was crying and trying to keep his mouth closed. Rankin didn’t know exactly what about the scene made him so angry, though it had something to do with the helplessness of the Big Mac guy. He tried, as the prison counselors had preached, putting his anger into words but gave up and instead clobbered Spikes in the head with the gym bag, knocking him backward into a stall, then, sidestepping the onrushing Tattoo, grabbed Tattoo by the back of his leather jacket and bull-rushed him face first into a sink. He turned and, seeing Spikes struggling up from the stall can, nailed him in the left temple with one of his brand new Timberlands. This time the guy stayed sitting. And Tattoo, gushing blood from the center of his face, remained lying on the floor. Rankin turned to the guy in the underpants, who was cowering against the urinals. He pulled back the door to the hallway, held it open for the guy, and told him, “Go out there make them bastards give you what you ordered.”

  * * *

  A block from the restaurant he hopped an east-bound city bus. He put the gymbag on the floor between his feet. A girl maybe nineteen or twenty on the nearly full bus sat down next to him. She took out an emery board and started filing her nails; each was painted a different color. She had blonde, spiky hair; prettiness marred by what seemed to be a permanently stunned look; a fragile-appearing body in a knee-length, baggy sweater; a fresh, piney scent that made Rankin think of some woods he’d lived a few days in after one of the times he’d run away as a kid.

  The bus’s heater was broken. Words and exhalations came out in white puffs. Passengers bitched and moaned about their discomfort; some, like Rankin, swiped at the windows next to them to clear them of fog. Beyond the glass a smear of building, street, and vehicle lights gave the impression of moving in a continuous band while the bus stood still. Gangsta rap played too loud somewhere at the rear of the vehicle. Laying on his back, alone in a forest of creatures, gazing up through a tunnel in those trees outside of some town or city whose name he couldn’t remember (had maybe never even known) at harsh blue sky, at the winking sun, he’d dreamed of what? Taking root and growing a hard, thorny bark there. “Nice.”

  He glanced at his seatmate, who, after having given him her opinion of his boots, was chin-pointing down at them. “Gore-Texlined.”

  A statement, not a question, from the girl.

  She snapped her gum. “Know what they’re saying to me?”

  “Must be they’re whispering whatever it is.”

  “They’re telling me it loud and clear.”

  Rankin, feeling a touch jumpy, only kept looking at her.

  “They’re saying here’s nobody’s mark, a guy with a head on his shoulders, an eye to the future. Somebody knows to take care a business.”

  She slid the emery board into her purse.

  “A man always on the ready, keeps things just so—socks in one drawer, underwear in another, clothes neat in the closet so he ain’t got to waste time finding ‘em.”

  Rankin didn’t respond to her with so much as a blink. “Shit, nailed me, you’re thinking, and is this a Goddamn psychic talking at me or what, but even if I maybe am sometimes—psychic I mean—I got your story from the Timberlands.” She smiled; straight, white teeth; pink, healthy-looking tongue. “Most of who I know with money to lay out on footgear like yours before the real winter’s here’d have come away with something less practical—rattlesnake hide cowboy stampers say—instead of taking the forward looking route you have and ‘fore long they’d be pissing to the world ‘bout their frostbit toes.”

  “Maybe most of who you know’s rock-dumb.”

  She picked up her feet to show Rankin they were in fancy snakeskin cowboy boots.

  Rankin didn’t even smile. “They real rattler?”

  “A hundred-twenty bucks of eastern diamondback.”

  “No lining?”

  “No noth
ing but the snake and my freezing dogs in a pair a socks.”

  “I’d save ‘em for dancing. Buy me warmer ones for walking.”

  “Knowing that’s the sensible course won’t make me follow it feeling how I do in ‘em ‘cept for the cold.” She pulled from her sweater pocket a lighter and cigarettes. She fired up a smoke. “Shitty place to live ‘round now, yeah?”

  Rankin shrugged.

  “You ain’t got an opinion on it must mean you don’t.”

  “First I come here’s today.”

  “From where did you?”

  “South a ways.”

  The girl blew smoke up at the ceiling. “You ain’t giving away no secrets, huh?”

  “Secrets what you after?”

  “Ain’t that why anybody talks to strangers?”

  “I figure people got all kinds a reasons to.”

  “Suspicion a that kind goes with them boots.”

  “I got cause to be suspicious of you?”

  “I’ll say maybe for fear a flat out no’d turn down the excitement.”

  “You like it up high?”

  “Nobody buys boots like these knowing the cold that’s coming don’t like it all out.” She dragged again on her cigarette. She talked out the smoke. “I’m Florence.”

  Rankin tilted his head to her.

  “Way it works now you say what you want me to call you.”

  Rankin pointed a finger at his chest. “Sam.”

  “For Samuel?”

  “For Samson.”

  “Like the strong guy got done in by Delilah?”

  “First I heard that.”

  She laughed. “First you heard what?”

  “How he got done in and who by.”

  “Ain’t you read the Bible?”

  “A little, but a long time ago.”

  “You ought to go back to it. I do all the time.”