The Insides by Jeremy P. Bushnell

Author:Jeremy P. Bushnell [Bushnell, Jeremy P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-547-6
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2016-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

12

ADVANCES

“He’s moving around,” Maja says. Her eyes are closed. Her fingers rest lightly on her forehead. She holds the young man in her mind, envisioning him as a bead of light, drifting through a luminous net of mismatched grids.

“Don’t lose him,” says Pig, steering the car around the same block for the third time. They’ve been driving aimlessly for half an hour, unwilling to leave Brooklyn but also afraid to stop moving, knowing that they aren’t that far from the double homicide they left behind them.

“I’m not going to lose him,” she says. “You need to remember that I’m actually good at this.”

“Yeah?” Pig replies. “Well, you need to remember that you need to tell me what the fuck is happening.”

“I told you what is happening,” she says. “He’s moving around.”

“Right, but—moving around like what? Like fleeing the city?”

“I don’t think so. He doesn’t seem to be heading toward an airport.”

“Bus station? Train?”

“Possibly,” she says. “He’s crossed back over to Manhattan. But unless he’s prepared to flee with only what he’s carrying—”

“We could follow him over there,” Pig says. “Go to Port Authority, head him off?”

Maja opens her eyes, thins her lips, shakes her head no. “If he does decide to get on a bus, you aren’t going to be able to stop him,” she says. “An enormous bus terminal is very visible, very public; it’s the last place in the world you’d want to attempt an engagement.”

“I just don’t want him to get away.”

“But that’s what I keep telling you,” Maja says. “He can’t get away. If he gets on a bus, we follow him. In fact, you want him to get on a bus. It puts you at an advantage. It will be easier to engage him literally anywhere a bus might go than it will be to engage him in the middle of New York City.”

As they near the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, Pig pulls the car over into an open spot on the side of the street, kills the engine. “All right, fine,” Pig says. “He can’t get away. I get it. But I don’t just want to sit here.” He snaps his hand out toward the windshield, a way of condemning the street beyond it. “I want to drive. That’s my job. I drive the car, I fuck up the people who get in my way: that’s what I do. But you know what your job is? Your job is to get me closer to this guy. Your job is to tell me where the fuck I should be going. So why don’t you do that before I get tired of talking to you.” She becomes aware of his presence, a big man, sweating in the August heat, filling the car with the stink of his anxiety, his impatience, his rage.

So what it will look like, between them, when he finally does get tired of talking to her? She understands that it could happen, and she understands that she must plan for it, prepare: the same thing she does with any other uncertainty.

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