Free The Last Good Day by Peter Blauner Page A

any of the pictures.
    “Sandi, this is the third message I’ve left.” Lynn sat in the Saab, making a call while she waited for Barry’s train. “I just want to say it really sucks that you stood me up like that last night. Friends don’t treat each other that way.”
    She saw a line of cars slowing down before they left the lot and a big man with a clipboard and a flashlight leaning in to talk to each driver. Something about the way the brake lights glowed in the gathering dusk sharpened the sense she’d had all day that a connection in the town’s underlying mechanisms was not functioning properly.
    “Look, just call me and let me know everything’s all right,” she said. “You’re so fucking irresponsible sometimes it drives me nuts. Call me, you old whore. I miss you.”
    A fine haze was coming off the river as the 8:07 pulled into the station with a gust of relief. Doors popped open, and commuters stumbled out onto the stark fluorescent-lit platform like big-headed aliens disgorged from a flying saucer in a Spielberg movie.
    Mike stood by the parking lot exit with his clipboard and flashlight, watching the elongated silhouettes descend the stairs, remembering how he used to love to come to this station as a kid for its hypnotic rhythms, the tide of commuters coming and going, the unholy racket of the old diesel engines pulling in. The hours he wasted on the bedroom floor with cruddy old toy trains he’d inherited from his brother, Johnny. There was a shiny Tonka model he wanted his mother to get him from Angelo’s Candy Store and Deli around the corner. A midnight-blue die-cast model of an Old 58 Union Pacific steam engine. It killed him not to have it. Every day he’d beg for it, his need churning like wheels in his head. But she squeezed every nickel so tight she made Jefferson look like a forceps baby. And so one day he just took it. Put it right in his pocket when no one was looking, where it became another part of the secret world he always kept hidden from her.
    He watched the commuters getting into their shiny Outlanders, Caravans, Escapes, Expeditions, Land Cruisers, Sequoias, and Tahoes. Rich people’s toys. Two by two, headlights came alive in different sectors and gradually formed a line moving toward him, their beams piercing the dark and revealing little misty swarms of circling gnats.
    “Excuse me, sir?” He stopped a fiftyish guy in a white ’99 Lexus and came around to the driver’s window. “We’re doing a routine canvass because of the incident at the train station this morning.”
    “Oh, look, I really need to get home.”
    The guy’s breath smelled like Cutty Sark, and his eyes were light-bulbs with the filaments burned out. What the hell’s he doing getting behind the wheel of a fifty-thousand-dollar car stewed to the gills? On almost any other night, Mike would’ve pulled him out and made him walk a straight line.
    “We’re just trying to see if anybody might have any relevant information about how this body turned up here …”
    “No, no, and no … I took the later train.”
    “How about last night? Were you at the station?”
    “No, I drove yesterday. Can I go now?”
    A lone Volvo horn beeped behind him, remote and cautious. “Thanks for your help, sir.”
    “Yeah, you too, buddy.”
    Four more cars passed with nothing to say. No one saw anything. No one knows anything. City people. He remembered the way his father would shake his head and hiss through his teeth when they cut him off at the River Road intersection in their snazzy European gas-guzzlers. Middle-aged men with cue-ball scalps and long sideburns. Mike looked at his watch, seeing he’d been at this for almost two hours. His calves ached, and his knees were still killing him from soccer practice. More than two weeks since his last real full day off. He noticed that his lungs were still bothering him, and again he wondered about the toxins he’d breathed in at Ground Zero.
    Some things kill you