Free Underground Airlines by Ben Winters Page A

just behind my heartbeats, rushing through my veins behind my blood. Like all I had to do was get cut and they’d come oozing out, a thick pulp of bad memories.
    I worked so hard to keep everything inside, but now here I was. A poor boy at the Crossroads Hotel, pacing the thin flowered carpeting, feeling the squish of old blood beneath my feet, feeling blisters on my toes burning in my boots.
    I don’t know when or how I fell asleep. I must have at some point, but I know I lay awake in my bed a long hour, many long hours, just working that shit out of my system.

10.
    “Mr. Dirkson? You better get up. Come on and wake up now.”
    I opened my eyes, and there he was, legs kicked up on the rickety hotel desk, eyes bright with laughter. The cop from the restaurant. The black one. Car number 101097.
    He saw that I was up and he raised his eyebrows and his smile widened, crocodile wide. “You’re mumbling in your sleep there, man,” he said. “You having some bad dreams?”
    I found Mr. Dirkson’s voice before I opened my mouth: timid fellow, nervous, waking up confused from a restless slumber. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. I said. Fumbled for the spectacles that he wore, which I’d kept folded by the bedside clock. “Officer? What—what seems to be the problem?”
    The cop chuckled and swung his legs off the desk, planted his sturdy brown patrolman’s shoes on the carpet. He palmed his chin and leaned forward. I slipped the glasses onto my nose and pushed them up, my eyes darting from his eyes down to his belt, to the service pistol snug against his hip. A Glock. A lot of major metro forces, they carry Glocks.
    His skin was moderate chestnut, sunflower highlights, number 145. When my eyes found his face again, he was smiling, but his eyes were no longer laughing.
    “Now, Mr. Dirkson,” he said calmly. “We need to have us a little talk, don’t we?”
    I thought, Goddamn it all to hell, but what I said was, “Goodness gracious.” In Mr. Dirkson’s mouse voice, eyes widening with surprise. “Am I in some kind of trouble?”
    “Funny thing about that question,” said the cop. “Any time anybody ask if they in some kind of trouble, they know that they are. And they usually know what kinda trouble they in, too.”
    He laughed; I could tell from his face that the man liked to laugh. He was a handsome devil, this grinning young cop. Nice nut-brown skin and nice white teeth, nice big, expressive eyes, nice neat Afro, short and sharp. He sat tipped back on the chair, fingers laced behind his head, amused as all heck, waiting for me to say something. I wondered how far he had gotten. Did he know simply that I was not Jim Dirkson and that I had no wife? Or had he gotten as far as Mr. Bridge? As far as Gaithersburg, Maryland? Had he cracked the trunk of the Nissan, broken into the double-locked false bottom, and found the bag of fake IDs and hundred-dollar bills?
    I wondered, too, if there was a silencer on the Glock. That wasn’t standard equipment for a policeman’s gun, but there are plenty of cops who put ’em on.
    Car number 101097 stood up and scratched the back of his neck, advanced casually toward me across the room. On the notepad on the bedside table was a ballpoint pen, and there was a way to drive it through a man’s trachea, but he would drop me first with the Glock. He had reflexes. I could see it in his movements, graceful and self-controlled, like a ballplayer.
    “I’m sorry, Officer, but I’m uh…well, I’m a bit confused. What is it that I can do for you?”
    I half rose out of the bed, and he motioned with two hands, palms down, stay where you are. He sat right next to me.
    “You had supper a couple nights ago with Father Patrick Barton, the parish priest of Saint Catherine’s Church on Meridian Street.”
    He said this as a grand announcement, like I was supposed to be amazed already by how much he knew, and so I took it that way, letting my mouth drop open.
    “You ate down at the