Free Parallel Lies by Ridley Pearson

‘bout some Latino. Didn’t even offer a bottle or nothing. What the hell is that about? Since when do we rat out a fellow rider …for nothing?”
    “What about this Latino?”
    “How the hell should I know? He put that hatchet to me because I was black. Wasn’t about to hit no white boy.”
    “Who else was in camp with you?”
    “They’re all long gone. Believe it. A rider gets hurt like I did, you split. Plain and simple.”
    “There were four others.”
    “New guys. The small one—he don’t like people of color. Kicked the shit outta me when I was just lying there. The others? They just watched him do it.”
    “The big guy. The guy who did this. White?”
    “Damn straight. Lumberjack, he was. Wide as this car. And he weren’t no rider, though he came off a westbound freight and wanted us to think he was.”
    “Why do you say that …about his not being a rider?”
    “Believe me, you know. He was one of you, not one of us.”
    Tyler pulled into the gas station and bought a six-pack of Bud. The guy hit the first can too hard, especially lying down as he was, and threw up before Tyler had the car moving.
    Tyler ran around the car and heaped snow onto the pile of vomit and got it out of the car as quickly as possible. The wounded man had pulled himself up on his elbow, enough elevation to work more of that beer down his throat. “Sorry ‘bout that,” he said, burping foully into the enclosed space.
    Nell Priest wouldn’t be happy about the hygiene. But Tyler was positively beaming. They had a witness and descriptions of two men, a lumberjack and a Latino.
    According to the forensic tech, two men had battled in that boxcar. Tyler finally had a pair of suspects. And this time it would be him telling Priest, not the other way around.

CHAPTER 7
    Alvarez, sitting in the plane’s window seat, row twenty-seven, would never have been mistaken for a hobo. For the flight from Chicago’s O’Hare to New York’s JFK, he wore fresh jeans, a black T-shirt, and a thin, black leather jacket that didn’t quite help enough against the cold. Only his boots remained the same—and these he had cleaned of the blood while changing in a bus station’s men’s room. He wore a pair of Ray-Bans, his face trained away from the other passengers and out the small, cold window. He would not be remembered on this flight.
    The fresh clothes had been recovered from a duffel/backpack left checked a week earlier at Chicago’s Greyhound station. The bag now carried the blue jeans and the red-and-gray flannel shirt he’d stolen. He’d thought better of disposing of those in the bus terminal’s trash—no reason to leave the bastards easy evidence to follow. He had soaked his own bloody clothes in lawn mower gasoline from the garage and burned them in a hole dug in the snow, deep in the neighboring forest. He’d stayed with that small fire until every last thread had burned. He was taking as few chances as possible.
    A second snowstorm had tracked in from Canada and had buried Chicago, less than twenty-four hours after St. Louis had been hit. This most recent storm had delayed his flight three hours. Hours spent anxiously with one eye on Airport-CNN and the other on the busy concourse. He’d hardly slept. He had a massive headache, and he was hungry. If he tookthe Carey bus from JFK to Grand Central and then the Lexington subway down to Bleeker, if everything went right—no more delays—maybe he could still make his meeting with McClaren, a meeting he needed if he were to pull off his larger plan.
    No rest for the wicked,
he thought, an ironic smile playing over his slightly bruised face as he gazed out at the endless clouds. There had been a time in his life when that vast sameness would have felt peaceful. But no more. He saw only lies heaped upon lies. Butchers in blue suits and boardrooms. Anything but peaceful. Now he, too, had contributed to that lack of peace—he had single-handedly derailed and destroyed a half dozen