The Old Man with the Pincer

It was the pincer that gave him away.

Not the eyes, though I had seen where they were fixed. Not the walk, though it was too even for a bad hip. It was the small sound the tool made as he came on, step after step across the stones: tap, tap, tap, the steel rod ringing faintly against rock. It was a flat clean note, regular as a metronome. And between two taps, quite suddenly, it stopped ringing.

I heard it stop. I heard the silence where the note should have been.

I thought: he has lifted it.

"Frank!" I said.

I don't know why I used his name. It came out of me like a shriek, shrill and thin, and I scrambled up out of the mud on one knee with my hands clawing at the pier. He didn't turn. He was still looking at the storm drain, at the black wet mouth where Devon's flashlight beam swung and flickered, and his shoulders were bunched under the strap of the duffel in the half-crouch of a man listening for a voice in the dark.

"Frank, behind you!"

He turned.

…

I have seen it in my mind a thousand times since, and it has never once run at the speed it did in life.

The old man did not shuffle. The bad hip was gone, the stoop, the slow bent trudge. One moment he was a stooped little figure in blue, a man of seventy at the end of a long shift. The next he had straightened to his full height, which was not small, and the steel rod swung up and forward in a sweep so smooth and so practiced that it seemed to belong to another body. At the top of the stroke the jaws of the pincer gaped. And out of them, with a sharp metallic click, like a switchblade, slid a long thin gleam.

A blade.

It was narrow as a pencil and ten inches long, flat and bright, and it caught the red light of the fire and threw it back along its edge in a quick flash. It had been hidden in the grabber's mechanism, sheathed in the jaws, and the old man's thumb had slid back the trigger, and the whole thing had become a spear. He drove it straight at the canvas bag on Dunleavy's shoulder.

I screamed. I heard it. It tore out of me and rang under the arch of the bridge, a piercing animal shriek, and I think that if I had not screamed, if I had made no sound at all, the point would have found the cloth and gone through. Because it did not. For the space of a single heartbeat Dunleavy hesitated, and his head came round in the direction of the sound, and instead of turning to face the blade he turned with it, from the hip, with his shoulder dropped, and the point whistled past the strap with an inch to spare.

He was not young. He was fifty-two and heavy, with bad knees and a belly, and he moved like a man of twenty.

His boot came up.

It was a short, hard, brutal kick, aimed low, and it caught the old man's wrist with a crack I heard from twenty feet away. The pincer flew from his hand. It spun over the stones, glittering, and landed with a clatter, and the old man made a thin, wild, startled sound, a bark of pain. He staggered. His feet went out from under him on the slick rock, and he fell with a thud, flat on his back, and lay there gasping.

His cap came off.

It rolled across the stones like a coin and stopped against the base of the pier at my feet. I stared at it. It was a plain knitted blue thing, the kind you buy at a hardware store for four dollars, and it lay there on its side in the mud with a few white hairs caught in the wool.

Then I looked up at the face on the ground.

…

It was a good face. I'll say that. It was the finest piece of work I have ever seen. It was a face as lined and creased as a map, a wrinkled, brown, leathery old man's face, with a thin white mustache and heavy-lidded eyes and a long deep fold on either side of the mouth, spotted with the dark patches of age. And as I looked, with the firelight playing across it, I saw that it was coming apart.

It came away at the temple.

A thin pale flap of something, curling up like the skin of a boiled egg, peeled from the skin at his hairline. It was rubbery. It was the color of old candle wax. Under it was another face, quite different, a smooth pink healthy one, with a high forehead and a short nose, a face of fifty or so, red and sweating and furious.

"Mask," said Dunleavy, quietly.

He stood over the man, his arms hanging and his chest heaving. The duffel still hung from his shoulder, unscathed. He did not draw his gun. He did not need to. He put his boot flat on the man's wrist, where it lay in the mud, and bent, and with two fingers lifted the loose edge of the false skin and drew it slowly away from the cheek, from the jaw, from the neck, a peeling sheet of cunningly modeled latex, until it hung from his fingers like a flag.

"Silicone," he said. "That's fine work. That's a hundred dollars an ounce. Somebody paid for you, friend."

The man on the ground said nothing. He had a thick bull neck and a bristle of iron hair, and a small tight mouth, drawn into a white line. He glared at Dunleavy with eyes of the palest, flattest blue.

"I don't know you," said Dunleavy. "Do I?"

"No," said the man.

"Then who sent you?"

The man smiled. It was not a nice thing to see. He turned his head, slowly, on the stones, and looked past Dunleavy, past the fire, past the pier, until his eyes found mine.

…

Behind us, there was a crash.

I whipped around. It was the drain. A great wet clatter of iron, and a shout, and a long ugly stream of curses in a high male voice, and I saw Devon Tran backing out of the culvert on his heels with a figure in his grip. He had the boy by the collar of his hooded sweatshirt. He was dragging him out into the light like a sack of wet laundry, and the boy was kicking and writhing, spitting and swearing at the top of his lungs.

"Let go! Let go of me, you—I didn't do anything—you can't—"

"Hold still!"

"I want a lawyer! I want my lawyer! Get your hands off me, you pig, you—"

"I said hold still."

Devon flung him on the stones and put a knee in his back and wrenched his arms behind him. A handcuff clicked. Then a second. The boy lay with his face in the mud, bucking, cursing, with his legs kicking in the air. A gray cap lay beside him, battered, with a frayed bill.

Devon rolled him over.

I looked. I had not seen the face. I had known it only as a back, a shape, a flicker. He was young. Twenty-four or twenty-five, thin and sharp-featured, with a long narrow nose, a wisp of a goatee, and a wild bright restless pair of eyes that rolled in his head as if on a string. His lip was split. There was blood on his chin. He might have been handsome, once, in a shifty way. He looked, I thought, exactly like what he was: a boy who had been given a job by someone who did not care what happened to him.

"Troy Haskell," said Devon, reading from a wallet he had pulled from the boy's pocket. "Twenty-four. Last known address in Parma. Two priors, theft and a juvenile for arson." He looked up. "That's the name. That's the one on the school sheet."

"Hello, Troy," said Dunleavy.

The boy stopped struggling.

He lay on his back in the filth with his chest heaving and his manacled hands under him, staring up at the underside of the bridge. His eyes flicked from face to face. They found my daughter, who had come to stand beside me. They stayed.

Then, to my utter astonishment, he began to laugh.

…

It was a high, wild, breathy giggle, a schoolboy's, with a break in the middle of it. He laughed until the tears ran from the corners of his eyes. His shoulders shook. He rolled his head from side to side on the stones, laughing, and the sound bounced off the arch above us and came back.

"Oh, man," he gasped. "Oh, man. You think—you think that's it? You think the list's it?"

"Quiet," said Devon.

"It's one page!" He twisted his head to look up at Dunleavy. His grin was horrible, a gap of stained teeth. "One page! Out of the books! That's nothing. That's the table of contents, pal. That's the wrapping on the sandwich. You think the old lady would put the whole thing in a tube under a bridge? You think she was that stupid?"

"I said be quiet—"

"Ask her mother!" shrieked Troy Haskell, directly at me. His eyes had found mine and were fixed there, huge and bloodshot and brilliant. "Ask your mother, lady. She was the smartest of them. She hid things best. She hid things so good, even he couldn't find them. Twenty years. Twenty years and he's still looking!" He gave another cackle. "And you're going to find it for him. You're going to find the second thing. Aren't you? Because if you haven't found it by six—"

He broke off.

I felt, rather than saw, Dunleavy go still.

"—by six," said Troy softly, with great relish, "the cop's boy is first."

No one moved.

He turned his head again and looked, not at me, not at Dunleavy, but at June, small and white in the firelight, with her hands pressed against her coat. His smile faded. Something odd came into his face, a thin, sly, sidelong look, almost tender.

"Then her," he said. "And you."

"Devon," said Dunleavy in a voice I did not know.

"Sir."

"Gag him."

"Wait!" Troy cried. He was grinning again, and the grin was hideous. "Wait. I'm not done. I want to say one more thing. To the kid."

"Gag him now."

"You came back once, didn't you?" said Troy.

He said it directly to my daughter, in a low sweet whisper, as if he were telling her a secret. His eyes were as bright as a bird's.

"I know about you. Everybody knows about you. You went out like a candle and you woke up and now you think you've got it all worked out." He tilted his head. "That's the rule, sweetheart. One time. They give you one time. And then—"

He did not finish. Devon's hand closed on his jaw, and a roll of gray tape went over his mouth, three turns, four, and the words dissolved into a thick wet muffled hum. But his eyes went on holding hers, bright and unblinking, above the tape.

Luck doesn't last, they said.

I looked at June.

She did not flinch. She stood quite still, with her hands at her sides, looking back at him. But I saw the color go out of her cheeks, all of it, as if a hand had wiped it away.

…

They took the old man to a separate car.

I watched it from where I stood. They hauled him up, a thick-necked man with his mask hanging in tatters, and marched him up the steps between two policemen, and he went without a fight. At the top, by the cruiser, he stopped. He turned his head over his shoulder. His eyes searched the dusk, found me.

"Ms. Ostrander," he called.

His voice was quite different now. It was deep and dry, a voice from a radio, courteous and unhurried.

"A message, from Mr. Ashby. He asked me to be sure I delivered it."

I said nothing. My throat was shut.

"He says your mother owes him," said the man. "He says it's been twenty years and the interest is high. He says it's time to pay."

The cruiser door slammed. The engine caught.

Dunleavy stood in the road with his hands on his hips and his head bowed. Two ambulances had arrived, and a fire truck, and a swarm of blue uniforms. The burning sedan hissed under a white spray of foam. The injured officers were being lifted onto stretchers, wrapped in silver blankets, and they were both alive, and both talking. The air stank of burnt rubber and chemicals. The crowd on the bridge had thinned to a ragged line of gawkers at the rail.

"We're leaving," he said. He did not raise his voice. "All of us. Now."

"Where?" said Devon.

"Three cars. Three routes. Nobody takes the same road twice. Nobody uses a radio." He lifted the duffel off his shoulder and weighed it in his hand. "Maren, you and the girl ride with me. Tran, take Park's car. The prisoners go in a van with a driver I choose myself. Go."

…

It was twenty minutes to six.

We drove in the dark with the heater roaring and the windshield wipers off. Dunleavy drove. He took the car through a maze of back streets I did not know, dark brick avenues and shuttered shops, under overpasses and across railroad tracks, and he took the turns hard, with his jaw clenched and his eyes darting from mirror to mirror. The duffel lay on the floor between my feet. I could smell diesel. I had both hands on it, as if it might jump.

June sat in the back.

She didn't speak. She sat with her knees drawn up and her sneakers on the seat, small and quiet and straight, looking out the window. I turned in my seat to look at her. Her face in the light of the passing lamps was pale and composed and utterly still, and her lips moved a little, as they did when she counted.

"June?"

"There's nobody behind us," she said.

"That's good."

"Is it?"

Dunleavy glanced into the rearview mirror. I saw his eyes flick to her face and away.

"We've been driving eleven minutes," said June. Her voice was thin, level, almost dreamy. "Through four turns that make no sense. I've been watching. Nobody's followed. Not a car, not a bike, not a light. Not once."

"We lost them."

"No." She did not turn her head. She was watching the empty road unroll behind us in the mirror, black and wet and gleaming, under the streetlamps' yellow stare. "Nobody following means they already know where we're going."