The Unlucky Man (8 page)

"Harry Katch," I said slowly, "Must be the single worst fake name I ever heard."

Unimpressed at this, Corg pointed out the obvious, "He’s a fake guy."

"Yeah," I agreed, "But I don’t think you’re supposed to advertise the fact."

Corg harrumphed but I could tell he felt mollified by this exchange. Running a meaty paw over the bald plate of his head he gunned the engine once more and eased us back into motion. Outside the window, the clouds continued to swirl.

Eventually, we had to stop. Driving without end and purpose was wearing away at our collective nerves, but Corg’s especially.

I’d taken the opportunity to change into my spare suit – an awkward proposition as we had continued to drive - and was revelling in the feeling of wearing shoes once again. However, despite my newfound comfort, I could feel Corg getting more and more tightly wound as the minutes ticked by. I tried to engage him in conversation a couple of times, but each time was stone-walled with sullen silence as he grew increasingly closed off and taciturn.

We left the car in a deserted street and headed into an unloved all-night diner, the kind of place that catered mostly to long haul drivers and dedicated night-owls, to drink coffee and collect our thoughts.

The glass front was decorated with frayed pictures of playing cards stuck onto the dirty window and the name above the door said Trixies in a faded, looping script. A lonely bell tinkled despondently as we pushed open the once bubblegum coloured door, revealing a sad collection of faded red booths over a chess-board floor and black and white pictures on the walls of rock’n’roll starts from decades passed. The shell of a juke-box huddled in one lonely corner.

I approached a disinterested waitress leaning on a spotted plastic counter whilst Corg slunk into a booth with his back to the wall and sat glowering.

"How’s the coffee?" I asked her with all the pleasantness and feigned nonchalance I could bring to bear.

She fixed me with a singularly uninterested, jaundiced look. "Best coffee in the building," she said, one eye on a small TV locked in a Perspex cage showing rolling news with the sound turned way down low. I tried to place her accent but came up blank.

"That so?" I asked.

"Yep." She sighed and gave me all of her washed out attention for a few brief seconds.

"Two coffees," I said. It wasn’t the kind of place to sell more than one type or give them fancy names. She reached behind her to where a dirty glass jug was percolating and, if I was any judge, burning into soup, and poured two thick cupfuls.

"Cream?"

I looked at the state of the jug. "I don’t think so." With a shrug she turned her full attention back to the television and I carried the drinks over to Corg in his chosen booth. I watched with distaste as he poured five or six shots of sugar from the dispenser then sipped his coffee and grimaced.

"How’s your syrup?" I asked him.

"Barely tolerable," he growled back as I took a sip from my own cup and was forced to agree: the gritty, greasy liquid tasted like charcoal that had been roasting for hours then mixed with potter’s clay. I set it down and, in the face of Corg’s continued silence, looked around the diner.

It had a lost, almost forgotten feel. The booths and plastic benches, once red, had faded to a uniform pinky grey, pitted with cigarette burns and scars. The floor too was rough and neglected, the Formica tiles, black and white and probably deco once upon a time, now shabby and peeling. Much like the coffee, everything seemed to have a layer of grease spread thinly over its surface.

Depressed by my surroundings, I turned my back on the interior of the diner and directed my attention out of the streaked window instead.

An almost equally dismal view met my eyes; a cold, grey street, touched with chill early morning sunlight, robbed of any warmth or colour. The road was empty, an unwelcoming line of desolate shop fronts and tired, shabby buildings.

An auto-repair shop across the way seemed to be the only other sign of life on the whole street, its barred window lit by a lone dirty yellow bulb that was mirrored in the deep puddles forming on the sidewalk.

For a while I watched this marooned reflection as the raindrops rippled and disturbed the surface of the water, spreading strange, dull neon patterns in their wake, an ever shifting, circling inkblot of dirty blues and oranges.

A sharp intake of breath from Corg brought me back to the real word. I looked over at him but found him staring fixedly past me.

"Damn."

I turned and followed his eye-line and found the TV screen - and my own face - staring back at me, Corg’s big bald head lined up next to it. The set was behind a cage of thin wire mesh and smeared with grime but I could still make out enough to put together a pretty good guess as to what was being said by the newscaster. Quite clearly, the word "murder" stood out bold and loud through the grease.

As the picture cut to a shot of the burned out husk of "Last Rights" - the place I’d worked for over half a decade - still smoking damply in clouds of thick grey fog, I remembered the waitress.

"Wait," I said imploringly, half stood up, trying to disentangle myself from the booth. I don’t know what the end of that sentence was going to be but it turned out not to matter as she bolted away, spiderlike, through the door into the back with a surprising burst of speed. We both clearly heard the unmistakable sound of a bolt being shot.

"What the hell is this?" Corg hissed.

"Never mind that, how much do you want to bet she’s got a phone in there with her?" I said. He rolled his eyes.

"We need to go. Again," was all he said in reply, wrenching open the door with such force that it bounced off the opposite wall, gouging a big chunk of plaster from the already crumbling facade in a cloud of dust. He glanced at the damage, almost guiltily, then shook his great head and stepped out into the rain. With one final glance at the television, which had resumed coverage of our twin photographs, I followed him out.

Back in the car and moving again. Whereas before it had felt like a prison, it now seemed more like a welcome sanctuary, warm and shut-off from the hostile world outside, the soft glow of the dash fading in the grey morning light.

I thought back to our faces on the TV screen, my own dark eyes and unruly hair, Corg grinning massively, the edges of a Hawaiian shirt just visible in the corners of the frame, the ridiculous, colourful cocktail that I knew him to be holding cropped out of the image.

"I know that picture," I said aloud, making Corg jump, "The one of you on the news. I recognise it - Heechey’s birthday last year. That god-awful theme bar we ended up in."

"So?" Corg said, nonplussed. He was squinting through the front window as we coasted along identical narrow streets. The rain had really picked up again, its continuous flow obscuring his view, drumming an insistent, repetitive beat against the glass. Oddly, our new danger seemed to have revitalized him somewhat, reducing his sullenness back to normal atmopsheric levels.

"So I took it, it’s on my laptop. They’ve been in my flat." It was obvious really. After all, they’d been waiting, watching Corg’s place, it made sense that they would have set up on mine too. Still, it was an upsetting feeling to imagine faceless shadows creeping through a space I considered my own, a private space, gloved hands rifling through my papers, my cupboards, my life.

With a sudden dislocation, it occurred to me that I couldn’t go back there. At the same time, I recognized that I had nowhere else to go either - no cash, no ID, no phone. On some level I must have known all this already, but full recognition still came with a bump.

"One of those isn’t a problem, at least," Corg said, which meant that I must have been vocalizing all of these thoughts rather than keeping them confined to my head.

"What do you mean?"

"Open the glove box," he said with a small smile. I did as I was told. "Now reach in and feel around the catch."

I fumbled for a moment with the metal clasp. Just when I was I was getting pissed at him for jerking me around, the lock popped in with a click and the false ceiling of the compartment slipped down, revealing a large, fatly stuffed brown jiffy bag of the type that’s always filled with cash in the movies. I had a look inside and it
was
filled with cash; all different denominations, most slightly dog-eared, none of them new, definitely enough to last us for some time.

I whistled. "Any other surprises?"

"There’s a sawn-off taped under my seat." There was a twinkle in his eye, but I could tell this wasn’t a joke.

"So where do we go?" I asked.

"Well," Corg said, more cheerful now than at any point since we'd left his apartment. I guess he just needed some direction. "I’ve been thinking about that. Seems to me the law is not our friend any more, right?"

I nodded.

"So I guess we go where there is no law." The sound of the wipers was loud in the pauses between his words.

"It’s time we headed over the bridge."

Old Links Bridge loomed ahead, a great, grey path to nowhere. After all the rain the river was high and rough, iron waters flowing in a fast torrent, swirling and bubbling not far below us as I leaned against the hood of the car and tried to ignore the wind whipping the rain into a frenzy about my head.

Corg dialled a number from his mobile when we stopped and let it ring a couple of times before hanging up. We were waiting for a callback, he’d said, and so we had sat in tense silence, expectant for his phone to buzz. Eventually the long minutes had gotten too much for me and I’d been forced to step out for some air.

The river was surging, swollen from all the new fallen water, pushing dangerously at its banks. If the storms didn’t break soon then it was going to flood for sure. I pictured it, rising up and swallowing the long expanse of bridge, spreading hungrily over roads and sidewalks in an insatiable, dirty iron tide.

With this mental picture came another childhood memory popping like a bubble from out of my subconscious, another event I hadn’t thought about in years. They were coming thick and fast recently.

I must have been about ten or twelve when the town we lived in flooded one winter. The season had been particularly mild, they had said on the television, and the rains unprecedentedly strong. There was a creek ran through the base of the town, down from the old rail yard where we used to hang out and play and this had grown fierce and wild with all the rain, spilling its edges and swallowing the yard.

And it wasn’t just the rivers either, I remember hearing my parents talk about it, caught snatches of the news, about how all the fallen water had saturated the land and couldn’t run off anywhere but instead just kept piling up and up until half the town seemed to be underwater. I think they evacuated the whole lower end to the high-school where everyone had to sleep on camp beds in the gymnasium for a couple of days.

My best friend and neighbour at that time was a kid the same age as me named Tony and his old man had a boat - a small thing no bigger than a canoe steered with two plastic oars. Staring at the water below me, I could picture every facet of that boat like it was only yesterday: the rubberized layer around the top, the black plastic of the rowlocks, the peeling paint around the base where it was painted the green of old leaves to the off-white tarnished finish of the body. Tony and I had spent a couple of days in that thing exploring the town we grew up in, seeing it in a way we never had before.

Everything had looked completely different in the flood. The spreading water had turned familiar pathways and gardens into an exotic alien landscape of blue green pools that shone like glass. Buttoned into rain slickers, with the drops drumming down onto our hoods, making a perpetual noise that was like being under canvas, the two of us intrepidly explored our new world of watery byways and waterlogged streets.

Often we would travel in silence, the only sound the splashing of our oars in the water. We could have been alone in all the world, or so it seemed to us at the time, although in retrospect I suspect memory has edited the scene to remove the support workers and community members battling pretty much around the clock to halt the rising tide.

Our fun came to an end when we stumbled across the bloated corpse of Henry Loomer, who everyone called Old Henry, a drunk who was well known throughout the town. The first we knew of Old Henry was as a strange shape in the water, bobbing against the ebb and flow of the swell. At first I think we thought he was a piece of debris, carried on the current, but when Tony leaned out of the boat, oar extended, and prodded the mysterious shape it floated round to face us.

Henry was swollen and discoloured by his time in the drink but we recognized the tangle of his beard and the camouflage coat he always wore and we started screaming and hightailed it back to dry land and our parents as fast as we could pump the oars through the water, kicking up a foam of waves in our wake. We thought we’d uncovered a murder, I remember, but in the end it was decided that Henry had just wandered off in his cups and it was exposure that had done for him in the end.

I hadn’t thought about that winter, or Tony, for what felt like an age. He moved away when we were both teenagers but I heard from him from time to time. He had gotten into Snowboarding in a big way, and was good at it too the way I heard it, maybe good enough to go pro. Then I heard that he’d died in a car crash – ploughed his car straight into a tree after some party or other the year after we both would have finished college. I sighed, remembering. Tests had shown that he was coked up to his eyeballs when it happened.

The cold spray of the choppy waters splashed at my face, startlingly cold and brutal. It forced me back from my memories and I turned to see that Corg was at last on the phone, his face lit by its cold white light, looking tense and wooden. I watched him, feeling a growing unease at his body language, until he hung up. I gave him a few moments for composure, in case he needed them, before heading back, the river gurgling menacingly at my back.

"OK," he said as the door bounced shut behind me, "We’re in. We cross and we drive and wait for them to call again with a place to meet."

I knew that he had crossed the bridge before, something I myself had never done, but I had no idea how often, or who Corg’s contacts were or, come to that, why he seemed so edgy as he put the car into drive and edged onto the floating span.

Our tires sounded oddly loud on the old surface of the bridge, another grand structure from a forgotten age. Twin pillars loomed on either side, braced against the backs of two great stone lions, one roaring, one poised and regal, both now ravaged and distorted by the elements. On either side the river thundered and churned.

"Watch your step," Corg said at last as we reached the end the bridge, breaking a contemplative silence, illuminating some of his concerns.

"When we get there. These people are serious so don’t fuck around and don’t give them a reason to get pissed off."

"After the night we’ve had?" I asked innocently, and we drove on in silence, Old Links Bridge and the river behind us slowly receding into memory.

It soon became clear that the news reports on what was happening on the old side of the City across the bridge had not been the product of simple hyperbole. In fact, if anything, the stories had fallen short of reality. It was a war zone.

Straight off Old Links we encountered a sign welcoming us to the Old Quarter. The original words were messily erased, scribbled away under a layer of red paint and someone had amended the sign so that it now read, "Welcome to the Wildlands," in spiky bold letters. Several holes in the sign that looked they had probably been made by small arms fire added to the general feel of the piece. I cut a glance at Corg but his eyes were locked firmly on the road ahead.

To begin with the streets were deserted, but all looked as if they had recently seen action and bore the pock-marking scars of bullets and the ashy legacy of fire. Here and there chunks of missing brickwork and holes on the sidewalk suggested a history of explosives at work. One building we passed was missing a whole front wall, the debris from the destruction spewed out and smouldering over the road.

"What’s been happening here?" I asked aloud, staring at the destruction all around but Corg only shrugged his big shoulders, looking around him with as much confusion as myself.

"I don’t know," he admitted, pale in the weak light of day.

"But you’ve been over here before?" I said, "Wasn’t it the same last time you were here?" Corg shook his head a little guiltily.

"No," he said, "Not like this. It was bad, getting worse every time I came over I guess, but nothing like this." He drove on in silence but I could tell he had something else to say. "I haven’t crossed the bridge for quite a while," he confessed at last, burdened by a heavy conscience.

"How long?" It wasn't really such a surprise, after all, things couldn't have deteriorated so fast or so far overnight.

He screwed up his face as he thought about it. "Six months," he said in the end. "At least."

More broken buildings floated by and small, tragic, pieces of everyday life began to show up on the street, little things in the main – chairs, plates, a discarded toy. At one point we were forced to veer around the burning wreck of a van pushed across the way in a makeshift road-block. It all looked disturbingly like something from a war movie. I had never seen anything like it.

A hollow feeling was rapidly building in my gut as the lifeless minutes ticked by.

"How did you get involved over here?" I asked at last in an attempt to fill a growing ominous silence as well as answer a question I had always wondered about. I think Corg too sensed the need to fill the empty air as he leapt at the chance to expand on a part of his life he usually kept pretty close to his chest a shade more eagerly than, perhaps, he otherwise would have.

"You ever meet a guy called Zach Mellor?" he asked, by way of starting his story and I shook my head. "Well, Zach and me used to be pretty tight, once upon a time. He ran a garage near where I used to live, over on Coble Avenue? Anyway, Zach and me used to hang out a fair bit, drink and play pool in the back of his shop mostly." He paused to weave around a stack of tyres that stunk like a dentist’s drill in full spin.

"One day, Zach tells me about this poker game he’s a part of, plays a couple of times a month."

This detail didn’t hold any surprises. Along with his other vices, Corg never could resist betting on cards. He wasn’t an inveterate gambler but he was definitely a sucker for a flutter. Actually, that was wrong, Corg’s problem - in my experience at least - was not that he couldn’t resist a bet but that he was never that good at picking the odds.

"The thing about this game, Zach told me," Corg continued, carefully manoeuvring around a chunk of fallen masonry, "Was it was over the bridge." He paused dramatically, "There was no way I could turn that down."

Through the window I saw the first sign of life we had encountered since crossing Old Links. A group of figures were gathered conspiratorially around a steel trash-can from which yellow and red flames danced merrily in stark contrast to the muted colours on display everywhere else.

They scattered as the light from our headlamps swept over them, melting back into the tunnel system of buildings at their back, casting long, distorted shadows in the twin beams. They wore scarves and bandanas over their faces, hoods up so all you could see of their features were their cold, serious eyes. They wore dark, stealthy colours, nothing too bright, browns and muddy greys in the main. In the brief glimpse I got before they slipped away I could see that all of them were armed and all of them looked like they meant business.

Corg watched the shadows as we passed, alert to any threat that might emerge from them but they remained empty even after we had moved on. He returned to his tale only after we had covered some further empty distance and seen no other indications of life save the two of us.

"Zach took me across the bridge, that first time. You can’t imagine how different it was to what it is now. This was a couple of years ago, back when people still crossed over regularly, back when the train still ran this way even." Corg’s face clouded briefly in memory.

"That first time, it was the middle of summer, there was some kind of street party going on, all night. It was real hot that day, I remember, and everyone was out in the street and there was beer flowing everywhere and people letting off fireworks. I never did find out what it was all for."

I looked around at the gloomy, rain drenched streets, at the rubble and debris everywhere, and tried to picture Corg’s party of memory. Somehow I couldn’t marry the two scenes together.

"Anyway, Zach got me in on the game. It was outdoors, in the ruin of this old theatre, lit by a couple of floods and a whole bunch of fairy lights all hooked up to a generator, I think. Big table set up and everyone sat on little garden chairs. It sounds funny, it looked funny, but there was some big money floating over that table."

He sighed. "Well, I did alright by myself that night, nothing fancy, but I came away on top." He glanced over at me from his vigil on the road, "I know what you’re thinking," he said, "But it’s true I did fine. You know me - we’ve played a few hands in our time - I never make a big win; I either break even or lose everything, guess I’ve got the wrong mentality for it."

"Your poker face isn’t great," I said but he waived that aside.

"So I did OK," he repeated, "But Zach, he bottomed out completely. I’d left the table by then, first I heard about it was him whispering in my ear in that old crabby voice of his. I was talking to this dynamite red-head, turning on the old Corgen charm, when Zach comes up and whispers “Corg man, I’ve made a deal with some people.”" He looked reflective for a moment. "Never did get her name."

"Turns out Zach had come up with a solution to his problem and that fix involved me." Ahead of us a beaten-up people carrier burst onto the road, packed with more hooded, masked figures. We both tensed, waiting to see what was to come, as Corg eased off the accelerator so as not to come too close. For a long moment the driver stared at us, the face of a skull adorning the scarf that hid his features, giving him a leering, devilish quality.

And then they were turning away from us, apparently deciding we weren’t worthy of interest. We were both clearly able to make out the glint of automatic rifles as those in the back turned their attention on us for the brief moments of their retreat.