The Corpse Wore Pasties (9 page)

Krash thought about it for a moment, ran a hand through her Mohawk, and punched me in the stomach.

Another band member—the biggest one—grabbed my collar and led me down the street, where all the stores were closed and foot traffic was nonexistent. Krash walked with us, hitting me in the arm every couple of steps, each punch slightly harder than the last. The other three members of the band tagged along behind.

I was starting to get the feeling that this conversation was not going to go well. It was time to extract myself from the situation, in the most expedient manner possible.

Lucky for me, I was wearing, as I often do, a shirt that fastened with snaps rather than buttons. I prefer shirts with snaps. Makes them easier to remove quickly, which is a plus in my line of work. And you never know when a piece of clothing from your wardrobe will make its way into a number.

Ease of removal was a plus tonight, too. I lunged forward, tearing the shirt open as I did, and ran, leaving the garment in the hands of my escort. And I kept running, across Broadway, towards City Hall. The park was closed this time of night, but the winding pathway between the Tweed Courthouse and City Hall stays open later. If I made pursuit difficult enough, maybe the drunken band members would decide they’d prefer to return to Danny’s Deep-Fry and finish packing up their equipment, rather than chasing me around downtown.

As I passed the cluster of concrete chess tables that lined the path, I shot a glance behind me. Had my plan worked? No such luck. All five were sprinting across Broadway towards me. I had a good head start, but Krash and the biggest one were beginning to catch up. And they looked like they were enjoying themselves. Great. They’d gotten themselves all riled for a pummeling, and they weren’t going to give up their punching bag just because it was running away.

I popped out of the pathway and into the wide pedestrian mall on the other side of City Hall. I glanced around, assessing my escape options. From this vantage point, I could see four choices nearby:

Option 1: The 6 train. There was an entrance to my left. Now, in almost every movie, TV show, or after- school special ever written about New York by an L.A. writer from Ohio, the escapee running away tries to elude capture by ducking into a subway station. This is something no self-respecting New Yorker would ever do. Look, it’s
the subway.
When you get into the station, you’re going to have to
wait for it to arrive
. For
at least
10 minutes. On the same platform
as the people chasing you
.

This is not a viable escape plan.

Option 2: Downtown, via Park Row. Not a chance. Like I said, the financial district shuts down after dark, and is full of twists, turns, and delightfully dark alleys in which I could be beaten up with impunity.

Option 3: Uptown on Centre Street, similarly abandoned at this time of night. Where, just a couple of blocks north, there was a park perfectly situated for a quiet and unobserved pummeling.

Option 4: Brooklyn. Across the street from me was the pedestrian ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. Sure, getting all the way across would be a bit of a hike, but I figured no one in their right mind (and certainly no one who’d left all their instruments at a venue called Danny’s Deep-Fry) was going to chase me across an entire river and into a different borough.

You’ve already seen how well that worked out.

So, there I was, four and a half minutes later, halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, half-naked and completely out of breath.

The porkpie that the breeze had taken off my head was lying a dozen or so feet away, directly in the path of the oncoming horde of hair-metal rockers. Krash, her mohawk flapping from side to side as she ran, and the big guy—who still had my shirt clutched in his hand—were quite a bit ahead of the rest of the band. Even at this distance, it was clear that the three bringing up the rear were several beers worse for wear.

To hell with it.

I like that hat.

I ran directly at them, screaming my lungs out, hoping the element of surprise would shake them.

They weren’t surprised. Amused, maybe. Not surprised. I had forgotten that I was dealing with people who probably pulled this sort of maneuver all the time.

The big one was in the lead. He leapt over my hat and we barreled toward each other on a collision course. At the last minute, I dropped my shoulder and hit the ground rolling. Hair Metal did the instinctual thing and jumped. I tumbled under him and popped back up onto my feet, grabbing my porkpie as I did so.

Ow. That sort of thing didn’t hurt as much when I was a teenager.

But I had my hat back. I also had a problem. Because the slower three members of the band were catching up. The faster two had turned around after I rolled past them, and were heading back in my direction. Which meant I had made myself lunch meat in a heavy metal sandwich.

I pulled my hat down, as tightly as possible, over my long, beautiful hair.

I was surrounded. And even if I could find some way to break away, there was a stitch in my side telling me I wasn’t currently in any shape to outrun even the drunkest rocker in the band.

I glanced around. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go backward. There was only one way I could go. One place I didn’t think they would follow me.

To my right and left were the railings that separate the wooden walkway in the center of the Brooklyn Bridge from the cars on either side. The pedestrian path is raised a couple dozen feet above the inbound and outbound vehicular traffic, to make life more difficult for potential jumpers, I suppose. You’d have to be fairly committed to crawl across a steel girder and over three lanes of speeding traffic just to make a dramatic leap into the East River.

I was fairly committed. Not to suicide, but to putting some distance between my body and the fists of Krash and her crew. I backed away as they advanced, making sure my ass was pointed in the direction of one of the railings. When butt hit wood, I hopped the railing as smoothly as my aching muscles could manage, turned my back on the band, and walked out onto one of the steel girders.

My attempt to remain upright lasted exactly two steps before I dropped to all fours and started crawling.

The girder was cold under my hands. My hands were sweating. The sweat was cold. The rivets hurt my knees. Whine, whine, whine. I crept forward, slowly, slowly. Below me, the late-night traffic was mostly taxis—yellow cabs, car services—and those drivers didn’t slow down for anything. I tried not to look. If the fall didn’t kill me, there’d be no dearth of speeding livery to finish the job.

The breeze picked up. Wind whistled past my ears.

Wow,
it seemed to be saying,
you’re a moron.

I chanced a look over my shoulder. Krash and the band were standing at the railing, watching me crawl.

“Fuck, yeah,” said the guitarist. Well, one of the guitarists. From what I’d seen of their instruments, I estimated that there were four in the band. Anyway, the big guitarist. The one with my shirt. He stepped over the railing onto the girder. And started walking toward me.

Once again, I had underestimated the stupidity of an idiot.

I need to stop making mistakes like that.

The guitarist was walking the girder like a tightrope. And catching up.

This was turning into a problem. If they’d caught me on the bridge, or in the park, they probably would have skinned their knuckles on my face a little and that would have been that. A few bruises, maybe a black eye, a broken rib or two at worst. Nothing permanent. But if I was going to be facing off with a heavy metal rocker with no instinct for self preservation on a narrow steel girder twenty feet above a cascading automotive death river, not to mention two hundred feet above a cascading watery death river, my chances of fatality had grown exponentially.

I decided not to mention this to Filthy.

And I kept crawling. As I did, I attempted to reason with him.

“Hey”—I said over my shoulder as I went—“why don’t we head back to the middle of the bridge and hang out? Or, you know, whatever it is we were planning to do before we got on this girder. I’ll turn around if you will!”

He grinned and kept walking towards me.

Bright kid.

And then, suddenly, there I was, at the end of my girder. Right on the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge. My options had suddenly dwindled to a) down, b) far down, and c) extremely far down (and quite wet). My friend was about a third of the way across, but he was closing the gap.

Now would be an excellent time to think of something clever. Like, oh, I don’t know, maybe I could jump onto the roof of a speeding taxi. On the other hand, smashing my head repeatedly against the girder would probably achieve the same basic effect with significantly less effort.

“Hey, look,” I said, pointing out over the water toward the Manhattan skyline. “The Chrysler Building!”

The guitarist looked, nodded, shrugged. And kept coming.

Well, there went that plan. Whatever it was. I looked around to see if I could come up with any other brilliant ideas.

And I did. Well, not brilliant, exactly. Fairly stupid, actually, when you got right down to it. But it was an idea.

Driving toward me on the roadway below was one of those damn tourist buses. The double-decker kind with open tops that drive across the bridge in the middle of the night to give camera-happy visitors to our fair city a chance to snap the sort of blurry memory of the Manhattan skyline one can only really achieve in a moving vehicle barreling across a bumpy bridge.

It was driving in the lane that would take it directly under me. Where it would offer a surface I could drop onto that was both considerably flatter and considerably closer than any other available option. No, it wasn’t a smart thing to do, per se, but—but nothing. It wasn’t a smart thing to do.

I was going to do it anyway.

I swung my legs over the side of the girder and let myself down, keeping my arms tightly wrapped around the cold metal. My pursuer was about halfway across. The wind had picked up again and even given the lack of regard for his own life he had so far displayed, he was forced to move more slowly.

Please don’t change lanes. Please don’t change lanes.

I could see the faces of the tourists on the upper level of the bus as it approached. They seemed vaguely interested. Vaguely. Hey, a man hanging from a girder is great and all, but isn’t that the Empire State Building just over the water?

I lowered myself until I was hanging just by my hands. My legs kicked in the air. Damn it, my palms had never been this sweaty. If I lost my grip and dropped in front of the bus instead of on top of it...well, at least it would make an amusing obituary.

The bus rattled closer. The guy behind me on the girder got closer, too. It was a coin toss which would get to me first. I could hear the tour guide, standing with his back to me, saying into a microphone, “In 1885, Robert E. Odlum was the first person to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, plunging...”

That was as good a cue as any. The bus was directly under me now. I lifted my legs to avoid kicking the tour guide in the head, then let go of the girder.

I dropped into the aisle, hitting it exactly as planned, between the rows of seats on either side. What I hadn’t planned on was physics: the forward momentum of the bus swept me off my feet and I went head over heels down the aisle. I tumbled forward, narrowly missing the steps leading down to the lower level, landing finally at the back end of the bus with my head on the floor and my feet in the lap of a rather surprisedlooking elderly gentleman.

Not the most graceful performance of my career, but at least I was on the bus and not under it.

Over the grey hair of the man whose pants my shoes were currently dirtying I could see the guitarist standing in the middle of the girder, watching the bus drive away. I winked at him as he receded into the distance. He probably couldn’t see it.

I rolled backward, popped to my feet, and adjusted my porkp—oh, crap. Where was my hat?

The porkpie lay at the feet of the tour guide, marking the spot in the aisle onto which I had dropped. As I started forward to retrieve it, the wind took it instead and blew it up into the air.

I reached out and grabbed.

And this time, I caught it.

I donned the hat and bent the front of the rim down. You know, for style. I smiled at the blue-haired couple next to me. Then I reached into my back pocket and handed them—oh, yes, I always carry a few with me—a postcard for my next show. They looked at it, smiled, nodded, and looked generally confused.

A woman in front of me leaned over and whispered to her companion, “I betcha the bus company organized that. Happens every trip, I betcha.”

The companion shook her head, and said, “Only in New York. Only in New York.”

I hate people who say that.

The F Train wasn’t running.

It took me another two hours to get home.

I crawled into bed next to Filthy.

“Tomorrow you can pretend to be a fireman!” she mumbled.

I ignored her.

Oh, god, Times Square. That neon-encrusted, advertising- infested, flickering heart of New York; seedy before they gussied it up at the end of the last century, but with a certain gut-wrenching charm. Even seedier now, though in a different way. Not as run down, but run out. No cleaner, though mopped. No safer, though patrolled. No better, though upgraded. Like one of those Atlantic City casinos that was redecorated instead of being destroyed, but without the gambling to offset the depressive tackiness of the decor. Offering the same wealth of shopping possibilities available at your least favorite mall and all the crowded charm of your least favorite riot. Times Square: the pop-up ad in the center of Manhattan.

I can’t believe people still have offices here.

I woke up aching and battered, but doggedly determined to finish my conversation of the previous night. Because, let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the way my interview with Angelina Blood had played out. So I wanted to talk to her again—this time, for more than three minutes, and in a place where she didn’t have backup.