Gone Tomorrow Read Free Page B

just resigned, and grave, and scared, and tired. She was staring up at me with the same intensity she had been using on the opposite window. She looked completely alert and aware. I felt completely scrutinized. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything.
    ‘It’s late,’ I said. ‘You should wait for rush hour.’ She didn’t reply.
    ‘Six more hours,’ I said. ‘It will work much better then.’
    Her hands moved, inside her bag.
    I said, ‘Not now.’
    She said nothing.
    ‘Just one,’ I said. ‘Show me one hand. You don’t need both of them in there.’
    The train slowed hard. I staggered backward and stepped forward again and reached up to the grab bar close to the roof. My hands were damp. The steel felt hot. Grand Central, I thought. But it wasn’t. I glanced out the window expecting lights and white tiles and saw the glow of a dim blue lamp instead. We were stopping in the tunnel. Maintenance, or signalling.
    I turned back.
    ‘Show me one hand,’ I said again.
    The woman didn’t answer. She was staring at my waist. With my hands high my T-shirt had ridden up and the scar low on my stomach was visible above the waistband of my pants. Raised white skin, hard and lumpy. Big crude stitches, like a cartoon. Shrapnel, from a truck bomb in Beirut, a long time ago. I had been a hundred yards from the explosion.
    I was ninety-eight yards closer to the woman on the bench.
    She stared on. Most people ask how I had gotten the scar. I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want to talk about bombs. Not with her.
    I said, ‘Show me one hand.’
    She asked, ‘Why?’
    ‘You don’t need two in there.’
    ‘Then what good can it do you?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I had no real idea what I was doing. I’m not a hostage negotiator. I was just talking for the sake of it. Which is uncharacteristic. Mostly I ‘in a very silent person.
    It would be statistically very unlikely for me to die halfway through a sentence.
    Maybe that’s why I was talking.
    The woman moved her hands. I saw her take a solo grip inside her bag with her right and she brought her left out slowly. Small, pale, faintly ridged with veins and tendons. Middle-aged skin. Plain nails, trimmed short. No rings. Not married, not engaged to be. She turned her hand over, to show me the other side. Empty palm, red because she was hot.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said.
    She laid her hand palm-down on the seat next to her and left it there, like it was nothing to do with the rest of her. Which it wasn’t, at that point. The train stopped in the darkness. I lowered my hands. The hem of my shirt fell back into place.
    I said, ‘Now show me what’s in the bag.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I just want to see it. Whatever it is.’
    She didn’t reply.
    She didn’t move.
    I said, ‘I won’t try to take it away from you. I promise. I just want to see it. I’m sure you can understand that.’
    The train moved on again. Slow acceleration, no jerk, low speed. A gentle cruise into the station. A slow roll. Maybe two hundred yards, I thought.
    I said, ‘I think I’m entitled to at least see it. Wouldn’t you agree?’
    She made a face, like she didn’t understand.
    She said, ‘I don’t see why you’re entitled to see it.’
    ‘You don’t?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Because I’m involved here. And maybe I can check it’s fixed right. For later. Because you need to do this later. Not now.’
    ‘You said you were a cop.’
    ‘We can work this out,’ I said. ‘I can help you.’ I glanced over my shoulder. The train was creeping along. White light up ahead. I turned back. The woman’s right hand was moving. She was juggling it into a firmer grip and slowly shaking it free of the bag, all at once.
    I watched. The bag snagged on her wrist and she used her left
    hand to free it up. Her right hand came out.
    Not a battery. No wires. No switch, no button, no plunger.
    Something else entirely.

FIVE

    THE WOMAN HAD A GUN IN FIER HAND. SHE WAS POINTING IT straight at me. Low down,