“That there’s the dead man’s switch,” the old geezer informs him.

  “What’s it do?”

  The old man shrugs. “Not much. Just a safety measure—so you don’t croak at the controls and leave her high and dry.”

  “Whattya mean?”

  “If you ain’t made no adjustment in two-and-a-half minutes, you gotta hit that dead man’s switch or she shuts down. She thinks you’re dead.”

  Marky-Mark giggles. “That is so fucking cool.” He gazes out the side window. The passing lights look like spinning Christmas trees, and floating reindeers, and glittering stardust spewing across the rushing darkness. He feels better. He feels like everything’s going to be okay. He feels loved, he feels brave and powerful and true. “So, like, what’s the speed limit for one of these things?”

  “Speed limit for a commercial passenger train is eighty miles per hour,” the old man tells him. “But you gotta back off down here to ’bout sixty-five, seventy.”

  The train bumps over the bridge, then keens around a gentle curve in the track, a sudden blizzard of sparks jumping across the darkness.

  “Whoa—that is so rad, man!” The kid takes it all in with wide-eyed narcotic wonder. “Those sparks are so fucking radical!”

  “Yeah, them things are pretty neat,” the old man says with a nod, and then spits a gob of tobacco juice in a paint can on the greasy floor at his feet. He glances again over his shoulder at the kid. “You love trains... don’t ya, kid.”

  “Huh?” Marky-Mark is staring through the windshield at the dark wilderness, curling around the flanks of the train like the wake of a black sea.

  “You just love trains.”

  “Hell yeah.”

  The old engineer measures his words. “You’re pretty sick, ain’t ya.”

  “Sick? Oh yeah. Right.” Marky keeps staring at the light show outside the windows. “I got brain cancer, man. It’s a bummer.”

  The old man sucks his cheek. “That’s a damn shame.”

  “Yeah, I’m totally gonna die and shit.”

  The engineer wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “How’d you like to take the stick?”

  “Huh?”

  Charlie McDaw grins a rotten-toothed grin in the darkness of the cab. “I think you’re ready to take control of this old girl.”

  * * *

  Five minutes later, Oswald feels the train jerk again, speeding up in fits and starts, and he finally gets out of his seat, head buzzing with nervous energy.

  He stands there in the middle of the aisle for a moment, gripping the luggage rack for purchase, as the other passengers murmur nervously around him. Heads are turning. The nun is pressing her face against the window, the businessman gripping his briefcase against his chest like a suckling nfant.

  Freddie “Forty-Five,” in the far corner, is sleeping through the whole thing, the paper tented over his face. Across the aisle from Felson sits a woman Oswald hadn’t noticed before, a little Arab lady with a makeshift burqa, her eyes wide and alarmed inside the opening of her veil.

  Oswald turns and starts down the aisle toward the metal door between the engine and car number one. Through the portal window he can see the blue strobe-like flare of sparks from below, flickering up against the gap between cars.

  Over the space of a single instant, Oswald’s brain swims with all the possibilities. The herky-jerky ride could have something to do with the set-up. But who was being set up? Was it Felson? Or was it Oswald? And why spook the passengers? Why tip off the civilians?

  Oswald gets halfway to the connecting door when the train shudders sideways.

  The shift in gravity tosses Oswald against the seat backs, then sends him tumbling to the floor. With a gasp, he lands on his ass, two of his stitches snapping, his flak vest pinching his injured ribs, the pain stabbing his side, as a chorus of yelps rises up from the other passengers. Some of them are trying to stand up now, or reaching for the overhead luggage rail.

  “The hell is going on?!” barks the businessman.

  “Something’s wrong,” says the nun, hugging her armrest for dear life.

  The train shivers and speeds up again, the steel wheels shrieking outside. Oswald climbs to his feet and uses the headrests as hand-holds to steady himself as he struggles against the g-forces toward the connecting door. “Stay in your seats!” he calls out to the others, taking charge for no good reason.

  He reaches the metal hatch at the front of the car when the train shudders again.

  Freddie “Forty-Five”—feigning slumber and trying to figure out what to do—grips his cut-down pistol-grip 12-gauge bazooka under the newspaper, the shotgun loaded for rhinoceros with thousand-grain armor-piercing shells, when the train rocks suddenly to the left, nearly throwing him out of his seat.

  This time, it feels as though the whole goddamn thing is going off the rails. The passenger cabin groans and creaks as the metal wheels howl outside, levitating off the rails and then banging back down on the track with a spectacular thud.

  Freddie slams against the window, the paper sliding off him.

  An old lady’s voice pierces the air. “Sweet Christ, we’re gonna crash!”

  Ducking down behind the seat, hiding the shotgun under the seat back, Freddie Felson silently curses that stupid, idiotic fucking retard Mark Ferri for fucking this thing up. What was the old man thinking?

  And what is Freddie supposed to do now? They told him to wait until Michigan City before he made any moves—but this is ridiculous!

  He peers over the headrest in front of him, and sees the Indian at the front of the car, pressing his fat face against the porthole window in the hatch.

  What the hell is that fat-body doing? Is he trying to get off the train? It looks like he’s trying to run. The son of a bitch is trying to run. If he gets away, the don is going to have Freddie’s pancreas for lunch with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

  Freddie carefully, slowly, gently pumps a shell into the shotgun’s breach.

  Then he makes his move.

  36.

  “JESUS CHRIST ON A HALF SHELL, KID—WHATTYA DOIN’?! WHATTYA DOIN’?!”

  The old engineer cries out in the flickering darkness of the cab.

  “It’s so—it’s like—so beautiful—it’s like time travel,” Marky-Mark babbles, hunched over the console like a drunken mad scientist, yanking levers and randomly playing Whack-a-Mole with all the pretty buttons. The drugs are peaking, the speeding train coursing through a kaleidoscope of blurring signal lights and passing Salvador Dali trees.

  “Pull back on that red stick!” the old man implores in a steel-wool rasp, his voice full of holy hell as the gravitational forces throw his brittle bones back against the iron bulwark.

  He bangs his ass against the riveted conduit and sees stars and then claws at the pipes for purchase.

  Marky drools on the console, shoving the throttle all the way forward. The engine roars and the walls of the cabin shiver and groan. The needles on the console are climbing past a hundred and change. “I can see my mother’s womb! I can see it! My mom’s womb!”

  Old Charlie McDaw makes one last desperate lunge for the kid’s arm.

  “NO!”

  Marky shoves him off without even looking. At that precise moment, the train jerks violently, and the old man tumbles backward, this time smacking the back of his skull on the iron entrails of the power plant.

  McDaw collapses, sliding down the wall—down, down, down—and out for the count.

  Gerbil sees the dick with the shotgun get out of his seat right as the train bucks and surges with the force of a gigantic angry bull getting spurred. Some of the luggage spills out of the bin, cracking open on the aisle floor.

  Screams fill the air as Gerbil sucks in a sphincter-tightening breath and death-grips her armrest.

  The prick with the cannon tumbles against the opposite seat and nearly drops the weapon, but somehow he stays on his feet, struggling to hold onto seat backs as he inches his way toward the front of the car.

  None of the other passengers have noticed the gunman yet. They’re too busy screaming or holding onto anything nailed down as the train pitches and yaws faster and faster and faster, the wind whistling now through the vents, the wheels singing metallic arias on the rails.

  Oswald is up there at the fore-hatch, madly trying to jiggle the handle open.

  Tearing the veil from her face, Gerbil grabs the opposite armrest and pulls herself into the aisle. The g-forces are pressing down on her now like she’s in a wind tunnel, the muffled shrieking steel-on-steel noise beneath her rising through the undercarriage.

  She frantically searches for something to use as a weapon as the other passengers start to figure things out.

  “OH MY GOD, NO!” yowls one hysterical voice.

  “HE’S GOT A GUN! HE’S GOT A GUN!” cries another.

  Gerbil spies something metallic shining on the floor and lunges for it.

  The train lurches. One of the windows cracks down the middle. Gerbil gets her hands on metal object at the exact moment Oswald’s voice rings out, penetrating the din.

  “EVERYBODY DOWN ON THE FLOOR!”

  Bracing himself against a metal hand-hold, Oswald watches Freddie “Forty-Five” Felson coming down the aisle with the elephant gun, looking like Ward Bond in Wagon Train.

  “Git yer hands up, Injun!” Freddie’s voice is stern and shrill as he staggers forward with each pitch and yaw of the train.

  “Calm down, Freddie.” Oswald cannot take his eyes off that huge cut-down muzzle, which is pointed directly at him, and he cannot stop thinking that he could very easily be responsible for at least a half a dozen deaths tonight on this very train once a firefight breaks out, and he cannot let that happen if he wants to avoid going to hell, so he screams again for everybody to get down.

  Like laboratory rats scattering in a maze, the passengers duck down behind seats, flop to the floor, crawl behind fallen suitcases, and cower down into the creaking corners as the vapor lights outside the windows blur past the train at a faster and faster clip, like a vast electrocardiograph signaling an imminent heart attack.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down,” Freddie says, approaching with the bazooka in Oswald’s face. “You calm down—you calm down!”

  “Freddie, there’s something I should explain—”

  “Git yer hands up, cocksucker!” Freddie’s close enough now to breathe his garlic breath in Oswald’s face, the muzzle of the shotgun only inches away. The train pounds over a bridge, and the dome lights flicker.

  Oswald can see a figure lurking behind Felson, but cannot identify it yet. “Okay, Freddie, just take it easy, just take a deep breath,” Oswald says, raising a single hand as though he’s in a classroom and has a question.

  “Raise ’em both!”

  Oswald sighs. “Freddie, the thing is, if I raise ’em both I’ll fall over.”

  Felson sticks the bazooka in Oswald’s face. “GODDAMNIT, RAISE BOTH THEM HANDS!!”

  Oswald complies, rolling his eyes. “Freddie, you got this whole thing backwards.”

  “Shut yer trap! I need to know something—before I air you out.”

  “If I could make one point—”

  “CLAM UP!”

  “Okay, all right, I’m just saying, if I was gonna pop you, don’t you think I woulda done it by now?”

  Felson blinks. “What does that have to do with the price of broccoli?”

  “I’m here to save your life, you idiot.”

  Felson smirks. “You’re here to save my life.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Isn’t that heartwarming.”

  Oswald shrugs. “It is what it is, Freddie. What can I say?”

  “Bullshit!”

  “You’re on the to-do list tonight, Freddie. I’m the only one’s gonna get you off it.”

  The train pitches as it thunders and screams around a curve, the sparks jumping in the windows, the overheads flickering off again, and now Oswald can see the figure behind Felson a little more clearly, a girl, sneaking up on the skinny thug with a big, shiny object in her hands.

  Felson lets out an angry chuckle. “A regular Robin Hood, this guy.”

  “Actually, Freddie, I’m not a hundred percent sure that’s the analogy you want to make.”

  “Whattya talkin’ about?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. I don’t give a flying fuck about the poor.”

  Behind him, the figure is edging closer and closer to Felson. Only inches away, her face becomes visible in the overhead light.

  Oswald freezes. He lets out a pained breath. His guts fill with ice. “Oh shit no... no, no, no.”

  Freddie cocks his head. “What’s the matter? You scared to die?”

  The floor quakes, the lights flickering, the car pitching. Oswald gazes past Felson at the girl standing in the aisle with the tuba. The massive instrument shimmers and reflects the blur of lights outside the windows.

  Oswald closes his eyes, shakes his head, and mutters softly, “Goddamnit, Gerbil, how the hell did you—?”

  Felson blinks. “What did you just say—? Did you just say—?”

  “I warned you.” Oswald’s voice is hoarse with emotion, cracking a little. “Goddamnit, Gerbil, I warned you. I told you to stay away.”

  Felson frowns. “Who the fuck you talking to? Some imaginary animal lives up your ass?” Felson glances over his shoulder—at the precise moment that Gerbil Goldstein swings that massive tuba at him.

  The blast pops open the air like a flash bulb in the flickering train car, and for a moment Gerbil Goldstein thinks somebody just slapped her in the face. She jerks backward in a cloud of cordite and buckshot. A chorus of screams erupts all around the car.

  The impact drives Gerbil to the floor, the tuba flying out of her hands, the big brass bell evaporating like a flower gobbled by a Weedwacker.

  Lying on the aisle floor, ears ringing, eyes flash-blind, half her face charred and stinging from the stray shot-wash, she realizes with a sudden intake of air that the tuba just saved her life.

  Gerbil rolls over and pukes half her guts out in a noisy, heaving retch. Her pounding head and the roar of the train distract her from the menacing shadow looming over her, accompanied by the sound of Freddie Felson’s voice: “That was not nice,” he says, pumping another shell into the breach. “That was downright—”

  A hard, sharp thwack rings out, making Gerbil flinch. Blinking convulsively, shivering, she gazes up through watery eyes at the skinny gunman towering over her. Felson stands very still, head cocked, eyes bulging. The shotgun falls out of his hands.

  THWACK!

  Oswald hits Felson again with the leather sap, this time putting all his might into the blow, which lands squarely on the man’s skull above his left ear. Felson topples then—landing in a fetal position on the aisle floor—looking almost tranquil in his stupor.

  “Mommy, can you hear me...?”

  At exactly 9:43 p.m., eleven miles west of Michigan City, Indiana, in the darkness of the vibrating cab, Mark Ferri travels back in time to his own birth. The epiphany comes in waves, in great plumes of blue sparks like radiant violets against the windshield.

  “It’s Marky, Mommy, can you hear me...?” Marky has tears on his face as he pushes his way through the moist envelope of his mother’s imaginary womb, his right hand death-gripping the throttle.

  The train is screaming, the world tapering into a narrow tunnel—a phosphorous opening, a star gate—as Marky pushes it all the way back to the moment he was born.

  “MOMMY, I’M HERE!”

  There is a loud snap, and the throttle comes off in Marky’s hand... sealing the fate of the Kalamazoo Superliner and the seventeen souls on board.

  37.

  Jimmy “the Cucumber” is hunched in the back seat of the Morellis’ Lincoln Navigator—which is idling in the darkness of a handicapped parking place about a hundred yards west of the Michigan City Amtrak station—when the first signs of the approaching train appear on the dark horizon. “Is that our bucket of bolts?” he says, reaching for the door handle.

  “Looks like it,” mutters Jack Morelli, glancing at his watch in the front passenger seat.

  Through the tinted window, the modest little station sits in the darkness to the east. A tree-lined boardwalk lit by gas lamps fronts a meager brick building, its windows glowing with cold, fluorescent light. The platform is deserted, the adjacent track stretching off into the night.

  In the distance, a pin-prick of silver headlight is visible on the horizon.

  “Showtime,” says the other Morelli brother, grabbing his hit kit.

  Doors clunk open, and the three enforcers climb out of the SUV with all their heavy artillery tucked into duffel bags and hard-shell cases, their breath showing in wisps of vapor visible in the sodium light. To a casual observer, they might look like members of the Geek Squad, or a trio of information technology managers en route to some office complex somewhere, equipped with diagnostic tools.

  “Goddamn thing is hauling ass,” Jilly Morelli comments as the trio crosses the platform.

  They stride across the deserted boarding area, and they pause near a spindly fruit tree laden with tiny Christmas lights. Less than a quarter of a mile away, the Superliner’s headlamp blooms and grows at an alarming rate—the rising clatter of the train like a drum solo in some free-form jazz piece.

  “Get ready,” Dalessandro orders, and from the sound of his voice it’s clear the man is in a zone. He wants zero margin of error. Nestled cozily in his duffel bag, which is slung over his shoulder, are twin Remington 8-gauge shotguns, their double-barrels shortened and vented, their stocks modified with pistol-grips.

  “Shouldn’t they be slowin’ down a little?” Jack Morelli wonders aloud, gaping at the speed at which the train is approaching.

  Jack Morelli has a matching pair of tricked-out nine-millimeter Glocks in his case, each one fully automatic and modified to accept Israeli army mags.