The dining car slides another fifty feet and comes to rest in a cloud of dust.

  41.

  The breathless stillness that follows is almost as jarring and abrupt as the collision. Oswald gasps for air, pinned under a fallen booth, his skull throbbing. Outside, somewhere in the distance, sirens wail. Car alarms howl, the crackle of flames sizzling through the night air. Somewhere to the east, the white noise of a breached water main floods the valley.

  Oswald blinks and blinks, and tries to get a breath into his aching lungs. The dining car, resting on its side, sits ticking like a broken clock. Liquid drips somewhere, either blood or coffee. Summoning all his strength, Oswald pushes the broken booth off his midsection and manages to sit up against a cracked window.

  He swallows the pain and takes a shallow breath and looks around the capsized car.

  Special Agent Brian Cosentino—also known as Jimmy “the Cucumber” Dalessandro—is about fifteen feet away, barely visible in the blue haze, on his hands and knees, trying to catch his own breath. The back of his shiny sport coat is coated in broken glass. He still has his ID tag dangling from his neck, and still grips the cut-down Remington in his big gnarled hand. He manages to rise up on one knee, brushing the glass off himself.

  Oswald starts to say something when he stops himself, and listens.

  Outside the overturned car, rising over the din of sirens, alarms, and crackling flames, comes a familiar sound that Oswald initially cannot identify. At first it sounds like the rustling of leaves or maybe raindrops falling on a tin roof. But neither of these sounds seems particularly probable or feasible at this point.

  Oswald cranes his neck to see through a six-inch gap that has formed between the damaged hatch and the dining car’s undercarriage.

  Through the narrow opening he can just make out the southern edge of the switchyard—the barbed-wire fence along the property line, and the thick forest of white pine beyond it—all of it flickering in the roaring flames. A cement viaduct rises above the tree line.

  Oswald smiles.

  The sound he’s hearing is applause, and the source of the clapping is coming from the viaduct, which stretches a hundred yards across the southeasternmost edge of the switchyard.

  * * *

  Rows of onlookers line the weathered precipice along the tracks. At least a hundred of them, maybe more. Like carrion crows, they peer down at the wreckage with keen interest, nodding and clapping, their ghostly silhouettes translucent against the black sky, like cut-out figures made of a smoke, the light from the flames reflecting off their cadaverous visages. At the center of the group stands Matilda in her angelic gown, her lustrous blonde hair flagging in the breeze, her laugh lines gone, her skin like satin. Even at this distance, the expression on her lovely, soft face is one of relief, satisfaction, maybe even pride.

  Oswald’s victims flank his late wife. Alberta Goldstein is there, waving sadly, fading out like a stain washing away against the night air. The Dead Accountant with the Broken Eyeglasses is clapping robustly next to her, like he always knew Oswald had it in him. The Dreadlock-Wearing Drug Dealer is cheering, and the Crooked Politician with the Neck Scars is whistling, and the Bloated Gambling-Addict Corpse is whooping and hollering, and even the Sucking Chest-Wound Gangbanger Dude looks impressed, nodding and making the raised-fist salute.

  Only the Head-Wound Kiddie-Porn Guy is still disgruntled—standing there with a scowl, his arms crossed against his blood-sodden chest. Slowly fading away, the guy holds onto his grudge like a security blanket.

  As the row of onlookers evaporates in the moonlight, fading into the fabric of shadows, Oswald sees Matilda lingering like a sparkling hologram in the night... until she stands alone, ghostly and radiant on the precipice.

  She smiles. She tilts her head in that adorable fashion that had always melted Oswald’s heart. He knows what that head-tilt means. He knows all the water under the bridge represented by that slight canting of her head. He sees it now, unspooling behind her, a magical flicker show on the dark clouds scudded across the sky.

  He sees their awkward-sweet courtship, the night they snuck into the drive-in, the time they made love in a rowboat in the Des Plaines. Even the sad moments flash like fireflies against the sky, the doctor informing Matilda she could never get pregnant, the quarrels, the money problems, the car accident, all of it. Oswald watches, transfixed, as the memories of a marriage flash and subside, slowing fading like a candlewick guttering out.

  A moment later, Matilda’s ghost floats down to the ground with the weightless grace of a feather. “You did good, Ozzie,” she says to him as she approaches the train.

  Peering through the gap like a little boy on Christmas morning, Oswald is transfixed by her translucent white robe fluttering in the breeze like a delicate sea anemone. Her angelic presence positively glows. Her smile is a supernova. “For once in your life, Oz,” she says, “you did some good in the world.”

  “Hold on a second, sweetie,” he says with a grunt as he tries to squeeze his massive girth through the gap between the dining car and the ruined hatch. He wants to get closer to her but he gets stuck. “Gimme a second here, honey,” he says, and flexes as hard as can against the metal, the wreckage creaking but remaining stubborn. It won’t budge. “Just one second.” He squeezes and squeezes. “Hold on.” He’s stuck. Wedged there like a beached whale. “Almost there.” Finally he pops out the other side with the force of a cannonball, sprawling to the ground.

  “Well done, Oz,” she says with a twinkle in her baby-blue eyes.

  Oswald levers himself back to his feet. He stands before her in awe and wonder. “What’s it like on the other side?” he says at last.

  “Boring... but nice.”

  “I knew I would see you again.”

  “This’ll be it for a while, Ozzie.” The sadness in her smile makes Oswald’s stomach clench with emotion. “You got many more good years in you. Make them count, Ozzie.” She starts to fade like milk dropped in water. “See you on the other side,” she says softly.

  “Wait... I just... wanted to tell you,” he calls out to her, but she’s already faded away. He reaches for her. His hands pass through the air. His big, beefy shoulders slump with sorrow, his head bowing, voice barely audible. “How much I love you.”

  Right then Oswald experiences something he will never be able to put words to. His stomach tightens, and his throat constricts, and his eyes well up. All his life he has stubbornly fought the urge to let loose. Even as a child, bound and strapped into the Tilt-A-Whirl’s rusty clutches, he would not give his stepfather the satisfaction of seeing him sob. Sure, he has wept a few times—especially in the wake of Matilda’s battle with cancer—but he has never truly sobbed. He has held it in for a lifetime.

  But now, watching those last ghostly vestiges of his one true love melt into the night, he finally lets the tears loose, and he sobs and sobs.

  * * *

  An indeterminate amount of time passes. Sirens close in. Voices pierce the air, coming from the buildings a half a mile away. Emergency vehicles approach, pounding over scabrous ground. Inside the upended dining car, in a fog cloud of acrid smoke, Oswald is on his hands and knees, his head down, his tears dripping off the hot skillet of a wall beneath him, when he senses a presence looming over him.

  He looks up.

  The undercover cop stands there, throwing a long shadow in the full moonlight slanting down into the overturned dining car. Trembling slightly from the shock, eyes blinking away the smoke, Special Agent Brian Cosentino—alias Jimmy “the Cucumber”—manages to stand. He still clutches his Remington. “I was sorry to hear about your wife, Chief,” he says finally. “She was a good soul, a wonderful woman.”

  Oswald swallows hard and then acknowledges the sentiment with a nod. It doesn’t occur to him to ask how the hell an undercover FBI agent would know about Matilda’s character. The capsized enclosure seems to spin, nausea rising up Oswald’s gorge.

  The Cucumber has a wistful smile in his lips. “The truth is, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with the Ferri clan without Matilda.” He sees Oswald’s confusion. “Years ago, your wife was worried you were up to something. She hired a young private investigator to put a tail on you.”

  Oswald looks at the agent, the truth starting to sink in. “Don’t tell me... that young PI was you.”

  The agent gives a proud nod. “I just gave her a vague idea of what you were doing... nothing about the mob. But I took notes.” He smiles. “In a year, I had enough background on the Ferri operation to build a case. I used it to get into the Bureau, and I used it to get into the Ferri family. Matilda was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Oswald manages to winch himself up to a standing position, holding onto a broken steel chair-leg to steady himself. Dizziness streams through his wounded brain, the light dimming slightly, as he struggles to stay on his feet.

  Special Agent Cosentino looks him in the eye, and Oswald returns the gaze. The two men look at each other for a moment, and finally Oswald manages to find his voice. With a sad smile he says, “Join the club.”

  Then Oswald folds to the floor, passing out into blessed oblivion...

  ... as the harvest moon way above the switchyard turns to blue and then, very very slowly, moves on.

  EPILOGUE:

  BIG-ASS TITTIES

  AND ICE-COLD BEER

  “Fate’s a bitch.”

  - Chainsaw Dupont

  The snore of a tattoo needle is music to Gerbil Goldstein’s ears.

  Whistling absently, she makes another little filigree of midnight blue along the uppermost contour of the fat lady’s gigantic bosom. The design is starting to take shape, beginning to resemble an elaborate Grim Reaper.

  “Fuck a DUCK—that hurts!” The topless obese woman sits with a towel draped modestly across her massive breasts, perched on a swivel chair in the heart of Gerbil’s sanctum sanctorum—a two-hundred-square-foot room in the back of an Iowa City bungalow (into which Gerbil moved six months ago). A beat-up table fan rattles and oscillates and pushes stale air around the cluttered room.

  “Gonna make those bag-boys at the Piggly Wiggly drool when they get a load of this,” Gerbil ventures, adjusting her magnifying glasses. She wears surgical gloves and a halter-top over her slender torso, moist with sweat. It’s summer in Iowa, and the heat is brutal. The atmosphere in the room—which is lined with posters of bleeding sacred hearts, iron crosses, skulls and crossbones, busts of Jesus, and Betty Boop-style Amazons such as Pamela Anderson and Bettie Page—is as thick as a roux, a mixture of sweat, incense, patchouli oil, rubbing alcohol and India ink.

  The fat gal chuckles. “Yeah, I figure they’re gonna stare at my big-ass titties anyway.”

  Gerbil nods, the needle buzzing. “Might as well give ’em something else to look at once in a while.”

  “Damn straight.”

  Gerbil pauses to refill the ink reservoir. “Which reminds me of something my old man—”

  A shrill voice from outside the back door cuts off Gerbil’s words.

  “GERBIL!”

  Sighing, setting down the needle, Gerbil peels off her rubber gloves. “Speak of the devil.”

  She tells the heavyset woman not to go anywhere, and she marches out of the room.

  “Hold your hemorrhoids, I’m coming!” She crosses the cracked linoleum of the little kitchenette and bangs through the back door, the screen slamming.

  The high afternoon sun blazes down on the backyard, a postage stamp-sized plot of measly grass and spindly maples. A tall post-hole fence keeps the prying gaze of neighbors away, and a bald patch of hard-packed dirt along the back edge of the property stands as evidence of the basketball hoop—rusty and missing its netting—mounted off the roof of a one-car garage.

  Oswald is lying supine and shirtless on a woven chaise lounge in the center of the yard, working on his tan. He holds a cardboard reflector around the base of his neck, and wears gigantic Jackie-O sunglasses. Most of his wounds are healed. His hair has grown back above his ear. His massive, bare belly, protruding from the top of his cargo shorts, resembles a small island nation infested with an outbreak of thick black hair. “Hey, kiddio,” he says as Gerbil approaches. “Did you happen to remember to pick up that twelve-pack of Old Milwaukee Lite I asked you to pick up?”

  Gerbil stands over the chaise, gazing down at him, nonplussed, hands on her hips. “For this you interrupt a session and drag me out here?”

  “I didn’t want to waste a trip inside if we didn’t have any.”

  “God forbid you should move your fat ass.”

  “Hey, is that any way to talk to your father?”

  “Oh please.”

  “Besides... I’m conserving my energy for the trial tomorrow,” he says with a smirk.

  The reality is, over the last six months—in the three separate Grand Jury testimonies, which Oswald has provided in The United States v. Anthony Michaelangelo Ferri—Oswald has expended very little energy. His appearances take less than a day out of his life, travel included. He flies in relative luxury on an Air Force turbo-prop plane equipped for military brass and government VIPs—portal to portal, from the safe house in Iowa to the courthouse in Chicago, in less than two hours—and he’s usually home for dinner. Plus, the appearances are practically stress-free. Oswald has zero fear of reprisals, and he would love to see the old cocker Anthony Ferri sent up the river for about six lifetimes.

  Oswald couldn’t care less about being a rat. Rats are noble creatures. Rats have beautiful shiny coats and they keep our sanitation canals clean and they’re very family-oriented animals.

  “And since when do you drink ‘Lite’ anything?” Gerbil is shaking her head now with a sneer on her face. “The only Lite you’ve ever seen is when you set your farts on fire.”

  “Nice.” He looks askance at her. “You got a mouth on you—you know that?”

  She gives him a demur smile. “Learned everything I know from my dear old dad.”

  Oswald watches her turn tail and head back into the bungalow.

  “It’s okay, I was going in anyway,” he calls after her and levers himself out of his chaise lounge. He rises to his feet, stretches his bullish neck, and looks at the house. The clapboard needs a new coat of paint. Some of the shingles are coming off. Maybe it’s time to do a little home repair. It’s not a bad place, though. Small but tidy. Cozy. Just right for Oswald and his wayward daughter.

  It’s all part of the sweet deal Oswald made with the Feds. In return for turning state’s evidence, he got a new name and a plumb spot in the Witness Protection Program. Once he got set up, it didn’t take long for him to secretly contact Gerbil and apologize for all his sins and give her the new address. He knew he was violating one of the cardinal rules of the Federal Witness Security Program—maybe even jeopardizing his safety—but he didn’t care. He owed it to her. He owed it to himself. And besides, a week after he moved in, he found a redneck bartender down the road who sold black-market assault weapons out of his back room to survivalists and right-wing crazies across the Midwest.

  Just last month Oswald picked up a nifty new Colt M4 Commando and a Russian A-K 47 with extra magazines—a great bargain at $1,500 for the pair—and the guy was nice enough to throw in three boxes of .450 Nitro hollow-points and two suppressors free of charge. Oswald also bought a pair of Sig-Saur nine-millimeter semi-autos at a sporting goods store using a credit card and ID he found inside a lady’s purse at the Dollar Tree. He currently has all the hardware stashed in his basement crawlspace, but has plans to build a quick-release panel under his bed whenever he gets around to his home improvements.

  With a sigh he ambles across the lawn to the rear screen door.

  Before going inside, he pauses.

  Out of the corner of his eye he sees the neighbor lady from two houses over out in her backyard. Dressed in her drab sweat suit and curlers, she’s got clothespins in her mouth and a sullen look in her tired, gray, fifty-year-old eyes as she slowly, morosely puts wash on the line. Oswald has heard rumors about the woman, whispered gossip floating around the neighborhood—that she’s battled depression all her life, that her husband left her for a floozy down at the car dealership, that she tried to kill herself last year.

  Oswald feels a twinge of something unnamable in the pit of his stomach.

  He can smell a high-risk individual a mile away, he can smell it radiating off this poor specimen in her Badgers sweatshirt and dishwater hair like a pheromone. The smell of self-annihilation is like a musky defense mechanism, like the spoor of an ailing skunk.

  “Not on my watch, ass-wipe,” Oswald murmurs under his breath as he yanks the screen open and slips inside the house. “Not on my watch.”

  The screen door bangs.

  Silence falls on the backyard.

  Two yards over, the lady in the sweatshirt notices none of it.

  She simply continues pinning laundry onto the line... alone in her quiet desperation.

  About Jay Bonansinga

  Jay Bonansinga is one of the premier writers of thriller, suspense, and horror fiction working today.

  He is the New York Times bestselling author of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead novels (four volumes in collaboration with the creator of the franchise, Robert Kirkman, and four volumes as solo author).

  He is also the author of fourteen original novels, including the Ulysses Grove series featuring his paranormal FBI profiler character.

  He is a frequent guest at Walker Stalker conventions.

  Jay lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife, the photographer Jill Norton, and his two teenaged sons.

  FOR A FREE SHORT STORY FROM JAY, visit him at BurnsAndLeaBooks.com

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  JayBonansinga1.com