Detective

that. A schmuck. An asshole. The real question was, when the fuck was Red going to show up?

15.
    R ED S HOWED UP T HAT N IGHT at three in the morning. Oddly enough, it was my wife who proclaimed his arrival. She shook me out of a sound sleep, and said, “What the fuck is that?”
    I was groggy, and it was a few moments before I realized what she was talking about.
    “What?” I muttered.
    “That!” she said, in the helpful way she has of clarifying what she has just said by repeating it in a louder and more strident tone of voice.
    Then I heard it. From the living room was coming a faint, but annoyingly high-pitched “beep, beep, beep.”
    “Oh, it’s my beeper,” I said. “It does that when the batteries get weak.”
    I stumbled out of bed and groped my way toward the living room, hoping my wife was sleepy enough that she wouldn’t notice the blatant contradiction between that statement and what I’d told her concerning my beeper just the other day. A disgusted “Mmmmmph!” and slamming of the pillow as she turned over assured me that she had not.
    I hurried into the living room, switched on the light, and pulled the unit out of the desk drawer where I’d stashed it. This made the beeping louder, but I quickly turned the volume down. I checked the vector. It was pointing south and slightly west. The object it was tracking was heading north. That made sense. Red would be coming up the New Jersey Turnpike.
    I’d stashed a bag of shoes, socks, pants and shirt in the foyer closet. I took it into the living room and quickly dressed. I shoved the tracking unit into my briefcase. I got my keys from the cabinet in the foyer. I switched off the light, and groped my way to the front door. I squeezed out, trying to let in as little light as possible, even though the bedroom was a few turns of the hallway away. I closed the door quietly behind me and rang for the elevator.
    I had to ring three times. The night man looked groggy when he opened the door. He had been sleeping. Tough luck for him. I’d been sleeping, too.
    I ran to my car and got in, pausing only to shut off the code alarm and lock the door. I opened the briefcase on the seat beside me and checked the tracking device. Red was still southwest of me and heading north. He figured to be around Newark. He was heading slightly northeast now, and somehow the thought flashed: “Holland Tunnel.” That’s what I would do if I were hitting Manhattan at approximately three-thirty in the morning. I pulled out, sped down West End Avenue to 96th Street, and got on the West Side Highway heading south.
    There was virtually no traffic at that time in the morning, no bottleneck at the ramp at 57th Street where the elevated section of the highway now ends. Even stopping for lights, I made Canal Street in record time.
    So did Red. By the time I got there he was right alongside me. The only trouble was the vector indicated he was still heading north. Shit! The Lincoln Tunnel.
    Ordinarily, a U-turn at the Canal Street exit on West Street would have been a problem, but not at three in the morning. I wheeled around and began racing Red to the tunnel.
    It was a dead heat. Unfortunately, the race didn’t end there. Red was still heading north. The George Washington Bridge! You dumb schmuck, I thought. Three in the morning and you’re going all the way up to the goddamn G. W Bridge.
    I sped on uptown, keeping pace with Red as he drove up the other side of the river. After ten minutes or so his vector turned and pointed east and I knew he was coming over the bridge.
    Which presented a terrific problem. Due to the construction taking place on the ramps to the bridge, the only way you could get on the West Side Highway heading south was if you were coming over the bridge from Jersey. So Red could get on the Highway and I couldn’t.
    Under the circumstances, I did the best I could. I positioned myself on Riverside Drive next to the bridge entrance ramp and waited to see what Red would do. If he just kept going straight, taking the Cross Bronx Expressway to either the Harlem River Drive or the Major Deegan, I could zoom up the ramp and come out right on his tail. But if he took the West Side Highway, I was going to have to hustle.
    All I could do was wait, watch the vector, and hope. I tracked Red’s progress as he hit the bridge. I could even tell when he stopped for the toll booth. Then he came over. He was right on top of me. Then the vector started turning in a circle