I took this photo of an H & M logo suspended forty-five stories above the streets of Manhattan from the 47th floor of the Bank of America Tower in New York City on September 24.
Of all the questions that sentence might raise (why was I in New York; what was I doing in the Bank of America Tower; why did I shoot an H&M logo), I'll answer the one about the dots.
The dots are ceramic inclusions, floor to ceiling, on the jillions of panes of glass comprising the building's outside skin. They reflect sunlight; otherwise, said the architect, we'd all be roasted like potatoes in the mid-day sun.
Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Twenty
Sparky here. This is Chapter Twenty of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.
When the ravine wasn't an open market for illegal activity, it was a dorm for addicts, the homeless and the people who prey on them.
I figured I couldn't wander in without a game plan. I knew from the noises coming from the ravine during my four to midnight shift that things didn't get going until ten or eleven o'clock at night. That made me think broad daylight would make the ravine safer. I learned pretty quickly that was a mistake, maybe the same mistake that Dubs and Carol made when they went in the year before.
I hadn't been under the canopy of maple, ash and birch trees for more than five minutes when two very scary looking guys came toward me. They wanted to know if I was buying and if I wasn't buying then what the fuck was I doing there. I took a can of pepper spray out of my pocket and pointed it at them. I told them to leave me alone. They laughed at my puny weapon and took a step toward me. I extended my arm and discharged the spray into the face of the guy closest to me. He went down and the other guy backed off. I turned and ran as fast as I could down a narrow path, the howls of the guy I assaulted echoing through the ravine, but I didn't hear anyone following.
I ran until my legs felt weak and my lungs burned. When I stopped to catch my breath, according to my phone, I was more than two kilometres from where I'd entered the ravine. I was also pretty far down the slope. I could hear the river and the incline was very steep. Too steep to drive a little balloon-tired gardening truck, so I headed back up the slope.
I was looking for a service road that the city utility and parks departments used to navigate the ravine. But the undergrowth was thick and densely overlain with fallen branches and saplings destroyed in an ice storm the previous winter. There were many spots where there was no way to advance, so I had to backtrack and try another way. This made for slow going, the day was getting late, and I was going to have to get out of the ravine no matter what before nightfall. After three hours in the underbrush, I was bug bitten, bleeding from where I'd been scratched by branches, thirsty, hungry and, even with the GPS on my phone, disoriented and clueless about whether I'd ever find what I was looking for.
Some game plan.
Around seven in the evening I had given up and was just trying to find any way at all out of the ravine when I found one of the things I was looking for, a narrow, level, two-rutted lane, just wide enough for small service vehicles to pass along. But with that discovery came a worse realization. I was about six kilometres from where I started, the service road could be anywhere from at least that long to many times that length and what I was looking for could still be anywhere.
My original idea had been to enter the ravine, find the service road right away and enjoy a relaxing stroll along it until I came upon the garden truck with the balloon tires, because, I guess, I thought I was that lucky and the cops were that lazy and stupid.
Without doubt, I was the stupid one.
Mortified and downhearted, I started down the service lane in the direction the GPS told me would bring me closest to a paved road, streetlights and a place where I could get something to eat and drink before going home. I was really tired and stumbled on a grass tuft growing in a rut. I reached out to break my fall and my hand landed on something... rubbery.
I'd found the truck. It was off the service lane, on its side and covered in fallen leaves and branches. The topmost layer of branches had been deposited by the ice storm, but the layer closest to the truck was arranged in an orderly criss-cross fashion, as if someone had deliberately put them there.
I pulled as many of the branches off as I could. Using my phone as a flashlight I peered into the vehicle interior. I just about hollered when I saw a small jar poking out of the cup holder.
It was getting late. I grabbed the jar, covered the truck back up and got out of the ravine as fast as I could. I emerged a few blocks away.
Sure enough, there was a Starbucks. As I approached it, my thirst and hunger fully ablaze, I remembered that this was the spot where Carol and Dubs had said they'd been the night Gerry died.
You can read the final chapter here.
No comments:
Post a Comment