West 47th Read Online Free PDF Page B

flow from La Guardia was coagulated.
    An eighteen-wheeler, like some behemoth suddenly intent on suicide, had swerved across the median, ended the lives of five and now lay there on the Grand Central Parkway with its exposed underside looking rigored.
    Mitchell Laughton was the passenger in a much abused fleet taxi sixty-four lengths back from the collisions. In fatalistic measure, death had missed him by, at most, half a minute.
    The taxi meter was ticking away voraciously. Each time it went gu-luckit to register a greater amount Mitch was made to think how this was another of those wastes of life time. A more equitable arrangement could have been created, he thought. For instance, when forced to wait like this, why shouldn’t a person be allowed to call time-out or perhaps even receive a credit on the other end?
    He’d certainly done more than a fair share of unfair waiting this day. The flight to Boston had been delayed a half hour because of air traffic; then his eleven o’clock appointment with Grayson at Fidelity Eastern Insurance had to be pushed ahead to one because Grayson was having a root canal emergency.
    And now this tie-up.
    Already it had cost Mitch nearly forty minutes.
    For what must have been the hundredth time he told himself to relax, take it in stride, do what Maddie advised to cope with such unavoidable irritating instances. Turn mentally inside out was the way she put it. Think flowers, for example, not a mere bouquet but a whole skyful, or think of finding a downy bird-belly feather that could be kept mid-air by the slightest breath for miles and miles over an ideal endless meadow. Think of a happy home run, a bases-loaded, tenth-inning game winner. Whatever it took to transcend, Maddie prescribed.
    At times Mitch had been able to perform her inside-out trick. Not often and not easily, but he had.
    However, this afternoon it was impossible.
    The taxi seat was one reason. The foam rubber within it had given up ten thousand passengers ago. What the rump got now was practically all inflicting springs. What’s more, the seat refused to stay in place, kept shifting forward from its proper slot beneath the back cushion. The ashtrays stunk, were stuffed with stubs and used tissues. No air conditioning, the uncloseable windows were cross-ventilating exhaust fumes.
    Then there was the driver of the next car over. Emaciated, brittle-looking woman with a mass of hair an impossible red. She had her dough-white, crepey arm out the window, hung down lifelessly except for her fingers doing nervous flicks at a cigarette. She brought the cigarette to her sparse lips, took a long, ugly drag, exhaled from her nostrils.
    Mitch imagined she had tusks.
    She noticed him noticing and shot him a scrinched-up, superior look that called him a creep.
    Ordinarily Mitch would have chalked her up as one of those inconsequential frays in the fabric of life. However, right there as she was, hardly more than a spit away, he was stuck with her.
    He got out of the cab. The concrete surface of the parkway felt slippery underfoot. He stretched his back and limbs thoroughly, craned up, hoping to see movement ahead.
    The taxi driver had gotten out earlier. He was on his haunches near the left front door, reading a tired copy of the Daily News that one of his morning passengers had left behind. The driver was a West Indian. His especially dark skin had a gloss to it. He stood, folded the newspaper and tossed it onto the front seat. Then he went back five or so lengths to a taxi that belonged to the same fleet, driven by someone he knew.
    Mitch reached in and helped himself to the newspaper. He placed it on the left section of the taxi’s hot, yellow hood, smoothed it out and stood over it.
    During his wait in Boston he’d read most of that day’s Globe and there’d been not a single line about what the News had chosen to front-page: the late-night frolic of an already notorious rock star who’d roller-bladed