The Intruder

A Novel

Peter Blauner

• Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781504072823
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura poliziesca e gialli

New York Times Bestseller: A lawyer is tormented by a destitute, emotionally unstable man—until one shocking moment changes everything: "A great plot." — Los Angeles Times Jacob Schiff has a good career, a beautiful home in New York City, and a loving family. John Gates has none of those things. A psychiatric patient with a traumatic past, John received professional treatment from Jacob's wife, with little success. Now, he's following her and lingering near the Schiffs's front door, menacing and harassing them at every opportunity—convinced that what Jacob has rightfully belongs to him instead. But Jacob Schiff has endured some brutal experiences too, and he has an angry streak. When, in desperation, he decides to take action to protect himself and his loved ones, the encounter takes a turn he didn't predict, and everything he was trying to save may be utterly destroyed. From the Edgar Award–winning author of Slow Motion Riot and Sunrise Highway, this "gripping" novel "develops into a raw-nerved courtroom thriller... a harrowing, compelling read" ( The New York Times ). "More than a story about a man protecting his family. It's about a man losing faith—in love, God, and humanity—and the possibility of regaining it." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette " The Intruder is un-putdownable." —Stephen King "A disturbing, cathartic climax." — Entertainment Weekly "Irresistible." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review "A tour de force." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

SUMMER

3

I lost my way. I lost my way. I was in a dark wood and I lost my way.

The words keep repeating themselves in John G.’s mind as he pushes a baby stroller full of soda cans across the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The stars and clouds look like dots and splatters of white paint thrown carelessly against the dark sky. The apartment houses and skyscrapers along Central Park South and Fifth Avenue rise up in the mist.

These last three months have been a long, inexorable slide. He’s still not exactly sure how he became homeless. He just knows it happened a step at a time. Everything only makes sense in light of what came just before it.

The job went first. Right after the near collision, there were ten days of administrative hearings, overnight psychiatric evaluations, and drug tests before the MTA finally got around to firing him.

He was divided by the news. A side of him was angry and defiant, not ready to give up. But another part was secretly grateful and relieved.

The next morning, he sat on his bed with the shades drawn and the day stretching out before him like a long road without signposts.

What was he going to do with the rest of his life? Everything looked the same. His wife’s makeup compact was still in the bathroom medicine cabinet; her herbal teas were still in the kitchen cupboard. But he felt utterly alone and confused. Cookie Monster lay on the blue carpet in the middle of his daughter’s empty room, like he’d been cast adrift on a cold sea. The Little Mermaid toys and the wooden railroad tracks John bought for her were heaped in a corner.

When he closed his eyes, he pictured her waving to him from across the street. The light turns red.

I lost my way. I’ve lost my way. I was in a dark wood and I lost my way.

He should have gone downtown and applied for unemployment right then. But he wasn’t ready to face the long lines and the questions about failing his drug test.

Instead, he turned on the television and watched Regis and Kathie Lee awhile. He had to get on top of his situation. Find a way to deal with the stress.

He still had the Haldol prescription they gave him after his overnights at Psych Services. Six months’ worth. But if he took one of the pills, he knew it would give him a stiff neck and a clear mind. Two things he didn’t want at the moment.

The other option was to go around the corner, buy two bottles of crack, and get outside himself a little.

He looked at Kathie Lee until her pink outfit hurt his eyes. Then he decided to get high. Just for the morning.

I lost my way. Hey, hey, hey.

The next day he got up a little later and went out to buy crack a bit earlier. He wasn’t falling into a real habit, he told himself. Just biding his time and saving his strength. He had about $1200 in the bank. There was still plenty of time to go out and look for work.

By the next week, though, he’d arranged most of his daily schedule around getting high. Instead of spending $10 a day on crack, he was spending $50, $60, and then $70. He was falling into a pattern: wake up, watch the Channel 2 News at Noon with Michele Marsh, buy a jumbo of ten vials, spend the afternoon smoking it in his apartment as the traffic went by on Bailey Avenue.

For hours, he’d sit there, staring out the window at the exact spot where she’d been standing. As if she might reappear at any minute.

In the night, questions would come. What had he done? Why was he being punished? Why does God tempt us with a vision of heaven in the perfection of a child’s face and then condemn us to a lonely wretched existence?

At the beginning of the next month, Mrs. Gordy, the landlady, sent up Curtis, the handyman.

“You gonna make the May rent?”

“No problem.” John opened the door only halfway, so Curtis wouldn’t see he’d already sold his TV and microwave to pay for drugs. “I got a few things lined up already. The worm is about to turn.”

Curtis looked doubtful. He was a tired man with skin as brown and veiny as an old autumn leaf. “Then I guess she’ll be hearing from you.”

But John knew he wouldn’t come through. He was in the throes of some psychotic need to fuck up. He missed his face-to-face appointment with his caseworker and fell off the Medicaid rolls.

When he tried to call back his caseworker the next day, he was told she didn’t work for the city anymore; he would have to reapply at a Staten Island office.

I was in a dark wood.

A week later, Curtis, the handyman, stood in the doorway, surveying the barren apartment. The May rent still hadn’t been paid and it was almost June. There was $133 left in the checking account. All the living room and bedroom furniture had been sold. The refrigerator was next.

A part of John G. was standing back and wondering how far he’d let himself go. At some point he had to hit bottom.

“Maybe I oughta start looking for another place,” he told Curtis.

The next day, he called the city social services office from a pay phone to ask about getting his benefits back. They put him on hold for forty-five minutes and then told him his case had been transferred out to Queens.

His mind went back and forth. Sometimes he thought this was just a temporary slipping-down period. Other times he wondered if it was all part of a plan. God was punishing him for a reason.

In the meantime, he needed another place. But most of his relatives were either dead, living far away, or fed up with him.

So his old conductor, Ernest Bayard, offered to let him sleep on the red vinyl couch in his apartment for five dollars a night. Just for a couple of weeks until John got his feet on the ground. But they started getting on each other’s nerves almost immediately. Ernest liked to stay home at night watching religious programs and treacly family sitcoms. John hid in the bathroom, puffing on his crack pipe and blowing smoke out into the air shaft.

One hot morning he woke up headachy and paranoid from smoking a whole jumbo in one night and accused Ernest of stealing his shoes.

By the afternoon, it was time to move on again.

The night before Independence Day, he found himself wandering through Central Park, carrying a duffel bag with a few clothes in it and $1.50 in his pants pocket.

The murderous humidity of June had finally lifted and he took his first deep breath in weeks. In the back of his mind, he had a tingling feeling that things were about to change once more.

He stopped by the Sheep Meadow, where he’d gone to buy drugs a hundred times before, and found a group of a dozen homeless men lying like beat-up pieces of luggage on the crescent of benches along the periphery. Human wreckage. The seventh semicircle of hell. Two or three of them had clear plastic bags filled with empty soda cans. Diet Coke. Pepsi. Slice. Fresca. They still made Fresca? He remembered bums getting on his train with bags like these and bragging about how they were going to redeem them for five cents a pop at some Gristede’s on the Upper West Side or a Times Square movie theater that’d been converted into a massive recycling center. Pathetic, he used to think, struggling with a sack full of a hundred cans on your back for a lousy $5. How could a man get so desperate?

But suddenly those $5 had an altered value. Five dollars was dinner at Burger King or a vial of crack. He was tempted to ask one of the guys where he went to return the cans, but he hesitated. He hadn’t fallen that far yet, had he? He hadn’t turned into one of the people he used to step over on the street. He had a skill. He drove a train, goddamn it. He could’ve been making $50,000 in a couple of years.

On the other hand, the night air was cooling and the benches looked comfortable. It didn’t mean he was turning into a bum. It was just a place to stay awhile. Until the weather changed and motivated him to find something more permanent.

He threw his bag on an empty bench and stretched out. A great oak tree bent over him and shivered its leaves.

This wasn’t really his life, he told himself.

Or maybe it was. This might be his penance, he thought. To end his days here. Maybe this was where he was supposed to finally die.

All right, so now he’s a bum. For the first few weeks, it doesn’t seem so awful. All right. So he’s stopped shaving. Okay, okay, he’s using bathroom sinks instead of showers to clean up. He’s still alive, isn’t he? He even renews his ’script and takes his Haldol when he isn’t smoking crack.

In a way, he feels more alive now, being out here, exposed to the elements. Every moment counts. A bum has to be thinking all the time, searching for shelter, figuring out how to eat.

The best thing is never knowing what’s going to happen next. The worst thing is never knowing what’s going to happen next.

Over the second half of July, he learns how to sleep during the day and prowl at night, hustling soda cans. The other guys from the park benches tell him which uptown supermarkets stay open until midnight for recycling. So he gets an abandoned baby stroller out of a Dumpster to transport the cans and starts scavenging.

He promises himself that he won’t resort to begging, though. Instead, he finds out which restaurants leave relatively fresh food in their Dumpsters. The ones on Forty-sixth Street have the best produce, but some of the local Dunkin’ Donuts managers are evil; they sprinkle coffee grounds on perfectly good donuts in the garbage just to keep the bums out of their trash.

The whole month, he has only one bad dream, about being in a rotting, oarless dinghy floating away from a rich, green breast of land.

“Yo, Fonz, what’s up?”

A voice snaps him out of thought and into the present moment. He’s back in the Sheep Meadow. He looks up and finds himself surrounded. A group of belligerent teenagers seem to have materialized out of nowhere. Four boys and two girls in loose jeans and big shirts, all gangsta pose and slouchy bad attitude. At first he asks himself if he’s imagining them, the way he imagined the man on the tracks all those weeks back.

“Yo, Fonz, give us a quarter,” says their leader, a lanky boy wearing a Chicago Blackhawks jersey and gold caps over his front teeth.

John G. tilts his head to the side. He doesn’t want any trouble.

“Yo, Fonz, this ain’t no Happy Days rerun. I asked you something.” The kid takes a step closer.

“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t listening.”

“Who you calling sir?” The kid pokes his tongue against the side of his mouth and the other guys in his crew giggle. “I look like a sir? Do I look like a old man to you?”

“No, no, I mean, I just meant it as a sign of respect.”

“But how can you respect me if you don’t know me?”

“I don’t know,” John G. mumbles. “Just the way you carry yourself.”

“Just the way I carry myself. Is that why you respect me? Or are you just frontin” cause I’m down with the crew?”

“Well, ah, ah, ah …”

A boy with a pacifier in his mouth imitates John G. in a Gomer Pylish voice. The others crack up, slapping hands and bumping shoulders. Individually, they’d each barely have the nerve to stare a man down across a subway car. But together, they’re a vicious little army.

It hurts John’s heart, knowing they can treat him so badly. Has he let himself fall that far?

“Say, ...