Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [83]
Why couldn’t he finally accept her death?
Why couldn’t he ever accept the way life was apparently supposed to be?
Arch Carroll stopped and listened closely to Barbra Streisand singing.
The song “Promises” made him remember the stretch when he’d visited Nora every night, night after night at New York Hospital. After the hospital visits, Carroll would eat at Galahanty’s Bar up the hill on First Avenue. A burger, soggy home fries, draft beer that tasted the way swamp gas smells. The beginning of his drinking problems.
The two Streisand songs had been favorites on Galahanty’s jukebox.
They always made him think of Nora—all alone back at that scary, skyscraper hospital.
Sitting in the bar, he always wanted to go back—at ten, eleven o’clock—to talk with her just a little bit more; to steep with her, to hold Nora tight against the gathering night inside her New York hospital room. To squeeze every possible moment out of the time they had left together…
The worst, the very truest line for him in “Promises” finally came….
Tears slowly rolled down his cheeks. The pain inside was like a rock solid column that extended from the center of his chest all the way into his forehead. The sadness, the inconsolable grief was for Nora, though, not for himself: the unfairness of what had happened to her.
Carroll began to hold himself fiercely tight, squeezing hard with both arms.
When would this feeling please stop? The past three years had been unbearable. When would it please fucking stop?
He always had the insane urge—to break glass.
Just to punch out glass.
Caitlin, meanwhile, stood immobile, perfectly silent in the darkened apartment hallway.
She couldn’t catch hold of her breath, couldn’t even swallow right then. She had wandered back from the bedroom when she’d heard noises. Faint strains of music…
She’d found Carroll like this. So sad to watch.
She walked back to the bedroom. She huddled deep down into the body-warm covers and sheets.
Lying there alone, Caitlin bit down hard on her lower lip. She understood and felt so much more about Carroll— clearly, in an instant. Maybe she understood more than she wanted to.
She wanted to hold him right now, only she was afraid to go and ask. Caitlin was afraid to intrude.
She didn’t know how long she’d been alone in the big silent bedroom overlooking the river.
The phone on the bedstand began to ring.
It was 3:30.
He didn’t pick up outside. Where was Carroll now?
She waited, four, five rings, and he still didn’t pick up.
Caitlin finally grabbed for the receiver.
A very excited voice was on the phone line. A man was talking, before she had a chance to say a word.
“Arch, sorry to wake you. This is Walter Trentkamp. I’m down at No. 13 right now. The Stock Exchange in Sydney just opened. There’s a massive panic! You’d better come now. It’s all going to crash!”
Chapter 61
“WHAT’S HAPPENING, ARCH, I think, is a disorderly, almost a riotous Market condition. Everybody desperately wants to sell. Except there’s a corresponding lack of buyers,” Caitlin said.
“What exactly does that mean?” Carroll asked.
‘It means the bottom line price of stocks and bonds has to plummet dramatically…. The crash that’s apparently coming could last a few hours, days, or drag on for years.”
“Years?”
“Back in sixty-three, on the day Kennedy was assassinated, the Market collapsed and was shut down early. The next day it recovered. But it wasn’t until after World War Two that the Market recovered from the crash of 1929!”
Carroll and Caitlin Dillon were hurrying across the immense