Gone Tomorrow

fire hose. It was prewashed and preaged and predistressed like new stuff is now but it would still be very strong. I would have ended up jerking her off her seat and dumping her down on the floor.
    Except that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near her. She would have hit the button before my hand was halfway there.
    I could have tried to jerk the bag upward and swipe behind it with my other hand to rip the detonator cord out of its terminals. Except that for the sake of her easy movement there would be enough spare length in the cord that I would have needed to haul it through a giant two-foot arc before I met any resistance. By which time she would have hit the button, if only in involuntary shock.
    I could have grabbed at her jacket and tried to tear some other wires loose. But there were fat pockets of goose feathers between me and the wires. A slippery nylon shell. No touch, no feel.
    No hope.
    I could have tried to incapacitate her. Hit her hard in the head, knock her out, one punch, instantaneous. But as fast as I still am, a decent swing from six feet away would have taken most of half a second. She had to move the ball of her thumb an eighth of an inch.
    She would have gotten there first.
    I asked, “Can I sit down? Next to you?”
    She said, “No, stay away from me.”
    A neutral, toneless voice. No obvious accent. American, but she could have been from anywhere. Up close she didn’t look really wild or deranged. Just resigned, and grave, and scared, and tired. She was staring up at me with the same intensity she had been using on the opposite window. She looked completely alert and aware. I felt completely scrutinized. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything.
    “It’s late,” I said. “You should wait for rush hour.”
    She didn’t reply.
    “Six more hours,” I said. “It will work much better then.”
    Her hands moved, inside her bag.
    I said, “Not now.”
    She said nothing.
    “Just one,” I said. “Show me one hand. You don’t need both of them in there.”
    The train slowed hard. I staggered backward and stepped forward again and reached up to the grab bar close to the roof. My hands were damp. The steel felt hot. Grand Central, I thought. But it wasn’t. I glanced out the window expecting lights and white tile and saw the glow of a dim blue lamp instead. We were stopping in the tunnel. Maintenance, or signaling.
    I turned back.
    “Show me one hand,” I said again.
    The woman didn’t answer. She was staring at my waist. With my hands high my T-shirt had ridden up and the scar low on my stomach was visible above the waistband of my pants. Raised white skin, hard and lumpy. Big crude stitches, like a cartoon. Shrapnel, from a truck bomb in Beirut, a long time ago. I had been a hundred yards from the explosion.
    I was ninety-eight yards closer to the woman on the bench.
    She stared on. Most people ask how I had gotten the scar. I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want to talk about bombs. Not with her.
    I said, “Show me one hand.”
    She asked, “Why?”
    “You don’t need two in there.”
    “Then what good can it do you?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. I had no real idea what I was doing. I’m not a hostage negotiator. I was just talking for the sake of it. Which is uncharacteristic. Mostly I’m a very silent person. It would be statistically very unlikely for me to die halfway through a sentence.
    Maybe that’s why I was talking.
    The woman moved her hands. I saw her take a solo grip inside her bag with her right and she brought her left out slowly. Small, pale, faintly ridged with veins and tendons. Middle-aged skin. Plain nails, trimmed short. No rings. Not married, not engaged to be. She turned her hand over, to show me the other side. Empty palm, red because she was hot.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    She laid her hand palm-down on the seat next to her and left it there, like it was nothing to do with the rest of her. Which it wasn’t, at that point. The train stopped in the darkness. I lowered my hands. The hem of my shirt fell back into place.
    I said, “Now show me what’s in the bag.”
    “Why?”
    “I just want to see it. Whatever it is.”
    She didn’t reply.
    She didn’t move.
    I said, “I won’t try to take it away from you. I promise. I just want to see it. I’m sure you can understand that.”
    The train moved on again. Slow acceleration, no jerk, low speed. A gentle cruise into the station. A slow roll. Maybe two hundred yards, I thought.
    I said,