The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  The swaying end of the extension cord hastened down. A Greek chorus. A safety line from God his ownself. Jonathan backslid and sloshed clumsily.

  When he mopped his eyes clear, he was looking into a bullet-shaped, eyeless head that had nosed out of the water between him and the hatchway of riveted iron. It was the girth of a Navy torpedo and so was the triangular, turd-colored body that uncoiled behind it, slopping greasy waves against the walls of the shaft. Shadows danced as the water surged to bury the trashberg.

  Too many drugs scampered through Jonathan's overloaded brain too many like a scorpion stinging itself to death in mad circles too many fucking drugs, Jonathan!

  He screamed for help in the wet darkness, grabbing the bottom-most climbing pretzel at last, pushing off from the trashberg and slamming bodily into the opposite wall. He spun as the blunt face backed into a striking curve and darted in to bite him.

  Twice. Hot pain stapled his kidneys to his lungs.

  He had a deathgrip on the line and did the fastest unbraced pull-up in sports history. He dealt the thing a firm kick in the snout. It back-pedaled in the thick water.

  He hit the shaft with a noise louder than the Notre Dame cathedral bell tolling the half hour. His boots slipped but he was moving fast, driven by the most primal motivation known to the human species. In seconds he had hooked one forearm over the sill to 107. Waiting glass sliced open his fingers. New blood introduced itself to old. He winced but who cared. It hurt but who thought pain was going to stop him?

  Which struck him as peculiar… because from the waist down, he was dead air. He could no longer feel his legs ascending. He wobbled on the line.

  A pleasing, novocained numbness rose to squelch his signals. He hung by one arm on the sill and tried to collate this new data. All he could vocalize was a drawn-out uhh noise. I've become the ghost, he thought. Cruz's ghost, moaning in the night. An inky-black cloud of sedation pushed upward, gently, toward his eyes, to mist them over.

  The lamp's bulb shorted out with a snap.

  Far above him, miles overhead, a silhouette watched from a tiny yellow rectangle, waving arms. Calling for someone named Jonathan. The undulating orange of the extension cord caressed his face. He tried to shout again, made a purring noise.

  Relax. His arm did.

  Jonathan watched the light above whip around crazily as he fell. He knew his head whacked the shaft on his roll downward, but felt no corresponding impact or sting. The pain had blotted away first. Then the terror. He felt the coolness of water, closing over his face. He only made a few bubbles because he had forgotten to breathe any more.

  He had an erection. He thought of Jamaica, making love with him. That, too, had been fuzzy-good this way. His cock pressed hard against his fatigue pants as his arm slid down the incline of the trashberg and went under.

  He tried to say Amanda's name. He would have liked his last thoughts to be about Amanda, but as the sliding, sinuous weight embraced him, he could no longer remember what she was supposed to look like.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Cruz could feel his bones grinding with every step. The cold coaxed his aches into handicaps and the boreal air helped to pound him awake. The downside was that it also helped him shake off the painkillers, which made his recent pummelings resurge vengefully, with teeth.

  An efficient sling of web straps and shiny aluminum buckles cradled his arm in a soft white pouch that was downy on the inside, like baby clothing. It kept his wrecked arm immobile against his chest and put him in mind of a color-coordinated shoulder holster. In the closet at St Jude's he had found his fatigue jacket on a hanger. About fifty bucks in tatty bills was still hiding in the upper front pocket.

  Somewhere between jail and the hospital, his dogtags had gone AWOL. Whoever thieved them had taken more than indulgent gold jewelry; Cruz felt unmanned and unmoored without his gift from Rosie. Another vital link to Florida had been stolen from him. Pieces of his identity were dropping away.

  He remembered blacking out in Bauhaus' shower stall. Waking up lashed to the hospital crib. Marko, of the shotgun shell mug. Cruz did not need a watch to know his time was pissing away posthaste.

  Catching a cab at St Jude's back dock had been easy. Finding one willing to drive to Oakwood in the worsening blizzard was a matter of mean bribery.

  Before sneaking from his room at the hospital he phoned Jamaica 's number and got her machine. He had no idea what he might say that would not clue Bauhaus to his movements, and he assumed Jamaica 's phone was hot. He had hoped she would pick up in person… but again, what would he say?

  Bauhaus' electronic ears were everywhere. Given Marko's special wake-up cheerfulness, Cruz decided no messages were good messages and hung up. Sorry.

  The only thing left was to try linking up with that Jonathan guy and find out what had gone down at Bauhaus' place. Jonathan could be quizzed on the brisk and destructive search that had most likely taken place one floor right above his head.

  His arm stabbed at his brain, restive, reminding him that none of this movement was a stellar idea.

  The cab inched up Garrison and tried to deny the force of the storm. New snow had taken a recess. Ship-flipping winds of hurricane strength careened inland. The unmelted dunes of snow were whipped into new, traffic-snarling, pedestrian-interring, civilization-stopping configurations. That toddlin' town. It toddles because it cannot walk, lumbered as it is by ton upon ton of excelsior from the sky - blanched water the thickness of cremation ashes.

  Cruz shivered in the inadequate kickback from the cab's heater. He was already cold and hurting, and once debarked, he'd be nearly broke. They pulled abreast of a police car, double-parked next to another vehicle beached on a plow-tide of filthy snow. Add fear. Cruz's heart began to bump so hard it hurt his throat.

  He muttered goddamnit several times and ordered the driver to drop him around the corner, on Kentmore, out of sight of the cruiser.

  Tip? Fuck you, too.

  The Kentmore door was locked. At night all entrances were supposed to be secure; tenants were keyed. Generally the doors hung open all hours anyway. Snow had drifted into a pile against the steps and door. It had been this way for a while. Tonight, of all nights.

  It took a bit of painful choreography for Cruz to unzip his jacket's tuck-away hood and snug the drawstring around his face. He hoped the snowblow would keep him anonymous. He tried not to act the spy when he peeked around Kenilworth 's northwest corner.

  It looked as though there might not be anyone inside the police car.

  Three steps closer. The dash and running lights were burning. No head silhouettes. Was the cop sleeping inside? Not bloody likely - not parked this way, not in this storm. Inside, then, pounding on doors, running down the scents of drugs and bad guys and missing children.

  Cruz drew closer, one more hunched trudger in the predawn blizzard. Slow pace. Curious citizen. Oh, look, the police. Everything'll be okay now…

  The car was vacant. Snow was in the process of piling up, grading smooth the sharp juncture of hood and windshield. The driver's side window was down and more snow was melting on the seat. The cruiser's heater was still running. No keys, though.

  His first thought was to sack the unit, and quickly. But his lame arm was a hindrance. The cop in charge would probably mosey out the Garrison door and book him as soon as he reached into the car's cabin. Did police cars have car alarms? Sure, they must. Now was not the time to find out for sure. Not now, when Cruz needed a bookful of other questions answered first.

  The Garrison door was cracked open a foot or so and the temperature in the foyer hovered just shy of zero. Cruz noticed curtains flapping recklessly out of a broken ground floor window. Another abandonment, he thought. They sneak off, clear out in the dead of night, taking the lightbulbs, taking the switchplates - even the ones dipped in Fergus' all-purpose white paint. Lights out. Nobody home.

  He had no way of seeing the blood on the windowsill. It had already frosted over and whited out.

&n
bsp; From the Garrison side he had to use the stairs at the end of the hallway. The subdivisional walls in Kenilworth were so mazed that many rooms shared no common access on the same floor. While you could walk from the Kentmore stairwell to the Garrison stairwell on Jonathan's floor, you could not make the same direct trip on the first or third floors. On the ground floor you'd run into a blank wall and another Fergus slapdash paintjob. Up top, you'd hit an off-center door where part of the corridor had been retrofitted to enlarge a room that otherwise would not have had a window.

  If Fergus would just fix the goddamned elevator a lot of agony could be circumvented. Cruz had never seen it budge, not once, the whole time he had lived here. The masking tape across the single-wide sliding door was old and crumbly. OUT OF ORDER. Maybe Fergus had painted the elevator shaft so thickly that the car could no longer slide up and down. Maybe he had lost the car. Pawned it, perhaps, for several cases of formaldehyde aftershave.

  Cruz passed more columns of disused icebox doors in the ground floor hallway. Now and then other small doors, three feet high and hasped, like special entrances for midgets. A wall where a door had been sealed off by Fergus. Kenilworth specialized in doors that led nowhere.

  No, wait.

  Here was the elevator: Outer door retracted, interior light on, apparently in working order. Cruz thought he heard a faint hum. Perhaps the lift inspectors had come round and Fergus had gotten his toe caught in some legal jam.

  Cruz was unsure. His aching arm urged him to give the elevator a try. When he stepped inside the car wobbled minutely with his weight; that was expected. It was the size of a single closet, and while the smells of disinfectant and wet carpet lingered, he had not expected to find it so clean, its walls so smooth and undirtied. It contradicted Kenilworth 's demeanor. It did not even seem like an elevator, he realized, because there was no chrome, no rails, no framed advertisements. Just a box with doors, an inner one of scissors gate that slid shut when the outer one was secure. He could see into the hallway through a lozenge-shaped port full of wire-mesh glass. Near his head was a grille the size of a paperback book. A tiny service hatch was set flush with the ceiling about six inches beyond his good arm's reach. The function buttons were old-fashioned spring knobs, one for each floor plus a painted-over toggle switch that he assumed could stop the car. He pushed 3 and noticed that the bottommost button was embossed with an L. Lobby, that was a hoot.

  Machinery whirred to speed and the car lurched, bumping against the sides of the shaft as it rose. A crooked gap of light wavered against the rubberized join where the two doors did not quite agree.

  Cruz gave silent thanks to the god of elevators. In here it was wanner. He leaned against the wall. Hauling his half-dead glutes up all of Kenilworth 's Dr Seuss stairs would nail a fresh jab of pain into his skull for every step ventured.

  The car halted at the second floor. Apparently all the bugs had not yet been worked out.

  He pressed 3 a bunch more, annoyed. After some deliberation of wheels and cables, the car decided to labor upward again. It rose three feet, then jolted to a crooked standstill that shoved Cruz off-kilter, as though the floor was a boat deck on choppy surf. He piled into a corner and remained standing. The lines had fouled, or the car had changed its batty mechanical mind and decided-now was siesta time. It was no longer wobbling. It felt as stuck as a fat man in a skinny doorway.

  Cruz cursed Fergus again and flipped the STOP button. Up-down, click-click, nada. Of course.

  He hauled open the inner door. He had to angle in his boot to succeed, and muscle spasms forced him to wince with the effort; every tendon in his neck seemed sprung. From his knees down he could see the second-floor elevator door. The floor of the car bisected the mesh window. Dim light played across his feet. All he had to do was drop to a sitting position, shove the door open with one foot and bail out. He hesitated because his attention was drawn to what he saw at the top of the open inner door.

  The masonry stopped. He saw a four-by-four vertical support post, and beyond it, blackness. The wall was not continuous; there was a gap of two feet or more between the second and third floors of the building, like horizontal dead-air soundproofing… though in a roach ranch like this one, nothing so sophisticated was ever intentional.

  He could just reach it. He backed across the car, going on tiptoe to see further. Conceivably this lightless gap could stretch to the limits of the building itself, and that was enough for Cruz's mind to classify it as a bootlegger's hidey-hole. A dry, cured smell rolled from the gap to bypass Cruz and seek the open elevator shaft. It was like old attics, mummy spices.

  This, he thought, would be a primo tuckaway for several tons of Great White.

  Dope, as a concept, punched new urgency into his chest.

  The gap was perfect, probably forgotten. It could be turned to advantage later, after more immediate accounts were updated.

  Something thumped smartly against the roof of the car, like a big tomato falling twenty feet and hitting. Splat. Chiquita came back to haunt him again.

  His sense of discovery flip-flopped with common sense. The elevator, regardless of appearances, had to be kin to everything else in Fergus' empire - worn out, ancient, dangerous and unpredictably finicky. Now it was jammed in the shaft, hanging on air, and things were raining onto the roof…

  … so get your gnarly ass out, already.

  Worming his legs downward was creepy enough, given the potential drop of the shaft just beneath him. The second floor door resisted a simple kick. His numb arm picked this moment to begin throbbing. The last of the injections was rinsing clear in his bloodstream.

  Cruz knew he would not curve, like smoke around a corner, to fall, but he thought about it anyway, the same way anyone on a high enough roof thinks about going over the edge. Gravity would provide freefall. Then positive impact with concrete and gears and stuff with sharp protrusions. So nice, to precipitate Bauhaus' jelloid bulk down such an avenue. Cruz wanted to witness the touchdown, revel in the shattering of bones, point out the curds of exploded brain.

  God, but he could do with a twin-bore blast of the White Stuff to clear the rooms of his head. Sharpen his reflexes; knock down the damnable pain in his armpit.

  Somewhere behind closed doors a woman screamed on the second floor. B.F.D. I've got problems of my own, lady. He wondered if Kenilworth 's theoretical ghost was up late, a-haunting.

  Another thonk; a big fist, or worse, hitting the roof of the car. Cruz held back the inner door and hung, putting his boot to the edge of the wire-mesh window below. Now he kicked, not pushed.

  He thought: The elevator works were eating themselves alive up there. Falling to pieces. The car would unjam and plummet any second.

  If it dropped now, his legs would be guillotined by concrete and steel. Crushed bones. Legs severed. He would be cut in two like a fingernail.

  The whole goddamned building was going nuts.

  On his second kick the door below banged back wide and Cruz squirmed free, battering his elbow against the floor as he fell out and rolled. The door swung shut and slammed loudly. He stayed spread out on the floor a few beats, smelling cat piss, his heart trying to pound itself into a new shape. Whatever else, he was still alive and breathing.

  Options reran.

  By now Marko had dropped by apartment 323 and realized it was a dodge. Having already trashed Cruz's place at the opposite end of the building, he would report immediately to Bauhaus. They would both have tipped to his absence from the hospital by now. Jamaica had to be warned, but not by phone; Jonathan had to be briefed if not cautioned. Cruz felt Jonathan was in no real jeopardy, just as the possibility of a fall down the elevator shaft had been no danger.

  He pushed hair from his eyes and scanned the second floor hallway. One more scream, from the far end, his end of Kenilworth. Some bitch getting slapped around because she won't put out during her period. Some mommy who can't control her brat, so she shrieks at it like that Velasquez puta. Some screamer who doesn't have all
the wordly goods the universe of TV game shows tells her she should have, so she vents off at her live-in peasant boyfriend. Who cared.

  Or maybe she wanted out. Just out. Cruz could get behind that.

  The thought of Marko and Bauhaus gave Cruz another potential for the gap between floors. A genuinely desperate person might hide himself there, coming and going through the roof hatch of the elevator. It would require tools and supplies and some prep, but past that it was foolproof. Who would even look? Between the cellar rooms and the walled-up corridors and the subdivided apartments and the unexpected turns, Kenilworth had more forgotten convolutions than a mystery novel had secret panels.

  No doubt, if Cruz searched long enough, he'd find bones.

  Across from the elevator door was the uneven end table, its Folger's coffee can still holding a bounty of dusty plastic flowers. On the floor with Cruz were gum wrappers and cigarette butts and the nondescript stains of animals or children or incontinent drunks. The ground-out butts had left bum commas in the prehistoric carpeting. There was a gray oval on the wall above the table where a mirror had once hung. Gentleman callers may perform a last-minute grooming inspection before delivering their calling cards at the doors of ladies of quality.

  Uh-huh, yeah, right.

  He backtracked to the eastern stairwell, walking right past Jonathan's closed and locked outer door. The sounds of hopelessness had ceased. Cruz paused.

  Nothing encouraged him to knock, so he took the stairs one by one. Let Jonathan sleep ten more minutes, if it was going to come to hairy late-night commotion.

  As he made the final turn, ascending to the third floor, a black face glared at him from apartment 304 and was instantly supplanted by a slamming door. Anger and hostility in that gaze, plus bumps. Not my bitch, not my connection, not my main man, so piss off.

  Cruz edged toward his own apartment, 307, like a good spy. That was his role tonight. He found the outer door closed but not locked. The inner door of the airlock was still open by three inches, admitting light to the cramped vestibule. As he eased it open, tensed to flee, he tipped to the extra ingredient in the fierce stare of that black guy, a man he had never seen and did not know from Martin Luther King.