by John Saul
A moment later, he’d felt something.
Something creeping toward him.
“Jagger?” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the darkness.
“Yeah,” Jagger replied, his voice little more than a croak.
It sounded to Jeff as if he was still on the mattress on the other side of the room.
Then something skittered across his leg, and when he struck out at it, his hand hit something soft. There was a squeak as the object hit the wall a few feet away.
A rat!
Jeff jerked his legs up, then scrambled to his feet.
Then he heard something else.
It was a voice from the other side of the door.
“Get away from the door. Both of you sit on the mattress and don’t move. You move, and the door closes and the light don’t go back on. You got till I count to ten.”
The man began counting, and for a moment Jeff was paralyzed. Where was the mattress? How was he supposed to find it? “Jagger,” he whispered. “Where are you?”
“Over here,” Jagger whispered back.
Jeff took a tentative step toward the other man’s voice, then another. “Say something,” he hissed into the blackness.
But instead of speaking, Jagger reached out in the darkness. His huge hand brushed against Jeff’s leg, then closed on it. “It’s okay,” Jagger said. “I got you.”
As the man outside finished counting, Jeff sank onto the mattress.
The door opened, a brilliant halogen beam cutting through the darkness, blinding Jeff as effectively as the darkness had a moment earlier.
“Welcome to the game,” the voice said. “You win, you go free. You lose, you die.”
Jeff heard the sound of something being set on the floor.
The halogen beam vanished, and the room was plunged back into blackness.
The bolt on the door slid back into place with a dull thump.
And then the light came back on.
Sitting next to the door was a large enamel bowl filled with something that looked like stew. The handles of two spoons protruded from the glutinous mass. Next to the bowl was a canteen.
Jagger got up and brought the bowl back to the mattress, setting it between them and offering Jeff a spoon.
Jeff shook his head.
Jagger shrugged and began to eat.
As he watched the other man consume the food, Jeff thought about the words that had been spoken in the darkness: “You win, you go free. You lose, you die.”
His eyes shifted from Jagger to the single dim bulb that hung overhead.
You win, you go free. You lose, you die.
And if the light went off—
But Jeff knew what would happen if the light went off. The terrible suffocating darkness would close around him, and whatever lay hidden in the darkness would once more begin to creep toward him.
He repeated the words to himself again: Welcome to the game. You win, you go free.
You lose, you die.
CHAPTER 11
Keith Converse felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. He’d spent the evening alone, which hadn’t been a good idea. He’d consumed almost half a fifth of scotch—and not the good scotch he and Mary had always saved for company, either. It had been the cheap stuff that he kept on hand for the days when he felt he just needed a drink after work. The whiskey was raw enough that until last night he’d never been able to swallow more than one or two, and usually he wound up pouring what was left of the second drink down the drain. But last night nothing had gone down the drain. He’d just kept drinking, hoping that the alcohol would eventually take away the image of the burned body he’d seen that day.
The body that everyone had told him was his son’s.
All evening, as he sat in his chair sipping whiskey and trying to forget what he’d seen, what Mary had said kept recurring to him: “He’s dead, Keith . . . Jeff’s dead, and you’ve got to face it.”
But all he saw, no matter how much scotch he forced down his throat, was that patch of unburned skin, the patch that hadn’t been charred this morning, but was burned so badly by afternoon that no tattoo could have been seen even if it were there.
Sometime after midnight, he forced himself to go to bed, but the patch of unmarked skin hung in his mind’s eye as if it were somehow lit from within. The patch of skin where a tattoo should have been.
As the sun came up, Keith finally gave up on sleep and rose to try to clear his head with a cold shower, his doubts having congealed into an absolute certainty.
The body they’d shown him wasn’t Jeff’s.
Then what had happened?
Was it a mistake?
Could they have shown him the wrong body?
Was it possible there had been another burned body in the morgue? While the coffeemaker did its work, Keith went into the tiny alcove off the living room that served as his office and logged on to the Internet. He ran the search every way he could, checked the archives of every news agency in the area. In the last week, only three people in all of New York had died in a fire.
Jeff and the two correction officers.
So they hadn’t showed him the wrong body.
Then what was going on?
He drank three cups of coffee, the argument raging inside his throbbing head. Mary had to be right—he was just refusing to face the reality of what had happened, grasping at any straw, no matter how weak it might be. Face it, he told himself over and over again. But no matter how hard he tried, a voice inside him kept insisting that something was wrong, that it hadn’t been Jeff’s body he’d seen in the morgue, no matter how impossible that seemed.
Back in his truck, and back on the expressway, he headed once more to the city. This time, though, he didn’t go to the Medical Examiner’s office. He headed instead to the Fifth Precinct station on Elizabeth Street.
He parked in a garage on the block north of the precinct house and walked south on a sidewalk that was already crowded at nine A.M. Twin green globes marked the station. Aside from that, it was a nondescript, not quite white building distinguished only by double front doors that had been painted a shade of blue so washed-out that Keith wondered if the bureaucrat who had chosen it had been color blind, or—more likely—the city had gotten a deal on a batch of paint no one else would buy. The blue doors stood open, though, and he stepped through a small foyer and pushed through an inner set of oak and glass doors, automatically looking around for the metal detectors that had stood just inside nearly every public building he’d been in since the morning after Jeff was arrested. But there were only several neutral-gray desks—only two of which were occupied—and a few patrolmen standing around talking. Around to the right he found the long, ornately carved oak counter that was the nerve center of the precinct.
The desk sergeant listened to his request, his face impassive. “Lemme get this straight,” he said when Keith was done. “You want to see the report on that wreck yesterday morning, the one up at Delancey and Bowery?” When Keith nodded, the sergeant frowned. “How come?”
Keith was ready for the question. “It was my son that died,” he said smoothly, giving no hint that he had any suspicions that it might not have been Jeff at all. “I just want to know what happened to him, that’s all.”
The desk sergeant’s gaze shifted to a pair of patrolmen who were just heading out the door. “Hey, Ryan—didn’t you and Hernandez catch that mess yesterday morning?”
The patrolman came over, and Keith introduced himself. “I just wondered exactly what happened. My son . . .” He let his voice trail off, leaving the last words unspoken.
“It was his kid that died,” the desk sergeant offered, his voice finally taking on a note of sympathy. “You want to tell him what happened?”
Johnny Ryan shook his head. “Not that much to tell,” he said. “By the time I got there, the van was already burning. Some old wreck of a car had slammed into it.”
“What about the driver of the other car? Wasn’t he hur
t?” Keith asked.
Ryan shrugged. “If he was, it sure didn’t slow him down much. He was gone before anyone could even get a good look at him—but don’t worry, we’ll find him.”
The other patrolman, whose name badge identified him as Enrico Hernandez, shook his head sourly. “Don’t know how—the clunker’d been stolen off a lot out in Queens last night. We figure it was some kid out for a joyride, but without any witnesses . . .” He shrugged helplessly.
“But somebody had to have seen it,” Keith pressed. “I mean, the middle of New York City—”
“You ever been over there at five-thirty in the morning? You could shoot a cannon down Bowery and not hit anything. Only people around at all were a couple of drunks, and neither one of ’em will say a thing. First one says he was poking around in a Dumpster, and the other was sound asleep. Said he didn’t even wake up until the thing blew up.” Then, remembering who he was talking to, he tried to backtrack. “I mean—”
“So nobody saw it all?” Keith asked.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not still looking,” Hernandez said, a little too quickly. “Look, we want to know what happened just as bad as you do. It wasn’t just your boy, you know. That guy killed two correction officers, too.”
But a prisoner on his way to Rikers Island doesn’t matter, Keith added silently to himself. “You guys happen to remember the names of the drunks?”
“One of ’em was Al Kelly,” Johnny Ryan offered, obviously relieved to at least be able to offer something—no matter how insignificant—to the man whose son had died yesterday morning. “Kelly’s almost always around that corner. He’s got gray hair—really long. Maybe about an inch taller than you. He usually wears three or four sweaters and a coat, and if he isn’t drunk by ten in the morning, you got the wrong guy.” He glanced at Hernandez. “You remember the other guy?”
“Peterson, wasn’t it? Something like that. Don’t remember ever seeing him before, but that doesn’t mean he won’t still be around.” He turned to the desk sergeant. “Any reason why he can’t see the report?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Not that I know of.” He pointed to one of the desks. “Ask Sayers. Just tell him what you want, and he’ll find it.”
Keith turned back to the two officers. “There going to be anything in it you haven’t already told me?”
“Not much,” Ryan sighed, shaking his head. “I wish there was—I really do. And a couple of the guys upstairs are on it, so maybe we’ll still find the perp, you know?”
“They here?” Keith asked. “The guys upstairs?”
The desk sergeant glanced at the board on the far wall, then shook his head. “Maybe a half hour or so. You can wait over there.” He tilted his head toward a bench that sat against the wainscoting—painted the same ugly shade of blue as the outside doors—then picked up a phone that had started ringing. “Fifth Precinct, Sergeant McCormick.”
“Maybe I’ll come back later,” Keith said.
But as he left the precinct, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be back.
CHAPTER 12
The morning looked a lot warmer than it was, and Keith hunched his shoulders against the chill wind blowing down Elizabeth Street as he headed up toward Kenmare, which would run into Delancey at the corner of Bowery. Though he was only a couple of blocks from the collection of massive gray stone buildings that housed the city’s government, he might as well have disappeared into another world. Elizabeth Street was lined on both sides with buildings of no more than four or five stories, with businesses operating on the sidewalk level and laundry hanging from lines strung between fire escapes on the floors above. Half the shops were grocery stores, though the Chinese fruits and vegetables they displayed were mostly unrecognizable to him. He had to thread his way through a milling throng of people who neither smiled nor nodded, let alone made any move to give way when there wasn’t enough room for two people to pass. Once, a horn blasted as he stepped into the street to avoid a pack of hard-looking teenage boys with rings in their ears, lips, and noses, only to have one of those he was avoiding grab his arm and snatch him back onto the sidewalk an instant before the cab would have run him down.
“Watch it, man—you wanna get yourself killed?” the kid asked.
“Thanks,” Keith said, but found himself talking to no one; the kid and his friends were already several yards away, and it was as if he no longer existed. Turning away from them, he bumped into a burly man slinging a barrel of garbage into a truck. As oblivious to him as the kids now were, the garbage man hardly glanced at him, going on with his work as if nothing had happened.
By the middle of the next block, Keith found himself doing his best to ignore the people around him, concentrating instead on the sidewalk directly ahead. Twice he made the mistake of waiting for a light to turn green at an intersection, and was nearly trampled by the crowd that ignored it. By the third block he discovered the trick everyone else already seemed to know—if you don’t look at the cabs, they won’t hit you. In fact, the cabbies didn’t even bother to honk or curse at him, but let him cross with the same impunity they granted the city’s natives.
At the corner of Kenmare, he turned right toward Bowery and Delancey—the intersection where the accident had taken place. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but the vague sense of letdown—almost of disappointment—he felt at the corner’s normality told him he must have been expecting something.
The bustling Asian community of Elizabeth Street suddenly gave way to restaurant equipment stores, except for one restaurant that seemed to be left over from an era when the neighborhood had been mostly Italian. Window after window displayed commercial mixers and kitchen equipment, bar glasses and furniture, and more kinds of lighting fixtures than Keith had even thought existed. It was almost devoid of people on the sidewalk, and there were no apartments above the businesses.
No windows from which some early rising resident might have seen what had happened yesterday morning.
It was just another impersonal city intersection, the cars heading east into Delancey and toward the Williamsburg Bridge waiting impatiently as the streams of traffic on Bowery flowed north and south.
No sign of the accident at all, except for the boarded-up windows of the restaurant supply house the van had careened into after the car struck it.
No sign that someone had died here only a little more than twenty-four hours ago.
This morning, with the sun shining incongruously on the spot where the black van had burned, it seemed almost impossible that it could have happened, and he stood for a moment on the southeast corner, trying to picture the scene from early yesterday morning. The van would have been coming from the west, heading toward the bridge. The car that hit it must have been going north on Bowery, and very fast—Keith had a pretty good idea how heavy a Ford van was, but could only guess how much force it would take to smash in the door of a reinforced van and knock it all the way across the street and into the building’s windows. After it hit the van, the car’s momentum would have carried it farther north, though the deflection of the crash should also have sent it skidding eastward.
He crossed the street, and twenty yards to the north found a wall that looked as if a car might have rubbed against it, leaving flecks of paint on the deeply gouged surface. His fingers unconsciously tracing the marks the careening car had left, he looked back toward where the van had burned.
“Man, it was somethin’,” a slurring voice said.
Startled, Keith looked down to see a crumpled figure covered with enough ragged and filthy clothing that he was almost invisible, curled in the doorway of an empty store. He was peering blearily up at Keith through eyes so bloodshot their color was indistinguishable, and under the layer of grime that stained his skin, a vast network of ruined veins and scabrous sores spread over his features.
“Shoulda seen it, man—looked just like the fires of hell.”
Keith’s pulse quickened and he squatted down. “You were here yesterday m
orning?” he asked. “When the van burned?”
The man’s lips twisted in a lopsided grimace, revealing the stumps of half a dozen broken teeth. “Where else am I gonna be?” His rheumy eyes fixed on Keith. “You got a couple’a bucks? I ain’t ate in a while.”
On any other day Keith would have walked away from the man, probably not even looked at him if he could have avoided it. In Bridgehampton, the man couldn’t have stayed on the streets more than a few minutes before the police force—if you could really call Bill Chapin and his three deputies a force—would have hustled him onto a bus with a one-way ticket back to Manhattan. Certainly, he wouldn’t have been allowed to roam the streets long enough for any of the town’s wealthier citizens to have their weekend spoiled by stumbling across him.
But this wasn’t an ordinary day, and Keith wasn’t in the familiar confines of Bridgehampton, and instead of quickly standing up and walking away, he pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket.
It flipped open the same way it always did: to Jeff’s graduation photo, taken almost a year ago.
Keith’s stomach tightened as he gazed at the photograph. Taking out a five-dollar bill, he turned the wallet toward the man leaning against the building. “Did you see this person?” he asked. “Yesterday morning?”
The drunk peered at the photo. “Nah,” he mumbled. “Who’s that?”
“My son,” Keith said. “He was—” He fell abruptly silent and flipped the wallet closed as the surrealism of the entire scene suddenly closed in on him. How had this happened? How could he explain to this man—this man whose own life had devolved down to sprawling in a doorway at ten o’clock in the morning—what he was doing here? Why would the man even listen, let alone care?
What was he even doing here?
Grasping at straws, just like Mary had said.
The drunk, his eyes glued to the five-dollar bill, said, “Onliest guy I saw was the one from the van.”
Keith’s pulse quickened. “The driver?”
The man shrugged. “Nah—who cares about him?” He frowned, then reached tentatively toward Keith’s wallet. “Lemme see that pitcher again.”
