by John Saul
Neither of them were tempted to turn into it.
A few hundred yards later, Jagger grabbed hold of Jeff’s shoulder. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “Would you look at that?”
For a second Jeff didn’t trust his vision—it had to be a hallucination. But as they took a few more steps, he realized it wasn’t a trick of his eye.
There was light ahead.
Daylight.
CHAPTER 23
The familiar beep of the answering machine in Jeff’s apartment signaling a message waiting was so unexpected that both Keith and Heather stopped short at the door. Their eyes locked on the machine, the same thought crashing into both their heads.
Jeff!
He’d gotten out of the tunnels and was calling for help and—
And both of them hesitated before they’d taken more than a single step toward the machine. Why would Jeff call here? He couldn’t know they were looking for him, let alone that his father was staying in his apartment. The red light continued to blink and the beep sounded again.
“No one knows I’m here,” Keith said.
Where a moment ago both of them had been eager to listen to the message, they were now reluctant. Why would anyone call here?
“Probably my foreman,” Keith said, but the lack of conviction in his voice told Heather he didn’t really believe it. Finally, Heather went over and pressed the button.
“One new message,” the impersonal voice of the machine intoned.
“Keith? Are you there? If you’re there, you pick the phone up right now!” It was Mary’s voice, and the edge on it told Keith his wife was on the verge of hysteria. There was a barely perceptible pause, and then she went on. “I know you’re staying there—Vic DiMarco says he hasn’t seen you since day before yesterday. You have to be at Jeff’s. I don’t see how you can stand it, with all his things around you—” She abruptly cut off her own words and Keith could almost hear her struggling to regain control of herself. Then she started over: “There’s going to be a memorial mass for Jeff tomorrow. I was going to hold it out here at St. Barnabas, but then—well, I started thinking about how much Jeff loved the city, and how many friends he has there, and how much he loved St. Patrick’s. So the mass is going to be there. At one o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I tried to call Heather, but she’s not home. I’ll keep trying. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and now Keith had the distinct impression she was trying to think of more to say, if for no other reason than to avoid hanging up the telephone. Finally, she spoke again, and now her voice had a flat, defeated quality. “If you get this, please call me back, Keith.”
There was a click, and then the computer-generated voice spoke again: “1:52 P.M.”
As the machine fell silent, neither Keith nor Heather said anything. Keith reached out and pressed the button that activated the outgoing message on the machine, and Jeff’s voice emerged from the tinny speaker. “Hi! You know what to do, so go ahead and do it. I’ll call you back as soon as I can!”
They both listened to the message, then Keith shook his head. “I can’t erase it. We kept it on all through the trial because we were sure he was coming home. And I’m still sure.”
Heather chewed at her lower lip. “What about the memorial tomorrow?”
“What about it?” Keith asked, a note of stubbornness creeping into his voice that told Heather what he was thinking as clearly as any words could have.
“We have to go,” Heather said.
“But he’s not dead!” Keith’s voice began to rise. “What are we supposed to do, sit there acting like he’s dead when we don’t believe it?”
“I think we need to be there anyway,” Heather replied. “If neither one of us goes, how will it look? Everyone else thinks that Jeff is dead, and if we don’t go to the mass—”
“I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks,” Keith cut in. “Going to that mass is like admitting he’s dead. I’m damned if—”
Suddenly, all Heather’s tension erupted in pure anger. “Why doesn’t anyone matter except you?” she demanded. “Don’t you care about how anyone but you feels? And it’s not admitting he’s dead!”
“The hell it isn’t!” Keith shot back. “It’s not just a mass—it’s a funeral mass. It’s praying for the dead.”
Heather hardly let him finish. “Then don’t say the prayers for the dead! Pray that we find him—pray that he’s all right—pray for any damn thing you want!” Her eyes fixed on him. “And call Mary. Don’t be the same kind of asshole my dad is to my mother!” Shocked by her own outburst, Heather clapped a hand over her mouth for a second, then shook her head almost violently. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have said that. I mean—”
But now it was Keith shaking his head. “It’s okay,” he told her, his own anger draining away as quickly as hers. “You’re right—no matter what problems Mary and I have, she shouldn’t have to go through all this alone.” For the first time since they’d come into Jeff’s apartment, he smiled. “Actually, one of the main things we fought about was you—Mary always thought you were the best thing that ever happened to Jeff, and as I’m sure you know, I didn’t agree. So I guess it turns out I was wrong about that.” He picked up the phone and dialed Mary’s number. “It’s me,” he said when she picked up. “You’re right—I’m at Jeff’s. I’m—well, if I told you what I’m doing, you’d only think I was crazier than you already do.”
“You’re right,” Mary replied. “I don’t want to know.” There was a short silence. “Just be at the mass tomorrow, all right?”
Before Keith could reply, the phone went dead in his hand.
“I still say it can’t be this easy,” Jeff said. The patch of daylight had been growing steadily, and now it seemed to be drawing them out of the grim shadows of the railroad tunnel like a magnet.
“Why not?” Jagger demanded, his eyes fixed on the expanse of blue sky ahead. “All they said was we had to get out—that if we could get out we’d be free.” He took another step toward the bright beacon, but Jeff’s fingers closed on his arm, holding him back.
“It can’t be that easy,” he said. “They’re not going to just let us walk out.” Now he had an uneasy feeling that they weren’t actually alone in the shadows, that somewhere in the darkness, someone was watching them. He glanced around, but his eyes had already been blinded by the brilliant daylight ahead, and in contrast, the shadows behind him were an impenetrable pitch-black.
If there were people behind them—and he thought he could almost feel them now—he and Jagger would be framed in perfect silhouette against the bright backdrop of the sky. He moved off the center of the track like a creature of the darkness reacting to the dangers of daylight.
But Jagger was already moving toward the light again. Not wanting to lose his companion, Jeff followed him. After another eighty paces or so they could see the mouth of the tunnel. Though there was still a roof over the tracks and a solid concrete wall to the east, the west side of the tracks was open to the Hudson River. To the north they could see the George Washington Bridge, and across the river the wooded bluffs of New Jersey.
“Holy fuck,” Jagger whispered. “Will you look at that? We did it, man! We’re out!”
Jeff recognized where they were. The southernmost end of Riverside Park was just above them. From what he could remember from the long walks he and Heather had taken through the park a lifetime ago, a high fence separated the tracks from the park itself. It was designed to keep people away from the tracks, and out of the tunnels. A fence that now served to hold them in. But the fence was hardly insurmountable. It wasn’t as if they were on Rikers Island, where the prison buildings were surrounded by two fences and a no-man’s-land filled with razor wire. Here, there was only a single obstacle, maybe eight or nine feet high. A few strands of barbed wire ran along its top, but he remembered watching a couple of kids slither over the fence one day to retrieve a model airplane that had lost power at the wrong moment. Though one of the kids’ mothers had yell
ed bloody murder at her son, the boy ignored her, scaling the fence with the ease of a chimpanzee climbing the wall of an old cage in the Central Park Zoo. If those two boys could do it, so could he and Jagger.
Yet even as he told himself escape was possible, an instinct told him that something was wrong, that it couldn’t be as easy as it looked. From the moment he had tried to help Cynthia Allen on that subway platform, nothing in his life had been easy.
They moved forward again, but Jagger seemed to have been infected by the same unease, and instead of rushing toward daylight, he also moved ahead more cautiously.
The view of the Hudson broadened, and they could smell fresh air from the river. Jeff drew it deep into his lungs, reveling in its sweetness. As the crisp air flushed some of the staleness of the tunnels out of his system, his sense of danger began to diminish.
Perhaps, after all, they were about to escape.
But escape to what? Even if they got out of the tunnels, the police would be searching for them. For him, at least. The guards taking him to Rikers surely would have witnessed his escape.
Unless . . .
What if both the driver and the guard riding shotgun had died when the van exploded?
But even if that happened, the police would have found the van’s open back door. And they wouldn’t have found his body. They’d know he escaped, and they’d be looking for him.
On the surface, away from the terrible darkness and claustrophobia of the maze that lay beneath the city, at least he’d have a chance. “Maybe we can do it,” he whispered, not really meaning to speak out loud.
“Sure we can,” Jagger replied. He threw his arm around Jeff’s shoulders. “Over that fence, and we’re outta here. Come on.”
Moving forward, they edged closer and closer to the point where the west wall of the tunnel would end. Ten feet from their goal, Jeff cast one backward glance into the darkness—the darkness he hoped never to see again. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Quickening their pace, they emerged from the shadows into the late afternoon sunshine. The fence was right where Jeff remembered it. And on the other side, he saw the softball field, where he’d played a couple of times in pickup games.
Maybe thirty-five yards to the fence—fifty at most.
And then he heard a voice, low and menacing.
Mocking.
“Too bad, boys. Wrong exit.”
Jeff spun around to see five derelicts indolently watching them. Their hair was shaggy and unkempt. They wore grease-stained shirts and pants and had moth-eaten knit caps on their heads.
One was sitting on the ground, leaning against a rock. Two more were lounging against the wall of the tunnel itself. Another pair were sitting in faded canvas director’s chairs, one of which was missing an arm.
The man who had spoken was holding a gun—an ugly snub-nosed revolver—and pointing it at Jeff. The other four had their hands concealed in jacket pockets, and Jeff was certain that another gun was concealed in every one.
Instinctively, he looked the other way, only to see three more men, dressed as shabbily as the rest, and looking just as menacing.
The softball field was empty, and he and Jagger were shielded from the view of any chance passerby. There was no one in sight except the eight homeless men.
Silently, Jeff and Jagger turned away from the fence and retraced their steps.
A few seconds later the darkness of the tunnel closed around them again.
CHAPTER 24
Something wasn’t right with Jinx. Tillie could feel it, the way she could feel it whenever one of her clan was chewing on a problem. But she wasn’t about to say anything—not yet, anyway. That was why most of the kids in the tunnels were there—too much yammering from folks who didn’t give a damn about them and shouldn’t have even had them in the first place. And with a lot of them—including Jinx, Tillie knew—it wasn’t just yammering they’d finally run away from. For many, it was a lot worse than that. Not that she ever asked them questions—better just to let them be, listen to them when they felt like talking, and not push them to open up. So instead of demanding that Jinx tell her what was wrong, she went about her business, adding the contents of the bag of groceries she’d found on the table after meeting Eve Harris in the park to the kettle of soup simmering on the back burner. She didn’t know who’d left the groceries—it could have been any one of the dozens of people who’d dropped in for a meal over the last few weeks. The groceries certainly weren’t what she would have called Class A, which only showed up every now and then, since the wholesale markets were all the way downtown and not much of their goods ever made it this far north. No, this stuff looked like it had come from one of the restaurants—not a real greasy spoon, but not The Four Seasons, either. Maybe one of the places along Amsterdam Avenue. There were some potatoes—barely even beginning to get soft—and a bunch of carrots that had just started to go limp. Some meat, too—and pretty good stuff—a half-eaten filet wrapped up in tinfoil that Tillie suspected had been rescued from a trash barrel down the street from wherever the steak had come from, along with a few uncooked pieces of beef and lamb that were starting to smell. Starting to smell was a long way from inedible, though, and Tillie cut the meat into bite-sized chunks and added them to the soup. By the time the vegetables went in as well, the thin soup was rapidly turning into a pretty good-smelling stew. Nobody would even notice the track rabbit that had been the only meat in the pot before this windfall arrived. After giving the kettle a stir and putting the lid back on, she turned to look at Jinx, who was sitting at the kitchen table, idly leafing through a dog-eared copy of a movie magazine.
“Gonna be a movie star?”
Jinx rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. The day after I graduate from Columbia.”
“You could do that,” Tillie said, dropping into the chair opposite her.
“Sure. All I’d have to do is walk in, right?”
“So maybe you’d have to do that test—the one where you get a high school diploma.”
“And then take a bunch of other tests, like the SATs, and then figure out how to pay for it. You know how much it costs?”
Tillie shrugged. “Never gave it much thought.”
“It’s, like, thirty thousand dollars. And that’s for, like, one year. Where’m I going to get that kind of money?”
“Work?”
Jinx shrugged. “Where’m I gonna get a job that pays that good?”
Tillie pursed her lips. “So is that what’s buggin’ you?”
Jinx shook her head, but didn’t get up and walk away. That told Tillie she just wanted a little push. “So what is it? A guy?” Jinx started to shake her head, but her blush gave her away. “Aha!” Tillie grinned, exposing the gap in her teeth. “So who is it?” But even as she asked the question, Tillie remembered the way Jinx had been looking at Jeff Converse that morning, and her grin faded. “Not that guy they’re huntin’.”
Jinx’s expression tightened. “Why not?”
“You know damn well why not—they only hunt the bad ones.”
“Well, he didn’t look bad,” Jinx said. “The big one was scary, but the other one—Jeff—he looked nice.”
“Attila the Hun probably looked nice, too.”
“Who?”
“Jeez,” Tillie sighed. “You really did quit school, didn’t you?”
Her eyes turning stormy, Jinx stood up. “And I can quit here, too! I don’t have to hang around here, you know. If all you’re going to do is bug me—”
“Now that’s enough!” Tillie cut in. “You’re too smart a girl to be talkin’ that way, and I’m just tellin’ you what you already know, anyhow. If he hadn’t done something really bad, he wouldn’t be down here. He ain’t like us, and you know it!”
“I don’t know anything!” Jinx retorted. “I’m just a dumb runaway, right?” Before Tillie could reply, Jinx grabbed her jacket—one that Tillie had found for her at the Salvation Army two weeks ago—and stormed out.
Jinx made her way through the tunnels easily, following a route she knew as well as the streets on the surface. Twenty minutes later she emerged into Riverside Park and started toward Seventy-second Street. Liz Hodges was sitting on a tiny camp stool outside her tent, but right now Jinx didn’t feel like talking to Liz or anybody else. Leaving the park, she headed east on Seventy-second, then ducked down into the subway station on Broadway. Paying no attention to the transit cop who was leaning against the wall, she jumped over the turnstile and skipped down the stairs to the platform, oblivious to the cop’s shouting. Coming to the platform just as the doors to an uptown train were starting to close, she wiggled on and perched nervously on the edge of a seat until the train had pulled out of the station—and out of the reach of the transit cop. Damn Tillie! How does she always know when something’s wrong? Sometimes it’s like she can look right into my head. Except that Tillie was only partly right—it wasn’t just that Jinx had thought Jeff Converse was cute. There was something else, too.
He just didn’t seem like the kind of guy the hunters would be going after.
He wasn’t at all like the other guy—the one named Jagger. She hadn’t liked that one at all. There was something about the way he looked at her that made her shudder. He’d killed someone, and it had been a woman.
But not Jeff. Jinx had seen a gentleness in Jeff’s eyes. And yet everyone knew the men the hunters went after deserved to die—that was the whole thing about the hunt, wasn’t it? The hunters were just getting rid of people who should have been executed anyway.
The train slowed to a stop at 110th Street, and Jinx found herself staring at the very spot where Bobby Gomez had mugged a woman last fall. She still wished she hadn’t been hanging with Bobby that night, and after she saw what he did to the woman, she did her best to avoid him. He’d said he was just going to grab her purse. That wasn’t what it had looked like to Jinx.
It had looked like he was trying to kill the woman, and he’d only stopped beating on her when she called out that someone was coming. She and Bobby disappeared into the tunnel so quickly that she hadn’t even been able to tell if it was a cop who was coming down the platform. Not that it mattered—the main thing was that they’d gotten away, and Bobby hadn’t actually killed the woman.
