by John Saul
. . . APPREHENDED IN THE 110TH STREET MTA STATION . . .
The memory of the woman she’d seen last night suddenly came back to Jinx.
The woman in a wheelchair.
The woman Bobby Gomez had been mugging when she’d seen someone running toward them.
It had happened in the 110th Street station!
“This isn’t right,” she said, not realizing she was speaking out loud. “He didn’t do it. . . .”
“What do you mean, he didn’t do it?” Tillie countered. “ ‘Course he did it! If he didn’t do it, how’d he get convicted?”
“But I was there,” Jinx protested. “It was Bobby Gomez!” She told Tillie what she could remember about that night, but when she was done, Tillie shook her head.
“Just because Bobby Gomez tried to mug someone don’t mean this guy didn’t do nothin’,” she insisted, tapping Jeff’s picture with her finger. “Folks get mugged in the subway all the time—I’ve seen it happen a dozen times.”
“But it’s 110th Street,” Jinx insisted. “And last night I saw the woman Bobby beat on—she was in a wheelchair!”
Tillie’s expression hardened. “Now you listen to me, young lady. You’re only fifteen years old, and even if you were right—which you’re not—I still wouldn’t let you have nothin’ to do with that man.” Ignoring the storm brewing in Jinx’s eyes, Tillie plunged ahead. “He’s gonna be dead by this time tomorrow, and there’s nothin’ you can do to stop it. Once the hunters are on to someone, that’s it! You want to be there when they find him? Now just get on with taking Robby to school, and forget about that guy—I never should’ve let him in here at all.”
Knowing it was useless to argue with Tillie, Jinx shoved the paper back at her. But half an hour later, as she watched Robby walk down the tree-lined block on Seventy-eighth Street toward P.S. 87, she was still thinking about what she’d seen in the paper, and by the time Robby disappeared into the building, she knew what she was going to do.
Jeff couldn’t get the image of the dead man out of his mind. Dead, vacant eyes staring at him.
What had happened back there in that tiny room buried deep in the tunnels? What had the man done that made Jagger attack him while he slept?
When Jeff woke up, the room had been illuminated only by the faint orange glow of the dying fire in the barrel, but his eyes—now more accustomed to the darkness beneath the city than the light of the surface—had fixed immediately on Jagger, who was staring down at him with such hatred that his first instinct had been to try to scuttle away. But even as he pressed back into the hard concrete of the wall, he realized that it was the other man—the man who hadn’t even told them his name—upon whom Jagger’s gaze was fixed.
It was as if Jagger were in some kind of trance. When Jeff had spoken to him, Jagger had barely reacted. He’d remained crouched down, slowly rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, watching the man die. Only when the man’s last rattling breath bubbled from his lips had Jagger looked at him.
The hatred in his eyes had died away, and Jeff saw something else.
Desire.
Jagger’s hand had come up—a hand still covered with the blood of the man he’d just killed—and reached toward him. Just before his fingers would have touched his cheek, his hand dropped away.
Then Jagger’s eyes cleared and he glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. When his eyes fell on the corpse at his feet, he looked puzzled, as if he didn’t know what had happened.
“He was gonna do something to you.”
But what? The man had been crazy, but he’d been far more terrified of them than they were of him. What had Jagger thought he was going to do? They’d just been lying there, and—
A memory stirred.
Something had disturbed his sleep. He’d been dreaming, and in the dream he was back in his apartment, in bed, and he could feel Heather beside him, curled around his back, nestled into him like two spoons in a drawer. Her arm had come around him as she snuggled closer, and—
—and he’d come awake when the man on whose floor he was sleeping grunted in sudden agony as the rusted rail spike sank into him.
Maybe it had been more than a dream of Heather’s arm—maybe it was the man’s arm wrapping around him that had cued the dream in the first place. And if it was . . .
He remembered again the strange look he’d seen in Jagger’s eyes, and Jagger himself reaching out to touch him.
His reverie was interrupted by the sight of glowing light ahead. Not the orange flicker of one of the fires that seemed to burn everywhere in the tunnels, nor the glow of the work lights that illuminated some of the passages near the surface.
No, this was the bright light of the outside.
He picked up his pace, his pulse quickening as the shaft of light grew stronger. They found that the light came from a shaft leading up from the utility tunnel they’d been following ever since they left the body of the man Jagger had killed. Jeff had thought they were still at least a couple of levels below the street, but now he peered up the shaft and saw a large, rectangular grating through which he could make out some kind of wall rising toward the sky. They must not have been as far down as he’d thought. Since leaving the dead man, he’d become more and more disoriented.
“How we gonna get up there?” Jagger asked.
Jeff scanned the walls of the shaft, searching either for the metal rungs that were sunk into the concrete of some of the shafts they’d come across, or for the molded hand- and footholds that marked others. This shaft, though, seemed to be an unbroken expanse of smooth concrete stretching toward the tantalizing grating above. It was set at least fifteen feet above them—fifteen feet that might as well have been a hundred.
“We gotta find a ladder,” Jagger said.
Jeff didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he was studying the screen of the cell phone he’d found. Holding his breath, he pressed the power button.
The battery indicator still showed only one bar, but the reception indicator showed two. Even as he watched, it flickered to one.
Then back to two.
With shaking fingers he entered Heather Randall’s phone number and pressed the Send button.
Her number rang.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
“Be there,” he whispered under his breath as the phone rang a fourth time. “Please be—” His words died on his lips as the phone clicked and he heard Heather’s voice: “Hi—I’m really sorry I missed your call, but if you . . .”
The answering machine! The damned answering machine! He waited for the message to end, and finally heard the signal to start speaking.
“Heather? It’s me! It’s Jeff! Heather, listen carefully. I’m using a cell phone, and the batteries are about to run out. I’m in the tunnels—the ones under the streets—and people are hunting for me. I can’t get out and—” He broke off again, knowing how crazy it must sound. Then, as the battery beeped a warning that it was on the verge of giving out, he spoke the only three words that came to his mind: “I love you.”
Cutting the connection off, he looked once more at the flickering battery indicator.
Maybe he could get one more call in.
CHAPTER 26
Mary Converse looked at the old woman staring back at her from the mirror. Mary was only forty-one, but the woman she was looking at couldn’t have been a day under fifty-five. Gray was showing in her hair—hair that seemed to have become thinner overnight. Her eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, and a cobweb of wrinkles spread out from their corners. Her complexion looked distinctly unhealthy, like that of a heavy smoker, even though she’d smoked her last cigarette the day she found out she was pregnant with Jeff.
Jeff.
The vision in the mirror shimmered as her eyes filled with tears.
How was she going to do it? How was she going to get through this day? How was she going to sit in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and say good-bye to her on
ly child?
Be strong, she told herself. The Lord will never give you a load too heavy for you to bear. But she’d already been on her knees most of the night, praying for Jeff’s immortal soul, begging every saint she could think of to intervene with God on her son’s behalf. Her fingers were stiff from counting the decades of the rosary, and her knees were so sore that she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to genuflect as she entered the cathedral.
But still she’d kept praying, begging for a sign that Jeff’s sins had been forgiven and that he’d died in a state of grace.
None had come.
Taking a deep breath, Mary turned on the tap, soaked a washcloth in cold water, and wiped away her tears. God helps those who help themselves, she reminded herself. Stripping off her bathrobe and nightgown, she turned the shower on full force—and ice cold—then took a deep breath and stepped in. The freezing spray made her gasp, but she resisted the temptation of hot water and began scrubbing away the exhaustion of her sleepless night. After two minutes she could stand it no longer. Shivering, she shut off the water, stepped out of the stall, and wrapped herself in a bath towel.
The face that looked back at her from the mirror looked a little better: at least her complexion wasn’t quite as sallow. Half an hour later, her hair dried and arranged into a tight French twist, dressed in the same black suit she’d worn to her mother’s funeral five years ago, she surveyed herself one last time. Maybe—with the help of God—she’d get through the day.
And then the phone rang.
The sound so startled her that she almost dropped her cup, barely avoiding having coffee splash down the front of her suit. She set the cup on the counter as the phone rang again, and as she reached for the receiver, glanced at the little screen displaying the caller’s identification.
The number on the display meant nothing to her.
She glanced at the clock: not even seven-thirty yet. Why would someone she didn’t know be calling her at this hour?
The phone rang a third time. She knew she shouldn’t answer it—she’d gotten the phone with caller ID to combat a stream of crank calls during the trial.
The phone rang again, and then the answering machine picked it up. After she heard her own voice inform the caller that she couldn’t come to the phone, another voice, badly garbled, began to speak.
A frantic voice, shouting into the machine.
“. . . Mo—are you . . . it’s me, Mo—”
Mary’s hand jerked away from the phone as if she’d been stung. But as the words sank in, an incoherent cry rose in her throat and she snatched up the receiver.
“Who is this?” she asked. Her voice rose. “Who are you?”
The phone at the other end crackled, cutting in and out, but between the gaps of silence, she heard a voice: “Mom, it . . . me . . . I . . . dead . . .”
“Jeff?” Mary breathed. “Jeff? Is that you?”
The other phone crackled a couple of more times, and she thought she heard the voice again. Then there was nothing but silence.
For almost a minute Mary kept the phone pressed to her ear, willing the voice at the other end to speak again, but the silence only dragged on, and finally she put the receiver back on the cradle. As the impossibility of what she’d heard slowly sank in, she tried to tell herself that it hadn’t happened, that she’d only imagined she heard the words, only imagined she recognized the voice.
Almost against her own will, she picked up the receiver again and dialed *69. She pressed the phone against her ear, listening.
There was a click at the other end, and then a voice spoke.
An automated voice.
“This is your last call return service . . .” She listened to the recorded message, then pressed 1 to have the calling number dialed.
Another automated voice came on the line. “The cellular subscriber you are calling is either out of range or—”
Cutting the call short, she tried calling the number twice more; twice more the same message was repeated.
At eight o’clock, when she could no longer put off leaving for the city, Mary tried the number one last time.
Nothing.
It wasn’t him, she told herself as she left the apartment. It couldn’t have been.
But even as she silently repeated the words, she recalled the sound of Jeff’s voice.
Carolyn Randall woke earlier than usual that morning, and her first impulse was to roll over and go back to sleep. She and Perry had been to a party the night before—a party where she had met three movie stars as well as her favorite fashion designer—and her head was pounding with a hangover that was far worse than she deserved. All right, maybe she had one extra drink last night, or even two, but she hadn’t been drunk, no matter what Perry said. Through the headache that felt like a jackhammer pounding at her skull, she could still remember Perry’s words when they’d finally tumbled into bed at two-thirty: “I have no use for a wife who gets a reputation as a drunk, Carolyn. I can survive another divorce—but if your drinking costs me the nomination when Morgenthau finally retires, I’ll not only get rid of you, but see to it that you don’t get a nickel. So make up your mind—go along for the ride without the booze, or take the money and get out now.” She’d felt like spitting in his eye. He sure hadn’t talked like that five years ago when he found out what sex with someone like her was like instead of that old society prune he’d been married to at the time. But she also wasn’t about to take a hike right now. So she hadn’t argued—instead she’d given him the kind of blow job that could fix any argument they might have, and insisted that she wasn’t drunk. Which meant that this morning, no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t go back to sleep. Since Perry hadn’t awakened yet, she’d get up now, make sure the useless maid had his breakfast ready when he got up, and pretend she felt fine, just as she had pretended to enjoy having sex with him all this time. So instead of rolling over, she rolled out of bed, padded into her bathroom, and turned on the shower. Before stepping in, she peered into the mirror.
And didn’t like what she saw.
The first hint of wrinkles was starting to show around her eyes, and she thought she could even see some of those terrible little lines women who smoke get on their lips. She’d better start talking to the wives of some of Perry’s old friends—God knew, they’d all had enough work done that they would know the best plastic surgeons in Manhattan. Fifteen minutes later, just as Perry was starting to snort himself awake in that way she considered disgusting, she headed for the kitchen and the coffeemaker. She decided that as soon as she heard Perry cough up the load of phlegm that always accumulated in his throat overnight, she’d bring him a cup. He’d be so happy she’d thought about him that he’d forget all about last night.
She was passing the door to the library when she saw the blinking light on the answering machine on Perry’s desk. She hesitated, frowning. The light hadn’t been blinking last night when they came home, which meant that whoever called must have called very late, or very early this morning. Since nobody ever called her or Heather this early, she knew the message must be for Perry, and it must be urgent. If she picked up an important message and passed it on to him right away, he really would forget about last night’s little tiff. She went to the machine and pressed the Replay button, not noticing that it was Heather’s voice-mail light that was blinking, not Perry’s.
The voice she heard cleared the last of the alcohol from her bloodstream and made her headache vanish. “Heather?” Jeff Converse’s voice asked through a crackling of static. “It’s m—”
Then there was a series of broken fragments of his voice:
“It’s Je—, —Heather, list—, —cell phone—about to run out—, —under the streets—, —hunting for me. I can’t get out, and—”
There was a long silence, then she heard three more words: “I love you.”
The message ended with the machine’s impersonal voice announcing the time it had been received: 7:18 A.M.
For a m
oment Carolyn hesitated, uncertain whether she should even tell Perry about the message—he had an absolute thing about listening to other people’s messages. And besides, it couldn’t possibly be from Jeff Converse. He was dead—she’d heard it on the news and even read it in the paper. It had to be some kind of cruel prank someone was playing on Heather.
She knew Heather would be upset by it, and if Heather got upset, then Perry would, too. And if he got upset, he might remember he was already mad at her about last night. Better to tell him and let him decide what to do.
Five minutes later Perry was standing beside her in the long Charvet robe she’d given him for Christmas last year, listening to the message. She watched his eyes narrow as the voice spoke his daughter’s name. As the message went on, his complexion—never the kind of George Hamilton tan that Carolyn found really sexy on a man—turned deathly white. Then the color came back into his face, and the vein that always stood out on his forehead when he got angry started throbbing.
He was even angrier than Carolyn had thought he would be, and she braced herself for the tirade she was certain was about to crash down on her. But when the recording was over, he said nothing at all. Instead, he hit the Replay button and listened to it again, and then again.
“Well?” Carolyn finally asked, unable to control her anxiety any longer. “Do you think it really could be him?”
“Of course not,” Perry snapped, his voice cold with fury. “Converse is dead, so obviously it’s not him. It’s just someone’s idea of a sick joke. The question is, who did it? Because when I find out—”
“Well, if it’s not Jeff, it doesn’t matter, does it?” Carolyn cut in, hoping to find a quick way to soothe her husband before he turned on her. “Why don’t we just erase it? There’s no reason why Heather should even have to hear it!”
Perry didn’t even glance at her. “Just fix me some coffee,” he said. “I’ll take care of this—and I’ll find out who did it.”
Carolyn wasn’t tempted to argue with him, having long ago learned that even when Perry was wrong about something, he wasn’t willing to lose an argument.
