Leslie could not get out of there quickly enough.
Gainer glanced back. The rats were already returning, snarling and snapping at the air.
That toilet area, as it turned out, was located off a main passageway, the one with walls of bare brick and storage spaces built parallel. Gainer and Leslie recognized it and were at once reoriented. When they were previously there they hadn’t noticed how dim the passageway was, the only light coming from the few doors of the rooms connected to it.
Which way now? In one direction the passageway would take them to the north part of Ellis, where they’d seen those old shoes slung over a high pipe and the dormitory with the graffiti. They could go that way and, later on, work back around to the Riva. But wouldn’t it be expected of them, as amateurs, to run as far as possible from where the danger had first shown itself? It would be less predictable for them to remain around here in the thick of it, Gainer decided.
They headed south along the passageway, single file and close to the wall. On the lookout for a good hiding place. They had not gone twenty paces when they heard voices ahead. They stepped into the deeper shadow of one of the storage spaces just in time. Two of their adversaries entered the passageway.
The men’s voices were resonant in the tunnellike atmosphere.
“Me, I’d swim for it.”
“You’d wash up tomorrow down around Sandy Hook or someplace. The channel might look easy but it’s full of rips.”
“We’re going to be here all goddamn night.”
“Could be worth it.”
“Screw the bonus.”
“Okay. Seeing that’s how you feel, if you make the kill, say I made it so I can collect. I can use ten large. You think Sweet meant ten for wasting both or ten for each?”
“You’re a money hungry bastard.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Some shylock must be into you. Either that or you’ve got yourself a spinner with a tight ass and a cold nose.”
“I need, that’s all.”
“Christ, I hate the white powder shit that’s all over this place. Probably asbestos. Asbestos will give you cancer, you know. I can already feel it getting to my sinuses.”
“So, don’t breathe.”
The man sneezed twice and blessed himself.
By then the two were well down the dark passageway, having passed within a few feet of Gainer and Leslie. It hadn’t occurred to them to search the storage spaces along there, apparently presuming someone else already had.
But the next who came along might be more conscientious, Gainer thought. He and Leslie checked both ways before slipping out into the passageway again. They tried to keep their steps light but could not help making crunches and cracklings. Any moment now, Gainer expected one or more of them would jump out and fire from point-blank range. He himself had an automatic rifle now but it was the first time he’d ever even held one and its unfamiliarity made it seem less dependable than his ASP.
Thirty more paces brought them to an opening of double doors, one door being held awry by a single screw of its lower hinge. Inside was a moderate-sized room with ceiling and walls blistered to the third degree by moisture. Gainer and Leslie realized it was a room they hadn’t been in. Nor had anyone else for a long while. No human tracks in the plaster dust that lay like flour sifted onto every surface. It was not a possible hiding place, their footprints would give them away.
Across the room on the outer wall were three sash-type windows that presented a view of the New Jersey docks on the other side of the channel. Sumac and locust branches reached in through broken panes. Gainer’s mental map of the island told him he was near the southwest corner. An outside hiding place in that general area would be advantageous when the time came for them to try for the Riva.
The lower section of one of the windows was open about ten inches.
They walked quickly back and forth several times from the window to the entrance, so that from their tracks no one would be able to tell whether they’d come or gone. Gainer tried raising the window further. All three windows were metal-covered and rusted stuck. It would be a squeeze. Leslie went head and shoulders first out the window, just did manage to wiggle her way out. She dropped hard to the ground five feet below, landed in a sprawl.
Gainer wanted so much to make it through the opening he believed he could. But this was inches worse than the door he’d scraped through earlier. He got his head out by turning it sideways, but his shoulders and surely his chest would not go.
“Try, lover,” Leslie urged. She reached to pull on him.
The last thing Gainer wanted was to get helplessly stuck in a window and be blown away from the rear.
“I’ll find another way out,” he told her. He retracted his head and stood upright. Glanced down and out to her and knew from her expression she was feeling what he was—the wrench of this sudden separation. Both realized now how much they had been drawing on one another.
For Gainer, a new urgency was now added to the danger. Perhaps that was why on his way from the room he brushed against the precariously hung door, caused its last holding screw to tear loose.
The door fell flat with a clap as loud as a shot.
That was sure to bring them.
Gainer rushed down the corridor to his right, searching for a way out. He came on several doors and tried them. Some gave to closets, dead ends. They would be literally that for him. Others were either locked or stuck shut. The place was a maze of small windowless rooms and sidehalls. Gainer took so many rapid lefts and rights he worried that he’d turned himself around, might be headed back instead of away. If so, he’d run right into them. That small table crushed almost out of sight behind a disconnected radiator—wasn’t that the same he’d passed along the opposite way just moments ago?
Don’t panic.
Don’t feel cornered.
He continued on and, finally, there was an area he recognized from his explorings with Leslie. The crematorium. Only one room away from the extreme southwest corner now, he realized. Running out of options. He stood stock-still, hoping he wouldn’t hear them, hoping they had taken the fall of that door as something accidentally caused by one of their own.
No such luck.
He heard them coming from all directions, even from overhead, converging on this part of Ellis. They weren’t at all careful about their noise. It sounded as though some were running full out, rushing to be first to get off the ten-thousand-dollar shot.
Gainer hurried into the next room.
The morgue.
It had a line of windows on its outer wall. They were high up, out of reach by four feet. Metal casement-type windows. A couple were even slightly open. Gainer looked around, but there was nothing for him to stand on. Killed by four fucking feet, he thought.
Should he stand there and let them come to him or charge them like a kamikaze idiot? One thing for sure, he’d take as many as he could with him.
Appropriate place to die, huh Norma?
He didn’t want to die for at least a million reasons, all Leslie. He tried to picture her and it was difficult because it seemed all the many lovely parts of her he’d come to know so well wanted to be last remembered. He couldn’t even settle on her mouth, although her smile was very persistent and her hands, her hands that had conformed to the various shapes of him so many times.
Not enough.
God no, he hadn’t kissed her enough or touched or held or done anything enough with her. And again, as it had been with Norma, he felt the fultility of all the things left unsaid. Fuck the bullets, this was the suffering of it. Never again anything Leslie.
He hoped she was safe. He shouldn’t have allowed her to get into this mess with him, her and her nicely laid out, long, soft life. She was resourceful, somehow she’d survive, Gainer wanted to believe. And if there was another side, as she claimed, he would perch himself up there on the edge of a cloud or whatever and do nothing but wait.
Arrange that, Lady Caroline, wherever you
are Please?
By then four security men and Sweet had already reached the point where the door had fallen. They had correctly read all the footprints as a deliberate attempt to confuse and therefore thought the noise of the door had probably also been meant to throw them off. Still, while they were in this area they might as well give it a thorough going over, Sweet told them.
They spread out and moved down the hallways of that southwest corner, methodically searching all possible places, closing in gradually on the morgue. Within five minutes they had eliminated every other room.
Two of the men now came into the morgue with their rifles at the ready.
Sweet took one step in and quickly scanned the room. It was where, in the old days, meat had been butchered and kept, Sweet guessed. The concrete floor and especially the big old wooden icebox with its eight green painted doors made him think that. From the size of the doors, only two feet by one and a half feet, it certainly appeared they gave access to individual compartments that weren’t very deep.
Gainer was in the third one up on the left. Trying to be as still as death. He knew they were out there. Surely they would open the door, grab his feet and yank him out. Not that it mattered, but it was going to be embarrassing, being found cowering, especially inside such a thing. Maybe they wouldn’t bother to pull him out, just find him, kill him in there, close the door on him. In that way make it into a funny old anecdote they could remember and retell for years:
“… there he was in the morgue cooler all laid out ready to die, so, of course, we accommodated him!”
They’d get a lot of mileage out of it.
Gainer tried to get his mind off them by concentrating on the rack-like platform directly above him. It was identical to the one he was on. Constructed of evenly spaced hardwood slats, no doubt to allow the cold air to get in to the underside of a corpse. A far cry from that modern morgue in Zurich, Gainer thought. Attached to each of the slatted racks were wheels that fitted down into the grooves of steel tracks so that the racks could be rolled out or in with little effort. When Gainer had climbed up to where he now was he’d had trouble keeping the rack from rolling forward. It was that movable. Once he got stretched out on it, the rack stayed in place, but the slightest shift on his part could start it rolling. The rear wall of the cooler was only a couple of inches from the top of his head. It was metal-lined, as were all the other interior surfaces, and there was a metal container at the base of the rear wall for big hunks of ice.
A coldness passed through Gainer from toe to chin. It was beyond a chill, more like an animated gust that could have its own way with anything. As though not yet done with Gainer, it wound under, over and around him. The back of his neck shivered from ear to ear.
A draft, he thought. Probably made by his own fear. However, if as Leslie had said, there were lots of spirits hanging around Ellis, this old icebox for the dead must have a gang of them.
Sweet’s voice.
Gainer couldn’t make out what was being said.
Sweet was impatient, extremely upset. What was supposed to have been an easy pick-up of cash and a couple of quick killings had turned into a shitty problem. This fucking island, Sweet thought, this fucking island had complicated things and before long, night would add its disadvantage. Well, no matter. He couldn’t go back to Hine with nothing but excuses. He’d been right about that falling door being a diversion. He shouldn’t have wasted time on it or any of these rooms.
Sweet turned abruptly, shoved two of the men aside and strode down the hall away from the morgue. He was bound for the buildings on the north section of Ellis, where he believed Gainer and Leslie would more likely be. And the money. He didn’t order the men to follow, just assumed they would.
All but one did.
He hung back from the others, and when they were far enough ahead and out of sight around a corner he went back to the morgue. He was the man Gainer and Leslie had overheard in the brick passageway, the money-hungry one who was supporting either the habit of a spinner or a shylock. He’d known the morgue was a morgue the moment he’d seen it, and if his need hadn’t bit his tongue he would have said so. He’d suspected those little icebox doors that appeared so incapable of hiding anyone, hadn’t shared this suspicion because it would have meant also sharing the ten or twenty large bonus. Now, he’d have it all.
He remained quiet. Just outside the entrance to the morgue. Listened, heard nothing. By moving his head gradually to the right, the vertical edge of the entranceway revealed more and more of the room to him, and eventually his view included the green, wooden, floor-to-ceiling icebox. All eight of its doors. He’d thought he might catch the man and the woman in the act of climbing out, but now that he saw the doors were unchanged, he doubted his theory. No reason for them to stay in there when they believed they were in the clear.
Less cautious but with automatic rifle at the ready, he entered the room, approached the morgue cooler, jerked open one of its lower doors. Saw the slats of the empty rack. Crouched and took a closer look. Saw all the way in.
He pulled open one of the doors second from the bottom.
Nothing in there.
And then, third door up on the left.
Gainer had to time it perfectly. He used the rear wall to push off with his hands and send the rack rolling suddenly forward. It flew out the open door, and the man caught only a glimpse of the soles of Gainer’s sneakers before the end edge of the hardwood rack smashed across the bridge of his nose.
Knocked the man staggering back.
His finger on the trigger of his rifle was included in his involuntary clutching at the pain. He pulled off a burst of shots that were wild and pocked across the ceiling.
He lurched sideways, grabbed at the air as though it might support him, tripped himself, went down hard with his rifle clattering under him on the cement floor. He at once sat up because he knew staying down would be death. He lifted his head as though it weighed more than all the rest of him, shook his head from side to side, and the blood that was streaming from both his nostrils splattered left and right.
By then Gainer was standing nearby with his ASP in hand. It appeared the man would give in to unconsciousness. Which would be better for them both, Gainer thought. The man rolled over onto his side, braced himself and managed to slowly rise up onto one knee. He tried to recover the rifle, groped around for it, finally got it. He was bringing his eyes and the muzzle of the rifle up to Gainer when Gainer killed him.
The racks of the morgue cooler were seven feet long. Gainer pulled out one all the way. He propped it against the wall and with its slats it became a ladder, providing easy access to those high casement windows. Gainer climbed up, pushed one of the windows open. He dropped the automatic rifle out to the ground and then himself.
He immediately looked for Leslie. There, in the weed growth by the west seawall, was where he’d last seen her, but apparently she wasn’t there now. He went around the corner to the south side, moved in spurts, kept low and close to the foundation of the buildings, and when he’d gone about halfway along the south side—there she was. Using a contest of tangles between wild rose and greenbriar for cover. The relief Gainer felt at the sight of her told him how worried he’d been. He crawled into the thicket to her. They hugged. A short one and then a longer, tighter one.
“What took so long?” she whispered.
“I almost got lost.”
She was grateful for the ambiguity.
Gainer got to his knees and parted the leaves to look out in the direction of the seawall. He was surprised to find the Riva and the Awesomes tied up only about forty feet away. No sign of the men who’d been guarding them before. That was strange. He’d expected to have to kill those two to get to the boat. Maybe they were hidden somewhere close by. He asked Leslie.
“They’re not here anymore,” she said matter of factly with a slightly perplexed shrug.
They decided not to wait for dark. They came out from the brambles. Gainer crouched alo
ng through waist-high goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. Leslie rushed ahead and was behind the wheel of the Riva by the time he reached the seawall.
There were the two guards.
Gainer nearly stumbled over them.
One had a hole in his head, the other in his heart.
Not here anymore? For damn sure.
Gainer unhitched the mooring lines and tossed the fenders aboard. He shoved off from the wall to set the Riva drifting, hoping to catch a current that would take it noiselessly out for a fair distance. At a point twenty feet from the seawall the Riva became caught in a conflict of currents, was held right there.
Leslie started the engine.
It gave off a loud initial growl, then settled into a gurgle as Leslie kept it going as slowly and quietly as possible. Now they made distance, put one, two, three hundred feet between themselves and Ellis.
But that growl carried. It was a sound Sweet and his men were on the alert for. The moment they heard it they recognized it and ran full out for the seawall, where they’d left the boats. They looked out toward the Statue of Liberty, spotted the Riva. Climbed into their Awesomes.
The engines of the four Awesomes roared.
Leslie asked the Riva for all it had, and suddenly it surged forward. She made a tight turn to head for any part of Manhattan. It seemed to Gainer from the way they were cutting the water and the way the wind was buffeting that no one could catch them. He wasn’t accustomed to going that fast on water. He looked back toward Ellis, saw the four Awesomes rounding the southeast corner. Their hulls raised up by their speed, they formed black triangles with the horizontal line of the water. He kept his eyes on them, saw how quickly they were growing larger and knew they were overtaking.
Leslie glanced back at them. She beat on the teakwood wheel of the Riva with the heel of her hand, as though to make it realize it had to go faster, but the speedometer needle was laying on forty-five and there was no more throttle to give it.
The Awesomes came up behind them, four across in a line like a squadron on the attack. Doing ninety. They could run rings around the Riva. As they drew closer, slapping against the wake of the Riva, the men not behind the steering wheel of each Awesome leaned up and out, aimed their automatic rifles ahead and opened fire. Bullets sang against the wind a foot or two above Gainer and Leslie. Bullets hit the water, causing lines of splats along both sides. Impatient shots. In another few seconds the Awesomes would be alongside at point-blank range.
19 Purchase Street Page 47
