“Ticket?” It was the conductor looking down at him.
Alvarez swallowed dryly. “You already—” He glanced up to see his green seat stub was not where he had just put it. Panic seized hold of him. He blinked rapidly, his eyes stinging.
The conductor leaned in toward him. Alvarez prepared to fight back. The man said, “Never mind. Sorry to disturb you.” He bent and retrieved the green stub from where it had fallen to the car floor.
Alvarez thought that in a way this had worked out even more in his favor, for now he and the conductor had a connection. He would be remembered as a ticketed passenger. “No problem,” Alvarez said.
The conductor moved on. The pain in Alvarez’s chest slowly subsided. He tried to steady himself.
Voices from behind, as the conductor rousted the sleeping kid, asking for a ticket. The kid protested, claiming he’d already given the man his ticket. The conductor was heard asking for a receipt. Alvarez watched in the reflection on the inside of the window as the kid pulled a ticket receipt out of his wallet. A receipt! Sweat dripped down and blurred Alvarez’s vision.
The other conductor and the man who had boarded in Crawfordsville approached from the rear. The two conductors talked while one dropped to a knee, no doubt looking for the missing green seat stub. Alvarez couldn’t hear them, but he didn’t have to. No matter what they were saying, it was trouble.
“This here is Agent Tyler. He’s interested in anyone who boarded at Crawfordsville. I told him I counted two.”
“I saw three,” the other conductor corrected. His name tag read Charles Daniels. Tyler’s conductor was tagged Felix Ramone. “I punched two in car three. Haven’t hit the third yet.”
“I started in five and worked forward. Didn’t punch no one. Six through nine weren’t open.”
Tyler had noticed that at Crawfordsville only three cars had been open for boarding. He had a little trouble maintaining his sea legs with the train’s movements.
“I seen two ladies,” Ramone told his partner.
“Me? I seen them and a guy.”
“You get a look at him?” Tyler asked Daniels.
“If I did,” the man replied, “I didn’t pay him no mind.”
“So we have one unidentified male on board who has yet to be ticketed,” Tyler suggested. His skin itched. The hair on the nape of his neck felt prickly.
“Probably somewhere in six through nine. More seats back there anyway.”
Tyler spoke softly, “Here’s what I want to do. Mr. Ramone, you’re going to go check six through nine. If you ticket the guy, you do nothing unusual. Complete your rounds and come back up the train and find me.” Ramone nodded. He looked a little excited, which bothered Tyler. “Mr. Daniels, you and I are going to have a talk with the two women who boarded at Crawfordsville. We’ll ask a few questions. Maybe get a description. Nice and quiet, nothing showy.”
“Got it.”
“What’s this guy done, anyway?” Ramone asked.
The other conductor paused as if remembering something, and then said, “You know, come to think of it, I shoulda checked that guy’s receipt.” He turned slowly toward the front of the car.
“What guy?” Tyler asked, his throat sour and dry.
The man pointed. But the seat where Alvarez had been sitting was now empty.
Car number three, two cars forward of where Alvarez had left his duffel, was packed. He carried his green stub with him and knew that there would be a receipt or two for the picking, tossed as litter, since few passengers, other than businesspeople, held on to their receipts once punched in by the conductor. The trick was to locate one of today’s, and quickly.
Alvarez bent and scooped one off the floor, but it carried a shoe print, and that bothered him. On closer inspection, it had been punched yesterday. This train evidently had come from the East Coast and had already run more than twelve hours without cleaning.
The door thumped closed behind him as he moved into the next car. He was getting too far away from his duffel, too disconnected from his plans.
He scooped down, again collecting receipts, this time a pair. One was clean and punched as an Indianapolis boarding. He pocketed it. He took a minute to collect himself and dab off some sweat with his forearm.
He didn’t want to cross paths with the conductor—especially not with the man who had boarded late—but he was running out of room at this end of the train, and his duffel was now three cars behind him. If an NUS agent, this guy was likely to know his face. He tried to settle himself. Calm won the day.
The public address system announced that the dining car was open. Several people came out of their seats at once. Alvarez saw an opening: the dining car was midtrain. If he could group himself in with the others…
Tyler had three hours until the train reached Chicago, plenty of time to isolate the one man who had boarded in Crawfordsville.
The conductor, Daniels, came alive as they entered the next car. “There,” he said, indicating two women. One of the women stood and headed away from them. “Excuse me!” the conductor called out loudly. The woman didn’t turn. She stepped out of the way of a thick group of several people, apparently heading for the dining car.
Tyler rose to his toes, trying to keep his eye on the woman. As they reached the vacated seat, Tyler said to the conductor, “You take her. I’ll talk to this one.” He turned, stepping out of the way of the other passengers in the crowded aisle. His cell phone rang, and he was distracted as he answered it.
The man ducking his head in that group behind him was Umberto Alvarez.
“Nothing on this end,” Nell Priest told him over the phone. “It’ll be weeks before we know exactly what rolled this train, but it could have been an axle shear. It could have been a hot box from bad bearings.”
“The same M.O.”
“Yes.”
Tyler debated telling her what he knew. He gave in. “Rucker has a gate photo and prints. He’s closing in on an ID.”
“And you?” she asked.
“I’m on an Amtrak to Chicago.”
“Do we have a face?” she asked.
Tyler was about to mention the black leather jacket. For privacy, he turned while cupping the phone. As he did so, he saw the backs of two black leather jackets among the group of passengers that had just squeezed past him. Granted, there were probably other such jackets in this car, but these two walking away nagged at him. He kept his eye on that group.
“If you want to be part of this,” he said, “get yourself to Chicago by tonight. I gotta go.” He disconnected and followed that group—those two jackets—an unexplained sense of dread overcoming him. The interview with the woman could wait—she looked to be in her eighties; she wasn’t going anywhere fast.
The conductor pounded his fist onto the door of the car’s only lavatory and called out to the woman inside. “Madame! Excuse me! We’d like a word with you in a moment.”
The sense of dread in Tyler built to a higher level. He moved more quickly now. He stepped into the loud passageway between cars, watching the group through the glass in the end door. As he entered this car, the group was just leaving. He hurried, walking more quickly. He didn’t want to run—to attract that kind of attention—but he did turn it up a notch. He reached the far end in time to see through both door windows and into the next car.
One of the two men wearing the black leather jackets was tall, with wide shoulders. Strong, Tyler thought. Dark haired. All at once, this man reached up into the overhead rack and, without breaking his stride, snagged a piece of luggage.
A small black duffel bag. The kind that doubled as a backpack.
The description fit.
It was hardly definitive—the ubiquitous black duffel—and yet the cop in Tyler sensed this was a person worth confronting.
He pushed through the rear door, adrenaline coursing through his system. The suspect simultaneously exited through the far end of the next car.
His instinct drove him. A veteran, he sur
vived the street because of it, cleared investigations, and won cases. And Tyler knew he had it. He moved down the next car’s center aisle with confidence and determination. He prioritized. He wanted to talk to this guy. That was all. No violation of rights, no violence. Nothing whatsoever like the afternoon with Chester Washington that had ruined his life. The bag and black leather jacket could easily be coincidence, he reminded himself. But enough for probable cause. The investigator felt energized. This particular train made sense as an escape route. There weren’t a hell of a lot of other options.
Another possibility remained—that the sabotage had been done days or weeks earlier, and that the suspect was nowhere in the area, but this seemed unlikely given that Rucker had turned up the matching flight manifests. What else explained the arrival of K. C. Jones at Indianapolis?
As he approached the rear door to the next train car, the suspect out of sight, Tyler kept the image of Harry Wells firmly in mind, that deep cut from earlobe to eye, the bleed-out that left the man “as pale as a polar bear” as one of the techs had put it. This guy was dangerous, and the tight confines of a train were no place to come to terms with that. This thought was followed by a twinge of anxiety—a weightlessness in the center of his chest. The train car suddenly felt as if it were shrinking, and Tyler sensed the early warning signs of his particular brand of claustrophobia. Not now! he pleaded, but the car continued to shrink, an esophagus ready to swallow him. His head pounded and the train car continued to constrict. When a sudden whoosh rocked the entire train as an eastbound express passed, the jolt broke his anxiety. He pulled open the car door and stepped out into the noisy passageway that connected the two cars. He spun abruptly as he caught sight of a man to his right. The man’s back was turned, a thin spiral of cigarette smoke rising. Tyler caught himself reaching for the man as he identified that the black jacket was not leather but Gore-Tex or nylon, and that there was no duffel to be seen.
He glanced into the next car, but it was the dining car—nothing but a narrow aisle with a turn to the left, as seen from this end.
The smoker’s partner, a woman with short hair, freckles, and thin lips, stared at Tyler contemptuously.
Tyler stammered, “A man. Just now.” He added, “A black duffel.” The woman pointed to the dining car.
Tyler tripped a bright red bar and waited for the automatic door to slide out of his way. He paused by the car’s only lavatory. OCCUPIED, the indicator read. He knocked. A woman’s voice answered. Tyler moved on.
The automatic door wheezed behind him. It was the same woman with the ultrashort haircut. She slipped past Tyler, who hurried and followed her. The small counter area was stainless steel. The thin woman ordered a Diet Coke. Tyler now pushed past her, facing twenty or more people, all standing with drinks and packaged sandwiches, cookies, and candy bars.
No black leather jacket. No black duffel.
His suspect was no longer here. He’s running from me, Tyler thought, encouraged.
Tyler’s legs buckled. The train slowed noticeably. An express to Chicago, there were no scheduled stops after Crawfordsville. This was merely a slowing—a turn up ahead, or a slight grade, an approaching town, or a control light being observed. Slowing. He hurried through the small crowd thinking:
He’s going to jump!
Flight. Escape. The cop knew with absolute certainty that this was his suspect, and that he was about to lose him.
He recalled Harry Wells’s broken body after being knifed and thrown from the train.
He lost his balance again.
The train dragged considerably.
Tyler punched the door’s red bar, and the door whooshed open.
Noise. Wind. Through the passageway, an open side door on the left. The brown farm fields and slanting rain blurred past.
“Federal agent!” he announced, going for his gun. The duffel appeared as a huge black wall and knocked him back on his heels.
His head banged against the steel wall and he swooned. Dizzy. He squeezed his trigger finger, but nothing happened. He had dropped the gun. He struggled forward, suddenly off-balance again as the train slowed further. He lowered his vision, looking for his gun, and something connected with his chin. His head snapped back and he heard a crack. And then he heard it, like a bird taking flight—the rapid flutter of clothing. And then it was gone, absorbed in the wind and the rain.
The train lurched once more, this time regaining speed.
Tyler found his weapon and grabbed it. He leaned his head outside, the rain stinging his face, the wind whipping his hair. “Sweet Jesus,” he mumbled, knowing he had to jump, had to follow. He looked down: a wet, auburn blur of winter’s monochromes streaming past. He took a tentative step forward, his face wet and cold, his vision partially blinded. He held on tightly, leaning further, knowing what had to be done—he had to jump, tuck, and roll.
The train’s rhythm increased in tempo, the song of steel wheels picking up speed.
Jump! he commanded himself, first shutting his eyes, then opening them again. That blur like a long brown ribbon. Jumping down into things he couldn’t even see.
His toes hovering on the edge, Tyler finally stepped back and away from the open door. He couldn’t do it.
Alvarez came to standing, already brushing himself off. He tested the right ankle. Sore, but he could walk it off. He located the duffel—twenty yards behind him. He’d thrown it ahead of his jump. He watched the train, waiting only a second or two for the agent to jump, fearing the man would be armed.
Then he cleared his head, turned for the duffel, and ran. Ran, as fast and hard as his body would carry him.
CHAPTER 17
The pristine carpet of unplowed snow confirmed to Alvarez that the farmhouse was empty. A dead giveaway. Either the owners of this farm had left on Christmas holiday prior to last week’s snowstorm, or they had abandoned the farm for winter to snowbirding in Florida or Phoenix or some other such spot. Alvarez approached the nearby barn without fear of being spotted. Typical of these Midwestern farms, he found the barn doors unlocked. A large tractor occupied the structure’s main area. He discovered a room filled with dozens of tools of every description but still nothing to assist his escape. But inside the attached shed, essentially a two-car garage, he found a robin’s-egg blue, vintage Buick with white walls and a spit-polish shine. With no activity at the farm since the storm, the car seemed unlikely to be reported stolen. In the end, the only tracks in the snow led from the garage to the two-lane road.
The incident on the train from Crawfordsville had left Alvarez’s head spinning. For over a year and a half he’d wondered how long he might maintain his advantage of surprise, might continue to stay one step ahead. Now he knew: not much longer.
He felt a sense of urgency unlike anything he’d yet experienced. He couldn’t change the schedule of the bullet train, so he would have to adjust.
His right elbow and ankle ached. He’d been lucky the other guy hadn’t followed, because he’d landed in an open expanse of farmland. He’d have been caught or shot in minutes. But God had been looking down on him: the agent hadn’t jumped. Alvarez took it as a sign—he was meant to continue. David had withstood another test from Goliath.
He made the trip to Rockford, Illinois, on farm roads, never exceeding the speed limit and always using his turn signals. He couldn’t afford to be arrested now, although many a fugitive had hidden from the system by going inside—being arrested under an alias on a lesser crime and doing a year or two while the search for them, the manhunt, ran out of steam. Alvarez kept this ace in his back pocket—a contingency plan, there if needed. If they drew too close, a breaking and entering or assaulting an officer would earn him a year or two in prison and would ironically shelter him.
Rockford, Illinois, was a necessary detour, and though a long way from New York, it was a trip he had to make, wanted to make, and one he had made often over the past eighteen months.
The Bennett House, on Arcadia, only blocks from Rockford
Memorial Hospital, was an imposing brick colonial with wooden black shutters and a gleaming black door with a brass knocker. There was a trace of old snow shoveled and plowed into sand brown lumps of decomposing ice, and the thick air held a bite that burned his skin as he climbed the short wheelchair ramp to the door. He rang and let himself inside.
He was met by Mrs. Dundell, a woman of great energies and deep compassion, a registered nurse for twenty years before turning her talents to the management of Bennett House, with its staff of eleven and its client base of ten live-ins and dozens of outpatients.
“Ahh…Mr. Alvarez. So nice to see you! Is that knee bothering you?” Always the nurse.
“Slipped on some ice.”
“Yes, it’s that time of year.”
“Miguel?” He pronounced it in the Spanish.
“I wish you’d called,” Mrs. Dundell said, leading him by the elbow to a small sitting room peopled with antiques, dried flowers, and out-of-date magazines. “He’s having a bit of a challenge today. A cold, I hope. Flu’s possible. He’s in his room.” She changed tone. “But I’m glad you’re here. Your visits always cheer him up.”
“His lungs?”
“Better, I think. His spirits have been good. We want this cold over as quickly as possible.”
“The job?”
“Everyone at the library loves him. He’s been very earnest and dedicated. I’ve heard nothing but glowing reports.”
“Attendance?”
“Yes, he’s been fine on that, ever since your last visit. Well done, whatever you said to him. Not one unexcused absence.”
“I told him I’d kick his butt,” Alvarez teased.
“Yes…I’m sure you did.” When Mrs. Dundell grinned, a room felt warmer, a window brighter. “It’s good you’ve come. Are you sure that knee’s okay? I could have a look at it.”
“Just banged up a little. I’ll live through the morning.” He grinned at the irony.
The bedroom was small and sparingly decorated in a slightly frilly, Victorian motif. The wall-mounted television played the Cartoon Network.
Parallel Lies Page 16
