Precious Blood (41 page)

“We need to go to Williamsburg. Down to the waterfront near Greenpoint.”

The driver casually looked Jenner up and down, his eyes narrowing as he saw Jun and his expensive orange fur coat.

“That would be one hundred dollars.”

Jun said, “But it’s a ten-minute drive!”

“Not today. Today it is not ten minutes. It is not twenty minutes. It is maybe thirty minutes, if we are lucky. Maybe longer.”

Jenner said, “Jun, it doesn’t matter. We need to get there.”

They got in the car.

“Please pay now.”

Twenty minutes later, they were still inching east on Delancey. At Suffolk, the traffic ground to a complete halt.

The blare of horns became deafening; drivers and passengers were getting out of their cars to peer ahead.

Jenner stood next to the Lincoln in the crook of the open door. To his left, a turbaned Sikh was talking into a cell phone next to a yellow cab with its Off Duty lights lit, gesturing to the unseen listener as he stared toward the bridge.

Jenner tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, do you know what’s going on ahead?”

“Very bad! Bomb at Union Square. National Guard close bridge. No one can leave now! All bridges, all tunnels.”

Jenner felt faint. He tapped on the livery cab’s roof.

“Jun! Get out. They’ve closed the bridges and the tunnels.

That explosion at Union Square was a bomb. They’re shutting down Manhattan.”

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Jun climbed out and slammed the door. “What do we do?”

“We walk. They’ve got to be open to foot traffic.”

Jun nodded. Jenner was already on the median, walking toward the bridge.

Behind Jenner, Jun looked back and slowly raised his middle finger to the livery car driver, now completely locked in immobile traffic. The little man shrugged, smiled softly, and held the one hundred dollars up, fanning out the twenties and waving them gently.

Farrar stood back and admired his work.

The stubby cross was finished, the four-by-fours nailed securely together. He’d kept the upright to almost seven feet; if he sank it fifteen inches into the ground, her feet would be supported a couple of inches off the earth. He would begin working on her up in his room, where he had all his tools, then carry her down to the courtyard. There he would put her on the cross and move her out of the warehouse buildings in the handcart. He would cover her with the tarps, toss on some junk, and any passing driver would dismiss him as just another homeless man with a cart out gathering scrap metal.

He looked out toward the river and realized that it had gone dark some time ago. He pulled his coat around himself, feeling the night’s chill. The ground at the church would be frozen now; he’d need a tool to dig with if he was going to get the upright securely planted. For a second he wondered whether it was worth the extra effort, but he caught himself with a grin. As Father Martin used to say, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” At least the bastard was right about something.

The streets would be empty when he wheeled her to the church, but when the first flames rose and the alarm was sounded, a crowd would quickly gather in the churchyard and witness it before the cops shut the scene down.

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The thought warmed him. He wished he had a shovel, but it was something he’d never needed—he didn’t bury his prey.

His eyes lit on a five-foot cast-iron rail, an upright from a segment of Victorian fence he’d found near the Gowanus. He picked it up, felt its weight. It would do nicely.

He powered up the old generator, went back to his workbench, and began grinding the tip of the pole to a sharp, chisel-like edge.

Midway through he paused, turned, and made a few jab-bing motions with the sharpened rail. It had a satisfying heft; it would make digging a posthole in the frozen cemetery ground as easy as scooping melted ice cream.

Holding the iron bar at its center, he spun it around like a windmill, his movements smooth and powerful. He was delighted—it really was the perfect size for him. He could put it to use for far more than just digging in the dirt.

He went back to sharpening it, relaxed at the thought of the pleasures the next twenty-four hours would bring. He thought about the girl lying in her little cell, listening to the grinding.

The National Guard blockade of the Williamsburg Bridge was utter chaos. The sergeant in charge, a pale young man who couldn’t have been twenty-five, had stationed most of the men out on the bridge roads, waving back the approaching cars. Apparently following an established contingency plan, his men were detaining and searching vehicles SUV-size or larger. The combination of cars being turned back into the unyielding knot of blocked traffic, and larger vehicles being waved forward, only to be stopped for searching, had locked the intersection cold. The whole mess was made worse by the thin stream of inbound cars still filtering across from the Brooklyn side, blocking one possible exit for the cars trapped on the bridge approach.

Drivers were becoming increasingly upset, blasting their
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horns and shouting at each other. The blare of horns was punctuated by the sporadic crunch of low-speed impacts as drivers pushed and pulled their way through what was now something between a parking lot and a demolition derby, trying to get up over the median and back onto westbound Delancey Street.

In the crush of people squeezing onto the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, Jenner could only spot Jun ahead of him because of his bright orange coat; any other day, he’d have given him hell about it. The press of bodies was becoming frightening; each surge carried him a little further forward, almost lifting him up off his feet. He kept one hand firmly on the wallet in his pants pocket and let the swelling crowd motion bear him toward the checkpoint.

He wondered if Jun could see him, knew how far behind he’d fallen.

The crowd’s movements had become bizarrely random, buoying him forward, then carrying him back, to the left, to the right, with no net forward progress. There was yelling from the front of the line, and finally a guardsman made an announcement, his voice tinny and indistinct through the megaphone.

The sergeant had instructions to let no one pass; he moved onto the roadway, megaphone at his side, shouting across the full width of the inbound and outbound lanes at the men now stationed there, standing sullenly behind pale blue NYPD

barriers, automatic rifles slung across their chests.

Jenner spotted Jun ahead and shuffled through the throng toward him. There were police helicopters above now, and looking over the crowd, he saw lights in the sky over the Brooklyn Bridge. Apparently all the bridges were cut off.

The subways were closed, the bridges were closed. The city was on fire, and they were stuck.

*

*

*

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It was a nightmare, far worse than anything she’d imagined. She should’ve known right away: when she first went under, she felt herself starting to suffocate as she wriggled through the dirt and grime caked under the floorboards.

She was on her back, the mattress pulled onto the hole she’d made, being swallowed whole by the dark. Grit was spattering from the flooring above her face, raining into her nose and eyes.

She had to turn over, get herself facedown, protect her eyes and nose and mouth. But when she tried to tilt to her right, her shoulder pressed up against the floorboards above her. She hunched her back and twisted more, tried to screw her torso around, but she couldn’t do it.

She started to lose it and pushed harder, twisting her hips, trying to lengthen her torso, desperate to turn over. In an instant she was wedged, her left shoulder up against the floorboards, her right arm crushed underneath her, unable to move forward, stuck too tight to turn back. She panicked, flailing with her legs, clouds of choking dust eddying around her. Her head was thumping up against the joist, sending down showers of rotten wood and dirt, spilling into her ear and down her neck, edging her into hysteria.

She tried to regulate her breathing: breathe in for a count of five; slowly breathe out for a count of six. She calmed, and as she did, she could feel her position easing. After a few minutes, she was able to relax enough to let her left shoulder roll back down flat.

She lay there, thinking for a while. Then made her decision: she’d have to go back to the room.

She wriggled backward to the hole, arms stretched toward it, then pushed the mattress up and out of the way, raking her back against the edge as she pushed herself up into the room again.

She lay on the floor, panting. Here her breath came easily; cold air that had seemed dank an hour earlier now tasted clean and sweet. Lying on her side, breathing deeply, she
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shook as she imagined herself crawling back down into the asphyxiating crawlspace.

Then she heard him outside. Grinding. Grinding something, sharpening something. Something he probably was going to stick into her.

And she stopped crying, and got onto her hands and knees, and put her arms forward into the hole, and then her face, and then dragged herself forward, back into the void.

At around 9:30 p.m., the helicopters overhead stopped circling and moved off in formation. Looking downtown toward the harbor, Jenner saw the helicopters at the Brooklyn Bridge follow them. He and Jun were only a few yards from the barricades when word finally came through that there had been no bomb, that it was an explosion in an electrical substation that had ignited a Downtown 6 train.

Several people were injured, some critically, but any wider implication to the blast had been ruled out.

Within minutes the crush at the walkway entrance was un-bearable. The guardsmen hurried to remove the barricades, but they were too slow for the crowd; Jenner saw beer cans and plastic cups flying overhead.

Just as the bottleneck seemed on the verge of going out of control, an ESU van arrived, and a half-dozen cops in helmets and body armor climbed out. Their sergeant spoke quickly with the National Guard sergeant, then started shouting out commands. Some of the guardsmen were redeployed onto the bridge to help get the cars moving, and the cops began funneling the pedestrians onto the walkway.

On the bridge, the path was wider, built to carry both bicycle and foot traffic. Jenner turned back to look at the city.

The sky was dark, the skyline crenellated by blocky office buildings, their facades grids of light and dark metal. Beneath him, Delancey Street was all lit up for the holidays.

Looking uptown, he couldn’t see any flames or smoke. There
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were sirens everywhere, but they seemed to be responding to the chaos at the bridge; he couldn’t make out anything happening up toward the Union Square area.

Jenner looked over to Brooklyn. Once they crossed the bridge, it was probably only a couple of miles to where Ana was.

If she was even there.

They hurried across amid a streaming tide of people carrying briefcases, Christmas gifts, shopping bags. There was little chatter on the bridge, the crowds moving quickly and quietly, occasionally turning back to judge the distance from the Manhattan anchorage, now lit up with spotlights, or to search the skyline for smoke.

As they passed the Brooklyn anchorage, wrapped in scaffolding as part of the never-ending structural work, floodlights came on, illuminating the girders and meshwork and throwing shadows on the fabric netting billowing and slacking in the wind.

The crowd spilled off the bridge onto Continental Army Plaza. Traffic on the Brooklyn side was light; apparently word had got out about the bridge closures, or they’d shut down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Helmeted cops were moving the cars and trucks forward; a platoon of National Guardsmen was assembling in front of the mounted statue of Washington.

Jenner and Jun headed away from the main mass of people, back toward the river; soon they were walking on empty streets. As they walked, the battered tenements gave way to old brick Victorian factories and warehouses. Nearer the waterfront, there were signs of gentrification, with billboards attached to the scaffolded facades promising expensive condominium loft developments. Downriver, toward DUMBO, cranes dotted the bank, tearing down the old and decrepit to better house the new and luxurious.

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The neighborhood was desolate, and they were quite alone as they walked down the middle of the road, their shadows shortening before flipping and lengthening as they passed under the streetlights. Jun was tense, his hand hovering by his side as he scanned the empty side streets.

On Kent, they turned north. At the corner of South Second Street, Jenner paused under a streetlamp to check Farrar’s small painting.

“Is this the area?”

Jenner shook his head. “No. It’s a bit nearer to Greenpoint, maybe another mile.”

They walked on the sidewalk now, neither speaking.

Farrar wasn’t sure if he could wait until midnight to begin; the urge to start, to pull her out and start, was overwhelming. His eyes scanned the room, a final check that everything was in place.

He’d arranged large red and white pillar candles around the center of the room; this would be his main work area, the broad expanse of floor in the middle of which lay the cross.

He’d laid kindling at the foot of the cross to make sure she knew what was coming.

He’d set his equipment out on a folded black towel on a large tin box. This project was a fairly simple one, and didn’t require any complex instruments or elaborate props.

The worn lid of his boxed set of six surgical knives lay open, showing off the deep indigo velvet lining, as luxurious now as it had been when it was made back in the nineteenth century. The scalpels were unusually long, each with a traditional blade on one end and a different tool on the other. In a catalogue of antique surgical tools, he’d discovered that one of those implements was a curette, although he wasn’t sure what curetting was. Of course, the intended function of the implement was irrelevant; he had proven himself skilled at
Precious Blood