The Manhattan Hunt Club (4 page)

CHAPTER 4

J
oAnna Gartner gazed at the man who lay on the bunk on the other side of the bars. Right now he looked utterly harmless. His hands—slim fingered, almost feminine—were folded over his chest, which was rising and falling in the slow and steady rhythm of sleep. His eyelids, barely twitching with the tic that kept them constantly blinking whenever he was awake, now hid the glowing flame of rage that made JoAnna want to shrink away from him whenever his gaze fell directly on her.

Jagger.

That was his name: Jagger. He had a first name, but she, along with everyone else at Rikers Island, never used it.

Nor did they use the nickname the other prisoners had given him, back when he had been in the general population.

The Dragger.

Jagger the Dragger.

She hadn’t understood it at first; when she first heard it, she assumed he must be in the habit of dragging things out. A lot of the prisoners did that—filling the long hours of their sentences with even longer tales of why they didn’t belong here at all, or dragging out their chores in the kitchen, or the laundry, or the dining room, in an effort to avoid going back to their cells. But that wasn’t how Jagger had gotten the nickname. He’d come by it far more legitimately.

Initially, JoAnna hadn’t believed the story. She assumed it was just one of the rumors that flowed through the cell blocks every day, getting more and more outlandish with every retelling. But then she’d seen the photograph.

In the photo, a body was lying on a floor in the midst of a pool of blood that all but obliterated the worn-out carpet on which it lay. It was easy to see where all the blood had come from: the body was so badly mutilated that its gender was no longer distinguishable.

Its face was covered with makeup, put on so garishly that it looked like the work of a child.

The muscular arms of the corpse had been shoved through the sleeves of a woman’s blouse—a blouse so small that the arms themselves had torn the sleeves to shreds. There was a skirt, too, partially wrapped around the corpse’s waist.

“Jagger dressed him up in drag after he killed him,” the person who showed JoAnna the photo explained. “Guess he wanted to pretend he was screwing a girl.”

JoAnna’s stomach heaved, and she dropped the photo as if merely touching it could somehow infect her with the insanity it depicted.

Right now, though, asleep in his cell, the Dragger looked perfectly harmless.

But she knew that he was not.

If he was, then Bobby Breen would still be alive. But Bobby Breen wasn’t alive, because JoAnna herself had found his corpse yesterday, stuffed in a closet in the large kitchen where he and Jagger had both been working. Stripped naked, the genitals hacked away with the same jagged tin can lid that had been used to slit his throat, his cheeks and lips were stained a purplish red with grape juice, and an apron was tied around his waist as a makeshift skirt.

Jagger had not yet spoken a single word about what had been found in the closet. In fact, he hadn’t said a word about anything.

“They want him downtown for evaluation,” JoAnna had been told an hour ago, as her captain handed her the orders transferring Jagger from the prison to a hospital. “Don’t know why they’re bothering—if they want to know if he’s crazy, all they have to do is ask me.”

Or me, JoAnna had thought. But she hadn’t said it. Instead she’d looked at the clock—it was after midnight, but nowhere near four A.M., when they usually woke up the prisoners that were being taken downtown. “Why now?”

The captain shrugged. “I figure they’re just trying to make him disappear—get him out before anybody has a chance at him. Everybody liked Breen—everybody hates Jagger. So what are you gonna do?”

So now JoAnna Gartner stood in front of Jagger’s cell on the second tier of the Central Punitive Unit.

“Time to go.” Though her voice was low enough not to waken any of the prisoners who might be sleeping, Jagger’s eyes snapped open. Sitting up, he locked his eyes on to hers, and, as always, JoAnna had to resist an overwhelming urge to step back from the burning fury that glowed inside the man.

“Stand up and turn around, back to the door, hands behind your back,” she ordered.

Jagger’s eyes flicked toward JoAnna’s backup, Ruiz, who was standing a few yards away, silently using a video camera to capture every second of the prisoner’s transfer. Saying not a word, Jagger obeyed. As he unfolded himself from the bunk, his six-foot-five-inch frame—bulked up to nearly 250 pounds of heavily tattooed muscles—loomed over JoAnna, and once again she had to resist the urge to back away from him.

Only when Jagger’s hands were shackled behind him did JoAnna open the door. He started to turn around, but JoAnna reached out and grasped the chain between the manacles on his wrists, lifting his arms just enough to let him know how much it would hurt if she raised them any higher. “Let’s just take this nice and slow,” she told him.

With Ruiz keeping the camera trained on them, she steered Jagger out of the cell and down the steps to the main floor.

They paused at the pen just inside the entrance to the CPU while two more officers fitted Jagger with leg irons and waist chains and moved his hands to the front of his body, where they were locked to the waist chains. Then they began the slow progress toward the main entrance, waiting for each barred door to close behind them before the one in front opened.

It was twenty past midnight when they emerged from the building. A black van was already waiting, with a captain and an officer from the Emergency Services Unit ready to receive the prisoner.

Twenty minutes later the van pulled into a hospital emergency entrance. Four men in orderlies’ uniforms were waiting with a gurney. Both officers got out, one glancing up and down the deserted sidewalk while the other unlocked the padlock on the back door of the van.

A minute later Jagger was out of the truck.

“Get on the gurney,” one of the orderlies said.

When Jagger made no move to obey, one of the officers nudged him with the butt of the MP-5 cradled in his arms. “You heard the man.”

His eyes smoldering, Jagger lay down on the gurney.

The orderlies strapped him tight.

With two of the orderlies at the front of the gurney and the other two at its rear, they moved Jagger quickly through the doors, down a hall, and into a waiting elevator.

The doors slid closed, but instead of pressing a button that would take the elevator up to the floors housing the patients, one of the orderlies slipped a key into a lock, turned it, and punched a button that sent the elevator down.

In the second subbasement, they emerged into a long hallway. The orderlies quickly pushed the gurney to the far end, through two dark rooms, and finally into a third, lit only by a single bulb hanging in a metal cage in the center of the ceiling.

At its far end was another door, covered in metal.

One of the orderlies produced a key and opened the door.

Beyond lay only darkness.

CHAPTER 5

I
f Jeff had slept at all, neither his body nor his mind had benefited from it. The thin pallet that separated him from the cold metal of the bunk felt no softer than the steel itself; his left hip was numb, his whole back felt sore, and his left shoulder ached from the weight it had borne through the long hours of the night. Every muscle in his body felt weaker now than when he’d lain down last night, as if he’d been running for hours instead of sleeping. His mind felt no better than his body, for as the endless minutes crept by, the terrible reality of what had happened to him only tightened its grip on his consciousness. At first his mind had refused to accept the truth, still clinging to some frayed shred of hope that even now that the trial and the sentencing were over, something would happen to free him from the surreal world in which he was trapped. But as the sounds of the night—the shouts and curses of angry prisoners, the clanging of barred doors as the night watch plodded through its routine—kept sleep at bay, hope had finally ebbed away, and the truth at last began to twist his mind as surely as the cold cell and hard bunk had wracked his body.

Maybe I should’ve just killed her,
he told himself. At least then it would have been his word against a dead body’s. Wouldn’t that be something? Walk away from a murder instead of going to jail just for trying to help. Well, fuck it—the guys he’d met in jail were right: once they busted you, it was over. It didn’t make any difference whether you’d done something or not—it was the cops against you, and the cops always won.

So he’d get through it. He’d do his time, and stay out of trouble, and get out as soon as he could. And then—

But he couldn’t even think about it. All he could think about now was the yawning chasm that lay ahead. A chasm he was about to be thrown into, empty except for cell blocks, boredom, and constant fear.

As the clamor of voices and clanging cell doors rose around him, he sat up and pulled on his clothes—the same clothes he’d been wearing for a week, which Heather had brought him when she took the other clothes home.

The clothes she’d have been picking up today, except that today he was being moved to Rikers.

Numbly, his body functioning more by rote than by conscious decision, he began following the morning routine, until an hour later he was standing in front of one more in an endless series of locked doors. Two C.O.’s flanked him, but no other prisoners were in sight. Then the door opened and he stepped outside.

He was in the sally port between the Detention Center and the Criminal Courts Building. Though dawn hadn’t yet quite begun to break, the darkness in the heavily gated courtyard was washed away by floodlights, and he could see the bridge connecting the two buildings spanning the courtyard two flights up. A bus sat near the door to the Courts Building, from which the last of this morning’s first batch of prisoners from Rikers Island were being unloaded for their day in court. For the next several hours they would wait in the holding areas or the feeder pens, exactly as he had waited during the endless days of his trial. Just before going into the building, the last of the prisoners turned and stared at Jeff. Understanding exactly where Jeff was being taken this morning, he smiled and ran his tongue suggestively over his lips. With a wink at Jeff, the prisoner finally responded to the officer’s nudge and disappeared through the door to the courthouse.

Sitting a few yards from the bus, with two more C.O.’s flanking it, was a windowless black Ford van. “Pretty fancy,” one of the officers next to Jeff remarked, his lips twisting into a sarcastic smile. “Your very own limousine.”

Jeff kept his mouth shut; he’d learned by now that when the guards made jokes, he wasn’t included.

As the two guards from Detention escorted him toward the van, the other two opened its back door. Ducking his head, Jeff climbed inside, sliding onto the first bench he came to. Ahead of him was a heavy black-painted metal grille separating him from the next bench, which could only be accessed from the side door. Ahead of that was another grille, another bench, yet a third grille, and then the driver’s compartment. As Jeff sat on the bench, his wrists still cuffed, the door slammed behind him and he heard a padlock drop against the back panel.

A minute later, one of the officers slid behind the wheel and the other climbed into the passenger seat.

Though it was barely visible through the three sets of thick mesh grilles and the windshield, Jeff saw the big gate ahead of the van swing open, and a moment later the truck passed through and turned right. A block later it turned left, then went straight ahead for three blocks. As it made another left turn, Jeff caught a glimpse of a sign.

Elizabeth Street.

In the last few minutes before dawn, the street was all but deserted of any traffic except a few lumbering trucks, and as the lights ahead turned green, the van began to accelerate. But several blocks later it began to slow again.

The driver turned right, and finally Jeff knew where they were going—straight ahead he could see the Williamsburg Bridge.

The light at Bowery turned green, and the van surged ahead as the officer behind the wheel once more hit the gas pedal.

As they were crossing Bowery, however, something crashed against the van, smashing into the sliding door on the passenger side. As the door caved in, the van itself skidded sideways and spun around. It sheared off a fire hydrant, then slammed into the front of a building on the west side of Bowery. Knocked off his seat by the first impact, Jeff bounced off the grille in front of him. A moment later his shoulder slammed into the side of the van, and as his back twisted a sharp pain shot from the injured shoulder down his arm.

Now a cacophony of shouting voices rose over the sound of water pouring down onto the wrecked van from the geyser of the broken hydrant, and then the back door was jerked open. “Out, fuckhead!” a rough voice commanded as the cage door opened.

His head spinning, and half blinded by the blood streaming from a cut on his forehead, Jeff stumbled out of the van.

He stood unsteadily on the street. Water from the hydrant was spraying everywhere, and a crowd of shabbily dressed people seemed to have materialized from out of nowhere. As people milled around, someone grabbed Jeff’s arm and whispered urgently in his ear, “Don’t talk—don’t think—don’t do nothin’! Just follow me, and maybe we can get you out of here!”

His brain as fogged with pain as his eyes were with blood from the still-streaming wound, Jeff didn’t hesitate. Knowing only that for the first time in months he was free from the claustrophobic confines of barred cells, locked holding pens, and sealed transport vans, he sucked the cold predawn air into his lungs and shambled across the intersection toward the subway entrance that lay only a few yards away.

Only at the top of the stairs leading to the subterranean station below did he pause. Around him lay the shadows of the fading night. The geyser of water still shot into the air from the sheared-off hydrant. Below him lay the brilliantly lit, windowless crypt of the subway station.

If he ran, he could vanish into the darkness and quiet.

He could be alone, for the first time in months.

The darkness, the quiet, and, most of all, the air pulled at him, but just as he was about to take the first step, everything changed.

A siren, then another, shattered the silence. An instant later a third one wailed to life.

All of them were coming toward him, closing on the surrealistic scene before him.

Then it happened.

The van exploded, and as the fireball rose into the air, instinct took over. The mass of the subway entrance protecting him from flying debris, Jeff stumbled down the stairs into the station.

It all occurred in only a few seconds. The man who had pulled him from the van was already leaping over the turnstiles of the deserted station. Jeff followed, running down the next two flights of stairs and hitting the platform just as a downtown train ground to a stop. The doors opened and Jeff started toward it.

“You fuckin’ crazy, man? Transit cops’ll get you in five minutes flat!” the man he’d been following said. Pulling on Jeff’s arm, he hurried toward the far end of the platform. “Come on,” he yelled. “Quick, before another train comes!”

Jeff staggered after him, his mind still too numb to think clearly, but when they came to the end of the platform, he stopped short. There was nothing ahead except a blank wall.

He turned and looked back the other way. The train was just pulling away, its taillights quickly disappearing. There was only one other person on the platform: a derelict sitting on the floor, leaning against a pillar. He heard something next to him, and when he turned, the man he’d been following seemed to have disappeared. But then came the voice again:

“Move, damn it!”

At the same time, Jeff heard footsteps pounding down the stairs at the far end.

As they grew louder, he leaped down onto the tracks and raced into the tunnel.

The darkness swallowed him in an instant.