The Manhattan Hunt Club (7 page)

CHAPTER 10

U
ntil that day, Jeff hadn’t realized he was afraid of the dark. But until that day, he had never before experienced true darkness, the kind of darkness that makes you wonder whether you’ll ever see again, that wraps around you like a shroud, that suffocates you as much as blinds you. He had no idea where he was—no idea how long he’d been there. All he knew was that the single dim lightbulb that hung from the ceiling had become his lifeline to sanity.

He’d made a mistake—he understood that now. When the man who’d guided him down the stairs into the Bowery subway station jumped off the platform and dashed into the shadowy darkness of the tunnel itself, he should have stayed where he was—should have waited for the police who were only seconds behind him. But he hadn’t been thinking—hadn’t had time to think. And so he’d followed his instincts.

And the instincts that had leaped up from deep within the most primitive part of his brain were those of a wild animal that was being pursued. He’d turned and fled into the subway tunnel, suddenly less afraid of the man who had led him down the stairs than of the people racing toward him on the platform. He’d pounded down the tracks, desperately trying to keep up with the figure ahead of him—a fleeting form made visible for only an occasional second or two by one of the tiny bulbs that were the tunnel’s only illumination. He’d almost crashed into the running man, unaware that the man had stopped.

Over the panting of his own breath and the pounding of his heart, he heard a sound.

A familiar rumbling sound that was getting steadily louder.

In the distance, a light appeared.

“Off the tracks!” the man barked. “Now!”

Jeff started to step over the rail to his left, but the man grabbed his arm. “Here!”

Half guiding, half dragging him, the man led him up onto a narrow catwalk. He pulled Jeff after him into a shallow alcove in the tunnel’s concrete wall.

The rumbling became a terrifying roar, and the spot of light grew into a beam that pierced the darkness of the tunnel. Jeff shrank back, pressing himself against the cold concrete.

The train shot by, so close that if he’d reached out, he could have touched the glass and metal monster roaring past. Swirling dust enveloped them, and as Jeff drew in a breath, he took in the dust and began choking and coughing. Automatically, he raised his hand, and the man next to him in the alcove caught it before it would have brushed against the speeding train. Suddenly, it was over, the roar of the train fading away as quickly as it had come. Still choking on the dust the train had stirred up, and trembling so badly his knees threatened to buckle beneath him, Jeff sagged against the wall until his coughing finally ceased.

“It’s worst the first time,” the man beside him said. “After a while you learn to hold your breath—that way the dust don’t get to you so bad. Come on.”

As surefootedly as if he were walking the streets on the surface, the man jumped back onto the tracks. Jeff followed, and a while later his companion ducked into a passageway leading off to the left, then led him up a ladder and through another series of passages, these filled with pipes.

Jeff had no idea how long they’d moved through the tunnels, nor how far they’d gone. There was no way to tell what time it might be, and he’d lost all sense of direction within seconds after he’d climbed the first ladder. All he knew was that if he didn’t keep up with the man, he’d be hopelessly lost.

Lost somewhere under the city.

Lost in the darkness.

When he was so close to exhaustion that he wondered if he could go any farther, they came to a heavy, metal door. The man opened it and pushed him through. The door closed behind him with a hollow thud.

At first, the light inside the room had been so bright that its glare blinded Jeff. But a few seconds later, as his eyes adjusted, he realized he wasn’t alone. There was another man in the room—a man a few years older than he.

A few years older, and a lot bigger, maybe four inches taller. The man outweighed him by at least fifty pounds, and none of the extra weight looked like fat.

Jeff recognized the orange jumpsuit as what the inmates at Rikers Island wore, once they’d been convicted. It was what he himself would have been wearing now, if not for the car that had crashed into the van.

“You got a name?” the man asked.

He hesitated, then nodded. “Jeff.”

“Jeff,” the man repeated softly, almost to himself. Then he nodded, too. “I like that. I like that a lot.”

The man smiled at him, revealing a missing tooth. “I’m Jagger,” he said. His smile faded as he looked at Jeff’s clothes. “You ain’t from the jail, are you?” he asked, his voice turning suspicious. “ ‘Cause if you think I’m goin’ back, you better get a whole lotta help. I ain’t goin’ back.”

Jeff shook his head quickly as he saw Jagger’s right hand ball into a huge fist. “I’m not taking you anywhere. I don’t even know where we are.”

“Under the hospital,” Jagger told him, sinking down onto the mattress that was the only thing in the room.

“The hospital?” Jeff asked. “What hospital?”

“The one they took me to.”

“When was that?”

Jagger frowned, then shook his head, shrugging. “Don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to think, you know?” His smile returned, and he patted the mattress next to him. “You want to sit down?”

Jeff hesitated, then shook his head as his hand closed on the knob of the door behind him.

Though the knob turned, the door was bolted.

Jagger uncoiled from the floor and took a step toward him. His voice dropped and took on a menacing edge: “You ain’t leaving. I don’t want you to leave.”

Jeff thought he knew which hospital Jagger had said they were beneath. It had to be Bellevue. He’d heard stories about the place from people at the Tombs. “I’d rather be at Rikers,” most of them said, shivering. “At least out there, everybody isn’t crazy.” But why had they taken Jagger to Bellevue? And why had he been at Rikers in the first place?

“I’m not going anywhere,” he’d said as Jagger’s hand tightened into a fist again. He moved away from the door, and Jagger’s fist relaxed.

That had been an hour ago—or maybe two, or maybe even more. Jeff wasn’t sure. He’d finally sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall. He thought he might have fallen asleep for a few minutes, but wasn’t any more sure of that than of how long he’d been here. But when he opened his eyes, Jagger was sitting on the mattress, watching him. Jeff’s muscles ached, and the cold of the concrete seemed to have sunk into his bones.

Then the light had gone off, and the terrible darkness closed around him.

Darkness, and silence.

A darkness so thick and heavy it felt like he was suffocating, and a silence so complete, it seemed he might never hear again.

A moment later, he’d felt something.

Something creeping toward him.

“Jagger?” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the darkness.

“Yeah,” Jagger replied, his voice little more than a croak.

It sounded to Jeff as if he was still on the mattress on the other side of the room.

Then something skittered across his leg, and when he struck out at it, his hand hit something soft. There was a squeak as the object hit the wall a few feet away.

A rat!

Jeff jerked his legs up, then scrambled to his feet.

Then he heard something else.

It was a voice from the other side of the door.

“Get away from the door. Both of you sit on the mattress and don’t move. You move, and the door closes and the light don’t go back on. You got till I count to ten.”

The man began counting, and for a moment Jeff was paralyzed. Where was the mattress? How was he supposed to find it? “Jagger,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

“Over here,” Jagger whispered back.

Jeff took a tentative step toward the other man’s voice, then another. “Say something,” he hissed into the blackness.

But instead of speaking, Jagger reached out in the darkness. His huge hand brushed against Jeff’s leg, then closed on it. “It’s okay,” Jagger said. “I got you.”

As the man outside finished counting, Jeff sank onto the mattress.

The door opened, a brilliant halogen beam cutting through the darkness, blinding Jeff as effectively as the darkness had a moment earlier.

“Welcome to the game,” the voice said. “You win, you go free. You lose, you die.”

Jeff heard the sound of something being set on the floor.

The halogen beam vanished, and the room was plunged back into blackness.

The bolt on the door slid back into place with a dull thump.

And then the light came back on.

Sitting next to the door was a large enamel bowl filled with something that looked like stew. The handles of two spoons protruded from the glutinous mass. Next to the bowl was a canteen.

Jagger got up and brought the bowl back to the mattress, setting it between them and offering Jeff a spoon.

Jeff shook his head.

Jagger shrugged and began to eat.

As he watched the other man consume the food, Jeff thought about the words that had been spoken in the darkness:
“You win, you go free. You lose, you die.”

His eyes shifted from Jagger to the single dim bulb that hung overhead.

You win, you go free. You lose, you die.

And if the light went off—

But Jeff knew what would happen if the light went off. The terrible suffocating darkness would close around him, and whatever lay hidden in the darkness would once more begin to creep toward him.

He repeated the words to himself again:
Welcome to the game. You win, you go free.

You lose, you die.

CHAPTER 11

K
eith Converse felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. He’d spent the evening alone, which hadn’t been a good idea. He’d consumed almost half a fifth of scotch—and not the good scotch he and Mary had always saved for company, either. It had been the cheap stuff that he kept on hand for the days when he felt he just needed a drink after work. The whiskey was raw enough that until last night he’d never been able to swallow more than one or two, and usually he wound up pouring what was left of the second drink down the drain. But last night nothing had gone down the drain. He’d just kept drinking, hoping that the alcohol would eventually take away the image of the burned body he’d seen that day.

The body that everyone had told him was his son’s.

All evening, as he sat in his chair sipping whiskey and trying to forget what he’d seen, what Mary had said kept recurring to him:
“He’s dead, Keith . . . Jeff’s dead, and you’ve got to face it.”

But all he saw, no matter how much scotch he forced down his throat, was that patch of unburned skin, the patch that hadn’t been charred this morning, but was burned so badly by afternoon that no tattoo could have been seen even if it were there.

Sometime after midnight, he forced himself to go to bed, but the patch of unmarked skin hung in his mind’s eye as if it were somehow lit from within. The patch of skin where a tattoo should have been.

As the sun came up, Keith finally gave up on sleep and rose to try to clear his head with a cold shower, his doubts having congealed into an absolute certainty.

The body they’d shown him wasn’t Jeff’s.

Then what had happened?

Was it a mistake?

Could they have shown him the wrong body?

Was it possible there had been another burned body in the morgue? While the coffeemaker did its work, Keith went into the tiny alcove off the living room that served as his office and logged on to the Internet. He ran the search every way he could, checked the archives of every news agency in the area. In the last week, only three people in all of New York had died in a fire.

Jeff and the two correction officers.

So they hadn’t showed him the wrong body.

Then what was going on?

He drank three cups of coffee, the argument raging inside his throbbing head. Mary had to be right—he was just refusing to face the reality of what had happened, grasping at any straw, no matter how weak it might be.
Face it,
he told himself over and over again. But no matter how hard he tried, a voice inside him kept insisting that something was wrong, that it hadn’t been Jeff’s body he’d seen in the morgue, no matter how impossible that seemed.

Back in his truck, and back on the expressway, he headed once more to the city. This time, though, he didn’t go to the Medical Examiner’s office. He headed instead to the Fifth Precinct station on Elizabeth Street.

He parked in a garage on the block north of the precinct house and walked south on a sidewalk that was already crowded at nine A.M. Twin green globes marked the station. Aside from that, it was a nondescript, not quite white building distinguished only by double front doors that had been painted a shade of blue so washed-out that Keith wondered if the bureaucrat who had chosen it had been color blind, or—more likely—the city had gotten a deal on a batch of paint no one else would buy. The blue doors stood open, though, and he stepped through a small foyer and pushed through an inner set of oak and glass doors, automatically looking around for the metal detectors that had stood just inside nearly every public building he’d been in since the morning after Jeff was arrested. But there were only several neutral-gray desks—only two of which were occupied—and a few patrolmen standing around talking. Around to the right he found the long, ornately carved oak counter that was the nerve center of the precinct.

The desk sergeant listened to his request, his face impassive. “Lemme get this straight,” he said when Keith was done. “You want to see the report on that wreck yesterday morning, the one up at Delancey and Bowery?” When Keith nodded, the sergeant frowned. “How come?”

Keith was ready for the question. “It was my son that died,” he said smoothly, giving no hint that he had any suspicions that it might not have been Jeff at all. “I just want to know what happened to him, that’s all.”

The desk sergeant’s gaze shifted to a pair of patrolmen who were just heading out the door. “Hey, Ryan—didn’t you and Hernandez catch that mess yesterday morning?”

The patrolman came over, and Keith introduced himself. “I just wondered exactly what happened. My son . . .” He let his voice trail off, leaving the last words unspoken.

“It was his kid that died,” the desk sergeant offered, his voice finally taking on a note of sympathy. “You want to tell him what happened?”

Johnny Ryan shook his head. “Not that much to tell,” he said. “By the time I got there, the van was already burning. Some old wreck of a car had slammed into it.”

“What about the driver of the other car? Wasn’t he hurt?” Keith asked.

Ryan shrugged. “If he was, it sure didn’t slow him down much. He was gone before anyone could even get a good look at him—but don’t worry, we’ll find him.”

The other patrolman, whose name badge identified him as Enrico Hernandez, shook his head sourly. “Don’t know how—the clunker’d been stolen off a lot out in Queens last night. We figure it was some kid out for a joyride, but without any witnesses . . .” He shrugged helplessly.

“But somebody
had
to have seen it,” Keith pressed. “I mean, the middle of New York City—”

“You ever been over there at five-thirty in the morning? You could shoot a cannon down Bowery and not hit anything. Only people around at all were a couple of drunks, and neither one of ’em will say a thing. First one says he was poking around in a Dumpster, and the other was sound asleep. Said he didn’t even wake up until the thing blew up.” Then, remembering who he was talking to, he tried to backtrack. “I mean—”

“So nobody saw it all?” Keith asked.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not still looking,” Hernandez said, a little too quickly. “Look, we want to know what happened just as bad as you do. It wasn’t just your boy, you know. That guy killed two correction officers, too.”

But a prisoner on his way to Rikers Island doesn’t matter, Keith added silently to himself. “You guys happen to remember the names of the drunks?”

“One of ’em was Al Kelly,” Johnny Ryan offered, obviously relieved to at least be able to offer something—no matter how insignificant—to the man whose son had died yesterday morning. “Kelly’s almost always around that corner. He’s got gray hair—really long. Maybe about an inch taller than you. He usually wears three or four sweaters and a coat, and if he isn’t drunk by ten in the morning, you got the wrong guy.” He glanced at Hernandez. “You remember the other guy?”

“Peterson, wasn’t it? Something like that. Don’t remember ever seeing him before, but that doesn’t mean he won’t still be around.” He turned to the desk sergeant. “Any reason why he can’t see the report?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Not that I know of.” He pointed to one of the desks. “Ask Sayers. Just tell him what you want, and he’ll find it.”

Keith turned back to the two officers. “There going to be anything in it you haven’t already told me?”

“Not much,” Ryan sighed, shaking his head. “I wish there was—I really do. And a couple of the guys upstairs are on it, so maybe we’ll still find the perp, you know?”

“They here?” Keith asked. “The guys upstairs?”

The desk sergeant glanced at the board on the far wall, then shook his head. “Maybe a half hour or so. You can wait over there.” He tilted his head toward a bench that sat against the wainscoting—painted the same ugly shade of blue as the outside doors—then picked up a phone that had started ringing. “Fifth Precinct, Sergeant McCormick.”

“Maybe I’ll come back later,” Keith said.

But as he left the precinct, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be back.