I leaned over, found her ear with my lips. It was strangely intimate, like a kiss in the darkness. “I think there’s a branch coming up,” I said, so softly there was hardly any sound at all. “Feel for it on your side.”
A moment later, I felt her hand on my sleeve. I moved over to her side of the tunnel, touched the rough stone of the wall with my fingertips. I reached the corner she’d found, paced forward till I touched the opposite side. It was an opening about three feet wide. More than just an alcove: I went five or six steps into it and came back. I found her ear again. “Matches.”
She dug the matchbook out of her pocket. I heard a scratch and a tiny bead of orange light flared between us, too weak to illuminate much other than her hand and, as she raised it, her face, creased with deep shadows. She looked frightened. I’m sure I did, too.
I took the matchbook from her, carried it deeper down the new tunnel. It ended after about ten feet in a solid wall. In the instant before the match went out, I saw that the wall was a relatively recent addition, a layer of cinderblocks spanning the rough-hewn tunnel from one side to the other. Maybe they did this after Hechtman’s spree, to keep people out of Pupin. Didn’t matter—what mattered was that we weren’t going any further this way.
I returned to Julie and was about to lean over and whisper to her again when a bellow split the air.
“Julie!”
It came from right beside us.
I pressed Julie back against the stone wall with one arm. Thank god she didn’t make a sound.
From inches away: “Where are you?”
I bent the four remaining matches down with my left hand, the way I’d seen Julie do it. With my other arm, I raised the wooden plank. I pressed down on the match heads with my thumb. From the main tunnel came the sound of movement, footsteps.
I snapped the matches against the friction strip. All four flared to life at once, burning the pad of my thumb. In the sudden flare, I saw him, slightly farther away than I’d thought, wheeling to face me. One arm extended. Finger on the trigger.
I threw the matches at his face and swung the plank.
I saw flashes, reflections, before the flame went out. The side of his gun, narrowing, vanishing, as it swung in my direction. His face, furious. The edge of the plank, sweeping toward him in a wide arc, striking his forearm.
Then darkness. And the gun went off.
The explosion was like a thunderclap, deafening, though in its aftermath I could hear the metallic zing! of the bullet ricocheting from wall to wall. In this confined space, he’d be as likely to hit himself as he would to get me or Julie. Maybe he realized this because he didn’t fire again.
I could hear him coming toward me. I tried to swing the plank again, but it stopped halfway through the swing and was wrenched out of my hands. I heard it clatter to the ground some distance away. Then a pair of muscular arms wrapped my torso and his forehead crashed into mine. My knees buckled and I felt bile rising in my throat. Only the pressure of his arms around me kept me upright. I could smell his sweat, and his breath. His sandwich—salami, I thought. Onions. Jesus. His head cracked against mine again.
I tasted blood inside my mouth, where I’d bitten myself. I tried to clear my head by moving it side to side, tried to struggle against his grip, but I felt myself lifted off the ground, my feet dangling. All this in nearly total darkness. With Julie it had felt intimate, the brush of her hair and skin against my lips. With this man it felt like a nightmare—buried alive, two to a coffin, fighting to breathe.
He squeezed and I felt one of my ribs snap. I gasped, cried out.
I tried to raise my knee to his groin, but I had no leverage.
I ducked my head forward, felt his chin with mine, his cheek, his nose. I gripped his nose between my teeth and bit down. He howled and let go, dropping me.
I tried to roll away from him, but something drove into my side, hard: a foot. For an instant, I couldn’t even think. All I knew was pain.
Then I heard Julie’s voice, shouting “Hey!” and heard the man take a step toward it. Then a whack, the sound of splintering wood. I heard the man groan, followed by a sound like a heavy bag of laundry dropping.
A cluster of matches flared to life. Julie stood above the man’s still form, half the plank nestled in the crook of her right arm. I saw beads of sweat on her face. She didn’t look well.
“My hand,” she said. “I need a doctor.”
I got to my knees, felt the rib grate in my chest. I didn’t say anything. The matches went out. She lit some more.
“How many of those things do you have?” I said.
“I smoke two packs a day,” she said, wincing.
“Good for you,” I said.
“Fuck you,” she said. “Just get us the hell out of here.”
Chapter 8
They took Julie into surgery. We were at St. Vincent’s, where she’d had her original operation; we checked her in under her real name, which surprised me by being Julie, Julie Park. I was used to strippers and sex workers using aliases to keep their personal and professional lives separate. But Julie said, “I’m not ashamed of what I do, John. I won’t say I’m proud of it—but I’m not ashamed.”
Her doctor wasn’t there when we arrived, but they paged him and he showed up twenty minutes later. I had a longer wait. The doctor who eventually taped up my chest explained Julie’s situation to me as he circled the roll of bandages around and around and around my torso. Two fractures, only marginally knitted, had apparently broken again and one of the pins had shifted. Bones needed to be re-set and her hand re-immobilized. My doctor went on at length about metacarpals and phalanges, glad to have a captive audience.
When I next saw her it was three hours later and her right hand was completely encased in plaster. She was lying in a hospital bed. She raised her cast in my direction. “This is me giving you the finger,” she said.
“You probably saved my life,” I told her.
“I didn’t do it for you. When he finished with you, he’d have started on me.”
“Well,” I said. “Thank you anyway.”
“How’s your chest?” she said.
“Better than your hand,” I said.
It hadn’t taken us long to find our way out of the tunnels, but it had felt like hours. We finally emerged in the basement of Havemeyer, the chemistry building, just a few hundred yards from Broadway. Julie had cradled her hand while I stood on 116th Street trying to wave down a taxi without raising my arm.
And what of Jorge Ramos, the man on the receiving end of Julie’s home-run swing? His wallet gave us his name; his breathing, though uneven, told us he was alive when we left him. That’s all we knew or cared.
“I should never have agreed to meet you,” Julie said. “Di was right.”
“Look—”
“Not even by phone. When she sent me your e-mail address, I should have deleted it.”
“Ardo’s people might have come after you anyway.”
“They were done with me,” she said.
“Like they were done with Dorrie?”
“You don’t know that they had anything to do with her death.”
“No,” I said. “I also don’t know that they had anything to do with the man who chased us through the tunnels at gunpoint today, but I think it’s a reasonable guess.”