He saw this in my eyes—I could tell, since I saw sudden fear in his, combined with an odd look of resignation, maybe even of relief.
It took an act of will to make myself let go.
“Yes,” I said. “She was. And I’m glad it wasn’t you that did it. I’d have killed you if you had.” I saw him flinch. “Without a moment’s hesitation, Stu. You’d be dead now, you understand? And you’d deserve it.”
It was just an impulse to be cruel, a need to lash out, to make someone else hurt the way I hurt. But I realized when I said it that it was true. Maybe I should have known before.
When I found the man responsible for Dorrie’s death, I’d kill him.
I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back.
There wasn’t will enough in me.
PART THREE
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
WILLIAM BLAKE,
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE
Chapter 21
I sank beneath the earth, in the slow metal cage the MTA provided for the wheelchair-bound and infirm. It drew me down, to the deepest point in New York City’s subway system, eighteen stories below street level. Four miles north of Columbia on the 1 train, in the wilds of Washington Heights, the 191st Street station was almost literally the end of the line, before Manhattan dead-ended at the bend of the Harlem River and looked fearfully across the water at the Bronx. The train left you on a platform marked with smears of grime and decades of accumulated rot. It was damp and it was cold and the walls themselves looked tired, faded, the chipped mosaic tiles of the sign spelling out 191st Street looking like the remnants of a long-abandoned jigsaw puzzle.
And then this old, terrible elevator brought you to the very bottom. I’d come here once before, on a case for Leo—a runaway had made her home here, had found shelter here in the middle of one of the worst blizzards New York had ever seen, and then had died here with a filthy needle stuck in her arm, her skin a cyanotic blue. Her parents had paid us the better part of their savings to find her and had spent the rest to have her brought home and buried. I’d never felt worse about taking someone’s money.
The door to the room in which Julia Cortenay had died was labeled “Trash Room,” but the room behind it was actually empty and unused, a left-behind remnant of a scientific experiment some NYU professors had long ago paid the city to house there. They’d needed a safe, quiet place to set up a delicate instrument designed to detect cosmic rays, which apparently could penetrate the 180 feet of solid rock overhead while other forms of radiation could not. They’d set up their machine and watched it for years and then at some point they’d taken it away, wiser or not I couldn’t tell you. But the room was still there and Julia Cortenay had found it, and I needed a place to hide, and I found it now.
It wasn’t empty today. There was a wizened heap of skin and clothes in one dark corner, sucking down swallows from a bottle half hidden in the folds of a brown paper bag. He looked up at me, briefly, and then down again. I wasn’t a cop; I wasn’t, apparently, a threat; I didn’t matter. The air in the room held the rank smell of sweat and piss, and when I pulled the door shut behind me there was almost no light, just a single bulb glowing feebly overhead.
In the station near Stu’s home, I’d made two purchases: a cheap digital watch with a plastic band and, with the last of my quarters, another copy of the Post. I couldn’t help it—I wanted to see the worst. I stripped the middle out of the paper, spread it on the ground, and sat on it. I opened what was left of the paper to the cover story, bending close to the page so I could make out the type.
They train them, I think, in the newsroom, the way they train Rottweilers to attack, by giving them raw meat to sniff so that if they ever get the scent again later in life they start salivating. And my case gave them plenty to drool over. There was the sex angle—Ramos had been found in my bed, after all; fully clothed, it’s true, but that didn’t stop them from speculating. There was my history of arrests—only two, but that was two more than most of their readers had. And then there was my mysterious escape from the apartment just moments before the police arrived. I was a dangerous fugitive. I was presumed armed, said police department spokesperson Delia Cisneros. The police had a number of leads.
What leads, I wondered. And on the jump page I found out. They’d found the button that had come off my shirt, had found Ramos’ blood on it; and in a dumpster several blocks away—god damn it—they’d found the shirt, with more blood, and the wallet, with more blood still. Fingerprints confirmed that—
I balled up the paper and threw in the corner. I was well and truly screwed, I knew that now. What the hell had I been thinking? It was all the fault of movies, and books. Men survive on the run for years in books, your Jean Valjeans, your Fugitives. Harrison Ford makes it look so easy. It never smelled like this in the movies. No one wound up cowering under 180 feet of rock and thinking maybe it’d be just as well never to come up again.
I looked at the watch, pressing one of the buttons on its side to faintly illuminate its face. Hours to go. Hours till it was as dark outside as it was down here, till I could make my way under cover of night to the Cop Cot and to Susan.
And then what?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t think that far ahead.
I slept in snatches, waking once to find the other man tugging gently on one of my shoes. I shook my foot but he didn’t let go—he’d committed to his bit of larceny and by god he was going to follow through. I felt bad kicking him and did it as gently as I could. He tipped backwards and crawled back to his corner, defeated.
Hours later, demonstrating a more congenial bit of cellmate spirit, he came near again and offered me a hit off his bottle. I declined. This seemed to make him madder than the kick had.
He didn’t bother me again. Or if he did, it was while I was asleep and I’d just as soon not know.
The watch’s alarm chimed at eight. I rode the elevator back up and the nearly empty train downtown. I’d taken the crumpled newspaper with me and I held it in front of me in my seat, the front few pages folded back so an underwear ad was showing on one side and Page Six on the other. Gossip, movie stars, an editorial cartoon—nothing to attract attention, nothing with my name or face on it.
The train let me out on 72nd Street. To the east, Central Park loomed against the night sky, its ranks of trees penned in behind a waist-high stone wall. There were pedestrians but they had places to be and brushed past me without a glance. I kept my head down, my hands in my pockets, my shoulders high; I tried not to appear to be in a rush. Once inside the park, I cut across a patch of grass and into the shadows of the trees. I kept off the paths, stayed out of the cones of light cast by the old-fashioned metal streetlamps. At one intersection, I spotted a pair of uniformed policemen talking, one of them swinging his nightstick by its leather strap, and I did an about face that would have been the envy of any marine and quietly fled in the opposite direction.