"What if you don't come back?" Jagger asked.
"I'll be back," Jeff told him. "You think I want to be down here by myself? Just stay here and I'll be back in a couple of minutes."
He started climbing, creeping up the corroded ladder. Though he knew it had to be his imagination, the shaft seemed to be growing narrower, tightening around him until he felt he couldn't breathe. Panic welled up in him. If he got stuck-
You won't, he told himself.
But the higher he climbed, the worse the claustrophobia got. His skin was clammy now, his heart pounding, and his chest felt as if it were being squeezed by a boa constrictor.
Steeling himself against his rising panic, he kept climbing.
Then, above him, he sensed something.
Something was there, in the darkness above him.
He shined the light upward.
Two red eyes glinted.
It was a rat, no more than three feet above him!
He shied away from the rodent, his body jerking reflexively. His back slammed against the wall of the shaft behind him as one knee smashed into a rung of the ladder. The rat, baring its teeth and hissing at him, suddenly disappeared, and for a moment Jeff succumbed to the panic that had been building inside him since he'd begun climbing the shaft.
Where had it gone? Where could it have gone?
Down! It was coming down at him! He flashed the light around desperately, searching for the rat, but it had vanished. Then, as his panic subsided, he saw another passage going off to the side, three feet above his head. The hope that had been nearly extinguished by the claustrophobia and panic surged back, and he scrambled upward until he could see down the new passage.
Far in the distance he saw something that dissipated the terror of a moment before.
Light. Far away, barely visible, but utterly undeniable.
A way out.
CHAPTER 15
"Come on, Jinx, you know the rules. Move it along."
The girl barely glanced up from the greasy magazine she'd fished out of a trash barrel twenty minutes earlier. "What's the big deal? Is Mickey Mouse afraid I might pick his pocket?" She edged away as the patrolman moved closer. "Hey, come on, Paulie-what'd I ever do to you?"
Paul Hagen, who'd been working Times Square for most of his twenty-year career and was only now allowing himself to imagine a retirement that didn't begin by getting either shot or sliced up, couldn't remember how many Jinxes he'd seen over the years. And she was right-she hadn't ever done anything to him. And five years ago he probably wouldn't have bothered to speak to her unless he'd caught her with her hand in some tourist's pocket. But that was five years ago, and this was today, and Times Square wasn't what it used to be. In a lot of ways, Paul Hagen missed the old days, when Times Square was ground zero for all the people who couldn't survive anywhere else in the city, a place where they could make a life in their own way, hanging out with all the other losers. Hagen had learned to accept that part of it early on, the first couple of years he'd been patrolling the streets. There were two kinds of people in the world: regular people and scumbags.
He was a regular person.
Jinx, and everybody else who had wound up in Times Square with no visible means of support, no permanent address, no past, and no prospects, were scumbags. That was the way of the world. Scumbags hung out in Times Square, and everybody knew it. New Yorkers knew it. Tourists knew it. Whatever you wanted-whether it was a dime bag back in the sixties, or a quick line or an ounce of crack in the more recent past-you could get it in Times Square. A cheap drink, a dirty movie, a blow job from a drag queen-it had all been there, going on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. His job, at least as Hagen saw it, wasn't to put a stop to it, but to keep a semblance of order among the traders. Direct traffic, as it were. Maybe most of it was against the rules for the rest of the city, but Times Square had its own set of rules.
The tourists came to Times Square to see the kind of action they could never see back in Podunk, and if they got their pockets picked, or took home a case of venereal warts-hey, that was life in the big city. The city knew it, the tourists knew it, and everyone was happy.
But then everything changed.
Mickey Mouse came to town and turned Times Square into an urban Disneyland. Everybody said it was wonderful-that the city was safer than it had ever been. And Paul Hagen guessed that was probably true, at least for most people. But what about for people like Jinx? Where was she supposed to go now that he'd been told not to let her just hang out on the streets? The answer was easy-nobody gave a damn where she went, as long as they didn't have to see her. And his job, which had once been to make sure the Jinxes didn't do too much damage, was now to make sure that nobody even had to know she existed. So even though he didn't have anything against her, he didn't give her a break. "Come on," he said again. "You know the drill."
And Jinx did. She hadn't when she first arrived in the city three years ago from Altoona. Back then she'd just been trying to get away from her mom's boyfriend, who'd decided that even though she was only twelve, she was a lot sexier than her mother. And maybe she was. Her figure had sure been better than her mom's, which Elvin-what the fuck kind of name was Elvin?-had kept telling her while he pawed at her every night after her mom passed out. So she'd knocked Elvin out, hitting him over the head with one of her mom's empties, and split. She hitched about a hundred miles with an old guy who had pulled out his dick, but at least hadn't tried to make her do anything with it. She'd gotten away from him at a gas station near Milton, then caught a bus that brought her to New York. She hung around the bus station at first, sleeping in a chair and eating at the counter, and it had been the woman behind the counter-was her name Marge?-who gave Amber Janks her nickname. "You poor kid," she said after Amber told her the reason she'd left home. "You really got the wrong name, didn't you? Shoulda been Jinx instead of Janks."
Jinx it had been ever since, and now she no longer thought of herself as Amber Janks.
Amber Janks was dead, but Jinx was very much alive and taking care of herself.
Actually, it hadn't taken her long to figure out how. In the beginning a couple of men had said they wanted to take care of her, and Jinx believed them. At least until they tried to get her into bed. "Come on, baby," Jimmy Ramirez had told her. "We gonna make a fortune with that body, but you gotta know how to use it."
Elvin had already taught her how to use it, and Jinx had hated it, so when Jimmy started tearing her clothes off, she pretended to grope just long enough to get her hands on the knife he kept in his pocket. When she heard a couple of days later that Jimmy was dead, she wondered whether she'd killed him, then decided she didn't much care.
The other guy, who was maybe forty, hadn't been like Jimmy at all. He'd looked really nice, wearing jeans with a crease in them, and a plaid shirt. And he hadn't wanted to pimp for her, either. He said he just wanted to buy her lunch, and he bought her a few. But then, when they were in McDonald's, he put his hand on her leg, and she knew what that meant.
That time, she just got up and walked out. What was she going to do, cut him with one of those crappy little plastic knives?
Then she met Tillie, and everything got better. Tillie had taken her home, or at least to the place Tillie called home, and within a couple of weeks Jinx thought of it as home, too. It was actually just a couple of big rooms, not far from Grand Central, and you got to it by going down to Track 42 in the station itself.
"Don't pay any attention to nothin‘," Tillie had told her as they walked into the cavernous waiting room. "You don't look at people, they won't look at you. You don't talk, they won't talk. An' if you just keep walkin‘, the transit cops won't even bother you."