Wouldn’t that make my life easy? he thought. But of course that kind of stuff happened only in science fiction and fantasy stories, where the heroes were all noble and dead wasn’t always forever. Real life had less convenient rules.
Drake hauled open the heavy glass-and-brass door and walked up the pebbled incline between the outer and inner doors. A man with a long, filthy, matted beard and sunken eyes stood to one side wearing a sign announcing the arrival of the End Times, but there was no way to tell if he was celebrating or regretting the moment.
When he stepped into the main concourse-the enormous, ornate chamber that came immediately to mind when he thought of Grand Central Terminal-he made a beeline for the huge clock. He spotted Sully standing beneath it, but the older man was turned away, watching the stairs across the terminal, probably thinking about the baby carriage scene in De Palma’s Untouchables, a homage to the Russian flick Battleship Potemkin. They’d passed through Grand Central together a few times, and every time Sully had to tell him about those stairs. Sully saw him coming and perked up, shaking off whatever he’d been thinking about. From the haunted look in his eyes, Drake decided maybe it wasn’t old gangster movies, after all.
“Nate,” Sully said. “Thanks for coming.”
“I was already traveling. Just had to take a detour,” Drake replied. Their rapport mostly consisted of banter, but for once he thought maybe the lighthearted approach wasn’t appropriate. “What’s going on, Sully? You said ‘murder.’ One look at you and I’m guessing this isn’t some cozy mystery.”
Sully frowned, smoothing his gray mustache. “I’m not my usual jovial self, huh? I guess not. But you look more than a little like crap yourself, so maybe you shouldn’t judge.”
Drake raised his eyebrows. “Great to see you, too.”
A tired smile touched Sully’s face and a bit of the usual mischievous twinkle lit his eyes, but then the smile faded and his gaze turned dark. He nodded his head toward the row of arched doorways that led through into the train tunnels and platforms.
“Come on. This way,” he said.
Drake followed without asking any more questions. If Sully had a particular way he wanted the answer to unfold, Drake would indulge him. He’d earned that, and far more, in the years they’d been friends. He studied Sully as they reached a staircase and started down to a lower level. A drinker and an inveterate ladies’ man, he looked, as always, as if he would have been more at home gambling in 1950s Havana than dealing with twenty-first-century America. His graying hair looked a bit unruly, and dark circles under his eyes implied he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before. He wore a brown leather bomber jacket over one of his guayaberas-linen shirts that were most popular in Latin America and the Caribbean. Both the shirt and the khaki pants he was wearing were rumpled, indicating that whatever sleep he had gotten, he’d been wearing the same clothes since the day before.
It had been almost two months since Drake had seen Sully, but they’d spoken on the phone less than a week ago, and at the time there’d been no indication that anything was amiss. But murder gave no warning.
Sully led him through the lower-level concourse and past the arched entrances to a warren of underground railway tunnels until at last he turned through one of those archways and walked down a dozen steps to a train platform. Lights flickered unreliably in the darkness of the ceiling above them. The rumble of trains both near and distant made it feel like at any moment the world might shake itself apart. The noise reminded Drake of counting the seconds between thunder strikes as a child, trying to figure out how far away the storm might be and if the lightning might be coming his way.
No train awaited them at the platform. Drake had half expected that they were about to embark on a journey, but if they were, it apparently wouldn’t be by train. The tracks were empty, and other than themselves, the platform looked abandoned-except for the yellow line of police tape that had been used to cordon off the end of the platform from the public. Drake didn’t have to ask; he knew where they were headed now.
Two platforms over, a train clanked and hissed, waiting as a few stragglers hurried alongside it. A conductor stood outside the door, ushering them along. The man glanced at Drake and Sully. Once upon a time he would have minded his own business-New York had been that kind of town-but after 9/11 all that had changed. Sully knew it, too, because he stopped at the crime scene tape, making no move to go beyond it. They were suspicious enough just being down here without any obvious reason. Drake thought maybe the conductor would think they were plainclothes detectives, but then he realized they were probably underdressed for that. And if he had caught a glimpse of the guayabera under Sully’s bomber jacket, the man would know right off the bat they weren’t cops. Most police kept their quirks on the inside.
Standing by the police tape, Sully withdrew a cigar from inside his jacket pocket. He wasn’t much for rules, but he didn’t light it, just stuck it between his lips and rolled it around in his teeth for a minute, thinking. Drake had never known him to be a man prone to rumination.
“You’re starting to freak me out a little, Sully. How about you start by telling me who died?”
Sully stared at a spot beyond the police tape for a moment longer, then took the cigar from his mouth and turned to Drake.
“This platform’s been closed since last night. A train came in from Connecticut-plenty of stops along the way-and when it left, there was an old steamer trunk on the platform. Mostly people were getting on, leaving the city, but there were some arriving, too. One of the conductors remembered the trunk and that two men were sitting near it. He assumed they had carried it on but didn’t look too closely at them. Dark coats; that’s all he remembers.”
Sully shook his head, eyes narrowed in frustration. “Think about that, Nate. Anything in the world could have been in that trunk. The whole thing could have been full of Semtex or something. Can you imagine explosives in that kind of volume detonating under the city? We’re so obsessed with planes, but nobody’s paying attention to…”
He trailed off, taking a breath. He looked more angry than grieving, but Drake knew Sully well enough to see that he was both.
“So, this trunk wasn’t filled with explosives?” Drake ventured.
Sully shot him a hard look. “I was making a point. But no, it wasn’t. Place reacted like it could’ve been, though. Hundreds of trains were prevented from coming in, thousands of people evacuated. Transportation Authority brought in counterterrorism agents, and NYPD had a bomb squad down here. Bomb-sniffing dogs didn’t get a read on it, but they were still treating it like it was going to explode. A couple of the guys who wrangle those dogs-one of them used to train them to sniff for corpses, and he knows the smell pretty well. He said he thought there was a body in the trunk. Turned out he was right.”
Drake put a hand on his shoulder, hating to see his friend in pain. “Sully-”
“It was Luka,” Sully said, his jaw working, eyes flashing with anger. “But not all of him, Nate. No arms and no legs. Just his torso. They’d cut his head off, too, but at least that was in the trunk. Whoever killed him, they didn’t amputate his limbs to make it harder to ID him or they wouldn’t have put his-”
Sully faltered. Sneering, he jammed the cigar back into his mouth and stared again at the area beyond the yellow tape. The train two platforms away pulled out, clanking loudly, and Drake wondered if the conductor was still watching them. He wondered why the cops or the FBI weren’t on top of them already, wondering what they were doing there. If the trunk had been filled with explosives instead of Sully’s dead friend, they would never have been able to come down here without being stopped. But murder didn’t get the same attention.