The Manhattan Hunt Club Page 11

  Then the shoes and the smudges of makeup, as black as the gloves and the coveralls.

  Only when they were completely dressed, when every inch of their skin was covered in a dull and nonreflective black material, did they begin equipping themselves.

  Each of them carried a knife, strapped to the lower leg, where it could be easily reached from a crouch.

  Most of the guns were Steyr Mannlichers, SSG-PI models, chosen for their combination of accuracy, a short barrel, and the option to add either a flash hider or a suppressor. Fully loaded and equipped with second generation rifle scopes that could take advantage of any available light or provide their own infrared illumination, the guns still weighed barely ten pounds.

  A couple of the hunters carried far less complicated but usually just as effective M-14A1s, the favored sniper rifle of the Marines.

  For communication, they carried Ericsson-GE two-way radios, though by now they rarely needed them.

  As silently as he’d dressed, each man now nodded an acknowledgment that he was ready.

  Only then did the leader—who looked no different from the others—unlock the heavy door set into the room’s back wall. He swung the door open and stepped to one side. “I am Hawk,” he said. Then, as each man passed, he whispered a code name. Tonight, all the names happened to be avian.

  “Eagle.”

  “Falcon.”

  “Osprey.”

  “Harrier.”

  “Kite.”

  Beyond the heavy door, which the leader closed and locked behind him, was a wide tunnel filled with steam pipes. Dim lights—bare bulbs protected by heavy metal grilles—cast pools of illumination every hundred feet, and even the areas between the bulbs weren’t quite dark. “Level Four, Second Sector,” the leader said. “Teams of two. Eagle and Osprey. Falcon and Harrier. Kite with me.”

  The men quickly set off toward the north, darting from one shadowy area to the next, scurrying through the pools of light like cockroaches escaping into the shelter of darkness. Soon, they turned toward the west, and now the tunnel was narrower, its ceiling lower, its lights more distantly spaced. The men, though, were almost as familiar with the tunnels beneath the streets as they were with the streets themselves, and they slowed not at all as they moved deeper and deeper into the maze. So far they hadn’t needed to speak at all, for each of them knew exactly where they were. The real challenge wouldn’t come for another half hour, when they descended to a level none of them had visited before.

  With luck, one member of the party would bag the trophy tonight.

  More likely, tonight would be nothing more than reconnaissance, as it usually was whenever they began the exploration of a new territory. The teams would split up, each team mapping the passages they explored, searching the byways and shafts, familiarizing themselves with the terrain.

  For many, the reconnaissance was nearly as satisfying as the bagging of the trophy itself, although in the end the kill would always be the ultimate prize.

  “So how the fuck do we get out of here?”

  Jeff could hear the fear behind Jagger’s angry words—the same fear that had been burning away his own sense of hope.

  Up!

  That’s all they had to do—get up to the surface. But as he tried to remember how he’d arrived at the airless room in the first place, tried to recall the twists and turns as he’d been led through the tunnels under the city, he realized it was impossible. He had no idea where they might be—no idea of how far he’d come from the subway station. Jagger had said they brought him down from the hospital, which Jeff assumed was Bellevue, but who knew how far from the hospital Jagger might have been taken?

  What’s more, he had no idea how deep beneath the city they might be.

  Since the shot—and the scream that immediately followed it—had dictated the direction of their initial flight, they’d kept moving straight ahead. The tunnel, just tall enough so Jeff could walk upright, seemed to have been hacked out of the native rock itself. Pipes ran along the floor, large pipes that Jeff was certain were water mains. He was also fairly certain that they must be moving either north or south, under one of the avenues.

  Not Park—the commuter trains from Grand Central ran under Park.

  Unless they were south of the station. The trains to the suburbs all ran north, didn’t they? He wracked his brain, trying to remember. But there were so many trains running in and out of the city all day—not just from Grand Central, but from Penn Station as well.

  And the subways.

  How many were there?

  Dozens.

  And aside from the subway tunnels, how many others were there under the city?

  Hundreds.

  A dim memory came back to him, of a class he’d taken last fall. It seemed like another life—had been another life. Evenings with Heather Randall in his tiny apartment on 109th Street, just west of Broadway. A life that now seemed so far removed that even the memories seemed to belong to someone else. But then the memory of the class—a semester on urban infrastructure—came into sharper focus, and he could almost hear the professor’s voice.

  “No one really knows what’s under the streets of Manhattan anymore. A lot of people know parts of it—there are maps of the water system, maps of the gas mains, and maps of the trains and the subway systems and the electrical grid. But there is no map of all of it.”

  As they’d followed the flashlight beam, which already seemed to be weakening, Jeff had tried to keep his eyes trained upward, looking for a shaft that would take them to the surface.

  Now they’d found one. Directly above his head rose a narrow shaft with a rusting ladder anchored in rotting concrete.

  “One of us goes up that shaft and sees where it leads,” he said.

  Jagger shook his head. “I ain’t goin’. Could be anything up there.”

  “So what do you want to do, just keep walking? We’re going to have to go up sooner or later.”

  Jagger peered up at the hole. “Doesn’t look like it goes anywhere.”

  “It’s got to go somewhere—if it doesn’t, then why’s it there?” He reached up and grasped the lowest rung of the ladder. “Give me a boost.” As if he weighed no more than a child, Jagger raised him up until he was high enough to get a foot onto the bottom rung. “Shut off your light,” he said as he switched on his own. “No use wasting the batteries.”

  “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.”

  They moved through the waiting room and down a ramp, following a sign pointing to the tracks.

  Finally, Tillie pulled open the door leading to Track 42 and started down the steps to the platform.

  No trains stood on the tracks; no people were on the platforms.

  The air smelled musty.

  To the right were more platforms, more tracks.

  To the left was a low wall, then beyond it a tangle of pipes and catwalks and ladders. From high above, a faint glimmer of daylight was filtering through a grating.

  “That’s the street up there,” Tillie explained. “Where I used to live.”

  At the end of the platform was a sign warning people to go no farther, but Tillie ignored it, moving quickly down another ramp and onto the tracks themselves. Picking her way across Track 42, Tillie climbed over the low wall. When Jinx hesitated, Tillie urged her on.

  “It’s not so bad,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  At first Jinx was terrified, and she stayed close behind Tillie as they wound their way through what seemed to Jinx like nothing more than a jumble of tunnels and passages.

  Then they’d come to Tillie’s place.

  The biggest of the rooms was about twenty feet square, and there was a rusty stove, a worn sofa, and a few chairs along with a battered table, and even a television set. “See?” Tillie told her. “Now, this isn’t so bad, is it?”

  “Does the TV work?” was all Jinx had been able to think of to ask.

  Tillie had shrugged. “Nah, but it makes it kind of homey. And who knows?” she added with a grin that exposed a missing tooth. “Maybe we’ll get cable someday!”

  Half a dozen people had been living in the room, and when no one tried to get in bed with her that night, Ji
nx decided to stay. She’d lived there three years now, and Tillie and the others had taught her a lot. They showed her where the best Dumpsters were, the ones behind restaurants that threw away a lot of food. Some of them even wrapped up the food they were throwing away, just so people like Tillie—and now like Jinx—could take it home more easily.

  She’d learned how to panhandle and tell the story about how someone stole her bus ticket and all she needed was thirty-four dollars to get back home. She never failed to marvel at how many people fell for that one. Of course, you had to be careful not to hit the same person twice with it, but even if you got caught, you could always disappear into the crowd, and pretty soon the person yelling at you just looked like another crazy.

  She’d learned to pick pockets, too, and gotten so good at it that not even Paul Hagen could catch her. The trouble was, you couldn’t just hang around Times Square anymore, and now here was Paulie, running her off the block for the third time in a week.

  “So where’m I supposed to go?” she asked.

  Paul Hagen just shrugged. “Hey, don’t blame me—I’m just carrying out orders.”

  Jinx shrugged, too, and headed across Broadway, cursing just loudly enough so he’d hear it but not know what she was saying. She was just turning the corner onto Forty-third when the person she’d been looking for suddenly appeared out of a crowd of people hurrying to get to a theater before the curtain went up at ten after eight.

  “The hunt starts tomorrow,” the person said softly, shoving a thick envelope into Jinx’s hands before vanishing back into the crowd.

  Resisting an urge to look back to see if Paulie Hagen had seen her take the envelope, Jinx scurried across Broadway, ducked into the subway, and was gone.

  When Heather allowed herself a daydream, she and Jeff were in his tiny apartment on the West Side. It was Sunday morning, and she was wearing one of his old shirts, one that was miles too big for her. That was all right; just wearing it made her feel closer to Jeff. The Sunday Times was spread all over the floor, and the sun was flooding through the window, and if they ever got around to getting dressed, they’d go out, maybe buy a bagel, and go over to Morningside Park and feed the birds and the squirrels.