Strong 03 - Twice (15 page)

“We’re coming into Rain’s territory now,” she said. “Stay close to me and keep your mouths shut.”

“Who’s Rain?” asked Dax.

“Someone down here that you don’t want to fuck with.”

Dax gave a smug little laugh and Jeff checked the Glock at his waist.

“
W
hat did you say?” asked Lydia as the ground and the room around her seemed to disappear. She looked at the wretched man before her and he looked back with a lascivious leer. She wanted to leap across the room and strangle him, but she kept her place by the guard. The room suddenly felt hot and small and she wanted nothing more than to leave except to know why this little psycho thought she was Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.

“What are you talking about, Jetty?” asked Ford, the sweet lulling tone he’d been using to coax information out of Jetty gone, cast off like a bad disguise. His voice was a fist poised to take care of Jetty’s few remaining teeth.

Jetty turned to look at him in surprise, the smile he wore flickering into a worried frown. He looked sadly at the bag of candy and cigarettes that Ford still had under his hand.

“J-J-J-Jed,” he stammered, “had pictures of her. He talked about her all the time. Said she was waiting for him to get out.”

“When did you have the opportunity to talk to him?” asked Lydia, who had always imagined Jed like Hannibal Lecter, bound, isolated, with a mask over his face. At least that’s how she liked to think of him.

“During art therapy,” said Jetty quietly. “He only drew pictures of you.”

Lydia had to suppress a laugh, even though there was nothing funny about any of it. The ridiculousness of allowing Jed to have art therapy where he fed his obsession by drawing pictures of her was a testament to the idiocy of the psychiatric profession in general and
this hospital in particular. No wonder he’d been allowed to get away. “You bastards,” said Lydia under her breath.

“You said a bad word,” admonished Jetty. Lydia shot him a look and he cringed as if he thought she’d strike him. She felt bad for a second. Then the feeling passed as another thought occurred to her.

“Jetty,” she asked, moving toward him and sitting in the free chair beside Ford, “did you tell Jed McIntyre about the tunnels beneath the street?”

Jetty nodded. “He didn’t believe me.”

Ford looked at Lydia guiltily with a shake of his head.

“What?” she said, a frown creasing her forehead and dread burrowing what seemed to be a permanent home in her belly.

A
s they approached a ragtag group of men sitting around a lopsided card table playing poker by candlelight, Jeff decided that they had entered the twilight zone. They appeared to be playing for bottles and cans, using caps and metal tabs for chips. A few sacks filled with cans and bottles lay scattered on the floor around the table. Engaged in a loud, slurred argument over who had won the last hand, the card players did not acknowledge Violet, Dax, and Jeff as they passed until Dax accidentally shone the flashlight beam on their table.

“Hey, brother,” barked a beefy guy with a red baseball cap. “Mind your own business.”

Jeffrey braced himself for Dax to flip out but he just raised a hand in apology. “Sorry, mate.”

They passed a row of tents that seemed to lean against one another and go on forever. They were lit from inside, and Jeff and Dax could see shadows moving within, heard the occasional voice. Jeff thought he caught the scent of meat cooking.

“Track rabbits,” said Violet.

“Track rabbits?” said Dax with a grimace. “Dare I ask?”

“People down here are hungry. And the rats get pretty big,” she
said with a shrug. “It’s not half bad. The concept is harder to swallow than the meat.”

“That is fucking disgusting,” said Dax.

“Spoken like someone who’s never gone hungry,” said Violet indignantly.

“Whatever,” he said, not liking the old lady’s attitude. Jeff rolled his eyes; Dax didn’t even know how offensive he could be sometimes. But his honesty, even when it was inappropriate, was one of the things Jeff liked most about him. There was no artifice to Dax. He didn’t give a shit what anyone thought, and that made him one of the most trustworthy people Jeff knew. Dax was just like Lydia in that way, which was probably why the two were always butting heads.

Jeff felt Dax’s hand on his arm just before he noticed a tall form appear before them on the track, taking up the height and width of the tunnel. Violet seemed to hesitate for a second as though she had sensed something, but then she kept walking.

“There’s someone ahead of us,” whispered Jeff.

“I know.”

Jeff heard Dax click the safety off his gun. As they drew closer, Jeff could see that there was a light source behind the form, creating a shadow that was much bigger than the man who waited in their path.

“You brought cops down here, Violet?” asked the shade, his voice deep and resonant. He stood about six feet tall and seemed to be draped in robes, but the light was dim and Jeff couldn’t make out his clothes or his face. He just looked like a wraith, a dark shadow in a land of shadows.

Violet had instructed Dax to turn his flashlight off a while back and it didn’t seem like a good idea to turn it back on, though Dax was itching to do so. But he had his hands full with his Magnum Desert Eagle, a nasty Israeli gun that had more stopping power than a freight train.

“They’re not cops, Rain. They’re friends of Danielle’s.”

There was a pause and then a deep, cruel laugh. “That crack ho doesn’t have any friends.”

“Yes, she does,” said Dax, offended. He didn’t like it when people insulted his friends, even if what they said was true.

They stood silent for a moment and Rain was so still that he looked as though he could fade into the black and be as gone as if he’d never been there at all.

“What do they want?” he asked finally.

“They’re here for The Virus.”

As they talked, Violet continued to move forward slowly toward Rain and she was dwarfed by his height and size. Jeff and Dax hung back, waiting to see how the standoff would go.

“We’re the cure,” said Dax, his voice quiet but resonating against the concrete.

Rain nodded but kept his ground. “And then what?”

“And then we leave and never come back,” said Jeffrey.

“And you never tell anyone that you came here.”

“Sounds like a deal.”

“Leave the body. We’ll take care of it. No one will ever find it.”

And with that he seemed to meld into the darkness and was gone. Jeff was left with a chill down his spine and a feeling of dread in his heart. They’d be murderers when this deed was done and he wasn’t sure that rested well with him, no matter the reason. It was justice, of that he had no doubt. It was whether they had the right to dispense it that worried him. He knew how Lydia felt about it; they tried to take care of it her way … the “right” way. They’d failed, and now Jed McIntyre was free, uncontained. And that was unacceptable to him.

The three of them started walking again in silence. He didn’t want to talk anymore, to just pretend the bizarre unreality of this made it all a bad dream. If he hadn’t been one hundred percent certain that he had no choice, they wouldn’t be here at all. As it was, he’d willingly trade his soul for the woman he loved and the child she carried inside her.

“
W
hat are they thinking?” said Lydia at the wheel of Ford’s Taurus, speeding back to New York City. Ford had let her have the keys because he knew her head was going to explode if she didn’t have something to do on the way back to town. Now he regretted it as she pushed the old car beyond its limits, driving it as if it were her small tight Mercedes. Which it definitely was not. Ford heard an unfamiliar noise from the engine.

“Look … there’s no point in overreacting and there’s no point to racing back there,” said Ford. “We should just proceed to Haunted as planned. They’ll call when they’re done.”

“Done with what?” she asked. “Even if Jed McIntyre is lurking in the subway tunnels, what exactly do they plan to do?”

“That’s not information I need to have. And you should just let it go, too. They’re big boys, they can take care of themselves and anyone who tries to fuck with them. What are you going to do when we get there? Race into the tunnels and try to find them? Sit at your apartment, wringing your hands?”

Lydia pulled the car over to the side of the road and put her head on the wheel. He had a point. But her whole body was electrified with the need to get back to New York. What if something happened to them down there? The thought of Jeffrey crawling beneath the streets looking for Jed McIntyre made her sick with anxiety. How could he do this? Without telling her? When she knew he was okay, she was going to kill him.

Ford put a warm, callused hand on the back of her neck and she sat up, taking a deep breath. He had a kind, fatherly face, even if it was a little hard around the edges. She’d seen it change from warm to cold in under a second. Brown eyes communicated a depth and a sensitivity that Lydia found rarely in career cops, told her that he still had a humanity and compassion that were often casualties of the job. A thin smile disappeared into deep creases around the corners. A seemingly permanent five o’clock shadow made him look a little tough, a little unkempt. He smelled of Old Spice and sesame chicken.

“Pull it together, girl,” he said. “Let’s go to Haunted.”

She was about to agree with him when his cell phone rang. He removed it from the inside pocket of his lined beige raincoat.

“McKirdy,” he answered. “Oh, yeah?” he said after a second, his eyebrows raising in interest. Another pause, then, “What do you mean, ‘unusual’? He tapped an impatient finger against the dash. “Well, I’m more than an hour away.”

He looked at his watch and then at the sun hanging low and white in the sky, the sky growing dim as night began to fall. “Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“What’s up?” she asked as he put the phone back into his pocket.

“Turns out there’s a surveillance tape from the Ross building.”

“Really? What’s on it?”

“They can’t tell. One of the junior detectives I got working with me says they can’t make sense of what they’re seeing. The camera was in the basement of the building, in the laundry room. They see something strange around two-thirty in the morning and then it goes black.”

“Huh,” said Lydia. “So … what?”

“So looks like it’s back to NYC after all. Haunted will have to wait until tomorrow.”

She pulled out onto the road and headed back toward the city. Relief and anxiety fought it out in Lydia’s stomach. Part of her
wanted to head toward Haunted and away from everything that was happening in her life, as if to lay distance between her and the possible outcomes of Dax and Jeffrey’s mission were to make it less real. And the other part of her wanted desperately to be there, to be present, as if just being in the city would prevent the worst from happening. It was the helplessness that she couldn’t handle, that tied her up inside, that caused a dull ache in her head. She gripped the wheel and forced her foot down on the gas. The car struggled in response, but she kept pushing as if going faster would speed up time.

“
T
his is as far as I go,” said Violet. “I’ll wait here to take you back.”

They stood at a point where two tunnels met. About a hundred yards away they could see in the beam of Dax’s flashlight a metal staircase leading to a landing and a narrow catwalk that led to a door.

“Is he in there?” asked Dax.

“I know he lives just past this divide,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s in there or not.”

“Let’s wait a bit,” said Jeff to Dax. “Turn out the light and let’s just see if there’s any activity.”

“Come on, man. Let’s take this fucker. We’ve waited long enough. I’m getting fucking claustrophobic down here,” said Dax, cracking the tension out of his neck.

“There’s no point in just busting in there if he’s out and about. We’ll just give ourselves away and lose our chance. Patience.”

Dax turned out the light and Jeffrey motioned for him to follow as he made his way toward the staircase. Beneath the metal landing there was a narrow break in the wall that looked like it had once held an emergency phone. There was enough room for both of them to stand side by side. There they could see anyone coming from either direction and were just below the doorway.

Dax sighed and crouched down on the ground. He pulled the Magnum Desert Eagle from the holster at his shoulder and examined
it, clicking off the safety. Jeffrey removed his new Glock from his waist. He’d never recovered the gun he’d lost in Albania a few months ago, and this one had never been fired off the range. He liked the semiautomatic and generally carried one, but it always seemed like a wild card compared to the revolver. Revolvers were workhorses, they never jammed; semiautomatics were less reliable but had more rounds.

He tried to get a feel for their situation, but it was as if being in the tunnels had dulled his senses. He had always believed as a young FBI agent that you knew when you were walking into a mess, when the house that was supposed to be deserted, wasn’t; when a bust was going to go wrong; when a negotiation was about to fail. But he’d learned over the years that there was no way to tell how bad things were going to get, even if you had the instinct that things weren’t going to go your way.

He leaned against the wall and ran his free hand through his hair, which was damp with sweat and the moisture in the dank air. He regretted walking out on Lydia without saying good-bye. He felt it now in the form of an ache in his solar plexus; it had been arrogant to assume he’d be back before she knew he was gone. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, or how long it would be before he saw her again. He would have strangled her if she’d tried to pull something like this over on him. The only comfort he had was in knowing she probably would have done the same thing.

“I heard something,” said Dax.

“From where?” asked Jeff.

“From inside the door.”

Jeff listened carefully in the darkness and then he, too, heard a shuffling from above them. “Let’s move,” he said quietly.