The Equalizer (29 page)

McCall found a foothold on the ladder on one side, then the other. He managed to climb down, over Gershon's body, to the rungs right below him. He could hear the running footsteps echoing above them, getting closer. They turned the corner of the street.

“Sixteen rungs,” McCall said in the darkness. “I'll go first. Put your good arm around my shoulders and climb down after me. If you fall, I'll catch you.”

“They'll follow us.”

“It'll take them a few minutes to figure out where we went.”

McCall felt Gershon's good arm snake around his shoulders. He climbed down the sixteen rungs of the narrow iron ladder, virtually carrying Gershon on his back, into reeking darkness.

 

CHAPTER 21

McCall reached the bottom, stepping into stagnant water ankle-deep on the concrete floor. He swung Gershon down beside him. Directly in front of them were three huge pipes, two of them a pale blue, the third rust red, snaking off to the right like long fat slugs into semidarkness. Work lights cast a sparse radiance across the dank tunnel. There were smaller pipes in the ceiling above them. Pieces of broken plaster and splintered concrete were strewn across the tunnel floor. The air was fetid and heavy. And hot. Gershon looked around. Their voices echoed.

“What is this place?”

“Utility and steam tunnel,” McCall said. “Runs all the way to beneath Columbia University. Can you walk?”

“Yeah.”

“With me.”

McCall put his arm around Gershon's shoulders again. They half walked, half ran down the narrow tunnel, following the three fat pipes. There was no sound of pursuit behind them yet. McCall could hear rats scuttling through the tunnel, most of them above his head, amid the small pipes. He felt a shudder at the thought of them falling on top of them, scrabbling through their hair, crawling down their faces. Gershon's breathing was labored, but he seemed to be walking better.

They came to another tunnel with pipes barring their way. They had to climb over them. McCall stopped to listen. Gershon held on to the pipes, his hands trembling. It was colder here. There was no sound except for a constant dripping, echoing all around them, like fifty faucets leaking tiny putrid splashes onto the concrete floor.

“Maybe they don't know where we went,” Gershon said, his voice echoing in the cramped space.

“Maybe,” McCall said. “Let me look at this.”

He took off Gershon's leather jacket. Pulled up his sleeve. He had to unbutton and pull his shirt off his left shoulder to get to the wound on the upper part of his arm. It was still pumping blood. McCall jammed his handkerchief over the wound, then took the belt off Gershon's jacket and tied a tourniquet around his arm above the wound.

“I thought the tunnels beneath the city carried the sewage away to big treatment plants,” Gershon said.

“Lots of them do. That'll stop the blood loss until we can get you to a doctor.”

McCall put back on the shirt, buttoned it, and slid back on the leather jacket.

“Doesn't look bad,” Gershon said, but his voice was fainter.

“It wouldn't be if we were anywhere near an ER and not down in the bowels of the city.”

McCall took Gershon's weight again and they walked quickly down the narrow tunnel, one side of it covered with gray pipes, the other a brick wall where the pipes were only at the bottom. This tunnel was dissected by four more. McCall stopped, as if trying to get his bearings. He guided them down another secondary tunnel.

There was a faint, throbbing sound.

The walls of the tunnel vibrated.

“Subway train,” McCall said.

“Great,” Gershon muttered.

The train was in a tunnel close to them. The sound and the vibration grew in intensity. The subway train thundered by, unseen, then the noise diminished and the vibration ceased.

McCall led the way through overlapping shadows farther down the steam tunnel and came to an iron door set into the wall. It was half ajar. He laid Gershon against the pipes. He staggered a little. His face was streaming perspiration. His eyes closed.

“Stay with me, Danil!”

Gershon nodded. Opened his eyes. McCall hauled on the iron door. It opened a few inches. Just wide enough for one of them to squeeze through. McCall shoved Gershon through the narrow opening. He waited for one long moment, listening in the semidarkness. Still no sound of pursuit. But that didn't mean some of the killers hadn't descended the iron ladder and were walking the tunnels.

They were trained to be quiet.

McCall wedged himself through the narrow doorway.

He stepped out into an unused subway tunnel. Water trickled obscenely down the clammy walls. The air was thick with cold.

“This where the subway train came through?” Gershon asked.

“No, that was farther away. This tunnel has been abandoned for years. But be careful of the live rail. And if you feel the vibration of an oncoming train, step into one of the niches.”

“You said it was abandoned.”

“It is, but service trains still come through it and unscheduled locals.”

Halogen lights were placed in the tunnel wall across from them at intervals, most of them blown out, but an occasional light burned, throwing phosphorescent radiance across the glowing tracks. McCall and Gershon walked down the center of the tunnel.

“You look as if you're lost,” Gershon said, his voice still shaky with pain.

“I haven't gone down below the streets from that location.”

“You go down
into
these tunnels?” Gershon asked incredulously.

“Alice down the rabbit hole,” McCall said. “It's seductive to come down here. Leave behind the upworld with its hatred and violence and noise. I like the serenity of walking the tunnels.”

“How about the stagnant water and the filth and the stench?”

“There is that. Part of the experience.”

“You've lost it, McCall.”

“Kostmayer said the same thing.”

McCall gripped Gershon's arm and indicated a door set back in a niche. A red light glowed over it. They climbed up onto a very narrow platform and McCall dragged the iron door open.

They stepped into a vault with rusting steel girders holding up a low ceiling. There was more debris strewn across the concrete floor, pieces of steel, split wooden timbers, fragments of plaster. The only light came through the ajar iron door leading out into the abandoned subway tunnel. In the echoing vault paintings glowed on a brick wall—one of a child holding her mother's hand as they walked through a field of daisies. The little girl's hair was golden and the daisies were yellow; the rest was all in charcoal. It was somehow stunning. Next to that mural was a golden bridge spanning from nowhere to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, also in charcoal, the bridge itself the only glowing color.

“What bridge is that?” Gershon asked.

A sepulchral voice said: “Williamsburg Bridge. Not sure who painted it, but I'm told it's accurate.”

McCall whirled. Gershon stumbled back. From out of the milky darkness a figure emerged. He was African American, dressed in black jeans, a black NYU torn T-shirt, heavy brown workmen's boots. His face was like a skeleton's over which the skin had been stretched too tight. His eyes were black holes in the gloom. His hair was the same color as the charcoal on the brick wall, cropped close to his skull. He was probably in his sixties, but he could have been in his seventies, or even his eighties—he was timeless. If this underworld was ever made into a movie, McCall thought Morgan Freeman was the only actor who could play him. The old skeletal face split into a wide grin.

“Mr. McCall! You don't usually come down into the tunnels this way!”

“An impromptu visit. Danil, this is Jackson T. Foozelman.”

“My friends call me Fooz,” the old man said. He pointed at the mural of the little girl and her mother in the field of daisies. “Old Jacob painted that one. Took him better than six months. He just needed a few more brushstrokes down in the right-hand corner. See there? That shape is supposed to be a dog followin' the mother and daughter. Golden retriever, he said it would be. Then one morning Jacob went topside. Wanted to walk in Central Park. Can you imagine that? He hadn't been in the upworld for years. Don't know what got into him. He never came back. Never had the chance to finish that golden retriever. I heard he'd been hit by a taxicab crossing Central Park West. I wanted to finish his mural for him, put in the pooch, but I can't draw for shit. Damn shame.” He shook his head. “Dangerous in the upworld.” Then he said it again: “Damn shame.” He looked at Danil's face in the dimness, frowned, and reached out a bony hand. His long fingers, like claws, pulled Gershon's coat back from his arm. “What's happened here? Your friend's been bleedin' pretty bad, Mr. McCall.”

“He was shot,” McCall said.

Fooz shook his head, sighing, as if that's what you get for living up in the city.

“Have you got a doctor in the tunnels?” McCall asked.

“Sure we do. Dr. Bennett. But he's over with the Mole People seeing to a little girl who's runnin' a high fever. They live off the Amtrak tunnel below Riverside Drive.”

“Can you get word to him?”

“Sure can. Your friend needs somewhere to rest till the Doc can get here. My place is kinda rough right now. Got flooded two nights ago when we had all that rain topside? Take him to Candy Annie's. You know how to get there.”

“Not from here,” McCall said.

Fooz took an old Filofax book and a pencil out of his back pocket and scrawled a series of passageways on a Filofax page. “We're here,” he pointed out. “Other side of this old subway station is a storm tunnel. Take it to here … then cross to the viaduct here … then you gotta go down the stairs here. Hope they ain't flooded. Once you get into the passageway here, you'll know your way, Mr. McCall.”

“Some very bad guys may have come down into the tunnels after us,” McCall said. “From the Forty-second Street manhole entrance.”

“Sure, I know it. They'll get lost plenty fast.”

“They're armed. Don't go near them. But come and find me and let me know if they're down here.”

“Sure will, Mr. McCall. You get to Candy Annie's. I'll get word to the Doc.”

He melted back into the shadows and was gone.

McCall put his arm around Gershon's shoulders and they walked across the echoing space of the one-time subway station. Gershon shook his head. His words were compressed with pain.

“So there's a whole subculture living below the streets of New York City?”

“For a lot of years. They call themselves ‘Subs,' Subterranean Dwellers.”

“How many are there?”

“I've only met a few of them. Probably over a hundred.”

“How do they survive?”

“How do any of us? They do what they have to do.”

“How do they eat?”

“They have ‘runners.' They go up into the city for supplies every few days.”

“What do they use for money?”

“They panhandle on the streets. They do construction work for a day. They don't steal. Some people bring them down supplies.”

“Like you.”

It was a statement. Gershon started to cough. He spit up blood.

“Don't talk. Save your strength.”

They reached another iron door, almost rusted shut. McCall hauled on it and they walked through into a circular sewer tunnel. This time the water was almost up to their knees. It stank. They sloshed through it, a light from far down the tunnel casting an oblique radiance across the black water. McCall was virtually carrying Gershon now. He was going in and out of consciousness.

McCall followed the crude map on the back of the Filofax page. He climbed down a set of crumbling marble stairs into total darkness. He had to feel his way, one tentative step at a time, holding on to an iron railing with one hand and Gershon with the other. They made it to the next level down. It was bitterly cold. A wind blew from somewhere, keening through the eerie semidarkness. They were in a circular brick subway tunnel. Lights hung down at intervals, some of them out, some with such low wattage it was hard to see beyond the pools of wan radiance.

They walked down the tunnel for at least a mile until it widened out considerably. They came to a series of dank passageways that were better lit. They were filled with more rusting pipes, but also with a lot of big nooks and crannies.

People were living in them.

McCall noted a dwelling made out of old storm doors. Through an open doorway he saw a woman in her sixties, sitting in a rocking chair, gently rocking back and forth, reading a book. Stephen King's great time travel opus about saving JFK. There was a warm lamp on a table beside her. There was furniture around her that was not broken or discarded. Not quite off the Ikea floor, but in pretty good shape. She looked up, startled at the sound of their progress. Stared at them. Maybe she'd never seen anyone but Subterranean Dwellers in her domain. McCall and Gershon were clearly from the upworld. McCall couldn't tell if there was fear or amusement in her eyes. Then they were past her entranceway and she was a memory.

McCall climbed up some metal stairs to a half-level above. Here there were three more dwellings, made out of sheets of plywood, concrete blocks, some metal sheeting that was dark with rust. In one of them an older couple were sitting at a table drinking Starbucks coffee out of plastic cups. One of them must have made a run up to the city. There were pictures nailed onto the plywood walls around them and an old bookshelf jammed with books. They looked like they'd been taken from a library.

Probably overdue,
McCall thought.

In the second structure a young man with wild, curly hair, dressed in Army camouflage fatigues, was sitting in an old broken armchair smoking a cigarette. He never moved as they walked past. It was as if they weren't there, or he wasn't there.