The Skeleton's Knee (34 page)

It took me a couple of seconds to recover, to check that I was still all in one piece. I had nicks and cuts across both hands, and I assumed on my face, but both eyes were free of glass, and I could feel no pain. My major problem was simply breathing against the direct onslaught of wind and rain.

I twisted in my seat, trying to move the street sign out of the way enough so I could get a clear look at Norm. He lay slouched against the far door, his mouth open and gasping, his hands feebly moving about, as if groping in the dark. Blood covered the entire right side of his face and ran down his shirt collar.

He blinked at me a couple of times, his eyes refocusing. “Holy shit. I thought he’d shot us.”

“How are you?” I shouted over the noise. “You’re covered with blood.”

He touched his head then and looked at his red-tinged fingers, almost instantly cleansed by the rain. “It doesn’t feel too bad.” He felt again, less gingerly. “It’s just a cut.”

I could see better now, having shoved the sign back out the window. Norm had a good six-inch laceration to his scalp, cut down to the bone.

But he was back to watching the street. “I can see him. He’s headed for the El. Christ, he didn’t even notice us.”

I followed his stare and saw the man we’d been following slowly working his way up the stairs leading to the platform above, locked in his own capsule of rain, wind, and noise. He was just over a block away.

“Go for him,” Norm shouted at me. “He’ll get away.”

“You need help.”

“I can radio for it, and I’ll get troops for the stations down the line, but you got to go after him.”

“You don’t know how badly you’re hurt.”

He grabbed the rag he’d used earlier on the windshield and pushed it against the slice in his head. “There—that’s as much as you could do. Now go after Shattuck.”

I threw my weight against my door to get out, then began to run as fast I could for the station, bent double, slipping and falling constantly, peeling off my coat to cut down on wind resistance, and finally reaching the stairs, gasping for air. As I stumbled up the steps, I heard the deep rumble of a train pulling in.

I leaped over the turnstile, ignoring a startled, distant shout, and half fell into the last car, just as the doors were closing. It was empty. I paused briefly to get my bearings and began heading for the front. I didn’t know which car Shattuck had boarded, but I knew he was ahead somewhere and that it would be a miracle if he still hadn’t noticed I was after him.

The far door opened without problem, as did the entrance to the next car, which was also empty. I had my gun out and kept ducking down every once in a while to look under the seats, checking for someone waiting in ambush. I was moving as quickly as possible, almost at a run, hoping to beat the train to the next station. I knew that wherever Shattuck was, he couldn’t leave the train until it stopped moving.

I found him in the next car. Thinking it as empty as its predecessor, I pulled the door open just as the train went from above ground to below with a burst of roaring, screaming noise. The change was so sudden, so unexpected, that I instinctively dropped to the floor. Shattuck’s first shot smacked into the wall high above my head.

I could see his feet, far at the other end, and fired twice. He shot back as I rolled between two seats, and then he retreated to the next car.

I paused, replaced my spent shells with two of the six extra bullets I always kept in my jacket pocket, and quickly worked my way up to the far door.

Any doubts about the identity of my quarry were gone now. I’d seen him clearly in that brief moment—the same face and eyes that had smiled at me in the glow of a single candle so long ago. But just as I was sure it was Bob Shattuck, I was also quite sure I had no strategy to bring him under control. I was now in a simple running gunfight, which I could safely abandon now or risk seeing through to the finish.

Considering what I’d done to get this far, however, the debate barely flickered in my brain. I opened the door and stepped out between the cars, knowing he’d be waiting for me inside the next car.

I backed as far as I could into the gap between the cars, turned the door handle with my free hand, and kicked the door open with my foot; staying clear of the opening. As I did so, the train slowed and banked into a curve to the protesting shriek of all its wheels, throwing me off balance.

But no bullet came sailing through the open door.

Fighting the centrifugal force of the train, I pulled myself to the opening and peered inside. Far ahead, on the right side, Bob Shattuck was halfway out one of the broad windows. Outside, dimly lit, I could see in that split second that we were gliding nonstop through a darkened, closed station.

Then Shattuck fired again, sending me ducking back for cover.

When I looked out a second time, he was gone.

I quickly stepped into the car, saw the “North & Clybourn” station signs drifting past as the train finished grinding out of the curve before picking up speed once more. The dark, distant curved tile walls of the station slid by, quite slowly now, or so I thought.

As if by some act of unconscious will, everything seemed to begin moving slowly. In the passing split seconds, my gun hand came up and squeezed off three rounds at the window opposite me, reducing it to a blanched crazy quilt of cracked glass.

Without thought or apprehension, instinct having totally snuffed out common sense, I leapt off one of the benches, curled into a ball with my arms wrapped around my head, and crashed through the weakened glass window onto the platform beyond.

THE LANDING WAS BRUTAL
—and not in slow motion. It was a chaotic, painful jumble of hurt and terror, compounded by the sick last-second realization of just how big an idiot I’d been to try it. My head stayed well protected, with my arms locked tightly in place, but the rest of me took a high toll in bruises, twists, abrasions, and cuts. I rolled, tumbled, crashed, and finally came to a stop spread-eagled on my face, surrounded by broken safety glass, too stunned and racked by pain to move.

The raucous noise of the train was quickly sucked into the far end of the tunnel, and I was left on the platform, wet, bleeding, stunned, and alone. I was only about five feet shy of the station’s far wall.

I rolled painfully onto my side and surveyed my surroundings. I was resting on the platform of a large tile-covered vaulted room with two tracks, a platform on either side, and a single concrete wall running lengthwise down the middle, holding up the ceiling. The wall had openings in it every twelve feet or so—three-foot gaps that allowed me to see the station’s northbound side. The whole place was dark and quiet, lit only by exit lights and a few odd bare bulbs.

Shattuck was nowhere to be seen, which was just as well for me. Had he been here, waiting, I now recognized ruefully, it would have been a simple matter to put an executioner’s bullet through my head.

I carefully straightened to a sitting position. The fact that he was not here either meant he was lying dead on the tracks out of sight or he’d assumed no sane man would jump out of the train after him.

I got to my feet gingerly, half-surprised to find my gun still clenched in my bloody fist, and moved quietly on the balls of my feet toward the north end of the station. I kept my eyes on the three-foot gaps in the wall next to the tracks, watching the narrow views they afforded of the platform parallel to mine.

Shattuck had known this station was coming up, he’d known the train wouldn’t stop, and he’d seemed quite comfortable straddling that window—as if he’d done it before. Also, he wasn’t in the station—I was sure of that by now. It all suggested the possibility that he’d had this place in mind from the start.

I continued softly to the end of the platform and stood just by the wall, out of sight from the dark, dank-smelling tunnel, listening.

There was a less appealing explanation, of course, albeit a little farfetched: Shattuck had poised himself on the window ledge, taken a shot at me to make me duck, and then had dropped to the floor of the car and let me assume he’d jumped, hoping I’d oblige him by following suit.

A single small sound, as of someone stumbling in the dark, settled the issue for me. I slipped quietly off the edge of the platform and began walking as quickly and silently as possible away from the station, painfully aware that its lights, as feeble as they were, still made it easy for others to see me.

Now inside the tunnel, where each sound reverberated off the cement walls, I could plainly hear someone walking ahead of me—which meant the reverse would hold true if I wasn’t careful. I discovered the only way I could avoid crunching the gravel rail bed underfoot was to straddle the outermost rail and step cautiously from cross tie to cross tie.

The concentration this took, however, especially in my present battered state, made me inattentive to the slow and gradual approach of another southbound train, just beginning to hit the outer reaches of the long curve that led into the station. By the time I looked up, aware of the growing noise and searching out a hiding spot among the indentations in the wall, I suddenly realized I was visible in the subway’s single bright headlamp, as was the distant figure of Robert Shattuck, ahead and away on the other side of the tracks.

I jumped away from the rails, no longer worried about any sound I might make, but as I did, Shattuck turned toward me, as if drawn by my own panic. I saw the shock register on his distant face, and finally, just as the train was about to come between us, his gun flew up and spat a flame in my direction, its explosion muffled by the screaming of the subway’s wheels. A chunk of cement splattered to the left of me as I ducked into an alcove and the train blew by in a deafening, shrieking roar.

I readied my own weapon, steadying my arm against the edge of the shallow alcove, and was sighting where Shattuck had last been when the train pulled clear. But the tracks were empty.

I stayed where I was, straining to regain my night vision, trying to hear anything at all over the receding rumble of the cars. What I heard, or thought I heard, was the rhythmic pounding of feet running away from me.

I separated from my shelter and began jogging along the track, bent low, moving as fast as I could, no longer worrying about the crunch of gravel. Coming abreast of where I’d seen Shattuck, I slowed, crossed the tracks quietly, and began tracing his steps north. Both the noise of the train and the sound of Shattuck’s footfalls had vanished. Sweat began to trickle down my sides.

I came to an opening in the curved wall—a small secondary tunnel with a cement floor—obviously the source of the running sounds I’d heard earlier. It went straight for some one hundred feet and then turned out of sight to the left. A single anemic light was suspended from the domed eight-foot ceiling. The walls were smooth and bare, free of any hiding places—a shooting gallery custom-made for an ambush.

I opened the cylinder of my revolver, extracted the three spent shells, and replaced them with the extras from my pocket, leaving me one in reserve.

In a calmer, more rational setting, logic and caution would have dictated the obvious course to take. By all rights, I should have stayed there, bottling up the exit, waiting for Norm’s backup to arrive, which they were bound to do once they found the train with the shattered window and the debris I’d left behind on the platform. But if, as I suspected, this tunnel was merely the front door to a hideaway that Shattuck had harbored for some time, then it undoubtedly had a back door. That didn’t leave me much of an alternative, at least not a sane one.

Sanity, of course, is in the mind of the beholder, and what I was beginning to formulate didn’t seem too far off-the-wall. The tunnel’s blandness, as I saw it, cut two ways. It did expose me to fire, but it also allowed an ambush from a single spot only—the distant inside curve to the left. It was the only cover available, and was as easily assailable by me as I was from it.

I wiped my hand on my pants, took a firm grip on my gun, and bolted from my hiding place, running as fast as I could in a zigzag pattern directly toward the curve in the tunnel. I was startled to hear, echoing all around me and mixing with the pounding of my feet, the sound of my own voice shouting.

About halfway there, I saw a flash of movement from the inside corner, a glimmer of something metallic. I fired, still running for all I was worth, my aches and pains temporarily replaced by a frantic, pounding euphoria.

The gamble paid off. The glimpse of face and arm I’d shot at vanished, and I poured on more speed for the remaining fifty feet.

At the corner, I paused, poked my head around quickly, and saw a large dark room filled with ventilation machinery and odd pieces of track-repair equipment—squat, ugly, gloomily vague. At the far side was another entrance, animated ever so briefly by the blur of a pale shadow disappearing. I ran through the equipment room, almost without pause, risking exposure so I could keep up the pressure.

That was a mistake. The adrenaline that had served me well during the hundred-foot dash of moments earlier now made me careless. I entered the far exit too fast, sliding past the corner that might have given me protection, and was met by the eruption of a point-blank muzzle flash. Momentarily blinded, deafened, and feeling the sear of burning gunpowder along the right side of my head, I plunged on, hoping pure physical momentum might stifle a second, more accurate shot.

I crashed headlong into Bob Shattuck’s chest, sending him staggering backward. His gun, with which he tried to fracture my skull in a crossward blow, almost missed, its front sight slicing a furrow over both my eyes. It was bad enough, however, to send me reeling to the floor, dazed, my eyesight clouded by my own blood. I fired two shots in his direction, hoping to get lucky. There was a startled shout, a wild shot in return that whacked into the floor harmlessly, and the clang of a heavy metal door.

I lay there panting for a full minute, my gun arm still outstretched, my eyes half-blinking away the warm oozing from the gash just above them.