The motel was mob infested dive. I came in from the cold and the dark and almost welcomed its chintzy, warm decor. Outside, the city was a cruel monster with a frozen heart. I warmed my hands with my breath before surreptitiously moving to my usual pay phone. No one lingered in the drab lobby, not even the clerk who was probably in the back room with some hooker.
Since transferring and going undercover I’d slowly worked my way from small-time to the big fish, trying to get to Medusa’s head—the source of the Valkyr drug. I’d gone deep, Alex and his partner B.B. my only contacts in the DEA, the only ones in this decrepit city who knew I was down here among the roaches and dirty needles.
The pay phone rang. I picked it up on the second ring.
“V for victory,” I whispered.
“Maxey, B.B. here. Listen, something urgent has come up with Lupino. You need to meet with Alex, immediately.”
“Where?” I didn’t like the fear in B.B.’s voice.
“Roscoe Street Station, thirty minutes.”
I hadn’t had a face-to-face with Alex since going undercover. My mind raced. What had happened with Lupino urgent enough to risk blowing my cover?
“I’ll be there.” The line went dead.
Back outside the mercury was falling fast. It was colder than the Devil’s heart, raining iced pitchforks as if the heavens were ready to fall. I pulled my coat about my neck, buried my hands deep into the pockets. Everyone was running for shelter, like there was no tomorrow. The atmosphere didn’t get any better when I reached the subway.
The feeling hit me like a point-blank shot straight in the face. Something was wrong with this scene. People were moving quickly, trying to stay warm, trying to keep ahead of the storm. My Beretta stirred nervously under my coat, but it was too late. The train doors rumbled shut behind me, and I was in for the ride. Next stop, Roscoe Street Station.
And Alex.
#
I reached Roscoe without any delay. No one but me wanted off at the station. I pushed passed a half dozen weary commuters, stepped onto the platform. The station was drenched in gloom and Alex was a ghost nowhere to be seen. I had thought he would meet me at the platform. I checked my watch, looked around. No one. The train rumbled away.
“Alex?”
My voice bounced around the empty station as if it were a tomb. A few steps toward the exit and I froze. The gates to the surface streets had been rolled across the walkway. I rushed up the steps. The locks were engaged.
“Alex?”
Nothing. What was going on here? If the station had been closed due to the storm the train wouldn’t have stopped. There’d be some kind of warning, or alert...
I looked around. At the other end of the platform was a blue door marked Maintenance. It was ajar. Maybe there was a janitorial crew on duty here and they would let me out. I jogged over, rubbing my icy hands together for warmth.
“Hey, anyone home? I got locked in down here and...”
A trail of rust lead to the door. The smell hit me like a gun shot. I pushed the door open with my foot and followed the blood with my eyes. A uniformed man lay in a deeper pool of the red stuff, face down. His uniform read Transit Police.
I pushed into the maintenance closet, letting the door close behind me. The smell was stronger now. Death was in the air at Roscoe Street.
I knelt by the transit cop, feeling for a pulse, knowing I would come up empty. Stone cold. He was a big man, but I managed to lift his body to reveal three neat bullet holes in his chest. Professional. I would have to find Alex and fast.
My head snapped up. Voices were coming from the station. I crept to the door, which hadn’t closed all the way, and tugged it open.
Two men now stood at the platform, guns in hand. The sheer brazen display of firepower another indicator of a professional operation.
“I swore I heard something—wasn’t Jake supposed to take care of this?” one of the men said, a tight beanie wrapped around his skull. He was marching in place and rubbing his hands together.
“Nah,” the other man said slowly, cigarette dangling from his lip. “He and Mickey’re having too much fun taking care of the cop up there. It’s gonna be a slaughterhouse by the time they’re done.”
“Great,” the beanie-head man said. “Who gets to clean that up?”
“Hell if I care,” the other spat. “As long as they do their damn job they can crucify the son-of-a-bitch.” He flicked his cigarette into the subway tracks.
“Damn, it’s cold,” the beanie-head said, following the cigarette’s blazing trail. “W-w-what’s the friggin plan, anyway?”
The other laughed. “Simple, gun down every mother-loving bastard that gets off the train.”
“Sweet. But didn’t the train go already?”
“No idea, let’s just wait and see.”
As usual my timing was impeccable. I’d walked in on some big time crime operation with nothing but a smile and my service piece. And from my vantage point these guys were packing serious hardware. I could only guess what the boys upstairs had in store.
Still peering from the maintenance closet I noticed the thugs had unlocked the subway gate to the surface levels. Well, that was something.
I backed from the door, letting it close. This couldn’t have been what B.B. wanted me to meet Alex for.
Alex?
Had he gotten caught up in this late night drama?
The distant metal-on-metal scream of an inbound train brought me back to the two hired guns blocking my escape. My only chance would be to take them by surprise, slip by as the train roared through the station. If the train was bound for Roscoe Street the thugs had promised to deliver Murder One in spades. My cold hand slipped into the holster under my leather jacket As I thought about the imminent carnage. Three years ago I would have called for back up, no risks. But that was then, and tonight was going down hard.
With any luck, so was the Valkyr case.
The train was screeching her approach, seconds away. Onboard, the packed carts were cattle trucks bound for slaughter. I cracked the door one last time—the noise masked by the squeals of rapid transit—and slipped from the maintenance closet.
“Here they come!” the beanie-headed murderer cried. The other said nothing but leveled a gun by his hip.
I sprinted and slipped behind a bench, crouching next to a tiled pillar. The two were close to the platform’s edge, beyond the yellow warning line. My gun went to beanie-head first.
Crunch!
I’d gotten too close to the trash can, the sound of leather and rubber sole crushing a soda can broke through the crescendo of the arriving train. There was no time to hide. Beanie-head was already spinning, gun drawn.
“What the Hell...?”
I still had the advantage. Two shots from the Beretta sent the skinny man spinning into his compadre, who was in the act of his own ungraceful pirouette. The beanie-head caught the other’s gun arm, knocking him backwards hard enough to send them both over the edge of the platform...
I turned away. The train had not been bound for Roscoe Street. Instead it hurtled by at full speed, where, upon reaching the next available station, the traumatized driver would report a horrific accident. The parts would be collected from here to Brighton Beach. The commuters, though inconvenienced on one of the coldest evenings of the year, were still be alive to file complaints to the MTA.
No time to lose—Alex could be anywhere in the station. In the gloom, something caught my eye—the cold glint of a Desert Eagle. One of Punchinello’s thugs had dropped it before catching his last train. I took the weapon, ejected the clip. Full mag. I slapped the clip back in place. At least now I had some backup.
The security gate stairs led up to a grimy tiled passageway decorated with peeling plastered posters and colorful graffiti. Several of the tags were all too familiar: hastily sprayed V-shapes, mile-markers on the road to Hell.
Half the lights were either broken or stuttering, casting uneasy shadows from trash and debris. A biting draft seemed to push me forward, wrapping around my legs, grasping at my hair, making the ragged bills flutter uneasily against the walls, as if trying to break free and flee this place of death.
I skidded to a halt before a T-junction, alerted by a noise. Around the next corner someone was half whispering, half yelling.
“Yo, guys, lemme in... Yo, guys? Hey! Quit kidding around, you hear me? What is this, a joke? Hey! Anybody! Answer me!”
Without risking having my head blown off it was impossible to tell where the impatient mobster was located. It sounded as if he was rattling another security gate. Maybe he was stuck on this side of the gate, maybe not. It didn’t matter, there was no way I was going to get past the junction and continue on without being seen. If I stayed low to the ground, however, there was a possibility of taking him by surprise...
BOOM!
Grout and tile rained down around my ears, forcing me to duck and cover. The reverberations traveled up my feet to my spine and for a terrible second I thought the ceiling was going to become my tomb.
The lights dimmed—those that still worked—then returned to normal. A few moments later I risked getting to my feet, brushing the dust and debris from my shoulders and hair.
Either someone was dropping bombs on New York, or the thugs upstairs were remodeling the station. Whatever the case I was no closer to finding Alex.
The raspy voice cried out again, no longer a whisper but a shrill report. “Forget this! Screw you guys!”
The echo of his footsteps grew fainter. The mobster made good on his word, giving up on the two men I’d help catch a train. After a moment, back pressed against the wall, I risked a look around the corner. Nothing, except another security gate to a closed section of the station. I continued past it, hoping my mobster encounters were over.
Naturally, I was wrong.
I hurried, feeling not for the first time that evening that time was not on my side. I couldn’t help but wonder what these guys would do if they found Alex before I did. I pushed the thought from my mind, buried it deep.
I hopped over a fallen trash can, Beretta in hand, feeling like a comic book cop or a hard boiled dick in some cheesy noir. Despite Hollywood, this wasn’t the way normal police work was done. Then again, this situation was well beyond the scope of normal police work. The dead transit cop had been testament to that. These guys were bold, well funded, organized—Punchinello’s men.
I descended some steps and found another platform. This one looked like a service line.
More voices, a dozen or so feet ahead. I slipped behind a pillar, back pressed to the cold tile. I held my breath, hands clasped around the gun, teeth clenched. I tasted blood.
“Hey, what was that?” a man squeaked, all nasal.
I listened from my hiding place, trying to piece together the scene. How many; were they armed; location...
“It’s nothin, relax.”
“Don’t tell me to relax!” the nasal-voice said. “We got half the freakin NYPD coming down on us any minute.”
“Yo, take it easy. It’s a cinch. We got the whole goddamed place on lockdown. Nobody’s gettin in or out.”
Two men, no doubt armed. Why they had the station on ice was a mystery to me. Unless the mobsters were making moves into the rapid transport business. This broken narrative was making little or no sense. Whatever else was happening at Roscoe, for Alex I had ended up in the middle of a big-time crime operation.
“Okay, okay,” one of the men said, not the nasal-voiced one. I realized he was talking on a cell phone, the other half of the conversation lost to me. “Yo, you still there? Boss? Goddamn cell phones.”
“What was that about, Frank?” the other squeaked.
“The boss. No witnesses.” Frank’s voice seemed to fade. I realized he was moving away. Within moments he was back, but now there was a third voice, a whimpering voice.
“Shall we?” Frank mumbled.
“Come on, let’s just do him here!”
There was a sound like tape being peeled back, and then the third man found his voice. “P-p-please, no don’t!”
The sound of a gun being cocked.
“Kiss it goodbye!” the nasal voiced man cried.
Powerless. That’s what I’d been the night my wife and baby daughter had been taken from me. Murdered. Powerless to save them from the cruelty of this fallen world, despite my best intentions.
Something hot began squirming in my brain, the faces of my dead loved ones were acid-stamped visages in my mind’s eye. The anger I’d been channeling into my DEA role as brass balls undercover work mutated into a new type of rage: a cold, calculated machine programed for vengeance. It was a numbers game, that was all. How long I could hold on was anyone’s guess.
I jumped out from behind the pillar, barrel rolled twice, arms outstretched before me with Justice in hand. Bad police work, but I wasn’t going to let another innocent to die tonight.
Two men, another on his knees. A transit cop, blue uniform covered in dirt and blood. The nasal-voiced man was staring down the sights of his weapon, which was pressed agains’t the transit cop’s forehead. They didn’t even react to my presence.
Einstein had said everything was relative to the observer. Seconds were passing in ever expanding increments, until a minute became an hour, a day a lifetime...
My bullets found their targets. I had time to study the mobsters’ faces: their reaction to seeing me, all wide eyed and unbelieving. Then surprise turned to cold anger, then more surprise as the nine-millimeter rounds tore through leather jackets and flesh.
Then reality returned to real-time. The bodies hit the dirty tile like dropped rag dolls in fast forward. For a moment everything seemed too fast.
“W-who are you?”
I glanced at the transit cop, who was cowering on his knees, hands still above his head. A gear in my brain locked back into place, and I began to think again. “What’s going on here?”
The transit cop lowered his arms. “A massacre... These armed thugs just appeared out of nowhere. We need to get help. I can make the call from the control room, one floor up. Can you take me there? Cell phones aren’t worth a damn down here.”
I was busy fingering the bodies for clips. “Sure, sounds good. Follow me.”
The uniformed man did as he was told, without question or hesitation. I reloaded the Beretta and continued through the door the mobsters had brought the transit cop through. “Up here?”
“Yeah, yeah, straight up these steps!” His uniform was soaked with sweat. I didn’t see a wedding ring on his finger. I wondered what his plans had been for the evening, before this.
I nodded, steeling myself for what lay above. “What about the service cart,” I said, nodding at the yellow car on the rails. “Can we use it? Where does it go?”
“No power, but I can juice it from the control room. It’ll take us to the supply line, then on out to the materials depot.”
Plan B if Alex remained a ghost. “Okay, let’s go.”
We double timed it up the stairs, hugging the piss-yellow tile like frightened rats. I couldn’t hear any more voices, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more bad guys.
We were halfway up when the transit cop broke the silence with a nervous whisper. “H-how’d ya move like that?”
“What?” I asked, keeping my eyes forward and up.
“Back there... Damn, you took both those guys out before they got a chance to...”
“Shhh!” I pointed ahead to a pair of double doors, at the crest of the steps. “That it?”
The transit cop nodded, eyes wide and face damp. “The red light means it’s locked. I’ve got the key code.”
I reached the top step and poked my head around the corner to the adjacent corridor. It was in darkness, another security gate blocking the way. I saw no one and nodded.
The transit cop nodded back, emboldened by my presence. I watched as he scaled the steps to the control room and entered his magic number.
He turned back to me as the doors swished open. “Home free, come on, this way...”
My gun was already sighted on the first mobster’s face, which disappeared behind a red mist as I squeezed the trigger. Another man tumbled out from the control room cradling a twelve-gauge. I fired two rounds into his chest, then one into his head. Professional.
“Oh no, oh damn, oh Jesus help me!”
My eyes focused. The transit cop was down. Blood was pooling on his uniform, turning the material a deep shade of purple.
I was at his side in an instant, looping my arms around his shoulders and dragging him through the doors. They hissed shut behind us.
The transit cop cried out in pain.
“It’s okay,” I said. I continued to drag the man’s body to the control panels. “You’re hit in the shoulder, apply pressure there.”
The cop did as I said, no questions, no hesitation.
“G-g-gimme the p-phone!” he said. “I’ll m-m-make the call.”
I did just that, dropping the old fashioned rotary into his lap. “I need to get the power up on that service line. It’s our way out of here.”
“B-back room,” the transit cop sputtered, shaking fingers trying to dial a number.
I moved quickly, ignoring the bodies of other fallen transit police and technicians. The control room was a morgue. Pretty soon the whole station would be, too.
The back room door was marked GRID followed by a series of numbers and letters. I pushed through, finding more bodies. The small room was banked with CCTV displays of each platform line in the station. Most of them were dark.
A quick inspection of a large breaker board told me that the mobsters had done their homework. The breakers for most of the lines had been thrown. I reactivated the one for the service line and ran back to the control room.
The transit cop lay slumped over the phone. Gone. The last number he had ever dialed was marked with bloody fingerprints. The phone line was dead. I wanted to laugh. Of course it was dead. Why would the mobsters leave the lines up? But at least the power was back, and the service line would take me out of this gangster’s paradise.
Alex?
I had no choice, there was no other way out of the station, not now. Before my brain could hesitate my feet took me out of the control room and back down the stairs to the service line. The waiting car lit up like a Christmas tree. A single engine with no other rolling stock attached. It looked abandoned. I clambered aboard the battered yellow cart and hit a lever. Power surged through the steel frame as it began to groan forward.
Finally my brain caught up with my body. I had no idea how to control this thing. I hadn’t taken a second to familiarize myself with the controls. Where was the brake?
Too late. Something slammed against the front window, cracking the glass. Something else smashed through the roof. The headlights illuminated a wooden latticework across the track, dead ahead. A barricade.
It was too late to pull the brakes, even if could find them. I dove to the floor and covered my head as the car hurtled through the blockade.
So much for being subtle.