The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) (19 page)

Chapter 32

November 29, 8:32 p.m.

Thirty-Third Street Subway Station

Joe paused in the darkness next to the edge of the subway platform, studying the people who milled about in the everyday world. Ordinary people, waiting for their train. To them, a trip down into the subway was just a space between their ordinary worlds. They moved through it, not paying attention, intent on their real destination. For him, his whole world now existed in the spaces between.

And right now this interspace was unguarded. That was the essential part. No one was posted at the ends of the platform to watch for him and keep him from getting Edison to safety. Apparently, they’d concentrated their forces around Grand Central. They couldn’t be everywhere.

He breathed in the smell of engine oil, creosote, and urine. And dog. Kneeling, he lowered his bundle carefully to the stone-covered ground, wishing it were softer. “How you doing, old friend?”

His heart caught in his throat as he waited for the dog to respond. Was he still alive? Then, the blanket moved as Edison tried to wag his tail.

Edison opened his eyes and looked at Joe, but didn’t lift his head. He was weak and tired. Joe had to get him help right away.

First, he needed to make sure that the dog could be transported further. Joe eased the dirty blanket from around the dog, lifting him as little as possible. He needed to see the wound. The dim light of the platform verified that the blood that had once run down Edison’s shoulder had dried. He stroked the area around the wound lightly, checking to see if blood had seeped out from beneath the duct tape. Edison’s fur was warm and dry. So, the duct tape was holding—no leaks.

“That’s very good,” he told Edison. “You’re going to be OK.”

Edison’s ears perked up at the sound of his voice, but that was all the movement he had in him.

Joe began to wrap the blanket around the dog’s limp body, thinking as he worked, keeping his motions gentle and slow.

He couldn’t make it up the stairs and into the outside world. He wished that his life were more like a movie—that his love for the dog would let him overcome his handicap, but he knew better. Whatever quirk had settled into his brain chemistry, wishing that it would go away wasn’t going to fix it.

If he tried to go out, he would have a panic attack. Edison would be needlessly upset, and even if people stopped to help Joe, Edison’s needs might get ignored. He had to come up with a strategy that was all about the dog.

During his run through the tunnels, he’d realized that he had to call someone for help. His cell phone was surely monitored by now. The second he turned it on, cops would descend on him. For all he knew, Saddiq would receive his location information, too. Everyone would focus on arresting him, and Edison’s needs would get lost.

He’d have to try a pay phone. Many stations in the system still had pay phones, although he’d read that more than half didn’t work anymore. Maybe he’d get lucky. If not, he’d have to ask a commuter to borrow a cell phone. Maybe that guy would take pity on a man with a wounded dog.

He finished wrapping the dog and picked him up like a baby. Time to go.

In less than a minute, he was up the stairs. He expected someone to yell his name, to come and arrest him, but no one did.

He hurried to the pay phone and gently set Edison next to a metal post painted bright yellow. He tried not to think about how dirty the floor was, how dirty the blanket was. Edison would pull through this. He would.

While he’d run through the tunnels with the wounded dog in his arms, he’d made a list of people who might help him. It was a short list, and made shorter by the fact that the police likely knew most of the people on it—Celeste, Leandro, Vivian Torres. He doubted that any of them had a secure phone line anymore. He could try Mr. Rossi, but didn’t want to waste time being lectured about why running and hiding in the tunnels was too dangerous.

That left his dog walker—Andres Peterson. He always paid the man in cash so there would be no credit card trail to link the two of them. Andres never stayed long enough at the Hyatt to talk to the staff. Celeste was the only link, and she would never tell the cops anything.

He rubbed his palms together to clean off the dried blood, watching the flakes fall to the concrete floor, then picked up the filthy handset, and dropped in a quarter. The phone burred once (cyan), twice (blue), three times (red) before it was answered.

“Andres? It’s Joe Tesla.”

“I came to the Hyatt, Mr. Tesla, but you were not there.” Andres’s tone was frosty. In all the excitement, he’d forgotten to cancel the dog walker. This was not the best day to have alienated him.

“I’m sorry, Andres.” He cut to the most important information. “Edison has been hurt. Badly.”

“The friendly dog? No!”

Joe didn’t have time to explain, and any explanation might make it less likely that Andres would help him. “Can you come to the Thirty-Third Street subway station to pick him up and take him to the veterinarian? It is an emergency. Life or death.”

A crashing sound came through the phone. “I come at once.”

Joe gave him directions on where to meet and told him to hurry before hanging up the black plastic receiver.

“Andres is coming, Edison,” he told the dog as he lifted him again, happy to see his ears move at the sound of Andres’s name. “He’s going to help you.”

Joe wished, again, that he could help the dog himself. That he could trot up those stairs, hail a cab, and save the creature who had given him more than any other, who had never asked for anything beyond basic care in return. Letting down Edison was worse than letting down the rest of the world.

No self-pity.

What he needed to do was find a way to wait in a busy subway station with a wounded dog without drawing attention to himself, even with God knew how many cops searching for him. That was easy.

Becoming invisible was all about the props. He snagged a Starbucks cup from an overflowing garbage can and made for the exit where he had instructed Andres to meet him. People walked by him, heads hunched into their warm coats, ignoring Joe completely.

Once he was as close to the outside as he dared to get, he put the dog on the cold floor. “Just a minute, Edison. I’ll pick you back up in a minute.”

Edison’s brown eyes followed his every move.

Joe slid the backpack off his back and turned it upside down so that no one could see that it was fairly clean and in good shape. Then he sat down. He emptied the last few drops of cold coffee onto the ground and dropped in a couple of quarters. He sat the cup in front of him, picked up the dog and held him carefully in his lap.

Now he wasn’t a millionaire murder suspect on the run. He was far easier to recognize and dismiss—a beggar with a dog. New York City had an army of invisible street people. One more would never be noticed.

People walked by him, eyes averted from the dirty man with the dog wrapped in a blanket. They didn’t want to have to think about him, to weigh whether or not they should give him money, or feel sorry for him or the dog. And that suited him just fine.

What he most wanted to do was sit and hold his dog in peace. He wanted Edison to feel how much he loved him, know how sorry he was, and take strength and hope from his touch. It was a lot, too much, to project onto the dog, but he didn’t care.

“It’s going to be OK,” he promised him in a low, crooning voice. “Andres will get you to a vet. Then you can stay with him for a while, or Celeste.”

Joe pushed the image of Edison’s lifeless body from his mind. Instead, he stroked the dog’s head, his soft ears, and stared into those patient brown eyes. Edison didn’t deserve this. He deserved walks in the park and steak sandwiches and warm evenings by the fire.

“Once I’ve sorted this out, I’ll get you back. I promise.”

He kept up a steady dialogue while petting the dog, trying not to think of anything but the moment. No future. No past.

A figure knelt next to him and Andres’s familiar voice spoke softly. “I’m here.”

“Thank you.” Joe had never felt such gratitude toward anyone. “Thank you.”

“I could not let Mr. Edison down.” Andres petted the dog’s head gently.

Joe pulled all of the money out of his pocket and handed it to Andres. It was more than five hundred dollars. “This should cover the vet bill and the taxi there. If it runs over, Celeste can pay you.”

Andres took only one hundred dollars and handed back the rest. “If it is more, I will ask Celeste. I think you need this more than she.”

What did Andres know? Who had told him?

Apparently reading the questions from his face, Andres said, “I see it in the evening paper. You are on the front page. Now I know why you did not call me before.”

He would look into that later. “There is an emergency vet—”

“I know all this,” Andres said. “I researched on my phone on the way. They will take good care of this good dog. Make him jumping for a ball like a puppy.”

Edison’s tail moved once (cyan) at the word ball.

Joe smiled down at him. He hoped that Andres was right and that he and Edison had many long games of fetch in the tunnels ahead of them, that the dog would sit stretched out by his feet soaking up the warmth of hundreds more fires, that he would gulp down bits of Joe’s sandwiches for years to come. He couldn’t bear to think of the alternative.

Andres stripped off his long coat. “Take this.”

“I couldn’t,” Joe said. “I don’t know when—”

“You can give it back later,” Andres said. “But my mother would scold me if I sent you away with no coat and no blanket.”

He folded the coat lengthwise and placed it on the floor. Joe didn’t want to argue anymore, so he left it there.

Joe eased his arms under the blanket and put Edison into Andres’s outstretched arms, wondering if he would ever hold the dog’s warm body again.

Andres shifted Edison closer to his chest, and the dog whimpered in pain. It cut Joe’s heart to hear it.

Andres, too, looked grave. “I go now. My cab is waiting on the street. Good luck.”

“Good luck to you.” Joe bent down and kissed the top of Edison’s mu
zzle. “And to you, Yellow Dog.”

Chapter 33

November 29, 9:04 p.m.

Thirty-Third Street Subway Station

Joe watched Andres and Edison until they disappeared up the stairs and into the light. He imagined them crossing under the streetlight, passing people hurrying to get out of the cold, getting into the cab, closing the door, and riding away.

His imagination didn’t dare go further than that.

Instead, he shrugged into Andres’s warm coat and headed back for the anonymity of the underground. Shivering, he pulled the coat tighter around himself. He hadn’t noticed how cold he was until Edison was gone. His teeth chattered, and he silently thanked Andres for giving him the coat off his back, and so much more than that.

A train must have just arrived, because the corridor was suddenly full of people. A man bumped into Joe’s shoulder and muttered at him. Joe moved closer to the wall, to stay out of the way of the crowds that surged past him on their way home.

Home.

The mass pushed him to one side, but he limped back into the station. His ankle throbbed, and he couldn’t remember what he’d done to it. His arms and back ached, too, from carrying a limp Edison through the tunnels. He only hoped that it mattered, that the vet would be able to heal him. That his pathetic weakness had not doomed the brave and loyal dog like it had doomed Brandon. If Joe could have gone outside and explained everything to the police, Brandon would still be alive, and Edison would be chasing a ball in the park. No self-pity, he reminded himself. But this wasn’t self-pity. It was grief and shame.

A man in a dark suit dodged in front of him to drop his newspaper in the recycling bin. Joe held out his hand, and the man slapped the paper in it without breaking stride.

Joe sat down on the subway bench, holding the newspaper. He was afraid to read it and see what it said about him, but he had to know.

He unfolded the newspaper. He hadn’t expected the
New York Post
. The man had looked more like someone who read the rarified words of
The New York Times
. A surprise. The scent of ink drifted up, an ordinary smell from his past—a time when he could sit with his coffee and read the paper and then go outside and start his day. He ached for those days.

He shook the paper out and read the headline:
Mogul on Murder Spree?
Underneath the headline was a photo of him gleaned from an old version of the Pellucid web site. They were lucky that he’d quit, considering the damage control they would have had to do if their chief technology officer was a crazy killer hunting victims through New York’s subterranean world. Mind-boggling.

He read the headline again. He was a mogul now, was he? And a killer. Anger rising, he skimmed the article, gritting his teeth when he came across phrases like
mentally ill
and
chained to a life indoors
and
source of his murderous rage
. They had effectively painted him as a bored rich kook who couldn’t go outside and had turned to murder in the tunnels to amuse himself. The last line read,
If he’s innocent, then why is this so-called brilliant man cowering in corners instead of accounting for his whereabouts to the police?

Joe tore the paper in half. Yes, it was damaging, and parts of it were lies, but it contained a grain of truth—he was cowering here instead of proving his innocence. Well, screw ’em. He’d find the guilty parties and get them arrested.

He dropped the pieces of newspaper into the recycling bin.

What was up with Vivian? Had she received his emails and relayed his tips to the cops? If she had, no one on the force was leaking the information to the
Post
. If she hadn’t, how else could he get that information out to the public? Everyone needed to know Rebar’s true identity. They needed to know that Saddiq had killed Brandon, and probably Rebar as well. Maybe that would be enough for them to put the pieces together. Or not. His best chance of solving this lay in putting together the pieces himself.

A man sat next to him on the bench. He turned up the collar of his camel-hair coat and studied Joe’s face. Did he recognize him? With his face covered in stubble and grime, wearing an Eastern European army surplus coat and stinking of blood and dog, Joe didn’t see how the man would connect him to the well-groomed and happy millionaire on the front page of the newspaper. He couldn’t be sure.

“Spare change?” Joe held out his dirty hand, palm up. He figured this was the last thing the guy would expect from a millionaire.

The man’s face tightened. He shook his head and looked away.

Joe stifled a smile and reached down for Edison. His hand landed on empty air. He looked at the spot and saw a dirty tile floor with dark spots of gum stuck to it. He was alone.

Worry for Edison rose up in him again, and he pushed it back down. Edison was in the best possible hands now. Andres would see to it. And once he got out of the vet’s office, he would lie by Celeste’s bed—Joe envied him—and be petted and spoiled until he could come home to Joe again.

For both of their sakes, Joe had to restore their world even though he’d been branded crazy. Starting with finding the truth, and then sharing it. He’d have to do it without Edison’s support, on his own.

What he wanted to start with was a warm shower, a soft bed, and a hot dinner. He knew where he could get some version of all three.

Home.