Contagion (34 page)

     “Did Phil tell you the story?” Twin asked when they entered.

     “Just that the doctor goes,” Phil said. “And five big ones for us. Anything else?”

     “Yeah,” Twin said. “You gotta do a white chick too. Might as well do her first. Here’s the address.”

     Twin handed over a scrap of paper with Beth Holderness’s name and address written on it.

     “You care how I do these honkies?” Reginald asked.

     “I couldn’t care less,” Twin said. “Just be sure you get rid of them.”

     “I’d like to use the new machine pistol,” Reginald said. He smiled with the toothpick still stuck in the corner of his mouth.

     “It’ll be good to see if it’s worth the money we paid for it,” Twin said.

     Twin opened up one of the desk drawers and withdrew a new Tec pistol. It still had some packing grease on the handle. He gave the gun a shove across the desk. Reginald snapped it up before it got to the edge. “Enjoy yourself,” Twin added.

     “I intend to,” Reginald said.

     Reginald made it a point never to show any emotion, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it. As he walked out of the building, his mood was soaring. He loved this kind of work. He unlocked the driver’s door of his jet-black Camaro and slipped in behind the wheel. He put the Tec pistol on the passenger seat and covered it with a newspaper. As soon as the motor was humming, he turned on his tape deck and pushed in his current favorite rap cassette. The car had a sound system that was the envy of the gang. It had enough sub-woofer power to loosen ceramic tile in whatever neighborhood Reginald cruised.

     With one last glance at Beth Holderness’s address and with his head bobbing with the music, Reginald pulled away from the curb and headed uptown.

     Beth hadn’t gone directly home. In her distressed state, she needed to talk with someone. She’d stopped at a friend’s house and even had had a glass of wine. After talking the situation over, she felt somewhat better, but was still depressed. She couldn’t believe she’d been fired. There was also the gnawing possibility that she’d stumbled onto something significant in the incubator.

     Beth lived in a five-story tenement on East Eighty-third Street between First and Second Avenues. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood, but it wasn’t bad either. The only problem was that her building was not one of the best. The landlord did the least possible in terms of repair, and there was always trouble with something. As Beth arrived, she saw there was a new problem. The outer front door had been sprung open with a crowbar. Beth sighed. It had happened before and it had taken three months for the landlord to fix it.

     For several months Beth had been intending to move out of the building, and had been saving her money for a deposit on a new apartment. Now that she was out of work, she’d have to dip into her savings. She probably couldn’t move, at least not for the foreseeable future.

     As she climbed the last flight of stairs she told herself that as bad as things seemed, they could be worse. She reminded herself that at least she was healthy.

     Outside of her door, Beth fumbled with the clutter in the depths of her purse to find her apartment key, which she kept separate from the building key. Her idea was that if she lost one, she wouldn’t necessarily lose the other.

     Finally coming up with the key, she let herself into her apartment. She closed and locked the door, as was her habit. After taking off her coat and hanging it up, Beth again searched through her purse for Jack Stapleron’s card. When she found it, she sat on the couch and gave him a call.

     Although it was after seven, Beth called the medical examiner’s office.

     An operator told her that Dr. Stapleton had left for the day. Turning the card over, she tried Jack’s home number. She got his answering machine.

     “Dr. Stapleton,” Beth said after Jack’s beep sounded. “This is Beth Holderness. I have something to tell you.” Beth choked back tears from a sudden surge of emotion. She considered hanging up to collect herself, but instead she cleared her throat and continued haltingly: “I have to talk with you. I did find something. Unfortunately I was also fired. So please call.”

     Beth depressed the disconnect and then hung up the phone. For a second she debated calling back to describe what she found, but she decided against it. She’d wait for Jack to call her.

     Beth was about to stand up when a tremendous crash shocked her into complete immobility. The door to her apartment had burst open, and it slammed back against the wall hard enough to drive the doorknob into the plaster. The deadbolt that she’d felt so secure about had splintered the doorjamb as if the jamb had been made of balsa wood.

     A figure stood on the threshold like a magician appearing out of a cloud of smoke. He was dressed from head to foot in black leather. He glanced at Beth, then turned and yanked the door closed. Quiet returned to the apartment with the same suddenness as the explosive crash. At the moment only the muffled sound of a TV in a neighboring apartment could be heard.

     If Beth could have envisioned this situation she would have thought she’d scream or flee or both, but she didn’t do either. She’d been paralyzed. She’d even been holding her breath, which she now let out with an audible sigh.

     The man advanced toward her. His face was expressionless. A tooth-pick jauntily stuck out of his mouth. In his left hand he brandished the largest pistol Beth had ever seen. Its ammunition clip protruded down almost a foot. The man stopped directly in front of Beth. He didn’t say a word. Instead he slowly raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead. Beth closed her eyes...

     Jack exited the subway at 103rd Street and jogged north. The weather was fine and the temperature reasonable. He expected a big turnout at the playground, and he wasn’t disappointed. Warren saw him through the chain-link fence and told him to get his ass in gear and get over there.

     Jack jogged the rest of the way home. As he approached his building, thoughts of Friday night and his uninvited visitors unwelcomely entered his mind. Having been at the General that day and having been discovered, Jack thought it was very possible that the Black Kings would be back. If they were, Jack wanted to know about it.

     Instead of going in the front door, Jack descended a few steps and walked down a dank tunnel that connected the front and the back of his building. It reeked of urine. He emerged in the backyard, which looked like a junkyard. In the half-light he could make out the twisted remains of discarded bedsprings, broken baby carriages, bald car tires, and other unwanted trash.

     Against the back of the building was a fire escape. It didn’t descend all the way to the ground. The last segment was a metal ladder with a cement counterweight. By turning over a garbage can and standing on its base, Jack was able to reach up and grab the lowest rung. As soon as he put his weight on it, it came down with a clatter.

     Jack climbed up the ladder. When he stepped off onto the grate of the first landing, the ladder retracted to its original position with equal clamor. Jack stood still for a few minutes to be sure that the din didn’t disturb anyone. When no one stuck their head out of a window to complain, Jack continued climbing.

     On each floor Jack had ample opportunity to glance in at the various domestic scenes, but he assiduously avoided doing so. It wasn’t pretty.

     When he saw it close-up, Jack found true poverty enervating. Jack also kept his eyes elevated to avoid looking down. He’d always been afraid of heights, and climbing the fire escape was a test of his fortitude.

     As Jack approached his own floor he slowed down. The fire escape serviced both his kitchen window and his bedroom window, both of which were ablaze with light. When he’d left that morning, he’d left all the lights on.

     Jack sidled up to the kitchen window first and peered in. The room was empty. A grouping of fruit he’d left on the table was undisturbed.

     From where he was standing he could also see through to his door to the common hall. His repair was still in place. The door had not been forced open.

     Moving to the second window, Jack made sure that the bedroom was as he’d left it. Satisfied, he opened the window and climbed in. He knew he’d been taking a chance leaving the bedroom window unlocked, but he thought it worth the risk. Once inside his apartment, he made a rapid final check. It was empty with no sign of any unexpected visitors having been there.

     Jack quickly changed into his basketball gear and exited the same way he’d entered. Given his acrophobia, descent was more difficult than ascent, but Jack forced himself to do it. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t wild about stepping out of his front door unprotected.

     When Jack got to the street end of the tunnel, he paused in the shadows to view the area immediately in front of his building. He was particularly concerned about seeing any groups of men sitting in cars. When he was reasonably confident there were no hostile gang members waiting for him, he jogged down to the playground.

     Unfortunately, during the time he’d taken to climb up and down the fire escape and change clothes the crowd at the playground had swelled. It took Jack even longer than usual to get into the game, and when he did, he ended up on a comparatively poor team.

     Although Jack’s shot was on, particularly his long jumper, his team mates’ weren’t. The game was a rout, to Warren’s delight; his team had been winning all night. Disgusted with his luck, Jack went to the sidelines and picked up his sweatshirt. Pulling it over his head, he started for the gate.

     “Hey, man, you leaving already?” Warren called out. “Come on, stick around. We’ll let you win one of these days.” Warren guffawed. He wasn’t being a bad sport; ridiculing the defeated was part of the accepted playground behavior. Everybody did it and everybody expected it.

     “I don’t mind getting whipped if it’s by a decent team,” Jack shot back. “But losing to a bunch of pansies is embarrassing.”

     “Ohhhh,” Warren’s teammates crooned. Jack’s retort had been a good one.

     Warren strutted over to Jack and stuck his index finger into Jack’s chest. “Pansies, huh?” he said. tell you what. My five would devastate any five you could put together right now! You pick, we play.”

     Jack’s eyes swept around the court. Everybody was looking in their direction. Jack considered the challenge and weighed the pluses and the minuses. First of all, he wanted more exercise so he did want to play, and he knew that Warren could make it happen. At the same time, Jack understood that picking four people out of the crowd would irritate the ones he didn’t pick. These were people Jack had been painstakingly cultivating over the past months to accept him. Beyond that, the people who were supposed to have winners would be especially vexed, not at Warren, who was insulated from such emotion, but at Jack. Considering all the angles, Jack decided it wasn’t worth it. “I’m going running in the park,” Jack said.

     Having bested Jack’s retort and willing to accept Jack’s refusal to meet his challenge as another victory, Warren bowed in recognition of his team’s cheering. He high-rived with one of them and then swaggered back onto the court. “Let’s run!” he yelled.

     Jack smiled to himself, thinking how much the dynamics of the playground basketball court revealed about current intra-city society. Vaguely he wondered if any psychologist had ever thought about studying it from an academic point of view. He thought it would be fruitful indeed.

     Jack stepped through the chain-link gate onto the sidewalk and started jogging. He ran due east. Ahead, at the end of the block he could see the dark silhouettes of jagged rocks and leafless trees. He knew that in a few minutes he’d leave behind the bustle of the city and enter the placid interior of Central Park. It was his favorite place to run.

     Reginald had been stymied. There was no way he could have walked out into a playground in a hostile neighborhood. Having found the doc playing b-ball, he’d resigned himself to waiting in his Camaro. His hope was that Jack would separate himself from the crowd, perhaps by heading for one of the nearby delis for a drink.

     When he’d seen Jack quit the game and pull on his sweater, he’d been encouraged enough to reach under the newspaper and snap the safety off the Tec. But then he heard Warren’s challenge and was sure he’d be sitting through at least another game. He was wrong. To his delight, a few minutes later Jack came out of the playground. But he didn’t head west in the direction of the shops as Reginald had anticipated. Instead he headed east!

     Cursing under his breath, Reginald had to make a U-turn right in the middle of all the traffic. A cabdriver complained bitterly by leaning on his horn. It was all Reginald could do to keep from reaching for the Tec. The cabdriver was one of those guys from the Far East whom Reginald would have loved to surprise with a couple of bursts.

     Reginald’s disappointment turned back to delight when he became aware of Jack’s destination. As Jack sprinted across Central Park West, Reginald quickly parked. Leaping from the car, he grabbed the Tec along with the newspaper. Cradling the package in his hands, he, too, dashed across Central Park West, dodging the traffic.

     At that point an entrance to the park’s West Drive continued eastward into the park. Nearby was a sweeping stone stairway that rose up around a rocky outcropping. Lampposts partially lit the walkway before it disappeared into the blackness. Reginald started up the stairs where he’d seen Jack go seconds earlier. Reginald was pleased. He couldn’t believe his luck. In fact, chasing his prey into the dark, deserted park was making the job almost too easy.

     From Jack’s point of view at that moment the park’s desolate darkness was more a source of comfort than uneasiness, unlike when he’d crossed the park on his bike Friday night. He felt consolation in the fact that although his vision was hampered, so was everyone else’s. He firmly believed if the Black Kings were to harass him it would be in and around his apartment.