Lowland Rider (19 page)

Jesse nodded back without smiling. "There's a difference."

"Fuck this shit," Montcalm said. "I'm not getting in any pissing contest with you, pal. I've just got one thing to say, and that's this—get the fuck out of here. You get off this line and out of these tunnels, so I don't ever see your face again, and I don't ever hear of anybody else seeing it either." The face was getting red now.

"Why?" Jesse asked quietly.

Montcalm gave a half-laugh of disbelief. "You asshole. Don't fuck with me."

"No, why, really? I mean, who do you think I am? What do you think I've done? For all I know, you could be some maniac who wanders around the subway trying to scare people."

Montcalm shook his head. "
You're
who I want to scare."

"You sure you've got the right guy?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. I got a lot of friends down here. They tell me what I want to know."

"And you think I made you unhappy somehow?”

“That's right."

"Then why don't you arrest me, Sergeant Montcalm?"

Something flared in
Montcalm's
eyes, but he smothered it and grinned instead. "I told you
you
were the right guy."

"If I am, arrest me," Jesse said calmly, turning away from Montcalm and looking across the aisle at the dark reflections of Montcalm and himself.

"Smart guy," Montcalm said. "Real smart, aren't you?"

"Arrest me," Jesse repeated. "Then you could arrest Rodriguez too. And then maybe yourself. We could all go to prison together."

~*~

Bob Montcalm felt his stomach turn over. Rodriguez? he thought. How the hell did he know about Rodriguez? "Who the fuck is Rodriguez?" he said, hearing his voice shake.

"Rodriguez is your pimp," the man answered, still looking across the aisle. "Rodriguez is the man who pays you money to be a whore."

"What do you know?" Montcalm asked cautiously. "What do you know about Rodriguez?"

"Rodriguez gives you money, he gives you dope. You protect his people."

"Where… how do you know that?"

"I know. You have your ways of finding out things. I have mine."

Montcalm was scared of this man. He was scared of his knowledge and he was scared of his eyes. He had such dead eyes. How could he threaten a man who was already dead? But he had to. He thought of Gina and he knew he had no choice. "Do you know that if you don't get out of here, if you don't stay out of my business, you're dead."

"I'm already dead."

It was bravado, Montcalm felt almost certain of it. But there was something in the man's voice, a flatness he'd never heard from anyone before, that gave him the shivers. "I'm not fucking around. You'll be dead."

The man turned and looked into
Montcalm's
eyes. "And you'll kill me?"

Montcalm wouldn't. He couldn't. He had never killed anyone in his life, and believed himself to be incapable of it. Fifteen years before he had come close and had declined. He was uniformed then, patrolling the Pelham Bay Parkway line a few hours after rush hour on a Wednesday evening. He had rounded a corner and seen two men wrenching a briefcase away from a portly, middle-aged man. One of the men was slashing at the fat man's arm with a knife while the other was pulling at the briefcase. The victim was blubbering and howling, and Montcalm could see that nothing short of unconsciousness was going to make the man give up his treasure. Montcalm had started to run toward them, and had just drawn his gun when he saw the man with the knife raise it over his head.

Montcalm instantly knew the mugger's intent. He was going to stab the man either in the chest, the face, or the neck. Montcalm also knew that the only way to stop him was to bring up his gun and fire.

But he didn't. And the mugger stabbed the man in the neck, severing his jugular vein so that he bled to death while Montcalm held the two men at gunpoint until both medical and police assistance came. If they would have tried to escape, he would have had to let them go. He knew that if he had not shot the man before, then he would not shoot him if he tried to escape. He wondered if he could shoot someone to save his own life, and decided that he probably could, but hoped that he would never have to make that choice.

In the fifteen years that followed, he had been lucky. Although he made his share of arrests, he had never had to kill a man, and since he knew his weakness, he developed a hard and frightening facade, a look that said
I would as easily kill you as hold you here. Please try to run. Go ahead, try it
. The look worked. No one ever had. No one, he thought, until now.

"You'll kill me? You'll do it yourself?" the man with the dead eyes repeated.

"That's right," said Montcalm, looking as hard as he knew how.

"I don't think so," said the nameless man who was fucking up his life so royally. "I don't think you'll do that."

"I will and I can. Don't you know who the hell I am down here?"

"The big man?"

"Yeah. That's right."

The stranger shook his head. "
A
big man, maybe. But not the big man."

Montcalm's
eyes narrowed. "Who then? You?”

“Not me, and not Rodriguez."

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I'm the law down here, friend. Me."

"Uh-huh." The man nodded agreement and got to his feet as the train pulled into a station. "You have anything else to say to me?"

"I've said all I have to." He looked up with hard eyes as the man nodded again.

"Uh-huh."

"Remember it. I don't want to see you again."

The doors opened and the man stepped off. When he was gone and the train was moving again, Montcalm sat back against the hard seat, devitalized by the confrontation with the man with the dead eyes, devitalized and beaten. The man would not leave the subways, for some reason of his own that Montcalm could not even guess at. There was no possibility that the man was a plant, a cop set to trap Montcalm. No, the guy was not a cop. He had
skell
written all over him. But how in hell could a
skell
have so
goddam
much self-confidence? How could a
skell
be so unafraid of Bob Montcalm, the big man of the line?

The big man . . .

And what the hell was
that
all about? About there being somebody
else
who was the big man? Who the hell was the big man if not Bob Montcalm?

Who in hell . . .?

Who in hell was this Enoch, Frank
Zito
wondered fearfully. And what the hell did he want with an eye, for
crissakes
?

Frank
Zito
had the eye in his pocket. It was wrapped in a piece of Saran Wrap that he had taken from his mother's kitchen drawer. But the eye was not from a person he had killed, since Frank
Zito
had never killed anyone. Rather it had been dug, not too delicately, from the head of an elderly vagrant whose body Frank
Zito
had found hunched over in an alley two blocks from where he lived. The indelicacy was due to the fact that Frank
Zito
had done the job with a dull pocket knife in semidarkness.

Still, he had the eye now, and could feel its fluid softness press against his pants pocket as he walked beside his friend Harry toward an abandoned spur of the Concourse line. He and Harry had gotten off at the 161st Street station, had waited until there was no one else on the platform, and then jumped down onto the tracks. Walking on the tracks always scared Frank
Zito
, even at three in the morning when the trains ran less frequently. "Don't worry so much," Harry had told him. "There are those
whadyacallems
, those things you can get into when a train goes by, got 'em for the guys that work the tracks. We'll hear 'em
comin
'."

Frank
Zito
wondered why he had ever let Harry talk him into this. Frank had heard the stories all right, about this guy who dressed all in white and lived down in the tunnels like a
skell
, but who
wasn't
a
skell
, this guy everybody called Enoch and talked about like he was Jesus—God forgive him for even
thinkin
'
that—this guy who would actually
give
you shit, like money and jewelry and stuff, if you brought him things he wanted, eyes and fingers and shit like that.

"He gotta be crazy," Frank
Zito
had told Harry when Harry explained it to him.

"Uh-uh," Harry said. "You see him, you know he ain't crazy."

"You done it?"

"Yeah. Look." Harry held out a diamond. It was small, but it looked real as hell, and Frank
Zito
reached out a hand to touch it. "Uh-uh," Harry said, closing his fingers and putting the stone back into his pocket.

"He give you
that
? This Enoch?"

"Yeah."

Frank
Zito
frowned. "What you give him?"

A smile curled
Harry's
lips. "Teeth."

"
Teeth?
"

"Yeah. From this guy. Little guy. I worked him over, took his wallet, knocked out some teeth. They were
lyin
' there after he ran away."

"You gave this weirdo some
teeth
and he gave you that stone?"

"He ain't a weirdo, don't call him that."

"Well, what the fuck am I supposed to call him, the tooth fairy?"

Harry jabbed a finger into Frank's chest, and the force behind it reminded Frank that Harry outweighed him by fifty pounds. "No shit,
Zito
. You don't talk about him like that. You wouldn't if you seen him."

"Okay, hey, I'm sorry, all right? It's just hard to believe that some
dude'd
give you a rock like that for some fucking
teeth
."

"I said he did, didn't I?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"So you want in on this?"

At first Frank
Zito
didn't want anything to do with it. Frank didn't like to get in fights. But the more he thought about the diamond Harry had shown him, the more he thought about making this Enoch character an offering of his own. Shit, there were plenty of people around the Bronx who'd kill somebody for a handful of change, let alone a fucking diamond. And it wasn't morality that kept Frank
Zito
from mugging or killing people as much as it was the fear that he might get killed himself by a prospective victim, or at least get caught, go to prison, and get his young and pretty ass drilled for ten years. Frank had never been a junkie, never been desperate for money, so the possible rewards had never been worth the risk.

But a
diamond
. And just for some
teeth
.

So one night Frank
Zito
had gone prowling for a victim. If he had to kill them he had to kill them. But if he could just knock out some teeth that was better, and maybe he'd be able to pick up a wallet or a purse in the bargain. Instead he'd been lucky, and tripped over the old bum lying dead in the alley. Frank decided to take some teeth, but when he pried open the man's jaw he found that there weren't any to take.

He decided to cut off a finger, but quickly learned that bone, even brittle with age, was much harder than he had thought it would be. What the fuck else was there? he wondered. Hair? No, hair was nothing. He wouldn't get a piece of coal for a bunch of hair—that Enoch guy would laugh at him and tell him to go back to the barber shop. An ear? He tugged at his own ear and felt the tough cartilage clinging to the skull. Maybe, maybe. But something easier, something softer…

What the hell. The eye.

The thought made him queasy, but after all it wasn't much worse than pulling teeth out of that stinking mouth, was it? Sure, it would be messy, but it would wash off. Everything would wash off.

So he did it, felt proud of himself when he didn't vomit, and carried it home inside a discarded bag from McDonald's. When his mother asked him about it, he told her it was
french
fries, and was relieved when she didn't ask him for some. That night, after she was asleep, he wrapped it in Saran Wrap and put it at the back of the drawer beneath his underwear. The refrigerator would have been better, but he didn't want to take a chance on his mother spotting it behind a six-pack. The next day he saw Harry and told him that he had something for Enoch. Harry said there would be an offering held early Sunday morning, and that he would meet him at the local subway station at midnight.

For three days the eye sat in the underwear drawer, and when Frank
Zito
took it out on Saturday night he saw that its thick yellow color had changed to a sickly gray spotted with patches of black, and that it had grown much, much softer. He wrapped it in several more thicknesses of Saran Wrap, and put it in his pocket.

Neither he nor Harry talked much on their way to the offering, and when they walked down the tunnel, they didn't speak a word. Instead they listened to the sound of muffled footsteps that seemed to be all around them, although they saw no one else in the thin beam of
Harry's
flashlight. Finally Frank glimpsed some light ahead, and heard the murmur of voices. As they rounded the last curve, the light grew brighter, and they walked off the track onto a side spur that had been closed off to trains forty years earlier, and came into a chamber fifty feet long by twenty wide, lit by flashlights and several Coleman lanterns.