The Third Rail (7 page)

"Hey, buddy."

I didn't say anything. Just tightened my fists and felt a patch of dryness at the back of my throat
.

"Kid, you hear me?"

I gripped the handle of the hammer I kept in my pocket
and focused my mind on the piece of bone where his jaw hinged. That's where I'd go. Right fucking there
.

"Where you getting off?" The thin man shifted closer, fingering the sleeve of my jacket, pressing me farther into the corner. I caught a flash of teeth, eyes rippling down the car to see if anyone was watching. His collar was loose around his throat and a blue-gray stubble ran down his jaw and cheeks. Underneath the scruff, the skin looked rough and scored
.

"Fuck off, mister." I tugged my sleeve free and started to pull the hammer out of my pocket. It wasn't the best solution, but at least it was certain. And that felt good
.

"Are you all right, young man?" The woman with the green scarf had moved softly. Now she stood in the aisle, close to us, eyes skimming over the thin man who burned with a bright smile
.

"I'm fine, ma'am." I slipped the hammer back in my pocket. "Just gonna change seats."

Her face was plain and broad, with blunt angles for chin and cheeks and a short flat nose. Not a beautiful face, but open and honest. Maybe even wise. It lightened when she heard me speak, and I felt a warmth I would have enjoyed if I'd known how scarce a childhood commodity it would turn out to be
.

As it was, I moved past the thin man without touching him and took a seat two rows closer to the front. Just across from the woman and her friend, face muffled in the folds of his coat. The conductor had returned to the back of the car, eyes closed, head against the window, bouncing lightly to the tune of train and track. And that was how we sat as our train approached a sharp bend at the corner of Lake and Wabash
.

J
im Doherty and I pieced through the past for an hour, maybe more. At a little after ten, I headed back to the North Side, my friend's files in hand. I eased my key into the lock and cracked open the front door to my flat. Didn't make a sound. Didn't matter a bit. She was there, waiting on the other side, wagging her entire body in a spasm of greeting. I dropped to a knee and scooped Maggie up. The springer spaniel was a year old, but still seemed like no weight at all. She licked my face where she could find it and then scrambled out of my arms. I stepped back and watched as a blur of liver, gold, and white sprinted once, twice, three times around the living room, leaped to the couch, and stopped dead still, staring at me, tongue out, panting lightly, body wag still in full flower. I crouched so I was eye level with the pup and feinted like I was going to make a run at her. She offered a head fake to my left and tore off to the right, into the kitchen. I heard the clatter of claws on tile and then a slide and thump into what I suspected was the refrigerator. A second later, Maggie was back in the living room, bearing down on me at full speed. I dropped to a knee and caught her in midleap. She curled into my chest and almost immediately settled. I found a seat on
the couch. Five minutes later, the pup was asleep. I sat that way for a half hour. The best half hour of my day. Then I moved lightly. Maggie opened her eyes and stretched. She jumped down to the floor, shook herself once, twice, and wagged her tail, looking up at me, wondering what was for dinner.

DINNER WAS
a cheeseburger and a cold can of beer. I steamed some spinach to make myself feel better. Then I gave most of it to the dog. She didn't like it, either. I put a call in to Rachel Swenson's cell phone, but got her voice mail and left a message. My favorite judge still had her own place on the Gold Coast, but spent a good part of the week at my apartment. It felt good to have her here, to see her clothes strewn around the bedroom, my bathroom cluttered with atomizers and smoothers, exfoliants and lotions, peelers and masks. I didn't know what most of it was for, but it didn't matter. Between Rachel and the pup, my apartment was full. And the emptiness I never really knew existed, gone. Or at least put away for a while.

I found the pup's leash and took her for a quick tour of the neighborhood. Then I settled in at my desk and powered up my Mac. The CTA shootings dominated Google's news page. I searched for my name, but didn't get a hit in any of the articles. Good. I shut down the link and sat in the dark, watching the wind batter my front windows. Outside, the night offered an inky canvas on which to replay the day's events: a woman dropping to the hard boards of the Southport L, surprise scratched all over her face; an alley, tunneling through the black and filling up with snow; a tangle of footprints and
the fat hole of a .40-cal pressed to my head. Slipping underneath was the electric silk of the voice on my cell phone, one that called me by name, one I couldn't place. I closed my eyes and let the images play. Pretty soon I started to nod off, the pup close by, readily following my lead.

F
ive miles south, Nelson rolled to a stop underneath a cement overpass near the corner of Jefferson and Congress. A twist of snow blew across the hood of his Impala and dissolved into cold smoke. Overhead, the Eisenhower hummed with the whine and thump of rubber on asphalt. Nelson looked at the envelope on his dashboard, addressed to his favorite reporter. Then he put on his gloves and cracked open the driver's-side door.

The parking lot wasn't much more than an afterthought, shoved under the highway between the Clinton Blue line stop and the Greyhound bus station. During the day it was filled with the cars of Loop workers who couldn't afford downtown parking. At night, it became a black hole. Tonight was no exception. A brown Ford with a cracked windshield and rims for tires sat in a far corner. Otherwise, Nelson had the place to himself.

He moved out from under the highway and took a slow walk around the block. The bus station had a single cab out front, motor running, driver asleep in the front seat. The rest of the buildings on the street were factories, locked up for the
night. Nelson ducked back under the overpass and moved past his car to a far wall abutting the L station. There he found a green door with black stenciled letters that read
CTA
.

Nelson turned his back to the wind and pulled out the keys he had made. The third one fit, and the door opened. He stepped out of the weather and into a greasy darkness. Nelson found a light switch and flipped it on. A stairwell uncoiled to his left, down and into the belly of Chicago's subway system.

Nelson walked back outside, popped the trunk on the Impala, and considered a local prostitute named Maria Jackson, smiling red at him through the thick plastic. Robles had done a good job wrapping her after he'd finished, and the blood did not seem to have leaked. Nelson took a last look around, lifted the body, and carried it inside. Then he drove his car two blocks and parked on a deserted section of street. From the backseat he pulled a duffel bag. Inside it was a rifle, his scopes, and the hard black case he'd taken from Robles. Nelson hiked back to the access door and opened it again. Maria hadn't gone anywhere. He hefted her body across his shoulders, duffel in his right hand, and began to walk down the first staircase.

NELSON TOOK HIS TIME
, resting frequently. Two flights of stairs and a long sloping ramp threaded him back toward the Loop and deep into the lower levels of the subway. A second door opened out to the first run of tracks, an auxiliary spur reserved for trains in need of repair. Nelson walked another hundred paces before allowing the body to slip from his shoulders. Maria Jackson fell among the cinders with a graceless thump. Nelson kept moving.

A quarter mile later, he stopped again. The auxiliary track
split here. Nelson took the right fork and came to a second set of tracks. This was a primary set for the Blue Line's run into the Loop.

Nelson stepped gingerly across the rails and onto the main track. He would hear the train well before it came around the bend, roughly two hundred yards away. Besides, he didn't figure the job to take long. The track Nelson was standing on was the oldest usable section in the entire CTA. It had been scheduled for renovation in 2004. The work had been delayed once, twice, and now, in 2010, still hadn't been done. Which was why Nelson was here. Unlike the other three hundred miles of subway track, this portion had not been updated with sealed fluorescent lighting. Nelson looked up at the bare lightbulbs. Heavy-duty, yes, and partially shielded with steel covers. But lightbulbs all the same.

Nelson found the ladder he knew they kept in a maintenance shed and positioned it under a bulb. Then he took Robles' black case out of his duffel, climbed the ladder, and unscrewed the bulb from its porcelain fixture. He knew this fixture well. He'd bought a half dozen like it from a man who collected CTA odds and ends. Nelson knew it took six turns to secure the bulb in the fixture. Four turns and it would still be all right. Three turns and the vibrations from passing trains would begin to turn the bulb in its grooves and eventually loosen it. Fewer turns ... or more vibrations ... and the bulb got looser that much more quickly. An inexact science, with an inevitable result.

Nelson opened the case and took out one of the two bulbs stored inside. Carefully he screwed it in. One and one-half turns. The bulb was now, essentially, a timing device. Depending on how many trains rattled by, the bulb would loosen itself in anywhere from seven days to a couple of
weeks. Then it would fall and smash on the steel tracks below. Nelson held out his hand again, felt the oily breeze flowing across his fingertips, and looked up at the huge black vents connecting this section to the rest of the subway system. He climbed down the ladder and checked his watch. Robles was supposed to deliver the package at 2:00 a.m. Plenty of time. One more bulb down the line and Nelson would find a good place to hide, a good place from which to hunt.

I
opened my eyes and looked around my living room. The sound was small, but certain. I tapped a key on my sleeping computer. The screen pulsed in the dark: 2:06 a.m. I picked up my gun because it felt like the thing to do, walked to my front door, and considered the thin bar of light peeking out from underneath. Then I opened the door. Sitting in the hallway was a plain brown package, no name on it, wrapped in string. I padded down the hall to a small window looking out over Lakewood. The street was empty. I took the stairs softly, found nothing in the lobby, even less in the basement. I went back upstairs, checking each floor in turn. Whoever my messenger was, he was no longer in the building.

I had left the front door ajar. Maggie was in the hall, sniffing at the package.

"Something to eat, Mags?"

She gave me a hopeful look and went back inside. I followed. The package felt like a book. I cut the string and found it to be exactly that. A copy of the
Iliad
. I opened it up and found the poem's opening lines highlighted and circled:

I felt around inside the package and found two more items. The first was a cardboard cutout of a train on a black set of tracks, running across a background of yellow. The second was a small map of a subway system, with a key taped to it and an address attached. I took a long look at the map and then jumped on the computer. Twenty minutes later, I was driving through Chicago's sleeping streets, brown package on the front seat beside me.

I HELD A FLASHLIGHT
in one hand and my gun in the other. The address attached to the key had taken me to the corner of Clinton and Congress. The key opened a CTA access door tucked under the Ike, near the Clinton L station. A couple sets of stairs and a long ramp brought me to a second door and a run of tracks somewhere in Chicago's subway system. The room itself felt vast. Dull ribbons of steel ran off ahead of me. A string of lights kept the dark canopy above me nailed in place.

I found a wall and moved along its edge until I came to a small alcove formed by two concrete pillars. I stepped just inside and crouched, spreading my map on the ground. Best I could tell, the door I had passed through was marked with a star. Due east was a second spot, marked on the map with a black
X
and the word
BODY
in blue Magic Marker.

I put the map away, took out my gun again, and nudged forward. I'd expected the L's thunder, imagined maybe even having
to duck a couple of trains, but the place was quiet. As if to underscore the point, a low rumble drifted in and away. I stayed close to the wall, my light playing on the steel to my right. Chicago's trains were powered by an electrified third rail, six hundred volts of direct current. I'd try to keep a healthy distance.

Thirty yards farther, I saw the body. It had been dumped in the middle of a rail bed. I stepped carefully across the tracks and squatted close. The woman was wrapped in plastic, dressed in jeans and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt. Her hands were taped behind her back, and it looked like her throat had been cut. There wasn't much I could do without touching things, so I took a step back, careful to avoid the blood that had pooled underneath. I ran my light up and down the tunnel and wondered why I'd been summoned. Then I stepped off the tracks and found out.

The red dot flicked ahead a few feet, then skipped behind me. I dove for a crevice in the subway wall just as a round clipped the concrete somewhere above my head. I hugged the ground hard and lifted my face an inch or so. The red dot danced in the air, inviting me to come out and play. Then it moved up and over my body. Seconds hung, stretched, and fell. Each breath, an exercise in eternity. The shooter was using some sort of low-light targeting scope and a laser, knew exactly where I was, and could take me out at his leisure. I told myself to stay down, crouch deeper into whatever cover I could find, even as I felt myself lift. Whoever he was, he could kill me whether I stood or hid behind my hands. The last part of that equation, however, I could control. So I stood. Then I took a step. I felt the shake in my boots, and took a second step.