Before Cain Strikes (27 page)

And now Penelope Sue had interrupted his nap. Since the sun was still out, he couldn’t have been asleep for very long.

“Are you awake?” she asked him. She was still on the bed and was staring down at him the same way a pet owner stares down at an unruly dog.

He was not amused.

Then she pointed to the TV. “Look.”

“Penelope Sue…”

“Look, you fool!”

He looked.

The station was NY1. The broadcast was live. The story was the massacre at Penn Station.

Tom leaned on the bed for support and pulled himself erect. Two minutes later, he was out the door.

While the uptown A-train was resting comfortably beside its platform in Penn Station, the downtown C-train, expected to dock across the platform, was still stuck in a tunnel, impatiently awaiting clearance to continue its journey. The impatience was clearly shared by its passengers and by its conductor, a round man named Chester London who lived at Fifty-nine Gelston Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, and who suffered from serious attention deficit disorder. That was why he’d applied for the job at the MTA so many years ago. What better job
for a person with ADD than the operation of a subway train? For him, the world was always go-go-go.

Except for right now.

He hopped up and down on his seat in his small compartment and fingered the levers in front of him. They were so close to Penn Station. Surely whatever was going down there had been taken care of by now, right? As a passenger he was at the mercy of the machine, but as a conductor, didn’t he have the right—no, the duty—to get his people to their destination?

Chester London fidgeted in his seat. Would they actually fire him if he did his job? His was a union position, after all, and in his years at the MTA, he’d made a lot of pals. His passengers would be grateful. His ADD would be eternally grateful. The bosses might suspend him, but suspension was just an excuse to go on vacation. When was the last time he’d been to Atlantic City? It was before Velma died, that’s for sure.

Fuck it.

He shifted the brake lever forward. Penn Station, here we come.

Confident that the SWAT officers had taken up her cause and were actively searching for a man with a shoulder wound, Esme had returned to the platform to check on the status of the wounded. So many more victims, but soon it would be over, right? Penn Station was in lockdown. Not even Cain42 could walk through walls.

In fact, she had proof of his tangibility in her hands. This coat had been part of his disguise. She hefted its weight in her hands. No, Cain42 was real. And that made him fallible. And today he would fail.

She took note of the detectives walking the A-train’s last car. Soon she would head over there to give her
statement. She knew she would be delivering her statement on today’s events many, many times before this nightmare was truly over. She also would be turning over the coat, and the knife she’d uncovered in its deep pockets. The knife she knew would be especially valuable. Murder weapons always were.

The echoes of the Galileo case were unmistakable.

Had she made the right choice?

As Cain42 approached her from the shadows, the same question resonated through his mind. Creeping up to her like this was foolhardy. His risk of exposure was enormous. He neared her now. She didn’t know he was there. His heart quickened. It felt good.

Tom noticed him, though. Tom was descending the stairs toward the platform and spotted Esme immediately. He always did. He saw Cain42 come at her from behind and he tried to quicken his pace, but the lack of sleep had left his body uncooperative. He opened his mouth to shout out a warning, but the headlights of the C-train were within view now, and as with lightning, the thunder quickly followed, rumbling itself into a monstrous angry bellow.

Cain42 reached out. But he didn’t pull to retrieve the coat. No, with the onrush of the train, he had a better idea now.

He pushed.

And Tom Piper watched from afar as Esme and the coat went toppling down toward the train tracks and the impatient C, forty-four tons of stainless steel per car, roared home.

T
he C-train came to a stop at roughly the same position it always reached at this platform (at least when Chester London was at the brake). He had seen the woman on the tracks, but by then he had been reaching for the brake already. Trains took time to slow down. He knew he wouldn’t be held accountable…unless, of course, the woman on the tracks had been the reason for the red light.

He left his compartment and rushed out to the platform. Everyone stared in silent shock at the spot on the tracks where Esme fell, which was now covered by the second-to-last car of the C-train. The tragedy had turned the hundreds of people into mute, gawking statues.

All but one, that is. Tom Piper approached the back of the train. Cain42 had scurried away when he’d realized everyone’s attention was fixed on Esme, but even if the monster had remained there on the platform, Tom would still have bypassed him for her. The gray-haired special agent climbed down to the tracks. He refused to believe she was dead. He didn’t know what he could do to help her, but God help him, he was going to try.

Chester, meanwhile, noticed ragged bits of the long
brown coat caught up in the front wheels. The woman had been holding that coat. Still, there wasn’t any blood on the subway car. That had to indicate something, didn’t it?

Tom was on his stomach now and peering into the dark underbelly of the C-train. He lay in the one-and-a-half foot ravine between the subway’s two main rails, among potato chip wrappers and rat feces. He ignored it all.

“I need a flashlight!” he called out.

Two of the paramedics who’d been manning the triage center were already climbing down to the tracks. One had a flashlight and handed it to him. Tom shone the beam along the undercarriage.

The other paramedic had a body bag.

“It’s Tom!”
His voice cracked, like old leather. He needed water.
“Can you hear me?”

He crawled farther, now half-underneath the subway car. If he could fit like this, perhaps she’d been able to. He peered forward. A pair of yellow eyes peered back at him. They belonged to a furry rat the size of a puppy. The plump rodent squeaked a curse at him and then scampered off.

Tom crawled another few feet forward. He was now completely under the aft of the last car. The flashlight beam extended to the last car’s fore section, but no farther. He heard more squeaking, but no breathing. No Esme.

To make matters worse, the folks on the platform had recovered from their horror and had recommenced their chattering gossip. But at least they’d exhibited a few minutes of awe. At least they hadn’t yet become too desensitized.

Not all of the folks on the platform had recovered. One
in particular was drowning ocean-deep in post-traumatic stress. The paramedics couldn’t find anything wrong with Grover physically, aside from the typical aftereffects of prolonged tear gas (a mind-splitting headache, which they treated with Tylenol; and excess phlegm, which they treated with an empty plastic cup for him to spit into). No, the injuries he was suffering were invisible and thus all the more deadly.

For the past ten minutes, a veteran NYPD detective named Chuck Rowling had been attempting to get something, anything, out of the poor man that could help add order to the chaos in the last car. Rowling knew there was another FBI agent on the train, Esme Stuart, but his Herculean task was to wrangle some sense out of this witness who was so obviously still in shock.

Then the woman was pushed to the tracks, and Rowling’s interview stopped. He saw the man who did it and, as the train braked to its screeching halt at the other end of the platform, watched the black-coated assailant casually make his way back to the turnstile. With one hand on his holstered sidearm, Chuck Rowling was in pursuit.

His other hand went for his radio.

“She’s breathing!”
shouted someone, and Rowling, by instinct, turned to look. The voice came from the subway train—no, below the subway train. The woman was alive? How was that even—

Rowling turned back to look for the man in the black coat, but he was gone.

How Esme survived her showdown with the C-train was not as miraculous as it was ironic: the knife saved her life.

It took her body two-point-three seconds to travel the
five feet from the platform to the tracks, and not once did Esme’s neurons fire up the notion of survival. Or rather, they did, but in their own mischievous ways. To shield her psyche from what was about to be an inevitable violent end to its existence, her subconscious culled for her a pleasant memory from years ago, almost eight years ago to the day: a delightful episode from Sophie’s first Thanksgiving.

Sophie’s first Thanksgiving began with a wintry early-morning road trip from Oyster Bay up to Rafe’s parents’ house in Sullivan County. No, actually, Sophie’s first Thanksgiving began at 4:34 a.m., when she awoke crying and Esme awoke yawning and mother and daughter sat on the sofa and watched
Home Alone
. When Rafe finally joined them at around six, sauntering into the living room like a brain-starved zombie, he at least had the good sense not to ask what she was doing up.

What had woken Sophie up was gas. For some reason, her metabolism wasn’t tolerating any of the formula they bought. She was fine with (and eager for) breast milk, but the formula gave her an upset stomach and that meant lots of crying and spitting. And Sophie spat milk as if she were a faucet. One minute she could be playing with a toy and the next, the toy and much of the carpet would be both white and wet. Esme was convinced that the child spat out far more milk than she consumed, that somewhere a separate universe was supplying her with excess milk, but, ah, well. According to the books she read (and she read many), infants spat up about as regularly as they slapped themselves in the face with their tiny hands, which is to say often.

So they got in the car around seven and, on the way, Esme breast-fed her until Sophie napped, and then Esme napped, and then there they were in Sullivan County.
Lester and Eunice were there on the front stoop to greet them when they pulled into the driveway, next to his blue Cadillac.

Eunice Stuart was the type of woman who insulted you in French, all the while pretending to offer a lovely and sophisticated compliment. Esme spoke French. She was not amused when, five minutes into their first meeting, the woman called her,
au français,
“city trash.” It was no wonder that Lester got along so famously with Halley Worth. She and his late wife were cut from the same
bourgeois
cloth. And Esme meant
bourgeois
in only the loveliest and most sophisticated way imaginable.

Eunice Stuart wore an auburn wig large enough to nest a pair of ostrich eggs, and on that cold Thanksgiving morning, the wind was bending the grass and flapping the lapels of their coats and Eunice Stuart’s auburn wig lay conspicuously unaffected. Esme removed the convertible car seat, with Sophie asleep inside it, and carried it toward her in-laws. Rafe offered to help, but she shook her head. She wanted to show them what a good mother she was.

All this Esme’s mind provided for her as she fell to her certain death toward the C-train’s steel tracks. All this condensed into mere seconds, as well as what happened next on that cold Thanksgiving morning, the payoff of the story.

Esme brought Baby Sophie over to her grandparents. They hadn’t seen her since her birth and beheld her now with the requisite responses of
aww
’s and
ooh
’s. Rafe beamed proudly. Look what he accomplished, Mom and Dad. Esme was happy for his happiness. It didn’t even occur to her that she was a bit jealous, that perhaps she wished her parents were still around. All that occurred to her right then, really, was one, man, convertible car
seats are heavy; and two, her mother-in-law’s wig must have been made of plaster. Fortunately, at that moment, Eunice reached into the car seat, unfastened its complicated array of buckles and elevated her granddaughter into her arms.

“Hello! Hello, there! I’m your Grandma. Can you say
Grandma?
Grand-ma. Grand-ma.”

Sophie simultaneously opened her eyes and her mouth. And Rafe and Esme knew what was about to happen about half a second before it did, but, much like Tom Piper on the subway platform stairs, could do nothing to warn or to prevent. Not that Esme would have warned or prevented her beautiful little girl from, with a giggle, hosing down Eunice’s overrouged face with about a gallon of semidigested milk. The milk went everywhere—on Eunice’s eyelashes, up her nose, in her mouth—but most significantly, it splashed into her wig.

The wig absorbed it like a sponge.

Eunice excused herself, went inside, and when she met them all a few minutes later in the parlor for tea, she was wearing a floppy beach hat. Indoors. On Thanksgiving.

It was memories like that which made the mind chuckle and snort. It even brought a short smile to Esme’s lips, as her body collided with the first rail. The bottom half of her body had conveniently landed in the depression between the two rails, but the top half of her body was splayed over the first rail like a drunken sailor over a pub bar. But her mind was far, far away from the emergency at hand, and it didn’t even register with her that she was about to be sawed in two by friction, torque and train.

That was when Cain42’s knife saved her life, or rather,
the combined efforts of the knife and, well, gravity. The coat, naturally, came down with her and, in fact, landed before she did, and also partially on the first rail. So when her torso, which had fallen on a precarious angle to the rail, attempted to correct itself, it rolled in the direction of the fallen coat. The knife, although sheathed and pocketed, poked back at her torso. Reflexes did the rest. She flinched away from the poking and thus rolled in the other direction. Her torso joined the rest of her body in the filthy depression between the two tracks and there it lay as the first car of the train passed over her location.

Unfortunately, that was when Esme snapped from her memory-lane stupor. Her subconscious, no matter how strong, could not in a million years compete with the cacophonous fury unleashed by so many tons of steel traveling so many miles per hour less than twelve inches from her face. It was the sound of ten thousand sticks of chalk being dragged across ten thousand boards of slate, somehow emanating from the inside of a pizza oven and washing over Esme’s entire body in a hot and screaming wave. The liquids in her eyes began to sear. All she saw was darkness, heavy monstrous darkness, and she couldn’t escape it, she daren’t even move; she had to sustain it without going mad, but, Jesus Christ, it wouldn’t stop, it wouldn’t stop, it wouldn’t stop….

And even when it finally stopped, it didn’t kindly stop for her. And so she didn’t hear Tom calling out her name because all sound had become a choir of tonal ringing. As she lay there, underneath the second-to-last car of the train, as Tom finally spotted her with his flashlight, her subconscious resumed its fanciful associations, and she thought about the ear-swatting she’d performed just
the other day on Grover Kirk. Was this fate reminding her of what comes around?

Then she felt a hand touch her right foot, and she opened her eyes and tried to lift her head to see if Grover was there in person, perhaps to drag her to hell, but that simple effort of raising her head an inch apparently tipped the scales of her sanity too far, and Esme passed out.

She woke up on Grover’s cot.

Detective Rowling had transferred his witness to the station, in the hope that a different setting might ease the poor fellow’s stress level and elucidate a coherent statement. In fact, it was when the paramedics shifted Esme to the now-vacant cot that Tom first learned Grover Kirk was still alive.

He learned a few other things, as well….

“Tom?” Esme’s brown eyes shifted left to right, full of confusion. “What are you doing here?”

He sat down beside her. “How do you feel?”

“Like I got run over by a train.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

She tried to sit up, and that was when she noticed her left arm was in a sling.

“When you fell, you busted your shoulder.”

“Fell?” Then she remembered. “Oh.”

She noticed the rest of her body appeared intact. There were cuts and bruises every which way, and her outfit was in filth-stained tatters, but she spotted no broken bones or missing limbs. Her hearing, though, remained fuzzy, as if her ears were stuffed with seawater.

Tom went on to tell her about Grover, and that, according to the security tapes, a man fitting the description given by Detective Rowling of her assailant had
nonchalantly walked out of Penn Station with everyone else and was long gone.

“Why did they lift the lockdown?” she asked. There were still people here on the platform, but she recognized most of them. These were her fellow passengers from the second-to-last car of the A-train. Everyone else had apparently been allowed to leave.

“The manager of one of the clothing stores upstairs was shot,” replied Tom. “When one of the store’s sales associates staggered into the crowd, screaming, it created a panic. So the bosses made a decision.”

“And let Cain42 slip away.”

“From their point of view, they lowered the temperature on a pot of boiling water.”

“Yet another reason never to eat a meal prepared for you by a politician.” Then she asked him about Hoboken, and he told her what had gone down with Jefferson Harbinger.

“You always get your man,” she said.

He chuckled. “I don’t know if you’re implying I’m gay or a Mountie.”

“A gay Mountie.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

She smiled up at him, this woman who was the closest thing he had in the world to a daughter, this woman who he’d almost lost only a few minutes ago, this extraordinary woman.

“There’s a long line of detectives waiting to interview you,” he said. “Not to mention Ziegler.”

She released a stoic sigh and nodded. Duty called.

To which Tom added, “So what do you say we get the hell out of here?”

“But…”

“You’re in no condition to argue. Or drive, come to think of it. Hand me your keys, young lady.”