The Manhattan Hunt Club (19 page)

CHAPTER 24

S
omething wasn’t right with Jinx. Tillie could feel it, the way she could feel it whenever one of her clan was chewing on a problem. But she wasn’t about to say anything—not yet, anyway. That was why most of the kids in the tunnels were there—too much yammering from folks who didn’t give a damn about them and shouldn’t have even had them in the first place. And with a lot of them—including Jinx, Tillie knew—it wasn’t just yammering they’d finally run away from. For many, it was a lot worse than that. Not that she ever asked them questions—better just to let them be, listen to them when they felt like talking, and not push them to open up. So instead of demanding that Jinx tell her what was wrong, she went about her business, adding the contents of the bag of groceries she’d found on the table after meeting Eve Harris in the park to the kettle of soup simmering on the back burner. She didn’t know who’d left the groceries—it could have been any one of the dozens of people who’d dropped in for a meal over the last few weeks. The groceries certainly weren’t what she would have called Class A, which only showed up every now and then, since the wholesale markets were all the way downtown and not much of their goods ever made it this far north. No, this stuff looked like it had come from one of the restaurants—not a real greasy spoon, but not The Four Seasons, either. Maybe one of the places along Amsterdam Avenue. There were some potatoes—barely even beginning to get soft—and a bunch of carrots that had just started to go limp. Some meat, too—and pretty good stuff—a half-eaten filet wrapped up in tinfoil that Tillie suspected had been rescued from a trash barrel down the street from wherever the steak had come from, along with a few uncooked pieces of beef and lamb that were starting to smell. Starting to smell was a long way from inedible, though, and Tillie cut the meat into bite-sized chunks and added them to the soup. By the time the vegetables went in as well, the thin soup was rapidly turning into a pretty good-smelling stew. Nobody would even notice the track rabbit that had been the only meat in the pot before this windfall arrived. After giving the kettle a stir and putting the lid back on, she turned to look at Jinx, who was sitting at the kitchen table, idly leafing through a dog-eared copy of a movie magazine.

“Gonna be a movie star?”

Jinx rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. The day after I graduate from Columbia.”

“You could do that,” Tillie said, dropping into the chair opposite her.

“Sure. All I’d have to do is walk in, right?”

“So maybe you’d have to do that test—the one where you get a high school diploma.”

“And then take a bunch of other tests, like the SATs, and then figure out how to pay for it. You know how much it costs?”

Tillie shrugged. “Never gave it much thought.”

“It’s, like, thirty thousand dollars. And that’s for, like, one year. Where’m I going to get that kind of money?”

“Work?”

Jinx shrugged. “Where’m I gonna get a job that pays that good?”

Tillie pursed her lips. “So is that what’s buggin’ you?”

Jinx shook her head, but didn’t get up and walk away. That told Tillie she just wanted a little push. “So what is it? A guy?” Jinx started to shake her head, but her blush gave her away. “Aha!” Tillie grinned, exposing the gap in her teeth. “So who is it?” But even as she asked the question, Tillie remembered the way Jinx had been looking at Jeff Converse that morning, and her grin faded. “Not that guy they’re huntin’.”

Jinx’s expression tightened. “Why not?”

“You know damn well why not—they only hunt the bad ones.”

“Well, he didn’t look bad,” Jinx said. “The big one was scary, but the other one—Jeff—he looked nice.”

“Attila the Hun probably looked nice, too.”

“Who?”

“Jeez,” Tillie sighed. “You really did quit school, didn’t you?”

Her eyes turning stormy, Jinx stood up. “And I can quit here, too! I don’t have to hang around here, you know. If all you’re going to do is bug me—”

“Now that’s enough!” Tillie cut in. “You’re too smart a girl to be talkin’ that way, and I’m just tellin’ you what you already know, anyhow. If he hadn’t done something really bad, he wouldn’t be down here. He ain’t like us, and you know it!”

“I don’t know anything!” Jinx retorted. “I’m just a dumb runaway, right?” Before Tillie could reply, Jinx grabbed her jacket—one that Tillie had found for her at the Salvation Army two weeks ago—and stormed out.

Jinx made her way through the tunnels easily, following a route she knew as well as the streets on the surface. Twenty minutes later she emerged into Riverside Park and started toward Seventy-second Street. Liz Hodges was sitting on a tiny camp stool outside her tent, but right now Jinx didn’t feel like talking to Liz or anybody else. Leaving the park, she headed east on Seventy-second, then ducked down into the subway station on Broadway. Paying no attention to the transit cop who was leaning against the wall, she jumped over the turnstile and skipped down the stairs to the platform, oblivious to the cop’s shouting. Coming to the platform just as the doors to an uptown train were starting to close, she wiggled on and perched nervously on the edge of a seat until the train had pulled out of the station—and out of the reach of the transit cop.
Damn Tillie! How does she always know when something’s wrong? Sometimes it’s like she can look right into my head.
Except that Tillie was only partly right—it wasn’t just that Jinx had thought Jeff Converse was cute. There was something else, too.

He just didn’t seem like the kind of guy the hunters would be going after.

He wasn’t at all like the other guy—the one named Jagger. She hadn’t liked that one at all. There was something about the way he looked at her that made her shudder. He’d killed someone, and it had been a woman.

But not Jeff. Jinx had seen a gentleness in Jeff’s eyes. And yet everyone knew the men the hunters went after deserved to die—that was the whole thing about the hunt, wasn’t it? The hunters were just getting rid of people who should have been executed anyway.

The train slowed to a stop at 110th Street, and Jinx found herself staring at the very spot where Bobby Gomez had mugged a woman last fall. She still wished she hadn’t been hanging with Bobby that night, and after she saw what he did to the woman, she did her best to avoid him. He’d said he was just going to grab her purse. That wasn’t what it had looked like to Jinx.

It had looked like he was trying to kill the woman, and he’d only stopped beating on her when she called out that someone was coming. She and Bobby disappeared into the tunnel so quickly that she hadn’t even been able to tell if it was a cop who was coming down the platform. Not that it mattered—the main thing was that they’d gotten away, and Bobby hadn’t actually killed the woman.

From then on Jinx stayed as far away from Bobby as she could, and when she heard he’d disappeared a few days ago, all she felt was relief—one less thing to worry about. But instinctively she still avoided the 110th Street station as much as she could.

Getting off at 116th Street, she emerged from the station on Broadway and crossed the street to the Columbia University campus. Columbia had become one of her favorite places in the city from the moment she’d stumbled across it two years ago. She could wander along its paths for hours, fantasizing about going to classes in its ornate brick buildings. Once, she almost snuck into the back of a lecture hall, but she lost her nerve at the last minute, certain that everyone would know right away that she didn’t belong there and throw her out. But they couldn’t throw her off the campus.

She was about to pass through the big gate onto the campus itself when she stopped. A few yards down the sidewalk a man was pushing a wheelchair in which sat a young woman.

The woman looked oddly familiar.

And she seemed to be looking back at her.

As the man pushed the woman closer, Jinx suddenly knew. It was the woman from the subway—the woman Bobby Gomez had mugged last fall!

Turning away at once, Jinx hurried through the gates and walked quickly toward the enormous quadrangle in the center of the campus, not daring to look back. If the woman recognized her and called the police—

Wanting to be as far away from the neighborhood as possible, Jinx veered off to the south, broke into a run, and kept going until she exited the campus at 114th Street. She kept going south, so freaked by seeing the woman that she skipped the nearby 110th Street station and disappeared back into the subway at 103rd.

Only when the train had rumbled off into the darkness of the tunnels did she feel really safe again.

T
he gnawing in Jeff’s stomach told him the day had passed, so he knew that even if they found a place where they could peer out of the tunnels, the sight of daylight that had buoyed his spirits earlier would have faded into the semidarkness of a New York night. When the hunger in his belly had first begun to stir hours earlier, he’d simply ignored it—lunch was a meal he never minded missing, and before he was arrested, he’d almost given up eating it at all. But in prison, eating had become something to break up the dull monotony of the days, and though his palate had never grown fond of jail cuisine, apparently his stomach had. The small pangs of hunger he’d experienced a few hours ago had become far more insistent.

As he and Jagger retreated back into the darkness—their eyes still fixed on the tantalizing sunlight that remained out of reach—he’d been certain that they’d quickly find another way out.

There had to be hundreds of escape routes—surely they could find a storm drain emptying into the river, or a shaft leading up to a manhole in a street.

In his memory he could see dozens of gratings in the streets, in the sidewalks, in the parks—all of them leading into the maze of passageways beneath the city. Surely they’d quickly find one. It wasn’t possible they were all guarded.

Was it?

Before they’d turned away from the last drop of daylight, they tried to develop a strategy. It seemed simple at the time: the hunters—whoever they were—knew they were on the West Side. So they would start working their way east. Somewhere, they would find an unguarded escape route to the surface.

They’d started east, following the plan, but after an hour, perhaps two, they lost their bearings.

At first it hadn’t been too difficult to keep track of their direction—the passages seemed to be laid out on a grid that mirrored the grid of the streets above. They stayed away from the darkest areas and tried to keep to the upper levels, heeding Tillie’s words about the increasing craziness of the people who lived in the lower depths. But at certain crossroads their way was blocked by knots of hard-eyed men in gangs large enough to intimidate even Jagger. The fifth time it happened, Jeff was certain that the men weren’t simply blocking escape routes, but instead were steering them in a particular direction. They were being herded like cattle.

With the way up blocked, they’d finally had no choice but to burrow deeper, and it had now been hours since Jeff had had any real idea of their location, much less a plan for how to escape.

The tunnels were all starting to look alike—the one they were currently in was lined with pipes and lit every hundred yards or so by a bulb just bright enough to allow them to make their way, but dim enough to leave them deep in darkness most of the time.

Suddenly, Jagger’s strong fingers closed around his arm. “Somethin’ ahead,” the big man whispered softly, so that no echo of his words would betray their presence.

Jeff peered into the darkness and saw what Jagger meant.

A faint, orange glow.

A campfire, perhaps.

They remained where they were, frozen in the darkness, searching the gloom for any movement, straining to catch any sound.

All was quiet.

“Stay here,” Jagger whispered. “I’ll go see.”

“We’ll both go,” Jeff whispered back. Before Jagger could argue with him, he pulled free from the other man’s grip and began creeping toward the glow. It was emanating from the same kind of opening in the tunnel’s concrete wall that led to the chambers in which Tillie and her family dwelt.

But how many rooms might there be?

And what kind of people were sheltered there?

When the opening in the wall was only five yards away, they paused again, listening to the faint crackling sounds of burning wood.

Still no voices.

They moved closer, then Jagger darted ahead, crossing in front of the doorway and pressing himself against the wall on the other side.

Jeff started to follow but Jagger raised his hand to signal him to stay where he was. As Jagger’s hand rose, a shadow filled the door and a gruff voice said, “Lester? That you?”

Jeff flattened himself against the wall, too late. A form stepped out into the tunnel, and the beam of a flashlight blinded Jeff.

“Who are y—” the voice began, but was cut off in a strangled yelp as Jagger’s arm snaked around the man’s neck and jerked him backward. As the flashlight dropped from the man’s hand and clattered to the tunnel’s concrete floor, Jagger forced the man back through the door from which he’d just emerged. Jeff snatched up the flashlight and followed.

It was a small chamber, lit only by the flickering light of a fire burning in a barrel so rusted that large areas of the metal had corroded all the way through. There was some kind of shaft in the ceiling of the chamber, which acted as a chimney, and the draft from the open door was just enough to keep the room from filling with the fire’s black smoke. A battered plastic crate served as the only furniture. Filthy blankets piled in one corner appeared to be the man’s bed, and an old kettle hanging from a makeshift tripod could be put over the fire barrel for cooking. The pot was steaming, and Jeff assumed the man had just pulled the tripod away from the fire. The smell from the kettle, however, was nowhere near as savory as that produced by Tillie’s stove.

Jagger released the man with a shove that hurled him against the wall. He collapsed to the floor and huddled there. Pulling his knees to his chest, he peered fearfully up at them. His eyes flicked furtively from one to the other, but every few seconds they came to rest on a spot behind them. Jeff turned to see what was capturing the man’s interest. In the corner was a large black plastic bag out of which spilled the kind of tattered clothing so many of the city’s homeless carried around with them.