The Manhattan Hunt Club (23 page)

Today, if it somehow had been Jeff Converse’s voice he’d heard on the telephone, Perry Randall was going to need that privacy to deal with the situation that had suddenly arisen. Obviously, someone had made a terrible mistake, and that mistake would have to be rectified. As the ornate, heirloom Seth Thomas regulator on the wall softly chimed the half hour, Randall closed the file on his desk—a file that contained every scrap of information relating to Jeff Converse’s case, every page of which he’d reviewed again that morning—and placed it in his briefcase. Though he’d found nothing in it that seemed relevant to today’s problem, one couldn’t be too careful.

As he rose from the desk, he couldn’t help pausing at the window to gaze at the park spread out below. A park that was, thanks to him and his friends in The Hundred, a safe place to walk once more. Much in the city had changed in the years since Perry Randall had been elected to The Hundred. The crime rate had dropped dramatically. The murders and muggings that had been so commonplace only a decade ago had all but disappeared.

The subways—though he himself never rode them—had been cleaned up.

The panhandlers that had choked the sidewalks and train stations were all but gone.

Much of that had happened, Perry Randall knew, because of the policies he and the other members had developed in the privacy of the club. Unwritten rules for the city had been decided upon, and if the public had not had a hand in forming them, everyone had certainly benefited from their implementation. The city had changed for the better more quickly than even the members of the club could have hoped. But obviously, in the case of Jeff Converse, something had gone wrong.

He was just opening the hall closet to choose a coat when the door from the far wing opened and Heather appeared. They were both surprised, and Perry tried to think of something to say, but it was Heather who broke the uncomfortable silence.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, her voice strained with tension. “You’re really going?”

The question confused him, but his years in the courtroom and at the negotiating table kept his features from showing it. Had she heard the message on the answering machine? That was impossible—if she had, she would have come to him right away, insisting that he use every connection he had to find out if somehow Jeff might possibly still be alive. Besides, Carolyn had told him the new message light was flashing when she’d listened to the message, and he’d erased it himself right after he listened to it.

“Is it such a crime for your father to go to the club?” he asked, cocking his head in the manner that had always brought her running into his arms when she was a child.

Today she made no move to come any closer.

Then, as he noticed the simple black dress she was wearing, he understood. “Jeff’s funeral?” he asked, injecting just the right amount of concern into the question. “I’m—well, I’m afraid I didn’t know.” He hesitated, then shifted down a gear. “Nobody told me,” he added. If she felt any of the guilt he’d intended her to feel, she gave no sign of it, and it occurred to him—not for the first time—that if she set her mind to it, she could be nearly as good a lawyer as he.

“I didn’t really think you’d want to go,” Heather replied. “Given the way you treated Jeff—”

“I didn’t
treat
Jeff any way at all,” he cut in, for once letting his aggravation show. “All I was doing was my job. And despite my personal feelings, I made it a point to remove myself from Jeff’s case completely. I built a firewall between me and that case, Heather, and you know it. Now, I can’t help the way I feel, but you have to understand that I did nothing—nothing at all—to influence the trial. It was the jury who decided Jeff’s guilt, not me. And I have to tell you that the way you keep holding it against me—”

“It’s not just the trial, Daddy,” Heather cut in. “It’s everything. You always treated him like a servant, and—” Abruptly, she stopped and glanced at her watch. “What does it matter now anyway?” she asked. “I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, and if I don’t go, I’ll be late.”

Perry held the door open for her, and after hesitating a moment, she stepped through. “Where is the service?” Perry asked as they rode down in the elevator.

“St. Patrick’s. It was Jeff’s favorite church. He loved the surprise of it in the middle of midtown. He said it was some of the finest architecture in the city.”

“If you like that sort of thing, I suppose it’s good for its kind. But I’m afraid I’ve always found it a bit . . .” He paused, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose what I think doesn’t really matter, does it?” Heather offered no reply, and neither of them spoke again until they were on the sidewalk. “Can I drop you?” he asked, nodding toward the black Lincoln Town Car waiting by the curb, its driver holding the door open for him.

She shook her head. “It’s such a nice day, I think I’ll walk.”

As the car pulled away from the curb, Perry Randall realized that even though Jeff Converse was no longer a part of Heather’s life and would never be a part of her life again, she still had not forgiven him for failing to leap to the boy’s defense. As the Town Car settled into the stream of traffic moving down the avenue, he tried to relax in the knowledge that sooner or later Heather would have to forgive him and they would return to the nearly perfect relationship they’d had before she fell in love with Jeff Converse.

After all, the boy had been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and eventually Heather would realize that. Besides, as far as she was concerned, Jeff Converse was already dead.

And in a few more hours, he undoubtedly would be.

CHAPTER 29

“W
hy don’t you just tell me, okay?” Jinx said, struggling not to turn away from the steely gaze of the man who was staring down at her with the hardest eyes she’d ever seen. She’d never had any trouble staring people down before, but this man, whom she’d never seen before and already hoped she’d never see again, was different. She wasn’t sure how old he was; he could have been twenty, or could just as easily have been forty—maybe even forty-five. She’d found him in the Seventy-second Street subway station, lounging against the wall at the far end. She’d known right away he was one of the herders, even though he was doing his best to look like he didn’t have anything better to do than hang out in the subway. But if he hadn’t been a herder, he’d have been sprawled out on the platform, probably holding tight to the brown bag that sat between his feet—no wino Jinx had ever seen let the bottle leave his hand, much less sit unguarded on the floor while he was standing up. The knife had most clearly given him away. Jinx spotted it right off, clutched in his right hand, only partly hidden by the ragged denim vest that he wore over a dirty flannel shirt with torn-off sleeves. Once she pegged him as a herder, she’d walked right up to him and asked him if he’d seen the two guys in the hunt.

He’d just stared at her blankly, like he didn’t know what she was talking about. She hadn’t realized how big he was until she was right in front of him. Now he towered over her, the thick muscles of his tattoo-covered biceps rippling every time he flexed them, which she knew he was doing just to impress her. Well, screw him—she’d been on the streets way too long to be impressed with big muscles and small brains. She held her ground and her gaze never wavered. “Come on, what’s the big deal?”

The man’s lips pulled back to reveal his rotting teeth, and his glazed eyes told her he’d gotten hold of some drugs not very long ago. She wondered if Lester and Eddie were dealing again—if they were, Tillie’d kick their asses out for sure. But if the man was stoned, he was a lot more dangerous than he’d be if he was straight, or just drunk. His eyes finally shifted away from hers and raked over her body.

Sizing her up.

She saw him glance down the platform, checking out the crowd, and she steeled herself, knowing that if he was really junked up, he might try to rape her right there. Ready to spring away if he made a move toward her, she tried once more. “Look—all I’m supposed to do is find out if they tried to get out through here. So what do I say? That you were too fucked up to see?” The man tensed, and for a second Jinx thought she might have gone too far. But a second later the gamble paid off.

“One joint,” the man snarled. “All’s I had was one fuckin’ joint.” But even as he spoke, his right hand moved to cover the barely scabbed tracks on the inside of his left arm.

“So what about it?” she asked. “Did you see ’em or not?”

“What the fuck business is it of yours?” the man countered, but the aggression in his voice had given way to a faint whine.

“You got your job, I got mine. So what’s the big fuckin’ deal?” Her confidence restored, Jinx’s eyes locked onto the man again.

“I ain’t seen ’em,” he said, his eyes shifting to the subway tunnel as if he expected them to come walking out of the darkness. Jinx was about to turn away when the man said, “But I heard they tried to get out over by the river yesterday.”

The whine in his voice was more prominent, and then Jinx understood. He was scared of her now. He didn’t know who she was or who she might be working for. But he knew exactly what would happen to him if he fucked up—the hunters would turn on him, and instead of having an easy source of the cash he needed for whatever he was shooting, he’d be running in the tunnels himself. She turned back to face him again. Suddenly, he didn’t look nearly as big as he had a few moments ago, and the hard, empty glaze in his eyes had given way to a nervousness that told Jinx the junk was starting to wear off. The sweat that broke out on his forehead confirmed it.

“Like I care what happened yesterday,” she said, seizing the opportunity. “What they want to know is where they are now.”

The last of the man’s junkie confidence crumbled. “I don’t know—I’m tellin’ you, I don’t know nothin’.” Then, as if searching for something, anything, that might make Jinx say something good about him to whomever she was working for, he said, “They found Crazy Harry this morning.”

Crazy Harry? Who was he? She had never heard of him, but she said nothing, certain that her silence would be enough to keep the man talking. Sure enough, he started up again. “He was in his room, down near where Shine’s bunch hangs out. Someone cut him last night.” His voice dropped. “The guy that told me said it looked like they jammed a railroad spike in him.” The man’s head shook from side to side as if he could hardly believe what he’d heard. “Who’d do a thing like that? Shit, Harry was crazy, but he never hurt no one. Why’d anyone want to cut him up?”

But Jinx had stopped listening.

A railroad spike.
The guy with Jeff Converse—Jagger, that was his name—had carried a railroad spike.

“Where’d he live?” she asked.

“Who?” the man countered.

“Crazy Harry!” Jinx replied. “You said he lived down near Shine. Where’s that?”

The man shook his head. “How do I know? Down below somewhere—down where all the crazies live.”

“How do I get there?” Jinx asked.

Now the man’s eyes changed again, turning suspicious. “Thought you just wanted to know about them guys the hunters are after.”

He started to reach for her arm, but with instincts honed by years on the streets, Jinx spun away before his huge hand closed on her. Flipping him the bird, she darted toward the stairs and was halfway up to the surface before the man had even moved. By the time she got to the surface, she knew exactly where she would go next.

Sledge.

She’d known Sledge almost as long as she’d known Tillie, and if anyone would know where this guy called Shine lived, he would. Sledge talked to everyone, and everyone talked to him.

Emerging into the afternoon sunlight, she headed north, abandoning the tunnels, at least for a while.

T
he man called Sledge thought he was somewhere around seventy years old, though he wasn’t quite sure and he didn’t really care. His real name was Charles Price, but he hadn’t used it for so long that if someone had spoken it, he probably wouldn’t have responded at all. He’d grown up in West Virginia, and after a year in the coal mines had decided that there had to be more to life than breathing dust and dying young.

As it turned out, that wasn’t quite true.

For a long time he drifted from one job to another, always managing to drink his way out of them. Finally the day came when there were no more jobs, and Sledge found himself on the streets. It wasn’t much of a comedown, since the free flophouses and missions weren’t much worse than the rooms he’d been paying for. Then one night someone tried to roll him in one of the missions—it was the third time—and Sledge decided he’d had it. That was when he started looking around for a better place to live, and discovered the tunnels.

He started out in a nest on one of the catwalks above the tracks under Grand Central, using the washrooms to clean up and doing some panhandling in the huge waiting room. But the transit cops kept giving him a hard time, and finally he migrated north. For a while he lived in a really weird place—a little forgotten subway station that he’d stumbled into one night when he was really drunk. He’d thought the walls were all paneled with wood, and it hadn’t looked like any subway station he’d ever seen before. He’d passed out, of course, but when he awoke the next day it turned out he hadn’t been hallucinating at all. There really was paneling on the walls, and a grand piano on the platform, and a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. If he’d kept his mouth shut about it, he might still be living there, but he told too many people, and one night some people from the surface showed up, and the next time he tried to get in, it was all locked up. He’d heard it was part of some kind of museum now, but wasn’t sure and didn’t care.

He just moved farther north.

He lived under the park now, in a railroad tunnel that was hardly used at all anymore. He’d started out in one of the cubbyholes dug into the walls, but when someone moved out of one of the work bunkers, he moved in. He’d added some worn carpet, a little furniture he’d found on the sidewalks—thrown out even though it wasn’t in half bad condition—and hung some pictures on the walls. He’d found a barrel to use for a cooking fire, and stuck it under one of the big grates above the tracks—right outside his bunker—so he had skylights and ventilation, and most of the time it wasn’t bad at all. When it turned out he was a pretty decent cook—folks said he could make track rabbit taste just like the real thing—other people started showing up, sometimes with food, sometimes not. If they had food, Sledge threw it on the barbecue, and if they didn’t, he shared whatever he had on the grill. Now there were seven chairs around the barrel, and it seemed like people were coming and going all the time. Somewhere along the line Sledge had quit drinking—he hadn’t thought about it, couldn’t even remember when it happened.

Now, he was on his third or fourth barbecue barrel and thinking it might be getting time to start looking for a new one. On a day like today, with a brilliant blue sky overhead—far brighter than the sky over West Virginia had ever been when he was a boy—and sunlight streaming through the grated skylight overhead, Sledge thought life had turned out pretty good after all. He had lots of friends, and his friends knew they could count on him. He was always home, his fire was always lit, and pretty much anyone was invited to sit down and have a bite to eat. When he saw Jinx coming down the tracks, his smile widened. “Hey, young lady, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” He flipped over a piece of chicken that looked to be done just about right, transferred it to one of the mismatched but not too badly chipped plates that someone had just washed, and held it out to her. “Just in time for some hot lunch.”

Jinx took the plate, and when she told him she was trying to find out where Shine lived, his smile faded. “You don’t want to be goin’ anywhere near those folks.”

“I’m lookin’ for someone,” Jinx replied.

“You’re lookin’ for trouble if you go lookin’ for Shine. How come you want to find him?”

“It’s not him—it’s one of the guys the hunters are after.”

The last of Sledge’s smile faded. “You ain’t messin’ in that, are you?” He glanced around, but even though they seemed to be alone, he still dropped his voice. “Them guys the hunters go after are even worse’n Shine’s crowd.”

“But one of the guys they’re after didn’t do nothing,” Jinx protested.

Sledge’s brows arched. He’d never met anyone in the tunnels who didn’t have some kind of hard luck story about how they got there, and not one of them ever admitted it might be their own damned fault. With the young kids, there was probably some truth to their tales, but he figured the rest of them were just making up excuses. “Bet he told you that himself, didn’t he?” Jinx shook her head and told him what had happened. “So what happened to this Bobby Gomez guy?” he asked when she was finished.

Jinx spread her hands dismissively. “Gone.”

“Well, if I was you, that’s what I’d be, too. Gone out of here, gettin’ myself a job, and gettin’ my ass back in school. And I sure wouldn’t be messin’ in nobody’s business except my own, especially the hunters’.”

“All’s I was askin’ was where Shine—”

“Don’t you be pushin’ me, young lady,” Sledge said. “I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’ at all, you hear?”

“I was just—” Jinx began again, but before she could say anything else, a new voice called out.

“Hey, Sledge. You hear about Crazy Harry?”

Jinx turned to see two men coming down the tracks. One of them was a Puerto Rican tagger who spent most of his time spraying murals on the walls of the tunnels. She didn’t recognize the other man.

“What about him?” Sledge asked as the tagger dropped a bag on one of the chairs and started pulling out groceries.

“Got himself killed last night down under the Circle.”

The men kept talking, but Jinx had already stopped listening. The Circle had to be Columbus Circle. All kinds of subways came together around there, which meant there were bound to be a lot of herders. If she was careful and asked the right questions . . .

As Sledge and the two other guys kept talking, Jinx finished her piece of chicken, left the empty plate on the table, and slipped away. She headed south down the tracks, then made her way through a maze of utility tunnels and passages until she came to a shaft Robby had found that came up behind a utility building in the park. Leaving the park, she headed to Cathedral Parkway and the MTA station.

As she rode south a few minutes later, she glanced around the car, sizing up the crowd for an easy lift. But it was the wrong time of day—rush hour was best, when the cars were so crowded that even if someone felt her trying to pick a wallet out of a pocket or a purse, they wouldn’t be quite certain who’d done it. The arrival of a transit cop in the car put an end to her reconnaissance, and she settled onto a seat.

The cop, recognizing Jinx, decided to stay in the car, too.

As the train rattled through the tunnel and pulled into the station at 103rd Street, Jinx waited for the cop to get up and move toward the door.

He didn’t.

At Ninety-sixth Street Jinx stood up, and so did the cop.

Neither of them got off.

At Seventy-second Street, Jinx got off the car, then got back on.

So did the cop.

Jinx moved to the next car, the cop following her.

F
rom his own seat a few yards away, Keith Converse—on his way to the memorial mass at St. Patrick’s—watched the interplay between the cop and the girl. As far as he could tell, the girl hadn’t done anything wrong.

She didn’t look like a prostitute, and she didn’t look like a juvenile delinquent. She just looked . . .

Homeless.

Homeless, and vaguely familiar.