The Manhattan Hunt Club (35 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABOUT THE PEOPLE LIVING UNDER MANHATTAN

A
full count of the people living beneath the streets of Manhattan is difficult to achieve for two simple reasons: The population is transient and most census officials do not wish to go into the tunnels. Estimates of their numbers vary wildly, from a few hundred, to a few thousand, to tens of thousands. Since Grand Central Station was restored and most of its public seating removed, the homeless have largely disappeared from that very public venue, though they can still be found making efforts to keep themselves clean in the rest rooms on the lower levels. Though many of the “nests” above the tracks have been cleaned out, this does not mean the people who inhabited those nests are no longer in the city; rather, they have simply burrowed deeper into the tunnels, beyond the reach of official New York.

To date, there is no complete and integrated map of the tunnel system beneath the city. Partial maps exist: the subway system, the water system, the various utility systems. But in addition to the tunnels and passageways and storm drains that are still in use, there are miles of abandoned tunnels that have been long forgotten. Forgotten, at any rate, by everyone except those who live in them.

Contrary to popular belief, not all the people who live beneath the streets are derelicts and drunks. Many of them are productive members of society, holding jobs and attending school, giving false surface addresses to whatever bureaucracies they come in contact with. Some families have chosen to live under the streets rather than having their children separated from them by government agencies. Many of these people do not consider themselves homeless, but only “houseless.” They organize themselves into tribes and family groups and establish territorial claims beneath the city. It is said that the deeper people live beneath the city, the less frequently they visit the surface and the less likely it is that they will ever live on the surface again.

Many of our subterranean citizens suffer from mental illness and chemical dependencies that often make them incapable of taking advantage of the services that are provided for them. They drift through our lives, muttering softly to themselves or ranting at invisible enemies, until finally they disappear back underground.

Underground and out of our consciousness.

All of the characters and events in this book, on the surface and in the tunnels, are fictional. At least, I hope they are . . .

—J.S.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M
any, many people helped me in the preparation of this book, especially with regard to the New York City criminal justice system. My dear friend Elkan Abramowitz and his partner, Bill McGuire, connected me with all the right people and guided me through the various judicial departments of New York City, and Marvin Mitzner, Esq., put me in touch with the mayor’s office. People from the district attorney’s office, the police department, and the Department of Correction were all very cooperative in showing me their facilities, familiarizing me with their procedures, and answering my innumerable questions. From the district attorney’s office, I particularly want to thank Constance Cucchiara, who spent a morning guiding me through the courtrooms at 100 Centre Street and solved the mystery of the missing twelfth floor. From the Midtown South Precinct, I am especially indebted to Adam D’Amico, who gave me a guided tour of the precinct house and instructed me in the procedures involved in booking a person into the judicial system. I owe a special thanks to Deborah Hamlor and Jo-Ona Danoise of the City of New York Department of Correction, who spent an entire day with me as I toured Rikers Island and the Manhattan Detention Complex. They not only provided me with mountains of information but were endlessly patient. Many thanks to both of you! Others who were generous with their time and information at Rikers Island were Bureau Captain Sheila Vaughan, Head of Special Transportation Brian Riordan, and many other correction officers. Thank you for an enlightening experience and for your time and energy. John Scudiero, warden of the Manhattan Detention Complex, also took several hours to educate me about his facility and its relationship to the New York City courts and provided me with a tour from a prisoner’s perspective. I also wish to thank the judges and bailiffs who seemed utterly unsurprised to see me appearing through the doors usually reserved for prisoners. Thanks, too, to Mayor Giuliani’s office for connecting me with various precincts in Manhattan, and to the transit police, who didn’t apprehend me as I endlessly poked around subway stations and Grand Central station, taking pictures, peering down tunnels, and generally behaving in what must have seemed a very suspicious manner.

By John Saul:

SUFFER THE CHILDREN***

PUNISH THE SINNERS***

CRY FOR THE STRANGERS***

COMES THE BLIND FURY***

WHEN THE WIND BLOWS***

THE GOD PROJECT**

NATHANIEL**

BRAINCHILD**

HELLFIRE**

THE UNWANTED**

THE UNLOVED**

CREATURE**

SECOND CHILD**

SLEEPWALK**

DARKNESS**

SHADOWS**

GUARDIAN*

THE HOMING*

BLACK LIGHTNING*

THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES:

Part 1: AN EYE FOR AN EYE: THE DOLL*

Part 2: TWIST OF FATE: THE LOCKET*

Part 3: ASHES TO ASHES: THE DRAGON’S FLAME*

Part 4: IN THE SHADOW OF EVIL:

THE HANDKERCHIEF*

Part 5: DAY OF RECKONING: THE STEREOSCOPE*

Part 6: ASYLUM*

THE PRESENCE*

THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL*

NIGHTSHADE*

THE MANHATTAN HUNT CLUB*

*Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

**Published by Bantam Books

***Published by Dell Books

PRAISE FOR JOHN SAUL

The Manhattan Hunt Club

“Nonstop action keeps the book
moving at a brisk pace.”

—Library Journal

“Thrilling . . . Packed with plot twists.”

—Booklist

Nightshade

“[Saul] haunts his shadowy realm ingeniously and
persistently. . . .
Nightshade
may be his masterpiece.”

—Providence Journal

“Gripping . . . Saul, and his unerring instincts to instill fear, returns to tap into our deepest, most closely guarded shadows and secrets.”

—Palo Alto Daily News

The Right Hand of Evil

“[A] tale of evil that is both extreme and entertaining.”

—Chicago Tribune

“[A] whopper of a nightmare tale . . . Dazzling . . . Dizzying twists.”

—Publishers Weekly

The Presence

“A suspenseful thriller . . . Provocative . . .
Nicely done, indeed.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Enough smoothly crafted suspense to keep readers turning pages long after dark.”

—The Seattle Times

Black Lightning

“Electrifyingly scary.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“One of Saul’s best.”

—Publishers Weekly

The Homing

“If you are a Stephen King/Dean Koontz fan,
The Homing
is a book you will only open once.
You will not put it down until its last page has
been absorbed. John Saul takes the psychological
suspense novel to a new height.”

—The Dayton Voice

“Eerie . . . Chills aplenty.”

—The West Coast Review of Books

Guardian

“Chills and thrills . . . A great hair-raiser.”

—San Diego Union-Tribune

“Tension and terror . . . A suspense-filled
and logical tale.”

—Rocky Mountain News

Please read on for an exciting preview of John Saul’s latest book

MIDNIGHT VOICES

Coming in hardcover in June 2002.

Published by Ballantine Books.

PROLOGUE

T
here’s nothing going on. Nobody’s watching me. Nobody’s following me.

The words had become a mantra, one he repeated silently over and over again, as if by simple repetition he could make the phrases true.

The thing was, he wasn’t absolutely certain they weren’t true. If something really was going on, he had no idea what it might be, or why. Sure, he was a lawyer, and everybody supposedly hated lawyers, but that was really mostly a joke. Besides, all he’d ever practiced was real estate law, and even that had been limited to little more than signing off on contracts of sale, and putting together some boilerplate for leases. As far as he knew, no one involved in any of the deals he’d put his initials on had even been unhappy, let alone developed a grudge against him.

Nor had he caught anyone watching him. Or at least he hadn’t caught anyone watching him any more than anybody watched anybody else. Like right now, while he was running in Central Park. He watched the other runners, and they watched him. Well, maybe it wasn’t really watching—more like keeping an eye out to make sure he didn’t run into anybody else, or get run over by a biker or a skater, or some other jerk who was on the wrong path. No, it was more like just a feeling he got sometimes. Not all the time.

Just some of the time.

On the sidewalk sometimes.

Mostly in the park.

Which was really stupid, now that he thought about it. That was one of the main reasons people went to the park, wasn’t it? People-watching? Half the benches in it were filled with people who didn’t seem to have anything better to do than feed the pigeons and the squirrels and watch other people minding their own business. One day a couple of weeks ago his son had asked him who they were.

“Who are who?” he’d countered, not sure what the boy was talking about.

“The people on the benches,” the ten-year-old boy had asked. “The ones who are always watching us.”

The little boy’s sister, two years older than her brother, had rolled her eyes. “They’re not watching us. They’re just feeding the squirrels.”

Up until that day, he’d never really thought about it at all. Never really noticed it. But after that, it had started to seem like maybe his son was right. It seemed like there was always someone watching whatever he and the kids were doing.

Some old man in a suit that looked out of date.

An old lady wearing a hat and gloves no matter what the time or day.

A nanny letting her eyes drift from her charges for a moment.

Just the normal people who drifted in and out the park. Sometimes they smiled and nodded, but they seemed to smile and nod at anyone who passed, at anyone who paid them the slightest bit of attention.

They were just people, spending a few hours sitting in the park and watching life passing them by. Certainly, it was nothing personal.

But somehow they seemed to be everywhere. He’d told himself it was just that he’d become conscious of them. When he hadn’t thought about them, he’d hardly noticed them at all, but now that his son had pointed them out, he was thinking about them all the time.

Within a week, it had spread beyond the park. He was starting to see them everywhere he went. When he took his son to the barbershop, or the whole family went out for dinner.

“You’re imagining things,” his wife had told him just a couple of days ago. “It’s just an old woman eating by herself. Of course she’s going to look around at whoever’s in the restaurant. Don’t you, when you’re eating alone?”

She was right, and he knew she was right, but it hadn’t done any good. If fact, every day it had gotten worse, until he’d gotten to the point where no matter where he was, or what he was doing, he felt eyes watching him.

More and more, he’d get that tingly feeling, and know that someone behind him was watching him. He’d try to ignore it, try to resist the urge to look back over his shoulder, but eventually the hair on the back of his neck would stand up, and the tingling would turn into a chill, and finally he’d turn around.

And nobody would be there.

Except that of course there would always be someone there; this was the middle of Manhattan, for God’s sake. There was always at least one person there, no matter where he was: on the sidewalk, in the subway, at work, in a restaurant, in the park.

Then it went beyond the feeling of being watched. A couple of days ago he’d started feeling as if he were being followed.

He’d stopped trying to resist the urge to turn around, and by today it seemed as if he were glancing over his shoulder every few seconds.

When he’d walked home from work this afternoon, he’d kept looking into store windows, but it wasn’t the merchandise he was looking at; it was the reflections in the glass.

The reflections of people swirling around him, some of them almost bumping into him, some of them excusing themselves as they pushed past, some of them just looking annoyed.

But no one was following him.

He was sure of it.

Except that he wasn’t sure of it at all, and when he’d gotten home he’d been so jumpy he’d had a drink, which he practically never did. A glass of wine with dinner was about all he ever allowed himself. Finally he’d decided to go for a run—it wouldn’t be dark for another half hour, and maybe if he got some exercise—some real exercise—he would finally shake the paranoia that seemed to be tightening its grip every day.

“Now?” his wife had asked. “It’s almost dark!”

“I’ll be fine,” he’d insisted.

And he was. He’d entered the park at Seventy-seventh, and headed north until he came to the Bank Rock Bridge. He’d headed east across the bridge, then started jogging through the maze of paths from which the Ramble had gotten its name. The area was all but deserted, and as he started working his way south toward the Bow Bridge he finally began to feel the paranoia lift.

There was no one watching him.

No one following him.

Nothing was going on at all.

As the tension began draining out of his body, his pace slowed to an easy jog. Late afternoon was turning into dusk, and the benches were empty of people. Even the few runners that were still out were picking up their pace, anxious to get out of the park before darkness overtook them. Behind him, he could hear another runner pounding along the path, and he eased over to the right to make it easy for the other to pass. But then, just when the other runner should have flashed by him, the pounding footsteps suddenly slowed.

And the feeling of paranoia came rushing back.

What had happened?

Why had the other runner slowed?

Why hadn’t he gone past?

Something was wrong. He started to twist around to glance back over his shoulder.

Too late.

An arm snaked around his neck, an arm covered with some kind of dark material. Before he could even react to it, the arm tightened. His hands came up to pull the arm free, his fingers sinking into the sleeve that covered it, but then he felt a hand on his head.

A hand that was pushing his head to the left, deep into the crook of his assailant’s elbow.

The arm tightened; the pressure increased.

He gathered his strength, raised his arm to jam his elbows back into his attacker’s abdomen and—

With a quick jerk, the man behind him snapped his neck, and as his spine broke every muscle in his body went limp.

A second later his wallet and watch—along with his attacker—were gone, and his corpse lay still in the rapidly gathering darkness.

CHAPTER 1

C
aroline Evans’s dream was not a nightmare, and as it began evaporating into the morning light, she tried to cling to it, wanting nothing more than to retreat into the warm, sweet bliss of sleep where the joy and rapture of the dream and the reality of her life were one and the same.

Even now she could feel Brad’s arms around her, feel his warm breath on her cheek, feel his gentle fingers caressing her skin. But none of the sensations were as sharp and perfect as they had been a few moments ago, and her moan—a moan that had begun in anticipation of ecstasy but which had already devolved into nothing more than an expression of pain and frustration—drove the last vestiges of the dream from her consciousness.

The arms that a moment ago had held her in comfort were suddenly a constricting tangle of sheets, and the heat of his breath on her cheek faded into nothing more than the weak warmth of a few rays of sunlight that had managed to penetrate the blinds covering the bedroom window.

Only the fingers touching her back were real, but they were not those of her husband leading her into a morning of slow lovemaking, but of her eleven-year-old son prodding her to get out of bed.

“It’s almost nine,” Ryan complained. “I’m gonna’ be late for practice!”

Caroline rolled over, the image of her husband rising in her memory as she gazed at her son.

So alike.

The same soft brown eyes, the same unruly shock of brown hair, the same perfectly chiseled features, though Ryan’s had not yet quite emerged from the softness of boyhood into the perfectly defined angles and planes that always made everyone—men and women alike—look twice whenever Brad entered a room.

Had the person who killed him looked twice? Had he looked even once? Had he even cared? Probably not—all he’d wanted was Brad’s wallet and watch, and he’d gone about it in the most efficient method possible, coming up behind Brad, slipping an arm around his neck, and then using his other hand to shove Brad’s head hard to the left, ripping vertebrae apart and crushing his spinal cord.

Maybe she shouldn’t have gone to the morgue that day, shouldn’t have looked at Brad’s body lying on the cold metal of the drawer, shouldn’t have let herself see death in his face.

Caroline shuddered at the memory, struggling to banish it. But she could never rid herself of that last image she had of her husband, an image that would remain seared in her memory until the day she died.

There were plenty of other people who could have identified him at the morgue. Any one of the partners in his law firm could have done it, or any of their friends. But she had insisted on going herself, certain that it was a mistake, that it hadn’t been Brad at all who’d been mugged in the park.

A terrible cold seized her as the memory of that evening last fall came over her. When Brad had gone out for his run around part of the lake and through the Ramble she’d worried that it was too dark. But he’d insisted that a good run might help him get over the jumpiness that had come over him the last couple of weeks. She’d been helping Laurie with her math homework and barely responded to Brad’s quick kiss before he’d headed out.

Hardly even nodded an acknowledgment of what turned out to be his last words: “Love you.”

Love you.

The words kept echoing through her mind six hours later when she’d gazed numbly down at the face that was so utterly expressionless as to be almost unrecognizable.
Love you . . . love you . . . love you . . .
“I love you, too,” she’d whispered, her vision mercifully blurred by the tears in her eyes. But in the months that had passed since that night more than half a year ago, her tears had all but dried up. Sometimes they still came, sneaking up on her late at night when she was alone in bed, trying to fall asleep, trying to escape into the dream in which Brad was still alive, and neither the tears nor the anger were a part of her life.

Caroline wasn’t quite sure when the anger had begun to creep up on her.

Not at the funeral, where she’d sat with her arms holding her children close. Maybe at the burial, where she’d stood clutching their hands in the fading afternoon light as if they, too, might disappear into the grave that had swallowed up her husband.

That was when she’d first realized that Brad must have known he’d be alone in total darkness by the time he finished his run around the lake. And both of them knew how dangerous the park was after dark. Why had he gone? Why had he risked it? But she knew the answer to those questions, too. Even if he’d thought about it, he’d have finished his run. That was one of the things she loved about him, that he always finished whatever he started.

Books he didn’t like, but finished anyway.

Rocks that looked easy to climb, but turned out to be almost impossible to scale. Almost, but not quite.

“Well, why couldn’t you have quit just once?” she’d whispered as she peered out into the darkness of that evening four days after he’d died. “Why couldn’t you just once have said ‘This is really stupid,’ and turned around and come home?” But he hadn’t, and she knew that even if the thought had occurred to him, he still would have finished what he set out to do. That was when anger had first begun to temper her grief, and though the anger brought guilt along with it, she also knew that it was the anger rather than the grief that had let her keep functioning during those first terrible weeks after her life had been torn apart. Now, more than half a year later, the anger was finally beginning to give way to something else, something she couldn’t yet quite identify. The first shock of Brad’s death was over. The turmoil of emotions—the first numbness brought on by the shock of his death, followed by the grief, then the anger—was finally starting to settle down. As each day had crept inexorably by, she had slowly begun to deal with the new reality of her life. She was by herself now, with two children to raise, and no matter how much she might sometimes wish she could just disappear into the same grave into which Brad now lay, she also knew she loved her children every bit as much as she had loved their father.

No matter how she felt, their lives would go on, and so would hers. So she’d gone back to work at the antique shop, and done her best to help her children begin healing from wounds the loss of their father had caused. There had been just enough money in their savings account to keep them afloat for a few months, but last week she had withdrawn the last of it, and next week the rent was due. Her financial resources had sunk even lower than those of her emotions.