The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

The TPF cop pushed the canvas sack in front of them. “Not that it would stop anything,” he whispered. “A million bucks, and a bullet would go through it like shit through an open window.”

  The firing stopped, but Miskowsky waited for a full minute before raising his head. The TPF cop was peering curiously over the sack at the rear of the car.

  “What do we do now?” Miskowsky whispered. “You feel like getting up and walking into that firepower?”

  “Hell, no,” the TPF cop said. “We don’t move until we find out what’s going on. Christ, lying in all this shit, I’ll never get my uniform clean.”

  With the shooting stopped, the tunnel seemed twice as dark as before, the silence more profound. Miskowsky, keeping low behind the soft bulwark of the bag, was grateful for both.

  RYDER

  As Ryder started down the aisle, the passengers, following him with glazed eyes, seemed stunned by the violence of the gunfire. At the rear, the window of the storm door had collapsed. Welcome stood facing it, half exposed to the tunnel, his feet braced on the floor in a litter of shattered glass. The muzzle of his gun, poking through the empty window, moved in a slow circle, probing the tunnel like the feeler of some malevolent insect. Steever, sitting on the isolated seat, looked relaxed, but Ryder could see that he had been hit. There was a dark wet patch on his right sleeve, just below the shoulder.

  He paused in front of Steever and looked down at him inquiringly.

  “Not too bad,” Steever said. “I think it went right through and came out.”

  “How many shots?”

  “Just one. I let go a few rounds.” He tapped the gun lying across his lap. “Couldn’t see nothing out there, so there wasn’t no sense to shooting. I guess I got mad. Then this one”—he nodded minimally toward Welcome—“he come running down and ripped off a burst.”

  Ryder nodded and edged up beside Welcome. Through the glassless door the tunnel was still and shadowy, an underground forest of dun-colored pillars. There were men out there, but they were perfectly concealed.

  He eased back from the opening. Welcome was quivering with tension, and his breathing was shallow and rapid.

  “You left your post without orders,” Ryder said. “Get back to the center of the car.”

  Welcome said, “Fuck yourself.”

  “Go back to your post.”

  Welcome whirled suddenly, and whether by intention or not, the muzzle of his gun touched Ryder’s chest. Then the pressure increased, and through the material of his raincoat he could feel the hollow ring of the bore, but he didn’t shift his eyes. He kept them level, focused on Welcome’s, glowing darkly in the slits of his mask.

  “Go back to your post,” Ryder said again.

  “Shit on your orders,” Welcome said, but Ryder knew, whether by the intonation of his voice or some subtle change in the intensity of his eyes, that he was backing down. In another moment, Welcome lowered the gun. The confrontation was over. For now.

  Welcome brushed by him and strode stiff-legged to the center of the car. Ryder waited until he took up his position overlooking the passengers, then looked out at the tunnel. Nothing moved. He turned away and sat down beside Steever.

  “You’re certain there was just a single shot?”

  Steever nodded.

  “No answer after you fired? Or after Welcome fired?”

  “Just the one shot, that’s all.”

  “Somebody got nervous or foolish,” Ryder said. “I don’t think there’ll be any more trouble. Can you handle the gun?”

  “I handled it, didn’t I? It hurts a little, not much.”

  “It was just some individual stupidity,” Ryder said, “but we can’t let it pass.”

  “I’m not mad anymore,” Steever said.

  “It isn’t a question of being mad. We have to keep our promise. Everything depends on their believing we mean what we say.”

  “Knock off a passenger?” Steever said.

  “Yes. You want to pick one out?”

  Steever shrugged. “They’re all the same to me.”

  Ryder bent toward the wound. Blood was seeping slowly through the torn cloth of the raincoat. “As soon as it’s done, I’ll take a look at your shoulder. Okay with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll send one back. Can you handle it?”

  “I’m fine,” Steever said. “Send him back.”

  Ryder got up and walked to the center of the car. Which one? The old lady wino was probably the least loss to the world…. No. It wasn’t his business to make moral judgments, just to designate a casualty.

  “You.” He pointed at random. “Come here, please.”

  “Me?” A wavering finger touched a chest.

  “Yes,” Ryder said, “you.”

  DENNY DOYLE

  Denny Doyle was daydreaming. He was driving a subway train, but on a very strange line. It was underground, all right, but it had scenery—trees and lakes and hills, all of it bathed in bright sunlight as it flashed by. There were stations, with people standing on them—these were underground, only the track between stations was out-of-doors—but he wasn’t required to make any stops. It was a perfect ride, the controller up against the post, all signals green, so that he never once had to touch the brake.

  The pleasant daydream dissolved with the first shattering shot from the roadbed, and when the machine gun fired, Denny hunched his shoulders and pulled his head into their shelter. When he saw the wetness on the blue cloth of the heavy man’s raincoat, he almost became sick. He couldn’t stand the sight of blood, or, for that matter, of any kind of violence, except for the football games on TV, where you couldn’t hear the ugly impact of flesh on flesh. If the truth had to be told, he was a physical coward, an unnatural sin for an Irishman.

  At first, when the leader of the hijackers pointed, he was going to refuse to get up, but he was afraid to disobey. He stood up on trembling legs, aware that all the passengers were looking at him. His legs were rubbery, and that gave him the idea of purposely collapsing, so that the leader, seeing how helpless he was, would tell him to sit down again. But he was afraid the leader would see through it and get angry. So he moved toward the center of the car with the help of the straps. When the straps ended, he reached for one of the center poles and held onto it with both hands, looking upward into the gray eyes that showed through the leader’s mask.

  “Motorman, we have something for you to do.”

  Denny’s mouth and throat were filled with wetness, and he had to swallow twice before he could speak. “Please don’t do anything to me.”

  “Come along with me,” the leader said.

  Denny clung to the pole. “It isn’t just me. I have a wife and five kids. My wife is sick, she’s in and out of the hospital—”

  “Stop worrying.” The leader nudged Denny away from the pole. “They want you to move those nine cars back there when the power comes on.”

  He took Denny’s arm and walked him to the rear of the car. The heavy man stood up to meet them. Denny averted his eyes from the bloody sleeve.

  “Walk back to the cab of the first car,” the leader said, “and wait for instructions from Command Center. I’ll help you down to the track.”

  Denny stared into the leader’s eyes. They were expressionless, as he was sure the man’s face would be, too, if it was visible. He watched the leader slide back the storm door with its shattered window.

  Denny hung back. “The controls,” he said. “How can I work the train without the keys and the brake handle?”

  “They’re sending a full set of tools.”

  “I hate to use somebody else’s brake handle. You know, every motorman has his own brake handle—”

  “You’ll have to make do.” For the first time there was a note of impatience in the leader’s voice. “Let’s go, please.”

  Denny stepped closer to the door, then stopped. “I can’t do it. I’ll have to go past the trainmaster’s body. I can’t look at it….”

  “Just shut
your eyes,” the leader said. He changed his position and edged Denny onto the threshold plate.

  Out of nowhere, Denny suddenly remembered the joke he had made when they first started doing the mass in English: “If that’s all the whole thing is about, I never would have started in the first place.” Was he to be punished for that harmless joke? God, dear God, I didn’t mean it. Get me out of this and I’ll be Your most devout and worshipful servant. Never another joke—though I didn’t mean any disrespect by it. Never a sin, never a lie, never an impious thought. Oh, dear God, nothing but goodness, faith, belief….

  “Swing down,” the leader said.

  ANITA LEMOYNE

  In the instant before the hijack leader lifted his finger to point, Anita Lemoyne experienced an intimation of her own mortality—a phrase she had picked up from the TV putz, who used it a lot after he got his rocks off. She lost her concentration on the Latin lover, and her eyes began a kind of nervous shuttling from the square broad cuddling her two boys to the old wino with her encrustation of filth and scabs, with the milky eyes and slack lips opening and closing over her gummy mouth. Jesus!

  Intimations of mortality. Not meaning death, exactly, but the knowledge that one of these days her body would thicken, her boobs would droop, her skin would go slack, and that would be the end of high-priced tricking. She had turned out at the age of fourteen, and she was almost thirty now, and it was time she thought of the future. The square mama and the lady wino. They were two forks up ahead in the road she was traveling. The wino was a living death, anybody could see that. But what about the fat little mama, snug as a bug in a cramped spick-and-span apartment, buying her clothes at the cut-rate stores, doing motionless fucking now and then with the same man, cleaning, cooking, wiping the snot off of her kids’ faces? Two fates worse than death. Maybe it was high time she started saving up her bread so she could open up a little shop, a boutique that would cater to the girls in the life. The way whores spent their money it could be a real good thing. The way they spent. The way she spent! Between her apartment and her clothes and her bar bills and the crazy way she tipped…. The leader’s eyes came to rest on the motorman, poor bastard, and his finger pointed.

  Intimations of mortality!

  Frightened, her eyes sought out the Latin creep. He was laughing at the way the motorman was walking, supporting himself with the help of the straps. Never mind him, she thought, look at me, look at me. As if he had heard, he turned toward her. She held his eyes and gave him a big smile, then dropped her eyes and stared boldly at his middle. Almost at once his raincoat began to make a tent. Thank God, Anita thought. If I can get that kind of a reaction out of a man just by looking at him, I don’t have too much to worry about yet.

  Intimations of mortality, my big white ass!

  SERGEANT MISKOWSKY

  “What are we supposed to do,” Miskowsky said, “start walking like nothing happened?” Behind the money bag, his cheek was pressed to the filthy roadbed.

  “Goddamn if I know,” the TPF cop said. “Whoever fired that first shot is going to have his ass in a sling, I’ll bet on that.”

  “So what do we do?” Miskowsky said.

  “I’m just a patrolman. You’re the sergeant. So what do we do?”

  “I ain’t your sergeant. Anyway, what’s a sergeant with all this brass around? I want orders before I move.”

  The TPF cop was up on his elbows, looking over the top of the canvas bag. “There’s somebody at the door there. See? Two guys. No, three.”

  The sergeant peered around the edge of the bag. “They just opened the storm door, and they’re talking or something.” He stiffened. “Look—one of them just jumped out on the roadbed.”

  Miskowsky watched the shadowy figure straighten up, look back at the car, face about again, and then slowly, almost in a shuffle, start walking.

  “He’s heading this way.” Miskowsky’s whisper was hoarse. “Better get your gun ready. He’s heading straight for us.”

  Miskowsky, focused on the walking figure, never saw the looming shape in the open doorway. There was a flashing stab of brightness, and the walking figure reached upward and then crumpled. The tunnel repeated the shots in a series of echoes.

  “My God,” Miskowsky said. “It’s war.”

  TOM BERRY

  When the motorman started walking toward the rear of the car Tom Berry shut his eyes and flagged down a taxi—what else, for God’s sake, a subway train?—and whipped downtown to Deedee’s slope-floor Caligari pad.

  “There was nothing I could do about it, absolutely nothing,” he said as she opened the door.

  Deedee pulled him inside and threw her arms around him in a frenzy of relief and passion.

  “All I could think of was: I’m glad it’s the motorman and not me.”

  She was kissing his face wildly, her lips taking inventory of his eyes, cheeks, nose, and then she was dragging him to the bed, tearing at his clothes, at her own.

  Later, when they lay exhausted, their limbs entwined like an indecipherable monogram, he tried again to explain himself. “I threw off the shackles of servitude to a false master and saved myself for the revolution.”

  Suddenly, her skin surface cooled perceptibly. “You sat there with a loaded revolver in your belt and did nothing?”

  She disengaged her arms and legs, dissolving the monogram. “Traitor! You were sworn to uphold the rights of the people, and you betrayed them.”

  “But, Deedee, they outnumbered me four to one; they had submachine guns.”

  “During the Long March, the Eighth Route Army faced the Kuomintang’s machine guns with knives, stones, even clenched fists.”

  “I’m not the Eighth Route Army, Deedee. I’m just one lone pig. The reactionary bandits would have shot me dead if I had twitched a muscle.”

  He reached out for her, and she leaped off the bed in a spasm of revulsion. Pointing a quivering finger, she said, “You are a coward.”

  “No, Deedee. Dialectically, I declined to lay my life down to protect the money and property of the ruling interests.”

  “The people’s rights were being trampled on. You violated your solemn oath as a police officer to protect those rights!”

  “The police are the repressive tentacle of the capitalist octopus,” he shouted. “They pull the chestnuts of the ruling class out of the fire of contradiction over the prostrate body of the workers and peasants. Off the pigs!”

  “You failed your duty. It’s people like you who have given the pigs a bad name!”

  “Deedee! What has happened to your Weltanschauung?” He held his arms out pleadingly. She withdrew to the farthest corner of the room, where she took her stand ankle-deep in record albums. “Deedee! Comrade! Brother!”

  “The Provisional People’s Court has weighed your case, Comrade Ratfink.” She whirled suddenly, picked up his gun, and pointed it at him. “The verdict is death!”

  She fired, and the room disintegrated. The motorman was dead.

  BOROUGH COMMANDER

  A Special Operations Division sniper in the tunnel reported the shooting. The borough commander’s first reaction was bewilderment, even before anger.

  “I don’t get it,” he said to the commissioner. “We’re still under the delivery deadline.”

  The commissioner was pale. “They’ve gone ape. I thought we could trust them at least to stick to their own rules.”

  The borough commander remembered the rest of the sniper’s message. “Somebody threw a shot at them. That’s it. Reprisal. They’re sticking to their rules, all right, the fucking cold-blooded monsters.”

  “Who fired the shot?”

  “I doubt we’ll ever know. A SOD sniper in the tunnel said it sounded like a pistol shot.”

  The commissioner said, “They don’t fool around. They’re merciless.”

  “That’s what they’re telling us. The message of this killing is that they’re men of their word, and we’d better act accordingly.”

  “Where are the
two men with the money?”

  “The sniper says they’re about fifteen feet away from him. They hit the deck when the machine gun went off, and they’re still there.”

  The commissioner nodded. “What’s your next move?”

  My next move, the borough commander thought, but knew that he wouldn’t have liked it any better—in fact, liked it less—if the commissioner had given him an order. “There are sixteen hostages left, that’s still the prime consideration.”

  “Yes,” the commissioner said.

  The borough commander excused himself, and, taking the walkie-talkie, spoke to DCI Daniels on Pelham One Two Eight, instructing him to contact the hijackers through Command Center and inform them that the ransom money would be on its way again, but that more time was needed because of the delay owing to the recent incident.

  “You hear all that?” the borough commander said. “You ever hear a cop kowtow to murderers like that before?”

  “Easy,” the commissioner said.

  “Easy. They call a tune, and we dance to it. An army of cops, with guns and grenade launchers and computers, and we suck their ass. Two citizens killed, and we still suck ass—”

  “Cool it!” the commissioner said sharply.

  The borough commander looked at him and read a mirror reflection of his own anger and misery. “Sorry, sir.”

  “All right. Maybe we’ll have a shot at them later on.”

  “Maybe,” the borough commander said. “But I’ll tell you something, sir—after this I’ll never be the same man again. I’ll never be as good a cop.”

  “Cool it,” the commissioner said.

  ARTIS JAMES

  The man who gunned down the motorman was the one Artis James had hit or thought he had hit. He didn’t connect the two events; at least, not yet. He had been hugging his pillar ever since the machine-gun fire responded to his shot, and it was coincidence that he took his first peek just as the motorman—he could make out the pinstripe overalls—was climbing down to the roadbed. When the man in the doorway fired, Artis ducked again. By the time he thought it was safe to take another look the motorman was a motionless hulk lying three or four feet away from the other motionless hulk that used to be the trainmaster.