The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  Slipping the belt around Longman and tying it, Ryder was almost overpowered by the stink of vomit and terror. But he worked methodically, feeling Longman’s sweat-soaked body trembling under his touch. When the jacket was secure, he buttoned up Longman’s coat.

  Steever said conversationally, “The train blew good.”

  “Yes,” Ryder said. He looked Longman over. “All right. I think we’re ready to go upstairs.”

  BOROUGH COMMANDER

  “That short move they made to Union Square,” the borough commander said. “It wasn’t in the script. It’s got me worried.”

  They were speeding downtown, the siren wide open, traffic scurrying out of their way toward the curb.

  The commissioner was pursuing a path of his own. “They know we can follow every move the train makes. They know we’re covering them every inch of the way on the surface. But it doesn’t seem to bother them. They can’t possibly be that stupid, so they may be very clever.”

  “Yes,” the borough commander said. “That’s what I’ve got in mind. The move to Union Square. They said they did it to get away from the police staked out in the tunnel. How come?”

  “They don’t like policemen.”

  “They knew we were in the tunnel before, and didn’t seem to mind. Why now?”

  The borough commander paused for so long an interval that the commissioner said impatiently, “Well, why?”

  “This time they didn’t want us to see what they were doing.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “They don’t care that we’re following them—right? In fact, stretching the point, you could say they want us to follow them all the way downtown—right?”

  “Stop dragging it out,” the commissioner said. “If you have a theory, spit it out.”

  “My theory,” the borough commander said, “is that they aren’t on the train.”

  “That’s what I thought your theory was. But how can the train move if they’re not on it?”

  “That’s the catch. Except for that, it makes sense. The whole pursuit flows south, but they stay near Union Square and pop up through an emergency exit. How about this—three get off and one stays on to drive the train?”

  “A selfless criminal, sacrificing himself for the others? Did you ever meet a criminal like that, Charlie?”

  “No,” the borough commander said. “A more logical tack—suppose they figured out some way to make the train go with nobody in the cab?”

  “If they did that,” the commissioner said, “they’re dead ducks. Daniels is following on the express track. He would spot them.”

  “Maybe not. They might be able to conceal themselves until he went by.” He shook his head. “That short move. That unexpected move.”

  “Well?” the commissioner said. “You want to play your hunch?”

  “Yes sir,” the borough commander said. “With your permission.” The commissioner nodded. The borough commander leaned forward to the driver. “Next corner,” he said. “Turn off and head back to Union Square.”

  The radio broke in. “Sir. The motorman of DCI Daniels’ train has reported that they were blown off the track. By an explosive placed on the track.”

  The commissioner asked about casualties and was told that one policeman was hurt, not seriously. “That was the purpose of the short move,” he said to the borough commander. “They didn’t want anybody around when they mined the track.”

  “Never mind the turn,” the borough commander said to the driver. “Go on as you were.”

  OLD MAN

  The old man, calling on ancient memory, activating disused impulses, held up his hand (that famous hand that once was a scepter, demanding obedience at home, subservience in the shop) and said, “Quiet down. Everybody quiet down a minute.”

  He paused to savor the thrill of the faces turned to him, to the Authority. But before he could speak again, he had lost them. The big man, the theater critic, had lumbered forward and was trying to turn the recessed handle of the cab door. Then he began to pound on the door with his fist. The door rattled but remained firmly shut. The big man stopped, turned abruptly, and went back to his seat. They were entering a station. Bleecker Street? Maybe Spring Street by now, he couldn’t read the signs. Several passengers had their windows down, and they were screaming for help at the crowd on the platform. The crowd shouted back angrily. Someone threw a folded newspaper that hit the window, spread open, and bounced back onto the platform in a shower of pages.

  “My friends….” The old man stood up and reached for a metal strap. “My friends, the situation is not so bad as it looks.”

  The black man gave a snorting laugh into his bloody handkerchief (my handkerchief, the old man thought), but the rest became attentive.

  “In the first place, we don’t have to worry about those bastards no more.” Three, four faces turned apprehensively toward the cab door. The old man smiled. “As the young lady pointed out, the bastards are off the train. Good-bye and good luck.”

  “Then who’s driving it?”

  “Nobody. Some way, they got it started.”

  “We’ll all be killed!” An agonized scream from the mother of the boys.

  “Not so,” the old man said. “I admit that right now we are on a runaway train, but only temporary. Purely temporary.”

  The car entered a curve and careened wildly, the wheel flanges grinding, bumping, as they resisted the pull of the car to follow the curve off the tracks. The passengers swayed, fell against one another. The old man, clinging desperately to the strap, was half lifted from the floor. The black man reached out a bloody hand and steadied him. The train straightened out.

  “Thank you,” the old man said.

  The black man ignored him. Leaning across the aisle, he pointed his finger at the two black errand boys. Their faces were ashy. “Brothers, you have got one last chance to be men.”

  The boys looked at each other in bewilderment, and one of them said, “Man, what you talking about?”

  “Be black men, brothers. Show these honkies you are a man. The worst that can happen to you is death.”

  Softly, his voice barely rising over the noises of the train, the boy said, “That’s worst enough.”

  The girl in the Anzac hat came halfway out of her seat. “Stop all this bullshit, ferchrisesake, and bust down that door, somebody.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” The old man held up his hand. “If you’ll only listen to me. I happen to know something about the subway, and I tell you it’s not too much to worry about.”

  He smiled confidently as the passengers turned to him again, anxious but hopeful—the way his sons would look when they asked him for a new ball glove, the way his employees sued for assurance that, depression or no depression, nobody would be fired.

  “Trippers,” he said. “The safest railroad in the world, like they call it. They got these things on the track, trippers. Whenever a train goes through a red light, the trippers come up, automatically, and stop the train!” He looked around him in triumph. “So. Soon we will run into a red light, the trippers will come up, and presto! the train will stop.”

  GRAND CENTRAL TOWER

  “Pelham One Two Three is now passing Canal Street station. Still proceeding at the same speed.”

  In the reverberant stillness of the Tower Room, hushed except for Mrs. Jenkins’ voice, Marino savored the unhurried, professional steadiness of his tone.

  “I read you,” the NYPD dispatcher said. “Keep talking.”

  “Roger,” Marino said crisply. “Four more stations, and then they’re at South Ferry.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  TOM BERRY

  With the first impact of the explosion, Tom Berry curled into the fetal position and sustained another minor injury in the process. His knee struck against a heavy object and went numb. Nursing his knee, he raised his head an inch or two and saw one of the hijackers lying on the roadbed. It was the lover boy, and Berry concluded that the explosion had felled him. Th
en he saw the leader slapping at his coat and realized that the explosion had been something separate, that the leader had shot the lover through the pocket of his coat.

  Suddenly, with wild hope, Berry remembered the object his knee had struck. He patted the grimy floor frantically, and found his gun.

  He rolled over on his stomach, still in the shelter of the pillar, and propped the short barrel of the .38 on his left wrist. He looked for the leader through the sight, but he had disappeared. Then he picked him up. He was bending over the figure of the lover. Berry heard him fire and saw the lover’s head jerk. The leader unbuttoned the lover’s jacket and removed something from the body. It was the money belt. Berry watched him slip it onto the small man’s shoulders and tie it in place.

  He was having trouble with his vision. He shut his eyes for a moment, squeezing them hard to rupture the film that obscured them. When he opened his eyes, the little man was disappearing through the break in the tunnel wall, and the heavy man was right behind him. Berry put his sight on the broad back of the heavy man and squeezed off. He saw the heavy man convulse and then topple backward in a crushing fall. He shifted the revolver quickly to find the leader, but the leader was gone.

  ANITA LEMOYNE

  Anita Lemoyne swayed to the front of the car. Behind her, the old man, the self-made prophet, was still holding forth. Anita braced herself against the sway of the car and looked through the window. The tracks, the tunnel, the posts, were swept up in the rush of the train as if by some powerful vacuum cleaner. A station whipped by, an oasis of light, crowds of people. Two names. Brooklyn Bridge-Worth Street? Three or four more to South Ferry, the last stop. And then what?

  “I never knew these things went so fast.”

  The theater critic was standing behind her, a towering man, rumpled, wheezing, as if supporting his weight was an effort. His face was tinted with a booze flush, his eyes were blue, combining innocence and knowingness. Which meant, Anita thought, that the innocence was for show, the knowingness couldn’t quite be concealed.

  “Are you afraid?” he said.

  “You heard the old guy. He knows the subway. He says.”

  “I just wondered…” His eyes more innocent than ever, he brushed up against her lightly. “Did you ever work in the theater?”

  Men. Well, it helped pass the time. “Two years.”

  “I thought so.” The wheezing stopped. “I see so much, but I knew I had seen you in a theater. I wonder where.”

  “You ever been in Cleveland, Ohio?”

  “Sure. You worked there?”

  “The little Gem Theater? I worked in that theater. Usher and sell popcorn.”

  “You’re joking.”

  He laughed and used the sway of the train to give her a solid bump in the ass. Out of habit, automatically, she returned a little grind, and it started him wheezing again.

  “Who would joke at a time like this? We could all be dead in five minutes’ time.”

  He backed off. “You don’t believe the old man? About the red signal stopping us?”

  “Sure I believe him.” She pointed a finger at the window. “I’m looking for the red signals. But all I see is green.”

  She backed her butt into him and gave it some pressure. Why not? It might be the last time ever. She arched her back and felt him rise to the occasion. Letting him have a joggle or two to keep him interested, she continued to watch the dismal flying landscape. They sailed past Fulton Street and back into the tunnel. Ahead, as far as she could see, the signals were all bright green.

  TA PATROLMAN ROTH

  Patrolman Harry Roth phoned headquarters as soon as the train flashed by the Fulton Street station.

  “She just whizzed by.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “Listen. You want to know something funny?”

  “Some other time.”

  “No. I mean it. You know what? I didn’t see anybody driving the train.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t see anybody in the cab. The front window is busted out, I think, and nobody is in the cab. I was right at the edge of the platform, and I still didn’t see anybody. I’m sorry, that’s what I saw.”

  “Don’t you know trains can’t drive all by themselves, because of the deadman’s feature?”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “You really thought there was nobody in the cab?”

  “Maybe he was bending down.”

  “Oh, bending down. Over and out.”

  “I know what I saw,” Patrolman Roth said to himself. “If he don’t believe me, fuck him. I’m sorry.”

  RYDER

  The pillar was a defensible position, but defense was not one of Ryder’s options. The man who fired the shot had to be killed, quickly, if he was to make it back to the emergency exit.

  He had acted instinctively when the shot was fired, sensing that he couldn’t get by Steever’s body and into the emergency exit without drawing a second shot, and so had taken off on a crouching run across the tracks to the shelter of the pillar. The shot had come from the south, and since he had seen no one on the roadbed, the assumption was that the enemy, too, was hidden behind a pillar. He wasted no effort speculating on the enemy’s identity or in self-recrimination. Both were irrelevant. Whether he was a cop or the passenger Steever thought might have jumped from the train did not affect the problem, which was to dispose of him.

  He glanced at the exit. Longman was framed in the opening, staring at him. He pointed at him urgently, then pantomimed climbing, a series of rising handover-hand gestures. Longman still stared. He repeated the gestures decisively. Longman hesitated for another moment, then turned toward the ladder. Steever lay where he had fallen. He had crashed onto his back with a shattering force that might have cracked his spine even if the bullet had not done so. His eyes were open, moving in his expressionless face, and Ryder was certain that he was paralyzed.

  He put both men out of his mind and returned to his problem. The enemy knew precisely where he was, and he knew only in a rough way where the enemy was. The solution was to flush out the enemy’s position, and there was no way of doing it except by taking what would otherwise be an imprudent risk. He checked his automatic, then, deliberately, stepped out from the shelter of the pillar. The shot rang out at once, and Ryder fired at the muzzle flash. He fired twice more before drawing back into the shelter of the post. He strained for some sound, but heard nothing.

  He had no way of knowing if he had scored a hit, and now he must pile risk upon risk. The enemy would not be fooled by the same trick again, and there was no time for maneuver. He stepped out from behind his pillar and ran forward to the next one. No shot. Either he had hit the enemy, or the enemy was waiting for an unmissable shot. He ran forward to the next pillar. No shot. He had closed the distance by a third. And now he could see the enemy. He was sprawled on the track, only his legs still in the shelter of a pillar, and Ryder knew he was hurt. He didn’t know how badly—he was conscious, at least, trying to raise his head—but you didn’t expect gifts, you were satisfied with an advantage. That was what he had now, and it remained only to exploit it.

  He stepped out from behind his pillar, and walked down the center of the track toward the enemy. The enemy stretched out his right hand, and Ryder saw his gun, lying on the roadbed a few inches beyond the extended fingers. The enemy saw or heard him, and tried to crawl toward the gun but collapsed.

  It was safely beyond his reach.

  OLD MAN

  As Pelham One Two Three ran by the Wall Street station, the passengers became agitated again and crowded around the old man.

  “Where are the red lights?”

  “We’re not stopping! We’ll all be killed!”

  The young mother sent up a shrill keening sound that struck the old man to the heart. It was such a cry, sixty, sixty-five years ago, that his mother had made when his brother, her eldest child, had been struck by a trolley car.

  “It will b
e a red light,” he shouted. “It must be a red light!”

  He turned toward the girl at the front of the car. She shook her head.

  “The train will stop,” the old man said falteringly, and knew that his life was over. The others would die in an accident; he was already dead of failure.

  TOM BERRY

  The first slug had hit under Tom Berry’s upraised right arm, and his revolver flew away. The second had seemed to strike in front of him and then skid into his body, below the chest. The impact threw him to his left, onto the roadbed, where he came to rest in a wetness his mind refused to identify as his own blood.

  Losing his revolver was getting to be repetitious. Freudian? He lost it because he wanted to lose it? This time it wasn’t really lost. It lay on the roadbed in plain sight about two arm lengths away, but it might just as well be lost. He couldn’t reach it.

  He watched the leader approach—calm, unhurried, his pistol hanging down at his side. What’s his rate of speed? That’s exactly how much more time I have to live. The leader could have stopped, taken careful aim, and finished him off (after all, he was two for three from a greater distance), but, Berry thought, he was a compulsive perfectionist. He would administer the coup de grâce in the traditional way, gun to temple, as he had done with his late colleague, the lover. He could count on it being done expertly, no fuss and no muss. Just a single instant of monstrous red explosion, and after that peace. What was so good about peace? What was so fucking good about that kind of peace?

  He was sobbing when the leader paused above him, and he had a view of sensible unstylish black shoes. The leader was starting to bend. Berry shut his eyes. Will she weep for me?

  Somewhere in the tunnel, someone was shouting.

  PATROLMAN SEVERINO