“It’s locked,” came one voice. “What is this?”
“It says it’s a janitor’s closet,” said a second voice over the rustle of paper. “Big hey.”
“Who has the key?”
“Duh. The janitor?”
“Mark it with the others.”
“He’s not in there. He’s not down here. He’s probably somewheres eating dinner, which is what we would be doing if they hadn’t called us out.”
“We need the key.” The knob shook again. “It feels soft somehow.”
“They have pills for that.”
Scrbacek could feel the pressure. He gritted his teeth and pushed with his legs, and the door refused to budge.
“Something’s wrong,” said the first voice. “Help me shove.”
“I’d rather you use the pills.”
“Shut up and help me push.”
More pressure. Scrbacek’s legs began to ache, his shoulder burned. He exhaled and took a slow deep breath.
“I’m getting the key to this room.”
One set of footsteps hurried away and turned down a corridor.
“I’m getting the key to this room,” mimicked the second voice before it called out, “You know, they could have at least let us finish our steaks.”
The second set of footsteps slowly followed the first. When he thought he heard the second set turn down the corridor, Scrbacek carefully pulled the sign away from the door. As he moved it, the metal frame clanked. An army of mites crawled beneath his skin. He spent another moment listening.
Nothing.
He checked the phone. Four minutes and fifty-four seconds. Fifty-three seconds. Fifty-two seconds. It was getting late. He was running out of time. With no choice, he carefully pulled open the door and stuck out his head.
The hallway was empty. Scrbacek crept out of the doorway, closing it silently behind him. To the right, the way the footsteps had gone, was the casino and the boardwalk and the sea. East. He turned to his left, kept close to the wall, and began his way to the exit.
“Hey, you,” he heard being called from behind him. “You the janitor?”
Scrbacek turned around but kept walking, backward. A short chubby man in a cable-knit sweater stood at where the hallway turned a corner, a badly folded blueprint in his hand. “Yeah,” said Scrbacek. “But I’m just off shift.”
“We’re looking for some keys,” called the man, taking a step forward, his round buttery face tilted now at an angle.
“You got to find the supervisor,” said Scrbacek, still walking backward, his arms wide. “I can’t help you. Sorry. I’m off shift.”
The man took another step forward.
Scrbacek checked the phone in his hand. Four minutes and twenty-three seconds. Twenty-two seconds.
“You in a hurry for some reason?” said the man as he began walking toward Scrbacek, matching Scrbacek’s pace. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Actually, I got a hot date waiting on me. Maybe later.”
“Not later. Now. Stop,” said the man, speeding up into a slow run, throwing down the blueprint, hopping awkwardly on one foot for a moment as he pulled a silver revolver from beneath the cuff of his pants.
“No time,” shouted Scrbacek, and then he was off, sprinting down the hall, away.
“Hey, Bert,” shouted the man as he pursued. “We got him. We got the bastard.”
Scrbacek heard the pounding of footsteps behind him and then the brutal shout of the pistol. On the wall to Scrbacek’s left, an explosive puff of powder.
Southwest corner, southwest. That’s what Aboud had said. At the far end of the hallway was a T. Scrbacek knew he had to go left, and fast. He sprinted toward it, madly, his boots slipping on the smooth linoleum. He faked a move to the right and then dived left, sliding on the floor for a moment before he picked himself up. As he was diving, he glanced down the hallway he had come from and could see the short pudgy man running, his butter face red with effort, and behind him a taller man rushing forward, hauling an absurdly large rifle.
The hallway before him was long, with doors on either side. At the far end, it turned to the right with a sign on the wall, pointing in that direction, saying EMERGENCY EXIT. He didn’t think he could make it to the exit before the men chasing him turned the corner, and there were almost three minutes left now, too much time for him to risk a mad dash to the door. He’d set off the alarm, be too early for his ride, they’d come crawling out of the casino, bullets would fly.
There was a door on his right. He stopped to try it. Locked. There was a door on his left. He dashed to it and spun the knob. His hand slipped. The charging footsteps grew closer. He spun the knob again, and the door opened and he jumped inside, shutting the door behind him.
He was on a large iron grate, part of a catwalk that surrounded the upper third of a cavernous room suffused with an unnatural heat. From the grate, a set of metal stairs led to the floor twenty feet below, where four massive boilers, like four huge insects, squatted, each boiler fitted with valves and controls, wide tubes snaking from their bodies and shooting into the walls. It was as if whatever power drove the casino was supplied by these giant insects, burning oil, money, and hope as they maintained the building’s gross bodily functions.
He had no time to explore the lower depths of this room. A glance at the timer on the phone showed he had about two minutes left to catch his ride. Outside the door, he could hear his pursuers pass by. They would go to the exit, see that it hadn’t been opened, then come back checking each of the doors, looking for him.
There was a wooden wedge, to keep the door open, hanging from the inside doorknob. Three hard hats hung on a rack behind the door, along with a clipboard. A large sign held a cartoon of a man smacking his bare head against a metal beam with the words writ large: SAFETY FIRST!
He took the wedge off the knob and placed it on the floor just a few feet from the back wall, securing it with his foot. He grabbed one of the hats off the rack and spun it like a wobbly Frisbee. It clattered off the top of a boiler and clanked down onto the floor.
They had to have heard that.
He took another and did the same, throwing this one farther, and then grabbed the third hard hat before scooting to the wall, behind the door, which banged open suddenly, jamming into the wedge, and missing his nose by half an inch. The second hard hat was still rattling in the far corner of the room.
“We got him,” said one of the men as he charged down the stairs. “You stay up here on the walk, go around the other side and sight him out.”
“He’s our meat, Bert,” said the other man. “Meat.”
Scrbacek could hear their footsteps, one moving down the stairs, the other circling the room on the catwalk. He peeked his head out from behind the door, saw the chubby man with the butter face slide across the catwalk, his gun held in two hands, pointed down toward the far corner of the room. The other man, the man with the rifle, was somewhere on the floor, out of Scrbacek’s sight.
It wasn’t quite right, they weren’t in perfect position, but Scrbacek didn’t have any more time. He glanced at the phone, took a breath, and then spun the last of the hard hats toward the back wall.
It flew through the air like an ungainly bird, tipping to the right and then diving behind one of the great insectival boilers. The instant it hit, there was a barrage of explosions, from the catwalk and the floor, accompanied by the singing of lead bouncing off concrete.
Subsumed by the repeated roar of gunfire was a set of quick, stealthy footsteps fleeing the room.
Down the hall, he turned the corner, stopping at the emergency exit with the large red panel spanned by white letters proclaiming ALARM WILL SOUND.
He checked the phone. Nine seconds. Eight seconds. Seven seconds. He took a deep breath. Six seconds. Five seconds. He heard something furious charge behind him, but by now he didn’t care.
He crashed through the door, sounding the alarm, felt the slap of the fresh evening air upon his face, bound
ed up the stairs, four steps at a time, spun around a landing, more bounding.
The sound of shouting, the report of a gun.
At street level there was the cacophonous rush of running from all about him, but he didn’t look fore and aft. Instead, he darted directly toward the large maroon Lincoln Town Car that was cruising along slowly, just in front of the exit, the car’s rear door open.
He dived through the car’s open door. The hump of the floor slammed into his side as the car door shut. From the floor he could feel the car accelerating smoothly into the stream of traffic, before taking a hard left, which meant it was now speeding west, heading for the heart of Crapstown.
“Thanks for stopping by,” said Scrbacek as he pulled himself up and onto the car’s large bench seat.
“It’s good to see you so prompt,” said Aboud from the front passenger seat.
Scrbacek sat back in the leather, closed his eyes, felt the great clench of his muscles ease.
“You said you was at that casino on business,” said Aboud. “What kind of business?”
“Let’s get someplace quiet, away from everything,” said Scrbacek, his eyes still closed, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Good idea. Someplace away from everything. That’s just where we’re going.”
There was something in Aboud’s voice, a catch of anger. Scrbacek opened his eyes, and his heart stopped. The little man was turned in his seat, pointing the large black Zastava at Scrbacek’s ribs.
“What the hell?”
“I got to tell you, I’m sorry about this, Scrbacek. I like you, I do. You got pluck.”
“Like chicken,” said Sergei from behind the wheel.
“No, Sergei,” said Aboud. “You pluck chickens, chickens don’t have pluck.”
“This English is like bad puzzle.”
“And you don’t have no nuns smacking your knuckles when you get it wrong. So, Scrbacek, like I said, I’m sorry about this, but there’s a load of unhappiness about what is happening. You know, for a lot of us, the only way out was the bus terminal, and now it’s gone.”
“The terminal?”
“Gone, poof. Burned to the ground, and six dead besides. Mostly hoods, granted, but still. Word is you set the whole thing up, called in the police, everything.”
“I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t . . .”
“You see, Scrbacek, some of us don’t know how long we can survive with you running around like you are.”
“What is expression?” said Sergei. “A chicken running like man with nothing on his head?”
“What’s this with you and chickens all of a sudden?” said Aboud. “If you’re hungry or something, we’ll stop at a Popeyes.”
“I okay, boss.”
“What are you going to do to me?” said Scrbacek.
“If it was my decision,” said Aboud, “I’d drive you up to Newark myself, put you on a plane to like Rio or something. They got some nice-looking broads in Rio. I had a Brazilian girl dancing at the club once. Pretty girl. Black teeth, which was a shame, but pretty girl.”
“The Brazilian Firecracker,” said Sergei.
“But, see, it’s not up to me.”
“Who’s it up to? DeLoatch? You in with DeLoatch, you bastard?”
“What, the criminal attorney? Why would I be in with him? No, I have orders from the Inner Circle. I got to take you in.”
“Where?”
“To the underworld, pal. The Inner Circle, it needs to figure whether it’s better for everyone if you live or you die.”
“And how are they going to decide that?”
“How the hell do you think?” said Aboud. “They’re putting you on trial.”
47
OYEZ, OYEZ
A great cavern deep underground, a space long forgotten, damp, foul, surviving from a time of cold war, when signs in every school taught children to duck and cover at first glimpse of the white-hot light, when good honest folk stocked their basements with canned goods and vats of Coca-Cola, when great thinkers in the Pentagon believed battalions could be saved by burying themselves in bunkers far beneath the surface of the earth, awaiting only the all clear to rise from the depths and beat back the communist hordes. But now capitalism worldwide reigns triumphant, the Russian bear has collapsed, the battalions have been sent to a division in the south, the entrances to the nuclear bunkers have all been sealed with cement, and what is left of the hysteria and fear is this great cavern deep underground, a space long forgotten, damp, foul.
The air is fetid and warm, the stench of sewage a marker of the huge leaking pipes that run above the cavern’s roof on their path to the sea. At the edges of the vast cement floor, now cracked and uneven, lie remnants of supplies brought here long ago to feed and tend an army as it awaited its moment of glory: metal barrels, cabinets rusted shut, vermin-infested mattresses, the scraps of ruined cots. At the floor’s center, forming a large circle, candles burn. The candlelight reveals shadowy figures seated outside the flickering ring, their faces hidden in darkness, a score or more of hellish silhouettes, seated on discarded pallets, on halved oil canisters, on tilting piles of obsolete army manuals. Cigarette embers glow and sputter like the eyes of Cyclopean demons.
Suddenly, from overhead, powered by pirated current, a narrow beam of light falls within the center of the circle, illuminating a large wooden crate with one word printed on its side:
FLAMMABLE
Atop the crate, within the cylinder of spinning motes and shifting smoke, stands a demented master of ceremonies. The man is short and hunched, diffident, his ears huge, his teeth bucked, his thick spectacles hiding the tenor of his eyes. His face is rent by shadow, and his hands are clasped tightly one in the other. This man is known to all those present as Squirrel. He inhales loudly, the wet rush of breath echoing through the cavernous darkness, and whatever sounds that had been filling the chamber die.
“The Court of the Furies,” says Squirrel, “is now in session.”
A loud murmur rises from outside the circle. Squirrel stands motionless on the crate until silence again fills the cavern.
“Will the defendant rise?”
From overhead, a second beam of light falls upon a broken man. He sits also within the circle of flame, in a chair, alone, behind a ragged metal table of military issue. The man’s face is bruised and swollen. A filthy bandage spans the bridge of his nose. His hands are cuffed in front of him, his calves tied tight to the chair with thick army-surplus rope. He wears torn jeans, a filthy shirt that had once been white, a raincoat, singed and torn. He looks as if he had been formed from the very grime of Crapstown. Pressing his hands upon the table, the man leverages himself to standing.
He had been dragged down to this great hole in the earth by a small Arab man with a big gun, pulled through a manhole, led with a flashlight along the great rivers of sewage, while a huge bald Russian shoved him from behind.
“The old woman calls this the River Styx,” the Arab told him as they passed along the vile stream—a thousand flushes, one atop the other, in a never-ending flow out to the sea. “More like the River Stinks, if you ask me.”
At one point the Arab’s flashlight hit upon a lump in the middle of the sewer, which on further examination proved to be a huge frog, its eyes wide with delight, its mouth open to catch the morsels drifting by. “That’s the life, hey, Sergei,” said the Arab.
“You make joke,” said the Russian in his dark accent, “but in Moscow now is every night fight for best spot in sewer.”
Prodded by the Arab and the Russian, the defendant had leaped a gap that seemed to have no bottom, had crawled through a rat-infested tunnel built originally to circulate air, and had climbed down a ladder of steel inserted long ago deep into the rock by the Army Corps of Engineers, climbed down to this cavern, where a circle of fire and dark justice awaited him.
“J.D. Scrbacek,” says Squirrel, “you have been brought before the Court of the Furies on trial for your life. The Sentinel ha
s brought this charge and will now relate to the Court the accusations leveled upon your head.”
From behind the circle of light comes a woman, huge and angry, with dreadlocks thick and a vest of black leather. She had come to the seaside a decade ago from a southern city sinking into the sea, looking for something better, and found instead Crapstown. More stubborn perhaps than smart, she made her life here among the ruins. Her name is Regina. She walks to the defendant until she is inches away from the broken man’s face and says softly, “You’re getting it now, Stifferdeck.” She smiles darkly before spinning to address the circle.
“J.D. Scrbacek, you are charged with being a spy for Caleb Breest, the murderer of Malloy. You are charged with being in league with them casino interests that seek to destroy us all. You are charged with bringing to Crapstown violence and destruction and death. You are charged with placing the fate of all Crapstown in violent jeopardy to save your own miserable skin.”
“The penalty of all these crimes,” squeals Squirrel atop his crate, “is death by”—Squirrel pauses for a moment and rubs his hands together—“dissection.”
A soft murmur from the circle, followed by distinct lines of laughter.
“J.D. Scrbacek,” says Squirrel, “how do you plead?”
“Not guilty,” says the defendant in a hoarse, defeated tone.
“Figures he’d start off by lying,” says Regina. “Why don’t we just do it now and get it over with? Why waste everybody’s time?”
A voice from the edge of the circle, a deep bass: “We doing this right.”
The light veers from Squirrel to seek the source of the voice. It is a large man wearing cook’s white, with a chef’s hat tilted on his melon head and a stained apron splattered with rendered fat. He sits on a high metal box, his figure rising above the others. In his right hand he holds a giant cleaver, which gleams in the spotlight. “We doing this by the book. Ain’t no railroad here.”
The others of the circle murmur their assent. The light moves from the huge man in white back to Squirrel.
The Four-Night Run Page 30