by Geoff Watson
“What’s happening to us?” He turned to Colby as they walked toward the information booth. Both of them were still a bit jumpy. “You’re the daredevil now, and I’m the rule follower.”
“I think that’s probably a good thing. For both of us.”
For the second time in as many days, Noodle found himself running toward the Yonkers Metro-North station. Only this time, Tom’s dad was the one panting by his side. Noodle had to hand it to him, though: the old guy could move pretty fast when he wanted to.
The two of them careened toward the station and almost collided with a snowman-shaped transit worker. Her body stretched her blue uniform to maximum capacity, and the buttons on her shirt were the exact brassy match to her cropped hair.
“Sorry,” Noodle quickly excused himself as he tried to squeeze past her.
“You’re gonna kill someone running around like that,” she said, righting her balance with an incredulous look for Tom’s dad, as if he were responsible for the boy’s dangerous disregard for pedestrian safety.
“We have to meet someone,” explained Mr. Edison with an apologetic half smile. “We’re just running a bit late, that’s all.”
“Well, whoever you’re meeting’s none of my business, but y’ain’t gonna make it. That much I can tell you.” She shook her head in a slow back and forth to emphasize her point. “I got a broken-down train south of Marble Hill. Fifty-minute backup. At least.”
“So what should we do? Catch the train out of Fleetwood?” asked Tom’s dad. He was coated in perspiration, Noodle noticed. He better not sweat off too many more calories. Mr. E’s body was already close to scarecrow territory.
The woman’s eyebrows drew up. “That, or grab a taxi to Morris Heights.”
“But … that’s halfway to Manhattan,” said Noodle. “It’ll take forever.”
“Don’t hafta tell me how far it is; I know how far it is,” she said as she waddled past them like an irritated duck.
Noodle searched around the station. The sassy transit worker’s story checked out. Nobody was waiting on the platform for the train, and the ticket window was dark and empty.
“Come on,” said Tom’s dad. “We won’t get any closer to Grand Central by hanging around down here.”
Noodle followed him onto the street, where he was already hailing a cab. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for a beat-up yellow taxi to pull up.
Almost every available inch of the car’s interior was colorfully decorated with tacky wooden beads and Jamaican flags. A stick of half-burned incense stuck out from one of the air-conditioning vents. Noodle sniffed. Sandalwood. He slid across the vinyl backseat and peered through the scratched window, gray with grime.
“Fleetwood Station, please.” Tom’s dad told the driver, a dreadlocked Rastafarian with warm eyes.
“Broken-down train, right?” The cabbie winked in the rearview. “I been shuttling people to Fleetwood all day.”
As they screeched out into traffic, Mr. Edison pulled out his wallet to check his cash. There was only a single bill inside. A twenty, which would be just enough to get them to Fleetwood. He hoped.
The cab hadn’t even hit two greens when the brake lights on the cars ahead of them began to flash, one by one, and traffic slowed to a turtle crawl. A snaking line of cars waited their turn to merge onto the Cross County Parkway.
Tom’s dad fidgeted in his seat, his eyes steady on the ever-increasing fare meter. $3.60 … $5.90 … $7.20 … A few more minutes passed, and the cab finally stopped moving altogether. Its idling engine jiggled the straw-skirted hula dancer that was attached to the dashboard.
“Excuse me.” Tom’s dad leaned toward the driver and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Is there some other route? We’re in a rush.”
“You gon’ wan’ make yourself comfortable, mon. Parkway traffic’s been a headache all day,” responded the cabbie with the calm of someone long used to traffic delays and diversions. “We’ll be here awhile.”
“Murphy’s Law.” Noodle rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “No luck but bad today.” He slumped down in his seat. Tom’s dad tapped his fingers on the taxi’s divider and tried not to think of his son at Grand Central or of Curt Keller, who was no doubt out there looking for him.
“Cool ring!” said Noodle, pulling Mr. Edison from his worried thoughts. “Where’d you get that?”
“Oh, this?” Tom’s dad twisted it off his pinkie finger to show Noodle the golden, circled rose pattern beneath the many-sided emerald. “It’s a family ring. Never wore it before, but with everything that’s happened, I thought it might bring us luck.” And with another nervous glance at the fare, he added, “But it sure won’t pay for this cab ride, and we’re losing time.”
He leaned forward toward the cabbie again. “I’m sorry, but would you mind getting off at the next exit?”
“Sure thing,” said the cabbie. “But I don’t know how else you plan on getting to Fleetwood.”
“Don’t worry about us. We’ll figure something out.”
Once they were off the highway, Tom’s dad grabbed his few bills of change from the driver and swung open the door. He now wore a determined expression on his face. Like a superhero.
“I have to get to my son, Noodle,” was all the explanation he gave.
“I couldn’t agree more, Mr. E. But how’re you planning to get us to Grand Central—flying carpet?”
“Just follow me.”
Together, Noodle and Tom’s dad raced across Yonkers Avenue, then took another left, which put them on Hayward Street, a narrow road just a few hundred yards from the parkway.
Halfway down the block, Tom’s dad stopped. His eyes cut back and forth in search of something. Then he stepped off the sidewalk and knelt to examine the tiny opening in the top of a manhole cover.
Noodle scooted closer to watch. “Are you ever gonna tell me what we’re doing?”
“If I explain it to you, Noodle, you’ll back out.”
“Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”
Mr. Edison pulled out his ring of house keys and sifted through them until he found what looked like a small, nondescript key, the kind that might open a jewelry box.
“City workers enter the utility vault by using a lock pick.” Tom’s dad hooked the key underneath a small opening near the edge of the manhole cover. “We’ll have to improvise with a regular key. It’s just a matter of pushing back … the … catch.”
Then he jiggered the key until something underneath the cover clicked, and he was able to wedge it up a few inches with his fingers.
“Here. Come lend me a hand.”
Noodle squeezed his fingers in next to Tom’s dad’s and helped lift the cover a little bit higher. The metal was heavy, almost a hundred pounds, Noodle guessed, and it took all their combined strength to drag it over to the side.
Below the street, a paint-chipped ladder disappeared down into the darkness. Noodle leaned over and could barely make out a maze of pipes, ranging from a couple centimeters to about four feet in thickness.
“I used to work for the city as a low-level engineer before I started at Alset,” Tom’s dad explained as he descended the ladder, “so I know the whole infrastructure back and front. Up and down.” He was gone from sight now, but his voice rose, echoing up from the depths of the cavern. “Noodle, hurry up.”
Noodle wasn’t thrilled about this odd change in plans, but he didn’t have a choice if he wanted to get to Colby and Tom. He closed his eyes, grabbed hold of the ladder, and began to climb down. If there was one thing he was accustomed to doing, it was following an Edison down a blind alley toward almost certain trouble and probable injury.
“Wowzie,” he said as he joined Mr. E at the bottom of the ladder, which opened up into a tunnel. “We’re, like, in the city’s basement.” It smelled like a basement, too—wet and mildewed, cast in concrete, with pipes crisscrossing all around him and leading out in all different directions.
Tom’s dad was busy check
ing all the markings and symbols that were painted on the various pipes. “Gamma line, check. But we need to follow the beta line. Both empty into the Hudson River,” he muttered to himself.
“What do you mean, ‘empty into the Hudson River’?” asked Noodle, coughing through the dry lump of fear that had just formed in his throat.
“Each of these submains feeds into a main pipe. Just keep looking for the beta line.”
Noodle wasn’t sure how that answered his question, but he did what he was told, brushing some rust off one of the smaller aqueducts. Its symbol was a Greek letter that looked sort of like a cursive E.
After a few more minutes of searching, Noodle broke the silence. “I see B,” he called, as soon as he spied a large letter B chalked in white across the side of one of the tunnel’s larger pipes.
“Brilliant!” Tom’s dad answered. “You found it.”
With zero regard for his jacket, Tom’s dad bent below the dirty pipe to inspect its pressure gauge, his face and hands now completely covered in fine red powder.
“And when will it be an appropriate time for you to tell me what the heck we’re doing down here, Big T?”
“We’re going to get Tom and Colby, of course.” Mr. Edison reached toward a steering wheel–type device that was connected to a small circular door at the top of the pipe, and began to yank it left. “And we’re not waiting in an hour of traffic either.”
Hissing sounds filled the tunnel. A thick jet of steam shot out from the top of the aqueduct as Tom’s dad creaked open the rusty hatch.
“Ah!” he said as he took a deep inhale. “Brings me back to my days as a junior engineer. Weekends, we’d all get together for aqueduct races.”
Inside the pipe was a rushing stream of water.
“Ready to give it a go?”
“I don’t even know what an aqueduct race is, but it sounds exactly like something your kid would make me do.” Noodle took a couple steps back, unsure if Mr. E was serious with this plan. “And he usually has some pretty crazy ideas.”
“Just lie back and relax.” Tom’s dad grinned. “It’s easy.”
“Yeah. Piece of cake.”
Uh-uh, Mr. E.” As he stared down at the rushing water inside the anaconda-sized pipe, Noodle was starting to have second thoughts. “I love Tom and all, but a man’s gotta draw the line.”
Without paying much attention to his protests, Tom’s dad stuck one foot through the opening at the top of the aqueduct, then lowered in the rest of his body. Another moment, and he’d disappeared inside the pipe completely.
“Come on. The water’s not even cold.” His voice sounded tinny and hollow.
“This is really happening.” Noodle shook his head in disbelief as he took a hesitant step toward the aqueduct. He couldn’t wimp out now. Tom and Colby would never let him live it down.
Eyes closed, he placed a cautious foot through the opening. Water rushed into his shoes. Its biting cold numbed his whole leg in a matter of seconds.
“Hold your breath and plunge right in,” Tom’s dad instructed from the darkness. Like it was that easy.
“Hawwwwhhhh …” Shin-deep in the foot-high water, Noodle shivered to his core. He swung in his other leg, then plunged himself beneath the opening. Inside the aqueduct, Tom’s dad, now shrugging off his Windbreaker jacket, kept himself anchored as the water rushed past his body.
“Double-knot the end of this around your wrist,” he said, offering one of the jacket sleeves. Noodle grabbed it, gritting his teeth as icy liquid pooled up around his waist and into his shirt.
“Keep your toes up and your body relaxed,” Tom’s dad instructed. “Anchors aweigh!”
Noodle sat back in the slow-moving current and let it carry him into the darkness. Soon their bodies were moving through the water at a leisurely pace.
“Huh. Once you get past the initial hypothermia shock, it actually isn’t so bad,” Noodle remarked. He was even beginning to relax and imagine how fun aqueduct races with his friends might be, when a faint rumble began in the distance.
“What was that?” he asked, averting his face from the slap of steadily higher-rising wavelets.
“Hold your breath!” Tom’s dad shouted. “We’re about to merge onto City Tunnel Number One.” The water’s flow quickly accelerated. At the last second, Noodle gulped in a huge mouthful of air, just as his body whipped down a steep thirty-foot drop, then swooshed around another sharp corner. Water shot up into his nose as he flipped and spun along the pipe’s walls, clutching on to the Windbreaker for dear life.
“Half of New York’s water … travels through … this very pipeline,” he heard Tom’s dad yelling between submersions. “It feeds … over nine … hundred different—”
Noodle’s head was dunked under the water. He frantically tried to resurface but was becoming disoriented, unable to tell up from down.
“Aaaagghhhh!” He scooped some air into his lungs, then was swept into a rapid current.
The aqueduct fed into a massive pipeline over ten feet in diameter. As Noodle’s head broke the surface again, he began to cough. He was dazed, waterlogged, not a very good swimmer, and somehow he had managed to let go of Tom’s dad’s jacket. All around him, rapids roared past like liquid mountains.
“Noodle!” He followed the voice. In front of him, he could just make out the bobbing shape of a head as it disappeared, then reappeared between the foaming swells.
“Mr. E!” He coughed as water filled his mouth.
An undercurrent pulled him beneath the river surface, then hurled him down the pipe. He paddled against the heavy force, losing breath. His hands and feet churning like a blender, he felt like he was going to drown for sure.
“Don’t fight the current,” yelled Tom’s dad. “Just let it pull you.”
His body was telling him to panic, but Noodle went against his instincts and stopped fighting. To his surprise, the water spun his body calmly and dragged it with the current.
Out of nowhere, a hand reached through the frigid water to grab and pull him close. Noodle hacked and choked on the air.
“It’s almost over,” said Tom’s dad, just as the pipe took another hairpin twist, then another bend. “My apologies, bud. I assumed you were a stronger swimmer.”
“The Zuckerbergs are strictly land dwellers.”
Soon, a pinpoint of light appeared in the distance, and the stream rushed them swiftly toward the tunnel’s opening.
As they sailed out of the pipeline’s mouth, Noodle closed his eyes, held his breath, and prepared for the impact. His body slapped against the water like an awkward cannon-ball. His arms and belly stung as if he’d just taken a nose-dive into a nettles patch. Noodle doubled over in pain as he sank into the muddy depths of the water.
“Land!” He whooped the moment his head bobbed to the surface.
Several yards to the right of him was a long pier where a huge luxury yacht sat anchored at the far end. Stunned restaurant patrons at a riverside restaurant laughed and pointed at the boy who’d just surfaced.
Beyond the pier, Noodle could make out the sprawling skyline of midtown Manhattan.
“Where exactly are we?” he asked as he awkwardly treaded water.
“Pier Eighty-one,” said Tom’s dad, seconds before dunking his head into the river and swimming toward the shore. “Just a quick shuttle ride to Grand Central.”
“I hope the MetroCard machine accepts soaking bills,” Noodle called as he dog-paddled after him.
They hoisted themselves up onto the wooden-planked dock, and as Noodle staggered to his feet, he could feel his trembling legs almost give out.
“That was …” He sighed, unable to rouse enough energy to speak.
Tom’s dad stared off into the distance.
“Let’s go get my boy.”
What if Keller nabbed them?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Colb.”
“Who’s joking?”
Tom and Colby waited by the information booth in the middl
e of the crowded terminal. Afternoon sunlight was streaking through the old building’s massive windows, which gave the marble floor and hundred-foot stone support beams a calm, ethereal feel.
Tom’s nerves, however, were stretched as tight as they could go. Every face coming up the subway stairs or through the street doors was unfamiliar and potentially threatening. The longer they waited, the more time Keller and Nicky had to find them. Not to mention the next clue, which Tom had been dying to know since the moment he’d hung up with Noodle.
“Maybe we should head back to Yonkers,” said Colby. “At least we know we’d be safe.”
“No, my dad said to wait here.”
“And your dad is always right,” said a very familiar voice behind him.
Tom spun around to find his soaking wet father standing in front of him, along with an equally sodden Noodle.
“Dad!” He jumped up into his father’s arms and, for a moment, let himself be twirled in the air like a five-year-old.
“First question,” said Colby as she approached Noodle and placed a tentative hand on his sopping curls. “How come you two look like you just fell into the Hudson River?”
“How ironic you should say that,” said Noodle with a wide smirk for Tom’s dad. “Care to field that question, Big T?”
“Maybe later. For now, I’m just so relieved you all are safe.”
“Well, we’re not gonna be for long with Keller still out there.” Now that his dad knew about the hunt, Tom figured the best plan was to bring him up to speed. The truth was, he was sure he could use his father’s engineering smarts for the next leg of the adventure, whatever that was.
“So what’s the next clue say?” Tom asked immediately. As relieved as he’d been to see Noodle and his dad, time was simply a luxury they could not afford.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Mr. Edison. “This treasure hunt’s over. As soon as we get home, I’m calling the police.”
“Dad, you honestly think the police will help us? Keller’s probably got people on the inside.”
“I bet you anything Faber’s in his back pocket,” added Noodle. “I could tell by the way she was giving me the stink eye in her office.” He did an impression of the officer for the others’ benefit.