Night-Train

by Thomas F Monteleone

  Jeeezuzkrist…

  He sat there, dazed, thinking nothing, seeing nothing save for the instant’s vision in his mind’s eye. That one was worth waiting for, he thought over and over, seized with envy for whoever the young stud was that was getting into that action, and also by thoughts of regret that Beatrice hadn’t been that foxy when they were young. Thirty years ago, Bea had been a very attractive woman, but to her, sex had always been something to “get over with,” and Whitey knew that she had never really enjoyed it. Shit, on their wedding night she wouldn’t even let him see her with her clothes off. Wouldn’t even let him take his clothes off! He remembered how they had done it through the open flaps of their pajamas, and how pitiful it had been.

  Suddenly his hard-on was less than a memory and it was welcome back to the real world.

  Climbing down off the platform, he entered the special world of darkness. It was his usual pattern to meander down toward Grand Central, but his recollection of the abandoned rail lines had got him to thinking … it had been quite a long time since he had been down any of those empty places, and maybe a spot-check and the dropping of a few baits wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  Every once in a while one of the department’s health inspectors would make a surprise visit into somebody’s territory, looking for what they call “Specials” in the trade. A Special was a live rat, and if they found one in your turf, your ass was in a crack. Whitey always thought it was pretty amazing that they didn’t find more Specials than they did. His supervisor had read everybody a report one time that said that, despite the rat-killers and all their baits and shingles, there were still more than eight million of the little bastards under the city.

  Amazing. Simply amazing.

  So he ambled off into a tunnel, heading south toward the five-track turnaround. It wouldn’t hurt to drop a few baits down in there, even though the rats seemed to avoid the place.

  CHAPTER 11

  PROVENZA

  He left the captain’s office with the memo in his hand, feeling like James Bond when he got his license to kill. The bull pen was churning with the usual noise—phones ringing, the teletype clattering, and the occasional loud voice of a detective. No one seemed to notice that John was grinning impishly as he walked by. Damn, he hadn’t felt this good since he passed the lieutenant’s exam with the highest grade in his section. He felt as if the captain had just given him another promotion.

  Hell, it was like a promotion. The captain and the chief had bought John’s decoy plan, and he was going to be one of the guys in charge of the operation. That was a pretty big deal in his book, no shit.

  And he needed a couple of “big deals” in his life these days; he needed something to make him feel needed, worthwhile, and all that other psychological bullshit. John thought he was recovering fairly well from the divorce from Lisa, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet. He wasn’t drinking bad, like at first, but his relationships with women were still flaming failures.

  Maybe he still loved Lisa? Maybe that was why he couldn’t get it up? And all that crapola he’d been telling himself about not being interested in sex anymore was just a load?

  He stopped short in the center of the bull pen. How the hell did I get into that can of worms? Forget it, man, you’ve got work to do. He headed down the hall to the debriefing room where Corvino was waiting for him.

  His partner was drinking coffee as he entered the room. “We got it!” exclaimed John, waving the captain’s memo in Corvino’s face.

  “No shit!” Corvino was smiling slyly.

  “Yeah, well, we went a few rounds before everything was hammered out, but they’re putting together a task force of seventy-five men, with around-the-clock shifts. We won’t be letting any of this out to the press, just in case the killer reads the papers, of course.”

  “And you’re going to be one of the decoys …” said Corvino.

  “You bet your ass I am. You’ll be coordinating our efforts, picking up any leads we get, and following up on them during the day.”

  “Sounds like I’m going to be doing a lot of jerking off.”

  Provenza laughed. “That depends on how this whole thing works out. First thing we’ve got to do is go down to records and pick out a team of guys who fit the general physical description.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?” asked John. He was dying to get this whole deal off the ground and catch that bastard!

  Corvino smiled. “At least we’ll feel like we’re doing something,” he said. “This case was starting to drive me bug-shit. Let’s go.”

  That’s how it went down yesterday, and now I’m out here all by myself, long past midnight, thought Provenza as he lit up another cigarette. The territory he had staked out was along the Lexington Avenue line between 51st Street and Spring Street down by the Bowery. John had a hunch that the Slasher was not from within Manhattan, was probably some crazy who lived out in Brooklyn or Queens and just rode in to the island whenever he was on a stabbing spree.

  Stabbing spree. Is that anything like a shopping spree?

  Where’re you going, honey?

  Oh, nowhere. I thought I’d go out stabbing for a little while…

  Take it easy, man, this place is getting to you. Provenza took a pull off his cigarette and stared southward down the tracks beyond the Spring Street station. It was 1:10 in the morning and there was absolutely nobody down there with him. Provenza hated to admit it, but the place was starting to get to him, gnawing at him.

  Usually, even in the middle of the night, there was somebody waiting for a train. The city was so vast, so full of different kinds of people, that there were always a few night owls bopping around town. But the Spring Street station, for the moment anyway, was pale and silent, as cold and empty as the tunnels themselves.

  Provenza had been on duty since 10 P.M. and he was planning to knock off at around 3 A.M. None of the slashings had been committed any later than that, and John had figured that the killer was probably a guy with a regular job who had to get up in the morning and didn’t keep real late hours. The police psychologists had a fairly well established profile on killers of this type, and they found it was usually pretty much on target when they finally caught them. Such a killer was usually a loner, never married and had minimal contact with the opposite sex. It was not uncommon for him to’ have lived with a mother or other dominating parent-type longer than the norm. He usually held a small, going-nowhere, nebbishy little job—shop clerk, postal worker, delivery man. And he was almost always the kind of person that the neighbors never noticed. “He was such a quiet man,” they would say. “He was always nice to the kids in the neighborhood.” Or, “He never seemed like the type who would do something like this.”

  No, folks, none of the psycho-killers ever seems like “the type.” They don’t realize that we are all the type, thought John. They don’t know that we all have a monster inside of us, a monster with venom dripping from its fangs and a fire in its eyes. An ancient thing that rises up in the night and howls at the moon and stalks our nightmares. That’s what it was all about—keeping the monster hidden, locked away beneath that trapdoor into our subconscious.

  Most people have enough of a life—friends, lovers, dreams, jobs, children—to give them the strength to keep the latch tightly closed on the trapdoor. But there are always a few who can’t keep everything together, for whatever reasons —a bad childhood, a ruined career, a genetic mutation, or any of a thousand other things—and the screws that hold the latch down start to come loose.

  And that’s all it takes, thought Provenza. Once the latch shakes loose, the monster will rattle it and worry it until finally it’s free, roaming around upstairs, pulling levers and throwing switches and making us do things that we otherwise only dream about.

  John Provenza knew all about that kind of crap. He’d been there, almost. When Lisa had divorced him, had tried to keep him from seeing the kids despite the court-awarded visitation rights, he’d almost cracked. There had be
en a lot of drinking, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of times when he couldn’t remember what he had been doing for hours at a clip. When his first partner was killed during the drug-factory bust, John wasn’t sure that he might not have prevented it, if he hadn’t been so juiced the night before. When his second partner bought the farm, John knew rationally that it hadn’t been his fault, but still the death haunted him and he’d started drinking more heavily than ever in his off hours.

  He used to sit in his Brooklyn house, the empty house with hardly a light turned on at night anymore, and listen to the latch on his own trapdoor start rattling. He knew he was close to the edge, but there wasn’t anybody who could yank him back. Nobody but John Provenza.

  And he was back now. Not all the way, he knew, but he was working on things. Still really bad with women, though. He was beginning to think that he would never get another hard-on in his life, but that was the least of his problems. At least he didn’t want to kill himself, or anybody else, anymore. There had been times when he busted someone, especially some arrogant punk, when he almost squeezed the trigger on his .38 snub-nose, just to feel the violent sexual release of offing someone who really deserved it.

  Such were his thoughts as he stood in the middle-of-the-night chill of the station. He had already made the trip between 51st Street and Spring four times, getting off at each station along the way, ambling around, then going on down the line. The funny thing was that Provenza had never really liked the subways. As a little kid, when his father would take him for weekend jaunts to the amusements at Coney Island or to the park to play ball, or just about anywhere that wasn’t Flatbush, they would ride the trains. John had always hated the rattle and roar and dirty smells. Some of his earliest memories were of standing on the platform, holding his hands tightly over his ears as the trains assaulted the stations.

  As he grew older, he began to realize that there were other, better reasons to dislike the subways. The number-one reason was the pack of bad-asses who tended to ride them and hang out in the lonelier stations. All through grade school and most of high school, John avoided the trains as long as he could find a different way of getting around. He put lots of miles on his Schwinn DeLuxe and he walked his way through countless pairs of sneakers, as they used to call them. But then there was the one time he was taking the subway home from a late baseball practice when he was in the tenth grade. He was sitting at the end of the car when he heard shouting. Four punks were rousting an old man, rifling his baggy overcoat and his suit pockets for his money. When the old man resisted, one of the punks rapped him across the head, knocking him down. Not one of the other passengers moved to help the victim, and John joined them in their paralysis, hating himself but fearful of getting his own head broken.

  That might have been the first time that he thought seriously of becoming a cop.

  Of course, there had been the short sojourn in the sewers, working at the job his father had got him. But he had hated it. It wasn’t the dampness or the cold or the grubby nature of the job that got to him. It was just being underground all the time, being in the dark, walking around alone with your thoughts. It seemed to Provenza that there was something about being down there under the streets that affected your mind. If you lived in the dark, you started having dark thoughts.

  That was it, man. That was the way it was for him. And the same went for the goddamned subways. There was something down here in these tunnels that hung over your mind like a heavy cloak, waiting to drop down and envelop you in its smothering folds.

  Where the hell was the train? He had been waiting for what seemed like a damned long time.

  Footsteps echoed through the empty station. Provenza felt his muscles tense along his shoulders, his hands clench. Leather slapping deliberately, slowly upon the concrete. Someone was coming down the steps to the platform, and Provenza turned quickly to see who it was.

  For a few insane moments he was absolutely convinced that it was the Slasher. Scenes flashed through his mind like strobe images: the flash of the kitchen knife, the maniacal grin of his killer, the cold kiss of the blade entering his flesh.

  Come off it, man. How could you be so lucky—your first night out, and you think you’re just going to run into him? You’re reading too much into this whole thing.

  Suddenly the footsteps stopped, just short of turning the corner to come down to the station platform. Provenza watched the corner by the steps. Come on, you bastard, what’re you waiting for? Maybe it was him? Maybe he sensed Provenza down there, waiting for him … It couldn’t be!

  But maybe it was …

  He stood there silently, muscles tensed, ready to spring, for what seemed like an eternity, sensing that whoever was beyond the corner also knew that there was someone waiting.

  Come on!

  He was abruptly aware of a rumbling, a slight vibration in the platform itself. The train. He had wanted it to come for so long, and now he wished that it was delayed just a little longer. He could hear its wheels clattering on the old tracks now, and, turning for an instant, and staring past the support girders, he saw its lights growing in the mouth of the tunnel, growing closer, brighter.

  He had to make a decision—quickly. Either he boarded the train and left whoever it was standing there, or he waited for the confrontation. That simple, right? «

  At that moment, he caught movement in the periphery of his vision, a blur of dark color moving very quickly. Everything happened so fast that afterward he was not sure what he had seen.

  Turning, he saw a small, hunched-up shape appear around the corner, scurry across the platform, and leap down onto the tracks only an instant before the train filled the void in a roar of noise, steel grating upon steel, its double doors slamming open.

  Jesus Christ! Lights were going off behind his eyes like flashbulbs popping. He ran up to the spot and tried to peer down between the train and the edge of the platform, but it was only the tiniest of cracks. He rushed into the train and ran forward, forcing open the doors between the cars. The handful of passengers chose to ignore him in the best tradition of the city: if anything was coming down, they didn’t want to get involved.

  He reached the motorman’s cab just as the train started to pull out of the station. Pounding on the door, Provenza ordered him to open it up. The train continued to crawl out of the station as the steel door was unlatched and swung open. The motorman was a young black man with a thick mustache. His eyes were dark and narrow as he stared at Provenza. “What the fuck you—?”

  “NYPD,” said John, flashing his badge at the motorman. “Stop this train! Stop the sucker right now!”

  The man released his control lever and the train eased to a halt halfway out of the station. “What’s goin’ on, man?”

  “Didn’t you see it? Didn’t you see something fall in front of you just as you were pulling into the station?!”

  “Huh? I didn’t see nothin’, man. What’re you talkin’ about?”

  Ignoring him, John pressed on. “Can you back this thing up?”

  “Well, yeah, but I gotta—”

  “Can you back this thing up!? Answer me!”

  “Well, yeah, man. But I’m tryin’ to tell you—I gotta call my tower first. They gotta know why I’m dead on the rails like this.”

  “Well, go ahead and call ‘em, and then back the son-of-a-bitch up. You ran over something, I’m telling you!”

  The motorman shrugged, picked up his radio mike, and called into the tower room. Some guy yelled at him until he explained that a cop had made him do it. They exchanged a few more comments about timetables and other trains behind him, and then cleared the maneuver. “Okay, man, here we go,” said the motorman as he turned a lever and leaned on it. “How far back?”

  “Right past the stairs to the platform.”

  There was a hum of power as the cars slid back into the station. Provenza could feel the blood pounding in his temples. When the train stopped, he peered through the front door at the tracks below. “C’mon
, take me down there. Let’s go!”

  The motorman locked up his control lever, exited the cab, and pushed through the front door. “Watch it climbin’ down, and stay away from that third rail.”

  Provenza jumped down and peered into the dark gravel of the roadbed, wishing that he had a flashlight or a lantern. “What am I spozed to have hit?” asked the motorman.

  “I don’t know. It was small and dark. I barely saw it, really.”

  “You sure you did see it, man? There ain’t nothin’ down here.”

  Provenza asked for a flashlight, and the motorman fetched it from the cab. The beam revealed nothing on the tracks or at the base of the platform. Everything was caked with soot and oil, but there was no sign of anything unusual. This was crazy. He just saw something jump right out in front of the train. He saw it, dammit!

  “Hey, what’s happenin’, man?” said another voice. Looking up, John saw a bearded, dark-skinned youth standing in the front door of the car. The motorman started to say something but Provenza cut him off. “Police business. Everything’s okay, just go back to your seat. No problem.”

  “Yeah, but how come we stoppin’?”

  Provenza was staring at the trough between the rails. It was deep enough, wide enough for a man to lie down in and conceivably save himself from a train passing over him. “Hey, man, I gotta be gettin’ somewhere!”

  John looked up at the passenger. “Listen, pal, if you don’t stop bugging me, the only place you’re going is downtown. Can you dig it? Now go sit down and be quiet!”

  The bearded kid shrugged and shuffled away from the door, muttering something. Provenza looked at the motorman, who was wearing a puzzled expression and seemed to be afraid to say anything.