Before Cain Strikes

by Joshua Corin

  Cain42 led him toward the dressing rooms in the rear of the small shop. On the way, he grabbed two baggy coats—one black and one red—off a sales rack and tucked them under an armpit.

  “Into a stall,” Cain 42 instructed.

  Now the manager hesitated. “A stall?”

  Cain42 took out his .45 revolver (standard issue for MTA police) and shoved the barrel against the manager’s right nostril. “Into a stall.”

  They went into a stall.

  “Now turn around.”

  “Please don’t kill me….”

  “Trust me,” replied Cain42. “If I wanted to kill you, I’d use something a lot more torturous than a gun. Now turn around or I’ll demonstrate what I mean.”

  The manager, weeping now, obviously convinced he was about to meet his maker, turned around. Cain42 contemplated how best to proceed with just one usable hand and decided to let the two baggy coats fall to the floor. As the barrel of the revolver was no longer threatening the manager’s right nostril, it was free to be used to pick the red coat back up and position its amorphous form against the manager’s left shoulder. It wouldn’t silence the gunshot as effectively as he might have wished, but desperate times called for desperate measures, etc.

  And so: bang.

  The manager fainted.

  Cain42 tucked his revolver back into its holster and carefully slid the baggy black coat over his torso. He checked in the mirror, making sure it both covered his uniform and that his shoulder wound wasn’t seeping through the material. Good and good. After hanging his gun belt on the stall’s hook (because ordinary folks in baggy black coats regrettably weren’t allowed to carry firearms in New York State), he returned to the front of the store, where the teenage clerk still stood, using the store computer’s internet to Tweet her experiences with all eighty-three of her closest buds. He grabbed a wool hat off a rotating rack and waved goodbye. She didn’t even notice.

  The manager had a solid alibi and couldn’t have been the same man who arrived only minutes earlier on the uptown A-train, but in a hunt, any amount of misdirection slowed the hunter down, and Cain42 very much did not enjoy his current role as prey. He spotted Esme again, halfway across the concourse. More SWAT officers had gathered around her now. It looked as if she was giving them orders. She still held the brown coat in her right hand. And in her left…

  She had his hunting knife, sheath and all.

  How had she gotten his hunting knife? Cain42 patted himself down. After climbing over the turnstile and sheathing the knife, he must have tucked it into the pocket of the coat. Such a stupid mistake! The gunshot wound must have rattled his nerves more than he thought.

  Such a stupid mistake because his fingerprints were on the handle of that knife.

  It was his fault. He’d broken one of his own cardinal rules and used the same knife numerous times. It wasn’t an especially good knife. In fact, it cut unevenly. But that was why he preferred it. When he buried that cheap blade into flesh, he just knew it had to hurt.

  Esme—and the coat, and the knife—trundled back down the steps to the ACE platform, and Cain42 followed her into the lion’s den of cops and witnesses. Daylight and freedom would have to wait even longer still. He needed to retrieve that knife, and had to hope he wasn’t recognized. And if he was, well, he would just have to get creative again.

  Tom was so slumber-deep into REM that even his dreams were dreaming. So it took more than the usual prodding, poking and nudging for Penelope Sue to wake him up. She had to resort to shoving. When Tom woke up, he was on the carpet. He was disoriented—and to make matters worse, Penelope Sue had the TV news blasting and the male reporter’s voice sounded as if it was being shouted into his ears. What time was it? He’d returned from Hoboken around noon, after handing Jefferson Harbinger off to a team of federal agents, who would be escorting the whacko back to Switzerland so he could hand over to them the server, and with it the keys to Cain42’s website. But Tom’s end of the operation was over. The case had been solved. It was time for a long-overdue nap.

  And now Penelope Sue had interrupted his nap. Since the sun was still out, he couldn’t have been asleep for very long.

  “Are you awake?” she asked him. She was still on the bed and was staring down at him the same way a pet owner stares down at an unruly dog.

  He was not amused.

  Then she pointed to the TV. “Look.”

  “Penelope Sue…”

  “Look, you fool!”

  He looked.

  The station was NY1. The broadcast was live. The story was the massacre at Penn Station.

  Tom leaned on the bed for support and pulled himself erect. Two minutes later, he was out the door.

  While the uptown A-train was resting comfortably beside its platform in Penn Station, the downtown C-train, expected to dock across the platform, was still stuck in a tunnel, impatiently awaiting clearance to continue its journey. The impatience was clearly shared by its passengers and by its conductor, a round man named Chester London who lived at Fifty-nine Gelston Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, and who suffered from serious attention deficit disorder. That was why he’d applied for the job at the MTA so many years ago. What better job for a person with ADD than the operation of a subway train? For him, the world was always go-go-go.

  Except for right now.

  He hopped up and down on his seat in his small compartment and fingered the levers in front of him. They were so close to Penn Station. Surely whatever was going down there had been taken care of by now, right? As a passenger he was at the mercy of the machine, but as a conductor, didn’t he have the right—no, the duty—to get his people to their destination?

  Chester London fidgeted in his seat. Would they actually fire him if he did his job? His was a union position, after all, and in his years at the MTA, he’d made a lot of pals. His passengers would be grateful. His ADD would be eternally grateful. The bosses might suspend him, but suspension was just an excuse to go on vacation. When was the last time he’d been to Atlantic City? It was before Velma died, that’s for sure.

  Fuck it.

  He shifted the brake lever forward. Penn Station, here we come.

  Confident that the SWAT officers had taken up her cause and were actively searching for a man with a shoulder wound, Esme had returned to the platform to check on the status of the wounded. So many more victims, but soon it would be over, right? Penn Station was in lockdown. Not even Cain42 could walk through walls.

  In fact, she had proof of his tangibility in her hands. This coat had been part of his disguise. She hefted its weight in her hands. No, Cain42 was real. And that made him fallible. And today he would fail.

  She took note of the detectives walking the A-train’s last car. Soon she would head over there to give her statement. She knew she would be delivering her statement on today’s events many, many times before this nightmare was truly over. She also would be turning over the coat, and the knife she’d uncovered in its deep pockets. The knife she knew would be especially valuable. Murder weapons always were.

  The echoes of the Galileo case were unmistakable.

  Had she made the right choice?

  As Cain42 approached her from the shadows, the same question resonated through his mind. Creeping up to her like this was foolhardy. His risk of exposure was enormous. He neared her now. She didn’t know he was there. His heart quickened. It felt good.

  Tom noticed him, though. Tom was descending the stairs toward the platform and spotted Esme immediately. He always did. He saw Cain42 come at her from behind and he tried to quicken his pace, but the lack of sleep had left his body uncooperative. He opened his mouth to shout out a warning, but the headlights of the C-train were within view now, and as with lightning, the thunder quickly followed, rumbling itself into a monstrous angry bellow.

  Cain42 reached out. But he didn’t pull to retrieve the coat. No, with the onrush of the train, he had a better idea now.

  He pushed.

  And Tom Piper
watched from afar as Esme and the coat went toppling down toward the train tracks and the impatient C, forty-four tons of stainless steel per car, roared home.

  27

  The C-train came to a stop at roughly the same position it always reached at this platform (at least when Chester London was at the brake). He had seen the woman on the tracks, but by then he had been reaching for the brake already. Trains took time to slow down. He knew he wouldn’t be held accountable…unless, of course, the woman on the tracks had been the reason for the red light.

  He left his compartment and rushed out to the platform. Everyone stared in silent shock at the spot on the tracks where Esme fell, which was now covered by the second-to-last car of the C-train. The tragedy had turned the hundreds of people into mute, gawking statues.

  All but one, that is. Tom Piper approached the back of the train. Cain42 had scurried away when he’d realized everyone’s attention was fixed on Esme, but even if the monster had remained there on the platform, Tom would still have bypassed him for her. The gray-haired special agent climbed down to the tracks. He refused to believe she was dead. He didn’t know what he could do to help her, but God help him, he was going to try.

  Chester, meanwhile, noticed ragged bits of the long brown coat caught up in the front wheels. The woman had been holding that coat. Still, there wasn’t any blood on the subway car. That had to indicate something, didn’t it?

  Tom was on his stomach now and peering into the dark underbelly of the C-train. He lay in the one-and-a-half foot ravine between the subway’s two main rails, among potato chip wrappers and rat feces. He ignored it all.

  “I need a flashlight!” he called out.

  Two of the paramedics who’d been manning the triage center were already climbing down to the tracks. One had a flashlight and handed it to him. Tom shone the beam along the undercarriage.

  The other paramedic had a body bag.

  “It’s Tom!” His voice cracked, like old leather. He needed water. “Can you hear me?”

  He crawled farther, now half-underneath the subway car. If he could fit like this, perhaps she’d been able to. He peered forward. A pair of yellow eyes peered back at him. They belonged to a furry rat the size of a puppy. The plump rodent squeaked a curse at him and then scampered off.

  Tom crawled another few feet forward. He was now completely under the aft of the last car. The flashlight beam extended to the last car’s fore section, but no farther. He heard more squeaking, but no breathing. No Esme.

  To make matters worse, the folks on the platform had recovered from their horror and had recommenced their chattering gossip. But at least they’d exhibited a few minutes of awe. At least they hadn’t yet become too desensitized.

  Not all of the folks on the platform had recovered. One in particular was drowning ocean-deep in post-traumatic stress. The paramedics couldn’t find anything wrong with Grover physically, aside from the typical aftereffects of prolonged tear gas (a mind-splitting headache, which they treated with Tylenol; and excess phlegm, which they treated with an empty plastic cup for him to spit into). No, the injuries he was suffering were invisible and thus all the more deadly.

  For the past ten minutes, a veteran NYPD detective named Chuck Rowling had been attempting to get something, anything, out of the poor man that could help add order to the chaos in the last car. Rowling knew there was another FBI agent on the train, Esme Stuart, but his Herculean task was to wrangle some sense out of this witness who was so obviously still in shock.

  Then the woman was pushed to the tracks, and Rowling’s interview stopped. He saw the man who did it and, as the train braked to its screeching halt at the other end of the platform, watched the black-coated assailant casually make his way back to the turnstile. With one hand on his holstered sidearm, Chuck Rowling was in pursuit.

  His other hand went for his radio.

  “She’s breathing!” shouted someone, and Rowling, by instinct, turned to look. The voice came from the subway train—no, below the subway train. The woman was alive? How was that even—

  Rowling turned back to look for the man in the black coat, but he was gone.

  How Esme survived her showdown with the C-train was not as miraculous as it was ironic: the knife saved her life.

  It took her body two-point-three seconds to travel the five feet from the platform to the tracks, and not once did Esme’s neurons fire up the notion of survival. Or rather, they did, but in their own mischievous ways. To shield her psyche from what was about to be an inevitable violent end to its existence, her subconscious culled for her a pleasant memory from years ago, almost eight years ago to the day: a delightful episode from Sophie’s first Thanksgiving.

  Sophie’s first Thanksgiving began with a wintry early-morning road trip from Oyster Bay up to Rafe’s parents’ house in Sullivan County. No, actually, Sophie’s first Thanksgiving began at 4:34 a.m., when she awoke crying and Esme awoke yawning and mother and daughter sat on the sofa and watched Home Alone. When Rafe finally joined them at around six, sauntering into the living room like a brain-starved zombie, he at least had the good sense not to ask what she was doing up.

  What had woken Sophie up was gas. For some reason, her metabolism wasn’t tolerating any of the formula they bought. She was fine with (and eager for) breast milk, but the formula gave her an upset stomach and that meant lots of crying and spitting. And Sophie spat milk as if she were a faucet. One minute she could be playing with a toy and the next, the toy and much of the carpet would be both white and wet. Esme was convinced that the child spat out far more milk than she consumed, that somewhere a separate universe was supplying her with excess milk, but, ah, well. According to the books she read (and she read many), infants spat up about as regularly as they slapped themselves in the face with their tiny hands, which is to say often.

  So they got in the car around seven and, on the way, Esme breast-fed her until Sophie napped, and then Esme napped, and then there they were in Sullivan County. Lester and Eunice were there on the front stoop to greet them when they pulled into the driveway, next to his blue Cadillac.

  Eunice Stuart was the type of woman who insulted you in French, all the while pretending to offer a lovely and sophisticated compliment. Esme spoke French. She was not amused when, five minutes into their first meeting, the woman called her, au français, “city trash.” It was no wonder that Lester got along so famously with Halley Worth. She and his late wife were cut from the same bourgeois cloth. And Esme meant bourgeois in only the loveliest and most sophisticated way imaginable.

  Eunice Stuart wore an auburn wig large enough to nest a pair of ostrich eggs, and on that cold Thanksgiving morning, the wind was bending the grass and flapping the lapels of their coats and Eunice Stuart’s auburn wig lay conspicuously unaffected. Esme removed the convertible car seat, with Sophie asleep inside it, and carried it toward her in-laws. Rafe offered to help, but she shook her head. She wanted to show them what a good mother she was.

  All this Esme’s mind provided for her as she fell to her certain death toward the C-train’s steel tracks. All this condensed into mere seconds, as well as what happened next on that cold Thanksgiving morning, the payoff of the story.

  Esme brought Baby Sophie over to her grandparents. They hadn’t seen her since her birth and beheld her now with the requisite responses of aww’s and ooh’s. Rafe beamed proudly. Look what he accomplished, Mom and Dad. Esme was happy for his happiness. It didn’t even occur to her that she was a bit jealous, that perhaps she wished her parents were still around. All that occurred to her right then, really, was one, man, convertible car seats are heavy; and two, her mother-in-law’s wig must have been made of plaster. Fortunately, at that moment, Eunice reached into the car seat, unfastened its complicated array of buckles and elevated her granddaughter into her arms.

  “Hello! Hello, there! I’m your Grandma. Can you say Grandma? Grand-ma. Grand-ma.”

  Sophie simultaneously opened her eyes and her mouth. And Rafe and Esme knew wh
at was about to happen about half a second before it did, but, much like Tom Piper on the subway platform stairs, could do nothing to warn or to prevent. Not that Esme would have warned or prevented her beautiful little girl from, with a giggle, hosing down Eunice’s overrouged face with about a gallon of semidigested milk. The milk went everywhere—on Eunice’s eyelashes, up her nose, in her mouth—but most significantly, it splashed into her wig.

  The wig absorbed it like a sponge.

  Eunice excused herself, went inside, and when she met them all a few minutes later in the parlor for tea, she was wearing a floppy beach hat. Indoors. On Thanksgiving.

  It was memories like that which made the mind chuckle and snort. It even brought a short smile to Esme’s lips, as her body collided with the first rail. The bottom half of her body had conveniently landed in the depression between the two rails, but the top half of her body was splayed over the first rail like a drunken sailor over a pub bar. But her mind was far, far away from the emergency at hand, and it didn’t even register with her that she was about to be sawed in two by friction, torque and train.

  That was when Cain42’s knife saved her life, or rather, the combined efforts of the knife and, well, gravity. The coat, naturally, came down with her and, in fact, landed before she did, and also partially on the first rail. So when her torso, which had fallen on a precarious angle to the rail, attempted to correct itself, it rolled in the direction of the fallen coat. The knife, although sheathed and pocketed, poked back at her torso. Reflexes did the rest. She flinched away from the poking and thus rolled in the other direction. Her torso joined the rest of her body in the filthy depression between the two tracks and there it lay as the first car of the train passed over her location.

  Unfortunately, that was when Esme snapped from her memory-lane stupor. Her subconscious, no matter how strong, could not in a million years compete with the cacophonous fury unleashed by so many tons of steel traveling so many miles per hour less than twelve inches from her face. It was the sound of ten thousand sticks of chalk being dragged across ten thousand boards of slate, somehow emanating from the inside of a pizza oven and washing over Esme’s entire body in a hot and screaming wave. The liquids in her eyes began to sear. All she saw was darkness, heavy monstrous darkness, and she couldn’t escape it, she daren’t even move; she had to sustain it without going mad, but, Jesus Christ, it wouldn’t stop, it wouldn’t stop, it wouldn’t stop….