Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  There were forty-three steps until the turnoff. Forty-three steps in solid blackness. Hood counted them off for safety’s sake. In the bowels of this labyrinthine structure, almost a century old, it was possible to crawl inside and never crawl out. Every year, Grand Central workers found at least a couple of DOAs in the warren of tunnels beneath the great building.

  The turnoff was nothing more than a pipe duct in the ceiling, left empty when other, better, routes were found. It was box shaped, about four feet across and three feet high, and layered with decades of filth and animal droppings. Hood crawled forward on all fours, the flashlight sweeping the space in front until it ended some ten feet ahead at a wall. A dead end, it seemed. Hood shifted position, work boots to the wall, and delivered two swift kicks. A rotted piece of plywood snapped in half and dropped down a forty-foot vertical shaft only ten inches in diameter.

  Hood took out the mirror and guided it into the shaft. A mere eight inches above, Hood saw the fire stop that had been put in place to seal off the standpipe void. The fire stop could not be removed by pressing down. A groove of metal held it in place. But it could be easily removed by pressing up—something that wasn’t supposed to be possible from a shaft only ten inches in diameter. Then again, no one knew about the pipe duct just eight inches below and slightly to the left of the void.

  Hood smiled. They had thought they’d sealed up the darkness below. They had thought nothing could ever rise up and touch them again. But some things just won’t stay buried. Some things rise up no matter what you do to stop them.

  46

  It was 8:12 A.M. when Georgia walked out the doors of the stationmaster’s office carrying a large, navy blue gym bag weighing about thirty-two pounds. Inside were two brown paper bags loaded with ten bound stacks of five hundred hundred-dollar bills—five hundred thousand dollars each—along with a microchip transmitter buried between the stacks. She had no gun, no Handie-Talkie and no duty holster. If anyone was going to be shooting here, the NYPD was very clear that it was going to be them. All Georgia had was a radio strapped beneath her blouse. It chafed her skin and hampered the movement of her right wrist where the microphone was concealed.

  “Your job,” Brennan told her again, “is to put the two paper bags in the standpipe box and get the hell out of there.”

  The standpipe box was at the end of a corridor near the entrance to the Lexington Avenue subway. Rush hour was at its peak, and the faces streamed past her faster than she could process them. She allowed her gaze to drift sideways to a janitor mopping the marble floors, to two men in Giants football jerseys reading sports scores in the New York Post, to a commuter in a business suit sipping a Starbucks coffee and talking into his shirtsleeve. Every one of them looked like what he was: five-oh. A cop. Any halfway-savvy street kid would make them right away. Then again, she wasn’t exactly James Bond herself. There had been almost no time to prepare for this drop—which was just what Robin Hood wanted.

  Georgia opened the oak door of the standpipe box and was greeted by the familiar brass double-headed serpent—the standpipe hookups. She pushed down on the bottom of the fire stop. It was solidly in place. Then she hefted the two paper bags into the box and closed the door. She pretended to be checking inside her empty bag when she spoke into her sleeve.

  “Alpha Position to Checkpoint One,” she said. “Breakfast has been served.” The money was being referred to as “food” across the airwaves. The drop was “breakfast.”

  “Ten-four, Alpha,” came a voice on the line. It was Willard’s. “Now beat it.”

  Georgia walked across the main concourse of Grand Central. Shafts of morning light streamed through the sixty-foot arches of mullioned glass. A hollow feeling rose in her chest, a churning in her stomach. She couldn’t tell if it was a delayed reaction to stress and lack of sleep or an illness coming on. She didn’t want to chance the heat feeling this way. She bought a chocolate bar at a kiosk, then walked up a marble staircase overlooking the concourse. She unwrapped the tinfoil and nibbled on the bar. Her radio was still within receiving distance and she caught the voices of detectives checking in with each other, waiting for Robin Hood to appear.

  Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. Georgia finished the chocolate bar. There was no garbage can nearby, so she stuffed the crumpled tinfoil in her pocket. Still no sign of Robin Hood. Georgia heard a voice on the radio spew out a string of expletives. She looked out from the balcony at the floor of the main concourse and caught the familiar figure of Chris Willard, talking into his sleeve and bunching up his lips beneath his red mustache as if he wanted to hit somebody.

  “He ate the food,” she heard him say over the radio. “The goddamn prick ate the food.” The money was gone. There was no way Robin Hood could’ve touched that standpipe door with all those plainclothes detectives standing around. That meant only one thing: He’d found another route into the box.

  Georgia went back in her mind to the blueprints Brennan had spread across the table. The vent below the standpipe riser was sealed with a fire stop. The chief had said the vent was too small for an adult to crawl into—only ten inches in diameter. But somehow, Robin Hood had managed it. The vent ended near a walkway on Track Seventeen. And the fastest way to get there, she remembered from her drill, was through a fire-exit door at the back of a restaurant not fifty feet from Georgia on the upper balcony.

  She pushed aside the churning in her stomach and raced into the restaurant. Four flights down was Track Seventeen. It was crawling with commuters. Georgia maneuvered through the crowd until she came to a tight knot of detectives in a corner by an open vent. On the floor were the two crumpled paper bags along with a prybar. A heavyset older black man in a frayed denim jacket was being questioned by Willard and another detective from A and E. Arzuti was on the side.

  “What’s going on?” Georgia asked Arzuti, nodding toward the man.

  “Hey!” Willard yelled over. “I thought I told you to scram.”

  “I’m catching a train, Chris,” she shouted back. “I think that’s within the definition of scram.”

  The old man in the frayed jacket looked in Georgia’s direction. He had a hapless frown on his face and big, sad, rheumy eyes.

  “You’re not arresting this guy, are you?” Georgia asked Arzuti under her breath. “I mean, he’s not Robin Hood. Just look at him.”

  “We’re just questioning him at the moment,” Arzuti replied.

  “What happened? I gathered from the radio that Robin Hood got the money internally, somehow.”

  “We followed the transmitters down here where the vent ended. When we got here, the old guy was crumpling up the bags and pocketing a prybar he said he found inside one of them.”

  Georgia gave Arzuti a confused look. “Where’s the money?”

  “No idea. Our suspect here says he was walking by and something loud smashed over the grate on the vent. He saw the bags and pulled them out and they were empty except for the prybar.”

  “And the transmitters,” Georgia reminded him.

  “Yes, unfortunately,” Arzuti admitted. “That’s the one thing we didn’t want back.”

  Georgia edged nearer the detectives and squinted at the void. It looked too small for Georgia to squeeze through, let alone this heavy, older man.

  “Robin Hood didn’t get up that void, Phil,” said Georgia.

  “I know. Sandowsky is upstairs, poring over the blueprints, trying to find an alternate route. Wherever it is, it’s not obvious on the plans.” Arzuti spread his palms. “You can’t help, Skeehan. This isn’t an FDNY operation. You aren’t even armed right now.”

  “I know, I know,” said Georgia, holding up her hands. “I’ll go back to base.”

  “We’ll keep you posted,” Arzuti murmured.

  Georgia made a face. “What you mean is, I’ll read about it in the newspapers.” They both knew how the game worked.

  There was a fire-exit door at the far end of the corridor. Georgia opened it and found herself in the middle
of a crowd of pedestrians and gridlocked cars on Forty-sixth Street, just off Lexington Avenue, four blocks north of the main building. The hazy heat of the day was beginning to bear down hard.

  A blue-and-white city bus rumbled past, and Georgia choked back the smell of diesel exhaust. She was dying of thirst from the chocolate bar. At a pretzel cart, she fumbled in her purse for change to buy a soda, then dropped it all over the sidewalk. She bent to pick it up. People stepped over her as if she were little more than an oversized box that had tipped into their path. She saw their shoes—work boots and sneakers and wing tips and loafers.

  And open-toed Ferragamo pumps. The color of desert sand. With gold buttons glistening above the toe opening and a couple of Day-Glo nail-polished toes peeking through the faux-lizard skin.

  The world seemed to stop. The noise on the street faded to distant chatter. Georgia rose to her feet, the change forgotten. The crowd rushed past. She searched the backs of heads for a tall, buxom woman with raven hair. But she didn’t see her. Her skin felt like it would burst with anticipation. Why are you doing this? she asked herself. She’s dead. Get it through your head—she’s dead.

  Still, her heart pumped faster and her steps quickened. She looked down for the shoes, if only to convince herself that she was wrong. Her eyes smarted from staring into the morning sun, and she shielded them against the glare. She nearly bumped into a lamppost, her eyes were so focused on people’s feet.

  And then she saw the Ferragamo pumps. They were on a tall, leggy blonde about fifty feet in front of her. Beneath the woman’s beige linen suit, her hips swung with a rhythm that even Randy Carter would recognize. Georgia’s mind was slower than her body, because, for an instant, a wave of relief passed through her. She’s alive. Dear God, she’s alive. But her body wasn’t fooled. A cold, heavy sensation gathered in her gut, as if some vital organ had been ripped out and replaced with gravel. She wasn’t whole anymore.

  “Connie!” she called out. The woman turned reflexively and froze. Mirrored sunglasses did little to hide the contours of her caramel-colored face. The crowd ebbed and flowed around them like waves on sand. Georgia couldn’t hear the rumble of buses and car horns, the screech of tires, the one-way conversations on cell phones anymore. Everything disappeared except the woman with the dyed-blond hair and the Ferragamo pumps.

  Connie’s mirrored sunglasses lingered on Georgia’s face. Georgia couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t read the small parting of her full, cocoa-colored lips, yet her own face was an open book of hurt and betrayal. It was a fitting meeting—Connie, disguised and inscrutable; Georgia, out there on a limb with all her emotions just waiting to be picked off like ducks in a shooting gallery. For a long moment, neither woman made a move. Georgia felt as if she’d just stumbled out of a wrecked car and was too disoriented even to call nine-one-one. Finally, she took a step forward.

  The movement had the same effect it would on a rabbit. Connie bolted. The response knocked Georgia out of her dreamlike state. Her adrenaline flushed out her brain. She remembered the microphone still attached to her wrist and spoke into it now as she ran after Connie. In those pumps, there was no way Connie would get far.

  “Alpha Position to Checkpoint One. I am on Forty-sixth Street and Lexington. Have just made visual contact with suspect. She is in a beige linen suit pumps, and her hair is dyed blond. She is Officer Connie Ruiz.”

  Arzuti’s voice came on the line. He was so flummoxed, he forgot her code name. “Skeehan, are you serious?”

  Georgia squinted. Connie had stopped along the side of the building. Was she giving up? Then she saw her whip out a key and stick it into an unmarked door. It opened easily, and she disappeared inside.

  “You bet your ass I am, Arzuti. Connie Ruiz is Robin Hood. And she just went back into Grand Central.”

  47

  Georgia lost her. She didn’t have a key to open the door Connie had gone through. It was marked Authorized Personnel Only.

  The money. Connie didn’t have the money with her. It weighed around thirty-two pounds, and Connie was carrying only a small handbag when Georgia spotted her. That meant the money was still somewhere in Grand Central Terminal—but perhaps not for long. Now that Connie had been spotted, she might try to get it out.

  And how would I get the money out? Georgia asked herself. Not on foot. She’d already been made. Everyone at A and E would be looking for her. Not by car. Even if she had a rental in the parking lot of Grand Central, it would take too long to get it out. And, with the gridlock at rush hour in Manhattan, she wouldn’t get far. The commuter rails would be too sparsely populated at this hour of the morning. That left the subway. And since Connie knew every piece of track in this building, she didn’t need to take a public route to get there. She’d find a back way.

  Georgia raced down Forty-sixth Street, then found a cobblestoned entrance to Grand Central’s underground parking garage. She ran up to the parking attendant, a small, grizzled Latino in a starched uniform shirt, and showed him her badge. “Where does the door at the corner of Lex and Forty-sixth lead to?”

  “General storage on the lower level,” said the attendant.

  “How do I get there from here?”

  “Make a right at the door. Take the stairs on Platform F.”

  “Thanks.”

  She followed his instructions and soon found herself two stories below the pavements of Manhattan, in a dim and deserted train yard. Bare bulbs shone at intervals along the grimy concrete walls like torches in a castle dungeon. On the tracks, five silver commuter cars awaited repairs. Georgia saw construction lamps, electrical cables and an assortment of hand and power tools stretched out on the concrete before her. She picked up a heavy hammer and swung it in her hands. She wanted something for protection.

  She scanned the trains. She could hear the constant drip of water from somewhere in the train yard, and, overhead, a distant clunk and whir of trains pulling into and out of the station. She tried the door to a shed on the platform, but it was locked. The rattle reverberated along the cavernous stretch of tracks.

  And then she heard it. A ping—like a crescent wrench hitting a steel rail. Then all was silent again. Georgia let out a gasp. Her heart felt as if it would burst through her chest. She lowered herself off the platform and walked toward the broken car. It blocked the light like a huge mountain. On the other side, all was shadowy.

  Georgia circled the car. The windows were dark. From track level, she saw the gritty underbelly of the beast—all wheels and gears and axle grease. An empty aluminum can tipped over inside the car and began a slow rattle along the floor. Georgia’s pulse quickened. Her breathing became rapid and shallow. She tightened her grip on her hammer and took a step forward in the direction of the sound.

  There was a thunderous rattle of empty cans. A man with a long, wiry beard, greasy hair and a ragged raincoat the color of wet cement appeared at the door of the car. He had an empty malt liquor bottle in his hands and he was holding the neck of it like a weapon and swinging wildly in her direction. Despite the summer temperatures, he was in at least three layers of clothing. His toes were poking out of his sneakers, and he reeked of urine and sweat.

  “Go on,” he shouted. “Get. Get out of here. Goddamn Martians—taking over the goddamn city is what you’re doing.”

  Georgia said nothing. She held her hammer tight but didn’t swing it. She treated emotionally disturbed people—EDPs, in formal law-enforcement terminology, “skells” in firehouse lingo—the same way she would a guard dog. She did nothing to provoke, and all her movements were passive and slow.

  As she backed away from the rail car, she caught a movement on the other side of the yard. She turned just in time to catch a figure in navy blue coveralls, work boots and a yellow hard hat stumbling across the tracks. She had changed clothes, but those hips gave her away every time. Connie.

  Georgia ran across the track bed now, mindful of the third rails and of any oncoming headlights from trains. She hoisted herself up
on the other side of the platform. Her clothes were now covered with filth and sweat. Her side was shot through with pain from running. In an adjoining corridor, she caught the flash of a yellow hard hat as Connie ran down a flight of concrete stairs. Georgia followed.

  Unlike the rail yard, the halls down here—forty feet below the pavements of New York—were compact and bright. But the temperature was easily over a hundred degrees. And the noise was unceasing. Whistles, pings and staccato bursts like gunfire. Georgia looked down a long, twisting hallway to her right, and an identical one to her left. In both, white clouds of steam rose from huge pipes in crumbling asbestos sleeves. Both were so hot, neither Georgia nor Connie could last long.

  Right or left? Georgia knew Connie was right-handed. In a moment of panic, most people choose their favored orientations. But Connie was also a cop. She’d go against her instincts. So Georgia chose the left-hand tunnel. Sweat poured off her skin, loosening her grip on her hammer. Her throat burned, her lips were chapped and a headache throbbed behind her stinging eyes. Her mind started to wander. Mac is innocent. Mac didn’t kill Connie. Richie will be so happy. We’ll all be so happy.

  She was losing focus. She tried to shake it off and force herself to move quickly, yet her legs felt like they were strapped with ankle weights and her vision started to blur. Her arm had grown numb from lugging the hammer. She threw it on the concrete in an effort to pick up the pace. It’s no use. I’m starting to drift. I’ll die down here without backup. She reached for the microphone still on her wrist and spoke into the receiver.

  “Ten-thirteen,” she sputtered, using the universal code for police officer needing assistance. She’d forgotten that her microphone was only hooked to detectives at A and E. It wasn’t a radio into dispatch. It was possible that no one was even listening. It was possible the damn microphone didn’t even work this far below street level.