The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  It had been him, from the club, one of the enforcers.

  He offered her the plastic cup again, as if she didn’t quite understand that he was bringing her coffee.

  “Cold in here,” Kuzbec said, his voice concerned. “Sorry I can’t give you any light. This will warm you up. Okay?”

  She took the cup from him. He sat back on his haunches and waited, as if wanting to make sure she drank her coffee and appreciated his good deed for the night.

  Natalya struggled a little, trying to remove the lid.

  “You can drink it through the little hole there,” Kuzbec said with a patient smile, as if she were four years old, and pointed out the place on the lid where she could sip.

  Natalya managed to remove the lid of the plastic cup, took a swallow of the hot coffee, then threw the rest of it in his face.

  Kuzbec screamed and fell back.

  Natalya jumped to her feet to bolt past him.

  Kuzbec had the presence of mind to stick out his leg. She tripped over it and fell headlong onto the floor. He kicked her in the ribs. Pain rocketed through her body. Then she heard the sound of someone else coming into the storage room. There was a scuffle of violent movement. She rolled over and looked up. In a haze, she saw one of the other enforcers—she thought his name was Salam—pulling Kuzbec away to the open door. She heard the words “Leave her!” but they were echoing and faint and sounded like they were coming from down a long tunnel. She gasped to get her breath back after the kick to her ribs. She saw the second enforcer push Kuzbec through the open doorway. Subway tracks gleamed in the light beyond them. Then Salam closed the door to the storage room and she heard the key turn again in the lock.

  Natalya crawled to the shelves, avoiding the spilled coffee. She sat up and put her back against the shelves and drew her knees up and hugged them.

  She was going to die in this darkness.

  * * *

  She hadn’t seen him when the men had come for her at the apartment. She hadn’t even known they were there. She’d been late leaving to pick up Natalya from school and was in the kitchen, stuffing a tuna sandwich into a plastic container with a juice box to bring to her. She’d forgotten to give her her lunch that morning. She might be hungry on the walk back to the Dakota. She had heard some muffled sounds coming from somewhere—one of the guest bedrooms. She hadn’t thought anything about it. The nice young man McCall had sent to look after them was in there. She’d started to turn around, and then someone had grabbed her from behind and pinned her arms to her sides. Someone else had grabbed her hair. A third man had thrust a chloroformed rag over her nose and mouth. The sickly stench of it had been overpowering. The man holding her by the hair had dragged her away, even as the sweet aroma had brought oblivion.

  She’d swum up from dark depths to consciousness to find herself on a concrete staircase. Her wrists were bound behind her back with duct tape. Her ankles were also tightly bound. There was a piece of tape across her mouth. Above her head was an iron railing going down the staircase. There was a mosaic on the tiled wall in brilliant colors. Below the staircase was a platform. She could just see the edge of it. She could hear vague footfalls that echoed hollowly in what had to be a subway station.

  Then one set of footsteps grew louder.

  Katia watched as the shape of the man climbing the stairs came into focus. She shook off the last effects of the chloroform. She recognized the figure immediately. Someone she knew as well as she knew herself or her own daughter.

  Alexei Berezovsky stopped a foot away and smiled down at her. He was wearing all black and had a pistol in a holster on his right hip. He looked like he’d just stepped out of some Western movie, the bad guy, all in black, all he needed was the black hat. His smile chilled her blood. She wondered how she could ever have loved this man. But he had been charismatic in the beginning. She had seen no vicious side of him. She had seen the persona others saw at the art exhibitions and the Dolls nightclubs and the charity fund-raisers where he used his charm as a weapon and a disguise. She had seen the ugly side of him for the first time right after she’d become pregnant with Natalya, when she hadn’t wanted to wear a ruby bracelet he had given to her to a ballet opening night. She had said she preferred to wear an emerald bracelet her mother had given her for her eighteenth birthday. He had knocked the emerald bracelet out of her hand, thrown her onto the bed, slapped her face until she thought she would pass out, then told her she would wear what he told her to wear when he told her to wear it.

  From that night on she had been terrified of him.

  And yet, when she’d told him she was leaving him, fully expecting to be beaten, he had smiled sadly and nodded and said it would be a good thing for her and Natalya to come to the United States. He had opened a Dolls nightclub in Manhattan and she would have a job there. Natalya could go to an American high school. It would do them both good to be out of Moscow. Two days later they had flown to New York.

  There had never been any talk about divorce. But she knew it was not a trial separation. It was forever. She understood the reason behind the magnanimous gesture. Berezovsky had simply tired of her. Tired of her company, tired of making love to her, if you could call their violent fucking anything so tender, tired of parading his wife out at charity functions. He’d had numerous affairs that he had never tried to hide from her or anyone else.

  She had never been so relieved in her life when that airplane took off from Sheremetyevo International Airport and she had clutched her daughter’s hand tightly and thought of the new life they would have away from their abusive husband and father.

  She stared up at him.

  He leaned down and ripped off the gray duct tape from across her mouth. She gasped in breath.

  All he said to her was: “We are waiting for your guardian angel,” and then hit her in the face.

  He beat her the way he had always beaten her during their marriage, careful not to break her cheekbones or scar her. Blood spilled out of her mouth. Her left eye closed almost completely. He used his open palm to slap her face, again and again, like he was going to smack her head right off her shoulders. His signet ring gouged out little bits of flesh. When he stopped her face was bright red in the pale light drifting up from the platform below.

  She tried to say: “Natalya…” but he slapped the word out of her mouth.

  Then he punched her in the stomach. The pain was agony and she thought she would throw up on the stairs. He slapped her head back and it hit the iron railing. She shut her eyes, waiting for more blows, but none came.

  She opened her eyes to see Berezovsky walking back down the stairs to the subway platform below. He disappeared from sight. One of the young men from Dolls passed through her line of vision, not looking up at her, carrying a submachine gun over his shoulder. There were occasional shuffling movements and the murmur of men talking softly.

  They were waiting for her “guardian angel.”

  For Robert McCall.

  With submachine guns and handguns.

  He didn’t have a chance.

  * * *

  Scott McCall was handcuffed to a railing beside the boarded-up ticket booth in the main station of the old City Hall subway station. They’d grabbed him as he’d walked down the street from his violin lesson. Bundled him into the backseat of a black Lincoln town car. A black sack had been pulled down over his head and he’d been handcuffed right there. He’d had no idea where they’d driven to, but it hadn’t been that far. He thought they were still in the city. When they’d handcuffed him to the railing and taken the sack off his head, he’d known where he was. City Hall was right beside the Brooklyn Bridge. Obviously the subway station was no longer an operating part of the system, although he could faintly hear trains occasionally down below. They came and went very quickly. Maybe the trains went through the station and then looped around to return to the city. Certainly there were no passengers getting off and ascending the marble staircases up to the station building. This main area was derelict
and badly in need of repairs.

  Scott was scared. Watching movies he’d always fantasized what he would do in a situation like this. He would figure out a way to escape. He would be a hero. But it wasn’t like that in real life. He felt alone and afraid and angry that he’d been taken. What did they want with him? He’d heard them talking about other prisoners. Were they somewhere in the deserted station?

  His mother and stepfather were well off, but not rich. They could scrape together a decent ransom, but why him? There were really rich kids who would bring in a lot more money for the kidnappers.

  But he knew.

  This was about his real father.

  His mom had let something slip about his dad being back in New York City. They’d met for a drink somewhere. But she swore he was not coming back into their lives. Scott would not be seeing him, which was a good thing. He had no desire to talk to the man who had abandoned him when he was five years old. He’d broken his mother’s heart. Even though Scott knew she loved his stepdad Tom Blake—and he was a great guy—Scott had always known his mom still carried a torch for Robert McCall. He couldn’t fathom why. The guy was basically a criminal working for some shadowy splinter unit of the government that no one would even admit existed. Doing their dirty work. Killing people.

  Scott hated him.

  And now this killer was back in their lives and his son had been kidnapped. Was this some kind of retribution? Some old enemy of his dad’s? Scott didn’t know and didn’t care. He just wanted to get out of there.

  He wrenched uselessly on the handcuffs that held him to the iron railing. He looked around the deserted station room. There was nothing at all that could help him escape. He didn’t want to hope that his real father was on his way there right now to rescue him. He didn’t want to owe him anything.

  He also didn’t want to die.

  Scott laid his head back against the boarded-up ticket booth and shivered in the cold.

  And realized that he was hoping against hope that his father would come for him.

  CHAPTER 46

  McCall walked down a long subterranean tunnel, carrying the heavy Adidas sports bag. He couldn’t find Candy Annie’s half-tunnel home. He thought he knew the way from the manhole entrance on Fifty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, but he’d become hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of subway and steam tunnels. They all looked the same without a Subterranean escort. When he’d first started walking the underground passageways, he’d marked them with an orange Sharpie so he could find his way back to his egress point. He came across some of those orange X’s at the beginnings and endings of tunnels, but now they were meaningless.

  Finally he walked down an abandoned tunnel and felt it vibrate. A train was thundering past in an adjacent tunnel. He realized he was in the same tunnel he’d walked down with Danil Gershon. He found the iron door with the unlit red light above it and hauled it open. He stepped into the vault that had once been a subway station with its rusting steel girders holding up a low ceiling. Light spilled through the ajar iron door from the subway tunnel. It glowed on the mural of the child holding her mother’s hand in the field of daisies. The Williamsburg Bridge still reached out on the wall, as if beckoning McCall to step onto it. Then a memory assailed him.

  McCall dropped the sports bag at his feet and felt into the back pocket of his black jeans. He came up with the folded Filofax page on which Fooz had scrawled a crude map. The route to Candy Annie’s crib. McCall picked up the sports bag and ran with it, following the route he had taken before. He passed some of the familiar dwellings in the various tunnels and the big open spaces of concrete hemmed in by pipes. He looked for the woman in her sixties in her rocking chair surrounded by good-looking furniture, but her tunnel niche was empty. He did see the young man in army fatigues with wild, curly hair sitting in the same broken armchair smoking a cigarette. It was like time had stopped for him. As if he hadn’t moved from that chair in the intervening days and was just smoking another cigarette. Maybe that was true. He stared out into space and took no notice of McCall as he ran past the niche.

  McCall looked for one more human landmark and found it: the metal sheeting of a dwelling in which the fifty-year-old man was doing really well on his LEGO town. In addition to the police and the fire station, he’d finished the mom-and-pop grocery store and had added to his High Street a post office, greengrocers, dry cleaners, hair salon, and even a McDonalds’ on the corner with yellow arches. Right now he was working on the roof of a red-bricked bank. He set a tiny American flag in the top and glanced up. He smiled at McCall, as if recognizing him, and made a gesture at the LEGO High Street.

  “Coming along nicely,” McCall said.

  The man nodded and went back to work.

  McCall ran faster, time eating away at him. He had just over an hour to get to City Hall subway station.

  He transversed the bigger spaces, like metal parks, but all of them were deserted now. He climbed up onto the next half level and knew where he was. He ran down the dimly lit tunnel and turned into Candy Annie’s dwelling.

  She was sitting on her bed watching a Dr. Who episode where a young Doctor and his companion Clara were fleeing from monsters down a series of tunnels not unlike the ones McCall had just run down. When she saw him, Candy Annie grabbed her remote, froze the picture on the TV screen, and jumped up.

  “Mr. McCall! You came back!”

  She threw herself into his arms and hugged him.

  McCall dropped the sports bag to the cement floor and put his arms around her.

  “You want to watch my Dr. Who episode with me?” she asked him. “Matt Smith, he’s the best one, so much energy, such great acting.”

  McCall pulled her from him. She was dressed in her usual white blouse and long diaphanous skirt. The amber light shone through them. Full set of underwear. Her hair was freshly washed and smelled of lavender. The light haloed her hair and face. Her eyes were shining. McCall held her at arm’s length.

  “Annie, I need to find Fooz. It’s very important. People’s lives are at stake.”

  Now her eyes grew troubled. “I haven’t seen him since we came back from the cemetery. When was that? A week ago? Time gets a little fuzzy down here. I think he’s been sick.”

  “I need him, Annie. Do you know where he lives?”

  “I’ve never actually been there. Fooz discourages socializing. Unless you’re a Sherlockian.”

  “Can you take me to his place?”

  “Sure. I know my way around the tunnels. It’s my home,” she said simply. “Come with me.”

  She threw a multicolored wool shawl around her shoulders, one McCall thought she probably had made herself, grabbed a handful of Hershey’s Kisses and a couple of Snickers bars, and moved quickly out of the narrow space. He picked up the sports bag. She led him down the long tunnel and then through a heavy iron door McCall had not noticed in the tunnel wall. She ran down some steps and along an abandoned subway tunnel filled with fallen bricks where part of it had caved in. She skirted around them, McCall right behind her, and climbed up some metal stairs to another door, this one made of warped wood. She heaved it open and McCall followed her into one of the big open spaces.

  There were several people sitting in deck chairs on a steel shelf as if they were at the beach. Pale light sifted down from above. Some of them were reading, others were stretched out on blankets, a young couple in torn jeans and T-shirts were throwing a Frisbee around. The young woman waved to Candy Annie. She waved back, but didn’t pause in her headlong rush through the echoing space. McCall felt eyes burning into his back. Upworlder. He gave the surrealistic scene barely a glance as he followed Candy Annie.

  She ran down several more subway tunnels, looking up at the gray and green pipes that snaked through them along the ceilings, some of them very low. She was counting softly to herself. Finally they came to a set of concrete stairs that led up to another iron door. McCall found his breathing was constricted. Partially due to the fractured ribs he had tape
d up on both sides of his lungs. But mainly because of the air down in the tunnels: putrid, humid, and stifling. Although it didn’t seem to affect Candy Annie in the slightest.

  Once through the iron doorway, McCall found they were in a tunnel with brick walls on both sides. It was larger than most of them and had bright graffiti painted on the tunnel walls in a language McCall didn’t recognize. It was like some kind of pigeon English. None of the words made any sense. But he wasn’t reading them; they were just a blur of vision as he ran through the echoing tunnel after the girl.

  She stopped halfway down where another tunnel was blocked off by large sheets of plywood.

  “This should be Fooz’s place,” she panted, finally stopping to catch her breath.

  McCall set down the sports bag and helped her move aside the plywood, which was not nailed down, but just leaned against the opening. Fooz had to have easy access, but he obviously didn’t want Subs wandering in for a cup of coffee or to shoot the breeze.

  Candy Annie went in first. McCall picked up the sports bag and entered the gloomy, narrow space, lit only by the work lights from the big tunnel behind them.

  It was like he’d stepped into a Victorian parlor.

  There was a Victorian curio cabinet in one corner filled with porcelain bells of all kinds, at least a hundred of them. There was a Hammond Accent Chair, a Victorian chaise longue, a Coaster Victorian seven-drawer jewellery armoire in antique white, the drawers open, filled with junk. There was a Queen Anne Cheval six-foot mirror, a Pulaski Victorian cherry cabinet, an antique wooden trunk, and a Victorian rolltop desk with little cubbyholes stuffed with papers and maps and faded photographs. There was a Lucinda sleigh bed along one wall with a Victorian oak wine cooler beside it. Along one wall was a kitchen stove, a sink, and an old-fashioned refrigerator from the fifties when they called them iceboxes. Incongruously there was a large TV set, circa 1995, in the Victorian cherry cabinet, its glass doors open. On top of the antique trunk was a remote along with discarded editions of the New York Times from that month. There were several DVDs, all about Sherlock Holmes: the old Basil Rathbone series of movies, the Elementary TV series, three seasons of the British Sherlock series, and a half-dozen DVDs starring actors McCall never knew had played Holmes: Jeremy Brett, Peter Cushing, and Ronald Howard. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves along three sides of the room with a mixture of leather-bound volumes and stacks of paperbacks. The walls themselves looked like dark oak, but McCall knew they were laminated onto the concrete. There was a small passage that led to the back. McCall caught a glimpse of a tiled bathroom and a shower stall.