The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  Jackson T. Foozelman was lying on the chaise longue, in his signature black jeans, black NYU torn T-shirt, and heavy brown workmen’s boots. There was a bottle of Jim Beam Devil’s Cut bourbon on top of the Victorian trunk, almost empty. A few cartons of takeout Chinese were littered on the floor, what was left in them rotting and even more rancid than the air inside Fooz’s place. Candy Annie made a face and started to pick them up.

  “Look at this! I ask him over to dinner all the time! I’m a good cook. Simple dishes, you know, I can’t get fancy down here, but you’d be surprised what I can whip up.”

  McCall wasn’t listening. He moved to a kerosene lamp on a small Victorian side table. A box of matches lay beside it. He lit the lamp and turned up the wick. The yellow light cast a warm glow over the furniture in the makeshift Victorian room. Then he walked to the chaise longue where Fooz was lying and leaned down and shook him. He stirred, his eyes half opening. McCall shook him harder.

  “Wake up, old man!”

  Candy Annie dumped the Chinese takeout cartons into a plastic trash bin under the sink. She looked over at McCall, as if shocked.

  “I told you, he’s sick!”

  “He’s not sick, he’s drunk himself into a stupor.”

  McCall shook him one last time and Fooz groaned and half sat up. His skeletal face seemed more taut, as if the skin had been stretched even tighter across his cheekbones. He put a shaking hand to his head, his eyes closed in pain. McCall was familiar with the feeling, but at this moment he didn’t care.

  “I need you awake and sober, Fooz.”

  Fooz opened his eyes, still groggy, looking up at him in his carefully appointed Victorian room right out of a Strand picture in a Sherlock Holmes volume. He tried to focus on McCall’s face. He stuck out a trembling, gnarled hand.

  “Dr. John Watson,” he mumbled. “We … we don’t know a thing about each other.”

  “Afghanistan or Iraq?” McCall asked, stopping the old man from tumbling back down into a prone position again.

  “Afghanistan, how did you…”

  Fooz broke off as pain obviously pounded through his head.

  McCall turned to Candy Annie.

  “Make him some coffee.”

  “Sure.”

  Fooz had a very modern Tassimo coffeemaker on the counter beside the sink, the kind that makes one cup at a time. Candy Annie opened the shelves above the sink, found some scattered Tassimo coffee disks, chose a Maxwell House and put it into the top slot in the coffeemaker and shut the lid. She took a Yankees mug from the small counter beside the sink and washed it and put it into the slot at the bottom of the coffeemaker.

  By this time McCall had Fooz sitting up again.

  “We don’t know a thing about each other,” Fooz said again, his voice raspy and dreamy. It had taken on a distinctly London accent.

  He wasn’t quoting from the classic Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet where Holmes, upon meeting Dr. Watson for the first time, says, “How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” Fooz was quoting from the first episode of the brilliant Sherlock series “A Study in Pink,” where Dr. Watson, played by Martin Freeman, first meets Sherlock Holmes, played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

  McCall said, “I know you’re an army doctor and you’ve been invalided home from Afghanistan, I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him, possibly because he’s an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his first wife.”

  McCall didn’t attempt Benedict Cumberbatch’s brilliant Holmes’s ironic throwaway monotone, but he knew the opening scene as well as Fooz did.

  Fooz nodded. His breath stank of bourbon. His eyes were still half closed. McCall slapped his face.

  “Wake up! You know who I am?”

  “Mr. McCall,” Fooz said. “Of course I do.”

  The coffee was ready. Candy Annie removed the Yankees mug, filled now with Maxwell House.

  “Pour some salt into it,” McCall said.

  Candy Annie looked at him, then found a package of salt in one of the shelves above the sink and poured a little into the mug.

  “More than that,” McCall said. “Fill it up.”

  Candy Annie made a face and poured more salt into the mug. She brought it over to the chaise longue. McCall thrust it into Fooz’s trembling hands. He took one swallow and spit out the coffee.

  “That’s terrible. I’m taking that machine back to Sears.”

  “Drink it.”

  McCall took Fooz’s trembling hands and held them steady. He forced him to drink the coffee. He gagged and spluttered, but got it all down. McCall took the Yankees mug from him and set it onto the trunk. Fooz’s breathing had calmed. His eyes were clearer. He stared up at McCall, looked over at an anxious Candy Annie, then back to McCall.

  “What can I do for a fellow Sherlockian?”

  McCall and Jackson T. Foozelman had walked the subterranean tunnels many times, both of them discussing Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the merits and quirks of the particular Holmes’s stories.

  But not tonight.

  “I need to get below City Hall station,” McCall said. “Right now.”

  Fooz shook his head.

  “Can’t take you there.”

  “Another cup,” McCall said to Candy Annie. Fooz looked at him. “No salt this time.”

  Candy Annie found another Tassimo coffee disk on the shelf, Gevalia Morning Roast. She grabbed a chipped white china mug and put it in the slot, then popped the Gevalia Morning Roast disk into the top of the coffeemaker.

  “You mean there are no tunnels that go that far?” McCall asked.

  “Oh, sure,” the old man said. “We got tunnels going way beyond the Brooklyn Bridge. There are tunnels right beneath City Hall station. It ain’t in use no more. Damn shame. Most beautiful subway station in Manhattan. Like it was a metro in Paris or somewhere. But some damned bureaucrat decided it would be cheaper just to shut ’er down.”

  “Why can’t you take me there?”

  Jackson T. Foozelman didn’t respond. The coffee was ready—twenty seconds. Candy Annie lifted the china mug off the coffeemaker and came back and put it into Fooz’s still trembling hands. He sipped at it.

  “Fooz, I don’t have much time,” McCall said with soft urgency.

  “That’s Brakers’ territory over there,” Fooz said, and he averted his eyes from McCall’s face and took a swallow of the coffee.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Brakers. Not exactly a tribe, but there’s a whole gang of ’em. Been living in the tunnels and passageways around that area since the 1980s. They’re very territorial. They don’t let any of the other Subs into their domain. You wander in there, like you’re lost, and you don’t come out again.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Don’t know. Fifty, maybe. We leave them alone, they leave us alone.”

  “Then draw me a map,” McCall said. “How to get there. Exactly where I can find a way up into City Hall station.”

  The old man shook his head again. “You wouldn’t be able to find it. The tunnels go every which way. Damned confusing, unless you’re someone who really knows how to walk ’em, and you don’t.”

  “So you have been there?”

  “When I was younger. Got into a hassle with some of the Brakers. They’re all young, wild. Criminals, I’d say, forced underground.”

  “Not an entire society.”

  Fooz shrugged. “Probably some good ones, too. I don’t know. I never went back.”

  McCall stood up. He paced for a moment, his hands clenching and unclenching in frustration. Then he turned back.

  “What if one of them gets sick?”

  “They’ll let Doc Bennett in.”

  “Go get him. I need to talk to him.”

  “To ask him to go into Brakers’ territory? Not unless one of ’em’s real sick.”

  McCall took hold
of the old man by his bony shoulders and hauled him up off the chaise longue.

  “Those men who were in the tunnels before, when I was here with my friend?”

  “I remember,” Fooz whispered.

  McCall did not let him go.

  “They killed him. Now they’ve got three hostages in the old City Hall subway station and one of them is my teenage son. I need your help, Fooz. If you can’t help me, I’ll go alone. Just draw me that map.”

  He let go of the old man’s shoulders.

  Fooz finished the coffee and handed it back to Candy Annie, who stood silently, awkwardly, not knowing what to do.

  “I’ll get the Doc, bring him here,” Fooz said, not looking at either of them. “He’ll help ya. He ain’t afraid of anything. We’ll go together.”

  Fooz pushed past McCall to the sink and threw some water on his face. He dried it off with a dish towel, then moved through his Victorian parlor to where the plywood at the front of the tunnel had been moved away.

  “Ten minutes,” Fooz said, and was gone.

  McCall took Candy Annie’s hand.

  “You go home, Annie.”

  “I’m frightened for you.”

  “I’m frightened for myself, but there’s nothing more you can do for me.”

  “Will you come back again? Let me know you’re … all right?”

  McCall knew she was going to say “alive,” but the word died in her throat.

  “I came back this time, didn’t I?” McCall said gently.

  She kissed him on the cheek.

  Then she ran through Fooz’s home and disappeared.

  Fooz came back with Dr. Bennett. He was dressed in the same rumpled gray suit McCall had met him in. He carried his old-fashioned doctor’s bag. His manner was as abrupt as ever.

  “What’s this all about? Fooz was barely coherent.”

  “I need a diversion. To get into Brakers’ territory around the tunnels below the old City Hall subway.”

  “Why?”

  “There are hostages being held inside the station.”

  “Call the police.”

  “That’d be a sure way to get them all killed. I’m not asking you to go in there.”

  “Sounds like you might need a doctor to be handy.”

  “That may be so, but I’m going up into the station alone. You got a message to go into Brakers’ territory. Someone is sick or took a bad fall. That’s all you know. You and Fooz just keep a reception committee busy.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Go down the tunnels that Fooz is going to draw for me.”

  Fooz picked up a pen from the antique trunk, took out his crumpled Filofax package from his back pocket, and drew a series of crisscrossing tunnels onto one of the Filofax pages. He tore it off and gave it to McCall.

  “These are the last ones you need to go down. We’ll get ya pretty close. Doc?”

  Dr. Bennett was looking around Fooz’s crib.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  “Doc?” McCall said.

  “You should be calling the police or the FBI,” Dr. Bennett said. “But I can tell you’re a stubborn man. And one to be reckoned with.”

  “His son is one of the hostages,” Fooz offered.

  Dr. Bennett gave McCall a curt nod.

  McCall looked at his watch: 11:28 P.M.

  “We have to go now,” he said.

  McCall heaved up the Adidas sports bag. The three of them walked out of Fooz’s home. Fooz pulled across the plywood sheets boarding it off. He staggered a little and McCall caught his arm.

  “You don’t need to nursemaid me, son,” Fooz said softly. “Let’s do this.”

  The three of them moved quickly down the dark tunnel.

  CHAPTER 47

  Fooz moved slower than McCall was used to, no doubt fighting the hangover, but he was still agile in going up and down the concrete and metal stairs to the various levels of the subterranean tunnels. Dr. Bennett had to hustle to keep up with the old man. McCall was carrying the heavy sports bag. As they came out into yet another dank, dripping tunnel, this one stinking of sewage, Fooz glanced back at him.

  “What’s in the sports bag?”

  “Firepower.”

  “I’d sure like to see that,” Fooz said, his eyes shining.

  He scampered down the reeking tunnel, found an iron door in a niche, and tried it. It was locked. He took a ring of old keys out of his pocket, tried one in the lock, turned it. Didn’t work.

  He tried another.

  Locked.

  The third key did the trick.

  Fooz pushed the door open.

  They came out into a vault like the one with the murals. There were paintings on the walls here, too, but they depicted violent scenes, apocalyptic devastation, crumbled charcoal buildings with the bodies of human beings, some with limbs severed, some headless, all of them writhing together in a kind of Dante’s Inferno coupling. The visions were disturbing and ominous. Some of them looked freshly painted to McCall.

  “Brakers’ territory,” Fooz whispered.

  There was almost no light in the vault. What there was came up from somewhere ahead and below them, pale illumination just touching the debris strewn around the space, outlining the hellish murals.

  A young man appeared out of the gloom, shouting something unintelligible, wielding an old rusty wrench. He took a swing at Fooz. The old man’s instincts had kicked in and he was already turning. He warded off the blow, but there was another shout and a wild-eyed young woman, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with a skull-and-crossbones on it, lunged at Fooz. She didn’t need a weapon. She had three-inch-long bloodred nails that gouged at his face, going for his eyes.

  At the same moment another young man, bearded and wearing army fatigues, came at McCall out of the murk, swinging a length of chain.

  McCall didn’t want to hurt these people. He wasn’t going to pull one of the guns and shoot any of them. He avoided the length of chain, grabbed the young man at the throat, ripped the chain out of his hand, wrapped it around his throat, and pulled on it. He fell to the concrete floor, gasping. At the same time McCall reached out, grabbed the girl by her long hair, and yanked her away from Fooz and down to the ground.

  Fooz threw himself into the kid with the wrench, both of them hitting the concrete hard. The wrench flew from the assailant’s hand. Fooz got in a couple of good punches before the young man hurled him off. Fooz flew across the cement floor. McCall thought his matchstick limbs were going to shatter on the concrete.

  Two Brakers had grabbed Dr. Bennett on either side. McCall picked up one of the attackers and tossed him into a pile of concrete debris. The second one had a length of steel pipe that he swung at McCall. McCall dodged under the blow, grabbed the man’s arm, but he would not release the pipe.

  McCall broke his arm and released it.

  He fell to the ground, crying out.

  Dr. Bennett knelt down beside him.

  A gunshot echoed through the big chamber.

  McCall looked across it. A tall woman was striding through the overlapping shadows. She was probably in her sixties, but held the years with grace. She looked like she’d worked on a farm all her life. Her face was tanned and leathery and very lined, but her cornflower blue eyes blazed even in the low light. Her back was ramrod straight. She wore faded blue jeans and a blue denim shirt. She had blond hair, curled like she worked on it for hours, going down her back well below her ass. She wore Nike Free Flyknit blue running shoes with a white swoosh that looked pretty new. So did her clothes. She went into the upworld. Maybe she did the shopping for her gang.

  She carried a Walther PPK 9 mm handgun in a black finish. She held it up, pointing at the ceiling. Around her were the shapes of other Brakers, who melted back into the shadows as she walked forward.

  The man at McCall’s feet reached for the fallen length of lead pipe. McCall kicked the pipe out of his reach. Dr. Bennett was saying something softly to the young
man with the broken arm, probably telling him to stay still. Fooz had scrambled to his feet. There were bloodred scratches down one side of his face.

  The older woman walked into one of the oblique pools of light coming from the area below. McCall thought she was quite beautiful, in spite of the deeply cut lines in her face. It was her eyes. They were mesmerizing.

  When she spoke her voice had a kind of husky Madonna-esque quality to it.

  “You know better than to venture into Brakers’ territory without an invitation, Mr. Foozelman.”

  Fooz decided to tell the truth.

  “Alicia, I have a friend who needs to get up into the old City Hall station. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  Fooz nodded at McCall. Alicia’s gorgeous eyes flicked to him, then looked over at the doctor still kneeling beside the young man who clutched his arm.

  “And you brought Dr. Bennett along because you knew your friend would start breaking arms?”

  “We were going to try to distract you so’s he could sneak out of here. I figured that wasn’t a good idea.”

  “But it’s a good thing I’m here,” Dr. Bennett said. “This man’s arm is broken in two places. It needs to be set, and not down here. My son works in the ER three nights a week at the New York-Presbyterian in Washington Heights. Let me take him there.”

  Alicia walked forward until she was only a few feet from McCall.

  “Did you have to break his arm?”