The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [49]
“General direction, then?”
Dennis hunched his shoulders as he started the routine of transferring links to the equipment in the house. “East.”
The river lay due east, but so did highways, towns, and scores of residential areas. Three lawyers—one of them dead—a doctor, and a shift supervisor: an unlikely commando unit with a maverick plan and a mystery prisoner. Rather than the thrill of the hunt, Nikola’s mind thickened with foreboding.
chapter 19
01:42
The man waiting for them by the tracks had not volunteered anything beyond a curt “Follow me.” He cast an imposing figure in a long drab coat that almost brushed the floor, a yellow electrical cord tied around his waist as a belt. In another incarnation, the coat must have belonged to a giant. Salt-and-pepper hair, unkempt and matted, fused with a bushy beard and mustache, and a greasy stench preceded him by a good six feet.
“Friend or foe?” Floyd whispered in her ear.
Laurel eyed him warily. “He doesn’t look like the DHS to me, so let’s find out. Besides, what choice do we have?”
After filing through a two-hundred-yard stretch of tunnel, they entered a dimly lit scene worthy of Francis Bacon. Laurel had heard of homeless people living with rats in dark caverns underneath the city: nightmarish tales of pain, filth, violence, and romance. But nothing could have prepared her for this. Scores of people, scattered along the rail bed and the platforms, moved along an abandoned passenger station. They huddled around open fires or scurried into cardboard-box burrows. Flames cast dancing shadows on the curved walls, and voices mingled with grunts and the crackle of whatever burned in the fires.
The man walking ahead stopped before a figure squatting by a huge samovarlike contraption, which rested on a tripod over a camping stove. He turned to the fugitives. “Refreshments,” he said. “I’m Henry Mayer. Henry will do.”
The group stood rooted to the spot. Laurel looked around the station. It was a long structure, three or four hundred feet, split into two levels: the track bed—perhaps twenty feet wide—from which the rails had been long removed, flanked by ample passenger platforms a few feet higher up. The walls, covered in grimy tiles that once must have been white, curved to form a vaulted surface overhead.
“Over there.” Henry pointed up to a yellowish glimmer issuing from an entrance roughly in the center of the right platform wall. “We have prepared a flat surface for …” He scratched his beard. “Your colleague.”
Floyd nodded to Raul. They stepped back to climb a wooden ramp between the rail bed and the higher platform—a few planks with battens nailed at intervals to afford a grip. Once on the raised area, they carried Russo over to the side entrance.
Henry remained impassive. Then his eyes darted a quick glance toward Lukas before staring back at Laurel.
She cleared her throat and said to Lucas, “Er … Floyd will need a hand with Russo, and I need Raul down here. Could you?”
Lukas nodded once and dashed over toward the ramp, as if eager to hide somewhere out of the open.
The man looking after the huge kettle reached into a cardboard box for a mug and, with a hand wrapped in something that once was a woolen mitten, grabbed the spout and pulled. The contraption, obviously set on gimbals, pivoted to spew a gush of dark liquid into the mug. Then the man held it in midair and waited.
Henry huffed and reached into his pocket.
Laurel blinked when Henry’s arm continued to sink past its natural stopping place, almost to his elbow, only to surface clenching a grimy ten-dollar bill.
The man at the kettle reached for the bill with one hand and advanced the mug with the other. Beyond Henry, Laurel spotted Raul returning, leaping down from the platform to the rail bed.
“Here.” Henry grabbed the mug and turned toward Raul.
Raul reached over. After a sharp intake of breath, he cursed, lowered the mug onto the floor, and blew on his hands.
“Tender, are we? Next you’ll ask for cream and sugar.”
When another mug was pointed in her direction, Laurel hid her hands inside