darkness. Nelson found a light switch and flipped it on. A stairwel uncoiled to his left, down and into the bel y of Chicago’s subway system.
Nelson walked back outside, popped the trunk on the Impala, and considered a local prostitute named Maria Jackson, smiling red at him through the thick plastic. Robles had done a good job wrapping her after he’d finished, and the blood did not seem to have leaked. Nelson took a last look around, lifted the body, and carried it inside. Then he drove his car two blocks and parked on a deserted section of street. From the backseat he pul ed a duffel bag. Inside it was a rifle, his scopes, and the hard black case he’d taken from Robles. Nelson hiked back to the access door and opened it again. Maria hadn’t gone anywhere. He hefted her body across his shoulders, duffel in his right hand, and began to walk down the first staircase.
Nelson took his time, resting frequently. Two flights of stairs and a long sloping ramp threaded him back toward the Loop and deep into the lower levels of the subway. A second door opened out to the first run of tracks, an auxiliary spur reserved for trains in need of repair. Nelson walked another hundred paces before al owing the body to slip from his shoulders. Maria Jackson fel among the cinders with a graceless thump. Nelson kept moving.
A quarter mile later, he stopped again. The auxiliary track split here. Nelson took the right fork and came to a second set of tracks. This was a primary set for the Blue Line’s run into the Loop.
Nelson stepped gingerly across the rails and onto the main track. He would hear the train wel before it came around the bend, roughly two hundred yards away. Besides, he didn’t figure the job to take long. The track Nelson was standing on was the oldest usable section in the entire CTA. It had been scheduled for renovation in 2004. The work had been delayed once, twice, and now, in 2010, stil hadn’t been done. Which was why Nelson was here. Unlike the other three hundred miles of subway track, this portion had not been updated with sealed fluorescent lighting. Nelson looked up at the bare lightbulbs. Heavy-duty, yes, and partial y shielded with steel covers. But lightbulbs al the same. Nelson found the ladder he knew they kept in a maintenance shed and positioned it under a bulb. Then he took Robles’ black case out of his duffel, climbed the ladder, and unscrewed the bulb from its porcelain fixture. He knew this fixture wel. He’d bought a half dozen like it from a man who col ected CTA odds and ends. Nelson knew it took six turns to secure the bulb in the fixture. Four turns and it would stil be al right. Three turns and the vibrations from passing trains would begin to turn the bulb in its grooves and eventual y loosen it. Fewer turns… or more vibrations… and the bulb got looser that much more quickly. An inexact science, with an inevitable result.
Nelson opened the case and took out one of the two bulbs stored inside. Careful y he screwed it in. One and one-half turns. The bulb was now, essential y, a timing device. Depending on how many trains rattled by, the bulb would loosen itself in anywhere from seven days to a couple of weeks. Then it would fal and smash on the steel tracks below. Nelson held out his hand again, felt the oily breeze flowing across his fingertips, and looked up at the huge black vents connecting this section to the rest of the subway system. He climbed down the ladder and checked his watch. Robles was supposed to deliver the package at 2:00 a.m. Plenty of time. One more bulb down the line and Nelson would find a good place to hide, a good place from which to hunt.
CHAPTER 17
I opened my eyes and looked around my living room. The sound was smal, but certain. I tapped a key on my sleeping computer. The screen pulsed in the dark: 2:06 a.m. I picked up my gun because it felt like the thing to do, walked to my front door, and considered the thin bar of light peeking out from underneath. Then I opened the door. Sitting in the hal way was a plain brown package, no name on it, wrapped in string. I padded down the hal to a smal window looking out over Lakewood. The street was empty. I took the stairs softly, found nothing in the lobby, even less in the basement. I went back upstairs, checking each floor in turn. Whoever my messenger was, he was no longer in the building. I had left the front door ajar. Maggie was in the hal, sniffing at the package.
“Something to eat, Mags?”
She gave me a hopeful look and went back inside. I fol owed. The package felt like a book. I cut the string and found it to be exactly that. A copy of the Iliad. I opened it up and found the poem’s opening lines highlighted and circled:
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son Achilles and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans…
I felt around inside the package and found two more items. The first was a cardboard cutout of a train on a black set of tracks, running across a background of yel ow. The second was a smal map of a subway system, with a key taped to it and an address attached. I took a long look at the map and then jumped on the computer. Twenty minutes later, I was driving through Chicago’s sleeping streets, brown package on the front seat beside me. I HELD A FLASHLIGHT in one hand and my gun in the other. The address attached to the key had taken me to the corner of Clinton and Congress. The key opened a CTA access door tucked under the Ike, near the Clinton L station. A couple sets of stairs and a long ramp brought me to a second door and a run of tracks somewhere in Chicago’s subway system. The room itself felt vast. Dul ribbons of steel ran off ahead of me. A string of lights kept the dark canopy above me nailed in place.
I found a wal and moved along its edge until I came to a smal alcove formed by two concrete pil ars. I stepped just inside and crouched, spreading my map on the ground. Best I could tel, the door I had passed through was marked with a star. Due east was a second spot, marked on the map with a black X and the word BODY in blue Magic Marker.
I put the map away, took out my gun again, and nudged forward. I’d expected the L’s thunder, imagined maybe even having to duck a couple of trains, but the place was quiet. As if to underscore the point, a low rumble drifted in and away. I stayed close to the wal, my light playing on the steel to my right. Chicago’s trains were powered by an electrified third rail, six hundred volts of direct current. I’d try to keep a healthy distance. Thirty yards farther, I saw the body. It had been dumped in the middle of a rail bed. I stepped careful y across the tracks and squatted close. The woman was wrapped in plastic, dressed in jeans and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt. Her hands were taped behind her back, and it looked like her throat had been cut. There wasn’t much I could do without touching things, so I took a step back, careful to avoid the blood that had pooled underneath. I ran my light up and down the tunnel and wondered why I’d been summoned. Then I stepped off the tracks and found out. The red dot flicked ahead a few feet, then skipped behind me. I dove for a crevice in the subway wal just as a round clipped the concrete somewhere above my head. I hugged the ground hard and lifted my face an inch or so. The red dot danced in the air, inviting me to come out and play. Then it moved up and over my body. Seconds hung, stretched, and fel. Each breath, an exercise in eternity. The shooter was using some sort of low-light targeting scope and a laser, knew exactly where I was, and could take me out at his leisure. I told myself to stay down, crouch deeper into whatever cover I could find, even as I felt myself lift. Whoever he was, he could kil me whether I stood or hid behind my hands. The last part of that equation, however, I could control. So I stood. Then I took a step. I felt the shake in my boots, and took a second step. Another round kicked up maybe a foot to my left. I flinched back into the wal, into cover that was not. Fear churned up and I used it to create resolve. I pushed away from the wal and walked back toward the door from which I’d entered. This time there was a whine and a ribbon of white sparks. A round had caught some steel and ricocheted away.
Unbidden, the face of an eleven-year-old girl jumped up in my mind. She’d been skipping rope outside a high- rise in the Robert Taylor Homes when a stray round off the pavement caught her in the head. I was a rookie cop and the first unit to respond. Her mom beat on my arms, my face, my badge, my chest. The blood of her daughter covered us both. The girl, however, was past caring.
I pushed the image away and kept walking alongside the track, edging down the long curved tunnel. I figured maybe he wasn’t going to kil me, unless he just wanted to play a little first. So I kept walking, concentrating on each breath, the rise and spread of my ribs, the feel of the air on my skin, and the grit under my shoes. Then I was at the door, opened and closed behind me. Breath came in a cold rush, flooding my lungs, causing my heart to freeze and thump in my chest. I sat back against a wal and listened. Somewhere above me I heard the echo of a second door opening and closing. The access door at street level. My shooter had just left the building, his point made and received.
