Suddenly, on instinct and against reason, Jack leaped out of the car. Using the large white sanitation truck as cover, he stayed low and circled back around the Crown Victoria.
Just as Jack rounded the back of the truck, coming out behind the blue car, the blond man noticed his approach. The man’s eyes grew wide with shock. He reached for his cell phone, quickly dialing, but before he could lift the phone to his ear, Jack was upon him, knocking the phone away, thrusting him against the car.
“Where’s my wife?” Jack said through gritted teeth, his body like a coiled spring ready to release.
“I watched you die…” the man said in disbelief. He reached for his gun, but Jack snatched it from him, tucking it into the small of his back.
“Where is she?” Jack wrapped his hands around the man’s throat. “I’ll snap your neck.”
While the element of surprise gave Jack the advantage, it was only temporary. The man quickly recovered his wits and, with lightning motion, swept his arms up, freeing himself from the stranglehold. His hand clenched into a fist and in a continuous arc struck Jack in the side of the jaw, stunning and knocking him backward.
The man took off, racing up the street. Without breaking stride, he grabbed his phone from where it lay in the gutter and kept running, dialing on the fly. Jack quickly recovered, regained his footing, and took off in pursuit. He couldn’t afford the world knowing he was alive, not yet. He ran for everything he was worth, knowing that if the call went through, Mia’s already meager life expectancy could drop down to minutes. He pressed on, pushing his legs to the limit.
The man cut across Center Street, up Chambers, and hung a right onto Broadway. He was fast, but Jack was faster, quickly gaining on him. They bobbed and weaved through oncoming traffic, as cars locked up their brakes and tires screeched, trying to avoid the two crazed men who ran through the streets of New York. The blond man leaped a fraction of a second before the front end of a yellow cab plowed into him, his butt sliding across the hood of the car, then practically landing in stride on the street as he fled. Jack didn’t miss a beat as he leaped onto the hood of the cab, jumping to the roof of the next vehicle and back to the sidewalk, landing inches from his prey.
Jack reached out, a hair’s breadth from grabbing him, when the man cut left and raced down a flight of subway entrance stairs, taking five at a time, stumbling but quickly gaining his footing. The man jumped the turnstile and charged along a darkened platform.
Jack never lost distance, hurdling the turnstile, never breaking stride. A moment of panic filled him as he watched the man charge the closing doors of a departing subway car but was quickly relieved as the doors sealed up and the car left the station.
Alone on the vacant platform of the subway, the man jumped onto the tracks and never stopped, the sound of his racing feet echoing through the shadowy, cavernous tunnel as he disappeared into the darkness.
Without hesitation, Jack also jumped to the tracks, the stench of urine and filth filling his lungs as he sprinted and gasped for breath, struggling to keep up with the man ahead of him. The footing grew precarious, the gravel fill intermittent and scattered and the gauged rail ties uneven with his stride.
They were both swallowed by the dark, the only light coming from the green and red subway lights affixed to the walls, their unnatural glow casting staccato shadows.
Jack’s heart pounded in his ears. He had been sprinting for three minutes full-out, farther and faster than he had ever pushed himself.
But the rhythmic thrum was soon obscured. The heavy roar of an approaching train grew by the second, shaking the ground on which they ran and making it even more treacherous.
And then it was there, up ahead, rounding the corner to bear down on them, the wail of the train’s horn shredding their ears as its harsh light blinded them. The subway brakes locked up, sparks flew, and the seized metal wheels let out a screaming cry. There would be no stopping the train in time.
But the blond man never stopped. His silhouette, ten feet ahead, seemed to accelerate as if playing chicken with the thirty-ton train. And then, suddenly, he cut left through an opening in the wall as if he knew it was there all along. The train bore down on Jack, only feet away, milliseconds from crushing him.
He dove through a hole in the wall just as the train roared past, a mix of shrill brakes and rumbling motors. He could feel the heat of the lead car as it barely missed clipping his back.
Jack found himself in an adjacent tunnel, this one without the benefit of the red and green directional lights. The blackness felt like a veil over his senses. He lost his bearings as he turned around, listening for any sign of the man who had shot him. He caught a glimpse of light ahead, coming from above, and approached what he realized was a sidewalk grate.
By the time he felt the man’s presence behind him, it was already too late.
The garrote had already wrapped around his neck.
Frank stood on the platform as the express train roared through the station without stopping. He had caught sight of Jack racing up Center Street and took chase, his body forgetting his age until he was forced to stop and wait for the train to pass. He doubled over, hands on his knees, swallowing air in large gulps. He was in good shape, but he was no match for Jack, who was fifteen years his junior. As the train continued by, Frank took the brief interlude to clear his mind of his anger. He couldn’t have been more specific when telling Jack not to leave the car under any circumstance. After enduring the sight of the evidence room filled with feds and not getting his hands on the evidence case, he was floored to emerge from the building and find Jack out of the car, tossing some stranger against a Crown Victoria.
Before he could shout, the blond man had taken off with Jack in full pursuit. As Frank took up the chase, running with everything his half-century body had, he hoped to God no one recognized his friend; otherwise, what little advantage they had was gone.
As he stared into the dark tunnel where Jack had vanished, he feared the worst. The Lower Manhattan underground was a maze of subway tunnels, viaducts, and abandoned passages dating back almost 150 years, a world where one could get lost forever.
“Where is it?” the man screamed in Jack’s ear.
As the garrote dug into Jack’s neck, he could feel the warm moisture of blood trailing down his back. He struggled, his arms flailing, his head throbbing while his brain screamed out for oxygen. The man had taken him by surprise, positioning himself in the shadows beneath the sidewalk grate, lying in wait.
And then, with the thin wire wrapped tightly around his neck, the man kicked Jack to the ground of the abandoned tunnel, crushing his face into the dirt, where puddles of stench-filled water dotted the ground.
Jack’s rage and anger were no longer directed at the man but were turned on himself for being so easily captured, where he was now about to die, where all hope for saving Mia would die along with him.
“Where is the case?” the man growled in his ear.
The question shocked Jack, and the tables turned as the man slammed his face into a puddle while tightening the garrote. But then the man lifted him out of the water and, to his surprise, loosened the garrote. As Jack gulped for air, drawing in a big breath, his face was shoved into the puddle, where he gasped nothing but water into his lungs. Reflexively choking, the man retightened the garrote, drowning Jack with a mouthful of water.
Jack’s lungs burned as his mind began to turn black, darkness flowing in from the periphery of his vision. He could taste death as if he already knew its flavor.
But then a singular thought filled his mind: it was Mia in all of her beauty, in all of her grace and perfection. If Jack was to die, then she would have no hope, no chance of living, for her captors wouldn’t be letting her go.
Despite all of his valiant thoughts, he lacked the strength to escape his captor. He would die in the darkest recesses of Manhattan, never to be found or heard of again, as if he had already died in the Byram River.
Again, his face was jammed into the puddle, the severe lack of oxygen kicking his body’s automatic response to breathe when the garrote was released. The water flowed deeper into his lungs this time, burning like nothing he had ever felt before. But this time, under the pressure of imminent death, he didn’t see the proverbial light or his family before his eyes; his life didn’t replay like all of the myths.
What Jack saw in a burst of memory was the night before, as if the curtain was momentarily pulled back, allowing him a brief glimpse of something forbidden. Not vivid, more like a recaptured dream. The river raged beneath him as he lay on the shore. The world was filled with shadows beneath the driving rain. All around him were shattered trees and rocks. And the pain came charging back at him as if it had just happened, as if his body had a memory of its own that it couldn’t suppress. The pain below his shoulder was like hot steel, his head throbbed, and the teeming rain poured down on his face as he struggled to breathe. He caught glimpses of debris on the soaked shore around him,
And he saw a man emerge from the woods, his face cloaked in the night. He looked around at the raging
