Fear the Night

If he was the homeless man who didn’t belong.

If he was real.

So many ifs. Bobby jammed his fists into his pockets and bowed his head as he limped away on newly raised blisters.

That was the trouble. When you went to the police and they didn’t believe you, it made you doubt yourself.

Officer Tom Dillon hoped to hell somebody knew what they were doing. He wasn’t due at the precinct till tomorrow for his next shift, and here he was looking for a guy named Vanya who might be the Night Sniper.

It was all part of a Special Operations Division plan that had sprung into place because Repetto had called it in after somebody’d shot at his daughter. Dillon had been on the Job only two years, but he’d heard plenty about Repetto. The guy knew his shit, and that was the only thing that kept Dillon from thinking tonight might not be a total waste of time.

Fifteen minutes ago an RMP car had dropped him off three blocks away from the crime scene, and he’d been walking ever since. He’d been assigned to stay on the move, observe, and get the information out fast on his two- way if anything or anyone merited suspicion.

Dillon wished he were home in bed with his wife, Glorianne, who was pregnant. Even in her fifth month, Glorianne was capable of having and enjoying sex. That had been something of a surprise to Dillon. But the doctor had said-

The young officer stopped and stared. He was sure he’d just seen somebody start down the steps of a subway stop half a block away, near the next corner. Which didn’t make sense, because he knew the subway stop was closed and boarded up. Had been for months.

Or maybe it had been a trick of his vision, a play of shadow, and he hadn’t seen anything at all. Dillon couldn’t be sure.

He’d better make sure.

Telling himself this might fall into the category of something that merited suspicion, he went to investigate.

Dillon peered down the narrow concrete stairwell into darkness. There was no sound from below. The acrid smell of stale urine wafted up at him, almost strong enough to make him turn his head.

“Hey!” he yelled. “You, down there!”

If anybody’s down there.

He got out his flashlight and aimed it down the stairwell, tentatively descending three or four concrete steps so he might see better.

The figure he’d glimpsed had been real. A ragged, homeless man holding a brown paper bag was just beginning to settle down with his whiskey in the shadows at the base of the steps. He glared up at Dillon, surprised, frightened, and perhaps indignant. The expression on his face suggested Dillon was invading his home.

Dillon was no stranger to the proprietary nature of some vagrants. He relaxed but kept the beam of his flashlight trained on the man. “You! C’mon up here.”

The man stood up unsteadily, as if his legs were sore, facing away from Dillon with his feet widely planted. His lower arms and hands disappeared in front of him, a slight bend to the elbows.

He appeared to be urinating, and not for the first time in the odorous stairwell.

Dillon thought about telling him it was illegal to piss down there; then he decided to be patient, let the poor guy finish his business before making his painful way back up to the city’s surface world.

That was when the man turned around with a sudden nimbleness that aroused Dillon’s suspicion. He saw that the homeless guy hadn’t been pissing but had struck a match and was holding it in the same hand that held the brown paper bag.

No, not a match. Too much flame, and growing. A twisted rag sticking up from the neck of the bottle in the bag. A wick!

Dillon tried to spin his body and clamber up the steps at the same time, scraping the toe of his left shoe on concrete and going nowhere. His right foot slipped and he banged his shin. He heard his flashlight clatter down the steps.

The explosion was more of a whoosh! than a bang. Dillon picked up a momentary stench of gasoline and realized the man had thrown a Molotov cocktail at him, and he was standing where it had detonated.

His legs were on fire!

His screams drew attention, and through his pain he managed to wrest his 9mm from its holster and fire several shots blindly through the flames in the stairwell.

The bullets splintered wood but missed the Night Sniper, who had bent down to pick up Dillon’s still-shining flashlight and shove it in a coat pocket. He hadn’t brought his own flashlight tonight because he hadn’t anticipated going underground.

The fire provided enough light to work by.

He got a fresh grip on the crooked panel and was through the plywood barrier and running down a frozen escalator, fumbling for the flashlight he’d need for the total darkness ahead.

It took a few minutes for the cops on the street to reach the subway stop and drag what was left of Dillon up to the sidewalk. Assuming, with a glance at his charred and smoldering body, that he was dead, they switched their efforts to trying to extinguish the fire at the top of the stairwell.

They had little other than the soles of their shoes and a shirt one of them had removed to try to smother the flames, but it didn’t take long for the remaining gasoline to burn itself out.

Convinced that Dillon had expired, but also knowing it could be a mistake to mentally pronounce someone dead at the scene of a crime, the three cops decided they couldn’t desert him. The shirtless cop, a big African- American named Wilson, was elected to stay with the fallen Dillon to wait for an ambulance.

It was a good thing. As if responding to their decision not to give up on him, the thing that Dillon had become began to moan.

While the other two uniforms made their way down the blackened steps and through the dark gap made by the pried plywood panel, Wilson used his two-way to call for medical transport and to get out the word:

The Night Sniper was in the subway system, on the run and under hot pursuit.

62

The Sniper ran stumbling along the tracks, staying close to the tunnel’s dark concrete wall, occasionally bumping it with his left shoulder. He knew that though the stop was closed, the E and V trains still roared through the tunnel. Now and then he thought he could feel the wind pressure of an approaching train shoving cool air ahead of it in the narrow tunnel. But there was no thunderous, clacking roar that accompanied the trains, and no approaching brilliant eye of light.

He knew he could find shelter in the occasional tile maintenance alcove along the tunnel, where he could press himself back while a train passed a few feet away from him. He’d done it more than once during his time as a street kid, and more recently while using the tunnels to get around the city undetected. It was a convenient and private way to move about, once you learned the train times and layout of the underground maze.

What he feared more than the trains was what he knew would soon be pursuing him. There’d been an army of cops in the area, and they’d see where he entered the tunnel. As soon as they’d tended to their burned comrade, and the fire blocking the stairwell was extinguished, they’d be after the cop’s killer.

And they’d be motivated.

He could hear his rasping breath, and every few steps feel the bite of sharp or angled rock beneath his soles.