measured, mistrustful of haste-felt herself propelled forward as if by some unseen hand, nudging her. There had been flashes of that sensation before on this case. Like when she bailed down the hatch in that living room floor in Bayside. Or chased Don’s killer into an exposed stairwell without backup. Or let herself get set up for a night meet under the High Line. Unguarded feelings like these were foreign to her and were usually unsettling-disturbing enough to be walled off.
What was different? she wondered. Was she suffering poor judgment from PTSD, after all? Or was she starting to see her precious emotional compartments as obstacles instead of allies and going with her gut more? Or was there truly some unseen force guiding her?
Or was she just plain obsessed with this case?
Whatever it was, touring in circles and zigzags along Broadway that night, literally searching for a doorway to the past, Nikki had a sense of homing in, and caution had lost its voice. Which was why, when she descended the subway stairs to the 96th Street station and found herself all alone in it, she walked as far south as she could on the platform to see just how close it came to the abandoned station at Ninety-first. Nikki gripped the stainless steel guardrail and used it to lean out over the tracks and peer into the tunnel. It was dark, except for two red lights shining back at her in warning. She couldn’t see the Ghost Station, but its platform was probably only a block and a half away from where she stood. She listened and, hearing no rumble, wondered if she could make it on foot before a train came.
And then Heat stopped wondering and jumped.
She kept to the center of the two main tracks, giving wide berth to the third rail on the outside right that powered the trains with six hundred fifty deadly volts. The ambient light from the station behind her faded with each stride she took away from it, and soon Nikki faced total darkness. Farther from the platform there would be less litter and fewer broken bottles to step on, but she still needed to see. Especially to watch out for uneven footing or unexpected obstacles to trip her. This was not the place to fall, or worse, break an ankle or get a foot stuck. The idea made her shudder. Reason told her to give it up and go back; to go through channels and get the MTA to arrange a special stop and shuttle her to the station the next morning. To Nikki, the next morning seemed forever away. She got out her cell phone and turned on the flashlight application. She smiled to herself because she could almost hear Rook smart-assing, “Subway spelunking? There’s an app for that.” Rook. She should call him and let him know where she was. But she’d wait until she got there. If there was any signal underground.
Her phone threw decent enough light for her to continue, but as soon as she switched it on, she heard voices behind her at the platform. She quickly turned it off and pressed herself against the tunnel wall and listened, hoping some well-intended Samaritan wouldn’t risk his life trying to rescue her.
Nikki felt a draft of air on her neck and craned upward to see if there was a ventilation grate overhead, but there wasn’t. Then she realized the movement on her neck wasn’t air but fur. She swept her hand and felt the rat fill her entire palm as she brushed it off. When it thudded onto the ground, she couldn’t see it, but she could hear it skitter off. She stepped away from the wall, switched the flashlight app back on, and got hustling toward 91st.
Moving as quickly as she dared, Nikki hopped puddles and stepped up and over crossties, which seemed to get higher because the dirt bed between rails in that section had become deeper. From the faint light ahead, she thought she might be getting closer to the Ghost Station and that, perhaps, it had a few service bulbs going. But to her alarm, the light grew swiftly brighter and the ground began to tremble lightly. Then a headlight pierced the blackness in the tunnel far ahead and made the rail tops shiny as they traced twin lines right toward her. Nikki was in the worst place: between platforms with a train coming.
She got ready to jump the third rail to the center track, but just as the thought came to her, a downtown express raced along those, closing off her escape. Nikki didn’t know how far ahead the platform was, but behind her felt like a long way, so she started running toward the oncoming train, vaulting crossties as if on an obstacle course at an NFL training camp. The headlight grew larger and more piercing. The low, distant tremble became a thundering rumble. Air, displaced by the forward motion of the subway, gusted into her face.
The headlight also lit up the Ghost Station that she neared on her left. But was it close enough to beat the oncoming train?
While she was distracted calculating her distance to the platform, the toe of her shoe snagged under a crosstie she’d misjudged and Nikki began to tumble forward. She wondered if the soil depression under the tracks was deep enough to let the train ride over her if she fell.
Nikki never had to find out. She righted herself. Gasping, she lurched for the edge of the platform. But it was too tall for her to jump up on. The train was seconds away. Its blazing headlight turned the tunnel into day. That’s when Nikki saw the metal service ladder recessed into the concrete. She pitched herself at it and grabbed the railing.
Heat rolled onto the deck of the platform just as the Uptown One roared by, kicking up a swirl of wind and a clatter more deafening than she’d experienced in all her years in New York. She was lucky to be alive to hear it.
The train moved on, and the air and noise stilled fast in its wake. Two blocks away, its brakes screeched as it pulled into the station she had just left. Nikki rolled over and sat to regain her breath from the excruciating whack she had given her kneecap on her scramble up the ladder. When she tested it with her fingertips, it didn’t feel broken, although the sting told her some skin would be missing. She used her phone flashlight to look for blood on her pants but didn’t see any. Just a smudge of railroad grime on the knee, identical to Nicole Bernardin’s.
Heat rose to her feet. She swept her light around the Ghost Station and saw a study in contrasts. One the one hand, design and equipment from the early part of the last century, left as it was the day the station had been sealed: a deco ticket booth; a vintage disposal machine for chopping tickets after entry; overhead fixtures for individual bulbs instead of fluorescent tubes; rows of scalloped ceiling accents; an ornately wrought banister descending the stairs from the capped sidewalk entrance; a scrolled iron gate that the station agent lifted for passengers exiting the trains; and a terra-cotta panel with “91” in relief on it, set into the wall to designate the station. But the romance of frozen time had been offset by its defilement.
Nearly every surface in the station wore a coat of graffiti: the wall tiles; the banisters; the support pillars. Soda cans as well as broken wine and beer bottles littered the ground, collected in corners, and rested next to a plastic cooler on the decaying concrete stairs. The doors to both restrooms had been broken off and taken. Nikki didn’t venture inside either one but could see and smell the violations inside the battered, tagged stalls.
This was the handiwork of the Mole People, she assumed. The Moles were the stuff of urban legends in the New York underground, which told of tribes of misfit subcultures that had organized to rule these tunnels. In reality, they were just tag artists making their marks or homeless who survived in the musty darkness. There had been a TV drama called Beauty and the Beast Nikki watched when she was in grade school that was about a lion man living below like that, but she had never seen dear, urbane Vincent with a spray can and a bottle of fortified wine.
A noise behind her made her turn and switch off her light. As her eyes adjusted to the muted street glow filtering down through the grates she and Rook had investigated, Nikki figured she must have heard the approach of another train. This one raced downtown on the opposite side of the tunnel from her. She waited until it passed before she lit up her phone again. She didn’t want to chance being seen and reported. She had work to do.
Nikki began old school, just like the station. She looked for footprints. A thick layer of soot and dust coated everything down there, and if Nicole Bernardin indeed had been there before she was killed, Heat just might find hers. She squatted down and held her light close to the floor. Slowly, patiently, she swept the beam just inches above it, alert for any disturbance or telltale shape that she might follow to the hiding place. The problem was that so many Moles had used the platform that the footprints were myriad. She made one more pass, this time walking the station floor in a stoop, seeing if any smaller, female prints emerged, but none did.
Next, she searched the ticket booth, which only took seconds. It had long ago been trashed and gutted. As she’d expected, both restrooms presented no hiding places when she examined them, too. The cooler on the stairs was empty, as was the inside of the ticket shredder, whose door had been pried off and left on the ground. She even inspected the bottom of the sidewalk grate itself, in case that was, literally, where Nicole had been styling. It wasn’t.
Unable to accept defeat, Nikki ignored her frustration and thought. Again she put herself in her mother’s shoes, asking herself, if she had been Cynthia Heat, and had been directed to find the drop, would Nicole expect her to search for footprints in the dust?
No.
Then what? How would Nicole let her know exactly where to look?
