Slaughter (19 page)

K
irby swung the sap hard at Jordan's head but hit his shoulder instead, said, “Sum'bitch!” and swung again. This time he missed entirely and almost fell as the boxcar jerked.

Then the girl, who appeared to be so frail, was on him like a tiger and much stronger than she looked.

“Ow! Friggin' country bitches,” he yelled as her sharp fingernails dug hard into the sides of his neck.

He pushed her away and she fell back. Got halfway up then stumbled and fell again.

The pulsing and swaying boxcar was Kirby's friend now. He could dispense with these two easily.

He turned toward the boy, but he was no longer there. That puzzled Kirby. He thought he'd hit Jordan hard enough to break a collarbone. The kid should be incapacitated.

So what'd he do? Jump outta the boxcar? Was the feisty little bastard lying in the darkness? Was he off the train and running and hiding in the night?

Jordan charged out of the blackness at the other end of the boxcar and hit Kirby at the knees; Kirby went down hard, and Jordan crawled up his back and twined an arm around Kirby's right arm and was twisting it, causing Kirby to yelp. He tried to push himself up with his left arm so he could stand, but Jordan punched the arm out from beneath him and Kirby went face-first against the hard floor.

Kirby yelped again. Damned farm kids spend their lives at hard labor, gettin' strong before they get smart. Twice as strong as they look. Kirby spat blood and figured he'd be lucky if his nose wasn't broken.

This is wrong! I don't deserve this! I need to be left alone!

But he knew he was too late. He couldn't surrender to himself. And nobody else was listening.

Here came the girl again. What the hell was she doin' now? Wrestling with both of them. Almost like she was attacking Jordan.

But that notion was dispelled when her teeth sank into Kirby's bare heel, and he was angry with himself now for using the sock as a sap and then missing his target. Friggin' Jordan kid should be the one down with his head split open.

What was the bitch doin' with Jordan now? Tryin' to take his pants down? What the hell? Was fighting for her life getting her hot?

Despite his bruises and bite marks, Kirby was feeling more confident. Jordan might be on top, but he was weakening. Jasmine kept clawing at him like she was trying to work down his Levi's.

What she would do then, only God knew.

Then he realized what Jasmine was attempting to do.

Sum'bitch!

Jasmine felt another fingernail bend back and tear as she clawed at the rough denim of Jordan's jeans. She grabbed the edge of a side pocket, gripped and pulled, and the fingernail felt as if it had torn completely loose.

She felt the wetness of blood.

It made her fight all the harder.

Jordan was squirming around now, understanding and trying to help her. He couldn't help much. One of Kirby's arms was pinned beneath him, the other bent back and pinned by Jordan, but he was a powerful man and still plenty dangerous.

“You kids stop this right now!” he yelled. As if they'd attacked him and started the hostilities.

Jasmine got three fingers into Jordan's side pocket and felt the smooth handle of the folding knife he always carried. She was elated. If she could just work the knife all the way out of the pocket, she could use one hand to open it with her teeth, then this struggle would end and that would be the end of Kirby.

How she hated him at that moment. He'd attempted to steal their future for whatever he could loot from their cold dead bodies.

Their future!

Her blood served as a lubricant. She worked, worked with her mangled fingers and felt the handle of the knife clear the edge of the pocket.

It was halfway out.

“You kids stop this now!”

“We ain't kids,” Jordan said.

“And we ain't gonna stop,” Jasmine added.

“I'm warnin' you!” Kirby yelled. “You're gonna be in a lotta trouble!”

“For doin' to you what you were gonna do to us?” Jasmine said. And the knife was free.

Jasmine gripped the knife as best she could in her uninjured hand. Like most folding knives it had a groove along the back of the blade where you could hook your fingernails into it and pull the blade open.

“A lotta trouble!” Kirby chose for his last words.

Jasmine didn't have the fingernails for this task. She gripped the knife carefully by its handle, holding her torn nails so they were under the least possible pressure.

Kirby knew death was on its way and bucked powerfully.

Jasmine was straddling him now, staring at a pulsing blue artery in his neck. She fixed her eyes on it, knowing the knife would go directly to its target. Drew her knife hand back and gripped it hard.

Too hard.

The blood from her torn nails had made the smooth knife handle even smoother, and too slippery to hold.

Jasmine felt it slide out from between her fingers like a watermelon seed. She made a futile grab for the knife, praying even that she could catch it by the blade.

But Kirby had worked his pinned arm free and grabbed at the knife while it was suspended in midair. He couldn't get a grip on it but he knocked it away. It went skittering across the boxcar floor, out of everyone's reach.

Kirby used his free arm to punch Jordan in the side of his head, then shoved him away along with Jasmine. He started to crawl toward the knife. Jordan was only half conscious, and Jasmine was winded

“I'll show you little pissants somethin' now!” Kirby wheezed.

Jasmine was terrified that he was right. He was closest to the knife, and could move faster and was stronger than either of them. She and Jordan were as good as dead.

Until her hand closed on a sock full of gravel.

She started crawling faster toward Kirby, not toward the knife itself. That puzzled him for a few seconds.

A few seconds were enough.

The first blow with the makeshift sap dazed Kirby.

Then Jasmine mounted him like a horse and hit him again and again and again . . .

 

 

The train was on the flat now, and in vast darkness. It speeded along, making time, toward the bright mystery of its wavering light far ahead. The train wouldn't go anywhere but straight for miles, and the source of the light was unseen, a wavering unsteady glow up ahead and off to the sides.

Jordan and Jasmine were still breathing hard, in concert with the rhythms of the train rattling through the fields.

Jasmine said, “Let's get rid of him.”

Jordan, leaning with his back against the swaying boxcar wall, looked over at Kirby stretched out motionless on the floor. It was too dark to see for sure, but there seemed to be a lot of blood around Kirby's head. Kirby's mouth was open. His eyes looked to be only half closed. His expression was that of a man slyly planning, except for the fact that he was so still. The dead didn't plan.

Jasmine got up, her body swaying with the boxcar so she could maintain her balance. Jordan used the boxcar wall as a support helping him to get to his feet. Fighting off dizziness, he almost fell.

They made their way to where Kirby lay.

“He gone?” Jasmine asked.

“Far as we're concerned,” Jordan said. “Time for Mister Kirby to get off the train.”

Together, they gripped Kirby by his shirt and leather belt and inched him toward the open steel door. He'd left a large bloodstain, glistening black in the darkness.

Jasmine sat down on the floor and shoved Kirby along with both feet. Jordan, with a wide stance, stood over Kirby and used Kirby's belt to lift him slightly and shove him toward the black rectangle of the door.

They pushed together, using all their might. Kirby's arm jammed in the door, as if he didn't want to leave.

Then the arm came loose, and he was out in the black night, as if plucked from the train by someone or something that had been waiting for him all along. Jordan leaned out the door and looked toward the back of the train. There was Kirby, his momentum still tumbling him along near the steel wheels. Then he bounced into invisibility and the night had him.

“Dead or alive,” Jordan said, “nobody's gonna find him for a while. And if he's dead, or even just unconscious, it'll take a while to figure he fell off a train.”

Jasmine knew the rails would be all the clue the police would need to tell them where the body had come from, but she didn't mention it to Jordan. He was still shaken up and not thinking straight.

He leaned back against the swaying boxcar wall and closed his eyes.

The train rattled on through the night.

 

I
t was a surprisingly cool morning. Quinn and Pearl were walking along Broadway toward Zabar's to have breakfast and then buy some pastry for the rest of the Q&A personnel.

It had rained slightly during the night, but now the sky was cloudless. The colorful lines of traffic-stalled cars were punctuated by the occasional yellow cab. Sunlight glancing off concrete, steel, and glass made everything look recently washed, which in a way was the case. Here and there, glitters of dew still clung to weeds or grass that had inched their way up between edges and cracks in the pavement.

Pearl's cell phone chimed and she walked slower and fished it out of her purse. She was afraid the caller was her mother, whom she deliberately and shamelessly saw too little of. But when she squinted down at the phone she saw the caller was her daughter, Jody.

Pearl and Quinn slowed to a near stop. A passerby bounced off Quinn, glared at him, and then looked closer and sweetened up.

“What's up?” Pearl asked her daughter. It was a question she never asked without some trepidation.

“I went out to see Gramma at Assisted Living. She says she misses you, told me to let you know you should give her a call at the nursing home.”

“Nursing home” was what Pearl's mother called Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey, where she had a well-furnished one-bedroom apartment. The kind of place that would have cost a million and a half dollars in Manhattan.

“That all?” It was a short message to be coming from Pearl's mother.

“No,” Jody said. “She wants us to buy her something here in the city.”

“You know about real estate prices in Manhattan. She's better off—”

“No, no, Mom. She doesn't want a better apartment—at least not now. She needs one of those folding contraptions with metal claws on the end of a long pole. For picking up objects she can't reach.”

“What kind of objects?” Pearl asked.

“I suspect desserts, snacks, wrapped candies. She uses a walker now and doesn't like it.”

“So she wants to use her walker and a grabber on a pole?”

“No, no. Just the pole contraption, like a lot of the other patients have here.”

“Tenants.”

“And maybe a new wheelchair.”

“Good God! Are they going to joust?”

“She's your mother and my grandmother. Don't make a joke of it.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“The longest pole they make, she said.”

“Sure. But with her walker she's standing up.”

“It's getting to things,” Jody said. “Her walker isn't fast enough. Some of the other women are always ahead of her. She gets the last or the smallest or what's broken.”

“She has tennis balls on her walker,” Pearl said. “If she puts oil on them she'll have the fastest walker. Oil on the tennis wheels, and those walkers will blow your hat off.”

Jody giggled.

“What's that I hear?” Pearl asked. “You're an attorney. You're supposed to be serious.”

“Oil your tennis balls,” Jody said, through her giggling. Pearl started to giggle. She couldn't help herself. More giggling. Quinn looked at her as if she were insane. But then, that could happen, talking to Jody.

“For God's sake,” Quinn said. “You're a cop.”

Pearl looked over at Quinn and opened her mouth to explain.

That was when they heard the three loud explosions.

Quinn put his hand on Pearl's shoulder, while she told Jody she had to go.

“Business?” Jody asked.

“Business.”

“Be careful, Mom.”

“I'm a cop.”

Quinn and Pearl ran toward the source of the explosions.

W
hen they got to the end of the block, a crowd was beginning to build. Three police cars had arrived, two of which were parked to block traffic and turn it around to detour. A potbellied, uniformed cop was wandering around, waving his arms and shouting for pedestrians to get back. Two others were knee-deep in debris, trying to find people and dig them out. Several civilians had ignored the uniforms and entered the field of wreckage. A ten-story building housing a dry cleaners and apartments had collapsed on a five-story office building. Broken bricks, bent iron rebar, twisted steel, chunks of concrete and marble, stretched before them for blocks. A cloud of dirt and drywall rolled over the scene, the breeze snatching it away from where Quinn and Pearl stood. They could hear a man screaming nearby, beneath the debris.

Sirens yowled, horns blared, voices screamed and pleaded for help. Quinn heard a child's voice somewhere in the grit that was airborne and distorting the source and direction of sound. It was also blocking his nose and leaving a horrible taste on his tongue.

He was close to the child who had screamed and, along with others, began to dig through and throw debris.

Five feet away, Pearl was working to free a woman who was trapped beneath what looked like a large fallen beam.

Quinn and the others concentrated on the child, who was almost completely buried.

Five minutes later several others joined their efforts. Quinn was surprised to see that one of the rescuers was Pearl. Her expression told him that the woman she'd been trying to save had died. Pearl found space next to Quinn and began gripping whatever wreckage she could reach and tossing it away. She was gasping for breath and he could hear her sobbing.

Someone yelled, a joyous whoop, and across the jagged and blackened pile of rubble two men were carefully removing the child they'd been working to free. No more than three or four years old, the child appeared to be in shock, but definitely alive and still protesting with healthy lungs.

More noise, more calls for help, more people trapped in the rubble. Quinn and Pearl continued to work near where a woman stood sobbing and pleading for help to free her husband, who was trapped beneath bricks and shattered glass. When the woman wasn't screaming, he could be heard from where he was virtually buried.

A particularly large chunk of concrete was eased aside by several bloody hands, and the man who'd been screaming but now was quiet was carefully removed from beneath the debris. He was white with shock, and his right leg was missing. The sobbing woman who'd directed searchers to him rushed toward him but was restrained by several men and a teenage girl.

Quinn took off his belt and fashioned a tourniquet to stanch the injured man's bleeding.

Movement and noise around him, more voices. Quinn was nudged aside, not all that gently. The belt was removed and replaced by something else. Something more effective. Then hands wearing huge gloves worked their way beneath the injured man and lifted him. More huge gloves, helping to locate and remove the injured, the people in shock. Playing out hoses. Wearing black T-shirts with white lettering—FDNY.

The Fire Department had arrived.

Sirens of every kind of emergency vehicle were still yowling. Uniforms at both ends of the blocked street were letting them pass in and out with alacrity. No one wanted to come in here unless compelled by compassion or occupation.

A woman obviously in shock, wearing a tattered pants suit, stumbled over to Pearl and collapsed. Pearl held her, helped her to walk, urged her to keep breathing, and led her toward where at least three ambulances were parked, their light strips putting on a colorful but muted display in the thick dust.

Exhausted, Quinn trudged on. He'd taken only a dozen steps when a hand like a claw closed on his arm and squeezed hard.

“Take him, please!” a woman's voice pleaded alongside Quinn.

He turned and saw a woman holding an infant less than a year old. She was obviously about to pass out and drop the child.

She thrust the infant at Quinn. Said, “My other daughter's in there.”

He could think of nothing to say, nothing to do but accept the child. The woman turned around and made her way back toward the center of hell. Quinn thought for a few seconds that he'd go after her, help her. But there was the child in his arms.

He gripped the silent, staring boy and walked toward the ambulances. As he strode in shuffling, zombie-like strides, he felt a glimmer of hope that the damage was less than it might be. There seemed to be some control of it now, since more police and the fire department had arrived.

When he reached the ambulances he turned the boy over to white-uniformed paramedics. As the back of the nearest ambulance opened, he saw the woman Pearl had been helping, sitting with others in the ambulance who were sobbing or simply sitting and staring.

He glanced around, walking along the line of parked ambulances, looking for Pearl. Finally he saw her sitting on the back of one of the vehicles with an open back door. It struck Quinn that she was staring with the same dazed expression as the woman who'd just handed him her baby.

When she saw Quinn she smiled, and he felt immensely better. He walked to her and stood next to her.

“The woman find her other daughter?” he asked.

“I think so. Yes.” She seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. He realized she thought he meant the first infant they'd help rescue.

“I meant the second baby,” he said.

“There was a second one?”

He smiled again.

Two in one day, she thought. Not such a tough guy. She drew a deep breath and stood up. “Wanna go back for more?”

“Like you do,” he said.

They walked back toward the fallen buildings. The volunteers, cops, and firefighters were swarming over the debris now, searching for survivors or more of the dead. At least half a dozen dogs and their handlers were roaming the wreckage.

“Let's pace ourselves this time,” Quinn said, seeing that there were signs of order and progress. “It's almost twilight.”

Pearl was so tired she simply grunted her agreement.

Quinn knew that even if he tried he couldn't stop her. Not anymore than she could stop him.

“The Gremlin, you think?” she asked.

“Probably. The little bastard might very well be part of the crowd, standing at the edges, watching and enjoying. And learning.”

“Infuriating,” Pearl said.

Quinn was silent for a few seconds, then stopped and stood still.

Pearl looked up at him.

Quinn said, “I smell gas.”