The Shaft (19 page)

    That was why Kenilworth was not overrun with searching cops.

    The cat resumed its investigation of Jonathan's other boxes. Bash had loaned him a collapsible camp cot that folded out bigger than a single, not quite a full. Jonathan would not trust his spine to anything that Fergus might scare up as 'furnishings,' although he did thieve a wicker rocking chair from the wreckage in one of the basement storage rooms. 207 had come with a hot plate, refrigerator, a mirrored bureau and a card table.

    Something stank.

    The fridge was chugging, pump laboring with a sound that suggested duress. Maybe the motor was busily frying its coil. But the smell was not electrical or mechanical; it was organic, a hint of decay. It was too cold inside. Jonathan could hear the steam heater in the corner sibilantly delivering warmth. He knew the knob was opened all the way. Definitely too cold.

    A knock of chill hit him next to the closet. By process of elimination, he called the place with the tub and toilet the bathroom; cold air was coming at him from the bathroom, then. Carrying the smell with it.

    Had the john overflowed? His lips retracted to tighten his face at the odor. His body requested he breathe orally unless he enjoyed the spectacle of regurgitation.

    The stink was similar to maggotty meat, a lush bouquet that again took him back to his Choc-O-Pop days and his discovery of a decomposing squirrel in the fireplace flue. He had yanked the sooty steel handle to vent the hearth. It resisted, screeching open when out-muscled. And the tiny corpse had tumbled out to burst open at his feet, loaded with wriggling white grubs. Yuck.

    Jonathan wondered if other tenants had to put up with this smell of fresh dogshit and suppurated bandages. As he reached for the pullchain over the sink, moving air hit him in a rush and for one second of bugfuck terror he was sure that someone or some thing was in the tiny bathroom with him.

    The window next to the tub was broken, most of the sharp, reflective wedges scattered inside the tub. Raked onto the sharp fractures still clinging to the frame were gelid clots of reddish-black matter like bloodstained feces. It was in the tub, too, a lot of it, slopped onto the sides as if a dumptruck of sewage had been emptied there through the window and most of it had bubbled down the drain, leaving semisolid chunks and crimson, inviting flies. Who knew where the flies had been drawn from, in this cold?

    It was a fastidious mess, considering.

    Jonathan turned the hot tap to full and engaged the shower plunger to dissolve and sluice away the detritus. Only four or five viscid droplets of muck had glopped onto the floor outside the tub. He tried not to imagine what it actually might be. It was just sewage, backup. Bloody sewage. The stuff in the tub was slightly redder than the stuff on the window.

    Mrs Velasquez's child had been taken in blood. Jonathan's heartbeat fired and missed.

    Leaving the water running and the doors open, he hurried up the next flight of stairs and came out on the third floor. Here was Cruz's apartment, 307, locked tight. Several doors down, near the stilled elevator was the Velasquezes'. Past it, just around the western corner near another set of disused icebox doors, he found a bloodstain on the carpet. White tape had been laid around it.

    When he returned to his bathroom he found the cat lapping at the coagulated gunk on the floor. He swept the animal aside, using his foot but not kicking it. It took no offense and kept its eyes on what it thought was food.

    'Get the hell away from that, stupid, you want to poison yourself?'

    
You said you'd feed me.

    'I did not say I'd feed you. Just hang on a second.'

    
I'm hungry now.

    'You gotta be kidding. I was hungry until I saw this shitstorm here.' It smeared when he attempted to scrub it, releasing a riper, subdermal sourness. 'I was hungry until I had to ftick around half the night with the goddamn police; before I practically became an accessory to a drug bust and an infanticide!'

    Fortunately for Jonathan, Bash had bestown a six-pack of Quietly Beer. Those first cold gulps would rinse down a lot of strife.

    Jonathan no longer cared who might be disturbed at this hour. He redonned his trucker's gloves and used a wrench to break out the remaining pieces of glass, which plummeted into the dark netherworld below and splashed. The shaft itself was no paragon of olfactory pleasure. It was like sticking your face into the smoke from a chimney at a crematorium. Something had died down there, something serious, and from the smell, still rotting eagerly away. Jonathan's face tried to close all ports in a tight pucker; even his surprised pores slammed shut.

    Rats. Perhaps they had crawled into the bottom of the shaft to eat, and got trapped down there, or drowned.

    As he pulled his head back to safety he heard a slight noise, beyond the dripping water and the steel acoustics of the shaft itself. Sort of a tuneless hum, truncated. Maybe another of Fergus' hapless tenants, weeping in the night.

    He emptied a box and cut it apart with his Swiss army knife, sizing a square that would block the hole for tonight. After work tomorrow he'd try to beard Fergus and complain.

    Doubtless he would get new window glass, a protestation of innocence, and no clues. He'd tell Bash about it at work, and Bash would listen. But he had no obligation to explain the night's events; he had his own problems to wrestle these days. Camela the Butt Person, for one.

    'MR HAPPY,' he said. An observation. A curiosity. A reminder. A possible path to some facts he could utilize.

    
As a name, I hate it. Stick to Cat.

    'You cause any more problems, you become a rectal nuisance, and I'll yoke you with a stupid name, kiddo.' This was not a toothless threat. Too many people he'd known had handicapped their pets with imbecilic labels derived from Tolkien or
Star Wars
or comic strips.

    Or a cat. May be a cat fell in and was bitten to death by all the rats. A BIG cat.

    Cruz could enlighten him. This sort of mystery was completely beyond Jonathan's ken.

    'Tell you what. I'll leave you in here. Live bait. If you're still here when I get back, we'll try something else. No sense in trying to sleep right now, anyway.'

    He left the cat a dish of skim milk and some smoked turkey, then bundled up, bound for the phones at the Oakwood post office.

    

    

    This cell just wasn't big enough for Cruz and the guy who wanted to mangle him.

    Routine nightly bullpen follies, he thought. No one in the block could know what time it was. There were no windows, no clocks, and no public servant was about to waste his or her life by playing cuckoo-bird for the lowlife soiling the cages. Along about dawn, Cruz got to see the result of one of Officer Stallis' forcible restraints. The glimpse was too detailed.

    A guy nineteen or so. Hard to tell past the blood. Divested of a biker jacket, shorn of insignia plus anything with a solid or sharp edge, shaken free of smokes and change, belt and shoes confiscated, he was hammerlocked, handcuffed and staggering. He had gotten his nose skewed sideways and a tooth or two was lost upfront. He had bitten through his lower lip. Or fallen and accidentally struck his head on a curb, several times. He had been revived with Officer Stallis' baton, at which time he made a gesture both officers Stallis and Reinholtz interpreted as threatening. He had probably been trying to hold his face on and figure out which way gravity was pulling. Fortunately the rear door of the patrol car sprang open and prevented the suspect from inflicting grievous bodily harm upon either officer. Several times.

    Cruz had been abstracting past the barwork, hands stuck through the interstices and into the freer portion of the cellblock, when Stallis had dragged in his catch of the night. The guy tried to clop and pace the duty officer's bring-along, but the cop was in a hurry and the arrestee still didn't know what planet he had just landed on. There was no time to compensate for the new and unusual G-forces and atmosphere. On this alien world you were expected to breathe your own blood. Midway past the bullpen the new prisoner lost it, doubling over and coughing.

    'Wait, wait… oh, god!'

    The duty officer's face flared with annoyance. He executed a classic ten-hutt stiffarm, grabbing scruff and cuffs and straightening the crooked captive the way you'd unfold a deck chair. He wheeled the guy around to fling him headlong into the bullpen's grid of metal. Cruz thought of the way he would flop a topheavy mattress against the nearest wall to keep it from tipping backward and overwhelming him. He jerked his arms in too late. Droplets from the Oakwood station's newest guest, unimpeded by the bars, speckled him. A deathly draft of beer-breath hoicked at him, stinging his nostrils with the rotten-tooth odor of congealing blood.

    'Fuck!' Cruz spat mostly at the uniform. He was behind bars now, and free to say just about any damned thing he cared to, since he was no longer in control of his immediate destiny. He wished for a teeny pinch of blow to put him on Cruz Control until escape time. He was, right now, glad he had kept his head and not smarted off to look good in front of Jamaica. She knew the score, anyway.

    The new arrival was billeted in solitary, a few doors down the stone corridor. That made him a minor; otherwise he'd be in with the general population. They were going to unload on the poor sumbitch: Obstruction, assault with intent, impeding officers in their lawful duty, resisting arrest, and whatever
garni du jour
they could add to whatever it was the guy had done in the first place. Bail would be astronomical.

    Big deal. Cruz knew his own bail would top four figures, easy. They had 24 hours to charge him. The way police logic worked in Oakwood, until Cruz was charged he was not entitled to any phone calls. If he complained about this later, they would simply respond that he was offered his calls, but had refused them. Once you're in that cell, shine the bullshit some cops will tell you about getting to use the telephone.

    
Once you're in that cell, they have you, and the only you have is the rights they feel like giving you.

    
Never let 'em see you sweat
. Cruz was still lucid; he still had all his parts. Most people lost it when confronted with arrest and detainment. TV had not prepared them. Only on cop shows did the knightly minions of law and order swap rough-and-tumble mots with their justly bested foes.

    When your survival imperative was no longer wired to your mouth you ended up in the shoes - socks, rather - of the dude just booked, who had probably said something stupid like I know my rights or You can't do this or, worst of all, I pay your salary.

    MR HAPPY. Jonathan had the number. Would he do anything with it?

    He remembered Jonathan's eyes, uploading. Green eyes, but not like Jamaica 's. An unfathomable slibphylum of green, more yellow near the pupil, with sharp bits of brown that came and went, a murky blend like agitated pea soup. Cloudy. Dense. Jonathan struck Cruz as too upscale for the likes of Kenilworth Arms. All that paper stuff, to move in. This guy was a thinker, a planner, the sort of person who devised stratagems and wrote down lists before making focused, surgical moves. He aimed before he fired. Probably destined for some high rise, an office with Danish furniture, a health plan and a savings account. He would spend years amassing the perks that Emilio or Bauhaus could summon right now with a fingersnap… only to waste. Jonathan was real people; he fit into the bourgeois world of people who drove Nipponese compacts and paid taxes. Cruz was a fringe dweller, a maverick virus; he slipped through the cracks and hung at the edge of proper civilization. Like a predator, he fed off the norm. Columnists wrote inept articles on what they called 'the drug subculture.' People like Jonathan read them in Sunday supplements, having one of two reactions: How can people LIVE like that? Or Jesus; must be goddamn nice. When you boiled it down to business structure it was all the same. Profits, losses, hostile takeovers, power raiders. The veepees eventually slid into their boss's vacancies. Corporate America; just say no. Cruz took pride in his outsider status, whose risks included the cell in which he had landed. Average people craved vicarious and riskless excitement. Maybe Jonathan's presence on the opposite side of the fence of social respectability would serve to balance out the fact that Cruz lived and breathed.

    Maybe Cruz could do Jonathan a favor someday.

    From what he overheard, Oakwood cops called their collars 'alleged individuals' when in the presence of Sergeant Barnett. Otherwise, arrestees were known as hemorrhoids. Or bugs. The benediction of the Oakwood station, as you were thrown into a cell, was:

    'Welcome to Club Paradise, bug.'

    It was what the duty officer had told him as he opened the bullpen door. Enter by yourself, hemorrhoid - or do it my way. Cruz heard it coming hollowly from down the cinderblock corridor, followed by the sound of the new prisoner being cuffed to a Murphy bunk. Then the slide-slam of the cell door, not barred, but a solid core job thick with industrial gray paint like the bulkhead of a battleship. The new guy had been isolated in one of the solitaries. One tiny square window, no glass. One food slot. Silence.

    One of the bullpen's bugs was hunched on the steel toilet, liberating a blatting, diarrhetic shit. Cruz tried to ignore the acidic aroma that enriched the big cell. When the duty officer came back, he saw flecks of the new bug dotting the starched uniform blouse. Good. Cruz wiped a palm down his own face and stuck his hands back through the bars. Your clothes got stale quickly in jail, and he could smell himself. Awhile back he'd unzipped to piss, and the updraft from his pants was like the den of a randy puma. Jamaica 's juices still scaled his thighs and starched his pubic beard. His penis, tender now to the point of pain, did not wish to see the outside world and shriveled, withdrawing toward the sanctuary of his torso as soon as he had relieved himself.