The Shaft (37 page)

    Options reran.

    By now Marko had dropped by apartment 323 and realized it was a dodge. Having already trashed Cruz's place at the opposite end of the building, he would report immediately to Bauhaus. They would both have tipped to his absence from the hospital by now. Jamaica had to be warned, but not by phone; Jonathan had to be briefed if not cautioned. Cruz felt Jonathan was in no real jeopardy, just as the possibility of a fall down the elevator shaft had been no danger.

    He pushed hair from his eyes and scanned the second floor hallway. One more scream, from the far end, his end of Kenilworth. Some bitch getting slapped around because she won't put out during her period. Some mommy who can't control her brat, so she shrieks at it like that Velasquez
puta
. Some screamer who doesn't have all the wordly goods the universe of TV game shows tells her she should have, so she vents off at her live-in peasant boyfriend. Who cared.

    Or maybe she wanted out. Just out. Cruz could get behind that.

    The thought of Marko and Bauhaus gave Cruz another potential for the gap between floors. A genuinely desperate person might hide himself there, coming and going through the roof hatch of the elevator. It would require tools and supplies and some prep, but past that it was foolproof. Who would even look? Between the cellar rooms and the walled-up corridors and the subdivided apartments and the unexpected turns, Kenilworth had more forgotten convolutions than a mystery novel had secret panels.

    No doubt, if Cruz searched long enough, he'd find bones.

    Across from the elevator door was the uneven end table, its Folger's coffee can still holding a bounty of dusty plastic flowers. On the floor with Cruz were gum wrappers and cigarette butts and the nondescript stains of animals or children or incontinent drunks. The ground-out butts had left bum commas in the prehistoric carpeting. There was a gray oval on the wall above the table where a mirror had once hung. Gentleman callers may perform a last-minute grooming inspection before delivering their calling cards at the doors of ladies of quality.

    
Uh-huh, yeah, right.

    He backtracked to the eastern stairwell, walking right past Jonathan's closed and locked outer door. The sounds of hopelessness had ceased. Cruz paused.

    Nothing encouraged him to knock, so he took the stairs one by one. Let Jonathan sleep ten more minutes, if it was going to come to hairy late-night commotion.

    As he made the final turn, ascending to the third floor, a black face glared at him from apartment 304 and was instantly supplanted by a slamming door. Anger and hostility in that gaze, plus bumps. Not my bitch, not my connection, not my main man, so piss off.

    Cruz edged toward his own apartment, 307, like a good spy. That was his role tonight. He found the outer door closed but not locked. The inner door of the airlock was still open by three inches, admitting light to the cramped vestibule. As he eased it open, tensed to flee, he tipped to the extra ingredient in the fierce stare of that black guy, a man he had never seen and did not know from Martin Luther King.

    A disgusted projectionist played the whole scenario in the theatre of Cruz's mind. Dummy. Can't you guess?

    Marko invades, probably using keys or a good Lockaid gun. His turnover of 307 is rapid, methodical, professional. He knows the federal investigator search routine and flows from gag to gag like a dancer being judged. He's out in three minutes flat. While Cruz is trying to con a cabbie into driving to Oakwood, the asshole from 304 stumps home after an evening of petty theft and sees the door to Cruz's place ajar. After a skittish second, he peeks. Sees the ghetto blaster, the tapes, the camera. Marko would have taken the film from the camera already. The black guy decides to enrich one of

    Chicago 's finer pawnshops with Cruz's untended property. He is sloppy, taking three times as long as Marko and leaves a hellacious mess. Between the pro and the amateur, Cruz has been cleaned out, utterly.

    He slumped onto his bed, dejected. Even the beer had been liberated from the fridge. He hoped it had boiled.

    Something new broke.

    Not Kenilworth, busting another stitch. Not Cruz's shabby fourth-hand furniture. He felt the actual give inside of himself, like a taut rubber band relaxing.

    Bauhaus, Marko, the pain, the burglary, the hasslement - none of this mattered a damn. Cruz glimpsed, for perhaps the second or third time in his life, a bigger picture than the world as seen through his own baby browns.

    What mattered was that he take action. Something to cut Jamaica free of that slug swine Bauhaus. Something to ensure Jonathan would be in the clear. Jonathan, who Cruz knew barely at all, yet who had done for him. A stranger who did not need any of Bauhaus' psychic sewage smeared across his life. Cruz needed something with which to strike a detente with Emilio, back home. Absolution was impossible… but a deal was never vetoed without scrutiny. Even before he was King Stud of Miami, Emilio was foremost a dealer. Cruz had to offer a deal. He also had to exorcise the ghost of Chiquita, falling still; scour her from the space she had appropriated inside his head.

    He had to arrange a life that did not require him to constantly look back over his shoulder in unending fear.

    The need to phone Rosie's emergency number swelled up and burst and filled him now, overriding even the agony of his ruined arm.

    Abruptly he felt uncomfortable up on Kenilworth 's third floor. He no longer belonged here. It was too high. Too far to fall.

    He did not have to strain to hear it now - the ebb-and-flow moan of Kenilworth 's ghost, the signature noise of the building itself.

    He used what the intruders had left him inside of his own apartment. He found a sweatshirt and spent several minutes gingerly wrestling into it, adding a layer to his insulation, then climbed back into his nightfighting jacket. He resecured his sling, snugging his arm above the jacket's waist drawstring. He had to use his teeth to retie it. When he zipped up his arm felt locked down, safe.

    He abandoned 307 to the fates and headed back for the stairs, avoiding the cursed elevator. When he rounded the second-floor corner he collided with Jamaica, who had hustled posthaste out of Jonathan's apartment, to hell with closing doors.

    The wild look in her eyes attacked Cruz's congratulatory self-effacement, stomping it down, rolling over and swiftly killing it.

    Sure enough, she found Playtex rubber gloves in one of Jonathan's kitchen boxes. This was a lifesaver.

    Once she hauled in the knotted extension cord she had quickly become a mess. It was caked and gravid with some gelatinous discharge. She tried wiping her hands and only spread it around, as cloudy and slippery as olive oil yet lacking that distinctive olfactory presence.

    The odor of the slime was a kissin' cousin to the stench of the grainier, fecal stuff. This was not alarming. The gunk on the line held swimming soot, the stale tang of bad seawater, and assorted particulate matter. Jamaica thought of a gobbet of industrial lubricant left on a dusty floor, then mixed with rancid fat plus that canned blue jelly they made you wash your hands with in jail, plus a healthy scoop of droppings from a very diseased dog.

    Then fermented.

    The water took its time warming up, as usual. She held her hand under the faucet. The glob resisted for a moment, then slid off to thicken the drain, leaving a film on her palm. She scrubbed at it with a paper towel, then hunted up the rubber gloves in a hurry because Jonathan, not her, was the one down in the shaft wading in this shit.

    Her guess at depth was doomed to remain a guess. In the dicey light from Jonathan's lantern she could only perceive tilting shadows from two stories up, like trying to follow a gunfight at the terminus of a dark alley. Her perspective was completely disrupted. The ghostly acoustics of the shaft hampered true sounds the same way. No sensory evidence was trustworthy.

    Cruz's garbage bag came up with a ragged tear in one side, and was so inundated in organic grease that Jamaica knew she would leave it in the bathtub. With gloved hands she widened the tear, then undid Cruz's knots. The slime made that pretty simple.

    Whatever had punctured the bag down there had taken one kilo of cocaine with it. She lifted out a taped brick with a wide, wet mouth… and the mouth was empty, its white bounty lost to the water. Half the take, stolen already.

    The weight of the gun in the Whitman Sampler box had saved the other kilo strictly by virtue of trapping it within a twist of thick plastic. Jamaica unwound it and it had become so convoluted that she felt encouraged. The candy box, astonishingly, was as dry as the night she had delivered it. The brick held speckles of water but its seal was inviolate.

    
Do your part
, she thought, and hurriedly fed the line back down to Jonathan.

    By the time they were finished, his bathroom would be a total loss. Best to shower and scrub and leave the cleaning of inanimate objects to some future, less fortunate tenant.

    The pretzel knots slipped and slid past her grasp, all the way until the line was paid out. She heard sloshing coming at her from the shaft as she placed the kilo and the candy box on top of the toilet tank. Real stupid, to risk getting them wet now.

    One kilo. Forty grand, maybe fifty - they could cut Bauhaus' pharmeceutical grade almost thirty percent before its orbit of potency began to decay. That would gram the load out to approximately…

    Shit. She'd need a calculator just to estimate what the flake was worth.

    She held the line, poised over a fouled bathtub in a subhuman tenement, blizzarded in, fearful and desperate and suddenly incapable of the simplest add-up, and that made her so mad she wanted to kick down the wall. Life in the lightspeed lane sure was a hoot. Do you know me? My name is Jamaica - this week - and I used to be a human being.

    More heavy sloshabout echoed toward her. She tried to keep track of Jonathan, who was listing awkwardly in the muck below, but the updraft had dented her nostrils two times too many. It was the smell of dead animals and rot heavy with parasites. The extension cord groaned against the moldy casement. Fortunately the tub had slid all the way to the wall and could scoot no further under Jonathan's swinging weight. She had watched the topmost pretzel loop squeeze shut like the eye of a sleeping cat.

    She had known what was in the candy box. She had known from the first, even without seeing. The heft of that box had told her stories. In a twitch of unexpected clarity she saw the gun representing just as much freedom as the kilo of coke sitting on the toilet tank.

    They had all talked of changing things, of steering their lives. Now she was on the brink of implementation, feeling something inside of her shy back. No. Better to stay where you are. To hold what you have rather than risk it. When you risk, you gamble, and when you gamble you can lose. Embrace the security you've built and don't dare to ask for more. You've walled yourself into such a nice fortress; it would be stupid to walk away and leave those walls, and their safety, and…

    'Hurry up!' It was Jonathan. 'Hurry with the fucking rope, goddammit, hey!'

    He had broken his own directive and was shouting, his voice superamplified by the tunnel of metal, hollow and lost. A misfire. Something had staled for sure.

    The line was completely paid out. Jamaica stepped into the tub, her boots skidding on moisture and residual gunk from the Hefty bag piled near the drain like a dead manta ray, deflated yet still lethal. She wriggled through the window, braced at the waist, to agitate the line. If Jonathan did not have it in hand, it had gotten hung up or tangled. There was no slack on her end.

    Light from his lamp darted across her face and stung her eyes. She averted her head, blind for a second. She had recorded a glimpse of how lubricated the entire shaft was, in the play of the lightbeam over the thickly coated walls. Genuinely gross.

    Climbing loops had fouled to form a big knot. She felt it shake free.

    By now the two of them were scaring up a beastly racket. She heard another voice in a distant apartment yell back. Shut the fuck up. One more tenor in the tenement symphony.

    The light below danced. The line swayed, then drew taut. She heard the gong noise of Jonathan's boots hitting the corrugated steel, then a less controlled gong of impact. When she looked she saw only the light, veering in circles, slicing burn tracks across her vision and illuminating nothing.

    She heard Jonathan scream. Not a help noise. Worse.

    More thuddings and splashing. The line remained weighted, telegraphing his ascent to her.

    To hell with decorum, she thought. Why should she start following rules today?

    'Jonathan?' They'd already announced themselves to the building at large anyway. She leaned farther out, head and shoulders into the fetor of the shaft now, and grabbed the extension cord with her gloved hands. It was too heavy for her, but she tried to pull it in, to help him closer.

    Below, the lamp bulb vanished, a lone star in a black void, finally embracing death itself.

    'Jonathan!'

    The line went slack in her grip. She could not know that the next sound she heard was Jonathan's face striking the shaft as he did a backward somersault and picked up speed. Then he splashed and sank.

    Panic endorphins flooded her, turning Jonathan's name into a yell. Jamaica had never screamed before and did not now.

    She heard him make a low noise.
Uhh
. Like Cruz's imaginary ghost, the off-key inhabitant of Kenilworth. It was a quiescent purr, almost sexual.

    She pictured him fallen, the back of his head caved in, with whatever had holed the Hefty bag now jutting through his chest. Or throat.