“Damn straight.”
“I like the way you think. But can’t we call the MTA or Parks and Rec and see if we can have them open it?”
“After office hours?” She shook her head. “Besides, by my estimation, after we got all the red tape cleared and signed all the insurance waivers, we’d be doing our climbing using walkers.” And then she added, “And since when did you become the cautious thinker?”
“Maybe because you’re scaring me. You look like you could use a choke chain tonight.”
“I’m tired of waiting. Ten years, Rook. And now I feel like I’m this close.” She tried the bolt head again with her bare fingertips, knowing it was useless. “I don’t want it to slip away.”
Rook felt the fire in her and said, “We’re going to need a tool to get that off.”
“That’s the Rook I know.”
He surveyed the area as if he’d miraculously find one to improvise, which would have been just that, miraculous. Nikki pointed across Broadway and said, “Oh, man, talk about a cruel irony.” Maybe a hundred feet away sat a locksmith shop with its lights off. “All locked up for the night.”
“We could call them.” When Rook read her impatience, he said, “No, we are not going to break in there. I may not always know where to draw the line, but burglary feels like a good place to start.”
She kicked at the grate with her toe. “If Nicole did get down there, she either had a key or she knew another way in.”
“What we need is a hex wrench to turn that bolt. Or, if it won’t turn, one of those handheld rotary cutters to saw off the head,” said Rook. “Those guys on Storage Wars use them all the time. They go through padlocks like buttah.”
“Is there an open hardware store at this hour?”
“No, but I know the next best thing. Remember JJ?” he said, referring to the building super of a gossip columnist whose murder they had solved.
“JJ, as in Cassidy Towne’s JJ?”
“He’s just down on Seventy-eighth. The man owns every tool imaginable.”
Even though it meant waiting a half hour, Heat agreed their best plan was for Rook to hop down to JJ’s. She would stay there and canvass the area for alternate points of entry. When he got in his taxi, he said to her, “Feels like we’re getting somewhere, doesn’t it?” She just shrugged and watched his cab drive off. Nikki had gotten somewhere too many times before only to have it be nowhere.
But this did feel different. Not just the recent surge in leads, but something else. Detective Heat-cautious, 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.