Jack found himself in an adjacent tunnel, this one without the benefit of the red and green directional lights. The blackness felt like a veil over his senses. He lost his bearings as he turned around, listening for any sign of the man who had shot him. He caught a glimpse of light ahead, coming from above, and approached what he realized was a sidewalk grate.
By the time he felt the man’s presence behind him, it was already too late.
The garrote had already wrapped around his neck.
Frank stood on the platform as the express train roared through the station without stopping. He had caught sight of Jack racing up Center Street and took chase, his body forgetting his age until he was forced to stop and wait for the train to pass. He doubled over, hands on his knees, swallowing air in large gulps. He was in good shape, but he was no match for Jack, who was fifteen years his junior. As the train continued by, Frank took the brief interlude to clear his mind of his anger. He couldn’t have been more specific when telling Jack not to leave the car under any circumstance. After enduring the sight of the evidence room filled with feds and not getting his hands on the evidence case, he was floored to emerge from the building and find Jack out of the car, tossing some stranger against a Crown Victoria.
Before he could shout, the blond man had taken off with Jack in full pursuit. As Frank took up the chase, running with everything his half-century body had, he hoped to God no one recognized his friend; otherwise, what little advantage they had was gone.
As he stared into the dark tunnel where Jack had vanished, he feared the worst. The Lower Manhattan underground was a maze of subway tunnels, viaducts, and abandoned passages dating back almost 150 years, a world where one could get lost forever.
“Where is it?” the man screamed in Jack’s ear.
As the garrote dug into Jack’s neck, he could feel the warm moisture of blood trailing down his back. He struggled, his arms flailing, his head throbbing while his brain screamed out for oxygen. The man had taken him by surprise, positioning himself in the shadows beneath the sidewalk grate, lying in wait.
And then, with the thin wire wrapped tightly around his neck, the man kicked Jack to the ground of the abandoned tunnel, crushing his face into the dirt, where puddles of stench-filled water dotted the ground.
Jack’s rage and anger were no longer directed at the man but were turned on himself for being so easily captured, where he was now about to die, where all hope for saving Mia would die along with him.
“Where is the case?” the man growled in his ear.
The question shocked Jack, and the tables turned as the man slammed his face into a puddle while tightening the garrote. But then the man lifted him out of the water and, to his surprise, loosened the garrote. As Jack gulped for air, drawing in a big breath, his face was shoved into the puddle, where he gasped nothing but water into his lungs. Reflexively choking, the man retightened the garrote, drowning Jack with a mouthful of water.
Jack’s lungs burned as his mind began to turn black, darkness flowing in from the periphery of his vision. He could taste death as if he already knew its flavor.
But then a singular thought filled his mind: it was Mia in all of her beauty, in all of her grace and perfection. If Jack was to die, then she would have no hope, no chance of living, for her captors wouldn’t be letting her go.
Despite all of his valiant thoughts, he lacked the strength to escape his captor. He would die in the darkest recesses of Manhattan, never to be found or heard of again, as if he had already died in the Byram River.
Again, his face was jammed into the puddle, the severe lack of oxygen kicking his body’s automatic response to breathe when the garrote was released. The water flowed deeper into his lungs this time, burning like nothing he had ever felt before. But this time, under the pressure of imminent death, he didn’t see the proverbial light or his family before his eyes; his life didn’t replay like all of the myths.
What Jack saw in a burst of memory was the night before, as if the curtain was momentarily pulled back, allowing him a brief glimpse of something forbidden. Not vivid, more like a recaptured dream. The river raged beneath him as he lay on the shore. The world was filled with shadows beneath the driving rain. All around him were shattered trees and rocks. And the pain came charging back at him as if it had just happened, as if his body had a memory of its own that it couldn’t suppress. The pain below his shoulder was like hot steel, his head throbbed, and the teeming rain poured down on his face as he struggled to breathe. He caught glimpses of debris on the soaked shore around him,
And he saw a man emerge from the woods, his face cloaked in the night. He looked around at the raging river, up at the bridge, skyward as the rain began to stop, while shafts of moonlight pierced the parting of the clouds. Jack could hear his own voice crying out.
“You have to help me…”
The man looked at Jack but said nothing.
“I think I’m dying, but my wife… I have to save my wife…”
Jack’s recollections were suddenly shattered as the garrote grew tighter around his neck, and a knee jammed into the small of his back, pulling him out of his memories to dangle him at the edge of death.
His captor held his cell phone in his other hand, thumb dialing. The signal that struggled through the grate was weak, intermittent, the call static-filled. “Hey, it’s Gallagher… Gallagher!” he repeated. “Listen to me. You’re not going to believe this…”
Frank trudged his way through the tunnel. He hated the dark; he was terrified of it. With the unworldly sounds that permeated the lower depths of the city, his mind filled with images of rats and dead bodies, of the unknown lurking in the shadows. He kept his ears attuned for any sound of Jack, for any indication of an oncoming train, not knowing where Jack could have possibly turned within the confined space of the tunnel.
With the help of the red and green glow of the subway lights, he could see the disturbed gravel, and the intermittent footprints along the rail ties confirmed that he was heading in the right direction.
“Listen to me. You’re not going to believe this.”
Frank heard the voice up ahead, his ear pinpointing the distance. He drew his gun and caught sight of a small service opening in the wall.
“He’s alive.”
Frank felt like a moth drawn to the flame as he crept through the opening on silent feet. He stepped through the dark, catching sight of Jack and an assailant in the checkerboard light wash that poured in from above.
“Jack Keeler…”
Frank raised his gun as he saw Jack facedown in a puddle, a wire dog-tied around his neck, his assailant atop him with a flexed right arm wrapping the wire, his cell phone held in the other hand, pressed to his ear.
“Tell him Jack Keeler is alive.”
Frank pulled the trigger, the report of his Sig Sauer sounding like a cannon in the confined space as the orange glow of the barrel flame momentarily lit the space.
The man fell to the ground, the sounds of death leaking from his mouth, from the exposed side of his head.
Jack rolled over in the puddle, gasping, rubbing his own neck as if it would impart air quicker. He heaved, his lungs expelling water with gut-wrenching coughs that echoed in the abandoned tunnel. He lay on his back, his eyes closed, his mind without focus, as his body struggled to recover from near death. Blood seeped from the razorlike wound that wrapped his neck, the surrounding skin swelling up.
Frank tucked his pistol back into his holster and leaned over the body of the dead man, rifling through his pockets, pulling out keys, a clip of bullets, his wallet. He picked up the cell phone, briefly looking at it, and tucked it into his pocket. He rolled the man over and removed his gun from his holster. He examined it, shaking his head before laying it on the ground.