Michael Harvey - The Third Rail

Hubert opened up the text message and photo he’d sent out earlier in the day and thought about its implications. He wanted to try Kel y’s cel again, but decided to wait until he had the details worked out. Hubert punched up the camera built into his Mac and hit RECORD. He talked for twenty minutes, laying out his thoughts while they were fresh, speculating about the curious things that were popping up in Jim Doherty’s old files. He had just started a new recording file when there was a sound outside in the hal way. Hubert terminated the recording, sending a copy to Kel y, and got up. He glanced at the knife a second time, but left it on the desk and walked to the door.

Rodriguez and I agreed. This guy had been wired into us from the start and it had to stop. No cel phone contact. No e-mail. Rodriguez would coordinate with Lawson and handle Cabrini. I’d head to the South Side and whatever waited. Somewhere along the line, I hoped one of us would find Rachel. Alive.

I checked my watch. It had already been almost an hour. I cruised the neighborhood one more time. Checked Jim Doherty’s house. Then Denny and Peg McNabb. Both looked empty. Locked up tight.

I parked two blocks away and stepped out of my car. Wind from the east screamed high in the bare trees, rattling storm doors and blowing paper bags across the street. I crept through a patchwork of yards. It was dark, but I’d done my homework and didn’t make a sound. Ten minutes later, I slipped over a fence, into the McNabbs’ backyard. It took me less than two minutes to work the lock to the basement door free. I half expected to hear Peg’s TV going upstairs, but there was nothing. I pul ed out the revolver Rodriguez had given me, crept up the cel ar stairs, and into the kitchen. They were both on the floor, facedown, hands tied behind their backs. Denny had managed to wrap one of Peg’s fingers in his. And that was how I found them. Each with a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.

I checked upstairs, but the rest of the place was empty. Then I sat in the kitchen with the old couple and watched light from the street play across the house next door. A shape moved behind a window. Or maybe I just wanted it to be so. Either way, I was over the fence in what felt like a heartbeat and pressed up against the side of Jim Doherty’s bungalow. Taped to the back door was a picture, flickering in the night. It was the same image Hubert Russel had sent to my phone. At least we were al on the same page.

I peeled the photo off the door, turned the knob, and walked inside. The retired cop was sitting at his kitchen table, a shotgun pointed at my chest.

“You surprised?” he said.

I looked at the photo again. It was the police graduation shot for James Nelson Doherty. He was smiling, proud and happy to be commissioned a police officer in the year of our Lord 1982.

“A smart friend of mine sent me this today,” I said.

“Figured it out, huh?”

“You didn’t become a cop until ’82. Two years after the crash.”

“So I couldn’t have been a uniform up on the platform when those cars derailed. That’s exactly right. Drop the gun.”

Doherty had a red binder with black block lettering on the table, along with a hard black case. He had a Mac on the floor by his feet and flipped it around with his boot so I could get a look. Rachel was on-screen, blindfolded and handcuffed to a chair. There was a shotgun five feet away, locked into a shooting stand and pointed at her head. I laid my gun on the ground.

“Where is she, Jim?”

“I assume you went to Cabrini. That was clever. I’l give your woman that. But let’s not waste the little time we have with loose ends.”

“That include your dead neighbors next door?”

“They were very old and they died together. You have no idea what a blessing that is.”

“Yeah, I envy them.”

“Shut up, Michael. And sit down.”

I did.

“You got it figured out yet?” Doherty said. “Or you want me to fil in the blanks?”

I held up the photo. “You were on the train.”

“Help.”

I turned to the sound, coming from the doorway of the crippled CTA car. James Doherty moved his face into the broken light. His skin was the color of wet cement, his eyes, blue marbles that rolled around in his skull before settling on me. Five feet below him, the woman with the green scarf and soft smile had been thrown against the car’s back door. The accordion metal had crushed the woman’s legs, and her pelvis was pinned under a twist of steel. Even that would have been okay until I saw the second piece lodged just beneath the ribs. It was the broken-off end of a girder that had split the door on impact. The girder was dark green and rusted, slick with blood, and slid in and out of her side each time she took a breath, which wasn’t often enough. The woman with the soft face was dying. Even to a kid, that much was more than clear.

“I didn’t recognize you until I saw the photo,” I said.

“Sometimes life takes its pound of flesh to the bone.” Doherty croaked out a laugh, and I could see the fine strands of insanity tangled up in it. “But I recognized you, Kel y. Minute you walked into the district as a rook. Same mayonnaise face you had as a kid. Stil looking for his daddy.”

I crawled toward Doherty, and we pulled at the hot, rusted metal. He mumbled and prayed as we worked. Then he kissed the woman’s face and tried to keep her awake. After about a minute or so, she still hadn’t moved. I heard a sound from the back of the car. A CTA conductor’s hat floated above us. Below it, my father’s red eyes.

“Please,” I said.

Something like pity flicked across his face and I thought he might try to save her. Then the pegs were reset. My old man grabbed me by the neck and threw me toward the back of the car and the open connecting door. I hit an edge, slumped across the threshold, and felt the night on my face. I looked up at the L tracks looming above me, a couple of firemen’s hats peeking over the side.

“Get out the fucking door,” my old man bellowed and tried to follow me to safety.

Doherty reached out and grabbed for his leg. My old man put a boot in Doherty’s face and slammed him into the side of the car. For a moment, there was nothing but a silent tremor that rippled through my fingers. Then the train lurched, this time badly. Quiet moans became screams. Steel groaned and rivets popped. A seam of metal split the length of the car. The woman with the soft face moaned once as something pierced her anew. Doherty reached, but his fingers were greased with blood, and she slipped away. Then she was gone, leaving nothing behind but a cold wind, chasing Jim Doherty’s screams through a gaping hole to the blank pavement below.

“He killed her,” Doherty said.

I shook my head. “She would have died whether she fel or not. The doctors told us that.”

“You mean the doctors paid for by your city. He was a coward. He kil ed her. You both did.”

I felt Doherty’s eyes, crawling across my soul, finding the dark crevices where guilt fed on a child’s doubt, and a woman’s pain echoed. I shook my head free, but the man with the shotgun had seen enough to smile.

I was dragged up to the tracks in a fireman’s sling. My father, right behind me. I took one look down into the street, but she was already covered with a sheet. They tried to talk me into an ambulance, but I twisted away, ran from the elevated, then walked twenty blocks home. That night, my old man drank a pint and a half of Ten High bourbon. He called me into the kitchen sometime after midnight and asked me what I saw on the train. I told him nothing. He beat me with his fists, asking the same question with every blow. I kept saying nothing because I didn’t know what answer would be better. But there was no right answer. And there was no beating that was going to hurt worse than knowing what my father was. And knowing that every time he looked at me, he’d see his own cowardice reflected there. And hate me for it.