Lisa Miscione - Twice

“You said a bad word,” admonished Jetty. Lydia shot him a look and he cringed as if he thought she’d strike him. She felt bad for a second. Then the feeling passed as another thought occurred to her.

“Jetty,” she asked, moving toward him and sitting in the free chair beside Ford, “did you tell Jed McIntyre about the tunnels beneath the street?”

Jetty nodded. “He didn’t believe me.”

Ford looked at Lydia guiltily with a shake of his head.

“What?” she said, a frown creasing her forehead and dread burrowing what seemed to be a permanent home in her belly.

As they approached a ragtag group of men sitting around a lopsided card table playing poker by candlelight, Jeff decided that they had entered the twilight zone. They appeared to be playing for bottles and cans, using caps and metal tabs for chips. A few sacks filled with cans and bottles lay scattered on the floor around the table. Engaged in a loud, slurred argument over who had won the last hand, the card players did not acknowledge Violet, Dax, and Jeff as they passed until Dax accidentally shone the flashlight beam on their table.

“Hey, brother,” barked a beefy guy with a red baseball cap. “Mind your own business.”

Jeffrey braced himself for Dax to flip out but he just raised a hand in apology. “Sorry, mate.”

They passed a row of tents that seemed to lean against one another and go on forever. They were lit from inside, and Jeff and Dax could see shadows moving within, heard the occasional voice. Jeff thought he caught the scent of meat cooking.

“Track rabbits,” said Violet.

“Track rabbits?” said Dax with a grimace. “Dare I ask?”

“People down here are hungry. And the rats get pretty big,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not half bad. The concept is harder to swallow than the meat.”

“That is fucking disgusting,” said Dax.

“Spoken like someone who’s never gone hungry,” said Violet indignantly.

“Whatever,” he said, not liking the old lady’s attitude. Jeff rolled his eyes; Dax didn’t even know how offensive he could be sometimes. But his honesty, even when it was inappropriate, was one of the things Jeff liked most about him. There was no artifice to Dax. He didn’t give a shit what anyone thought, and that made him one of the most trustworthy people Jeff knew. Dax was just like Lydia in that way, which was probably why the two were always butting heads.

Jeff felt Dax’s hand on his arm just before he noticed a tall form appear before them on the track, taking up the height and width of the tunnel. Violet seemed to hesitate for a second as though she had sensed something, but then she kept walking.

“There’s someone ahead of us,” whispered Jeff.

“I know.”

Jeff heard Dax click the safety off his gun. As they drew closer, Jeff could see that there was a light source behind the form, creating a shadow that was much bigger than the man who waited in their path.

“You brought cops down here, Violet?” asked the shade, his voice deep and resonant. He stood about six feet tall and seemed to be draped in robes, but the light was dim and Jeff couldn’t make out his clothes or his face. He just looked like a wraith, a dark shadow in a land of shadows.

Violet had instructed Dax to turn his flashlight off a while back and it didn’t seem like a good idea to turn it back on, though Dax was itching to do so. But he had his hands full with his Magnum Desert Eagle, a nasty Israeli gun that had more stopping power than a freight train.

“They’re not cops, Rain. They’re friends of Danielle’s.”

There was a pause and then a deep, cruel laugh. “That crack ho doesn’t have any friends.”

“Yes, she does,” said Dax, offended. He didn’t like it when people insulted his friends, even if what they said was true.

They stood silent for a moment and Rain was so still that he looked as though he could fade into the black and be as gone as if he’d never been there at all.

“What do they want?” he asked finally.

“They’re here for The Virus.”

As they talked, Violet continued to move forward slowly toward Rain and she was dwarfed by his height and size. Jeff and Dax hung back, waiting to see how the standoff would go.

“We’re the cure,” said Dax, his voice quiet but resonating against the concrete.

Rain nodded but kept his ground. “And then what?”

“And then we leave and never come back,” said Jeffrey.

“And you never tell anyone that you came here.”

“Sounds like a deal.”

“Leave the body. We’ll take care of it. No one will ever find it.”

And with that he seemed to meld into the darkness and was gone. Jeff was left with a chill down his spine and a feeling of dread in his heart. They’d be murderers when this deed was done and he wasn’t sure that rested well with him, no matter the reason. It was justice, of that he had no doubt. It was whether they had the right to dispense it that worried him. He knew how Lydia felt about it; they tried to take care of it her way… the “right” way. They’d failed, and now Jed McIntyre was free, uncontained. And that was unacceptable to him.

The three of them started walking again in silence. He didn’t want to talk anymore, to just pretend the bizarre unreality of this made it all a bad dream. If he hadn’t been one hundred percent certain that he had no choice, they wouldn’t be here at all. As it was, he’d willingly trade his soul for the woman he loved and the child she carried inside her.

“What are they thinking?” said Lydia at the wheel of Ford’s Taurus, speeding back to New York City. Ford had let her have the keys because he knew her head was going to explode if she didn’t have something to do on the way back to town. Now he regretted it as she pushed the old car beyond its limits, driving it as if it were her small tight Mercedes. Which it definitely was not. Ford heard an unfamiliar noise from the engine.

“Look… there’s no point in overreacting and there’s no point to racing back there,” said Ford. “We should just proceed to Haunted as planned. They’ll call when they’re done.”

“Done with what?” she asked. “Even if Jed McIntyre is lurking in the subway tunnels, what exactly do they plan to do?”

“That’s not information I need to have. And you should just let it go, too. They’re big boys, they can take care of themselves and anyone who tries to fuck with them. What are you going to do when we get there? Race into the tunnels and try to find them? Sit at your apartment, wringing your hands?”

Lydia pulled the car over to the side of the road and put her head on the wheel. He had a point. But her whole body was electrified with the need to get back to New York. What if something happened to them down there? The thought of Jeffrey crawling beneath the streets looking for Jed McIntyre made her sick with anxiety. How could he do this? Without telling her? When she knew he was okay, she was going to kill him.

Ford put a warm, callused hand on the back of her neck and she sat up, taking a deep breath. He had a kind, fatherly face, even if it was a little hard around the edges. She’d seen it change from warm to cold in under a second. Brown eyes communicated a depth and a sensitivity that Lydia found rarely in career cops, told her that he still had a humanity and compassion that were often casualties of the job. A thin smile disappeared into deep creases around the corners. A seemingly permanent five o’clock shadow made him look a little tough, a little unkempt. He smelled of Old Spice and sesame chicken.

“Pull it together, girl,” he said. “Let’s go to Haunted.”

She was about to agree with him when his cell phone rang. He removed it from the inside pocket of his lined beige raincoat.