John Saul - The Manhattan Hunt Club

Now Jeff could hear that lullaby again, and even with his eyes closed, he could feel Jagger watching him.

Then, before he could roll away, he heard the bolt on the door slide back with a clunk. Jagger's odd melody silenced.

A moment later the door opened.

Scratch came into the room, followed by two other men, both dressed in the same kind of clothes Scratch himself wore: frayed and filthy pants, ragged shirts, and jackets so stained and greasy they could have been almost any color at all. One of the men had a tattered woolen scarf wrapped around his neck. The other wore a stocking cap with so many holes in it that great clumps of his unkempt hair were poking through.

"Well, I guess it's time," Scratch drawled. "You ready?"

Jeff and Jagger glanced at each other, then both of them peered suspiciously at Scratch. "Ready for what?" Jeff finally asked.

Scratch's lips curled into a twisted smile. "Ready to play." When neither Jeff nor Jagger spoke, Scratch snapped his fingers and one of the other men tossed a bundle toward the mattress.

Jagger's hands snatched it out of the air before it landed.

"Nice reflexes," Scratch observed. "They'll like that."

As Jagger began ripping the bundle open, Scratch said, "That's all you get. And remember the rules-get to the surface, you win. Otherwise, you lose."

Jeff's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "How do I win? The police are going to be looking for me."

Scratch shook his head. "No they're not-as far as they're concerned, you're dead." His eyes flicked toward Jagger. "Both of you are. So if you get out, nobody's going to be looking for either one of you." His cold smile gave way to a mocking grin. " If you get out." He jerked a thumb at the third man, who stepped forward, pulling his right hand from his jacket pocket.

The hand held a heavy pistol.

"It's a.45," Scratch explained. "And Billy here's a really good shot. So think of it as hide-and-go-seek, okay? After we leave, you count to a hundred real slow. If you do, you're on your own. But if you come through that door too soon, Billy'll have a good time blowin‘ a couple'a holes in you."

A few seconds later they were gone, but though the door closed behind them, they didn't hear the familiar clunk of the bar. As Jeff went to the door and pressed his ear against it, Jagger finished tearing open the bundle. All he found inside were two flashlights and two sets of clothes as ragged as the ones Scratch and the others had been wearing, and even filthier. The smell that rose from them nauseated Jeff, but Jagger was already ripping off his orange coveralls. He tossed them in a corner and started pulling on the largest of the pants from the bundle, kicking the second set toward Jeff. "Don't matter how bad they stink," he said. "They ain't orange, and they don't say Rikers Island on ‘em." He finished pulling on the filthy clothes, then picked up one of the flashlights and started toward the door.

"How do you know they won't shoot you as soon as you go out there?"

"Can't be any worse than sittin‘ here wondering what's going to happen," Jagger replied. He pulled the door open, hesitated a second, then stepped out into the darkness beyond.

Nothing happened.

"You coming?" he asked. "Because I ain't waiting."

Ripping off his own clothes, Jeff pulled on the ill-fitting pants and shirt that still lay on the floor, then picked up the second flashlight. He was about to turn it on, then thought better of it. If the batteries ran out in one, they'd need the other.

Moving through the door, he peered into the darkness that stretched away in both directions. "Which way?" he asked.

"Up," Jagger replied. "Except we haven't got a ladder."

From somewhere far off in the darkness to the right, they heard something.

It sounded like a shot, followed by a scream.

"Let's get the fuck out of here," Jagger said. Without waiting for a reply, he moved quickly into the blackness to the left.

A second later, before Jagger would disappear completely, Jeff followed.

Keith and Eve Harris were sitting in a tavern- Mike's, or Jimmy's, or something like that-at a tiny table covered with a red-checkered tablecloth. A real linen tablecloth with the stains to prove it. Every table in the place was filled, and people were three deep at the bar that ran the full length of the far wall. Curtains partially blocked the view of the sidewalk outside, giving the illusion that a steady stream of bodiless heads were drifting by. The buzz of conversation was loud enough that Keith had to strain to hear Eve Harris, but that same buzz gave them a degree of privacy they might not have had at a quieter restaurant.

Keith's gaze had flipped back and forth between the woman and her business card at least half a dozen times in the five minutes since she'd led him into the tavern, ordered a glass of merlot to his scotch on the rocks, and handed him her card. "This is real?" he'd asked as he read the title beneath her name.

"It's real," the waiter had said. "Nice to see you again, Ms. Harris."

"Nice to see you, too, Justin. Everything going all right?"

"I'm still working, aren't I?" the waiter countered, then turned to Keith. "If it weren't for Ms. Harris, I'd probably be dead by now. You don't even want to know how I was living before I met her. Be back in a minute with the drinks."

A minute was exactly what it had been, and in that minute Eve Harris told him that she hadn't done much for the waiter-she'd just gotten to know him when he was panhandling in Foley Square, and after talking to him almost every day for a month, asked him what he wanted to do with his life. "He said he just wanted to get himself cleaned up enough to get a real job. So all I did was take him shopping. We got him new clothes and a haircut, and I rented him a room. Then I sent him in here to talk to Jimmy, and he's been working ever since." Then Justin reappeared with their drinks, and Eve Harris glared at him mischievously. "Of course, if he screws up, he'll be the best bartender living in a box on Foley Square."

"Don't worry, I'm not screwing up," Justin assured her, grinning.

Now that they were alone again, Keith said, "I don't get why you're even interested in this." He could feel Eve Harris studying him with as much concentration as he'd been studying her before answering.

She took a sip of her merlot, seemed to come to some kind of decision, then leaned forward in her chair. "I'm aware of who your son is, what he did, and what happened to him," she said. "But I'm also aware that Perry Randall's daughter doesn't think he was guilty, and was planning to marry him. What I don't understand is what you were doing in the subway, asking people if they'd seen your son. He's dead, isn't he?"

As briefly as he could, Keith told her what he'd seen at the Medical Examiner's office, and what the drunk over on Bowery had told him.

"And you believed him?" Eve asked.

"Why shouldn't I?" Keith challenged, a note of belligerence in his voice.

She shook her head almost sadly. "Mr. Converse, there are basically three kinds of people living on the streets of this city: the addicts, the crazies, and the houseless." She smiled thinly at the puzzled look on Keith's face. " ‘Houseless' is their term, not mine. Some of the people consider the streets their home, so they aren't homeless, at least according to them. Houseless, but not homeless. But a lot of the groups tend to overlap-most of the addicts and crazies are homeless, but not all the homeless are addicts or crazies." She tilted her head toward Justin, who was busily wiping down a table that had been momentarily vacated. "A lot of the homeless just need a break. But some of the rest of them…" She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. "I wish I could say they're all just down on their luck, but I've lived here too long and seen way too much. And I've learned that the addicts will tell you anything they think you might be willing to pay for." She fixed him with a look that told him she would know if he didn't tell her the exact truth. "So how much did you pay him?"