Coming to the corner of West Fifty-Seventh and Sixth Avenue, Larkin shot across the sidewalk as the blinking red hand turned solid. He skirted around a bicycle coming up the bike lane, and at the last second, dodged left to avoid a mommy jogger and her double-wide stroller, instead hurtling the ledger bar of the scaffolding that covered the block. Larkin rushed down the stairs of the subway station as a mass of bodies was exiting. He barked NYPD at the assholes trying to come up on his right, forcing them back into the throng of people.
Larkin burst into the station proper, taking a deep breath as he surveyed the redesign he’d visited two days ago and reorienting himself. Larkin had actively avoided riding the subway since college—his HSAM being so sensitive to sound associations and stimulation overloads—and he could think of literally no greater Hell on Earth than being stuck in a packed car during rush hour, idling in the tunnel because of train traffic, the swell of bodies pressing in on him, the hum of the AC, thepop,pop,popof chewing gum, bells and chimes of Candy Crush being played at full volume, a baby kicking and screaming in their stroller, fresh-from-college finance bros discussing the faults of the working class and whether Tom was going to bring coke to the party tonight in the same breath of conversation, and then the doors between cars opening and a dance team comes in with their speaker at full volume, screaming, “Do you know what time it is?” Larkin shuddered. Yes, he was a New Yorker who had to read the subway signs, seeming to lack that intuitive knowledge about the system that most riders possessed, but it was better than the alternative.
Doyle came to a stop at his side. He asked, only slightly out of breath in the way of a runner with exceptional stamina, “Which side was Marco on?”
“Uptown. The north end.”
“We need to get them to hold the trains.”
Doyle left Larkin, approaching the bullet-proof ticket booth, where the attendee inside was chatting through her microphone to a track employee—a young black man in steel-toed boots, jeans, a long-sleeve shirt and reflective safety vest, with a hard hat tucked under one arm and a utility belt with a radio strapped around his waist. Doyle butted into their conversation by flashing his badge, and something he said sparked recognition in the track worker’s face, who offered a hand and appeared to be introducing himself.
The two returned to Larkin’s side, with Doyle saying, “Larkin, this is Demetrius Armstrong. He reported the DB on Tuesday.”
“Mr. Armstrong,” Larkin said, quickly shaking his hand. “Everett Larkin, Cold Case Squad.”
“Yeah, hey,” Armstrong replied. He had a light-up-the-room smile like Doyle. “You guys are a little early. My boss isn’t going to be here for about another hour, and I was about to clock-out for lunch—”
“Change of plans, Mr. Armstrong,” Larkin interrupted. “We need to go into the uptown tunnel.”
“You need to go…inthe tunnel?”
“Yes. At once. Immediately.”
“Uh… yeah, I don’t… having workers on the tracks disrupts train schedules. It’s gotta be planned in advance. Ms. Crowley might be able to organize getting you in the tunnel between midnight and five o’clock,” Armstrong suggested.
“No,” Larkin said flatly.
Doyle stepped in to explain, “There’s a population of runaways and homeless who have set up a sort of camp somewhere between here and Sixty-Third and Lex. A teen girl among them is wanted for murder, and we believe she returned to this station less than an hour ago.”
Larkin added, “I have probable cause that she intends to kill another individual who’s currently hiding in the system. Now, please pretend this situation is a track fire.”
“The number-one ruleon the tracks is,do nottouch the third rail,” Armstrong warned, turning the beam of his flashlight on the raised and covered rail. “My dad worked for the Transit Authority in the ’80s. He told me he saw a guy step on the track and explode. Arms and legs literally shot off his core like missiles.”
“Noted,” Doyle said from the rear.
It’d taken longer than Larkin preferred to get to the platform and actually climb down the access stairs into the tunnel proper, but Armstrong didn’t have the sort of authority they’d needed, which required a phone call to Ms. Crowley, the station manager, which turned into a conversation with the Command Center, who then of course looped Lieutenant Connor in on the request, before approval was given to reroute uptown F trains onto the E line from West Fourth due to “police activity.”
Larkin and Doyle had left behind their suit coats in exchange for the same orange safety vest that Armstrong wore, and with pistols drawn and kept at low-ready, proceeded into the tunnel that’d been in twenty-four-hour continuous use for a hundred years. The garbage that’d settled on the tracks was the usual sort—empty soda bottles, napkins, candy wrappers, one uncapped and used needle, and a crust of pizza being hauled into the shadows by a rodent of unusual size. Maintenance lights, their bulbs grimy with dirt and soot and God only knew what else, did little to brighten beyond the immediate steps in front of them, while their flashlights illuminated years of graffiti along the walls. Most of the tags were sloppy, the artist’s name indecipherable, but there were one or two, the deeper they moved uptown, that Larkin almost dared to consider art.
Illegal, certainly, but a sort of beautiful and gritty urban art nonetheless.
“You know,” Armstrong said from ahead of Larkin, “I’m not surprised to hear there’s an encampment in this tunnel.”
“Why do you say that.”
“Well, most folks don’t realize it, but the reason the subway tunnels are different sizes and connect at certain stops but not others is because, prior to the MTA, the subway was run by three companies—all with their own plans and schematics. That’s to say, this F train is the IND and it can’t run on the original IRT lines because they’re too narrow. So the MTA has all these workarounds. In fact, my pop told me stories about starting his patrol in one neighborhood and coming out in a completely different precinct, just by walking underground. MTA didn’t even have complete schematics of their own system in the ’80s—that’s why they’ve got half-finished tracks, tunnels that lead nowhere, abandoned lines discovered during construction…. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they still didn’t know about some of what’s down here. That’s what makes it a haven for the mole people.”
“Mole people,” Larkin repeated.
“You’re not supposed to call ’em that,” Armstrong replied. “But some embrace the term.”
“Why do you know this,” Larkin asked.
Armstrong laughed cheerfully and said, “I’m a bit of a train geek. Me and my dad have been going to conventions every year since I was waist-high. We love it. Everyone’s got a thing, you know?”
“I suppose so.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “The Q was suspended in the late ’90s for track repairs, and Fifty-Seventh was the final stop. It was a convenient station to hop the tracks and head uptown to the BMT line at Sixty-Third. That was used to store non–rush-hour trains until the Second Avenue Q line finally opened a few years ago.” Armstrong stopped walking, turned, and cast his flashlight on Larkin and Doyle. “All it’d take is one person trying to keep off the grid to discover the relative seclusion of those tracks, andbam, encampment.”
