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Staring at the dim eye.
T.J. Colfax, dark-haired refugee from the hills of Eastern Tennessee, NYU Business School gra
d, quick-as-a-whip currency trader, had just swum out of a deep dream. Her tangled hair stuck to her cheeks, sweat crawling in veins down her face and neck and chest.
She found herself looking into the black eye--a hole in a rusty pipe, about six inches across, from which a small access plate had been removed.
She sucked mildewy air through her nose--her mouth was still taped shut. Tasting plastic, the hot adhesive. Bitter.
And John? she wondered. Where was he? Refusing to think about the loud crack she'd heard last night in the basement. She'd grown up in Eastern Tennessee and knew what gunshots sounded like.
Please, she prayed for her boss. Let him be all right.
Stay calm, she raged to herself. You fucking start to cry again, you remember what happened. In the basement, after the gunshot, she'd lost it completely, breaking down, sobbing in panic, and had nearly suffocated.
Right. Calm.
Look at the black eye in the pipe. Pretend it's winking at you. The eye of your guardian angel.
T.J. sat on the floor, surrounded by a hundred pipes and ducts and snakes of conduit and wires. Hotter than her brother's diner, hotter than the back seat of Jule Whelan's Nova ten years ago. Water dripped, stalactites drooped from the ancient girders above her head. A half-dozen tiny yellow bulbs were the only illumination. Above her head--directly above--was a sign. She couldn't read it clearly, though she caught the red border. At the end of whatever the message might have been was a fat exclamation point.
She struggled once more but the cuffs held her tight, pinching against the bone. From her throat rose a desperate cry, an animal's cry. But the thick tape on her mouth and the insistent churning of machinery swallowed up the sound; no one could've heard her.
The black eye continued to stare. You'll save me, won't you? she thought.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a clanging slam, an iron bell, far away. Like a ship's door slamming shut. The noise came from the hole in the pipe. From her friendly eye.
She jerked the cuffs against the pipe and tried to stand. But she couldn't move more than a few inches.
Okay, don't panic. Just relax. You'll be all right.
It was then that she happened to see the sign above her head. In her jockeying for slack she'd straightened up slightly and moved her head to the side. This gave her an oblique view of the words.
Oh, no. Oh, Jesus in my heart . . .
The tears began again.
She imagined her mother, her hair pulled back from her round face, wearing her cornflower-blue housedress, whispering, "Be all raht, honey love. Doan' you worry."
But she didn't believe the words.
She believed what the sign said.
Extreme Danger! Superheated steam under High Pressure. Do not remove plate from pipe. Call Consolidated Edison for access. Extreme danger!
The black eye gaped at her, the eye that opened into the heart of the steam pipe. It stared directly at the pink flesh of her chest. From somewhere deep inside the pipe came another clink of metal on metal, workers hammering, tightening old joints.
As Tammie Jean Colfax cried and cried she heard another clink. Then a distant groan, very faint. And it seemed to her, through her tears, that the black eye finally winked.
FIVE
Here's the situation," Lincoln Rhyme announced. "We've got a kidnap victim and a three p.m. deadline."
"No ransom demands"--Sellitto supplemented Rhyme's synopsis, then turned aside to answer his chirping phone. "Jerry," Rhyme said to Banks, "brief them about the scene this morning."
There were more people hovering in Lincoln Rhyme's dark room than in recent memory. Oh, after the accident friends had sometimes stopped by unannounced (the odds were pretty good that Rhyme'd be home of course) but he'd discouraged that. And he'd stopped returning phone calls too, growing more and more reclusive, drifting into solitude. He'd spend his hours writing his book and, when he was uninspired to write another one, reading. And when that grew tedious there were rental movies and pay-per-view and music. And then he'd given up TV and the stereo and spent hours staring at the art prints the aide had dutifully taped up on the wall opposite the bed. Finally they too had come down.
Solitude.
