Bad blood

49

“What the-?” a young detective asked as he stepped off the front subway car, his shield displayed in his pocket. He was carrying a large brown paper bag in his left hand, his gun in his right. “You guys lost your minds?”

“Mercer Wallace. Special Victims. My partner’s got his foot stuck in the track.”

“Chapman? That you? You oughta lay off the fancy legwork. You caught your perp?”

“No. Not yet,” Mercer said.

“There’s more ways out of here than Osama bin Laden has caves,” Mike called out. “Quillian may even know about most of them ’cause he came here as a kid with his old man. Can you get me an EMT? I think I’ve got a fracture.”

I hoisted myself up onto the platform. “I’m Alex Cooper. Did the lieutenant send this bag for me?”

“Yeah,” the detective said, handing it over, and taking a matchbook from his pocket. “And these. I’ll radio for a bus. We got to make it snappy. The trains will be stacking up behind us. They’ll be really restless to get going.”

“Make it snappy?” Mike said. “The train gets any closer to me my foot’s gonna break in two. I’m not looking for a Phinneas Baylor saw-off-your-ankle-yourself solution.”

The detective pulled a walkie-talkie from his pants pocket and stepped back into the subway car, directing the driver to reverse direction by thirty feet-perhaps relieving the pressure on the tracks-while he radioed for a team of paramedics.

I turned to Mercer, who was kneeling beside Mike, using his penknife to jab at the wood. I leaned over, intent on removing the shoe from Mike’s foot to ease his obvious pain.

“Nobody move.”

I was startled by the sound of Brendan Quillian’s voice. He had inched along the darkened tunnel wall and was no more than twenty feet from us, his gun pointed directly at Mike’s chest. He was shielded by one of the arches that formed beneath the vaulted ceiling.

“You, Miss Cooper. Take each of their guns and bring them over here to me.”

“Don’t move, Coop,” Mike said, grabbing my wrist with his hand. “He doesn’t have enough cartridges to shoot all of us.”

“Stay on your knees, Wallace. Tell her to bring me your guns.”

Mike’s fingers were pressing into my wrist. I looked to Mercer for his reaction and got nothing but a stone-faced stare. His gun was back in his waistband, where he had placed it to work on Mike’s foot. He shifted his large body to try to block me from Quillian’s line of fire.

The subway car with the young detective was just out of sight around the curve behind us. He couldn’t see what was happening.

“We’d be dead already if he had three rounds left,” Mike said to Mercer and me, loud enough for Quillian to hear. “Think about it. He wouldn’t be talking to us.”

Maybe that was true, or maybe he was being cautious until he got close enough to use his ammunition well.

“I just want to get out of here,” Quillian said.

“So did O’Malley,” Mike said. He was wincing in pain, ready to counter any excuses Quillian threw at him.

“I don’t want to kill the three of you, but you know I’m capable of doing it.”

“You killed your own child, you sick bastard. I know there’s nothing to stop you from shooting us if you had the lead,” Mike said. “If that fucking evil eye could see us at this range, maybe you would.”

Mike was throwing it all at Brendan, while I couldn’t help but think of the irony of his killing the baby he’d conceived with Bex, then never being able to father kids with Amanda.

“How about Teddy O’Malley, Brendan? Did he double-cross you?”

Quillian didn’t answer.

“He brought something to you in here that you needed, didn’t he? Food, for one thing? And I bet it was money. I bet he went to your sister’s house to get cash for your unexpected trip out of town.”

I was trying to figure which direction Quillian wanted to go to make his escape. If he could find the outlet to the street that he was looking for, maybe he’d let us be.

Now footsteps echoed on the platform behind us. The young detective sauntered forward, walkie-talkie in hand, no way of knowing that we’d been joined by Brendan Quillian.

“The bus is coming, Chapman,” he called out.

“You!” Quillian shouted from the darkened tracks. “Drop your gun and your radio right there. Get down on your knees. Bend over and put your hands on top of your head if you don’t want to see these three get blown up.”

“Don’t listen to the bastard,” Mike called out, but the young cop knew he had walked into a trap he couldn’t make sense of, so his equipment clattered to the platform as he followed the killer’s orders.

“Duke did all your dirty work, didn’t he?” Mike said. “Ever since you were a kid.”

“Let me see you lay your guns down and I’ll be out of here before there’s any more blood, okay?”

Brendan knew as well as we did that he had only minutes before the EMTs-and perhaps Peterson’s backup forces-would be in the tube.

Mike was shouting now, calling Brendan a baby killer, the noise reverberating in the tunnel. If Quillian dared to come out from behind the archway, both Mercer and Mike were capable of picking him off.

“That’s a lie! I didn’t know Duke was going to kill Bex. That was his idea-that was his plan to let me start a new life. He took it on his own to do that when I left the country. I didn’t talk to him after that-not for years. I turned my back on the whole damn bunch of them ’cause of what he did.”

“Till you needed Duke to kill your wife,” Mike said.

I looked up in Quillian’s direction. He seemed to be slithering along the wall toward our position, moving to conceal himself behind another arch, one step closer to the long-forgotten mail tunnel Mike had described that branched off at the south end of the platform. Perhaps Brendan had been looking for that since he’d run off after shooting O’Malley.

I knew Mercer would want to take a shot at him if he got within better range, but that he feared drawing fire because I was so close.

I opened the paper bag that Peterson had gotten me from Chinatown and pulled out one of Uncle Charlie’s devices. Mercer looked back and tried to push my hand away from it.

“Quillian’s only got one eye. Don’t stop me. He can’t see well enough to shoot unless he gets right on top of us,” I said. “And I know you’re not going to let that happen.”

My hand was shaking as I placed several of the Chinese firecrackers on the ground beside us.

“Keep talking to him, Mike,” Mercer said.

“I bet you paid Duke to kill Amanda. When you were ready to bail out of your marriage, but wanted to keep the Keating money, that’s when you realized you needed your brother again. Mailed him money-in the envelope Trish showed us today.”

Now I remembered what had fallen out of Trish’s apron.

“What’d you do, send a cashier’s check to Duke? Left no record in your account but gave him plenty of cash to operate with. Kind of poetic justice that Bobby Hassett sliced off one of Duke’s fingers before he killed him, don’t you think? Must have tied him up to keep him still, torture him before he died, like someone ought to do to you. Those big fingers of Duke’s-the ones that strangled Bex to death? The ones he used to murder Amanda for you?”

The first shot lit up the tunnel as the primer ignited the gunpowder in Brendan Quillian’s weapon. The noise sounded as loud as a cannon in the vaulted space. A bullet slammed into the side of the platform just inches over my head.

“Take Coop and run as fast as you can,” Mike said softly to Mercer. It looked as if his theory about how much ammunition Quillian still had in his gun was wrong.

“Don’t move your hand, Wallace,” Quillian said, his head cocked to the side so that his left eye-the good one-could focus on what his two armed adversaries were doing.

Mercer glanced at the red sticks I had lined up. “Okay, Alex. Ready?” he whispered.

I palmed the matchbook and nodded my head.

“If you know Bobby Hassett killed my brother, why don’t you arrest him, dammit? He’ll be along any minute,” Quillian said.

“What?” Mike said, puzzling out the answer. “So Teddy O’Malley double-crossed you? He went to Trish to get the money you wanted, but then he called Bobby Hassett to tell him where you were hiding. Let him even up all the old scores by trapping you in here and finishing you off-his father’s death, Bex’s murder. Your sandhog instincts are awfully primitive. How’d you know, Brendan? How’d you know Bobby Hassett is coming here?”

Quillian was taking baby steps along the curved wall in our direction. He was angry now, the bad-tempered Brendan Quillian who was responsible for so many deaths.

“’Cause I asked Teddy O’Malley if I could use his cell phone to call Trish. And when I opened it to dial her, I saw the last number he had called before getting here to meet me. It was Bobby Hassett’s phone.”

“Go ahead, Brendan. Take the tunnel,” Mike shouted. Quillian was getting uncomfortably close to the three of us. “We’ll let you run before the rest of the cops show up.”

“You’re not going anywhere, Chapman. That’s obvious. But that leaves Mr. Wallace and Ms. Cooper to chase after me. And I don’t really like that idea.”

Every time he moved, Quillian squinted and tilted his head to adjust the vision in his eye.

“Stand up, Mr. Wallace. Stand up now, will you?”

“No!” I said to Mercer as he lifted a knee, acting as though he were going to obey the command. He was far too big a target to put in Quillian’s way.

But as he shifted his weight, Mercer gave me the cover I needed to light the first match. I held it to the wire sticking out of the tip of the firecracker and lobbed it in Quillian’s direction. As soon as it was in the air I got two more off, throwing them over Mercer’s back and as close to the mouth of the tunnel as I could.

The loud barrage of explosions filled the small tube as the earth seemed to rattle and the hollow vaults burst with a deafening series of blasts. The black hole we were all in, backlit from the subway car that had disappeared behind the curving wall, came alive with a blinding series of colorful streaks and sparks-orange, yellow, green, and a searing white flash.

“Dynamite, Brendan,” Mike yelled out as I kept lighting firecrackers and throwing them as near to Quillian as I could. “They’ll blast you to kingdom come if you don’t make it out of here.”

The killer had panicked at the sound and sight of the explosive devices as they landed all around him. It was a combination of every noise, every vibration, every fear that had kept him for all of his young life out of the tunnels in which his father had worked, ever since the accident that had taken the sight of his right eye.

He lifted his gun to shoot in our direction over the other thunderous booms, but fired wildly as he bobbed his head to try to protect his eye from the streaking lights bursting around him.

I watched as he clapped a hand over his left eye, turning away from us before uncovering it to run toward the cylindrical tunnel that led off the side of the platform.

Phin was right-Quillian was so spooked by the noise that he didn’t stop to think that the cops would never use real explosives in a subway tunnel.

But the fireworks forced him to the exit he had been seeking-the one Mike said was an old pneumatic mail tunnel-and I had no idea where it led.