The Manhattan Hunt Club

CHAPTER 15

"Come on, Jinx, you know the rules. Move it along."

The girl barely glanced up from the greasy magazine she'd fished out of a trash barrel twenty minutes earlier. "What's the big deal? Is Mickey Mouse afraid I might pick his pocket?" She edged away as the patrolman moved closer. "Hey, come on, Paulie-what'd I ever do to you?"

Paul Hagen, who'd been working Times Square for most of his twenty-year career and was only now allowing himself to imagine a retirement that didn't begin by getting either shot or sliced up, couldn't remember how many Jinxes he'd seen over the years. And she was right-she hadn't ever done anything to him. And five years ago he probably wouldn't have bothered to speak to her unless he'd caught her with her hand in some tourist's pocket. But that was five years ago, and this was today, and Times Square wasn't what it used to be. In a lot of ways, Paul Hagen missed the old days, when Times Square was ground zero for all the people who couldn't survive anywhere else in the city, a place where they could make a life in their own way, hanging out with all the other losers. Hagen had learned to accept that part of it early on, the first couple of years he'd been patrolling the streets. There were two kinds of people in the world: regular people and scumbags.

He was a regular person.

Jinx, and everybody else who had wound up in Times Square with no visible means of support, no permanent address, no past, and no prospects, were scumbags. That was the way of the world. Scumbags hung out in Times Square, and everybody knew it. New Yorkers knew it. Tourists knew it. Whatever you wanted-whether it was a dime bag back in the sixties, or a quick line or an ounce of crack in the more recent past-you could get it in Times Square. A cheap drink, a dirty movie, a blow job from a drag queen-it had all been there, going on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. His job, at least as Hagen saw it, wasn't to put a stop to it, but to keep a semblance of order among the traders. Direct traffic, as it were. Maybe most of it was against the rules for the rest of the city, but Times Square had its own set of rules.

The tourists came to Times Square to see the kind of action they could never see back in Podunk, and if they got their pockets picked, or took home a case of venereal warts-hey, that was life in the big city. The city knew it, the tourists knew it, and everyone was happy.

But then everything changed.

Mickey Mouse came to town and turned Times Square into an urban Disneyland. Everybody said it was wonderful-that the city was safer than it had ever been. And Paul Hagen guessed that was probably true, at least for most people. But what about for people like Jinx? Where was she supposed to go now that he'd been told not to let her just hang out on the streets? The answer was easy-nobody gave a damn where she went, as long as they didn't have to see her. And his job, which had once been to make sure the Jinxes didn't do too much damage, was now to make sure that nobody even had to know she existed. So even though he didn't have anything against her, he didn't give her a break. "Come on," he said again. "You know the drill."

And Jinx did. She hadn't when she first arrived in the city three years ago from Altoona. Back then she'd just been trying to get away from her mom's boyfriend, who'd decided that even though she was only twelve, she was a lot sexier than her mother. And maybe she was. Her figure had sure been better than her mom's, which Elvin-what the fuck kind of name was Elvin?-had kept telling her while he pawed at her every night after her mom passed out. So she'd knocked Elvin out, hitting him over the head with one of her mom's empties, and split. She hitched about a hundred miles with an old guy who had pulled out his dick, but at least hadn't tried to make her do anything with it. She'd gotten away from him at a gas station near Milton, then caught a bus that brought her to New York. She hung around the bus station at first, sleeping in a chair and eating at the counter, and it had been the woman behind the counter-was her name Marge?-who gave Amber Janks her nickname. "You poor kid," she said after Amber told her the reason she'd left home. "You really got the wrong name, didn't you? Shoulda been Jinx instead of Janks."

Jinx it had been ever since, and now she no longer thought of herself as Amber Janks.

Amber Janks was dead, but Jinx was very much alive and taking care of herself.

Actually, it hadn't taken her long to figure out how. In the beginning a couple of men had said they wanted to take care of her, and Jinx believed them. At least until they tried to get her into bed. "Come on, baby," Jimmy Ramirez had told her. "We gonna make a fortune with that body, but you gotta know how to use it."

Elvin had already taught her how to use it, and Jinx had hated it, so when Jimmy started tearing her clothes off, she pretended to grope just long enough to get her hands on the knife he kept in his pocket. When she heard a couple of days later that Jimmy was dead, she wondered whether she'd killed him, then decided she didn't much care.

The other guy, who was maybe forty, hadn't been like Jimmy at all. He'd looked really nice, wearing jeans with a crease in them, and a plaid shirt. And he hadn't wanted to pimp for her, either. He said he just wanted to buy her lunch, and he bought her a few. But then, when they were in McDonald's, he put his hand on her leg, and she knew what that meant.

That time, she just got up and walked out. What was she going to do, cut him with one of those crappy little plastic knives?

Then she met Tillie, and everything got better. Tillie had taken her home, or at least to the place Tillie called home, and within a couple of weeks Jinx thought of it as home, too. It was actually just a couple of big rooms, not far from Grand Central, and you got to it by going down to Track 42 in the station itself.

"Don't pay any attention to nothin‘," Tillie had told her as they walked into the cavernous waiting room. "You don't look at people, they won't look at you. You don't talk, they won't talk. An' if you just keep walkin‘, the transit cops won't even bother you."

They moved through the waiting room and down a ramp, following a sign pointing to the tracks.

Finally, Tillie pulled open the door leading to Track 42 and started down the steps to the platform.

No trains stood on the tracks; no people were on the platforms.

The air smelled musty.

To the right were more platforms, more tracks.

To the left was a low wall, then beyond it a tangle of pipes and catwalks and ladders. From high above, a faint glimmer of daylight was filtering through a grating.

"That's the street up there," Tillie explained. "Where I used to live."

At the end of the platform was a sign warning people to go no farther, but Tillie ignored it, moving quickly down another ramp and onto the tracks themselves. Picking her way across Track 42, Tillie climbed over the low wall. When Jinx hesitated, Tillie urged her on.

"It's not so bad," she said. "You'll see."

At first Jinx was terrified, and she stayed close behind Tillie as they wound their way through what seemed to Jinx like nothing more than a jumble of tunnels and passages.

Then they'd come to Tillie's place.

The biggest of the rooms was about twenty feet square, and there was a rusty stove, a worn sofa, and a few chairs along with a battered table, and even a television set. "See?" Tillie told her. "Now, this isn't so bad, is it?"

"Does the TV work?" was all Jinx had been able to think of to ask.

Tillie had shrugged. "Nah, but it makes it kind of homey. And who knows?" she added with a grin that exposed a missing tooth. "Maybe we'll get cable someday!"

Half a dozen people had been living in the room, and when no one tried to get in bed with her that night, Jinx decided to stay. She'd lived there three years now, and Tillie and the others had taught her a lot. They showed her where the best Dumpsters were, the ones behind restaurants that threw away a lot of food. Some of them even wrapped up the food they were throwing away, just so people like Tillie-and now like Jinx-could take it home more easily.

She'd learned how to panhandle and tell the story about how someone stole her bus ticket and all she needed was thirty-four dollars to get back home. She never failed to marvel at how many people fell for that one. Of course, you had to be careful not to hit the same person twice with it, but even if you got caught, you could always disappear into the crowd, and pretty soon the person yelling at you just looked like another crazy.

She'd learned to pick pockets, too, and gotten so good at it that not even Paul Hagen could catch her. The trouble was, you couldn't just hang around Times Square anymore, and now here was Paulie, running her off the block for the third time in a week.

"So where'm I supposed to go?" she asked.

Paul Hagen just shrugged. "Hey, don't blame me-I'm just carrying out orders."

Jinx shrugged, too, and headed across Broadway, cursing just loudly enough so he'd hear it but not know what she was saying. She was just turning the corner onto Forty-third when the person she'd been looking for suddenly appeared out of a crowd of people hurrying to get to a theater before the curtain went up at ten after eight.

"The hunt starts tomorrow," the person said softly, shoving a thick envelope into Jinx's hands before vanishing back into the crowd.

Resisting an urge to look back to see if Paulie Hagen had seen her take the envelope, Jinx scurried across Broadway, ducked into the subway, and was gone.

When Heather allowed herself a daydream, she and Jeff were in his tiny apartment on the West Side. It was Sunday morning, and she was wearing one of his old shirts, one that was miles too big for her. That was all right; just wearing it made her feel closer to Jeff. The Sunday Times was spread all over the floor, and the sun was flooding through the window, and if they ever got around to getting dressed, they'd go out, maybe buy a bagel, and go over to Morningside Park and feed the birds and the squirrels.

Like a movie-like one of those perfect little New York romance movies, where rain never fell unless the heroine wanted to walk in it, and Central Park was as perfect for moonlit walks as for muggings, and there wasn't a drunk or a crazy or a panhandler in sight, let alone a blizzard of trash wrapping itself around your legs as the wind whistled in off the river.

But when she forced herself to face reality, it wasn't like that at all. She was back in her father's apartment overlooking Central Park, and it was dark outside, and Jeff was dead.

She wished she'd never gone down to the Medical Examiner's office. If she'd just ignored that telephone call, if she'd just hung up on Keith Converse and stayed home-

If she hadn't actually seen the body.

Even now, as she lay half awake in the evening darkness, she could see the terrible image of the ruined body in the morgue, barely recognizable as human. The charred flesh, the misshapen face, the-

The place where Jeff's tattoo had been.

How many times had she traced that tiny sun with her fingertip?

"It wasn't there," Keith had said. "I'm telling you, this morning that part of his body wasn't burned, and the tattoo wasn't there!"

Was that why she couldn't get past it, couldn't make herself believe that Jeff was really dead? Shouldn't she have felt a great void inside, a terrible emptiness where Jeff's love had always been? But she didn't feel that emptiness. Instead, she felt exactly as she had since she heard that Jeff was arrested: that it was all a terrible mistake, a nightmare they were all caught up in and from which they would soon awaken. It would be fall again, and Jeff would be waiting for her in their favorite little restaurant, and-

"Stop it!" The words erupted from Heather's throat in an anguished howl. Hugging herself against the chill inside her, she moved restlessly to the window of her bedroom and stared out into the gloom beyond the glass. If it was really only eight in the evening, why did she feel as exhausted as if it were three o'clock in the morning?

There was a knock at the door of the small sitting room that adjoined her bedroom, and a moment later her father appeared. "We thought we'd eat at Le Cirque. Would you like to join us?"

Le Cirque? Le Cirque? How could she even think about going to Le Cirque, or anywhere else, when all she wanted was to be with Jeff?

"What if it was a mistake?" Heather heard herself asking.

Her father seemed baffled by her question, but then his expression cleared and he shook his head. He moved toward her, reached out as if to embrace her, but when she drew away from his touch, his hands dropped back to his sides. "I know it's hard for you," he said. "But believe me, you'll get over this. In a few months-"

"In a few months I'll feel just as bad as I do right now, Daddy," she said. Then, at the look of anguish in his eyes, she relented. "Maybe I will feel better," she conceded. "But not right now. Why don't you and Carolyn just go on to dinner without me. I couldn't eat even if I went."

He hesitated, then kissed his daughter on the forehead. "I'll see you later then. If you want it, Dessie left some poached salmon in the refrigerator. Try to eat a little bit." He gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze, then was gone.

But being alone only made Heather feel worse, as if the walls of the apartment were closing around her, suffocating her. A minute later she, too, left the building, heading down Fifth Avenue toward-

Where?

She didn't know.

" We'll know when we get there."

The voice that whispered in her mind was Jeff's. It was what he'd always said when he decided they should take an aimless ramble somewhere in the city on a Sunday afternoon. "But where are we going?" Heather would always ask. In her perfectly ordered life, she had always known exactly where she was going, and why she was going there. "Life should not be full of surprises," her father had always taught her. "One should be prepared to deal with the unexpected, but to search it out is a waste of time." Jeff, on the other hand, had always delighted in the unexpected, and always wanted to explore every unfamiliar thing he could find, be it a building, a block, or a whole neighborhood. When she asked him where he was going, and why, he would only grin and shrug his shoulders. "How should I know? We'll know when we get there." And now he was saying it again, if only in her memory.

Though she still didn't know where she was going, Heather felt a little better.

He'll show me, she decided. He'll show me where to go, just like he always did.