The train rocked onward, with its characteristic symphony of sounds. The howl of rushing air in the tunnel, the thump and clatter of the expansion joints under the iron rims, the scrape of the current collector against the live rail, the whine of the motors, the sequential squeals as the cars lurched one after the other through curves and the wheel flanges bit down.
Where was she going? What did the 6 train pass under? Could a building be brought down by a human bomb? I thought not. So what big crowds were still assembled after two o’clock in the morning? Not many. Nightclubs, maybe, but we had already left most of them behind, and she wouldn’t get past a velvet rope anyway.
I stared on at her.
Too hard.
She felt it.
She turned her head, slowly, smoothly, like a preprogrammed movement.
She stared right back at me.
Our eyes met.
Her face changed.
She knew I knew.
FOUR
We looked straight at each other for the best part of ten seconds. Then I got to my feet. Braced against the motion and took a step. I would be killed thirty feet away, no question. I couldn’t get any deader by being any closer. I passed the Hispanic woman on my left. Passed the guy in the NBA shirt on my right. Passed the West African woman on my left. Her eyes were still closed. I handed myself from one grab bar to the next, left and right, swaying. Passenger number four stared at me all the way, frightened, panting, muttering. Her hands stayed in her bag.
I stopped six feet from her.
I said, ‘I really want to be wrong about this.’
She didn’t reply. Her lips moved. Her hands moved under the thick black canvas. The large object in her bag shifted slightly.
I said, ‘I need to see your hands.’
She didn’t reply.
‘I’m a cop,’ I lied. ‘I can help you.’
She didn’t reply.
I said, ‘We can talk.’
She didn’t reply.
I let go of the grab bars and dropped my hands to my sides. It made me smaller. Less threatening. Just a guy. I stood as still as the moving train would let me. I did nothing. I had no option. She would need a split second. I would need more than that. Except that there was absolutely nothing I could do. I could have grabbed her bag and tried to tear it away from her. But it was looped around her body and its strap was a wide band of tightly woven cotton. The same knit as a fire hose. It was pre-washed and pre-aged and pre-distressed like new stuff is now but it would still be very strong. I would have ended up jerking her up off her seat and dumping her down on the floor.
Except that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near her. She would have hit the button before my hand was halfway there.
I could have tried to jerk the bag upward and swipe behind it with my other hand to rip the detonator cord out of its terminals. Except that for the sake of her easy movement there would be enough spare length in the cord that I would have needed to haul it through a giant two-foot arc before I met any resistance. By which time she would have hit the button, if only in involuntary shock.
I could have grabbed at her jacket and tried to tear some other wires loose. But there were fat pockets of goose feathers between me and the wires. A slippery nylon shell. No touch, no feel.
No hope.
I could have tried to incapacitate her. Hit her hard in the head, knock her out, one punch, instantaneous. But as fast as I still am, a decent swing from six feet away would have taken most of half a second. She had to move the ball of her thumb an eighth of an inch.
She would have gotten there first.
I asked, ‘Can I sit down? Next to you?’
She said, ‘No, stay away from me.’
A neutral, toneless voice. No obvious accent. American, but she could have been from anywhere. Up close she didn’t look really wild or deranged. Just resigned, and grave, and scared, and tired. She was staring up at me with the same intensity she had been using on the opposite window. She looked completely alert and aware. I felt completely scrutinized. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything.
‘It’s late,’ I said. ‘You should wait for rush hour.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Six more hours,’ I said. ‘It will work much better then.’
Her hands moved, inside her bag.
I said, ‘Not now.’
She said nothing.
‘Just one,’ I said. ‘Show me one hand. You don’t need both of them in there.’
The train slowed hard. I staggered backward and stepped forward again and reached up to the grab bar close to the roof. My hands were damp. The steel felt hot. Grand Central, I thought. But it wasn’t. I glanced out the window expecting lights and white tiles and saw the glow of a dim blue lamp instead. We were stopping in the tunnel. Maintenance, or signalling.
I turned back.
‘Show me one hand,’ I said again.
The woman didn’t answer. She was staring at my waist. With my hands high my T-shirt had ridden up and the scar low on my stomach was visible above the waistband of my pants. Raised white skin, hard and lumpy. Big crude stitches, like a cartoon. Shrapnel, from a truck bomb in Beirut, a long time ago. I had been a hundred yards from the explosion.
I was ninety-eight yards closer to the woman on the bench.
She stared on. Most people ask how I had gotten the scar. I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want to talk about bombs. Not with her.
I said, ‘Show me one hand.’
She asked, ‘Why?’
‘You don’t need two in there.’
‘Then what good can it do you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I had no real idea what I was doing. I’m not a hostage negotiator. I was just talking for the sake of it. Which is uncharacteristic. Mostly I’m a very silent person. It would be statistically very unlikely for me to die halfway through a sentence.
Maybe that’s why I was talking.
The woman moved her hands. I saw her take a solo grip inside her bag with her right and she brought her left out slowly. Small, pale, faintly ridged with veins and tendons. Middle-aged skin. Plain nails, trimmed short. No rings. Not married, not engaged to be. She turned her hand over, to show me the other side. Empty palm, red because she was hot.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
She laid her hand palm-down on the seat next to her and left it there, like it was nothing to do with the rest of her. Which it wasn’t, at that point. The train stopped in the darkness. I lowered my hands. The hem of my shirt fell back into place.
I said, ‘Now show me what’s in the bag.’
‘Why?’
‘I just want to see it. Whatever it is.’
She didn’t reply.
She didn’t move.
I said, ‘I won’t try to take it away from you. I promise. I just want to see it. I’m sure you can understand that.’
The train moved on again. Slow acceleration, no jerk, low speed. A gentle cruise into the station. A slow roll. Maybe two hundred yards, I thought.
I said, ‘I think I’m entitled to at least see it. Wouldn’t you agree?’
She made a face, like she didn’t understand.
She said, ‘I don’t see why you’re entitled to see it.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No.’
‘Because I’m involved here. And maybe I can check it’s fixed right. For later. Because you need to do this later. Not now.’
‘You said you were a cop.’
‘We can work this out,’ I said. ‘I can help you.’ I glanced over my shoulder. The train was creeping along. White light up ahead. I turned back. The woman’s right hand was moving. She was juggling it into a firmer grip and slowly shaking it free of the bag, all at once.
I watched. The bag snagged on her wrist and she used her left hand to free it up. Her right hand came out.
Not a battery. No wires. No switch, no button, no plunger.
Something else entirely.
FIV
E
The woman had a gun in her hand. She was pointing it straight at me. Low down, dead centre, on a line between my groin and my navel. All kinds of necessary stuff in that region. Organs, spine, intestines, various arteries and veins. The gun was a Ruger Speed-Six. A big old .357 Magnum revolver with a short four-inch barrel, capable of blowing a hole in me big enough to see daylight through.
But overall I was a lot more cheerful than I had been a second before. Many reasons. Bombs kill people all at once, guns kill one at a time. Bombs don’t need aiming, and guns do. The Speed-Six weighs north of two pounds fully loaded. A lot of mass for a slender wrist to control. And Magnum rounds produce searing muzzle flash and punishing recoil. If she had used the gun before, she would know that. She would have what shooters call Magnum flinch. A split second before pulling the trigger her arm would clench and her eyes would close and her head would turn away. She had a decent chance of missing, even from six feet. Most handguns miss. Maybe not on the range, with ear defenders and eye protection and time and calm and nothing at stake. But in the real world, with panic and stress and the shakes and a thumping heart, handguns are all about luck, good or bad. Mine and hers.
If she missed, she wouldn’t get a second shot.
I said, ‘Take it easy.’ Just to be making sounds. Her finger was bone-white on the trigger, but she hadn’t moved it yet. The Speed-Six is a double-action revolver, which means that the first half of the trigger’s pull moves the hammer back and rotates the cylinder. The second half drops the hammer and fires the gun. Complex mechanics, which take time. Not much, but some. I stared at her finger. Sensed the guy with the ballplayer’s eyes, watching. I guessed my back was blocking the view from farther up the car.
I said, ‘You’ve got no beef with me, lady. You don’t even know me. Put the gun down and talk.’
She didn’t reply. Maybe something passed across her face, but I wasn’t watching her face. I was watching her finger. It was the only part of her that interested me. And I was concentrating on the vibrations coming up through the floor. Waiting for the car to stop. My crazy fellow passenger had told me that the R142As weigh thirty-five tons each. They can do sixty-two miles an hour. Therefore their brakes are very powerful. Too powerful for finesse at low speeds. No feathering is possible. They clamp and jerk and grind. Trains often skid the last yard on locked wheels. Hence the characteristic yelp as they stop.
I figured the same would apply even after our slow crawl. Maybe more so, relatively speaking. The gun was essentially a weight on the end of a pendulum. A long thin arm, two pounds of steel. When the brakes bit down, momentum would carry the gun onward. Uptown. Newton’s Law of Motion. I was ready to fight my own momentum and push off the bars the other way and jump downtown. If the gun jerked just five inches north and I jerked just five inches south I would be in the clear.
Maybe four inches would do it.
Or four and a half, for safety’s sake.
The woman asked, ‘Where did you get your scar?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Were you gut shot?’
‘Bomb,’ I said.
She moved the muzzle, to her left and my right. She aimed at where the scar was hidden by the hem of my shirt.
The train rolled on. Into the station. Infinitely slow. Barely walking pace. Grand Central’s platforms are long. The lead car was heading all the way to the end. I waited for the brakes to bite. I figured there would be a nice little lurch.
We never got there.
The gun barrel moved back to my centre mass. Then it moved vertical. For a split second I thought the woman was surrendering. But the barrel kept on moving. The woman raised her chin high, like a proud, obstinate gesture. She tucked the muzzle into the soft flesh beneath it. Squeezed the trigger halfway. The cylinder turned and the hammer scraped back across the nylon of her coat.
Then she pulled the trigger the rest of the way and blew her own head off.
SIX
The doors didn’t open for a long time. Maybe someone had used the emergency intercom or maybe the conductor had heard the shot. But whatever, the system went into full-on lockdown mode. It was undoubtedly something they rehearsed. And the procedure made a lot of sense. Better that a crazed gunman was contained in a single car, rather than being allowed to run around all over town.
But the waiting wasn’t pleasant. The .357 Magnum round was invented in 1935. Magnum is Latin for big. Heavier bullet, and a lot more propellant charge. Technically the propellant charge does not explode. It deflagrates, which is a chemical process halfway between burning and exploding. The idea is to create a huge bubble of hot gas that accelerates the bullet down the barrel, like a pent-up spring. Normally the gas follows the bullet out of the muzzle and sets fire to the oxygen in the air close by. Hence muzzle flash. But with a hard contact shot to the head like passenger number four had chosen, the bullet makes a hole in the skin and the gas pumps itself straight in after it. It expands violently under the skin and either rips itself a huge star-shaped exit wound, or it blows all the flesh and skin right off the bone and unwraps the skull completely, like peeling a banana upside down.
That was what had happened in this case. The woman’s face was reduced to rags and tatters of bloody flesh hanging off shattered bone. The bullet had travelled vertically through her mouth and had dumped its massive kinetic energy in her brain pan, and the sudden huge pressure had sought relief and found it where the plates of her skull had sealed themselves way back in childhood. They had burst open again and the pressure had pasted three or four large fragments of bone all over the wall above and behind her. One way or the other her head was basically gone. But the graffiti-resistant fibreglass was doing its job. White bone and dark blood and grey tissue were running down the slick surface, not sticking, leaving thin snail trails behind. The woman’s body had collapsed into a slumped position on the bench. Her right index finger was still hooked through the trigger guard. The gun had bounced off her thigh and was resting on the seat next to her.
The sound of the shot was still ringing in my ears. Behind me I could hear muted sounds. I could smell the woman’s blood. I ducked forward and checked her bag. Empty. I unzipped her jacket and opened it up. Nothing there. Just a white cotton blouse and the stink of voided bowel and bladder.
I found the emergency panel and called through to the conductor myself. I said, ‘Suicide by gunshot. Last but one car. It’s all over now. We’re secure. No further threat.’ I didn’t want to wait until the NYPD assembled SWAT teams and body armour and rifles and came in all stealthy. That could take a long time.
I didn’t get a reply from the conductor. But a minute later his voice came through the train PA. He said, ‘Passengers are advised that the doors will remain closed for a few minutes due to an evolving incident.’ He spoke slowly. He was probably reading from a card. His voice was shaky. Not at all like the smooth tones of the Bloomberg anchors.
I took a last look around the car and sat down three feet from the headless corpse and waited.
Whole episodes of TV cop shows could have run before the real-life cops even arrived. DNA could have been extracted and analysed, matches could have been made, perpetrators could have been hunted and caught and tried and sentenced. But eventually six officers came down the stairs. They were in caps and vests and they had drawn their weapons. NYPD patrolmen on the night shift, probably out of the 14th Precinct on West 35th Street, the famous Midtown South. They ran along the platform and started checking the train from the front. I got up again and watched through the windows above the couplers, down the whole length of the train, like peering into a long lit-up stainless steel tunnel. The view got murky farther down, due to dirt and green impurities in the layers of glass. But I could see the cops opening doors car by car, checking, clearing, turning the passengers out and hustling them upstairs to the street. It was a lightly loaded night train and it didn’t take long for them to reach us. They checked through the windows and saw the body and the gun and tense
d up. The doors hissed open and they swarmed on board, two through each set of doors. We all raised our hands, like a reflex.
One cop blocked each of the doorways and the other three moved straight towards the dead woman. They stopped and stood off about six feet. Didn’t check for a pulse or any other sign of life. Didn’t hold a mirror under her nose, to check for breathing. Partly because it was obvious she wasn’t breathing, and partly because she didn’t have a nose. The cartilage had torn away, leaving jagged splinters of bone between where the internal pressure had popped her eyeballs out.
A big cop with sergeant’s stripes turned around. He had gone a little pale but was otherwise well into a pretty good impersonation of just another night’s work. He asked, ‘Who saw what happened here?’
There was silence at the front of the car. The Hispanic woman, the man in the NBA shirt, and the African lady. They were all sitting tight and saying nothing. Point eight: a rigid stare ahead. They were all doing it. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. The guy in the golf shirt said nothing. So I said, ‘She took the gun out of her bag and shot herself.’