Splashing through oil-iridescent puddles, Lummy whistled as he swung along toward the illuminated globe marking the stairs to the 81st Street subway station. Nothing could bring him down tonight.
What a perfectly dreadful evening, Sarah Jarvis thought. The sixty-eight-year-old woman had never in her life expected to be invited to an Amway party. The very thought. It had taken hours for her friend and her to leave. Of course, it was raining by that time and, of course, there was not an on-duty cab to be found. Her friend lived in the next building. Sarah had to go all the way uptown to Washington Heights.
Sarah hated the subway. That stale smell always nauseated her. She disliked the noisy parts of the city anyway, and the subway was among the loudest. Tonight, though, everything was quiet. Alone on the platform, Sarah shivered under her twee jacket.
Peering over the edge of the platform and along the tunnel, she thought she saw the light of the uptown AA local. Something was there, but it seemed to move so slowly. Sarah turned away and looked at the advertising placards. She examined the poster calling for the reelection of that nice Mr. Nixon. In the adjacent newspaper vending machines, the headlines told of burglars breaking into a Washington hotel and apartment house. Watergate? What a funny name for a building, she thought. The Daily News led with a story about the so-called Subway Vigilante. The police were attributing five slayings over the past week to the mysterious killer. The victims had all been drug dealers and other criminals. The murders had all taken place in the subways. Sarah shuddered. The city was quite different than it had been in her childhood.
First she heard the steps, clattering down the stairs and past the deserted token booth. Then whistling, a peculiar tuneless drone, as the person entered the station. Despite herself, she was caught between apprehension and relief. Somewhat ashamed of her reaction, she decided she wouldn't mind a little human company.
As soon as she saw him, she was not so sure. Sarah had never been all that fond of black leather jackets, particularly those worn by slightly greasy, smirking young men. She turned her back firmly and focused on the wall across the tracks.
As the old woman turned her back, Lucky Lummy grinned broadly and touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip.
"Hey, lady, got a light?"
"No."
One corner of Lummy's mouth twitched as he moved toward her back. "Come on, lady, be nice."
He missed the tension gathering in her shoulders as Sarah remembered that self-defense class she had attended last winter.
"Just give me the purse, lad-aiee!" He screamed as Sarah turned and crushed his instep with her sensible but sophisticated beige pump. Lummy jerked back and aimed a punch at her face. Sarah evaded him by stepping backward and slipping on something slimy. Lummy grinned and started toward her.
Wind rushed past them from the tunnel as the AA train approached the station.
Neither noticed that a dozen people had all managed to get to the subway entrance simultaneously. Most of the crowd had attended a late showing of The Godfather and were continuing an animated discussion of whether or not Coppola had exaggerated the Mafia's role in modern crime. Someone who hadn't been at the screening was a transit worker who had had a long and trying day. He just wanted to go home and get dinner, not necessarily in that order. The newspapers had been pushing again; even that joker Rights stuff couldn't keep them occupied all the time. The transit man had been pulled off his regular track-checking duties to spend eighteen hours searching vainly for alligators in sewers and subway tunnels, conduit shafts, and deep utility holes. He mentally cursed his employers for kowtowing to the sensationalist press, and especially cursed the bird-dogging reporters he'd finally ditched.
The transit worker hung back a little, trying to stay out of the melee as the group fumbled for tokens and started through the gates. The moviegoers chattered as they went.
With a roar and braking screech of metal on metal, the AA local burst out of the tunnel.
On the platform, all manner of people confronted each other. Swearing in Italian, Lummy let go of his victim and looked around for a bolt-hole.
The first two couples had entered and were staring at the scene in front of them. One of the men moved toward Lucky Lummy as the other man grabbed his date and tried to retreat.
The doors of the local hissed open. At this time of night, there were few passengers on the train and no one got of. "There's never a transit cop when you need one," said the would-be rescuer. Momentarily, Lummy considered leaping for the punk and punching out his lights. Instead he feinted at the man, then half-limped, half-ran into the last car. The doors snapped closed and the train began to move. It might have been the light, but the bright grafitti on the sides seemed to change.
From inside the car, Lucky Lummy laughed and gestured obscenely at Sarah, who was feeling for bruises and trying to rearrange her soiled clothing. Lummy aimed a second gesture at the woman's inadvertent rescuers as the entire group converged on Sarah.
Abruptly Lummy's face contorted with fear and then outright terror as he began beating on the doors. The man who had tried to stop Lummy caught one last glimpse of him clawing at the rear door of the car as the train sped into darkness.
"What a creep!" said the date of the would-be rescuer. "Was he one of those jokers?"
"Naw," said his friend. "Just a garden-variety asshole." Everyone froze as they heard the screams from the uptown tunnel. Over the diminishing roar of the local, they could hear Lummy's hopeless, agonized cries. The train vanished. But the screams lasted until at least 83rd Street. The transit worker moved toward the downtown tunnel as the hero of the hour was congratulated by the mostly unharmed Sarah, as well as by the rest of the onlookers. Another transit employee came down the steps at the other end of the platform.
"Hey!" he yelled. "Sewer Jack! Jack Robicheaux. Don't you ever sleep?"
The exhausted man ignored him and let himself through a metal access door. As he walked down the tunnel, he began shedding his clothes. A watcher might have thought she had seen a man squatting down and crawling along the damp floor of the tunnel, a man who had grown a long snout filled with sharp, misshapen teeth and a muscular tail capable of smashing the watcher into jam. But no one saw the flash of greenish-gray scales as the erstwhile transit worker joined the darkness and was gone.
Back on the 81st Street platform, the spectators were still so transfixed by the echoes of Lummy's dying screams that few noted the rumbling, bass roar from the other direction.
Her last class over, Rosemary walked wearily toward the 116th Street subway entrance. One more task completed for today. Now she was on her way to her father's apartment to see her fiance. She had never had much enthusiasm for that, but these days she had little enthusiasm for anything at all. Rosemary moved through the days wishing that something in her life would be resolved.
She shifted her armload of books to her right arm as, onehanded, she sifted through her purse for a token. Walking through the gate, she paused, standing to one side to stay out of the path of the other students. Judging from the placards carried by a number of the people, the latest antiwar rally must have just ended. Rosemary noted some apparently normal kids carrying signs lettered with the joker Brigade's informal slogan: LAST TO GO-FIRST TO DIE.
C.C. had always been into that. She had even sung her songs at a few of the less-rowdy gatherings. One day she had even brought home a fellow activist, a guy named Fortunato.
While it was nice that the man was involved with the joker Rights movement, Rosemary didn't like pimps, geishas or no geishas, in her apartment. It had caused one of the few fights she had ever had with C.C. In the end C.C. had agreed to check with Rosemary more closely about future dinner guests.