John followed Christine down to the café, and then to the basement. She showed him where the hidden door was, and then the secret hallway to the vast underground space that had once been a speakeasy. She pointed out the markings over the door and explained how they worked: A mark over the hinges indicated an exit that was concealed from the outside; over the doorknob meant that the opening was exposed. Reese nodded and pocketed his key, ready to explore. But Christine pointed the flashlight beam at the ground and gestured for him to wait.
He heard a noise, but it was so soft that he wouldn’t have recognized it as a man approaching. Christine, turned, unsurprised. “Hey, Pony,” she said quietly.
“Daisy.” The man moved very quickly and was on her before Reese could intervene. But it wasn’t an attack anyhow; it was an embrace. Despite the man’s shabby appearance and pervasive odor, Christine hugged him back tightly.
“Missed you, girl. Who hit ‘cha?”
“Idiot at the airport. It’s handled. How are you?”
The man stepped back and Reese got a good look at him in the flashlight beam. He was nearly John’s height, but very thin and maybe ten years older. His hair was long and tangled, equal parts red and gray; his face was mostly hidden behind a full, unkempt beard. His clothes were faded and ragged, and he wore several different layers. He had the distinct smell of the street. But his eyes were sharp. He looked Reese up and down. “I’m alright,” he told the girl. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is John,” Christine said evenly. “He’s okay. John, Pony,”
Reese held his hand out. Pony considered for a long moment, then took it. John shook firmly, exactly as he would any Wall Street titan. He saw the man register that he hadn’t pulled back. They both nodded.
“Good you’re back,” Pony said, to the woman. He released John’s hand and vanished into the darkness.
He was very, very quiet.
Reese took the flashlight and looked around, getting his bearings. Then he shut it off and let his eyes adjust to the semi-darkness. “How many live down here?”
“Twenty or so, all the time,” Christine told him. “More when it’s cold, of course. Maybe twenty more have keys, just use it for pass-thru.”
“It’s good space.”
“It stays dry, most of the time. Do you want the tour, or do you want to explore on your own?”
“I’ll explore. You point out anything I miss.”
“Okay.”
The speakeasy itself was large, with a high ceiling. Smaller tunnels let away from it in all directions like the legs of a spider. There were, Christine said, nearly than thirty entrances, all secured, most concealed from the outside. The complex stretched under six city blocks. There was almost no way to trap a person down here. As bolt holes went, Reese decided, this one was fantastic.
He could see why Christine was reluctant to leave the security it offered.
“Why aren’t there more people here?” he wondered aloud.
“It’s got a bad rep,” she answered. “When I lived down here there were probably three hundred hard-core junkies. With all the mayhem that that implies.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Hard-core junkies,” she repeated. “Most of them are dead. The rest of us got clean.” She considered, then nodded. “Which is why Random’s allowed to rearrange my furniture, I suppose.”
Finch “ he’d called himself Harold Wren then “ had taken her off the street and forced her, literally kicking and screaming, into rehab. According to Finch it had saved her life, and she sounded like she agreed.
Reese paused, looking at the wall to his left. His instinct told him there ought to be an opening . It took him nearly two minutes to find it, but it was there. He nodded in satisfaction. Then he looked to the girl. She had waited in silence while he found it. She did silence as comfortably as Finch did.
“Once the old guys got a toehold down here,” she continued, as if there had been no break, “they started policing the place better, installing the locks.”
“Which you paid for,” Reese guessed.
“They were cheap enough, in bulk.”
In the next tunnel to the right, three men hovered over a barrel fire. The smoke vented through a grid to the street. They nodded to the woman, stared at Reese in mild challenge. He nodded to them and moved on.
“How long were you on the street?” Christine asked easily.
“Four months,” Reese answered at once. No point in lying about it; she knew the truth from his behavior. But it wasn’t like him to be so open. And then he added, “And then Finch rescued me. By what could technically be called kidnapping.”
“Ahhhh.” She seemed amused, but not surprised. “So he makes a habit of it.”
“You were his first. You taught him well.”
She shook her head. “Nope. After me he should never had done it again.”
“You turned out all right. Eventually.”
“Eventually.”
She was easy to talk to. She was observant and hellishly smart; like Finch, it would be difficult to deceive her. But there was something else. Her manner told him that if he hadn’t answered, she wouldn’t have insisted. She would have let it slide.
That made it easier not to resist.
He remembered how she had touched the back of Bear’s leg and waited for him to put his paw in her hand. She treated Reese the same way.
And he responded the same way. Put his paw trustingly, willingly in her hand. Remember this, Reese told himself. She may be on your side right now, but she is uniquely dangerous. Or useful.
Partly from curiosity, and partly to shift the conversation, he asked, “All those junkies. You were just a kid. How did you survive?”
“I was small and harmless,” Christine answered immediately. “When you’re no threat to anyone, ninety percent of people just ignore you.”
“But the other ten percent are predators.”
She nodded. “When you’re small and harmless and smarter than everyone else, you find the biggest predator and you make yourself useful to him.”
“Hmmm.” Reese stopped and looked upward. There was an outline of light in the ceiling. “Trap door?”
“Uh-huh. You’re good at this.”
“Thanks.”
They moved on. “His name was Sharps,” Christine volunteered unexpectedly. “The first one. He didn’t have any veins left in his arms or legs. But I could hit one in his back or neck without killing him. That made me indispensable. So he protected me.” She shrugged. Until he got septic and died. And then there was somebody else.”
Find the biggest predator and make yourself indispensable to him, Reese mused. It was an obvious answer. Then it struck him: That was what Finch had done. Finch was small and apparently harmless, and so much smarter. So he’d found the biggest predator and made himself indispensable to him.
But Finch hadn’t meant to make himself indispensible. What had he said at the train station? I really didn’t intend for you to come and find me, Mr. Reese. He’d genuinely thought that Reese would go on chasing the Numbers without him. That Reese wouldn’t do everything in his power to get him back.
Which just went to prove that Mr. I-Know-Exactly-Everything-About-You didn’t know exactly everything, after all.
Reese had flown halfway across the country looking for Finch. He’d shot up big chunks of New York City, and would cheerfully have torn the rest of it apart. How many times, this week alone, had he said simply, ‘I need to find my friend’. Not I’m trying to, or I want to. I need to.
What he’d said in the warehouse had been mostly true, too. He only had one friend. And maybe that was the explanation. Maybe that was all there was to it.
He saved my life. He gave me a purpose. He gave me his trust “ in tiny little doses, but more than he gives to anyone else.
Once a man had threatened to kill Reese’s friends and his family. John had answered, with perfect calm, that he didn’t have any friends, and no family left either.
But that wasn’t true anymore. Finch had somehow become both.
He is undeniably indispensable to Reese now.
“John,” Christine said, very quietly.
He looked at her, startled. Her hand hovered near his arm, but she didn’t touch him until his eyes acknowledged her approach. Like with the dog. No. Like with her dangerously insane father. He made his face relax, his voice soften. “Sorry. Drifted off for a minute.”
“You missed one.”
Reese smirked at himself and retraced his steps until he found the entrance he’d missed. It wasn’t very well-hidden, and he’d walked right past it. A stupid mistake. Embarrassing. Except Christine knew why he’d made the mistake, knew he’d been lost in his thoughts. Which was somehow more troubling.
“I met this woman named Joan,” he said, surprising both of them. “She was … little. Harmless. She looked after me. I never thought about her being indispensable so I’d protect her. I just thought she was kind.”
“Maybe she was,” Christine answered. “Probably she was. What I did isn’t what everybody does.”
“True,” Reese said, unconvinced. He cataloged the tunnel in his mind and moved on to the next one. “And she never needed it. But I would have protected her.”
“You protected me when I hadn’t done a damn thing for you,” Christine pointed out. “You’re not …” She stopped and considered her words. “You’re not really a predator. You like to think you are, but you’re not. Not a conventional one, anyhow.”
Reese looked at her and let his face be just a little dangerous. “Then what am I?”
“You’re a soldier,” she pronounced simply. “You can be dangerous and aggressive, but that’s how you can be, not who you are.”
A soldier. It was such a simple word. But the way she said it “ the way she meant it, in the very best sense of that word. In the oldest meaning it had for John …
…a little boy running barefoot on the lawn, chasing fireflies in the dusk with the neighbor kids. All of them flopping down onto the grass and the inevitable discussion children had while they looked up at the emerging stars. ‘I wanna be an astronaut.’ ‘I wanna be a nurse.’ ‘I wanna be a fireman.’ And for John, always and forever the first answer: ‘I wanna be a soldier.’ It had never changed. Not once, in all the years since. I wanna be a soldier.
Honorable. Brave. Honest. Strong. Protecting the weak …
I think all you ever wanted to do was protect people, Finch had said, with Reese’s arm at his throat.
It had all gotten distorted along the way. Protecting people became perverted into destroying people. It was bad enough in a war that he quickly saw was unnecessary, based on a lie. It was worse with the CIA. But by then it was too late. Your country needs you, John. The greater good, John. We are the darkness, John. The distortions. The outright lies. The things he’d believed. The things he’d done …
I wanna be a soldier. All you ever wanted to do was protect people.
Finch had done more than drag John out of the street and give him a job. He’d done more than save his life.
He’d given John a way back his better self.
This path leads out of the darkness. If I can stay on it, I can be someone that little boy would at least recognize. Maybe, someday, someone that little boy would be proud of. But I can’t get there without Finch. I need my friend.
Finch was indispensable. And John knew exactly why.
It all clicked into place.
A simple word from a woman who was all but a stranger had put his world right. He looked at Christine again. She was watching him with those uncanny blue eyes. Calm. Patient. He wondered what the hell emotions had just flashed over his face. Whether she knew how profoundly her words had affected him. It seemed likely. She didn’t miss much.
But she didn’t comment. Because she was kind, too. She understood that there were places he could not go, things he could not say aloud. And she let him be.
Reese cleared his throat. “You’re very good at assessing people.”
Her eyes dropped. There’s the line, Reese though, surprised. There’s where she stops being open. She can talk about the junkie she was, but not about the abused child she’d been before that. The one who’d gotten so good at reading people in order to survive.
“Have you ever been wrong?”
She hesitated. “Yeah.” Very softly.
He let her be, too. They walked a bit more.
John slowed, then stopped, staring at a grate half-way up the wall. He pointed. “There?”
“Yes,” Christine said. “But it narrows. I can get up it, or Bear can. I don’t think you can.”
“I’m very flexible.”
“Can you dislocate both shoulders?”
“Maybe.” Reese shook his head. “Do I want to? Not so much.”
“Exit of last resort.” Christine moved over to the grate and pulled out her cell phone. “Signal’s always bad down here, but if you can see daylight, you can usually get a bar or two.” She got a picture from her tablet, though it jerked and froze badly. Bear and the kitten were still cuddled together.
“I didn’t even think to ask. If you don’t like cats …”
“I’m keeping the cat, John.”
“Just checking.”
She smiled and took his arm. They continued their circuit of the tunnels.
“I can see why you don’t want to leave this,” Reese said, when they reached their original door again. “It’s fantastic.”
“When my dad was alive …” Christine hesitated, and Reese could tell she was surprised to have edged over her own comfort line, but she shook her head and went on, “… we lived two blocks from the north end of the tunnels. I didn’t come down here then, not into the main part, but I used to hide inside the doorways sometimes. It was always …” She stopped again. “I’ll find something. There are tunnels all over the city.”
Reese took his new key and opened the door. They moved through the basement and climbed the stairs. “Of course,” she continued, “the tunnels that I really want to find are the ones that aren’t on any of those charts. The ones that don’t exist. But I’ll figure it out.”
“Like I said,” Reese offered, “I know a guy.”
“I’ll remember.”
XXX
As they crossed the café, Zubec gestured them over. He didn’t say anything, just glared at the girl’s purple cheek. Then he pushed two steaming mugs and a plate of biscotti across the bar to them.
“Thanks,” Reese said. He took one mug and the plate. Christine took the other mug and they went to the elevator.
It looked like creamed coffee, but it smelled like Irish whiskey. Reese took a sip on the way up and found that it tasted like heaven. “Oh, that’s good.”
“He likes you,” Christine said.
He took another long sip. Coffee and real cream, whiskey and … brown sugar? “I think I love him,” Reese answered.
“I’ll let him know,” she teased gently.
“He’s worried about you.”
“He’s always worried about me.”
“Not without some cause.”
“True.”
Bear lifted his head and wagged his tail happily when they entered the apartment. “How’s the baby?” Reese asked. He rubbed the dog’s ears and slipped him a treat. Then he settled onto the couch and dunked one of the biscotti in his coffee. It was delicious, too.
Christine paused at the door to kick her shoes off. It was a habit Reese had noticed before; he suspected that if she lived anywhere but New York City she would be barefoot most of the time. The little boy running in the grass flashed through his mind again. She needed a house with a yard. Grass between her toes would do her good.
She wandered over to her screens and checked her many running processes. Outside the rain had slowed to a steady hard drizzle.
“Your hour’s up,” Reese said, gesturing toward the ice pack in the sink.
“Yes, dear,” Christine answered. “In a minute, dear.”
Reese sat back, wrapped both hands around his coffee mug. He was emotionally exhausted, but he felt centered again, in a way that he hadn’t since Finch had vanished. Let the genius be cranky for a few more days; it didn’t matter now. John understood their relationship again. As much as he ever had. Finch was indispensable. John knew why. He could live with that.
Christine made herself a fresh icepack, then settled on the other end of the couch with her coffee in one hand and the ice against her cheek with the other. He offered her a biscotti, but she waved it off. It probably hurt to open her mouth that wide. Badge of honor, Reese reminded himself, and let it be.
She didn’t seem to need any conversation from him, at the moment. It was very peaceful.
This, John thought suddenly. When he’d asked Finch if he’d ever craved a more conventional lifestyle, this was what he’d had in mind. His dog and his cat sleeping at his feet. The rain outside the window. A warm drink in his hand and nowhere he had to be. His beautiful wife at the other end of the couch, content to listen to the rain. Maybe a baby sleeping in the bassinet in the corner, a toddler crawling around on the rug …
He sighed heavily. It was all illusion. The beautiful woman at the end of the couch wasn’t his wife. He barely knew her. There was no baby, no bassinet. No toddler.
The cat wasn’t his anymore. The way things were looking, he wasn’t even sure about the dog.
And then, of course, his phone rang. He answered it without even looking at the screen. “Hello, Finch.”
“We have a new Number, Mr. Reese.”
“Of course we do.” He stood up, walked to the kitchen and put his mug on the counter. “I’ll be there shortly.”
He put his phone away, went to the bathroom to retrieve his bundle of wet clothes. When he returned, Christine held his wet shoes and jacket in a plastic bag with one hand, and a set of car keys with the other. “Want these?” she asked, jingling the keys.
He did, actually, very much. “You don’t mind?”
“I’m sure as hell not going out in this.”
He took the keys and then the bag. “I’ll bring it back, I promise.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Probably even in one piece.”
“Uh-huh. I’m not worried.”
“Uh-huh,” Reese replied. “Of course you’re not.”
Something occurred to him. “Listen. If you find tunnels that you want to check out, why don’t you come find a big predator to go with you?”
“I’m a big girl, Mr. Reese.”
“No, you’re really not.” He moved the ice pack, touched her bruised face very lightly, replaced the ice. “And besides, it’s kind of fun.”
Christine thought about it, finally nodded. “I’ll call you if I come up with something worth seeing.”
“Good.” Reese picked up the leash and gestured to the dog. “Let’s go, Bear.”
The dog lifted his head, but did not get up.
“Bear,” John said firmly.
The dog whined. Then he pushed himself up on his front paws, so he was sitting with the kitten between his feet. He reached down to lick the little thing again. Looked at John.
“He’s welcome to stay,” Christine said quietly.
Reese sighed. “He only knows commands in Dutch.” He wasn’t really concerned about that; if Fusco could figure it out, he was sure Christine could.
And she did, just that fast. “I have the Google. And he doesn’t seem to have any trouble communicating.”
The kitten wriggled, and Bear leaned down to nuzzle it again.
John shook his head. On impulse, he took out his phone and snapped a picture of the two of them. “She needs a name, you know.”
“We’ll come up with something tomorrow.”
She didn’t add, ‘if she’s still alive’, but Reese heard it. He couldn’t argue.
“One night,” he told Bear sternly. “You can stay one night, and you’d better behave yourself. No pizza, no soda, no scary movies.” He handed the leash to Christine. “He likes to chew paper. Especially books.”
“I’ll keep an eye on him. But I don’t think he’s going to leave her side.”
“I’ll come get him in the morning.” He went over and patted the dog one last time, and then the kitten. Then he took his clothes and left the apartment.
XXX
Christine Fitzgerald’s car was an utterly ordinary old two-door Ford, black, dirty and dented, with rust spots and a slightly bent back bumper. It was a five speed. Reese had to slide the driver’s seat all the way back to work the clutch. The interior was immaculate, of course.
It had no radio, but it had after-market slots for two USB drives and a phone jack.
No GPS, and likely no way to track it. At least, no way that anyone other than Christine knew about.
Reese didn’t think to look under the hood. At the first corner he wished he had. The unassuming little car had pick-up that would have made Mario Andretti weep for joy. He guessed it had something from the V-8 Hemi collection, and how the hell she’d gotten it shoehorned under that hood was either a mystery or a miracle.
On the way to the library, Reese began to plot how he could get his dog back without giving up the car.
Click here to visit the official POI website 'CBS:POI'.
Click here to register and post POI fics 'Register'.
Click here to read the latest POI fics 'Recently Added'.
|