F Train
Authors: Richard Hilary Weber
F Train
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Alibi eBook Original
Copyright © 2015 by Richard Hilary Weber
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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LIBI
is a registered trademark and the
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LIBI
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eBook ISBNâ9780553393798
Cover design: Caroline Teagle
Cover photograph: © Margaret Mendel/Getty Images
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Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
âRomans 12:19
10
P.M.
Taking the F train subway, a traveler can arrive in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, and get off at Fifteenth
StreetâProspect
Park, thinking he'll walk upstairs and find himself in a fashionable brownstone neighborhood.
But if he takes a wrong turn and climbs a different staircase, he'll discover Windsor Terrace, an enclave in a time warp, a more ordinary place, still home to some police and firefighters, sanitation workers, bus drivers and subway motormen, steeplejacks and city clerks. The salt, not the sugar, of New York.
Former FBI special agent Raymond O'Hara, long retired, made no mistake when he left the subway station, ten at night, and strolled into Windsor Terrace.
Destination: Farrell's bar.
Almost the last of the old Brooklyn Irish saloons, Farrell's was a few well-sited steps from Holy Name Roman Catholic Church. In front of the church, a beggar stopped Raymond, and Raymond handed the man a dollar before entering the tavern.
“Any good baddies?” Raymond aimed his remark at Brendan Ryan, whose
backâstubbornly,
defiantlyâwas turned to the only two women at the bar, Ryan's eyes listlessly scanning the afternoon's
New York Post
.
Front-page headline:
VEEP
NAMES
TRAITOR
DEMS
.
Ryan folded the paper and tossed it on the bar.
“Same old.”
“Brendan, see that guy out there by the church?”
Raymond nodded at the bar window and the man standing alone on the corner in front of the church. “Guy hit me up for a buck. First time it's ever happened to me around here.”
“Got me, too. Broke my heart. Guy used to come in here, a regular at the bar. So I gave him the buck. Used to be, someone said âI'm hungry, pal, can you spare something?' you told him âGet a job. Go to work.' Not no more. Say, how's your
granddaughter?”
“Terrific, thanks,” Raymond said. “Bouncing back, chicken pox can't lick her. She's got the O'Hara constitution. We walked the dog tonight, and you won't believe what she says. âGot your gun, Grandpa?'â”
“How come?”
“Kids.” Raymond shrugged. “They got kids scared, crap they hear on TV, in school.”
“Hey, let me tell you something, I wouldn't mind having mine back. My wife and me, both ex-Bureau, so you'd think they'd at least let us share one. This is New York, right, not Virginia, not some crazy place. I'd feel a lot better. Even if I only ever got to use it once.”
“For what?” Raymond said.
“A Sicilian.”
“Mob?”
“No such luck. Jerk smuggling salamis, no DOA license. Guy had a warehouse full of meat, just off Court Street. Pulls a knife on me. He lost a kidney.”
“Good salamis?”
“Best, if you go for garlic. Really, you don't miss a weapon?”
“Nothing happens. C'mon, life's good. It's like embassy duty, retired.”
“Tell me about it, I always wanted embassy work. See the world, sock away the allowance. Brussels, I was hoping for, supposed to have the world's best beers. Figured I'd get it for being a good boy, couple of years left in the Bureau, last post before retirement. No fucking way.”
“What happened?”
“Clinton's what happened. I spent two years in Little Rock, drilling barflies.”
“They got beer in Little Rock,” said Raymond.
“And more bimbos than Vegas. They don't even speak English. Listen to that drawl for two years? Coming back to Brooklyn, believe me, Ray, like going to heaven.”
“Find any there?”
“Any whatâ”
“Bimbos who blew Clinton.”
“You kidding? They all did, you listen to them. Every one of them thought they'd get retirement money, swearing they knelt before the commander in chief. âOn a stack of Bibles, Officer, he's got a wart on it, left side.' So much bullshit, I couldn't wait to get back to New York. Meantime, camel jockeys are planning the Towers. So Bush gets in, then what? Same old. Who listens to us? Bush sure as shit didn't. They got the Bureau drilling tourists, for Chrissakes. Fucking waste. Glad you're retired? I sure as hell am.”
“No argument from me. Another round?”
The bartender brought Raymond O'Hara and Brendan Ryan two glasses of draft beer.
“And a couple of balls with that,” Raymond said. “What the hell, retirement, right. Just a drop. But you know, I don't blame the Bureau, I don't hate them.”
“Of course not, me neither. I'm grateful. People who hate? My experience, Ray, they're fuck-ups. Hate puts you in as much crap as too much loving. Prudence, all that kind of stuff we used to get. The nuns and brothers were right. That's what I miss now. Prudence.”
The bartender filled two shot glasses with Tullamore Dew.
Raymond lifted his. “To retirement.”
“No shit.”
They knocked back the whiskey, and returned to sipping beer. And so the night rolled on, beers, wee drops, heads shaking.
2:30
A.M.
Snow fell thick and heavy, fat wet flakes like snowballs blowing in off the Atlantic, splashing up against Farrell's windows, melting on the plate glass in long slow streaks.
Raymond O'Hara and Brendan Ryan were the last patrons to leave the bar.
“Jesus,” Raymond said. “Look at this shit. I'm taking the subway.”
“Two lousy stops?”
“Beats Alaska. You're lucky, right around the corner. Me, I'll snooze on the platform. Catch a few z's.”
The bartender in Farrell's locked the saloon door behind Raymond O'Hara and Brendan Ryan.
Brendan headed straight for home right around the corner.
Raymond trudged through thickening snow, past Holy Name Churchâthe beggar was gone, too late and too cold even for that poor guyâand Raymond headed toward the F train station, a block away at Bartel-Pritchard Square and Fifteenth Street across from Prospect Park. Behind him the snow was blowing in harder, almost horizontally, obscuring streetlights, swirling round in mini-tornadoes. But Raymond didn't feel the cold. Beer and whiskey worked their own kind of warmth.
He picked his way slowly down slush-covered subway steps.
Eighteen minutes to three when he swiped his MetroCard through the turnstile slot.
He was the only passenger on the platform. He planned on riding the Coney Island F train two stops to Church Avenue, then walking a long miserable block along McDonald to 100 Caton and back to the
apartmentâ2Hâwhere
his wife, Mary Margaret, would be snoring, lightly, after giving up on Raymond hours (if not years) before.
At eleven minutes to three, the F rumbled in, and he was delighted.
Lucky night
â¦Between midnight and five, a train arrived maybe once an hour.
Positioning himself near the middle of the platform, Raymond relished this small blessing as the train pulled to a stop, glistening wet from two outdoor stationsâSmith and Ninth, then Fourth Avenue.
The motorman's side window was a watery blur.
The train was short, only four cars for the small hours of the morning. The second car stopped in front of Raymond.
Great positioning.
The doors didn't open at once, maybe nothing unusual given the time. Through windows streaked with water, Raymond saw passengers in the car. The interior lights were brightâ¦
â¦bright enough for him to conclude, after a moment or two, that something was very wrong inside the second car.
A half-dozen or so passengers were either sprawled on the floorâ¦
â¦or toppled across seats.
No one upright.
No one standing.
No one moving.
And yet he detected no signs of violence. No broken glass, no splattered blood, no gaping wounds.
Before him only a tableau of terror, almost frozen in time.
Gas
.
They can't all be drunk
â¦
Shouting, he ran toward the first car and the motorman's compartment.
“Don't open the doors! Don't open the fucking doors!”
The effects of whiskey and beer vanished. He was terrifyingly sober as he started pounding on the motorman's window.
The motorman a young African American, appeared annoyed, though not entirely unfamiliar with irate passengers in the middle of the night. His name badge said
Friel Whitmore
.
Whitmore opened his side window.
“Hell you want, manâ”
Raymond flashed his wallet, nothing there really, just a fast movement.
“FBI. Don't open the fucking doors. You got a car full of bodies. Your second car.”
“Show me.”
Friel Whitmore opened the first door of the front car and stepped onto the platform. He jogged briskly alongside Raymond, back to the second car.
Together, they peered in the first window, second, third. Nothing was changed inside the car, no one had moved.
But this time Raymond noticed what he hadn't registered at first shock.
A man was on his knees, immobile, his head in a woman's lap, the woman slumped against a window. Next to the woman's thigh, the man's right hand rested on a handgun.
Still Raymond detected no indications of violence: no wounds or blood, no other weapons, nothing.
“Got to call in,” motorman Friel Whitmore said, and raced back to his compartment.
“Tell them,
gas
!” Then Raymond O'Hara turned around again, transfixed.
The woman slumped against the window was a young, attractive African American, smartly dressed, gray fur jacket, navy slacks.
The man on his knees, head in her lap, was white, midthirties, short blond hair. He wore a tan raincoat, trench coat model, gray flannel trousers, cordovan shoes. The man's right hand covered most of the gun on the seat, and while Raymond wasn't sure, the weapon appeared to resemble the same Walther 7.65 Bureau-issued model he'd carried as a special agent.
Behind the couple's seat, on the floor at the far end of the car, was a khaki-colored plastic bucket about eighteen inches high, the collapsible kind made for backpacking campers. The bucket was open, no cover.
And no bodies at this end of the car.
Raymond walked back from window to window and counted the passengers: seven, as if asleep, but only more so: a montage of death beyond rational explanation.
Heading toward the end of the train, he moved quickly past the windows of the next car, where he saw only two riders, both awake, both unconcerned, so far.
The last car was empty.
Raymond returned to the front of the train as Friel Whitmore was stepping onto the platform, motioning to passengers in the first car to stay inside.
Good thinking
â¦
Everyone on this trainâexcept perhaps the motormanâwas a potential perpetrator, a suspect.
Or an unsuspecting witness.
As he approached Friel Whitmore, he made a mental note that the first car held at least as many passengers as the rest of train, and now all of them looked as if they were abruptly awakened from their usual train slumber: a little confused, starting to get worried, ignorant of death, innocent of slaughter. The train was stopped too long, its rhythm broken, something was out of the ordinary and they were sensing a difference.
But no one looked panicked, not yet. They just didn't understand; they didn't have a clue.
Raymond scanned their faces.
No one was trying to hide.
No one looked ready to run.
Soon, as knowledge of the catastrophe spread via the police and firefighters inchoate shock would grip them. Awareness was like that, always, the first hints of danger simply built up until reason vanished and terror took over.
2:57
A.M.
Outside the Fifteenth Street subway entrance on Bartel-Pritchard Square, three fire trucks and two police cruisers arrived almost
simultaneously.
A pair of uniformed patrolmen raced down the stairs and onto the platform.
Raymond O'Hara was waiting for them, standing at the second car.
“In there.” He pointed at a window. “No one's moved.”
“Who are you?”
Raymond produced his driver's license, and his membership card in the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.
The patrolman glanced at the ID.
Eight
firefightersâshiny
black raincoats, gas masks, yellow oxygen tanks on their backsâmarched onto the platform.
The lead firefighter lifted his mask.
“Before we go in, get everybody out of here. All of you, upstairs.”
Two
plainclothesmen
arrived. “Hang on. Anybody dead there, don't touch them. Leave them where they are. Soon as you say it's safe, we're going in.”
The police emptied the first and third cars, and led eleven passengers and Friel Whitmore off the platform and up the stairs.
The lead firefighter pushed Raymond O'Hara. “Hell you waiting for, Pop? Move your ass!”
Reluctantly, Raymond left the platform and walked upstairs to the square.
3:15
A.M.
Into the cold and snow, again.
Raymond O'Hara's teeth chattered.
And he dreaded what looked like an inevitable hike home through windswept Siberian-deep wastes.
No more F train tonight. The subway station was closed and barricaded. The police were taking over stations all across the city.
Around Bartel-Pritchard Square, search beams and flashing red and yellow emergency lights pierced the screen of swirling snow, the lights outlining a ghostly caravan of police and fire department vehicles, nine by this point.
A van pulled in to pick up the F train passengers, and two police ambulances followed right behind.
Despite snow and the ungodly hour, house lights began coming on in apartment windows around the square, shadows flickering on windowpanes, lending the chaotic scene below an air of performance, an eerie kind of theater in the round.
A young patrolman grabbed Raymond O'Hara's arm.
“This way, pal.”
The cop Raymond spoke to on the platform stopped his younger colleague. “He's with the Bureau.”
This warmed Raymond. “Who's here from homicide?”
“Sergeant Keane. The car over there.”
In the backseat of an unmarked vehicle, Detective Sergeant Marty Keane was talking on the phone. The sergeant was a blond crew cut sporty guy, still as lean as the champion sprinter he was in high school.
The patrolman with Raymond O'Hara tapped at the window and pointed to him.
Sergeant Marty Keane rolled the window down a crack. “What's up?”
“Guy who found the bodies. He's from the Bureau.”
“Retired.” Raymond wanted no
misunderstandings.
“For years now.”
“Hop in.” Sergeant Keane opened the door and made room for Raymond. “What happened?”
“I can only tell you what I saw. While it's still fresh.”
The sergeant turned on a recorder, and Raymond O'Hara began explaining his presence, relating the exact sequence of events, describing everything he observed, all the details, including a precise description of a man on his knees, hand on a gun, and Raymond O'Hara's fleeting impressions of the passengers left alive in the other cars; all in all, a professional comprehensive summary.
“Great,” Sergeant Keane said. “Terrific job, we got you on tape. Outstanding, thanks. Still, you know we have to get you back for more.”
“I'm with you. I go over and over this, and you get the whole works. You know, in a way I envy you guys, but in a way I don't. You nail the killers, but any slipups, any mistakes they can use in court, and you get screwed. Big-time on a case like this. You and the DA.” Raymond rubbed his eyes and stretched, the adrenaline wearing off. He was an old guy, and he was up way too late. “I'm all talked out, Sergeant, I'm pretty whacked.”
“Need a lift home?”
“You're a mind reader.”
“We'll get back to you again.”
The sergeant summoned a patrolman, and Raymond O'Hara rode home in a warm squad car, a four-minute trip.
4:17
A.M.
Once inside his apartment, Raymond undressed in the bedroom, keeping the lights out, trying not to wake his wife.
The air was stuffy inside the apartment, the radiators working overtime. He tried opening the bedroom window a crack, but the frame was stuck fast.
He stared out into Caton Avenue, empty at this late hour. The gas station across the street was closed. If he and Brendan Ryan hadn't been into some serious drinking there, closing Farrell's, if he'd come home at a decent hour, then who would have spotted those bodies?
And the man on his knees, hand on a gun, head in a woman's lap.
At this hour, the bodies might have gone right on riding, all the way out to Coney Island.
Unseen.
A car alarm went off in the street, sending up a futile ringing from somewhere down the block. A recorded voice boomed,
Step away from the vehicle
.
The snow was turning to icy rain, giving the asphalt road a black glitter like a firefighter's rubber coat.
Raymond O'Hara drew the curtains and slipped into bed beside his wife, Mary Margaret. Far too late to disturb her, but he certainly couldn't fall asleep. The ghostly tableau on the F train wouldn't allow it.
His preliminary conclusion: a madman's sick brainstorm of slaughter.
Before he drifted off, Raymond spent the next hour mulling over the macabre scene, floating with those comatose bodies down a twisting underground river into the interior of a dark continent, a place called
Fear
, toward an insane city where he always hoped he'd never set foot.
Raymond was a citizen whose loyalty and patriotism and competence were never questioned. His place wasn't the city of scam artists or professional flag-wavers or even of God, but the city called Self-Respect and At Peace with Your Own. Nine-eleven was a one-off, and so many years ago now, Raymond believed another probably impossible. Surveillance was almost total.
But this subway slaughterâand now he was certain it was mass murder, not some kind of freak accidentâthis massacre confounded him. Another attack imminent? Somehow he doubted it, but who knew? He'd been out of the picture for too many years and almost felt abandoned, left behind, because the real job, the work justifying a real existence, belonged to other people this time.
8
A.M.
No time for breakfast at home, and Lieutenant Florence Ottâdetective, NYPD homicide division,
Brooklynâsipped
her first coffee of the morning at the office.
The office, never a cheery placeâgray-green walls, strip lighting, worn linoleum, noise everywhere, from other rooms and the hall and the street outsideâand this morning the office felt even grimmer than usual.
Flo glanced questioningly at Detective Sergeant Francis X. Murphy, her colleague of long standing. Frank had been at work since four a.m. His handsâthe shape, size, and weight of rocksâpicked and pecked at computer keys.