Slipping Into Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

of looking at you.”
     
    He hoisted the duffel bag, not looking for a problem this soon, and started up the stairs to the station, his legs knotted and cramped from being folded into a narrow seat next to T-Wolf. He stopped on the landing, trying to take it all in. After all these years of drab prison earth tones, the gaudy neon of the boulevard almost seared his eyes like jet fuel. FOR THOSE WHO KNOW THERE IS MORE, the sign for a psychic throbbed red on a nearby building. HAVE YOU BEEN INJURED? an attorney’s ad asked in emerald next door.
     
    “Can I have a token?” He stopped at the clerk’s booth.
     
    “What?” The dusky lady behind the glass wore an MTA shirt and a tiny glittering Indian jewel in the middle of her forehead.
     
    “I said, can I buy a token please?”
     
    “They don’t sell those anymore, baby,” she said. “Where you been?”
     
    His face got warm. A man spends years studying obscure statutes and writing erudite letters to Court of Appeals judges from the prison law library, and then can’t figure out how to get on the subway.
     
    “I was away.” He pulled out one of the twenties, ready to throw himself on her mercy. “What do I need to do?”
     
    A swell of understanding raised the jewel on her brow. She took his cash, punched some buttons, and dropped a golden card into the trench under her partition without looking at him.
     
    “Just make sure the strip faces the right way.”
     
    He nodded gratefully and hurried through the turnstiles and up to the platform, wondering how he was going to manage the next ten minutes. No one told him it was going to be this hard.He looked down over the railing at the street below, having a shaky moment of vertigo. T-Wolf and four other guys just off the van were outside Shenanigans, getting themselves all worked up, arguing too loudly, shouting and bumping chests as if they were more interested in attracting the attention of the police than in getting into the club.
     
    “Okay! Okay! But what I’m asking, who put the shit in your mind? All right? Who put the shit in your mind?!”
     
    Not me, Hoolian told himself, turning away. Some guys secretly couldn’t wait to go back. It was just too hard for them, living on the outside and having to make decisions all the time. But he’d had enough time inside. He couldn’t have taken another day of the boredom, the constant stress, the sense of being totally controlled yet completely unprotected. He looked up the track and, in the widening beam of an approaching train, saw the brawling mass of inmates in the Auburn mess hall suddenly parting as a little man called Pellet fell to the floor, a fourteen-inch shank buried so deep in the back of his neck that the tip came out through his voice box.
     
    The raw-throated roar subsided and the train ground to a halt, its doors popping open in front of him. Hoolian took one look inside and, seeing no graffiti there, wondered if it was just a demonstration model not meant for regular customers.
     
    But then he heard the familiar static goulash of the conductor’s announcement, mangling the name of the next stop. Should he get on or stay off? The only address he had for Jessica was the Surfside Gardens housing project in Coney Island. He made a snap decision and got on, figuring he’d try to call again once he got there. The doors closed behind him and he took a seat, scrunching down at one end of the bench, trying not to take up too much room even though there was no one near him. An ad across the way announced, The Whale Is Back, the Hall of Ocean Life Has Reopened . But where had the whale gone? How had it survived while it was away?
     
    The train rocked off, passing a broad plain of lit-up rail yards and darkened warehouses. Over on the right, the Manhattan skyline glowed like peaks and valleys of a fever chart set in glass and concrete.
     
    At Times Square, a Hasidic family got on. The father in a white shirt, with a reddish pubic-looking beard, a black fedora, and a sleeping