Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“When?” Doyle said.

“Ain’t no time like the present,” I said, glancing at Chrissy’s file again.

CHAPTER 40

TWO HOURS AND SEVERAL phone calls later, Doyle and I were shivering as we waited out at Broadway and 125th Street near the railroad tracks for a liaison from the Amtrak police to help us look around for our witness.

We were finishing up a couple of Green Mountain French vanillas from the BP gas station we were parked beside when a big green pickup pulled up behind our cruiser. A lanky, goateed Amtrak police officer in an olive-drab tactical uniform hopped out of the Dodge and introduced himself as Sergeant Mark Avila. Then he dropped the covered truck’s tailgate and introduced his partner, a Belgian shepherd K-9 named Radar.

“My boss said this involves a murder investigation?” Avila said as he knelt and attached a leash to Radar’s harness.

I nodded grimly.

“We got a lead on a potential witness who’s supposed to live in something called the Freedom Tunnel. Do you know where that is?”

Avila nodded back even more grimly.

“All too well, unfortunately. We get calls there all the time,” he said.

“Where is it?” Doyle wanted to know. “I’ve been working in Harlem awhile, and I’ve never even heard of it.”

Avila pointed west toward the Hudson.

“The Freedom Tunnel is what they call the Amtrak train tunnel that runs under Riverside Park from Seventy-Second to a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth,” he said. It was built in the thirties but was abandoned. That’s when the homeless started moving in. People talk about the mole people under Grand Central a lot, but up until the 1990s, the Freedom Tunnel was teeming with people. It was like an underground shantytown.”

“What happened in the nineties?” Doyle asked.

“They reactivated the track for the Amtrak Empire Corridor line up to Albany and kicked everybody out. Well, almost everybody. We still get reports from the drivers that they’re seeing people. There must be a dozen or so of the diehard mole people still left.

“Every once in a while, we find one of them alongside the tracks hit by the train or OD’d or murdered. We can’t even ID them, let alone figure out who killed them. It’s like another world. Just nuts. What’s this witness’s name?”

Doyle trash-canned his coffee cup and took out his notes.

“They call him, um, Hamster,” he said.

Avila rubbed his chin with a thumb. The shepherd, Radar, looked up at him earnestly as he snapped his fingers.

“Yeah, I know him,” Avila said. “He’s one of the good ones. Nutty but clean. He sells books or something on the street during the day, then comes back home into his little hobbit hole, an abandoned toolshed that he squats in near the north entrance. Guy’s a trip. Has framed pictures on the walls, a La-Z-Boy, bookshelves, even a cat.”

“A cat?” I said.

“Yep,” Avila said. “All the comforts of home sweet home, only in a train tunnel. Like I said, nuts.”

CHAPTER 41

WE GOT BACK INTO the Crown Vic and followed Avila’s truck west underneath the West Side Highway until we were butt-up against a rusty chain-link fence. Two things were on its opposite side: train tracks and the massive clay-colored Hudso

n River.

We got out of our vehicle and followed the train cop and dog through litter-strewn weeds about a hundred feet along the fence until we found a hole. Hopping down through the gap, Doyle and I exchanged a skeptical glance after we viewed the opening of the train tunnel.

It was pitch black, about thirty feet wide, and completely covered in graffiti. And oh, yeah, it had train tracks sticking out of it. In a word, spooky. In another one, dangerous.

“Yo, Mark,” Doyle called ahead to the Amtrak cop. “You sure this is the way? Because I think I saw this movie, dude, and it didn’t end well.”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the dark,” the Amtrak cop said back with a wink before he disappeared into the dark tunnel’s mouth.

The tunnel was no less creepy inside, a dark and seemingly endless cave lined at intervals with piles of garbage and random objects, a tattered camp chair, a broken shovel, a toy shopping cart. Dust motes swirled in the shafts of dim light that fell down from grates high above in the twenty-foot concrete-and-steel-beam ceiling. We hugged the wall as a rumbling Amtrak diesel suddenly rolled in from the north toward Penn Station in a clatter of steel and short, amazingly loud horn blasts.