Acceleration Page 5

  He's got this down to a science—another one of his experiments. He dissects them with his eyes.

  For each woman, he has times listed for when they show up, at which subway stations. What stop they get on at and where they get off. He's got their schedules mapped out. This guy must spend hours on the trains, hunting.

  From their descriptions, they’re all white and in their late teens to early twenties. Thin and small and pale. That seems to be his thing. He talks about seeing something in their eyes, a vulnerability, a weakness. Stray dogs, he calls them at one point. Alley dogs, licking the hands of strangers.

  He scrawls a note to himself: Pick strangers.

  Somewhere in these pages is the answer, a way to track him down. There's nothing that gives his identity away, no convenient nameplate at the front: This book belongs to…

  1 need a name, he writes at one point. I’ve got one for him: Roach. Plain and simple, as ugly and descriptive as the tags he gives his targets. An insect that hides from the light.

  I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling, where a fly is beating its brains out against the bare lightbulb.

  I’ve got to think. What do I do with this? Give it to the cops? And what will they do? There's no name here, nothing to put a face on this nut. Will they even believe it? Maybe they'll say it's fiction, someone's overactive imagination. Can’t arrest somebody for a thought. What do I really have here? A collection of psychotic dreams set down on paper. The potential stalking of unknown women. They would just file it in a drawer somewhere. Like the transit cop said, a pipe bomb or a severed head they can deal with. But going through some wacko's diary trying to decipher fantasy from reality—forget about it.

  And my fingerprints are all over this book. What if they think it's me? I’ve got a record for a breaking and entering. I’m already dirty in their eyes.

  No. I can’t go to them.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to think. I can hear the soft plinking sound of the fly's assault on the bulb.

  Then it comes to me. The answer. And it feels like all the broken parts inside me are coming together, fitting into place.

  Maybe I’m supposed to find him! It makes sense, so clear and perfect. I’m the one who found the diary. For a reason. This is my second chance.

  Real faint, sounding in the back of my brain like the echo of an echo, one of those broken parts of me says: That's crazy- It's too late to save the drowned girl.

  But maybe that's why she keeps coming back in my dreams, to remind me. It's like when you get turned around deep underwater and you can’t even tell which way is up anymore. That's why she's come back—to show me the way up to the surface again.

  Maybe I’m the only one who can save these women.

  I get up and shift the fan around so it's aimed at my bed. Turning off the light, I end the epic battle of the fly versus the lightbulb. I’m hoping to find some cool escape in the dark. Kicking the sheets off the bed, I lie there in my underwear, blinking at the ceiling and the play of headlights on it from cars passing in the street below. A plan squeaks into place in my rusty brain.

  Find his targets, and I might just find Roach, too. I have their times, subway stops, and what they look like. So I track them down, watch, and wait for him to show.

  It's not a good plan, but it's the only one I’ve got. In a way that's too horrible to think about right now, they’re the bait.

  I just have to find them before he bites.

  ELEVEN

  “What a waste,” Vinny says to me, shaking his head.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  We’ve just finished watching die Terminator triple bill at the Imperial Theatre downtown. Six hours of time-traveling, Schwarzeneggerian carnage. You’d think Vin would be happy.

  “Well, now he's pretending to be a politician. What a waste of all that muscle. He's supposed to be out killing stuff.”

  Vinny's talking way too loud. He's on a caffeine high, thanks to an extra-large Coke and a big bag of M&M's.

  “Keep it down,” I tell him. “You’re scaring the civilians.”

  We’re walking down Yonge Street to the subway. After the cool of the theater, the heat sticks to me like cobwebs. Traffic is insane with everybody out cruising, and I can feel the exhaust fumes coating my lungs.

  I got off work a couple of hours early, telling Jacob I had a dentist's appointment so I could meet up with Vin for the cyborg bloodbath. At home he's got the entire Schwarzenegger collection. He's made me watch them all—even the documentaries from Arnold's old bodybuilding days. Vin's got this obsession with muscles, probably because he doesn’t have any.

  “Now he's governor,” Vin says. “So that's it. No more Terminator. No more Conan. He's a five-time Mr. Olympia, makes thirty million a movie, why's he want to go do that?”

  “Well, the guy's getting old. What is he, sixty? Who wants to see the Terminator as an old fart, getting a walker and fishing his bionic dentures out of his soup?”

  Vin ignores me and starts talking about the new Conan movie they were planning to make before Arnold got elected. Vin's so wired, it's going to take a real effort not to push him into traffic. I let my brain escape to another frequency, grunting now and then to show I’m hanging in there with him. I’ve got bigger things to worry about. Like my plan for tonight.

  The sun set a little while ago and the clouds are purple-red, their color intensified by the smog. The chill of the theater is a distant memory now, smothered by the breathless summer night.

  Vinny's going on now about the genius of the first Terminator movie, with Schwarzenegger hunting down Linda Hamilton to prevent her unborn son from saving the future.

  Hunting. The word sticks in my mind.

  My plan for tonight is to track down Roach. I don’t have it all worked out, but I figure I'll just follow the blueprints he's laid out in his diary.

  “…he's this perfect killing machine,” Vinny says.

  That startles me for a second. It's like Vin's been reading my mind. But then I realize he's still talking about the Terminator.

  In my back pocket is a photocopy of Roach's target list. I’m going to follow his little treasure map, see where it leads. But the thing is, who knows if he's picked out new targets by now? Or—

  Or if he's already done it!

  I stop dead on the sidewalk. The noise of traffic suddenly seems far away. What if I’m already too late? The thought knocks the wind out of me. A police siren in the distance filters through my brain, sounding like a scream rising and falling somewhere out of reach.

  The early-evening crowds push past as I make my way over to the curb to lean on a parking meter. I try to shake the fog out of my head, but getting a lungful of exhaust doesn’t help. I have to squeeze my eyes shut and make a supreme effort to hold on to the meter.

  “What's going on?” Vinny's voice is buried under the roar of a passing truck.

  Don’t lose it now, I tell myself. Don’t give up.

  No! He can’t have made his move already. I’d know if he had. Somehow I’d know. Deep in a corner of my brain I realize how crazy and desperate that sounds. But I hold on to the thought—it's the only thing steadying me.

  I’m not too late. I can’t be! The diary got turned in about two weeks ago, and he was still planning then, building up to it.

  Get a grip.

  “Duncan. Man, what's going on?”

  When I open my eyes again, Vinny's frowning at me like I’ve gone nuts. Who knows, maybe I’m halfway there.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I must have ate something bad. That fried chicken we had.”

  “Yeah? I don’t feel anything.”

  I inhale some more toxic fumes as the noise of the city rushes back in on me. “You didn’t have the coleslaw.”

  Vinny keeps an eye on me as we cross Yonge and head down the stairs to the subway. The breeze from an arriving train blows past us, a breath of stale air.

  “You gonna chuck?” Vinny asks.

  �
�You'll be the first to know,” I promise him.

  We get hung up in line at the ticket booth and have to wait for the next train. Vin stands on the edge of the platform, staring down the tunnel for any sign of light. But in the subway, before you see anything, you feel it. A vibration in the concrete, the air stirring. Like something's waking up in the dark down there.

  Vin yawns wide enough to fit a billiard ball in his mouth.

  “Miss your nap today?” I ask.

  He stretches and groans. “They’re doing all that construction down the block, starting up at seven in the freaking morning.”

  I examine one of the benches on the platform to make sure it's safe to sit. It's been graffiti tagged so many times it looks like an abstract painting. I collapse onto it, stretching out my legs. I’m working on zero sleep here. Vinny doesn’t know the meaning of tired. My eyes feel itchy, making me squint a little.

  “Condos,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “That's the construction up our block. They’re building condos on Keele Street.”

  Vinny barks a laugh. “Who's going to buy a condo next to the Jungle? I mean, what a view!”

  “I’m sure they'll put a barbed-wire fence around the new place to keep us out.”

  “Barbed wire won’t stop the noise.”

  My head's clearing up now. I push all my doubts way back in my brain where I won’t have to hear them whispering. I think too much. I have to start doing more, thinking less.

  “We gotta get out of that place,” he says.

  Before he came to the Jungle, Vin lived in a nice house out in Scarborough. But his parents divorced, it got ugly, and he and his mom ended up with next to nothing.

  “What’ve you got against the Jungle?” I ask.

  “It's a dead end. A sinkhole.”

  “Yeah. So what's your point?”

  “It's the duty of every prisoner of war to try and escape,” he says.

  “What war? What prison?”

  Vinny kicks a crumpled Mountain Dew can down the platform. “The war against the lower class. It's the largest undeclared war in modern history.”

  “Oh, man,” I groan. “Don’t start up with that stuff again. I’m sorry I asked.”

  Vinny's a rebel with too many causes. He's going to be a professional protester when he grows up.

  “They keep us out of sight in slums and ghettos. Keep us down with minimum wage and crappy schools. They numb our brains with fast food and five hundred channels. All because they need drones to do their dirty work.”

  I nod. I’ve heard this speech before. “Because somebody's got to work at McDonald's,” I say, deciding to agree with him to stop his rant.

  “Exactly!”

  “Next time you’re getting the caffeine-free Coke,” I tell him. “And never again am I letting you near the big bag of M&M's.”

  He just shakes his head, wandering over to the edge of the platform.

  Sure, I want to escape the Jungle. For Mom and Dad, what started out as a pit stop there turned permanent. That scares the crap out of me. Mom started my college fund when I was still doing somersaults in her stomach. Dad keeps telling me I’ve got her brains and his devastating good looks. I’ve got a future, so they tell me.

  “Man, look at those things,” Vinny says.

  “What things?”

  He nods toward the tracks. “Rats. There's like a whole civilization down here.”

  I get up and join him on the edge.

  Rats. Small and quick, speeding gray shadows. There's poison set under the platform overhang and in the tunnels, even in the lost and found. But they breed faster than they die. When the subway shuts down around one A.M., the tunnels are theirs. They own the night.

  “There's supposed to be more of them in the city than us,” Vinny says.

  I watch a mangy one crawl over the tracks to sink its teeth into a hot dog bun. When the air stirs just the smallest bit, it stops eating and raises its nose, smelling for danger. Then the sound approaches, like thunder rolling toward us. The rat knows the drill. As the train's headlights pull into view around a curve in the tunnel, a dozen gray shadows scatter to safety. Let your attention drift just once and you’re a rat pancake.

  We get on the first car and Vin stretches his legs out on a row of seats. I sit across from him, looking down the car at the other passengers. Three girls together, laughing about who was getting checked out by who at the mall. Pretty girls, heavy on the makeup. Farther on, there's a guy with a receding hairline not reading the newspaper he's holding in front of him, eyeballing the girls instead. Definitely illegal thoughts sliming through his mind.

  Will I know him when I see him? Or will I walk blindly past? Find the targeted women and find the psycho. Makes sense. Logical.

  The leering guy with the paper just seems like your average creep.

  On the ride out to Lawrence West Station, Vinny starts up again with his Schwarzenegger rant. Something about Arnie's bicep measurement back in his Mr. Olympia days.

  I’m staring off into space when he says, “Are you even listening?”

  “Huh? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think this Arnold obsession might be a sign of latent homosexuality.”

  “Oh yeah?” he says, taking his left hand out of his pocket. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  It's an old joke, and one of the rare times he ever shows that hand. With the missing fingers, all he has to do is fold his thumb and index down to give a middle-finger salute. He's used it on everyone from classmates to teachers to cops. His secret weapon. When he gestures at teachers with the finger, they never call him on it—who's going to yell at the kid with the deformed hand? He can’t help it. One time a cop said: “Are you pointing that at me?” And Vin explained how his hand was always like that, since the accident.

  When we get off at Lawrence West, I tell him I have to go do something.

  He shrugs. “I'll come with.”

  “Nah. You don’t want to come. It's just something I have to do before I go home.”

  Vin gives me a suspicious look. “Like what?”

  “Like nothing.”

  “You going to see a girl? Who?”

  “No girl. Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” I can see his brain working overtime. “I'll tell you later. I gotta do it by myself.”

  “Is it illegal?”

  Ever since I did community service, Vin thinks I’m a master criminal.

  “Yeah, I’m going to knock off a bank. Now go. Call you tomorrow,” I say, pushing him onto the escalator.

  As he escalates, he calls down, “I'll want the full story. And pictures. And her name.”

  I shake my head, and he yells back at me all the way to the top, stumbling off when his feet hit the end of the escalator.

  Her name. I don’t have any names. Not real ones anyway; only the tags he gave them. I catch the next train for Wilson Station. At 10:40 a woman will be getting off there, a woman with red hair. Cherry.

  You looked right at me on the subway today, but you didn’t see me. Nobody sees me. Until it's too late. You always sit in the front car, in that little single seat near the driver. Do you feel safe there? Your hair is the color of rust. Is it your real color? Today your seat was taken by some snot with a skateboard. 1 wanted to snap his neck. But then you would have seen me, Cherry. And it's not time yet.

  I refold the photocopy and stick it in my back pocket. He goes on like that for pages, endless ranting.

  Down at the other end of the subway car, the single seat by the driver is empty. Across from me a construction worker dozes, his jeans white with plaster dust. Farther down, an old lady with a pinched face is reading The National Enquirer.

  I check my watch: 10:30.

  We stop at Yorkdale and a few shoppers fresh from closing time at the mall get on, loaded down with their bags.

  The train doors are closing when a figure slips in, grabbing on to a pole as the subway starts up. She's breathing hard, been running to catch the train. Slid
ing into the single seat at the front, she tucks her red hair behind her ears and reaches for something in her bag.

  My focus tunnels in on her, everything going gray and distant beyond the woman sitting in the single seat. I lean over a little to get a better view of her around a pole.

  Oh my god. It's real—she's real. This is really happening. Up until now, the book was still just a book. I guess I didn’t completely believe it. But this woman is living, breathing proof.

  Now what do I do?

  The wheels of the train squeal taking a turn, sending up a shower of sparks outside the window. I’m so stunned that she's here I forget to blink, afraid she'll vanish if I break my stare. Curly rust-red hair. Pale skin. Freckles. Dressed all in black. Just as she's described in the diary. She's wearing running shoes with her skirt and tights, like she just got off work and doesn’t want to wear her heels home.

  She pulls a Kit Kat out of her bag and starts eating it, like this is just another night, another ride home. Nothing to worry about.

  Should I go over to her? And say what?

  “Your life's in danger. There's this serial killer in training who's got his eye on you. Look at what he wrote in these pages here.”

  Of course she’d think I was a nut—that I was the nut with the thing for her, mapping out fantasies and planning our future. No. I'll wait and watch. See what happens. He's the one I have to find.

  The stretch of track out to Wilson Station runs above-ground, crossing the 401 highway. It's completely dark out now. The red and white lights of the cars trail into the distance.

  She finishes her Kit Kat and rolls the foil into a ball, looking out the window, or maybe at her own reflection.

  There's nothing I can do that wouldn’t make me look like a lunatic. No way to tell her. A wave of panic rushes over me when we pull into Wilson. The doubts shouting inside my head drown out anything useful.

  The train stops and we exit at opposite ends of the car. I make like I’m checking my watch, waiting to see which way she'll go, which exit. It's 10:40. She's right on time, according to his notes.

  Cherry walks past me, close enough for me to smell her perfume. Something flowery and a little sharp. I pause for a few beats, seeing if anyone else shows interest in her, another shadow on her tail.