Page 93 of The Accomplice
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
KATE
She sat on the floor in the dark. Catching her breath. It didn’t matter that it was cold, that she was only in her nightdress. No shoes, not even socks. Her feet had gotten so numb from the freezing floor that she could no longer feel them.
Still, she was sweating.
For hours, she had tried to shift the steel plate covering the pit.
It had not moved. There was no way to lift it from the center because that would mean lifting most of its weight. Instead, Kate had moved as far forward as she could get, put her back against the wall and pushed upwards. Her arms couldn’t do it.
She had then tried locking her elbows, bending her knees and using her legs to push.
No dice, and her wrists had started to hurt so bad that she feared they might break. Nothing seemed to work. Not a sustained push, nor short, explosive pumping pushes from her legs. When a pain shot through her forearm, she stifled a scream and collapsed on the floor.
When her mom died, Kate had gotten low. As low as she had ever been. Her parents had put her through college, then law school. What Kate didn’t know at the time was that her mom hid her cancer diagnosis from her daughter. She didn’t want her to waste those years with worry, with sadness and the anguish that came near the end. Also, she didn’t want Kate to know of the choice that she had made. Insurance wouldn’t cover all of her medical bills, so it was either pay for Kate’s school, or pay for drug treatment that would have extended her life. Her mom decided it wasn’t really a choice at all. She had her life, and it was Kate. Her father understood and supported her mother’s decision. And every day Kate practiced law was a day that she paid back that debt to her mother. Every case she won for a victim, every morning when she put on her suit, every phone call to her father – the debt was supposed to get smaller ; the guilt was supposed to lessen.
It never did.
Not once.
And now, she was caught in a pit by a monster.
Was this what her mother had sacrificed those years for ? And they could have been good years. The best years. Because when time is precious, every moment, every smile, every hug and every kiss counts.
Kate wiped her face, ran her hands through her sweat-streaked hair. She gritted her teeth, and with her legs, arms and back aching – she stood up.
If she couldn’t move it from the center, or on one side, she would have to try one corner. Lifting the chair, she set it in the right-hand corner of the pit, the square seat slotting more or less perfectly into the right angle.
Kate stood on the chair this time ; knees bent. When she started to straighten up, she realized her head touched the steel plate a lot sooner, her legs at a forty-five-degree bend. She tucked her chin into her chest, spread her shoulders on the steel, hands on her knees.
Took three deep breaths.
Whispered a prayer to her mom.
And pushed.
The plate moved.
She dropped it down again. Took more air into her lungs. It had moved, but barely. She needed something else. Something to help prop it open so she could really get the plate tilting. She grabbed the strip of wood that was the backrest of the chair, put her other hand on the upright and started to work it free.
She was getting out of here.
She froze.
A metal door opened and then slammed shut. She heard footsteps on the floor.
He was coming.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
THE SANDMAN
The Sandman opened the five-pound padlock around the thirty-pound steel chain securing the double doors to the old bus depot in Coney Island. Before the bus routes came in 1955, streetcars carried passengers on the Coney Island Avenue Line. Those cars needed a lot of maintenance. When the streetcars gave way to buses, they needed work too – probably more than the streetcars.
As the buses modernized, the maintenance regime and practices had to modernize too. This depot wasn’t part of the old MTA yard on Coney Island. It had been part of a private company. He had bought the old depot through a shell company on the pretense of buying up land for development. Only the company didn’t develop the land. They sat on it and waited for the price of real estate to increase. And while they were waiting, the Sandman had a place all of his own. A private place, where it didn’t matter what kind of noises were made, or who came in and what came out. There were no houses or people in this particular part of the neighborhood, just more industrial buildings and supply companies. After five in the evening, there were no cars or trucks on the street until five the next morning.
He went inside, shut the door behind him. The space inside the depot could hold four buses. Four inspection pits. The first one up ahead, on his left, had a steel plate covering the pit. On top of the plate was an iron tool trolley, right in the center, for added weight. The depot had been constructed in the 1880s, and timber was still cheaper than steel back then. The roof had huge wooden beams running in cross sections. Some had fallen down. They had just rotted away. Mostly on the right side of the depot, near the twin double roller doors at that end. The wood wasn’t rotten. An infestation had done the damage.
