Page 116 of Jace 4Ever
Jace
After four days down here, I was starting to remember everything about being a mole. The first thing I’d managed was to get a coat to hide the clothes I had been wearing. Tony had forced me to eat for two days because I just wasn’t interested. Eventually, I realized I didn’t want to starve to death, so I started eating on my own. The food was almost all canned and stolen, just like I remembered.
Canned ravioli was perfectly delicious if you were starving.
For the past five nights, I’d managed to fall asleep on a discarded but wrapped mattress. I could wipe it down, so it was the best thing I had. One of the others had helped me find it before the garbage trucks came through on the second night.
I remembered scavenging my last mattress down there.
After opening the tap that everyone used for fresh water and rinsing my face, Tony led me back down another tunnel. “It’s our turn to see what we can do about food,” he said. “We’re running low, and we don’t want the kids to go hungry.”
Tony’s flashlight was bright enough for now, but it wasn’t smart to look behind us. Dark was an understatement, and I’d forgotten how darkdarkreally was. We headed toward Little Italy and Chinatown, and I knew the walk was nearly two hours through the underground.
We didn’t make it very far before someone came scurrying up to me and Tony as we walked through the tunnels. They flashed across the beam he directed down the tunnel, and they angled toward us, skirting the wall.
“Tony. This—Oh.” The kid pulled up short and studied me. “They’re looking for you.” He looked at Tony. “They’re looking for him. There’s a dude questioning everyone at the back-alley grate in the Meat Packing district. I was trying to get up there to tell you before you made a move with him.”
“Why?”
“Claims he’s got people all over down here looking for him. You.” His eyes darted to me.
“How many did he say he has?” I asked.
“Thirty, at all the entrances.”
A bolt of fear shot through me. They were still going to hunt me down and kill me. God, had they killed Jerrod? Nelson? Would they kill me after they caught me? I’d always done everything right and no matter what, it seemed I ended up back at the bottom.
I looked at Tony, who had an expression on his face that I couldn’t really read well in the dark. He seemed to be considering something.
“We can get you out of here,” he said finally. “I have...someone I can call who has amazing connection and might even be able to get you a new identity. At the very least they can get you away from here until the FBI or someone properly set you up.”
“You shouldn’t stand here figuring this out,” the kid said. “We’re only a few hundred yards from the Meat Packing entrance where I heard the guys talking. They were getting ready to pull up the grate and climb down.”
“Shit,” Tony said. He pointed up the way we came down the tunnel. “Go, go. We have to get you to a safe spot. Mike, hide here and signal if you hear them coming.”
The kid nodded and melted into the dark, and Tony motioned me to follow. We moved quietly through the dark, Tony finding a lower setting on his flashlight. “I’m going to have to go up to make a phone call, once we get you hidden securely.”
We wound through the dim tunnels as quietly as we could. Tony kept the beam low, but there was no way to miss we were flashing light around down here. I didn’t question where we were going—if he was going to hide me, I wasn’t going to ask anything.
Occasionally there were other people we hurried by, and other tunnels were filled with laughter, shouting, and in one case I was pretty sure I heard people having sex. Life went on down here, with or without the light. I had been part of this dark world, and I realized, as we ran, I didn’t want to be. Not again.
Tony stopped and held up a hand. I heard the sharp rapport and echo at the same time he did.
“Gunshot,” I whispered.
“They’d better not be down here firing at people,” the words were growled. He motioned me down a tunnel just ahead and into a small one immediately after that. I didn’t think I’d be able to get back out the way we came for all the twists and turns and corners we took. Some of the tunnels were smaller and some were nearly too tight for me to want to crawl through them.
I didn’t remember anything like these tunnels at all the last time I was down here.
Suddenly, we emerged under a grate, and the light from above nearly blinded me. There was another little tunnel out of the other side, but Tony nodded. “This will work. Good.” He looked up and I followed his gaze. I could see a cell receiver at the top of the building in a straight line of sight. He suddenly had a phone in his hand, and I saw hesitation in his movements.
“I’m going to put this on speaker,” he said, finally. “I haven’t talked to this guy in years, and I hope he doesn’t hang up on me. But he’ll be able to get you out of the city.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it.
The phone started ringing between us, and we waited through one ring, two rings, three rings—
“Who the hell is this? I’m in the middle of something really serious—”
