Hard Candy (Tom Keeler Book 4), page 1
HARD CANDY
JACK LIVELY
…in the darkness, there'll be hidden worlds that shine
When I hold Candy close she makes the hidden worlds mine
-Bruce Springsteen
CHAPTER ONE
The woman in white planted her boots firmly onto the studded yellow safety line of the Kitchewan Landing train station platform. She leaned over the edge to take a good look north. The approaching train was visible, maybe half a mile away and moving slowly. At that speed it would arrive in a couple of minutes, three at most. The train car interior would be warm and cozy and fine if a little dirty from the winter slush coming off boots and shoes. New York City was always going to be a couple of degrees warmer than upstate. They called it an urban heat island.
But the woman in white was wrong and the approaching train wasn’t warm.
The conductor was freezing in her little booth. Huddled tight and rubbing her gloved hands together. The heater had failed just after Beacon. Now they were pulling in to Kitchewan Landing, which in addition to being a regular stop was also the principal maintenance facility for the Hudson line. The tracks multiplied on the approach, fanning out to covered repair depots and cleaning huts. The train limped in to the station and the wheels ground to a halt beside the platform.
She leaned forward and pushed the button on the address system with a gloved forefinger. “Kitchewan Landing, final stop on this train. All change at Kitchewan. You gotta get off here folks. The waiting room’s warm and comfortable and the next train’s coming down the track.”
The conductor was cold but relatively happy. She lived in Kitchewan Landing, so this was the end of her day. There might be a few frustrated passengers, but they’d get where they were going, eventually. She looked out the window at the parking lot. Her Jeep Cherokee was parked in the back behind the depot near the trestle, but all she could see was a huge pile of salt, brown and dirty and currently being loaded into the backs of two municipal dump trucks. Equipped with blinking yellow lights and salt sprayers, the trucks were all ready to disperse their loads on the roads once the incoming blizzard hit.
The conductor exited her booth, locked it, and came through the aisle, speaking to the first passenger she saw. “All change here, sir. Train’s going into the depot. Once you get up in the waiting room they’ll have the schedule.” She wasn’t apologetic, just delivering information.
The man looked at her evenly and she felt the tug of attraction. He said, “No problem.”
The conductor tugged at her zipper and smoothed away any gaps in her protective layers. There was no vanity in her choice of outfit; it was simply a matter of urgent practicalities. Underneath her parka she wore a Metro-North uniform. The name tag was in gold and read, “DeValla.”
Tom Keeler watched the conductor move to the doors. He’d been looking at that river for hours now.
Keeler had been on the train since five in the morning, not just this train, a sequence of trains and waiting rooms and coffee kiosks starting out in a remote part of Ontario, Canada, and scheduled to end in less than an hour at Grand Central Station, New York City. It was 4:51 in the afternoon, and Keeler could have used a cup of coffee and a buttered bagel— not that he required these things. They just occurred to him as a desirable mental image over the darkening wastes of the Hudson. Bagels were just one of the things he was looking forward to in New York City.
The doors hissed open. Keeler could see a woman wrapped in a white down coat standing out on the platform and another figure behind her in a black coat. The conductor stepped off the train, arms wide to prevent the waiting passengers from boarding. She spoke, but Keeler could only make out the tone and see the vapor from her open mouth. The tone was informational, tinged with a small amount of performative regret. The woman in white moved uncertainly, first left and then right and was subsumed in the flow of passengers moving off the train and up the platform.
Keeler stood and pulled his backpack from the overhead rack. He exited the car and joined the stream of passengers moving. A small traffic jam was formed by the tight U-turn up the stairs. Keeler shuffled up with everyone else, one stair at a time. He was patient and content, not bothered either by the delay or the cold. He followed the person in front of him, trudging up the covered stairwell. A grimy plexiglass window gave a view onto the platform below. The woman in white was seated on the ground as if she had slipped on ice.
Up in the waiting area, the passengers gathered beneath a set of information screens. The next train was scheduled in twenty minutes. It would be the express service to Grand Central Station with only three stops. Keeler moved in the direction of a kiosk. He could smell the coffee and had already spotted the individually wrapped bagels.
A couple of minutes later, Keeler finished his buttered bagel. It had become dark out. Since it was elevated, the waiting room had a good view of the surrounding terrain. A police car mounted a rise at the entrance to the parking lot and came down toward the station, lights on and sirens blaring. Slush and mud and ice and dirt sprayed from the tires. An ambulance followed in the cruiser’s wake, likewise screaming and blaring with light and sound.
Keeler observed the passengers in the waiting area: maybe thirty total, plus the two people working the kiosk, what looked like an elderly couple. No Metro-North personnel in sight. He moved to the side that overlooked the tracks. Keeler could just about see down to the platform. A tight knot of Metro-North uniforms had gathered around a fallen figure. The woman in white wasn’t sitting anymore. She was laid out prone on the frozen cement.
The first fat snowflakes drifted through the vapor lights. The incoming police strobes bounced off the woman’s face, reflecting in sightless eyes trained on the underside of the stairwell.
CHAPTER TWO
Twenty minutes later, the express train to the city hadn’t come, but the snow had, slow and heavy and relentless, drifting and settling and staying put without melting. She hadn’t yet received the official word, but DeValla wasn’t sure that the train would actually make it, given the meteorological conditions.
She was down on the platform with the medics and the first responder team from the town police. The two paramedics were working hard on the woman in white. DeValla didn’t know what the situation was, but it looked serious. The paramedics were communicating by radio with their dispatcher, and she couldn’t make out much more than the crackle of radio static, some of which was amplified by the cops.
DeValla knew the local police and had exchanged words and organized for coffee to be brought up from the staff room to the platform. She’d also completed a walkthrough of the debilitated train, looking for lost items and sleeping passengers. The train was just now wheezing back up the track, diverting to the repair depot where the team would be taking a look at the heating system, but not before the morning.
From the south came two powerful horn blasts from a northbound commuter train as it crossed the trestle. No doubt the driver was aware of the situation and wanted to be safe, warning the responders on the platform that the train was incoming.
DeValla couldn’t help herself say the words out loud, “Here comes the money.”
One of the cops standing nearby chuckled. “Here it comes.”
The phrase was popular with those locals who didn’t work in the city. Kitchewan Landing being a commuter town, the money did indeed come up with the northbound trains. Whenever a train came over the trestle, the twin horns blasted loud enough to be heard all over town. More than a few locals would reflexively announce, “Here comes the money.”
This one was the express train to Kitchewan Landing, delivering the money fast.
Two more vehicles had supplemented the initial police response. The cops fanned out to block off the site from passengers coming off the northbound train. They’d left the blue lights going on the parked cruisers, because it looked good and serious. The darkness drew closer and the emergency lights bounced off surfaces, lighting up the station area like an actual crime scene.
The northbound express eased to a stop and shuddered. The doors hissed open. DeValla watched impassively as passengers scurried off. Clients, if you could call them that. Whatever condition they’d been in for the morning journey, by end-of-day the commuter crowd was invariably smelly, drunk, and dead tired. Some of the more anxious executive types were still muttering furiously into the air, ears stuffed with remote control hardware, rubbernecking at the emergency scene.
She stood with her back to the paramedic responders, fanning her arm through the air to move the commuters in the direction of the exit. “All right, let’s keep it moving here. Go straight up the stairs please.”
The train’s conductor was the last to exit, a large round man. They knew each other professionally.
He said, “What’s going on?”
“Some woman slipped is all I know. Maybe hit her head.”
The man was dressed just like she was, peaked conductor’s cap and uniform underneath a winter coat. He didn’t look half as cold as she’d been. But he didn’t look comfortable either.
“Do me a favor and take the walk through for me? I was supposed to pick up the girls from dance class.” He tried for a pitiful expression. “We’re late and you know Jen’s not going to care about why.”
She nodded. “No problem, Sal. Go get the girls and say hey from me.”
“Thanks, babe. I appreciate that.”
DeValla watched Sal move down the platform, following the last of the northbound commuters up into the covered stairwell. She was hungry and thinking of what to do about dinner. She walked down to the end of the platform and stepped onto the last car. Then she walked through the train slowly, looking left and right and crouching to peek beneath the seats. Sometimes there were people sleeping, either because they were tired or drunk or both.
This time there were no people on the train, just a truckload of empty beer cans, potato chip bags, and a laptop bag up on the luggage rack. The conductor pulled the laptop bag down and slung it over her shoulder. She headed off the train and stopped for a moment to report into her radio that the train was now clear of passengers and could be sent up to the depot for the night.
She walked south on the platform, and as she passed the response crew, one of the cops she knew couldn’t help himself from commenting. “Too cold out here for your hot ass DeValla?”
She ignored him and continued to the lost and found.
But the guy at the lost and found wasn’t at his desk. He’d already padlocked the cage protecting a wall of numbered cubbies and was about to do the same for the front door. He noticed her, and glanced down at the laptop bag in her hand.
“That all you got? You want me to open up again? I’ll turn on the computer.”
The blizzard was coming in now and the roads would be dangerous once the snow settled. It was best to get going. “Nah, forget about it.” DeValla turned away and let the man off the hook.
The laptop bag was black with a rough texture, made of some kind of durable polyester and almost identical to the thousands of similar bags carried by Metro-North customers working in the city. DeValla had a choice. With the lost and found closed, she could either take the bag up to the main office, or take it home with her and bring it in on her next shift. The lost and found office was close to her parked Cherokee. The main office was back up the platform through the driving snow and past the gathered cops and paramedics.
Which pretty much answered the question. The conductor went next door to the staff room. She had some paperwork to finish up and then she was out of there.
CHAPTER THREE
Up in the waiting area, Tom Keeler crushed a cardboard coffee cup in his gloved fist and let it drop into the mouth of a garbage can. It was his second cup. The police and paramedics had accessed the platform from a second passenger bridge, maybe forty yards down. Now they were hustling in the other direction making tracks in the gathering snow. The woman was strapped onto a stretcher breathing out of an oxygen mask. The paramedics moved her into the mouth of the covered stairwell, where they disappeared for a time, reappearing by the parking lot on the other side. The emergency team moved in a protective knot around the woman, now a small figure with the mask over her face.
The information screens displayed a grid of scheduled train departures for the coming hour. On the left side, the train direction: either down to Grand Central, or up to Poughkeepsie. On the right, the word delayed blinked in all four rows. Express and local trains both in and out of the city were going nowhere. The blizzard and the emergency, two fine reasons for a delayed schedule.
An hour later the situation was the same but different.
Somebody knew somebody and word had filtered up from the platform to the waiting room. The woman in white was alive and was being moved to Phelps Memorial Hospital. Nobody knew exactly what the deal was, and neither were they speculating. The rumors were idle and vague. Alive was better than dead, and less worthy of conjecture.
Keeler’s fellow passengers had stopped staring idly into their phones and had started actively using them, stabbing ungloved forefingers into screens, swiping, stabbing more, with thumbs, and finally holding the slim rectangles out in front of them delicately, like cocktail party hors d’oeuvres to be verbalized rather than ingested. Keeler didn’t have a phone as a matter of principle. And if he did have one, he wouldn’t have been using it. Instead, he was observing his surroundings.
He watched the emergency vehicles return up the hill to the station exit and disappear over the rise and around the corner. Two police cruisers escorted the ambulance. A few moments later the flashing lights reappeared as the small convoy turned onto the highway ramp and then got up to speed and disappeared all over again.
An hour after that Keeler was alone in the waiting room.
The phone work had been successful, and stranded passengers hadn’t hesitated to find a solution to the issue at hand. He’d watched as they filtered down from the waiting room, picked up by relatives, or disappearing into waiting taxi cabs. Whatever the mode of transportation, they’d all made the run up the hill and out of the station.
Keeler found himself thinking about what was going to happen next.
It was after 7 p.m. and the situation didn’t look good. The computer screens were now dominated by the word canceled. Snowfall blanketed the tracks in a soft white carpet that was only going to grow thicker. Keeler didn’t know anything about trains, and there was no one in sight to interrogate, except for the couple who ran the kiosk and they were on their way out. The woman reached up and pulled down the rolling steel curtain with a satisfying rumble and thunk. Her partner leaned in to operate the heavy padlock. She straightened up and seemed vaguely alarmed as she noticed Keeler coming.
He said, “Excuse me ma’am, I was wondering if you’d be able to recommend a place to eat supper in the area?”
“We call it dinner here. Only place I can guarantee open tonight would be the diner.” She pointed toward the parking lot exit. “Up the ramp there and go under the highway, make a left at the light. Then you take Riverside down past the duck pond, and you can’t miss it.” The woman regarded him with tired eyes. “Maybe a five-minute drive.”
The station entrance wasn’t fancy, just cold and plain. There was a soda machine and a brick wall between two covered staircases going up to the waiting area and the platforms. Across the way was a taxi stand with five spots, four empty and one taken. A man was leaned against the hood of a perfectly preserved Pontiac station wagon from the 1980s, with the wood siding and a taxi light on the roof. Keeler’s eyes took in the vehicle and the passengers inside, waiting for the driver. There were three commuters packed into the backseat. The front passenger seat was empty.
Keeler jogged across the road. The driver hardly noticed, his attention elsewhere.
“I’m going to the diner. Mind if I squeeze in?”
The driver swiveled his head. “Car’s full, buddy. Where did you wanna sit, on my lap?” His head swiveled back to the station platform, eyes interested and searching.
Keeler said, “There’s space in the passenger seat.”
“I’m waiting on a guy. Car’s full, believe me.”
A chain link fence ran the length of the tracks, from the station entrance to the second passenger bridge forty yards down. A man emerged. He was relatively short and well-built and wore a wool hat and a parka.
The driver said, “There he is.” He walked toward the man and they met halfway.
Keeler watched the two come together and conduct a short intense conversation. They knew each other, clearly. Maybe they’d gone to high school together. The driver did the initial speaking and then stood impatiently listening to the other guy respond. They came back to the Pontiac, ignoring Keeler, who watched the driver and passenger open the car doors and climb inside. The suspension sagged and squeaked. The passenger and driver secured their seat belts.
Keeler watched the station wagon cruise out of the parking spot and up the little hill at the exit. The company name was Kitchewan Old Cars, painted in gold and black script. The taxis were now gone for good, packed full of passengers with more expensive destinations than the diner. Keeler didn’t figure they’d be back for an empty train station on a canceled line. If the cabs returned it would be the next day, after breakfast, provided the municipal salt trucks and snow plows performed their function and cleared the roads.
The woman had said the diner was a five-minute drive. The snow was coming thick and fast, getting in his eyes if he looked up. Keeler made a rough calculation. Given the traffic lights, snow coming down, and all the other things that would prevent a car from moving, he figured the diner was about a mile away. He’d walk that in fifteen minutes.
