Cat and Mouse

screeched.
    Soneji did another slow spin around, his gun pointed out, the baby cradled in his left arm. The infant wasn’t crying, and that worried me sick. The bomb could be in a pocket of his trousers. It was somewhere. I hoped it wasn’t in the baby’s blanket.
    “You’re back there in the cellar? Aren’t you?” I said. At one time I had believed Gary Soneji was schizophrenic. Then I was certain that he wasn’t. Right now, I wasn’t sure of anything.
    He gestured with his free arm at the underground caverns. He continued to walk slowly toward the rear of the platform. We couldn’t stop him. “As a kid, this is where I always dreamed I would escape to. Take a big, fast train to Grand Central Station in New York city. Get away clean and free.
Escape
from everything.”
    “You’ve done it. You finally won. Isn’t that why you led us here? To catch you?” I said.
    “I’m
not
done. Not even close. I’m not finished with you yet, Cross,” he sneered.
    There was his threat again. It made my stomach drop to hear him talk like that. “What about me?” I called. “You keep making threats. I don’t see any action.”
    Soneji stopped moving. He stopped backing toward the rear of the platform. Everyone was watching him now, probably thinking none of this was real. I wasn’t even sure if I did.
    “This doesn’t end here, Cross.
I’m coming for you,
even from the grave if I have to. There’s no way you can stop this. You remember that! Don’t you forget now! I’m sure you won’t.”
    Then Soneji did something I would never understand. His left arm shot up. He threw the baby high in the air. The people watching gasped as the child tumbled forward.
    They sighed audibly as a man fifteen feet down the platform caught the baby perfectly.
    Then,
the infant started to cry.
    “Gary, no!” I shouted at Soneji. He was running again.
    “Are you ready to die, Dr. Cross?” he screamed back at me.
“Are you ready?”

Chapter 63

    S ONEJI DISAPPEARED through a silver, metallic door at the rear of the platform. He was quick, and he had surprise on his side. Gunshots rang out — Groza fired — but I didn’t think Soneji had been hit.
    “There’s more tunnels back there, lots of train tracks down here,” Groza told me. “We’re walking into a dark, dirty maze.”
    “Yeah, well let’s go anyway,” I said. “Gary loves it down here. We’ll make the best of it.”
    I noticed a maintenance worker and grabbed his flashlight. I pulled out my Glock. Seventeen shots. Groza had a .357 Magnum. Six more rounds. How many shots would it take to kill Soneji? Would he ever die?
    “He’s wearing a goddamn vest,” Groza said.
    “Yeah, I saw that.” I clicked the safety off the Glock. “He’s a Boy Scout —
always prepared
.”
    I opened the door through which Soneji had disappeared, and it was suddenly as dark as a tomb. I leveled the barrel of the Glock in front of me and continued forward. This was the cellar, all right, his private hell on a very large scale.
    Are you ready to die, Dr. Cross?
    There’s no way you can stop it from happening
.
    I bobbed and weaved as best I could and the flashlight beam shook all over the walls. I could see dim light, dusty lamps up ahead, so I turned off the flash. My lungs hurt. I couldn’t breathe very well, but maybe some of the physical distress was claustrophobia and terror.
    I didn’t like it in his cellar. This is how Gary must have felt when he was just a boy. Was he telling us that? Letting us experience it?
    “Jesus,” Groza muttered at my back. I figured that he felt what I felt, disoriented and afraid. The wind howled from somewhere inside the tunnel. We couldn’t see much of anything up ahead.
    You had to use your imagination in the dark, I was thinking as I proceeded forward. Soneji had learned how to do that as a boy. There were voices behind us now, but they were distant. The ghostly voices echoed off the walls. Nobody was hurrying to catch up with Soneji in the dark, dingy tunnel.
    The brakes of a train screeched on the other side of the blackened stone walls. The subway was down here, just parallel to us. There was a stench of garbage and waste that kept getting worse the farther we walked.
    I knew that street people lived in some of these tunnels. The NYPD had a Homeless Unit to deal with them.
    “Anything there?” Groza muttered, fear and uncertainty in his voice. “You see anything?”
    “Nothing.” I whispered. I didn’t want to make any