F Train by Richard Hilary Weber Read Free Book Online

up?”
    She glanced at the muted TV, a college basketball game in progress. “You’ve seen the news.”
    “F train. Yours, right?”
    “Mine.”
    “Congratulations. You’ll be famous. Gas, is what they’re saying.”
    “Forensics confirmed it. Sarin. Knives, poisons, baseball bats, guns, all that stuff I’m used to. The gold standards. But gas, Eddie, gas is new. We’ve never had a gas massacre in Brooklyn. Just lots of lone suicides.”
    Flo and Eddie had developed an accommodation—he said nothing that might shock or offend, and she was just as loving with him, a consequence of a growing quiet, an enforced serenity that simultaneously kept them together and pitilessly pushed them apart, tossing from solicitude to fatigue, until slamming into recoil.
    Work was usually a safe topic, Flo’s job a strange kind of oasis, a neutral zone. Here, and only here in this nursing-home room, mass murder on the New York subway was free of friction.
    Slowly, Flo served his supper, her hand to his mouth with each forkful…fried chicken, corn, string beans.
    “The TV,” Eddie said. “Look at him, that son of a bitch.”
    The mayor of New York was moving his mouth without a sound. Flo left the volume off. She’d heard his spiel in person, and once was enough. The mayor had nothing to say that would help her.
    The families of the dead were different. And tomorrow morning, she’d meet those grieving people.

Saturday
    7:20 A.M.
    “Too bad,” Flo said. “You missed the all-time fruitcake yesterday. The mayor’s consultant shrink.” She and Frank Murphy and Marty Keane were sitting in her office, finishing their coffees.
    “The mayor and the commissioner retain him,” she said. “So he’s ours to use, free for nothing, whenever we want. Mayor’s treat.”
    Frank rubbed his huge hands. “Can’t wait.”
    Flo smiled. “Comes with mass murder, Frank, especially before an election. Seven bodies, the mayor’s got a trophy here.”
    “And the families?” said Frank, placing those rock hands together almost as if in prayer. “When are the wakes?”
    “Reilly’s starts today,” said Marty. “Out by Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge. Sconzo Funeral Home on Fourth Avenue, a block from the church.”
    Flo turned off her computer. “We go now, pay our respects, and set up an appointment with his wife. Alone. Her husband was a professional, she’d expect nothing less from us.”
    “How long before Dangler sniffs him out? About being a Bureau special agent and all.”
    Flo shook her head. “The
Post
won’t learn it from us, Marty, or from the Bureau. So far it’s up to his family, it’s up to Mrs. Reilly. Unless she wants to stay mum, and I pray she does.”
    8 A.M.
    In the car riding out to the Sconzo Funeral Home in Bay Ridge, Flo said, “Real psychos, Frank, in our experience, they work alone.”
    “In our experience,” said Frank “Usually they do. But the guys who did the Towers, they couldn’t have been sane. And Jonestown? Almost a thousand of them, all religious, all Americans, Flo, lining up to drink cyanide Kool-Aid, even killing their own kids. Revolutionary suicide. They all had to be totally wacko?”
    “But in both cases nobody got away, and no perpetrator ever planned to get away. Dr. Gerald, in his great wisdom, didn’t note how on the F train nobody but victims seems to have stuck around.”
    “Our gasman,” said Frank, “or gasmen, they could’ve come from anywhere and be back in anywhere right now. Sunning themselves on a beach halfway round the world. No intention of setting foot in New York ever again. Crazy, right, Flo? Wacko like foxes, we can bet on it.”
    “Forensics say more about the weapon, Marty? How about the bucket?”
    “Forensics, they’re crying in their beer, Flo. No prints. We got the manufacturer’s name and that’s about it, a start. A camping goods outfit in Oregon.”
    “We’re after it, Flo, don’t worry.”
    Frank said: “Reconstruction, Flo. The gasman