He found the tire iron in his front closet. The elevator creaked like a Spanish galleon as it moved slowly back down to the lobby. Nate hoped the noise of it approaching would encourage the guy to move on while the getting was good. When the doors opened to the lobby, though, the man was still there.
And something was very wrong.
He was still curled up on the floor facing the front door, but his head was turned back toward the elevators. The angle wasn’t right, though. His head wasn’t just turned back, it was wrenched back, the expression on his face no longer a dirty grin but a hideous grimace. His eyes were glassy and frozen open with something like astonishment. Nate took a few steps toward him and dropped the tire iron. It made a dull thud on the softened linoleum. Beside him, on his left, was the door to the stairwell. He took another step and kneeled down before the body. Now it was clear. The man’s head had been twisted in some horrid display of force, his neck snapped like a bundle of dry twigs. The neck was already starting to purple, with pools of blood under the skin spreading like blossoms. A second later, a prickling sensation moved up his spine, all the way to the hairline.
Someone’s behind me.
He rose and turned just in time to see a figure eclipse his vision. A big, bare forearm clipped the left side of his jaw, spinning him back the other way. Then a thick, heavy hand came down on his right shoulder, grasping like a pincer.
He’s behind me! He’s behind me! He’s going to tear my fucking head off!
Nate threw his head back as hard as he could, connecting with a satisfying thud against flesh behind him. As he hoped, he had struck the attacker’s face. There was a terrible howl and then a string of curses and hard, heavy mouth breathing.
“Motherfucker, motherfucker . . .” The words were garbled and thick. Nate ducked, stepped to the right, and turned around. The tire iron was just a step away, but the attacker was reaching for it also, even while he belted out curses and blood poured from his nose and mouth. The man was sizable and sturdy, dressed in khakis and a dark T-shirt. Nate couldn’t see his face, as he was staring at the floor. He was white, at least middle aged, and moving his arms back and forth as if sweeping the surface in search of the tire iron.
Nate was spry and his vision was good, even in the dimness of the lobby, so the grab for the tire iron wasn’t much of a contest. He snatched it up and swung it sideways at the man, still bent over and bleeding from his mouth and nose.
“Owwww!” He clutched his midsection and stumbled backward toward the stairwell door. Nate raised the iron again. He didn’t want to knock the guy’s head off, but he wanted him prostrate, on the ground and neutralized. The man demonstrated some interesting acrobatics, though, ducking the blow by hitting his knees and then scrambling away. He started out in a crawling position but rose and ran toward the elevators.
“Stop!” Nate yelled. “I don’t want to hurt you, just . . .” He trailed off as the man lunged toward the broken elevator like a rodeo bull from a chute. He grabbed the plywood piece and yanked it backward. The screws, the blue tape, and everything else gave way like a popped balloon. The man plunged two thick arms between the stilled open doors of the elevator and grunted. They moved apart, and he squeezed between them. Nate watched, horrified, as the man flung himself into the black space.
There was no car behind the lobby elevator doors. The car itself was stalled between the eighth and ninth floors. Behind the doors was just the shaft space, with one thick cord bundle reaching upward toward the car. Under that was the bottom of the shaft, two levels below in a subbasement, maybe twenty-five feet from the lobby level. At the bottom of the shaft, surrounding the cord bundle, were four heavy springs. One of the springs was damaged. In an abandoned repair attempt, it had been left partially uncoiled so that a stiff, daggerlike spike pointed upward.
It was on this rusting, thick metal prong that the attacker’s chest landed. Because of a hideous display of physics, he not only impaled himself on the exposed end of the spring but also twisted a three-quarter turn as the spring bored farther into his body. Behind the rib cage, the metal dug into his heart and lungs like a wine cork. He was dead before he stopped moving.
CHAPTER 60
Monday, September 4, 2017
12:36 a.m.
The body of the man impaled on the elevator spring was bathed in the harsh glare of three aluminum-cased floodlights. NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit, or ESU, had responded around the same time as the Ninth Precinct detectives and commanders. The ESU was something like a SWAT team within the NYPD, but in addition to those kinds of duties, it also responded to structural failures, cave-ins, fallen debris, and things like this—a body at the bottom of an elevator shaft. ESU responders extended a ladder to the bottom of the shaft, checked the stability of the elevator car above them, and ran lighting equipment down to the bottom. Meanwhile, the Ninth Precinct detective catching the case waited patiently before being invited down the ladder. Around Zochi’s age, she was an athletic, youthful-looking Black woman named Letitia Clark. She went by Letty.